Val'anyr for icc as disci

[Ândrömèdâ]

You stuck in 3.0 or still only doing 10 mans? In 25's, they can't keep up with tank damage the way a Holy Paladin can. They can't raid heal like a Druid can.

But they can flow between the two quite seamlessly, their role being to "assist where necessary" and shift accordingly. A Discipline Priest assisting the raid while focussing a tank not only recovers from "Impending Tank Death" for those bursts that have your Paladin falling behind, but also keeping the raid members alive long enough to get topped off from someone else (be it druid, shaman, priest, or splash damage from a trigger happy Paladin, nobody cares).

There's a reason every serious guild brings a Disc Priest to hard mode 25 progression. But they're far from tossing your Holy Paladins (which they're still bringing, by the way) to the unemployment job, because they just can't keep up with the single target damage when Penance is on cooldown.

Discipline is about damage anticipation and mitigation (and to a certain extent, so are retau droods too when spamming HOTs). This is no question of comparing us with "standard" healing classes I think and I am not very found of the "fill the blank left by other healers" thing to be honest (don't take me wrong nothing personnal there )

On 25 raid a single paladin will hardly be able to deal with the tanks damages. At least he needs a second monotarget healer and/or raid healer HOTs for instance. 2 pala works fine but 1 pala 1 disci works as fine keep in mind that damage mitigation is there for compensating lower HPS. (-10% phisical damage; -3% with RH). If you include absorbs disci are far from beeing weak.

But the point is that we are not designed to top the meters with direct healing, so to the initial question I have to answer that a paladin would have done better use of this weapon (event hough I would have loved to get it myself ;D). And for your weapon choice:

- If you are 2 shards left from the legendary then you must collect them by respect to your guildmates first (!!)
- When you have it, my general idea is that stats are more reliable than the ICC one. Especially for tank healing
- If you switch to raid healing then of course second one may be interesting

[syanid]

Discipline isn't JUST about mitigation. Discipline isn't "support" healer, if such thing exists. It's dumb to separate ANY healer into casts of main healers or support healers.

A raid healer such as Holy priest has a tool to top off a group, it's prayer of healing (among others). You can cast it when you see the damage has occured or if you can predict the damage, you can pre-cast the spell. Either way, it doesn't require fast reaction. If casted without any damage being dealt - it was a waste of mana, same like gheal / fheal etc.

Discipline priest, however, has the fastest heals in the game and one of the best ever - Penance.
I am sure many of you had situations where you saw a member of your raid at some small amount of HP, like 100 or 1000, basically close to dying - and that member died and you were saying "GOD DAMN 0.1 SEC AND I WOULD SAVE YOU". That's where Discipline owns - Penance 1st tick is instant heal and incredibly fast heal. Hasted flash heals can go to numbers such as 0.7 second to cast it making it awesome for preventing deaths if shield and penance are on cd.

I had situations where as Holy I missed that 1 damn surge of light to save a guy, all I could do was weak shield or renew but that wasn't enough. Disc excels at fast healing and saving lives.
Druids and Holy priests top people off. Paladin does what they do, and they excel at it. Determining usefullness of a healer by healing meters (I.E. HPS) is incredibly bad way to judge the player or the class.

Consequently, due to the nature of healers - druids and holy priests will want output - hence Val'Anyr isn't as appealing. I would rather have +250 spellpower over the ability to proc a 500 damage absorbing shield if I were a druid or holy priest. The proc is unreliable, it can proc when not needed and it goes to waste.

Paladin on the other hand, can see when proc occured and pump up his targets to a 9k bubble. And Paladin can do it FAST.
Discipline priest can do the same, but at slower rate due to less powerful heals.

In the end, it boils down to a player. I don't know a player who would pass on the opportunity to have the legendary, just for the sake of showing off. If you are 2 shards away from it, then complete it. You can always replace it with another weapon. Collecting 30 fragments for your fellow healers might be a PITA since not many guilds do Ulduar to get the mace anymore.

[Ândrömèdâ]

@ syanid : don't take me wrong : I would certainly not say our task is only mitigation. Juste the tricky thing is that absorbs and damage mitigation can represent from 40 up to 60% of healing done, depending of the encounter. And this is not visible for most of the players so disci is often called a "healer support".

But this point should be solved or at least improved when Blizzard will have included absorbs in healing numbers, it should put and end to useless debates

I totally agree with what you wrote syanid

PS : sorry if my english is bad : I am a french guy so... not a brillliant english writer ;D

[Deleted]

can only hope u either get a Gkick now or they just abandon doing ulduar for ur mace/ simply cause with ur attitude u dont deserve it

[syanid]

My point is that those numbers do not matter at all.

Let's say that they fix the combat log so absorbs show - the number you get, even if it puts you on the top - doesn't matter at all.

If you are the raid leader, you will want to know which player or class outputs what DPS at which encounter. Recount shows you, for example, that Affliction Warlock does better than Destruction Warlock at Deathbringer Saurfang.

On the other hand, if you check the data between a Discipline Priest and say a Resto Druid (for argument's sake let's include absorbs) - you would notice that overall druid did "more".
By the rule of thumb, you'd come to a conclusion that more = better, and since druid did more than priest = druid > priest. So you leave out that disc priest for the next time and you bring additional druid but whoop, people start dying yet the overall HPS is larger. Why? Simple - the additional druid doesn't have the ability to do burst healing on low HP targets like Disc Priest can.

Sure, the Druid CAN (and does) more healing due to more spells, aoe heals but healing 10 people for 50k is vastly different to healing that one crucial guy for 15K in 1 global cooldown. Again, if you look at pure numbers you'd say "well the druid does 50k in 3 seconds, and the disc priest does maybe 20k, so druid > priest".

It's about the mechanics of the fight, not just about pure numbers that don't tell you the significant data.

The only fight where discipline priest wasn't as good was Mimiron Firefighter. The damage at that fight is more or less constant, especially the 2nd phase.
However, if there is raid damage that isn't constant and where one or two players can get hit for 120% of their HP pool - that's where discipline saves lives and where others fail (maybe the better word is don't perform as good).

So even with absorbs included, the "healing" done by disco will be lower than certain classes.

There is also the aspect of player's skill (in healer's case I'd say ability to predict and react rather than skill). I mostly play as disc, I love the underdog role without whom nothing works as it should. I have the lowest overhealing so far (around 20% for last night's run of ICC), simply due to the fact I'm trying to predict and react fast with heals. Paladins, druids, h. priests, shamans - simply cannot compete with the speed of disc priest heals.

To conclude this wall of text - the ONLY way to judge a healer is to bring 5 of them to the encounter. If healing works out, if tanks are alive and if dps don't die to predictable and expected raid damage - healers are playing good. If healing sucks (tank dies, there's aoe like Kologarn's shock thingy and kills some raid members) - something doesn't work and it's time to check which player is healing whom and what spells they use.

[Ândrömèdâ]

Once again I have to agree with you^^

WOTLK increased a lot the "numbers" thing in my opinion, which is completely silly from the healing point of view. My position is that Blizzard gave so much power to paladin which incredible numbers, overheal, crit and haste numbers that it induced or increased this kinda attitude.

During BC I NEVER had to raid-link my absorbs for instance. I had to from some times now and i think this is stupid for the reason you explained.

Healing is not about topping the numbers regarless of overhealing and doing over healers' job being number 1. Healing is making the right action at the right time regarding your assignements. Disc has this nice aspect it can go a out is primary role to "panic situations" control. This is why I love this spec ^^

[choose]

As a druid with a Val'anyr I have to disagree with some of the posters. I run with 2 healing specs my first specializes in HOT's. The second i glyph and spec into healing touch. In my current gear my healing touch is about a .6 - .7s cast and heals for around 8-12k. So i can build a pretty massive absorb shield on a single target such as a tank. On fights like heroic twins where the entire raid is covered in hots the (guessed) absorbs are insane. I know its not completely accurate but even if the numbers aren't right you can SEE the difference it makes. Val'anyr is amazing in ANY healers hands. The stats from the new ICC weapons do not overpower the proc. I would take the absorbs over 100-200 spell power any day. There is no 1 class that benefits more or less, the spec you choose to use with the proc will determine what you actually get out of it. It's OK to break from the cookie cutter and generalized specs if you can prove it to be worthwhile.