Why do some disc Priests go with crit instead of mastery?

[Theia]

Hi just a general question because I have looked at some Disc priests in the last days and observed that they are reforging to crit and out of mastery. They are also from some top level guilds, so I thought probably to try it out but don't know why they reforge that way. Could any of you help me pls.

And beside my guild is currently progressing on Shek'zeer 25er heroic, so what would you recommend me, crit or mastery?

Thx in advance for the help

[Lundmark]

10man with heavy smite usage may put crit ahead of mastery, you can even lower your spirit by a chunk to sustain the build or go mix of crit/haste until your spirit cannot support the haste any more.

25man is more towards mastery as you can't cap spirit shell on the groups... and is the best stat out of throughput(PW:S & SS)


*value of mastery changes with 5.2 though as it won't add alot to SS... and with the removal of the guaranteed Aegis from PoH... Crit might be the best choice for every one if not haste with loads of spirit

[Dorfie]

I was crit for months in 10 mans since I found myself smite spamming on every single boss. Recently went back to mastery for Empress/protectors/tsulong. Will probably go back to crit for Sha.

[Theia]

Hi, thanks for the replies as I am playing in a 25 man raid guild i am trying to have a look at priests who also does so. And the ones I have looked at are only from 25man and they are not bad at all. I am just curious, and thought perhaps someone could give me one or two reasons

I do know that crit is said to be better for 10man disc priests thats why I am so surprised.

[Yetiman]

*value of mastery changes with 5.2 though as it won't add alot to SS... and with the removal of the guaranteed Aegis from PoH... Crit might be the best choice for every one if not haste with loads of spirit

This is the main reason a lot of 25-man priests are reforging to crit: in preparation for 5.2; because the only way to proc DA in 5.2 will be with crit. However, I haven't seen (really haven't had time to look for) the new stat weights. Things is as follows:

1.- Mastery no longer affects Spirit Shell, but Divine Aegis does stack with it now (I MAY be mistaken, not sure what they mean by the patch notes here).
2.- Divine Aegis only procs off critical heals - no more PoH, unless you have A LOT of crit.
3.- In order to achieve a high level of crit to proc DA more often, most priests are sacrificing mastery (haste is our lowest priority stat in the shielding build, so we can't reforge too much out of it).
4.- However, reforging out of mastery will make our shields weaker, and crit scales poorly in comparison, so a loss of 1000 mastery (let's say 5%, just for ease of use), turned into 1000 crit, is actually around 3.5-4% (these are not actual numbers, but crit definetely doesn't scale on par with mastery, or haste for that matter).

Some priests are blindly reforging into crit thinking it will make them proc DA more often, but I'm a bit skeptical as of this post, and prefer to wait on the rest of the changes coming (hopefully there'll be a couple more) with 5.2 before I give my final veredict on the matter.

[Maxham]

Atonement builds

[derevka]

This is the main reason a lot of 25-man priests are reforging to crit: in preparation for 5.2; because the only way to proc DA in 5.2 will be with crit. However, I haven't seen (really haven't had time to look for) the new stat weights.

No priest should be prepping for 5.2 by making themselves weaker today by shifting stat priorities early. You simply reforge and regem once 5.2 comes out. A lot of the 'crit is king' is proliferated by a couple of gear websites (i wont name and shame), who severly devalue the importance of SS. Shell is THE reason you have a Disc in your Raid. Pure atonement healing, yes... crit is better than mastery, but leveraging SS is why you bring a Disc. 10 or 25.

[Yetiman]

I agree with you whole-heartedly, Derevka; it was just my opinion of why they MIGHT be reforging-regemming to crit right now. I'm staying with my mastery build until the patch hits, and THEN I'll apply changes where they are needed .

Granted, I only have a couple of pieces of heroic gear (my 10-man group stopped raiding when Christmas hit, and due to vacations and whatnot, we'll be retaking raiding for 5.2), so I really haven't seen the maximum output of my priest, and I run with around 45% Mastery when healing (reforged for shadow atm, so more haste and less mastery in my armory), but what I'm getting at is that once the patch hits, I'll probably keep this amount of mastery, more or less, and start stacking a bit more haste and crit. My healing breakdown is pretty even, and I atonement-heal quite a bit (our group's dps is kind of lacking in the output department :P), so I end up doing between 20-30k DPS, depending on the fight.

Either way, it's up in the air 'til the patch hits, and I won't keep on worrying about it until there's new info regarding anything disc-related.

P.S.: Loved your UI, I used it for a long time; any chance of updating it?

[pahmi]

No priest should be prepping for 5.2 by making themselves weaker today by shifting stat priorities early.

i wouldn't say that. I played this id with full crit build instead of mastery + Divine Star. (10-man)
The result was realy good, i got a few relay good WoL rankings even in fights like Garalon (rank 1)/Lei-Shi(rank3) ...

worldoflogs .com/reports/rt-39djbfqlppj6e5n3/

My point is crit is currently not so bad.

[Asyra]

As I currently farm 16/16H 25M and we almost always have two disc priests in every fight, I haven't been stacking mastery as much as others. If something has mastery already, I just leave it alone. If the item has crit on it, I leave it alone. If the item has a mix of stats and one of them is haste, I reforge for mastery/crit depending on which is missing (mastery if the item is only haste) and I gem for mastery still.

With a 2nd disc priest, especially one whom is a bit more of a meter lover, I find myself smiting more often than him (especially since I healed in 10Ms all of cata and the start of MoP). I have always been a fan of crit with disc, especially back in T13 when stats were inflated enough to support heavy mastery/crit builds. Things will eventually get back to that level of inflation and having browsed through the loot list for ToT, there is a lot of crit to be had, which is helpful in the changes that are currently planned for disc.

I personally am excited for the changes planned for disc in 5.2, I hate being a PoH/SS spam master. I agree that disc has a larger toolkit and we should actually use it, not just be drones that could be replaced with ticking birds on the keyboard.

[Havoc12]

There is no point in stacking crit unless its fights where you atonement heal a lot. In 25man there is not really much point at all. Puhmii gz on high ranks. Very impressive. I had a look at your logs and measured the return you got from crit. You are getting a nice benefit from crit on leishi, but on garalon the return is not as good as mastery assuming you are about 50% mastery 25% crit. I think it is not as bad as it should be because of a fortuitous good distribution on crits. Based on your numbers I would expect crit to do a lot worse than mastery on garalon, unless you have insanely high mastery.

Asyra you are mistaken if you think that 5.2 is going to make you use more of your toolkit. In 25man you will either be atonement spamming full time except for spirit shell because of the boss mechanics or you will be holy. At least bubble spamming is very challenging to maximise. Atonement spamming does not even require looking at the healthbars.

[Asyra]

Asyra you are mistaken if you think that 5.2 is going to make you use more of your toolkit. In 25man you will either be atonement spamming full time except for spirit shell because of the boss mechanics or you will be holy.

Ya...whatever you think. If you want to play like some mindless drone, feel free to do so.

[Havoc12]

I am betting good money 2 weeks into 5.2 you will be either spamming atonement and spirit shell, re-speced holy or riding the bench if your guild is pushing progress. In your case along with anyone who thinks the 5.2 changes are good for disc you will deserve it too, because you didn't do enough.

If you think that you don't think that pushing max results with bubble spam requires a lot of effort then either you are the best wow player in the world or you pretty much suck. My money is on the latter.

[Szer]

Just another day, just another whine post from Havoc...

Disc is fine on PTR, go and see for yourself. Its that easy.
You are maximalist in pure form. There is no grey tone for you (but they really are exist).
Why in the hell I should only attonement spam in 5.2? Because you say so? You should be benched forever in your guild if you think that way.

If you think that you don't think that pushing max results with bubble spam requires a lot of effort

I think that pushing bubble spam is senseless if you cant drop a healer with that kind of effort. If you really cant, then you hurt your raid, because you lose dps from attonement.

Healing is not a DPSing. You shouldnt consider it like DPS with "rotation" and push hard every possible second to maximize theoretical hps. Healing has a limits.
Your raid HPS should be approximately equal with raid incoming DPS (damage taken). If there is like 100k dps taken, then you shouldnt do 300k hps (100k ehps), 0 dps and your fellow healer do 0ehps.

That healing style is soooo stupidly retarded, because someone more skilled then you (and those guys sitting in top guilds) would do 70k hps (50k ehps), 50k dps and other healer would do another 50k. In that way I clearly see 50k dps profit with no loses.

Healing is a way to kill boss. Bubble spam cant kill boss. DPS can.
Healer is necessary measure when pure dps raid cant survive incoming damage. Then you take a healer. Or two. But any additional healer gimps your raid dps further.

Your job as healer is not play retarded way, but to maximize raid dps, for example if dpsers will survive and continue to dps then half of your job is done. All other time you should do as much damage to boss as you can. Then your second half of job would be done.

[Asyra]

I am betting good money 2 weeks into 5.2 you will be either spamming atonement and spirit shell, re-speced holy or riding the bench if your guild is pushing progress. In your case along with anyone who thinks the 5.2 changes are good for disc you will deserve it too, because you didn't do enough.

So I'm guessing that you are one of the those people that can't really comprehend how to actually be an effective healer outside of being the OPFotM. Disc is stupidly overpowered currently and if you don't know that, you clearly don't understand what is going on. Disc will be just fine and you can go ahead and spam atonement and be lazy, I'll just sit over here and NOT be a lazy retard and be perfectly fine.

[Count Zero]

Let's keep it civil, folks !

[Yetiman]

I haven't entered the PTR (and probably won't, come to think about it, just started a new job), but from what I've read in these forums (apart from all the name-calling and insults, which get really tedious, really fast), there are people rolling on the panic-bus (mainly 25-man priests), versus people who have a more serious and stable outlook concerning the patch changes. Granted, these latter ones, from what I have read, are mainly 10-man raiders, hence most changes won't affect them negatively (possibly we might be buffed).

Now, I just want to say that, even though I don't belong to a high-end progress guild (as can be attested to in my signature, 3/16 HC is hardly something to brag about, but that's neither here nor there). However, all the ranting on these forums, at least on behalf of healing priests, has been just that, ranting. It has not been backed up by logs from the PTR, only word of mouth. On the other hand, priests who have tried out the healing in the PTR seem, if not happy, then at least content with the performance of disc AND holy priests. Once again, I reiterate that most of these "neutral-positive" responses have come from 10-man testing; alas, I would like to see logs for 25-man, which seems to be the main issue for most people. Thus, until we have said logs (and if you do, please let me, and the rest of the community know), it would be best if everybody refrained from making all-encompassing statements regarding the future of our class.

We should follow the lead of the less-enlightened (shadow) third of our community, of whose discussions I've been trying to keep up with; they have been posting simulations for the new talent for them, comparing numbers for DP on live and the PTR, etc.

We should do the same concerning Solace and the changes to PoH, SS and the rest of our toolkit, instead of falling prey to useless bickering that serves no real progress.

Now everybody hold hands and sing "I feel Pretty"

[Havoc12]

Disc is fine on PTR, go and see for yourself. Its that easy.
You are maximalist in pure form. There is no grey tone for you (but they really are exist).
Why in the hell I should only attonement spam in 5.2? Because you say so? You should be benched forever in your guild if you think that way.

I think that pushing bubble spam is senseless if you cant drop a healer with that kind of effort. If you really cant, then you hurt your raid, because you lose dps from attonement.

I saw for myself and stand by everything I said. Disc is no longer capable of high HPS. I head all this rubbish before on the beta when I was telling ppl our max HPS is too low and lots of ppl including you if I remember correctly was saying no we have spirit shell we are fine. Now blizzard again nerfed our max HPS to shit and yet again you are repeating the same stuff. Some people just can't learn it seems. Guess what, reality hit disc pretty hard at launch and it will do the same when 5.2 hits, because unlike the PTR you won't have bugged inner focus giving you 100% crit on all PoHs.

Hmmm lets see I can do 0.8 to 1% of total DPS and bubble spam doing max HPS or I can do 1.2-1.4% total dps and drop my healing output by half. Or I could shoot myself and my raid in the foot, which is about the same really. You have to be brain dead to be smiting instead of bubble spamming between force and verves on vizier. Similarly you have to be retarded to bubble spam instead of smiting between attenuations, because only a few ppl take damage and you can heal them fast and cheap with atonement, leaving more mana to bubble spam hard when it really matters.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...=16894&e=17324

60k DPS from the top lei shi parse WITH a damage buff on the boss and 27% of that is smite.

When 5.2 hits, atonement is your only choice for spot healing during low damage phases and anything else that you try will simply result in lower HPS.

So I'm guessing that you are one of the those people that can't really comprehend how to actually be an effective healer outside of being the OPFotM. Disc is stupidly overpowered currently and if you don't know that, you clearly don't understand what is going on. Disc will be just fine and you can go ahead and spam atonement and be lazy, I'll just sit over here and NOT be a lazy retard and be perfectly fine.

Or maybe I have been playing dual healer spec since TBC, have a very strong understanding of every single priest healing mechanic and played disc at the start of MoP too. Maybe all my predictions from the beta came true as did all my predictions about the hotfixes and once 5.2 hits all my predictions will be true yet again. Obviously, you can't count above 10 otherwise you would do your math and realise exactly why I am saying that in 5.2 atonement will be much more prevalent than it is now.

[Asyra]

Or maybe I have been playing dual healer spec since TBC, have a very strong understanding of every single priest healing mechanic and played disc at the start of MoP too. Obviously, you can't count above 10 otherwise you would do your math and realise exactly why I am saying that in 5.2 atonement will be much more prevalent than it is now.

I know priest mechanics just fine, I have been playing a priest since this game was released, so I have a perfect grasp on the situation. And I never said that I WOULDN'T be smiting, I merely stated that isn't ALL I would be doing. You are the one who thinks that all someone would be doing is smiting, which is not the case, for numerous reasons. Your "the sky is falling" mentality does not other than cause people to ignore you, perhaps you should learn how to communicate with people better, and they might listen.

[Cattlehunter]

Healing is not a DPSing. You shouldnt consider it like DPS with "rotation" and push hard every possible second to maximize theoretical hps. Healing has a limits.
Your raid HPS should be approximately equal with raid incoming DPS (damage taken). If there is like 100k dps taken, then you shouldnt do 300k hps (100k ehps), 0 dps and your fellow healer do 0ehps.

That healing style is soooo stupidly retarded, because someone more skilled then you (and those guys sitting in top guilds) would do 70k hps (50k ehps), 50k dps and other healer would do another 50k. In that way I clearly see 50k dps profit with no loses.

Healing is a way to kill boss. Bubble spam cant kill boss. DPS can.
Healer is necessary measure when pure dps raid cant survive incoming damage. Then you take a healer. Or two. But any additional healer gimps your raid dps further.

Your job as healer is not play retarded way, but to maximize raid dps, for example if dpsers will survive and continue to dps then half of your job is done. All other time you should do as much damage to boss as you can. Then your second half of job would be done.

...and one way to do this is to heal enough that you can bring less healers. If me playing to maximize my HPS means that we can go from 3 healers to 2, or - even better - 2 healers to 1, then my ability to heal that much effectively translates into doubling the dps of another player, because it means we're able to bring another dps. In your bizzare hypothetical situation where the raid is taking 100k dps and one healer is doing 300k raw hps, with the second healer doing 0, then the retarded thing there isn't that the first healer is healing a lot, it's that the second healer is there at all.