Question about running possibly with 2 disc priests

[Monzsterr]

My team is 7/13H right now, so still pretty casual but still good enough to have some standards.
We have about an 18 man roster and just lost a long time member resto druid. Our current comp is mistweaver, holy prist, disc priest, and resto shaman. Our resto shaman really just a back up healer and is usually dps. So we need a 4th healer and today had another very good disc priest run with us. My question is (as the raid leader who doesn't know anything about healing other than cooldowns) I hear it's counter productive to have multiple disc priests due to bubble overlap. Would we really be shooting our self in the foot to run monk, hpriest, x2 dpriest? With a 20 man group can you assign one disc to group one and two and another to group 3 and 4?
Please forgive my ignorance of healing. Thanks for any advice you can give.

[Summer]

Don't think 3 healing priests is ideal no, but to put this nicely in heroic progress your only difficulties will come from doing mechanics right and there are no meaningful dps / healing checks as such that could stop you from killing a boss so raid comp is not so crucial. If you find a good player who wants to join you should probably hold on to him / her.

Could any of the priests reroll by any chance? :P

[Daedius]

Having 2 Disc priests isn't as much an issue as it was in the past where they had to rely on Rapture, where they got a % of mana back on shields breaking.

[PosPosPos]

Having 2 Disc priests isn't as much an issue as it was in the past where they had to rely on Rapture, where they got a % of mana back on shields breaking.

^
This is absolute rubbish and speaks of outright ignorance as to how disc priests play this entire expac. In MoP disc priests were primarily spamming atonement and direct heals to dish out the majority of their healing; PW:S was only cast to proc rapture every x seconds rather than as a filler, and thus didn't care how many disc priests the raid was running, because everyone in the raid took regular burst damage for pretty much all encounters.

Fast forward to Highmaul, BRF and HFC, disc priests now spam PW:S for the majority of their output(50% - 70% depending on the tier and encounter-to-encounter demands), not being able to shield the same targets is extremely detrimental on the triage and maximum output fronts, and you are doing the raid a disservice not having the 2nd disc swap to another healer spec as a result.

[Deleted]

If one of them is running CoW it can be very useful. For example, we killed Xhul Mythic with double disc. Me and my buddy. I am usually Holy, so I just took CoW and was keeping the tanks, while my co-priest healer was purely shielding. Was not an issue at all. Can be very useful in certain situation. It is all about one of the priests being okei with staying away from Shielding. Ofc, with that setup you much rather add a Holy Paladin, but CoW priest is much like Holy Paladin, only that it does less raid healing, but is in fact doing more Tank healing, having in Mind that it bypass other healers and never overheals on tanks.

[PosPosPos]

If one of them is running CoW it can be very useful. For example, we killed Xhul Mythic with double disc. Me and my buddy. I am usually Holy, so I just took CoW and was keeping the tanks, while my co-priest healer was purely shielding. Was not an issue at all. Can be very useful in certain situation. It is all about one of the priests being okei with staying away from Shielding. Ofc, with that setup you much rather add a Holy Paladin, but CoW priest is much like Holy Paladin, only that it does less raid healing, but is in fact doing more Tank healing, having in Mind that it bypass other healers and never overheals on tanks.

Naturally, fights like Xhulhorac and Iron Maidens are exceptions to the rule, because those are fights that revolve around shielding 2-3 high priority targets while the rest of the raid gets to tunnel on whatever they are doing.

However, double disc is a outright liability on the other non-gimmick encounters.

[Deleted]

Naturally, fights like Xhulhorac and Iron Maidens are exceptions to the rule, because those are fights that revolve around shielding 2-3 high priority targets while the rest of the raid gets to tunnel on whatever they are doing.

However, double disc is a outright liability on the other non-gimmick encounters.

I think as a guild that is running Heroic, they will be perfectly fine having one disc focusing on keeping the tanks, and the other being on the raid.

Seeing as the other option is holy and in HC there is not enough healing for Holy to shine (a spec that usually shines less in HC and a lot more in Mythic), I think you are better off having it switch to CoW and staying on the tanks.

[Monzsterr]

I appreciate the feedback, especially the distinction here that heroic raiding's requirements are not the same as mythic. What also concerns me about losing a resto druid and gaining a disc is the loss of tranquillity, those raid wide cool downs are big for us.
But at this point, having good players rather than good comp is probably better for us. I'm not sure what we'll do, probably try things out with two disc and see how it goes. Our tanks are rarely a healing issue and we've always relied more on externals like hand of sac and barkskin than we have on focused tank heals. But we do play on an RPPvP realm so sometimes you just need to take what you can get. I know the one thing we've tried twice this expac with different priests that has never worked is saying "hey, could one of you just go shadow for this fight". I get the impression that shadow is not an easy spec to play, especially if you're mainly a healer and not a usually dps.

[watchmepws]

I would not run 2 disc priests. In this expansion PWS is nearly 80% of a discs healing. Having to play the snipe game with another one is not fun at all.

You are also losing a major potential cooldown running 2 discs. As you mentioned, such as tranq. Having 2 barriers is no where as good as a nice tranq.

The only OK about 2 disc is cheesing a mechanic such as mythic maidens where the second disc priest literally is ONLY using CoW to keep 100% on required targets and not even touching shield.

[Tygerlily177]

With a 20 man group can you assign one disc to group one and two and another to group 3 and 4?

No one answered this one directly, so here is what I think:

The answer is yes and no. If damage were constant and raid wide, then you would be able to use this set up. However, the majority of the encounters in HFC have random debuffs or single-target damage that can easily be covered by one priest. If you just decide to blanket the raid anyway, then you will be wasting a lot of your resources.

Although heroic comps are more flexible than mythic ones, I would still choose two holy priests and one disc priest over one holy and two disc. My opinion is derived from my own experience:

In BRF, our second priest was tri-spec. We asked him to play Disc for Maidens, Holy for any of the 5 heal fights, and Shadow for the rest. The guild paid for his respecs, so it wasn't an issue. When we started doing farm, it was no longer important to have a perfect comp, so we just told him to stay Disc/Shadow because Disc still made Maidens so much easier. It was incredibly frustrating to heal everything else. The only fight that was relatively fine was Kromog due to the constant aoe damage. Even if we assigned him to CoW the tanks, it felt like a complete waste. A priest that is solely casting CoW is 1/10th of a paladin. I ended up just telling him to go Shadow for everything, and we just underhealed.

I think that you have already identified the other problem with running two discs: the lack of throughput cooldowns. Barrier cannot be used for every mechanic out there, so you will suffer with one less cooldown. Disc priests are also terrible at filling bars, so if your raid is low, you will feel the double effect.

Just my two cents.