Question Regarding Discipline Reforging

[Lefty12]

I'm a fairly new Disc healer (was Holy 100% before 5.2) and was reading about Disc priests over at Elitistjerks and they said your stat priorities and how you reforge should reflect your play style and what you use most often.

Atonement is always at least 50% of my healing and usually PW:S is in my top 3. How does mastery affect atonement? Which stat (crit or haste) will have a greater affect on atonement healing?

Thanks for your insight.

Edit: 10 man group. Healing with a Pally and a Shaman

[thsoern]

Haste is the best bust healing stat, but without a lot of spirit not very viable.
Crit is better than mastery for atonement. Mastery push your healing and shilds (pw:s, DA, SS).
If you have the feeling you can manage your mana, haste is great for atonement. I would suggest to stick with crit>mastery>haste, because crit and mastery work well together

[Lefty12]

If i have the spirit to maintain it would reforging everything to haste be beneficial on a fight like horridon where you're atonement healing 95% of the time?

[Sakamae]

Are you healing 10 man or 25 man, because recommendations will be different. For me healing 10 man, I prefer a crit>mastery>haste stat priority, sitting around 11k spirit. My crit % is usually within 5% of my mastery %. I heal with a holy paladin and resto druid. I typically dps our 2 heal fights, so some of my gear is shadow shared pieces. I probably have a bit more haste on average because of that. It's worked well for me this tier so far. We're just getting to heroics, so we're nothing special or super progressed. I do a lot of atonement healing, but a lot of absorb healing also. My top three are usually DA>SS>Atonement which flip flop based on the fight. Crit means more DA which is affected by mastery, so both stats are valuable for Atonement.

Atonement being always 50% of your healing sounds really high. I'm averaging around 20-30% with some higher due to the couple damage modifier fights. Even if you count solace in there, it's still too high. Top parses on Horridon are only in the mid 40s for Atonement percents, and that's a fight which you cheese it, so your 50% number doesn't make much sense to me.

Check out this post by Adinne for more information about stat interactions with Disc toolkit.

[Yetiman]

Are you healing 10 man or 25 man, because recommendations will be different. For me healing 10 man, I prefer a crit>mastery>haste stat priority, sitting around 11k spirit. I heal with a holy paladin and resto druid. I typically dps our 2 heal fights, so some of my gear is shadow shared pieces. I probably have a bit more haste on average because of that. It's worked well for me this tier so far. We're just getting to heroics, so we're nothing special or super progressed. I do a lot of atonement healing, but a lot of absorb healing also. My top three are usually DA>SS>Atonement which flip flop based on the fight.

Atonement being always 50% of your healing sounds really high. I'm averaging around 20-30% with some higher due to the couple damage modifier fights. Even if you count solace in there, it's still too high. Top parses on Horridon are only in the mid 40s for Atonement percents, and that's a fight which you cheese it, so your 50% number doesn't make much sense to me.

I second this. My healing breakdown yesterday, for Horridon for example, was as follows:
Atonement: 44.4%
Divine Aegis: 16.3%
PW:Shield: 13.8%
PoM: 10.5%

That's over 85% of my healing, the rest being myriad other abilities.

On the other hand, in Council of Elders, it's as follows:
Atonement: 35.3%
PW:Shield: 16.5%
DA: 16.3%
PoM:11.1%
Cascade: 8.8%

That's over 87% of my healing.

Jin'rokh has a similar breakdown to that of Horridon, with the exception that SS, Cascade and PoM enjoy higher percentages than PW:Shield.
So you trade off a bit of atonement for other spells (numerically speaking; in actual casts, my behavior is similar, just that the damage buffs boost your healing, and hence, atonement ranks up even higher).

I apologize for only showing only the first three fights (2 of which favor atonement heavily) but my RL only uploaded those fights yesterday; however, I believe the Council breakdown is more akin to a real "average" breakdown of abilities for fights in ToT. It will also matter if you're raiding 10- or 25-man; this is because 10-man favors Atonement (or the other way around, in fact :P), and usually the extra dps we contribute helps make up for any possible dps laggers (which happens to be the case in my raid group). Hence I usually do the following performance-wise: 80k-ish HPS, and 25-30k-ish DPS on any non-gimmick fight.

As to OP's original question about reforges, I tend to go with a Spirit>Mastery>=Crit>Haste to approx 2100 (aproximately 5%, which will give you 10% with raid-buffs). I've been thinking of throwing on some more crit instead of mastery for our next raid and see how it performs though.

[Lefty12]

Yea you guys are right I completely overestimated how much atonement I was doing. I went back and looked at the logs and Horridon is around 40% Jin'rokh was about 30%.

So it would make sense that b/c ~60% of my healing is NOT atonement that I should prioritize Mastery even of a fight like Horridon.

If healing ever becomes trivial (like previous tiers or content that we have on farm) would haste be the best way to increase your DPS as disc while still providing adequate healing w/ atonement?

[Dorfie]

Stack crit

[Rhianne]

So it would make sense that b/c ~60% of my healing is NOT atonement that I should prioritize Mastery even of a fight like Horridon.

You should prioritize Crit and Mastery pretty evenly. Mastery does increase total healing by a small percentage, and absorbs by twice as much. The problem is that divine aegis (typically the top absorb cast) is heavily crit dependent.

[Syri277]

don't sweat it, mathematically crit Is 2-3% better than mast in atonement heavy fights, and the opposite is right if it's pws heavy, and overall you want to find a balance, don't listen to anyone who says otherwise.
source for the math: http://www.healadinne.com/HealNotes/5.2Disc.html

[Lefty12]

Awesome. Thanks for the help

[Deleted]

The Stat prio for Disc is Haste (3039) > Crit > Mastery > Crit > Haste

[Lefty12]

3039 is for Renew which is rarely cast by Disc priests. Are you sure it's worth putting that much into haste?

[Akx]

No. It's generally (note GENERALLY -- we can always get into discussions about whether or not haste / regen is better than int / crit with just enough regen) not worth it to reforge into Haste as a throughput stat.

As a Disc priest I don't think I recall a single situation outside of a heroic dungeon where I used renew.

Mastery and Crit are pretty close together and should be kept a few percentage points within one another.

[Janvs]

Idd that softcap for disc is totally useless... Unless u are trying to gimp your raid casting renew.

[Deleted]

I am running 3039 haste myself, have been this entire expansion, its a sweetspot for me at least. Not so much for the renew tick, but thats just a bonus for those moments where you actually have to cast a renew. The crit vs. mastery debate is a tough one, some prefer balanced, some rpefer crit and some prefer mastery. I prefer mastery myself, cause of the fact that you can have more reliable healing output when you really need it.

[Anastacy]

3039 is for Renew which is rarely cast by Disc priests. Are you sure it's worth putting that much into haste?

As I stated in another thread, 3039 Haste isn't for Renew, it's for cast speed. CAST SPEED. Why do people only ever think about Renew? =\

2.2 casted PoH's is pretty nice, and can help you guarantee capped SS's on your whole raid (10man, obvi) even if you have to move out of some AoE really quick.

[Deleted]

Exactly, Smite is also at 1 sec cast with bl up =)

[Deleted]

It's quite simple, Haste does nothing at all for disc. The only thing it does does is make your castbar go faster and you'll go OOM quicker without any extra healing.
Yes you'll do more healing per second, but not more healing per mana
Crit gives more absorbs, mastery gives more healing and absorbs, spirit gives regen.
In the end, hast does nothing, not more regen, not more throughput, where as mastery crit and spirit does

[Noradin]

It's quite simple, Haste does nothing at all for disc. The only thing it does does is make your castbar go faster and you'll go OOM quicker without any extra healing.
Yes you'll do more healing per second, but not more healing per mana
Crit gives more absorbs, mastery gives more healing and absorbs, spirit gives regen.
In the end, hast does nothing, not more regen, not more throughput, where as mastery crit and spirit does

Thats a bit to exaggerated, haste certainly doesn't 'do nothing for disc', a configuration prioritizing haste is just not as effective as one going for crit and mastery first,
Sure you could claim haste generally doesn't improve hpm for disc (aside from Renew and HF dot), but neither does spirit, you have to twist your base of comparison a bit more than that for hast to become the only caster stat beside hit to do nothing for disc.

Depending on circumstances (which means depending on the encounter beside others) hast can improve your hps quite a bit, if it allows you to finish an efficient slow cast before you have to move instead of having to rely on flash heals for example. On encounters where you have to frequently change positions haste will improve your efficiency and thoughput.

[XyroN]

I am running 3039 haste myself, have been this entire expansion, its a sweetspot for me at least. Not so much for the renew tick, but thats just a bonus for those moments where you actually have to cast a renew. The crit vs. mastery debate is a tough one, some prefer balanced, some rpefer crit and some prefer mastery. I prefer mastery myself, cause of the fact that you can have more reliable healing output when you really need it.

I dont completely agree with what Gottan is saying, but it doesnt change the fact that he's probably atleast an 11x better disc priest than anybody on these forums. He knows _exactly_ what he's talking about, nuff said.