[Legion] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Kaigera]

nope nope nope, disc is all about finding the mid point based on your haste

assuming no hate, you can cast 5x atonement and 5x dps in 15sec, you do the same amount of hps whether you cast 5x atonement first then 5x dps, or if you cast 1x atonement 1x dps alternatively

But its gonna hurt you if you cast 8x atonement and 2x dps spell, 5x5=25 > 8x2=16, you can do the math

the only time you want to burst healing is like when you know wrought chaos/infernal etc. is incoming, and you can setup 10+ atonements and do a burst, other times stick with the 1x atonement 1x dps rotation yield the most output

Yes, you are correct: 5x5=25, 8x2=16, and that 25 is greater than 16. But you also need to remember that 10x10=100, 5.3x2.01=10.653, and that 'a' comes before 'b' in the alphabet. These are super fun facts, but none of them have any relevance to playing Disc in the material world.

Please describe how you are playing Disc, not just how you think it looks like it should be played on paper.
What is your specific rotation?

yeah I look at it, as long as he get 50%/50% at the end, its maximizing the output, alternating it just make it easier to know that you are doing it 50%/50%

Saying that it only matters how many spells were cast regardless of order.... Like. I just. Cant. Even.

That's like saying just as long as a Ret does #x abilities to generate Holy Power and #x abilities to spend it, it doesn't matter what the order is, and a basic generate > spend > generate > spend spell-by-spell rotation is the best way to track it to maximize dps output.

[tachycardias]

In the classic internet fashion I feel like there's a lot of people talking past each other without any real consideration for actually trying to figure out what people are talking about. In some ways i feel that there is merit to both the "50/50 ratio" and the "burst healer" descriptions. Perhaps defining our terms would be helpful in reducing the discord here.

First off, though I respect total's views and I think his thought process is solid, it should be recognized that there really isn't a correct way to view these things at this point. I guarantee any theories we have now will change drastically after a few months of seeing top guilds in mythics. Although Total certainly has more experience and logs than most, these logs alone are still a very small sample size when it comes to concepts of what the ideal strategy is. That's not to say they aren't useful- they are probably the most useful data we have now.

On the other hand, the '50/50 ratio' crowd is not wihtout merit. In fact, within the 'burst healer' paradigm, there is the implicit unanswered quesiton of- what does a 'rotation' (or whatever the closest thing to it is) consist of when youre not 'bursting'?

When I first started trying to math out Disc I tried to figure out what a sustainable rotation for healing in a general sense would be. I came to the conclusion that:
1) a roughly 50/50 ratio of atonement applicators to DPS spells was ideal.
2) with 0 haste, this is about 5 atonements on a sustained basis, assuming mostly PWS and Plea are used.

What this doesn't account for is:
1) Mana cost: Plea is somewhat expensive once ~5 atonements are out.
2) the "usefulness" of the healing: If you're casting atone/dps in equal numbers, you're only acquiring a new target about once per 3 secs. It's somewhat likely that even that target may be overhealing within that time- older targets are probably full health.
3) the time and mana efficiency of PWR: PWR is more time efficient than any other applicator and more mana friendly than Shadow mend, or Plea at 6 atones.

When added together, it becomes clear that you should try to preempt burst damage with pre-atones using PWR. Chaining PWR for a few casts with PWS on CD and then pushing damage until all but 3-5 atones are gone will give you a large amount of healing that is probably more useful than the belated sustained healing. Perhaps our Artifact ability Light's Wrath makes this even more evident as it fits this mold perfectly.

On the other hand, when you're not bursting, you come to the conclusion that it's probably best to maintain 3-4 atones for a modicum of sustained healing as it is pretty efficient since PWS gives you 2, and Plea is still efficient at 1-4 atones. You may even find it best to try and alternate atones/dps to some degree.

[Totaltotemic]

When I first started trying to math out Disc I tried to figure out what a sustainable rotation for healing in a general sense would be. I came to the conclusion that:
1) a roughly 50/50 ratio of atonement applicators to DPS spells was ideal.
2) with 0 haste, this is about 5 atonements on a sustained basis, assuming mostly PWS and Plea are used.

What this doesn't account for is:
1) Mana cost: Plea is somewhat expensive once ~5 atonements are out.
2) the "usefulness" of the healing: If you're casting atone/dps in equal numbers, you're only acquiring a new target about once per 3 secs. It's somewhat likely that even that target may be overhealing within that time- older targets are probably full health.
3) the time and mana efficiency of PWR: PWR is more time efficient than any other applicator and more mana friendly than Shadow mend, or Plea at 6 atones.

When added together, it becomes clear that you should try to preempt burst damage with pre-atones using PWR. Chaining PWR for a few casts with PWS on CD and then pushing damage until all but 3-5 atones are gone will give you a large amount of healing that is probably more useful than the belated sustained healing. Perhaps our Artifact ability Light's Wrath makes this even more evident as it fits this mold perfectly.

On the other hand, when you're not bursting, you come to the conclusion that it's probably best to maintain 3-4 atones for a modicum of sustained healing as it is pretty efficient since PWS gives you 2, and Plea is still efficient at 1-4 atones. You may even find it best to try and alternate atones/dps to some degree.

Yes, correct. However, the process of doing this has nothing to do with dumping spells into the vast buckets of "damage" and "healing" and arbitrarily splitting your total number of casts in half. That may somehow end up as the end result, but it's not a reason to do anything. You do tend to spread out your healing and damage spells, largely because PW:S and Penance have cooldowns, but it's not wrong to PW:S and then Plea instead of using Smite between because you could also just not cast Smite. I actually already made a pretty long explanation of this, but here's the part relevant to recent discussion:

___

How To Burst

So what kind of burst are we talking about here? Well, it’s the 12-15 Atonement count kind that may or may not eat a lot of mana, but either way uses one or more cooldowns. As such, this is not a cyclical rotation but a one-time process that then takes a break afterwards and goes back into what I will call “conservation mode.”

To set this up, we have to have a good idea of what conservation mode looks like (since we will be starting in this, moving on to burst, and then returning to conservation until burst is needed again). As mentioned in the guide, conservation involves “rolling” (or slowly and steadily applying) 5-6 Atonements and mixing in Penance and PtW (called SWP in the guide) and maybe a couple of Smites (depending on mana availability). Conservation looks like this:

Plea → PW:S → Plea → PW:S → Plea → PW:S interspersed across a 15 second timespan.
Penance → PtW → Smite → Penance → Smite can be interjected between the Atonement spells as time and mana permit. Further conservation would cut Smites first, then cut out some Pleas until you reach the bare minimum of PW:S → Penance → PW:S → PtW → PW:S where spells only are used every ~3 seconds. This does leave some dead time, but it may be necessary to save mana for bursting which is more efficient than spamming inefficient healing during times when healing isn’t needed.

So to start burst, we’ll let the conservative Atonement cycle die off. It is important to start again fresh from 1-2 Atonements (keeping only PW:S going and refresh SWP/PtW) so that we can get a few cheap Pleas off with fresh Atonement buffs so we can launch into the righteous PWR spam. By “spam” we mean 3-4 PWR casts, because any more and those fresh Atonements from the Pleas will die before we can start doing damage. Incidentally, this is where Haste really shines because it allows extending to 4 or even 5 PWRs (with a decent amount of haste and Power Infusion providing even more) in this part of the burst.

The PWR step is where we will decide which cooldowns to use. Power Infusion allows another PWR beyond 4 that is essentially free as well as increasing PtW and Mindbender damage, and it allows fitting in a couple of Smites after Penance has been exhausted. Because of this, it pairs very well with Mindbender (which should be used on almost every burst anyway) as well as Light’s Wrath (as more Atonements = more damage = even more healing). However, we can substitute PWR spam entirely for PW:S spam with Rapture instead. This works very well against one-time bursts of damage (as seen on Ursoc) or just as a lower mana cost way to burst. Rapture can also pair well with Light’s Wrath (as pretty much any situation where we go higher than 10 Atonements makes Light’s Wrath very good). Ideally you want at least some number of cooldowns for each burst, so don’t use them all at once!

All of the previous steps should be completed before the damage you are preparing for even happens (except in the case of constant damage). Ideally your last PWR should land the instant before damage happens if you are not using Light’s Wrath, or allow time to cast Light’s Wrath if you planned on using it.

The raid damage lands. At this time you either have ~0.5-1.0 seconds or less left on a Light’s Wrath or PWR cast. PtW/SWP has 8-10 seconds left on it and is ticking. Penance and then Mindbender follow in the next immediate casts. From here, you can Smite or PW:S depending on whether this is a burst that will be over quickly or if you will be healing for a while (PW:S for healing for a while after), and then fill GCDs with Smite as your Atonements start to fall off. Getting the next Penance off signals the end of your burst cycle.

From here, Atonements will start to fall off quickly as the PWR block expires and then we go back to the conservative mode, awaiting and planning for the next burst. Remember in this time that mana is precious, and you should know how many burst cycles are left in the fight. Make sure you have enough to do those.

From https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...UKd2672Ntg/pub (this is also at the bottom of the guide)

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But the "conservative" part certainly isn't the most HPS, that's just what you do when you don't really want to spend mana. It's not like you only do burst healing, but that is the best way to translate your mana and time into healing.

[Supliftz]

jesus christ this guy is dense

haha lets use scaled up hfc logs like they mean anything haha xD

[Djriff]

With Pre Patch today, we're going to start fresh threads for all the specs. Please continue the discussion here.