DI+WoM playstyle

[Mythrose]

Long time priest forum lurker, I main disc in our raid but recently got ahold of the 4pc and figured I'd give DI+WoM a go as holy. Serendipity procs are going towards heal/poh, PoM is cast on cd, but my question is, what do we do when we don't have serendipity stacks? should we be hard-casting heal to fish for DI procs? casting BH/FH to build stacks to 2 and cast heal? Renew filler?

Part 2 of this is what chakra to default to...and this may tie in to p1 as well, as I imagine if we spend time in serenity we will spend our fillers with renew and refreshing as needed.

[VigilantRose]

This is somewhat hard to model and we don't have particularly good data, but I'd suggest you try:
1. Divine Star + Surge of Light. This will go a long way towards filling in the lack of Serendipity.
2. Glyph Binding Heal, but only use it when you're personally damaged. It's just not justified when your expectation is Heal rather than Prayer of Healing to do a two-target Binding Heal.
3. Expect Heal, be pleasantly surprised by PoH. If you wait around for decent PoH casting conditions, you'll let a lot of Serendipity go to waste.
4. Chakra is a coin flip. I'd probably go with Serenity on principle, but I wouldn't expect all that many useful Renew refreshes.
5. Renew to fill the gaps. You don't really have many other options.

You also probably want to consume your Serendipity before every Divine Insight (even if you only have one stack).

[Mythrose]

I do run BH glyph, and I definitely use it for burst/to stack for serendipity PoH. I was also casting heal with one stack of serendipity when I had to, my uncertainty comes from what to do when I have zero stacks, what to use as filler...ie renew, heal to fish for DI, flash/binding to build stacks "manually" or ? It sounds like you advocate renew, my issue is I have lots of mastery on my gear since I main disc, which was making me lean toward heal/fh/binding.

I may try star+sol again, I was finding it very fight dependent for positioning, and I do like the more bursty nature of cascade, though, as well.

[VigilantRose]

I do run BH glyph, and I definitely use it for burst/to stack for serendipity PoH. I was also casting heal with one stack of serendipity when I had to, my uncertainty comes from what to do when I have zero stacks, what to use as filler...ie renew, heal to fish for DI, flash/binding to build stacks "manually" or ? It sounds like you advocate renew, my issue is I have lots of mastery on my gear since I main disc, which was making me lean toward heal/fh/binding.

With 15% Mastery/Haste, Heal + potential DI is 22% better hpct and 47% better hpm than Renew. So the theoretical right answer is "Heal > Renew". You lose a bit from Words of Mending and Chakra: Sanctuary CoH cooldown, but not enough to make Renew an effective choice over Heal.

I think the larger issue is that all of these effects aren't being cast on some theoretical raid with infinite damage nicely spread as you desire. If you've got a DI proc, you may not want to use it right now. But that means you don't want to cast Heal, since Heal without the possibility of a DI proc is mediocre. You also have to consider most raids entail fairly significant amounts of movement, inconveniently timed so you can't just move every 12 secs during CoH's GCD.

That's part of the reason I suggested trying Surge of Light. It creates a spell effect that does (most) everything you need from Renew, but is better than Renew and incidentally makes your Heal more convenient.

Divine Star synergizes with Surge of Light, but isn't strictly necessary. However, something to remember is that Cascade's "niche" is different between a Renew-centric and a Serendipity style of play. If you've got a Renew-centric style of play, you don't really have any answer to large-scale damage because your Prayer of Healing is both slow and hideously expensive. With your Serendipity procs, you don't need a Cascade-style mini-cooldown nearly so much because chances are you're at or pretty close to a 2-stack PoH.

In any case, I don't have the data necessary to 'advocate' anything. I'm merely trying to give you suggestions about how to think about your approach.

[Mythrose]

Thanks for the input! What you said makes a lot of sense, although the mana implications do concern me. On stacked fights have you found it worthwhile to drop WoM for CoP?

[Deleted]

Even after the buff to CoP I struggle to find use for it. It just feels like you rarely have time to cast more then 1 or 2 PoHs and heavy damage so far mainly comes from pulsing damage, making WoM preferred choice.