I believe our disc priest is holding us back, can you help guide them?

[Deleted]

I think you're missing dierdre's point which is that while Crit/Mastery are undoubtedly better - it doesn't make haste useless. While crit/mastery will get you the best results, you can make haste and spirit work to your advantage if you know the class better and are able to modify your playstyle.

[Dierdre]

No, no, haste IS pretty bad, and 21k spirit is even worse. Haste has zero benefit to PWS, DA, T90, PoM, and has very limited benefit to Smite, Penance, Spirit Shell, Holy Fire/Solace, while Crit and mastery immensely benefit all of these abilities and have a symbiotic relationship that makes the benefit they provide almost exponential, while haste has very little synergy with either of those stats or with the spells themselves.

No argument there, except for two things:

1. Both DA and SS cap, so the benefit mastery provides to a crit heavy build is also limited in practice unless there is continuous raid-wide damage, which is not always the case in SoO encounters.
2. Haste does benefit significantly (more than 5% cast time reduction by going from 2k to 5k haste) atonement dps throughput (which even if healers usually hate to admit it, is the biggest perk of having a disc priest), while mastery doesn't. Also, haste does benefit DA; not directly and in a lesser extent than mastery does, but by building DA through faster casts. It's just a tradeoff between mastery and haste. Sure, you won't get the huge shields in one cast, but I promise you no one dies, bosses die faster and everyone is happy. All I'm saying is that in practice, although it does provide lower maximum healing throughput than crit and mastery, haste is not as bad as it's depicted, particularly if you're contributing with dps instead of scratching your belly during low damage phases.

About spirit, yes, you probably couldn't spend 21k spirit even by spamming flash heal throughout the entire fight. Like Ghostcrawler used to say, if you finish a boss fight with more than 10% mana then you're running too much spirit.

[Deleted]

It's just a tradeoff between mastery and haste. Sure, you won't get the huge shields in one cast, but I promise you no one dies, bosses die faster and everyone is happy.

I like a bit of haste myself but the idea that it is a reasonable trade-off when it comes to healing seems odd. That increased DA generation only applies to cast time spells which we don't really rely upon for creating DA anyway.

Anyway, in this situation Atonement is correct that they should be focusing on mastery and crit more because they aren't adapting their style of play to benefit from the higher amounts of haste and spirit.

[Deleted]

You see, there's basically 2 kinds of healers at the moment: throughput healers (rshaman, rdruid, hpriest, mw) and absorb healers (disc, hpally). Throughput healers are great for reactive healing, as in bringing players back up once damage is taken, while the strength of absorb healers is preemptive healing, i.e. shielding players before damage is taken. So it's to be expected that on a fight like shamans, where you say you're just progressing, your throughput healers will outheal your disc. Once your team learns the fight, avoidable damage is reduced to a minimum, and your disc learns when and where the damage spikes go, the gap will close.

The best tips I can give your disc priest (and your team) are:

1. Learn the fights beforehand. It makes a huge difference for disc.
2. Never listen to people telling you that your healers are bad unless you're sure they know what they're about. Particularly if they start with "they're gemming X and reforging Y such noobs". Wipes are almost never a healer's fault, and they will NEVER be caused by gemming/reforging.

Only partially true. Is healer's fault that some moron collected half of the emotions on Garrosh by himself? Obviously no, but then it depends on the healers if it is going to be a wipe.

The better healers are, the more mistakes can be recovered from.

Unless already solohealing, healers are co-responsible even for enrage-wipe.

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Nah, actually, haste is insanely bad for disc. I once accidentally healed general nazgrim in my shadow gear, with almost 50% haste, I got beaten by everyone in healing, I felt borderline useless since I always top healing by a mile. Bad gearing vs good gearing makes an insane difference for disc. If this player optimized their gear correctly it would go a very long way to improving their performance.

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And icy veins is probably exactly why she is where she is. This is what Icy Veins says about stats


They might give the correct stat priority in their summary, but the section that actually goes into further detail pretty much implies all kinds of incorrect information for disc. It impiles that we should have spirit on every item that can, just because spirit is for healzers. It the implies Mastery>Crit because of the order in which they describe the further details on the stats. They THEN imply that crit is good for throughput but bad because its unreliable. For disc this is as far from the truth as possible, because crits become DA which almost invariably gets consumed before it expires, thus making it very reliable indeed. It then goes and implies after that haste is actually better for aoe healing than the other stats cause reasons they don't provide, and is only kinda 'low priority' for disc because we have instant casts. I remember foolishly thinking Smite heals = casting, casting = haste is good when I first rolled disc in late 5.3, and this exact sentence on icy veins had me being useless for weeks. It lets you think it's not set in stone, when it very much is.

Edit: Apparently they've finally corrected their geming advice. "06 Jun. 2014: Aligned the gemming suggestions with the recommended stat priority."
So until june they recommended Pure Spirit in blue, Spirit/Int in red and Spirit/crit in yellow. I know this for a fact because I went on a rampage about it after several guild members got me to help optimize their alt disc's and they'd all been geming and reforging wrong cause of Icy Veins.

I learnt more about disc from annoying people in LFR who were topping the meters than i did from icy veins. Just saying.

Oh, didn't realize Icy-Veins are that bad, my mistake than.

[Adinora]

I think you're missing dierdre's point which is that while Crit/Mastery are undoubtedly better - it doesn't make haste useless. While crit/mastery will get you the best results, you can make haste and spirit work to your advantage if you know the class better and are able to modify your playstyle.

I think he understood the point but the important part of all that is that it's not optimal. You CAN run with more haste than other disc priests and still do okay. But why would you use a stat that is less valuable over crit/mastery? It just doesn't make any sense.

[Dierdre]

I think he understood the point but the important part of all that is that it's not optimal.

I've never said otherwise. But there is a huge difference from "not optimal" to "insanely bad".

[Deleted]

The problem with having haste over crit or mastery is also spirit. You cast more spells so you need more spirit throughout a fight.

[Jimjam38]

I think you're missing dierdre's point which is that while Crit/Mastery are undoubtedly better - it doesn't make haste useless. While crit/mastery will get you the best results, you can make haste and spirit work to your advantage if you know the class better and are able to modify your playstyle.

I didn't say haste is useless. I said its bad, and in my earlier rant I made a point of explaining that haste in itself is not useless for disc, but the relative loss of crit/mastery needed to gain haste makes it bad.
Point for point, trading mastery or crit for haste you cannot increase your throughput unless you already have such excessive mastery relative to healthpool that you get DA capped from a single heal, which is not even attainable with the highest possible ilevel currently available.

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No argument there, except for two things:

1. Both DA and SS cap, so the benefit mastery provides to a crit heavy build is also limited in practice unless there is continuous raid-wide damage, which is not always the case in SoO encounters.
2. Haste does benefit significantly (more than 5% cast time reduction by going from 2k to 5k haste) atonement dps throughput (which even if healers usually hate to admit it, is the biggest perk of having a disc priest), while mastery doesn't. Also, haste does benefit DA; not directly and in a lesser extent than mastery does, but by building DA through faster casts. It's just a tradeoff between mastery and haste. Sure, you won't get the huge shields in one cast, but I promise you no one dies, bosses die faster and everyone is happy. All I'm saying is that in practice, although it does provide lower maximum healing throughput than crit and mastery, haste is not as bad as it's depicted, particularly if you're contributing with dps instead of scratching your belly during low damage phases.

About spirit, yes, you probably couldn't spend 21k spirit even by spamming flash heal throughout the entire fight. Like Ghostcrawler used to say, if you finish a boss fight with more than 10% mana then you're running too much spirit.

Disc DPS is only valuable in 10m. In 25man it's negligible, and disc's real benefit is the insane oversight of the T90 abilities not being capped and the massive throughput it provides. Furthermore, haste might be better than mastery for dps, but it's not better than crit. Furthermore, hard cast abilties don't scale well with haste, no matter what you might believe. Any spec that values haste does so because of hots, dots or channels or haste specific mechanics like Sanctity of Battle. We have penance, but its cooldown makes any haste value become pointless. If you sim us for dps, haste has a very small dps increase relative to a propper dps class. Yes, its more dps increase than mastery, but its not enough to really warrant us using haste.

Finally, yes, haste CAN indirectly benefit DA via allowing us to cast more hence more often procing DA, however haste also causes us to go OOM faster (which is why arcane mages got a passive to allow haste to increase their mana regen), which means you need more spirit to sustain that haste, which in turn means less stat budget for crit/mastery, meaning less throughput. Any throughput haste provides is offset by the increased demand for spirit it causes, and doesn't increase the mana gain from SF/MB enough to offset itself.

[Deleted]

There's no need to be so anally retentive about this and lecture; I know fine well about discipline priest and am clearly agreeing with you that crit/mastery are undoubtedly superior in every way and I am not for one second suggesting that anyone trade them for haste. The fact of the matter, however is that you can get acceptable results with poor stats if you know how to play the spec to its potential in different circumstances. While obviously the priest mentioned by the OP requires stat and gear adjustments ASAP in order to improve performance, there is a level of play adjustment and class awareness (which I guess the OP priest's stat priority makes clear enough as it is) which would be more important to promote. From my experiences, awareness and ability to wield a healing spec as a tool competently, is much, much more important in getting good results.

[Dierdre]

There's no need to be so anally retentive about this and lecture; I know fine well about discipline priest and am clearly agreeing with you that crit/mastery are undoubtedly superior in every way and I am not for one second suggesting that anyone trade them for haste. The fact of the matter, however is that you can get acceptable results with poor stats if you know how to play the spec to its potential in different circumstances. While obviously the priest mentioned by the OP requires stat and gear adjustments ASAP in order to improve performance, there is a level of play adjustment and class awareness (which I guess the OP priest's stat priority makes clear enough as it is) which would be more important to promote. From my experiences, awareness and ability to wield a healing spec as a tool competently, is much, much more important in getting good results.

/thread /tenchar