Is discipline haste viable outside CM?

[Demetrion]

Hello guys!

Fist of all, I need to tell you that I'm huge haste junkie. Seeing those penances and smites going from my dead arms like crazy makes my adrenalin pump.

Recently I've gotten my hands back on my old main, priest. Been experimenting a bit, doing some stuff, researching. First thing I've done was challenge modes to get that awesome Transmog. The gemming was pretty strickt, and was happy to see haste as n1 stat for challenge modes. I got bit disappointed when I saw that haste is the worst stat for discipline priests in raiding.

I know crit increases our throughoutput by a huge margin, and mastery only adds to it, but in 10 mans which I'll be healing (I've tried a flex with 9 guildies) I feel so clunky and slow with low haste levels. I've healed whole WotLK and Cata with nothing but haste gemming/reforging, and got really used on the speed which allowed me to react faster (I still think that faster reactions in 10 man are needed since there is less people to cover you up in case you are late).

Now, my question is, gemming/reforging for haste instead for crit (or mastery at least) is it that much worse? Could I still be viable with that setup?

Thank you in advance!

[Deleted]

Haste is not that much viable since most of our spells are instant or just don´t have such a long cast time. So i don´t see how you feel it being slow. Maybe Spirit shell but by casting Pw:S before it you can get enough casts out, we also dont use SS on cd (most fights) so it be a wasted stat just for that.
Also cause crit and mastery are just more important then haste. Crit gives DA wich will most likely always be one of your top heals, mastery just makes those more stronger. Haste also means more spirit. So likely you will waste those 2 stats on a weak but bit faster throughoutput then strong heals with many absorbs.

Id recomment holy if you favor haste, tho if you raid 10 man disc is often favored cause of the absorbs and extra dps it brings. I also don´t think the haste caps are that high for holy in 10 man, but im not sure.

[Aparthia]

Haste generally increases your healing in two ways. It can increase the number of ticks on your hots at certain breakpoints or it can reduce the time it takes to cast your spells, increasing your healing per cast time.

Disc doesn't use a lot of hots. In fact the only one available to us, Renew, is hardly ever worth using. Additionally most of the spells discipline get their throughput from are on cooldowns that don't benefit from haste(L90, HF, Penance, etc). In fact the only spells that do benefit from haste other than reducing the GCD is our filler: Smite or PoH.

And in that case it would only make sense to stack haste if it allowed you to get in another smite or poh between all of your hardhitting abilities. Calculating what amount of haste you need to get in say another smite between all those spells would be difficult, but I doubt it's even worth it. You have to consider the fact that going for haste effectively means you can stack less mastery and crit, which increases the output of all those hardhitting abilities that don't benefit from haste. Essentially it's a question of whether being able to get off _one_ more filler spell once in a while is worth more than a increase to _all_ of your abilities by having more crit or mastery in its place. Without having done the math, I hardly think it's worth it.

[Shockeye]

Haste really does very little for a Disc Priest, it should be your dump stat.
Crit and Mastery offer so much more than Haste, you should never prioritise Haste over either of those. The only thing Haste will really do for you is make Smite cast a bit faster, but that does little for your throughput. As Atonement copies damage to healing, you want each hit to be big, not fast, and you want lots of Crit for Divine Aegis, and Mastery just makes everything you do better.

The only time you might reforge to Haste is if you have an item with Spirit, Crit and Mastery, and you've got enough Spirit. In that scenario, a Haste reforge will be your best choice, but you'd never gem or enchant for Haste.

If you are addicted to Haste, you might want to play a different healer, or as Shinbout says, play Holy.

[Hypasonic]

Short answer: no
Middle answer: Unless you're progressing and lack dps (why would you now, but w/e) a disc can offer dps/healing with haste, but I doubt its needed now.

[wombats23]

speaking purely from a hps point of view, haste can outperform both crit and mastery.

using http://www.healadinne.com/HealCalc/healcalc.html and blood legion's disc priest http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...oltez/advanced. (i enabled 5% spell damage, 25 man raid, assume archangel and t16 2pc)

this is scholtez's smite's hps in relation to the secondary stats:


at the top you'll see stat weights: crit at .77, mastery .99, haste 1.27. at the bottom you'll see optimized pairs -- meaning, for example, if sholtez traded 13896 crit for 13896 haste, his hps from smite spamming would go up by 6.3%.

sooooooooo why aren't disc priests told to gear haste over crit? healcalc does not take into account mana consumption/regen. the more haste you have, the more spells you will cast, the more mana you will use, the more spirit you will need. ultimately you'll end up having less healing power overall since you'll be required to allocate a portion of your secondaries to spirit. also, haste is pretty useless for spirit shelling outside of breakpoints and (to the best of my knowledge) healcalc does not currently have a way of measuring SS + PoH spam. that said, i can't imagine haste benefiting SS outside of breakpoints or maybe some fight specific scenarios where you need a bit more haste to accommodate for movement.



tl;dr: haste isn't practical unless you have infinite mana. as i'm sure you understand, the only reason why haste works in cmodes is thanks to abusing amber for mana regen.

random side note: if you wanna run haste, play a resto shaman, but only for thok. i've seen shamans run something like 8000 spirit and 13k haste while still having endless mana thanks to thok proccing water shield every other second while you chain cast chain heals like it's BC again. as if they weren't a god tier healer for that fight already.

alternatively, run a 25 man and run a healing roster of you as disc + 4 resto shamans and call out mana tides.

[Mormolyce]

Well, if your mana can support it then sure. Particularly since you seem to be talking about atonement healing which does benefit from haste since it is almost entirely cast time driven. But of course, atonement is filler for when you don't need to heal seriously, and unless you or your raid outgears the content I think you're going to want to manage your mana, ie more spirit less haste.

[Aparthia]

wombats, Adinne, the creator of HealCalc, doesn't recommend stacking haste for discipline and it has nothing to do with spirit.

That table is looking at this in a vacuum -- what happens if you continuously spam smite, which you rarely will. In fact you should only be using smite if everything else is already on CD.

This is what Adinne has to say about haste:

Let me try to clarify a couple of things. Here's the problem with "atonement" healing from my point of view: You have 3 atonement spells. From those 3, 2 are on a CD and hence haste does very little to them. The third, Smite, is a relatively weak heal. Also, getting more haste will not necessarily buy you more Smites. For example, suppose that with your current haste amount you end up with half a second left before Penance comes off CD. At that point you have to either not cast another Smite or delay Penance. The only way haste will make a difference in that would be if you can get enough haste to actually finish the next Smite cast within that 0.5 second. In other words, you would be looking for haste breakpoints to reach that would nicely line up the smites with the Penance&HF CD. In my opinion any plan that advocates haste should do these calculations, otherwise more haste in and of itself doesn't really boost your atonement healing any more.

To put it simply, you want to cast penance and holy fire on CD. Haste will only benefit you if it does in fact allow you to fit one more Smite inbetween those CDs. So first of all you would need to compute those breakpoints so people can aim to be right above them. But even in that case, given how little healing Smite does compared to that Penance, that extra Smite is very unlikely to offset how much weaker that Penance will be with the sacrificed Crit&Mastery.

[wombats23]

oh, i certainly don't condone stacking haste either, at least not for heroic raiding. i just didn't want to completely shoot down OP's idea of running a haste heavy build for disc. i just wanted to point out that haste actually isn't THAT overwhelmingly weak when it comes to healing from a hps point of view. it just has drawbacks unlike crit and mastery, which can only be more and more beneficial the more you get.

personally, i think if you're only intending to run flex and normal raids (which the sounds like it'd fit OP's current extent of raiding), a healthy amount of haste is possible to pull off since fights (in theory) won't be taxing enough on your mana since they either won't last long enough or won't do that much damage. gotta snipe them heals with a faster penance!

(aside: i brought up the haste and spirit point because adinne mentions it here: http://howtopriest.com/viewtopic.php?p=41763#p41763. it's a post i remember reading a long time ago and just stuck with me for whatever reason. she might have posted a more up to date response about haste but i don't check h2p anymore since progression is over.)

but yeah, realistically if you intend to do heroic progression raiding, going haste heavy as disc just won't work out well. it's fun to mess around with when you're doing farm content though. my crit+haste disc priest will dominate all alts and trials on the dps meters (no, my priest actually won't, but i can dream.)

[Aparthia]

Smite's hps is only increased if you add enough haste for you to cast another one in between all of your other cooldowns. Otherwise it's wasted since you shouldn't be using smite if another, better ability would be coming off cooldown during its cast time.

That would require a tremendous amount of haste, stats you need to take out of mastery and crit. And I doubt that extra smite once in a while makes up for the loss all your other abilities suffer. To that end you might increase the HPS of Smite, but your overall HPS will decrease.

[wombats23]

Smite's hps is only increased if you add enough haste for you to cast another one in between all of your other cooldowns. Otherwise it's wasted since you shouldn't be using smite if another, better ability would be coming off cooldown during its cast time.

That would require a tremendous amount of haste, stats you need to take out of mastery and crit. And I doubt that extra smite once in a while makes up for the loss all your other abilities suffer. To that end you might increase the HPS of Smite, but your overall HPS will decrease.

ohhhhhhhh, i see your point now. took me a long time for the second underlined part to actually click in my head. i'm a dpser at heart and the idea of having an empty gcd is foreign to me thanks to clipping mind flay. wow, haste sounds pretty god awful now that i understand that.

[Maleric]

i just wanted to point out that haste actually isn't THAT overwhelmingly weak when it comes to healing from a hps point of view.

Is this even true though? You posted numbers looking at Smite in a vacuum. So you've established that if you cast nothing but Smite, haste is a decent stat. But as several other posters have pointed out, the big problem with haste for disc is that it doesn't do much for spells that have cooldowns, which account for most of disc's output. If you load up on haste your Smite HPS may be better than it would be with a crit build, but your Penance, level 90 talents, and HF/Solace will all be weaker.

[PosPosPos]

Is this even true though? You posted numbers looking at Smite in a vacuum. So you've established that if you cast nothing but Smite, haste is a decent stat. But as several other posters have pointed out, the big problem with haste for disc is that it doesn't do much for spells that have cooldowns, which account for most of disc's output. If you load up on haste your Smite HPS may be better than it would be with a crit build, but your Penance, level 90 talents, and HF/Solace will all be weaker.

A lot of people here are forgetting that Penance scales with haste as well, since Smite directly reduces the CD of Penance per cast.

More Smites = more Penances.

The biggest issue with haste is it does nothing for Halo, Cascade and Divine Star, which account for the biggest parts of your healing repertoire.

Spirit is a non-issue, as most disc priests are looking to drop as much as possible even on progression - and most can't drop any further even if they wanted to. Haste is just an indirect method of dropping spirit without actually dropping spirit.

Hence Haste is actually a really underrated stat, but should still come after min-maxing Crit and Mastery anyway.

[Hypasonic]

I'd find it difficult finding space for any haste on my gear, even if I wanted to. I only have 2 pieces which have haste on, DPS cloak and Wrists, everything else is crit+mastery, or spirit+crit/mastery forged to mastery/crit respectively.

SO even if I was fine with my regen as is, I'd have to give up crit or mastery to get haste and I ain't gonna do that :P

[Maleric]

A lot of people here are forgetting that Penance scales with haste as well, since Smite directly reduces the CD of Penance per cast.

More Smites = more Penances.

It still isn't worth it.

[Aparthia]

A lot of people here are forgetting that Penance scales with haste as well, since Smite directly reduces the CD of Penance per cast.

More Smites = more Penances.

The above issue remains the same. You need enough haste to fill in another smite between your other casts. If the added haste is not enough to leave room for another smite, you're better off waiting for the cooldown on HF, penance or your other abilities to finish and cast them as soon as they get off cooldown anyway and the haste will be wasted.

Just looking at a smite/penance rotation in a vacuum:

With no haste you can cast 4 smites between each penance. 4 smites would reduce the cooldown of penance to 7 seconds and would take 6 seconds to cast. Since you can't get off another smite in the remaining second, you're better off waiting to fire penance on cooldown. The question is then how much haste do you need to get a fifth smite in there? 5 smites would reduce the cooldown on Penance with 2.5 seconds to 6.5 seconds. And to get off 5 smites in a 6.5% window you need about 15.38% haste. With buffs that's 4202 rating.

This is however completely unrealistic since you will have Holy Fire, Divine Star and PoM come of cooldown regularly as well(not to mention things like spirit shell that will take up 10 seconds every minute) meaning you will have even less time to cast smites and adding another smite would require drastically higher haste numbers. That amount of haste will simply not be worth the crit/mastery you're giving up for a single 90k heal ever so often. You will suffer a bigger loss to all of your other abilities, including the other smites you would have gotten off anyway.

Haste builds for discipline are worthless.

[Deleted]

You are forgetting haste's value in increasing allowance for mistakes. Haste allows you to overcome slower reaction, or stepping out of fire before casting.
That said, on spirit/haste items I reforge out of spirit. I have cca 17% haste buffed. (no gems/enchants)

However, I tried Spoils 25m HC with full haste and it performed very well... also, there is the 'ZOMG I'M ON CRACK' funny feel of being almost gcd-capped on smite.

[Frmercury]

You could gem Hit and Exp while still performing adequately as Disc, but that doesn't mean it's optimal. Haste is not optimal for Disc.

[Hypasonic]

I think gemming stamina would be better

[gaymer77]

I don't have a problem with haste when I'm healing as disc. My main spec is shadow so I'm gemming haste everywhere I can & my healing gear is the exact same gear for me.