[Legion] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Gorsameth]

a class with a spell like shadow mend can't be bad in mythic +

speaking of which, has any disc priest done any high end mythic +'s to comment on it?

They have, I believe it was that at mythic 10 and up your using single target heals so much you might aswell play Holy.

[Ryeshot]

My math shows that in a raid environment that vers is actually better than crit, since you don't spam penance as much and most of your atonement healing is coming from smite, whose absorb is unaffected by crit. Every one of my raid testing shows that smite is more than 1 - (350/400) * 100 = 12.5% of my healing, but that may just be me.

Then again, there is very little haste/vers gear in EN and none of our tier is haste/vers, so maybe stacking haste/crit with jewelry as haste/vers will be best.

250mastery gives 1% atonement healing and 350crit gives 1% crit.

This would be true is mastery were additive, but it is not. At 0 mastery rating, an extra 250 rating gives:
40 * (1.1112 + .01) - 40 * (1.1112) = 44.848 - 44.448 =
.4%

This means that every 1% mastery gives only .4% effective atonement healing, so the new calculation is:
At 0 mastery:
.4x * 1.4 = .4448x + (1-x)
.56x = .4448x + 1 - x
1.1152x = 1
x = .8967
89.67%


You must have 89.67% of your atonement be mastery healing in order for mastery to pass crit even at 0 mastery rating.
I didn't try this for vers, but difference in 1% vers to crit is only 14.3%, so I'm sure it is somewhere around 75%.

With my first paragraph in this post I would say our stat priority is:
Haste > Vers>=Crit > Mastery

[Helelos]

What is good to gem for pre-patch? The multistrike gear becomes whatever stats, but I can't avoid the copious amounts of mastery on my gear.

[Izzirez]

People believe what they see.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...ealing&fight=3

Take a look at this fight. Ask yourself what you would think if you saw 90-100% of Disc Priests you've played with do what Izzi did. That's what a Disc that has never played Legion Disc in an actual raid looks like (and you can already see it was a lot better by the time we got to Cenarius). Now ask yourself how many people would continue to play Disc after performing like that in a test, and how many would just say "oh it sucks" and go play another spec.

Most people wash out of Disc before they get to the point where they can play decently (generally takes an hour or two in a raid environment if you know what you are doing, longer if you don't), so people only ever see that. It's actually totally understandable why people think Disc is bad; they never get to the point where they see a Disc doing well because it takes longer than other healers and people are impatient.

I don't like proof of me being bad :P

Keep in mind that I am normally a great player and have been able to pick up nearly every class and play it at a mythic level. I was perfectly comfortable with the class when doing Ursoc, and still there is that big of a discrepancy between Total and I. I could VERY easily see a less experienced disc priest coming into a raid, being uncomfortable, having open GCDs and putting up even less healing than I did, and be told that disc is not viable and he shouldn't ever play it. The evidence shows that for disc to be viable/good in Mythic raids, the player has to be able to play as well, if not better, than his peers in that raid. I firmly believe these exceptional disc priest will be a huge asset to their raid, but we will also see plenty of disc priests who cannot do that and will be looked down upon.

tl;dr: Get good at disc if you want to raid.

[Immortalem]

I was wondering which stats you had during that raidtest. Since it looks like that you had way less crit than Total. (at least from the amount you critted at Ursoc)

So were you going mastery ?

I still wanted to look into those logs since you did roughly equal healing at some fights but even came ahead of dmg to Total.

[Izzirez]

I was wondering which stats you had during that raidtest. Since it looks like that you had way less crit than Total. (at least from the amount you critted at Ursoc)

So were you going mastery ?

I still wanted to look into those logs since you did roughly equal healing at some fights but even came ahead of dmg to Total.

This wasn't the toon that I copied from live, so it was the default gear that you start with on a level 100 character. Almost all the gear had haste on it. I also had no artifact traits since I did the artifact quest just to have a character ready for the raid testing.

[Ryeshot]

Here's a tip for all novice disc priests out there:
Apply atones between every smite/penance cast. This makes it so your atones never fall off more than one at a time (one reason we don't use PWR), and gets you into the feel of abusing the Borrowed Time artifact trait. I promise that if you find a way to balance your damaging and healing casts by using different ones every gc/d, you will see a large improvement in your performance.

Many discs I see apply too many atones and therefore don't have the gc/ds for damaging casts > atonement healing, and others do the opposite. This way you automatically get a balance (you should not be striving for 12+ atonements in a raid, if you do that you will never be actually healing besides SWP/PtW, strive for 5-6 instead).

[Totaltotemic]

Here's a tip for all novice disc priests out there:
Apply atones between every smite/penance cast. This makes it so your atones never fall off more than one at a time (one reason we don't use PWR), and gets you into the feel of abusing the Borrowed Time artifact trait. I promise that if you find a way to balance your damaging and healing casts by using different ones every gc/d, you will see a large improvement in your performance.

Many discs I see apply too many atones and therefore don't have the gc/ds for damaging casts > atonement healing, and others do the opposite. This way you automatically get a balance (you should not be striving for 12+ atonements in a raid, if you do that you will never be actually healing besides SWP/PtW, strive for 5-6 instead).

That's a nice tip if you don't want to do any healing for the sake of casting every single GCD. You definitely do want to spam Atonements out sometimes, and if you never go beyond 12 atonements you will just not do any meaningful healing. Smite is a very small part of relevant healing, it's mostly just filler when you don't actually need to heal anyone or in the aftermath of a LW/Penance setup.

It's absolutely bizarre that you would say that you only heal with PtW if you don't use Smite when the most important damage spells are Penance and Mindbender, not either of those two spells. I don't really know why you're giving out "tips" that are just bad ideas.

[Ryeshot]

First off, if people are applying atones with plea every global, then they do not have time to cast any other spells, meaning their only atonement healing is SWP/PtW. Second, obviously it is smart to preempt atone > penance to heal a lot of damage, but my tip was passive healing so you aren't stuck with no atones to prepare for damage. From everything I have tested (recall this is beta, and not live so we are still testing), penance is a mana whore so I only use it when I need to heal people, and this way it is always off cooldown when I need it. I do not care about dps because that is only a mechanism of the way we heal. I'm sure I have done just about as much testing as you so let's not be ignorant and instead collaborate with each other.

[Gorsameth]

First off, if people are applying atones with plea every global, then they do not have time to cast any other spells, meaning their only atonement healing is SWP/PtW. Second, obviously it is smart to preempt atone > penance to heal a lot of damage, but my tip was passive healing so you aren't stuck with no atones to prepare for damage. From everything I have tested (recall this is beta, and not live so we are still testing), penance is a mana whore so I only use it when I need to heal people, and this way it is always off cooldown when I need it. I do not care about dps because that is only a mechanism of the way we heal. I'm sure I have done just about as much testing as you so let's not be ignorant and instead collaborate with each other.

If your not caring about the damage why are you bringing a Disc and not another class that is easier to play while doing more healing and has more tools/utility?

[Ryeshot]

Other classes do more ambient healing, disc's forte is its burst healing after large spikes of damage. Disc's damage is not irrelevant, but its main focus should be hps, not dps. Damage is simply a means to heal all your atoned targets, nothing more. It is the only mechanism that makes sense for that style of healing. Stop thinking of disc doing less healing as other healers, it does worse in some cases, and better in others. Just like every other healer class out there.

Edit:

It also has the potential to do insane dps at the cost of healing (like most healers in legion). In non-execute phase I did only 5% less dps than disc vs shadow, and both my weapons are same ilvl. This might be another reason to bring them - they can swap from heal to dps in a flash kinda like chakra dancing, but you need to go Schism in order to do that so...

[Totaltotemic]

First off, if people are applying atones with plea every global, then they do not have time to cast any other spells, meaning their only atonement healing is SWP/PtW. Second, obviously it is smart to preempt atone > penance to heal a lot of damage, but my tip was passive healing so you aren't stuck with no atones to prepare for damage. From everything I have tested (recall this is beta, and not live so we are still testing), penance is a mana whore so I only use it when I need to heal people, and this way it is always off cooldown when I need it. I do not care about dps because that is only a mechanism of the way we heal. I'm sure I have done just about as much testing as you so let's not be ignorant and instead collaborate with each other.

What in the world are you talking about? I have to dissect this post because pretty much every statement is just mind-blowingly wrong.

First off, if people are applying atones with plea every global, then they do not have time to cast any other spells, meaning their only atonement healing is SWP/PtW.

If people Plea every global, they have no mana whatsoever. Nobody is every Pleaing every global because it's literally impossible to do that.

Second, obviously it is smart to preempt atone > penance to heal a lot of damage, but my tip was passive healing so you aren't stuck with no atones to prepare for damage

Why would you have "no" Atonements? PW:S is still an ability, and you can still press Plea once or twice as well, but 5 Atonements isn't every other GCD, that's only true at 0 haste. You'd also have your Atonements falling off when you do want to burst if you staggered them exactly every other GCD.

From everything I have tested (recall this is beta, and not live so we are still testing), penance is a mana whore so I only use it when I need to heal people, and this way it is always off cooldown when I need it.

What? Just... what? How is Penance a "mana whore"? That makes absolutely no sense.

I do not care about dps because that is only a mechanism of the way we heal. I'm sure I have done just about as much testing as you so let's not be ignorant and instead collaborate with each other.

I don't care what your "testing" is if it's complete nonsense and doesn't follow any reasoning that makes sense, like your ridiculous idea that 1% more Atonement healing isn't 1% more Atonement healing just because you decide it isn't.

It also has the potential to do insane dps at the cost of healing (like most healers in legion). In non-execute phase I did only 5% less dps than disc vs shadow, and both my weapons are same ilvl. This might be another reason to bring them - they can swap from heal to dps in a flash kinda like chakra dancing, but you need to go Schism in order to do that so...

Can I have some of what you're smoking that you can see this strange world where Disc does the same DPS as Shadow? Seems like some really potent stuff.

- - - Updated - - -

You must have 89.67% of your atonement be mastery healing in order for mastery to pass crit even at 0 mastery rating.
I didn't try this for vers, but difference in 1% vers to crit is only 14.3%, so I'm sure it is somewhere around 75%.

And I have to point out that this is also totally wrong, and we can see this through simple, basic sanity checking.

Let's take 80% as our Atonement healing number. If I have 350 Mastery rating, I will do 1.4% more Atonement Healing. 80 (Atonement%) * 1.014 (boost in atonement) = 81.12%. 81.12 - 80 = 1.12%, or a 1.12% increase in healing. 350 Critical strike rating would be a 1% increase in healing.

So if this is not true at 80%, how could it possibly take until 89.67% to be true? It's too bad your work just seems to pull variables and constants out of thin air or someone could see what is actually wrong with your analysis, but just by looking at the end result and sanity checking it we can tell that it's very far off from reality. 71% is the number at which your Atonement healing as a percentage of total healing makes mastery even with crit, not 89.67%.

[Ryeshot]

If people Plea every global, they have no mana whatsoever. Nobody is every Pleaing every global because it's literally impossible to do that.

This was an exaggeration, I was talking about a balance between applying atones and damaging. I've seen people mindlessly atoning and producing little damage, reducing their atonement healing during passive damage. During passive damage, or no damage, I have found that is it best to rotate between smite and plea to maximize atone applications and healing done to those targets. So if during passive damage you just blanket the raid with atones and cast smite once or twice, your healing is severely lowered. Smite is the most effective heal besides PW:S when little damage is going out since it will never overheal the absorb, and the absorb is unaffected by atonement so it is 100% effective.

This also results in more HPS since every other cast is 15% faster, why would you waste a healing increase buff when you are going to apply the same amount of atones anyway?

What? Just... what? How is Penance a "mana whore"? That makes absolutely no sense.

Smite is the most HPM and HPS until ~4 targets (2 with castigation). Even so, using penance on cooldown will nuke your mana if you only use it for a dps increase. Smite spamming is still effective and is more mana efficient when little damage is going out. This way you can actually use your mana cooldowns like MB and PI for effective healing gain instead of a mana gain, which the latter is just selfish.

I don't care what your "testing" is if it's complete nonsense and doesn't follow any reasoning that makes sense, like your ridiculous idea that 1% more Atonement healing isn't 1% more Atonement healing just because you decide it isn't.

If you are responding to my previous post, please tell me where my error is because I would love to find it. I try to double check my results before posting them, but I may have made a mistake.

I tested 3 times on a target dummy and my gear, which is haste/crit gave me an average difference of 5% between disc and shadow damage over 3min single target. Recall that this is not execute phase, so there is still a difference, but not a colossal gap.

Please keep this criticism going, maybe we can reach a half way point by collaborating.

Let's take 80% as our Atonement healing number. If I have 350 Mastery rating, I will do 1.4% more Atonement Healing. 80 (Atonement%) * 1.014 (boost in atonement) = 81.12%. 81.12 - 80 = 1.12%, or a 1.12% increase in healing. 350 Critical strike rating would be a 1% increase in healing.

350 mastery = 1.4% mastery as you said
BUT it is a difference of 44.48 and 40 * (1.112 + .014)
45.04 - 44.48 = .56% atonement healing

Once again, mastery is multiplicative, if it were additive 1.4% mastery would result in 1.4% atonement, but it is not.
Additionally, 1% crit is not 1% increase in healing 1% crit is 1% increase in (1-x) healing, where x is % of non-atonement healing, plus .4448x (assuming you have 0 mastery).

[Totaltotemic]

This was an exaggeration, I was talking about a balance between applying atones and damaging. I've seen people mindlessly atoning and producing little damage, reducing their atonement healing during passive damage. During passive damage, or no damage, I have found that is it best to rotate between smite and plea to maximize atone applications and healing done to those targets. So if during passive damage you just blanket the raid with atones and cast smite once or twice, your healing is severely lowered. Smite is the most effective heal besides PW:S when little damage is going out since it will never overheal the absorb, and the absorb is unaffected by atonement so it is 100% effective.

This also results in more HPS since every other cast is 15% faster, why would you waste a healing increase buff when you are going to apply the same amount of atones anyway?

You know what's more HPS than that? Not using Smite and using your mana when it would actually do healing instead of throwing it away just for the sake of casting on every GCD.

Smite is the most HPM and HPS until ~4 targets (2 with castigation). Even so, using penance on cooldown will nuke your mana if you only use it for a dps increase. Smite spamming is still effective and is more mana efficient when little damage is going out. This way you can actually use your mana cooldowns like MB and PI for effective healing gain instead of a mana gain, which the latter is just selfish.

Or you could not use Smite. Why do you keep insisting that you Smite every single available GCD? You will run out of mana doing that.

I tested 3 times on a target dummy and my gear, which is haste/crit gave me an average difference of 5% between disc and shadow damage over 3min single target. Recall that this is not execute phase, so there is still a difference, but not a colossal gap.

You're probably very, very bad at Shadow or something else was going on entirely that dropped your damage considerably.

350 mastery = 1.4% mastery as you said
BUT it is a difference of 44.48 and 40 * (1.112 + .014)
45.04 - 44.48 = .56% atonement healing

Once again, mastery is multiplicative, if it were additive 1.4% mastery would result in 1.4% atonement, but it is not.
Additionally, 1% crit is not 1% increase in healing 1% crit is 1% increase in (1-x) healing, where x is % of non-atonement healing, plus .4448x (assuming you have 0 mastery).

Again, you're pulling out variables and constants and not explaining what you are talking about, and the result is just totally nonsensical. Why are you converting Atonement back into its passive damage transfer percentage? There is no reason to do this and it's just giving you a totally irrelevant number.

I recognize 44.48 as the post-base mastery Atonement transfer amount, but why are you saying that Crit somehow applies differently to Atonement healing and non-Atonement healing? You're also subtracting 44.48 from 45.04 when you should be dividing. Atonement transfer of 45.04% damage does 1.26% more healing than Atonement transfer of 44.48%... not .56%.

There is no collaboration when one party is just plain wrong. You don't compromise a correct answer with an incorrect answer when we're dealing with numbers just because it would make you feel better to do so.

[Ryeshot]

Yeah I just figured out the dividing problem, but that means 1% mastery is not 1% atonement, it is instead 1/1.112 = .8993% atonement. This means that mastery beats crit at:

250 * 1.112/350 = 79.43% so it seems we were both wrong.

I perfectly understand how shadow works and how to play it, maybe it was my lack of MH trait since I believe I was testing that back when I had CttV, I will test again just to make sure.

Haven't you heard of your ABC's? Why would you waste globals when smite is so mana efficient?

[Isentropy]

It also has the potential to do insane dps at the cost of healing (like most healers in legion). In non-execute phase I did only 5% less dps than disc vs shadow, and both my weapons are same ilvl. This might be another reason to bring them - they can swap from heal to dps in a flash kinda like chakra dancing, but you need to go Schism in order to do that so...

I tested 3 times on a target dummy and my gear, which is haste/crit gave me an average difference of 5% between disc and shadow damage over 3min single target. Recall that this is not execute phase, so there is still a difference, but not a colossal gap.

Yeah, I'm gonna have to call you out on this one. Not even close to true, so I'm not even sure how to explain exactly why it's not. In raids shadow is currently one of the best specs overall, arguably the best caster next to fire. Because of this, if we follow your logic, disc does more DPS than most of the DPS specs. I think we can agree that this is nonsense.

[Totaltotemic]

Yeah I just figured out the dividing problem, but that means 1% mastery is not 1% atonement, it is instead 1/1.112 = .8993% atonement. This means that mastery beats crit at:

250 * 1.112/350 = 79.43% so it seems we were both wrong.

Oh so now you're using PRE-BASE CRIT and POST-BASE mastery just to prove a point? Come on.

If you want to be super technical and include base stats, then 350 Crit is only a 0.9523% increase (5% to 6%). Yes, post-base is different than pre-base, but that's why these numbers fluctuate as you gain different amounts of stats.

Haven't you heard of your ABC's? Why would you waste globals when smite is so mana efficient?

Because. You. Will. Run. Out. Of. Mana. You cannot always be casting in Legion on raid bosses longer than about 5 minutes. Casting 3 Smites where the damage doesn't heal anyone and the absorb is just sniping everyone else's heals is not worth running out of mana and not being able to Penance some time later when it would heal many people when they actually need healing.

[Saiyoran]

They have, I believe it was that at mythic 10 and up your using single target heals so much you might aswell play Holy.

No, not really. Did Eye 10 the other day. Most of my healing was still atonement. You do have to Shadowmend a lot on last boss and Deepbeard because of the incoming tank damage but you're still using Penance on CD and keeping SW:P up (I felt Grace was better for this but didn't need Penitent or Clarity). I contributed over 130k dps on all bosses except the last which required too much movement to do much of anything besides emergency Mends, Penance, SW:P, and shield/plea spam. I still don't feel that Holy is better for tank healing. They have a better burst heal, but Shadowmend is more consistent healing than Flash Heal unless it was buffed.

[Gorsameth]

No, not really. Did Eye 10 the other day. Most of my healing was still atonement. You do have to Shadowmend a lot on last boss and Deepbeard because of the incoming tank damage but you're still using Penance on CD and keeping SW:P up (I felt Grace was better for this but didn't need Penitent or Clarity). I contributed over 130k dps on all bosses except the last which required too much movement to do much of anything besides emergency Mends, Penance, SW:P, and shield/plea spam. I still don't feel that Holy is better for tank healing. They have a better burst heal, but Shadowmend is more consistent healing than Flash Heal unless it was buffed.

The comment was a bit ago before the single target buffs, good to hear its better now and always good to hear people's recent experiences.

[Saiyoran]

The comment was a bit ago before the single target buffs, good to hear its better now and always good to hear people's recent experiences.

My bad, didn't check the date of your post.
I think the biggest thing is that dungeons bosses last so little time compared to raid bosses (with a few exceptions if you've got Tyrannical), which allows you to spam without regard for mana and keep Schism up at very high uptime.