[6.2.3] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Floopa]

Actually during testing casting quite a few pw:s was fine. Perhaps it won't be viable to blanket the raid in loads of shields, but we have plenty of mana to cover x amount of people that take big damage, like the conflag debuff on beastlord, or if people somehow get hit by the spears.

Archangel will most likely be clunky till we get our tier set sadly.

the conflag thing is better off being dispelled than healed through :P

[PosPosPos]

the conflag thing is better off being dispelled than healed through :P

You can't pad meters if you dispel it though.

[Deleted]

the conflag thing is better off being dispelled than healed through :P

Hmm maybe it's not the conflag, its a debuff from when you tank the fire. I just forgot the name I guess

[Symmone]

So considering the use of HN...its more for a DA pad right?
I LOVE the Holy Nova Radar addon, but I found that Im not really paying attention to the # of low health people, mostly just using it to position myself around the most number of people in order to spam HN to build up DA.

If Im able to spam a ton before a pull, I can build up a 56k DA on most everyone. Right now in raid, we are running with two disc priests (myself and someones alt temporarily) and I was wondering if anyone knew if the two DAs stacked? Would we both be able to put up two DAs worth around 56k? Do their absorbs meld together? I dont recall ever seeing two separate DA buffs on myself. Or is there a set maximum so two disc priests will be gimped with DA as well as PWS?

Im just curious what the synergies are between two disc priests DAs.

[Deleted]

They have to really do something about this. Either remove atonement completely or put it back, or make Archangel-build up feel less clunky now, and holy nova is annoying.

Atonement was never really the issue but it got a lot of the blame because multiple spells show up with the flag "Atonement" and a number of people decided they didn't like having to pseudo-DPS as a filler to healing. Instead of rolling a different healer we ended up with a shower of complaints which resulted in one of the few mechanically different healers being turned into a two-button hero.

Atonement was easy though. Much like Holy Nova and PW:S will be. Filler heals are supposed to be easy and at least with Atonement there was some interest in a variable length Penance CD to maximise and ToF uptime to game.

- - - Updated - - -

Did my first mythic raiding. Nothing prominent really a handful of 8-20 ranks, but I guess we'd need better dps to rank on some fights. Mostly nova spam.

PW:S-ed like crazy on Jugg. Mostly on people with debuffs. Were too spread for nova. Malkorok I went PoH spam and went a bit oom at the end. Spoils was mostly PW:S spam. PW:S-ed on Klaxxi aswell but ran into a Kunchong like an idiot midfight and didn't rank. At least those fights felt a bit more fun than the usual nova spam ones...

First mythic raiding and you get through to Klaxxi? Goodness.

[Symmone]

First mythic raiding and you get through to Klaxxi? Goodness.

Yeah mythic is silly (at least for SoO currently). I was only up through spoils on the old heroic. But now in mythic we were able to steam past thok, seigecrafter, paragons, and get easily into the last phase of garrosh.

=/

[Deleted]

Yeah mythic is silly (at least for SoO currently). I was only up through spoils on the old heroic. But now in mythic we were able to steam past thok, seigecrafter, paragons, and get easily into the last phase of garrosh.

=/

Oh, sorry dear! My mistake! I thought you were inferring that you hadn't done heroic prior to 6.0! But yeah, Mythic is silly easy. We ended up zerging down siegecrafter with only myself healing in two attempts last week. 250+ wipes for nothing it seems. We haven't taken a look at the last two yet but I'm not expecting them to be difficult.

[Deleted]

There's a reason the achievements got removed before 6.0, because they made mythic siege a joke. They do it every pre expansion patch. Guess its to let anyone who couldn't manage before see all of the end game content.

@Aimee Im assuming you've not done mythic paragons/garrosh at all (am i correct in this?) . You can just nuke down paragons in any order as long as you move from abilities still. Same with Garrosh, we just tanked the non empowered weapons on the raid and moved out for the empowered. You can nuke everything down almost instantly

[Symmone]

@Aimee Im assuming you've not done mythic paragons/garrosh at all (am i correct in this?) . You can just nuke down paragons in any order as long as you move from abilities still. Same with Garrosh, we just tanked the non empowered weapons on the raid and moved out for the empowered. You can nuke everything down almost instantly

Yeah its pretty easy. I didnt even know what was going on, watched netflix the whole time, and a lot of our raid was pugs. O.O

[Deleted]

There's a reason the achievements got removed before 6.0, because they made mythic siege a joke. They do it every pre expansion patch. Guess its to let anyone who couldn't manage before see all of the end game content.

@Aimee Im assuming you've not done mythic paragons/garrosh at all (am i correct in this?) . You can just nuke down paragons in any order as long as you move from abilities still. Same with Garrosh, we just tanked the non empowered weapons on the raid and moved out for the empowered. You can nuke everything down almost instantly

Not yet! We have very short raid nights that are quite far apart so we will be taking a peek at them tomorrow. I'm not surprised that the tactics have been reduced to that :<

I don't recall any other prepatch being this severe.

[Overdispersion]

Oh, sorry dear! My mistake! I thought you were inferring that you hadn't done heroic prior to 6.0! But yeah, Mythic is silly easy. We ended up zerging down siegecrafter with only myself healing in two attempts last week. 250+ wipes for nothing it seems. We haven't taken a look at the last two yet but I'm not expecting them to be difficult.

lol, no. We were just raiding 10 man before 6.0 though and we weren't used to splitting up for fiery edges so we had a lot of deaths to kunchongs and insane calculations. Our mindset was also to blame since everything prior to Klaxxi had been a cakewalk and we thought we could zerg through Klaxxi with our 10 man tactics...

[Ezekiah]

The fire lines actually do insane damage now. We lost all but one person to the one set of fire lines we let out because we really didn't think they'd do much damage. Nothing else did. We just killed Iyyokuk though, and then ressed one of the people and carried on.

[Deleted]

....disc's version of Lifebloom, Earthshield and Beacon. You were expected to throw up PW:S on the tank on cooldown, in order to trigger rapture (as tanks are the most likely to take damage quickly to ensure the proc gets used). Getting "max returns" on rapture was never the expectation, and it was never possible outside of constant-damage fights....

.....Bull-fucking-shit. Nothing you say here is true - there was no "min maxing" of tons of stuff. Hitting stuff on cooldown and using spirit shell to block out the damage you could predict was the most "optimal" way to do it, besides being literally able to see in the future (in which case, you can argue that druids spamming rejuv on the correct targets because they could see 5 seconds into the future would be a "skillcap"). I also kind of don't get why you think people wouldn't be able to decide, during the fight, if it would be better to spam PW:S or PoH etc for output - I've been doing that for the past 2 tiers, and gotten tons of top ranks. It's not hard - it's as simple as setting up your cluster tracker to show when X targets have lost Y HP, and throwing PoH on the ideal target, or spamming PW:S if not.

7 Short term CDs? Do you mean your actual healing spells and their use? Because they always had a clear priority through the entire expansion. I'm not sure why you'd think otherwise. Also, seven? PoM, Penance, Holy fire, lvl 90, which other 3 are you including?

Either way, I find it asinine of you to say that it's impossible to play disc optimally and that no one did it, because I know for a fact that tons of us have. Just because you never personally managed to do it does not mean it was impossible. You are making assumptions that are not true (that spells did not have a set priority, and that people can't micro-manage uptimes and react to different patterns of damage/targets - play a dps class and you'll learn to micro manage your output without dying). At the most advanced part this expansion, during T14, this was my cheat sheet for how to disc:


Track rapture and time it with spirit procs.
Keep Archangel up by using offensive penance and holy fire on CD.
Keep lvl 90 talent on CD (alternatively, time it with pattern-specific damage - EG delay cascade 5 seconds for AA+timing with fiery lines on paragons, or to counter garalon's stomp every 30 seconds).
Use Mindbender (or shadowfiend) on CD.
Time spirit shell with encounter-specific damage patterns. If no pattern, use on CD for less overhealing (using my cluster tracker to hit 5x targets [green stars] with every PoH). Before ToF buff, you'd get a power infusion with every other shell to increase output further with an extra PoH cast.

Fill with either:
PoH (if my cluster tracker shows blue stars on a group, which means no overhealing from PoH+hits 5 targets).
PW:S (if intense damage and my tracker does not show blue stars, spam PW:S on high-risk targets).
Smite (if damage does not warrant max-throughput spamming/damage is not predictable - such as iron juggernaut P1).

Special occasions:
Cast PoM if moving and holy fire/penance/lvl 90 wasn't available, and no one predictably was going to take dmg for PW:S to be effective, on the tank.
Likewise, PoM on CD during pulsing AOE as it got off all jumps.

Rapture tracking was over before ToT aswell, which made the cheat sheet even simpler. When you boil it all down, I really can't understand why you'd say that no one can "optimise" around this. It's fairly simple shit, comming from a DPS background atleast (I have noticed a ton of discs struggling during SoO with playing offensively, and thus lacking output, because disc has felt more like a dps than a healer for quite awhile).

There's a bunch of stuff you hit on cooldown (just like any other class). Easy.
There's three distinct damage patterns, for which you use a specific spell - PoH for heavy AOE, PW:S for spread AOE, and Smite for random hits/low damage. Easy - just observe which of the three patterns you are in, and respond with the spell.

And then there's shelling before the encounter-timer for [insert generic boss explosion on a set timer] hits zero.

Playing anymore "Optimally" than this is, as I said earlier, arguing that people can become precogs by playing better. Because yes; There's always a way to get more output. It's just not reliant on skill or behaviour - it's reliant on luck. You could argue that shielding a specific target would end up being better than smiting, but unless you know that damage is going to happen, the information given would not have shown that to be true. Better to smite a random target for 150K who needs it, than shield a specific for 300K without him taking damage because you didn't luck out.

Mate you seem to have a lot of things confused. After PoH was made to apply divine aegis automatically and with the tuning the way it was in cataclysm, disc acquired an important layer of complexity: Blanketing the raid with aegis. The complexity arose from the fact that aegis stacks on itself and refreshes the duration. Disc mostly cast one spell PoH, but the complexity came from having to micromanage a large number of short term CDs that clashed with each other in order to maintain a short duration absorb that was practically on the whole raid. In the first half of MoP, that complexity became extreme for three reasons,
a) rapture became critical for mana returns
b) spirit shell was added
c) You now had a total of 7 short duration CDs (less than 3 min): Holy fire, Penance, level 90, spirit shell, archangel, inner focus and power infusion NONE of which could be used on cooldown due to clashes and without a clear priority of what was best to use when.

After PoH was nerfed and aegis was changed, disc because an absolutely brain dead spec.

First of all PWS is not the equivalent of lifebloom, earth shield, sacred shield or beacon of light. These are all one target only abilities designed to go on the tank and effectively no one else. PWS can be up on multiple targets and it is used to heal the raid as much or more than it is used on the tank. It also provided borrowed time, a buff that when used properly added small but non-trivial thoughput boosts.

It is absolutely idiotic to say that the complexity came just from micro managing CDs and react to stuff. These are just part of being a good player and every player including all healers has to do it. The hard part with disc was that it required thinking 20-25s in the future at all times and had to decide on the fly things you really needed a calculator for. Absolutely no log I ever saw played it perfectly. Not a single one. I can say that I was extremely satisfied with my peformance and did better (in terms of pushing out HPS) in that period than I ever had before or since.

You say players can be pre-cog. Actually other classes can't but disc could, because you had a way to maintain a large absorb buffer ad infinitum and the way absorbs work with damage.: You don't need for a target to take cosntant damage like with a HoT. Even if he takes one hit just before the absorb expires you are fine. It was hard but very very possible to predict with high accuracy the best targets to build absorbs on. The problem comes when you realise that maintaining a large aegis stack produces constant clashes where you have to decide whether to let a stack somewhere expire in order to manage some CD, but there was no easy way of predicting whether doing so will net you more or less HPS without a calculator.

As I said before this was for pushing out the envelope, but in fact you could ignore a large chunk of this complexity and still be 5% off. Ultimately other things were more important for throughput.

As for your rules, I am sorry to say that far from being optimal they would probably cost you HPS most of the time.

YOu didn't have to decide between PWS or PoH, but whether borrowed time was a net gain so you could go for PWS-PoH 1:1 or whether PoH spam was better HPS. Also it was pointless to use ToF for most encounters. Spamming PWS was poitnless it was always better to add instants/penance first and then a cast into borrowed time. Yet another complexilty.

All in all disc was extremely complex and everyone just ignored a lot of the complexilty and simplify things, because it was simply impossible to get to maximum performance. You used one spell, PoH, for the vast majority of your healing, but getting max return from it ended up being fiendishly complicated. Many people including you obviously, never even realised this complexity was there, because other factors end up being more important for throughput

[Symmone]

Cant we treat HN the same way we treated PoH previously?
I always spam HN before a fight to build up DA on as many people as possible (and obvisouly never stop spamming after that).

But this brings up another question I had earlier if anyone as any thoughts!

So considering the use of HN...its more for a DA pad right?
I LOVE the Holy Nova Radar addon, but I found that Im not really paying attention to the # of low health people, mostly just using it to position myself around the most number of people in order to spam HN to build up DA.

If Im able to spam a ton before a pull, I can build up a 56k DA on most everyone. Right now in raid, we are running with two disc priests (myself and someones alt temporarily) and I was wondering if anyone knew if the two DAs stacked? Would we both be able to put up two DAs worth around 56k? Do their absorbs meld together? I dont recall ever seeing two separate DA buffs on myself. Or is there a set maximum so two disc priests will be gimped with DA as well as PWS?

Im just curious what the synergies are between two disc priests DAs.

[Deleted]

Aegis from different priest is counted as separate buffs, so they don't count towards the same cap. Each priest stacks DA to his own cap. However it is important to remember that the lowest absorb goes first. So it is possible for one priest to shut the other out if he has smaller absorbs on and the damage is shallow. In other words there is no synergy between DA from different priests, but there is also no real clash either.

HN spamming to build up aegis before the fight can work as long as you position yourself so that you hit fewer targets. Here is a calculation to show you what the chances are of aegis dropping off on someone repeatedly hit by HN

Chance for aegis to be refreshed after receiving a certain number of heals per 15s with 50% crit rate = (1-(1-crit)^n), where n is the number of heals per 15s

No hits	chance
1	0.5
2	0.75
3	0.875
4	0.9375
5	0.96875
6	0.984375
7	0.9921875
8	0.99609375
9	0.998046875
10	0.999023438
11	0.999511719

If you have 20 people in the raid and you are spamming HN with 50% crit rate then each person will receive on average ~3 heals per 15s, which gives you a 87.5% chance to refresh aegis every 15s. If you spam for about a minute you will lose 40% of your stacks. If you are hitting just 10 people however then you have a 97% chance of refreshing aegis per 15s, so you can build a lot of aegis on them.

With 30% crit rate however things don't look so good:

No hits	chance
1	0.3
2	0.51
3	0.657
4	0.7599
5	0.83193
6	0.882351
7	0.9176457
8	0.94235199
9	0.959646393
10	0.971752475
11	0.980226733

If you are hovering around 30% crit rate, then you should try to position yourself so that you hit 6-7 people. Then you can reliably build aegis on them.


HN serves a very different purpose to the old PoH. The old PoH was a moderate cost powerful heal, that you used pretty much for all aoe along with penance and your level 90. You now have two aoe spells a very cheap HN that does moderate healing and a very expensive PoH that provides 28% more throughput including 10% higher crit chance (for aegis stacking and overheal resistance).

When you have excess mana you spam PoH to burn it. When mana is limiting you use HN and PWS when possible and switch to PoH only for EAA and to deal with damage that would overwhelm HN/PWS. The old PoH as a workhorse that you use under all circumstances is now gone. The tools you use to deal with aoe damage now depend on the situation.

[kokodesuka]

Bug?

Casting prayer of healing while targeting an enemy unit actually create the aoe healing effect around it instead of the players priest.? Is it intended or am I missing something here?

[Deleted]

That sounds like a bug. When targeting an enemy unit, my PoH is going off around my character.

[Noradin]

Bug?

Casting prayer of healing while targeting an enemy unit actually create the aoe healing effect around it instead of the players priest.? Is it intended or am I missing something here?

While there are spells that are supposed to work like that, what group would a PoH cast on an enemy be supposed to heal?
Maybe it is just the animation? Or they messed something up with that holy talent which replaces PoH and would make sense to work cast on enemies?

[Melchey]

While there are spells that are supposed to work like that, what group would a PoH cast on an enemy be supposed to heal?
Maybe it is just the animation? Or they messed something up with that holy talent which replaces PoH and would make sense to work cast on enemies?

I've had it happen rarely. It heals party members in 30 yards of the enemy target. Or at least "appears" that way, since I've had it heal anyway. It might heal the enemy too, but haven't seen anything to prove that.

[Deleted]

I bet it's a bug with one of those new "help those in the same faction" mechanics to help lazy solo questing. You know. When atonement works on anyone and you get credit for the same tagged kill.