Disc priest help.

[Chickat]

Hello, I have been trying to get geared enough to start raid finder, and i was wondering if anyone could give me some tips. Right now im trying to go for a crap load of spirit and haste. Im reforging out of mastery and crit, but if i have to choose one ill choose mastery. I tend to do about 30% healing from atonement 20% from greater heal 20% from prayer of healing, 10% from shields, and 5-10% from penance and other heals. Im not exactly sure how i should be healing, but in the trolls and new dungeons it seems like im constantly having to spam Prayer of healing and greater heal to keep people alive. I also figure the more spirit means more greater heals which means more thought put in the end. Could anyone give me some tips?

Armory http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ctadoom/simple

Any help would be great. Thanks

Edit i know that there are some reforging and geming probs like having master int on my chest but im going to get to it tomorrow after i get some feedback.

[Deleted]

Hello, I have been trying to get geared enough to start raid finder, and i was wondering if anyone could give me some tips. Right now im trying to go for a crap load of spirit and haste. Im reforging out of mastery and crit, but if i have to choose one ill choose mastery. I tend to do about 30% healing from atonement 20% from greater heal 20% from prayer of healing, 10% from shields, and 5-10% from penance and other heals. Im not exactly sure how i should be healing, but in the trolls and new dungeons it seems like im constantly having to spam Prayer of healing and greater heal to keep people alive. I also figure the more spirit means more greater heals which means more thought put in the end. Could anyone give me some tips?

Armory http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...ctadoom/simple

Any help would be great. Thanks

Edit i know that there are some reforging and geming probs like having master int on my chest but im going to get to it tomorrow after i get some feedback.

PoH spam is pretty much how most of the raid finder encounters will be handled as there is simply no need to cast anything else so if your aiming primarily for Raid Finder groups then aim for stats that improve PoH, the problem with that is all stats, Haste, Mastery, and Crit make PoH stronger so you just have to figure out which ones work better for you.

I did this log a few weeks ago from LFR http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/s...ne/?s=89&e=283 PoH + DA are top of healing now you would think in 10 man raids spell priorities would change but it doesn't really here is our first DW kill log http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/p...?s=4060&e=4803 again with PoH and DA doing the majority of healing.


DS was geared towards the requirement of constant aoe healing so not surprisingly PoH tends to be top of our spells used.

My build for both of those logs is a non atonement AA / SoS spec with the stat prios of Crit > Mastery > haste > spirit http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...nitro/advanced.

Don't look at my build as the defacto stats you should aim for because to be honest my build hasn't changed from what I needed in Firelands as that instance had more single target healing encounters that favored those stats but with Dragon soul I can see Haste Crit and spirit having higher priorities.

[Deleted]

How you gear depends on how (and what) you heal. You can go with anything from balanced stats to stacked in any direction. Just give some though to which spells you use the most and which stats affect them. For example, mastery and haste are good stats to boost your PoH and crit helps your single target healing a bunch. That's not saying mastery and haste are bad for single target healing etc, quite the opposite infact, but that's the way you have to think about this.
If you use tons of PW:S, crit and haste does nearly nothing for that, but mastery does nearly nothing for Attonement.

Most disc priests however are reforging away form spirit.

EDIT: Also, don't use your experiences in 5mans to judge how to gear for raids. I'm not saying those experiences aren't valuable, but healing raids is a completely different beast. Towards the end of 4.2 i was healing zandalaris using nearly only shields and attonement :P



I heal together with a shaman and a druid (me and druid on 2 heal fights) and my role is kind of strange, I just kind of do whatever i want :P
The druid is mostly focusing on the raid, the shaman is pumping out big single target heals (mostly on the tanks) and healing rain/chainheal etc as needed of course. My role is, as i said, kind of strange. I assist on tanks with shields and heals but most of my healing comes from PoH spam and other raid heals (I'm on tanks when 2-healing though).

I'm speced for archangel/attonement. I'm not at home but my stats are roughly

1650 haste
1100 mastery
1100 crit
2300 spirit (+ another 400 from Tsunami, hoping to get the Dragonsoul version of that soon and i'll drop some more spirit)

That's about 700 more spirit than i had in Firelands. I'm pretty sure i'll be able to drop it again with higher itemlevels.

[Chickat]

The way i want to heal is smite healing when little damage is going out, and then spot healing with greater heal penance PWS and prayer of healing when lots of aoe needed. I have like 2500 spirit, with near 2900 in a dungeon or so. I like almost never running out of mana, but maybe thats a bad thing. I do run out of mana tho on fights where dps are standing in lots of fire or fights where the dps is so low the fight lasts twice as long as it needs to. The last boss in ZG lasted for 10 mins. I finally ran out of mana and we wiped with 1 chain left to break.

[Deleted]

Ending the fight with a lot of mana left means that mana is wasted. You need to find a balance between your regen and throughput stats.

How much spirit you need depends on how agressively you heal (as in not waiting for others HoTs etc to heal people up). Only you can find that out


Remember that this is in terms of killing raidbosses.

[Chickat]

Ending the fight with a lot of mana left means that mana is wasted. You need to find a balance between your regen and throughput stats.

How much spirit you need depends on how agressively you heal (as in not waiting for others HoTs etc to heal people up). Only you can find that out


Remember that this is in terms of killing raidbosses.

I guess i will have to just do a raid finder and find out what i like for myself then.

[Mythricia]

Ending the fight with a lot of mana left means that mana is wasted. You need to find a balance between your regen and throughput stats.

How much spirit you need depends on how agressively you heal (as in not waiting for others HoTs etc to heal people up). Only you can find that out


Remember that this is in terms of killing raidbosses.

Very much true.

I'd like to add that Spirit is not the only stat you can use to balance mana VS throughput.

Haste is also a stat that provides, in most cases, just a straight Mana -> Throughput conversion. Reaching haste plateaus and such does indeed increase your healing per mana on that particular spell (Renew for example), but does not increase your healing per mana at all for cast-time spells (PoH, GreaterHeal, Heal, FlashHeal, etc, again with some detail exceptions).

My personal take on this is this; Spirit is a great stat, I relish it, as a high-end Heroic DS Disc priest. Haste is also good for pure numbers; however, it's not really always the case that more haste would save more lives (As is the purpose of our role; to save lives). Get enough Spirit that you don't run OOM in a good fight (i.e. a fight where the rest of the raid played well enough), get enough Haste that your raid does not die from burst damage, and put the rest into Mastery or Crit, depending on your personal preference/healing style.

In the end, killing raid bosses will be more about what you as a player accomplish, than what your character in terms of stats, accomplish. Worry more about the former than the latter; once you're confident about the former, the latter will be more obvious to you.

[Chickat]

I did End time and Well of Eternity, and the two tanks i had were a paladin and death knight. Spamming power word shield/penance/and greater heal was JUST keeping them alive. Even on trash i had to sometimes spam greater heal. I wonder if it was just a tank problem with them not popping cds or having bad stats, or if its a me problem.

---------- Post added 2012-01-02 at 07:25 AM ----------

Very much true.

I'd like to add that Spirit is not the only stat you can use to balance mana VS throughput.

Haste is also a stat that provides, in most cases, just a straight Mana -> Throughput conversion. Reaching haste plateaus and such does indeed increase your healing per mana on that particular spell (Renew for example), but does not increase your healing per mana at all for cast-time spells (PoH, GreaterHeal, Heal, FlashHeal, etc, again with some detail exceptions).

My personal take on this is this; Spirit is a great stat, I relish it, as a high-end Heroic DS Disc priest. Haste is also good for pure numbers; however, it's not really always the case that more haste would save more lives (As is the purpose of our role; to save lives). Get enough Spirit that you don't run OOM in a good fight (i.e. a fight where the rest of the raid played well enough), get enough Haste that your raid does not die from burst damage, and put the rest into Mastery or Crit, depending on your personal preference/healing style.

In the end, killing raid bosses will be more about what you as a player accomplish, than what your character in terms of stats, accomplish. Worry more about the former than the latter; once you're confident about the former, the latter will be more obvious to you.

Am i suppose to be using renew as Disc? the guides ive seen say no, but if you use it id like to hear what you think about it.

[Deleted]

I only use renew on fights with a lot of movement (Hagara ice/ligntning phases for example) or sometimes when tankhealng. It's mostly pretty pointless.

Your experience in well/end time probably has to do with gear. Once you (and the tank) have high enough ilvl you can basically smite yourself through those instances too


Also, one thing i noticed about your spec... You really should drop Surge of Light (holy) and put the points in Renewed Hope (disc). SoL gives such small return on the investment and the randomness of it makes it not worth it imo.
I'd also move two points (or at least one) from Mental Agility to Strength of Soul if i were you, if nothing else jsut to make sure you can keep getting rapture on cooldown while tankhealing. That alone saves you MUCH more mana than mental agility would.


Edit: kind of weird edit maybe, but as babylon said in the post below, Greater Heal is your workhorse heal in most situations where shields, attonement and pennance isn't enough. Remember to use holy fire as much as possible though as that heals about as much as Gheal but casts a lot faster and uses less mana

[babylon]

Even on trash i had to sometimes spam greater heal.

gheal is an awesome tool, no matter if its a boss or trash! :> if you want your tank healing to be more stable, you might want to try sos build with a bit more mastery, but thats only if youre bored enough and have time/will to test new stuff
as for atonement spec (considering that you said you 'spam' penance and gheal), id recommend picking renewed hope maybe instead of surge of light.

Am i suppose to be using renew as Disc? the guides ive seen say no, but if you use it id like to hear what you think about it.

i always think of discipline priest using renew as if it was fire mage using arcane blast - it will serve purpose - provide dps, but would it be really more efficient than using fire tools?

[Chickat]

What item level would you said i would need before i can faceroll the new heroics by healing 90% of the time with just atonement?

[Deleted]

I had about 381 ilvl when 4.3 hit (meaning i had mostly better gear than what you can get in there already) and once the majority of players had learned the new instances they bacame really easy to heal

[Chickat]

Hm well my item level is 370 now and i still cant heal it with just atonement.

[zakaluka]

Hm well my item level is 370 now and i still cant heal it with just atonement.

Atonement is fill, not baseline. If you are trying to 'smite heal', you will soon give up, because that whole idea misses the point of AA/A.

The only part of Atonement that comes anywhere near the usefulness of GHeal is Holy Fire. PW:S, Mending, GHeal, Penance, HF, PoH all have a place during heavy damage, smite does not. You gotta learn when/how to use them.

[Chickat]

Atonement is fill, not baseline. If you are trying to 'smite heal', you will soon give up, because that whole idea misses the point of AA/A.

The only part of Atonement that comes anywhere near the usefulness of GHeal is Holy Fire. PW:S, Mending, GHeal, Penance, HF, PoH all have a place during heavy damage, smite does not. You gotta learn when/how to use them.

Oh, well i though that I would eventually be able to smite my way through the dungeons like heap said, but only smiting is rather boring isn't it.

[Deleted]

I actually went and tried this and pushed it allmost to the extreme (barely even used shields unless needed) :P

Result:
326 HF/smite
4 greater heals

http://i41.servimg.com/u/f41/12/51/00/69/attone10.jpg

[Deleted]

I actually went and tried this and pushed it allmost to the extreme (barely even used shields unless needed) :P

Result:
326 HF/smite
4 greater heals

http://i41.servimg.com/u/f41/12/51/00/69/attone10.jpg

You sir have some crazy keybinds
Isn't it quite easy to push hymn by accident when it's on s-W? Or do you use tfgh or esdf?

[Deleted]

I move with ESDF

[Chickat]

I actually went and tried this and pushed it allmost to the extreme (barely even used shields unless needed) :P

Result:
326 HF/smite
4 greater heals

http://i41.servimg.com/u/f41/12/51/00/69/attone10.jpg

Christ thats alot of atonement healing. What kind of spirit/haste/mastery levels do you have?

[Deleted]

Right now i have

1605 haste
1166 crit
1160 mastery
2616 spirit (including 400 from Tsunami)

http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/characte...udise/advanced