Disc Gearing - stat values

[Thragh]

I was wondering what are values or stats or what do you values do you aim for?

I use disc as an offspec and I have alot of gear but not sure which is better.

My main conflicts become between crit and haste pieces.

Thanks for any help/advice in advanced.

[Zeuq]

I was wondering what are values or stats or what do you values do you aim for?

I use disc as an offspec and I have alot of gear but not sure which is better.

My main conflicts become between crit and haste pieces.

Thanks for any help/advice in advanced.

In general, Intellect is your best regen stat by a fair margin. Spirit on gear is okay (and mostly unavoidable) and will help round out your regen but it should never be gemmed except to get your meta activated or perhaps for a really nice bonus. MP5 is also a poor stat; it will generally provide a little bit more regen than Spirit, and you may choose to gem that over Spirit when activating a meta, but otherwise avoid it. Intellect should be what you favor in gemming until you're comfortable with your regen at your content.

For throughput, Spell Power wins because your direct heals scale with it, and your shields also scale with those; once you get enough regen through gemming Intellect, Spell Power should be what you switch those gems over to.

As for Haste versus Crit, it's a bit more complicated. Haste is awesome at first, since you spend a lot of time spamming, but it drops off fairly quickly. I think you only need around 5% Haste geared (assuming full raid buffs) to achieve a 1s GCD with the Borrowed Time buff. If you're just tank healing (which happens less, as you focus more on burst and helping on the raid), Haste is useful a little later if you're casting Penance on every cooldown; unfortunately, I don't remember that number off the top of my head (10-11%?). After getting a base amount of Haste (10-11% is fairly easy to achieve), I'd focus more on Crit. The thing about Crit though, is that it doesn't affect your PWS (except for the glyph), so it's not as good of a throughput boost as you might think; moreover, you already get quite a bit just from talents, buffs, and all that Intellect, so it's pretty easy to hit 35-40% raid buffed.

[Thragh]

Well I raid higher end content and hardmodes and have acquired a good amount of gear for disc. ( I'm shadow)

For some reason I thought 15% was the magic haste number, I'm at 27K unbuffed mana and 31% crit with something like 740 regen, sorry to not have said this in the original post.

[Mithip]

12% is a good number of haste for disc.
Then stack crit and intellect -> SP when you have close to no mana problem (which you shouldn't)

[Relina]

Int for regen, it also gives a decent amount of crit for throughput.

Sp for throughput. The only stat PW:S scales with is Sp.

12% haste is fine for spamming PW:S on the raid, that'll get you to the GCD. If you're solely gonna tank heal you can keep stacking haste forever since Gheal will be your bread and butter and it won't ever hit the GCD.

Avoid crit unless you've capped your haste, but never gem/enchant for it. PW:S can't crit and it should be doing the majority of the work for you.

Spirit is still better than mp5 since it scales with your talents and kings, but should only be used if you can't avoid it or need to activate your meta.

[Paolo]

For tank healing:

http://penancepriest.blogspot.com/20...ciplinary.html

For raid healing (shield spam): spell power and intellect only. In this case, haste is wasted over 160 (read the link above), and crit is nearly useless.

[Ironfoot]

Int for regen, it also gives a decent amount of crit for throughput.

Sp for throughput. The only stat PW:S scales with is Sp.

12% haste is fine for spamming PW:S on the raid, that'll get you to the GCD. If you're solely gonna tank heal you can keep stacking haste forever since Gheal will be your bread and butter and it won't ever hit the GCD.

Avoid crit unless you've capped your haste, but never gem/enchant for it. PW:S can't crit and it should be doing the majority of the work for you.

Spirit is still better than mp5 since it scales with your talents and kings, but should only be used if you can't avoid it or need to activate your meta.

What. Just what.

Since when do Disc Priests use GHeal? Even for tank healing I rarely if ever touch it. 2 x FHeal > 1 x GHeal. Adds more Grace and more chance for DA to proc, therefore it's better.

PW:S can't crit? I presume you mean the shield itself not the heal it provides if you're glyphed. If you mean the shield, of course it can't crit. If you mean the heal, it can crit.

You need to balance Crit and Haste, and not neglect one or the other. Having you FHeal under 1 second is great, but useless if you have no crit. Having 40% crit is awesome, but just as useless if it takes too long to get a heal off.

It's all about balance.

You should only gem for Intellect/Spell Power, and mainly Spell Power once you're at 25k plus unbuffed mana.

Also MP5 > Spirit, in every situation. We're Disc Priests, leave Spirit to Holy Priests.

[harky]

You need to balance Crit and Haste, and not neglect one or the other. Having you FHeal under 1 second is great, but useless if you have no crit. Having 40% crit is awesome, but just as useless if it takes too long to get a heal off.

It's all about balance.

Uh, this might be good advise to someone just starting out, but to anyone in any reasonable gear this is just silly. The haste soft cap is insanely low for Disc. Raid buffed you'll hit the GCD cap with BT up with around 5% haste on your gear. Meanwhile crit is a goal up until you hit 30% unbuffed on your Holy school. That's hardly balanced... My advise is always gear up to '11%' haste (note, not really 11%, 5% from gear and 6% from talents -- which is 11.3%), then gear up to 30% holy crit, both while prioritizing SP/Int gains. For Disc it really isn't about balance, it's about having 43% haste with BT up with 0 haste rating.

[Paolo]

Just for clarity:

Everything Ironfoot said is totally wrong, with one exception. He's right that the PWS glyph can crit. Otherwise, it's all hogwash.

GH: is more HPS than 2xFH, and possibly more HPM (depending how you spec). But HPM is the least of our worries, since no disc priest ever goes OOM when tank healing anyway. Use of GH is correct in theory, but in practice might be wrong, if the long cast time leaves Jimmy dead on the floor. It's only useful when hasted by BT (and copious haste on gear) and when the long cast time will actually save poor Jimmy. And if you're worried about keeping up Inspiration, you're doing it wrong. It will be up 99%+ for any modest value of crit for a spamming tank healer. And the average DA bubble amount from 2xFH will be slightly less, or nearly equal to the average DA bubble from 1xGH.

Balance: is not a goal. Harky covered this above. Yes, you need both haste and crit. But if you're a shield-spammer (which means BT is always up) then haste above 5% is totally wasted (sort of like a caster going over hit cap). If you're a tank healer (which means BT is not always up) then there is no haste cap. This is my role, and I have 38% crit and 21% haste unbuffed. My GH screams off my fingers in under 2 seconds even without BT. I am totally imbalanced.

See the link I posted above.

Gemming for intellect: If you have mana problems, absolutely. If you don't (which applies to most disc priests), then gemming intellect is totally silly. However, it appears to be a common disease among disc priests, this lust for mana. I don't understand why myself... you should have basically enough mana from your gear. If you don't, you'll know it, and you will gem intellect at that point without being told.

[harky]

GH: is more HPS than 2xFH, and possibly more HPM (depending how you spec). But HPM is the least of our worries, since no disc priest ever goes OOM when tank healing anyway. Use of GH is correct in theory, but in practice might be wrong, if the long cast time leaves Jimmy dead on the floor. It's only useful when hasted by BT (and copious haste on gear) and when the long cast time will actually save poor Jimmy. And if you're worried about keeping up Inspiration, you're doing it wrong. It will be up 99%+ for any modest value of crit for a spamming tank healer. And the average DA bubble amount from 2xFH will be slightly less, or nearly equal to the average DA bubble from 1xGH.

This is misleading. 2x FH equals 1x GH in both healed amount and DA amount, obviously. However, being 'equal' is only in raw healed amount. 2x FH will always be closer to the mean and is actually better in the short term, while GH fluctuates a great deal. It's also a riskier move in regard to DA as you may risk exceeding the DA stack cap and canceling any gain. You also wind up losing 2% crit, or interrupt prevention by going with a GH build. While yes there is an almost-worthwhile approach in casting PW:S>Penance>GH, but it still requires you to spec into it and a 2% crit gain most likely outweighs the very slight Edge GH gains with BT up. The interrupt prevention alternately does nothing and is vital, so that's hard to call fight-to-fight. But again, the critical part is the distribution, rather than the average. While DPS can get away with not caring for the most part as a healer you can't. 2x Flash Heal is more consistent while providing equal HPS, lower HPM and better overall DA uptime.

[Paolo]

This is misleading. 2x FH equals 1x GH in both healed amount and DA amount, obviously. However, being 'equal' is only in raw healed amount. 2x FH will always be closer to the mean and is actually better in the short term, while GH fluctuates a great deal. It's also a riskier move in regard to DA as you may risk exceeding the DA stack cap and canceling any gain. You also wind up losing 2% crit, or interrupt prevention by going with a GH build. While yes there is an almost-worthwhile approach in casting PW:S>Penance>GH, but it still requires you to spec into it and a 2% crit gain most likely outweighs the very slight Edge GH gains with BT up. The interrupt prevention alternately does nothing and is vital, so that's hard to call fight-to-fight. But again, the critical part is the distribution, rather than the average. While DPS can get away with not caring for the most part as a healer you can't. 2x Flash Heal is more consistent while providing equal HPS, lower HPM and better overall DA uptime.

Generally agree. Not sure what the 2% you're referring to is. You get 4% from Renewed Hope on both spells, and 10% from IFH on low-health targets. However, with 5/5 Divine Fury (more common these days) and enough haste (and it's not much), you'll see GH become very usable very quickly. Mine is a 1.9 second cast before BT. And if you're spamming tank heals, you're unlikely to be going over the 10k DA cap on a boss fight anyway.

[harky]

If you're not risking the DA cap constantly then your crit is probably a wee bit low. Any avoidance streak causes a near instant DA cap once you're breaking 40% crit on FH. The 2% is because to get 5/5 Divine Fury you must drop either Holy Specialization, or Healing Focus. Healing Focus is not a loss on many fights, but on the fights it is a loss not having it is totally unacceptable. Thus it's more common to drop Holy Specialization to 3/5, a 2% crit loss.