Disc HPS on recount.

[harky]

I don't really have an issue with that, but if that's the case why comment at all? It's like an Apatheist entering a debate about religion. If you don't care, why discuss it. Theory based discussions are typically tuned very much towards high end progression where high performance and efficiency are required. If you don't have interest in min-maxing, or progression ideals, then why enter into debate about them?

@Hadrin; The 'inflation' caused by Recount is also caused by Skada. The issue is that both include activity time to modify damage done to create a DPS figure. Essentially Skada and Recount both take fight duration, activity and damage done and combine them to form 'DPS'. Skada uses a wider activity band when calculating DPS figures, so people with low activity tend to show up with lower DPS than they do with Recount. This is a moot point when using an Effective DPS condition, which dismisses activity in regard to DPS, thus whoever has the highest damage done will always be the top EDPS as well. The same can be said of EHPS. It's why proper parses are sorted by damage/healing done, rather than DPS/HPS. Since damage done reflect EDPS/EHPS it is the more important number. Recount and Skada both read directly from your combat log, so if you're having disparities then there's an issue with your settings. As far as Skada being lighter weight on resources? Get a better computer. It's the better of the two mods as it allows a much better analysis of output. That's why it's soaking up more resources.

[Suture]

I don't really have an issue with that, but if that's the case why comment at all? It's like an Apatheist entering a debate about religion. If you don't care, why discuss it. Theory based discussions are typically tuned very much towards high end progression where high performance and efficiency are required. If you don't have interest in min-maxing, or progression ideals, then why enter into debate about them?

I had a question (as I have stated twice now), and you answered it so thank you, I appreciate it .

[Odexy]

Both disc and holy are amazing to have in a raid, but neither are going to top the hps charts. Honestly, there should hardly even be a chart for it considering it doesn't keep track of hardly anything useful other than showing if a healer is slacking or not.

A lot of people assume that since priests can spec into two different kinds of healing, that we should stomp paladins, druids and shamans into the ground. To a certain extent, we do. I personally play a holy paladin and holy priest and although my paladin may rock the hps charts, I can't get over the fact that I don't feel as useful as I am on my priest. I can't provide an amazing buff like guardian spirit, nor can I bubble a raid in the same way a disc priest can. A shaman is an amazing raid healer, but if there's an ele or even an enhance in the raid then he loses a lot of his validity. (Since you can only have so many totems, and one bloodlust.)

I'm not saying a raid full of any specced priests would be ideal, since it wouldn't. Our tank heals lack in comparison to a paladin as holy (disc is certainly more competive) and our raid heals don't really hold up to a resto shaman regardless of spec. Our hots aren't even worth mentioning against a resto druids. Even with this mentioned, though, a priest is still required to run a smooth raid, IMO. We just have too much utility to pass up on.

[Kelesti]

Odexy, did you read the thread?

[Jeleh]

Ignore the tards and pity the fact you are more clued up than they are, disc priets are fantastic, every 25 man raid should carry one, they are more than worth their spot.

Nothing like pre shields to prevent raid damage, it prevents dangerous situations and eases things overall, as has been said many times in this post discs true benefits come from the shields and mitigated damage, get the addons and link those absorbs.

Remember, there is a lot of times where those other "superior" healers are not even needing to heal because your shield just soaked 7k incomming damage from that raid wide damage.

[Eletharin]

Addons like guessabsorb and worldoflogs absorb estimates are interesting, but don't use them to flaunt your numbers. Every utility that estimates absorbs does so with the intention of being as accurate as possible but often being very inaccurate. See some of the worldoflogs parses out there where divine aegis is credited with more absorbs then even 100% of all the priest critical healing for example. If the group is ignorant you might be able to pass a guessabsorbed log off as proof of your utility, but good group recognizes the value of a disc priest is greater then their total through put and is just as likely to mock your silly estimated healing meter.

[Odexy]

Odexy, did you read the thread?

Yup, the OP stated that they were annoyed of people saying his HPS was low. I said that priests generally have low hps regardless. Then I rambled. Besides, when people talk shit about disc hps it's because they're questioning their worth, which is pretty much what I was saying isn't true, although not directly.

[parkerdj26]

What is the believed margin of error on the guessed absorbs? My reason for asking this is that I'm particularly sick of people bashing Disc Priests. In 5 man heroics people love to see me, in Raids I always get some asshat *Normally Paladin Actually, not Holy Priest* spamming meters for his 90% flash of light heals. Druids tend to know they are OP and post less. Holy Priests have an understanding of what Disc brings to the table normally.

Would we say 10%-20%-30% margin of error? My reason for asking is that people obviously don't agree with the Disc taking the entire number, but how close do they think it is?

[harky]

That's part of the problem. You need not only a strong understanding of Discipline, but also of the specific fight mechanics involved. You need to know how the Priest is healing, who the Priest is healing and what the Priest is using to heal. Because the combat log does not allow this to be displayed accurately in any case, it's very hard to quantify how accurate a meter is.

Some examples in VoA when PW:S spamming:
Archavon- Will be completely inaccurate. At best 20% accurate. Will depend completely on the meter being run how inaccurate it is.
Emalon- You can expect this to be 60-70% correct.
Koralon- This will be in the 40-60% correct range.
Toravon- This will be in the 80%+ range.

However, that's a very loose way to look at it and it assumes that the Priest is not casting anything except PW:S and is never over-writing PW:S.

Same examples, but this time playing properly:
Archavon- Will not be mildly accurate in terms of absorb amount, but the absorb sources will be completely incorrect. Divine Aegis will be your top absorb and most likely top healing source.
Emalon- This too will be somewhat more accurate, but only in terms of absorb amount. Tell melee to stay in and shield them and the tanks only. Absorbs will be 15-20% of your healing and perhaps 80% accurate.
Koralon- Same story here, the absolute value will be more accurate, but the sources will be less accurate.
Toravon- Here it will be about the same as before, but will most likely be considered less accurate because you will use heals occasionally making the accuracy of the absolute value the same, but the sources less accurate.

Basically if you're using primarily PW:S spam the healing sources listed will be more accurate, but the overall absorb amount will be less accurate. The more AOE damage there is the more accurate the absolute value will be, but the less accurate the sources will be. Using more healing spells will further reduce how accurate the sources of healing are.

That's the issue though, people who do understand this issue also understand that it's almost impossible to analyze. The combat log prevents us from getting an accurate view of both absorb sources, targets, etc. We can make assumptions based on fights, but that's as far as it goes.

Here's what it boils down to and also why people think I don't like Discipline: Fights with very high margins of error on absorbs are due to fight mechanics not favoring an absorb mechanic with a 15 second per target cooldown. Since Discipline is only competitive when they can use PW:S for ~75% of their healing this means that any fight where the margin of error exceeds 25% is not a competitive fight for Discipline. Essentially any fight where Shield spam is not optimal for at least 65% of the fight is a bad fight for Disc. This is because Discipline's absorbs when healing normally function as about 20% of their healing, so if you can PW:S spam for 65% of the fight then your other absorbs will compensate when this isn't possible.

I've provided a list in the past of ICC fights where this is the case, but people typically won't like seeing what that list entails. Discipline is competitive on Marrowgar, Princes, Festergut and LK in normal modes and Saurfang, Rotface, Putricide in hard. Disc is extremely good on LK-H, which stands alone as Discipline's 'big fight'. If you consider 'competitive' being better than Holy, then that only occurs on Princes is normal (due to having no raid damage to heal), and Rotface, Princes and LK on Hard. In all Disc is competitive with the other healers on 8/24 fights in ICC normal and hard and better than Holy in 4/24 fights. Will people accept that? No, but it is what it is. As soon as Discipline gets to a fight where other spells exceed the value of PW:S, Discipline falls behind. This means that when AOE damage is very high, or very low that Discipline does poorly.

[Ynna]

I find it interesting that 98% of the disc hate I see (not that the quoted post is an example but just in general) comes from holy priests. I cannot think of one other (intelligent i.e. Not the paladin from VoA mentioned above) healer that i have played with that has said to me they hate disc. In fact, most say they love healing with a disc priest.

If I can just come in and focus on this for a moment.

you can call me pro-discipline all you want but 99% of the priests who heal are in agreement. disc is far superior to holy. math also definitively proves this. The way high end guilds heal encounters also definitively proves this. you and kelesti can be holy fanboys all you want bud but LOGIC proves the point.

This is taken from a different topic concerning discipline and holy.
This might be one of the reasons some Holy priests dislike discipline priests. I can imagine it's annoying to hear your spec of choice being talked down like that.
I personally haven't had this before but I've know of people who been asked why they were Holy instead of Discipline. And if you are asked to defend your choice you can sometimes become or seem aggressive about this.

Edit: What I'm really trying to do here is finding out why Holy priests feel they should defend themselves. They're not in a great spot at the moment, but it isn't terrible either.

[harky]

Ynna, keep in mind that what you quoted is from basically a fringe element that thinks Discipline is god's gift to healing and doesn't really grasp the difference between viable, competitive and optimal. I honestly don't understand the fanaticism with Discipline players that absorbs are always superior to heals and no other healer can touch them. There's no math to support that opinion and it seems completely based upon the way Discipline interacts with situations where you have too many healers for an encounter. It's virtually impossible to dip under 8k HPS as Discipline in AOE fights, so if you have too many healers they're all fighting for healing while Discipline is skating by with their 0% over-healing spell.

My issue isn't defending Holy, or putting down Discipline, but getting as accurate a picture of how well any healer actually performs in progression content. Currently the community and many high end guilds greatly over-estimate the worth of Discipline because of two false assumptions. Discipline and Holy both have their place and I could really care less about which is better, or even if either is better. Making sure the numbers are correct is all I care about.

[Vetis]

You could also say "Divide it in half"

Someone trying to be clever on an internet forum, ignore them. Everyone reading the post knew what the poster meant.

[Suture]

Harky,

Does your optimal, competitive, viable list take into account everything other than numbers? Thinks like buffs (if you didn't have a holy priest), Grace, Renewed Hope (I would think this would add a lot to the numbers), Rapture, PI, PS, etc..

Just a question out of curiosity not a challenge

(just for clarification I am not one of those disc priests who think disc is better than god. It is just the spec I prefer)

[harky]

Uh, it's not really a list. Just something a huge portion of the WoW community doesn't seem to grasp. That is what viable, competitive and optimal really mean. Optimal is hard to gauge, but is obvious who the best person for the job is. Because you need multiple raid healers there are several 'optimal' setups depending on the fight. A good example would be having a Holy Paladin on tank healing and a Druid on raid healing, they'd then both being doing what they do best. Competitive just means that you can compete with others. It doesn't really mean you can beat them, but you can come close enough that you're not being carried. Viable just means that the encounter is possible with you there. Viable basically implies that something can do at least the absolute bare minimum. Being 'viable, but not competitive' is just another way of saying that someone is being carried by the rest of the group.

Some examples of 'viable, but not competetive': Paladin raid healing, Priest tank healing.
Paladins don't have proper tools to manage ICC style raid healing. Priests in general do not have the single target throughput to manage tank healing on hard hitting bosses.

Some example of 'competitive, but not optimal': Druid tank healing, Shaman tank healing.
Druids and Shaman can tank heal pretty well and can compete with Paladins. However, they're both stronger at raid healing than they are at tank healing, so using them as tank healers is not optimal.

[SPC7R0]

At what point does the 'HPS don't matter' defense stop working? O_o

Healing is about who you heal, when you heal and with what you heal... not about how much you heal....

[Suture]

So mechanically speaking, not EHPS wise, disc is competitive on 8/24 fights and better than holy on 4/24 fights?

And you are still referring to bleeding edge content not necessarily the type of raiding most people participate in? I would think that for those of us not on the edge, the difference between viable, competitive, and optimal is minimal especially with the 15% buff.

I understand that, for example, a holy pally will always be the optimal tank healer regardless of gear, however that is irrelevant when a different healer can preform the same job with little or no notice from the tanks (and raid).

[harky]

Yes, that's in regard to 'bleeding edge' type content. Just keep in mind that how healers performed is altered greatly by healer count and Discipline in particular shines most when there is an excess of healing. That is how their reputation of 'smoothing out' healing came to be. What's really going on is because they can essentially ignore over-healing they appear to do better than other healers due to high over-healing figures.

Also, just to clarify, all healing specs for all healing classes in WoW are viable. Some healing setups may not be viable, but the individual healers when utilized properly are all viable. In regard to the now 15% buff you have to keep in mind that because that scales with how much healing you produce it means that it actually increases the difference between viable and competitive. There will certainly be a point where content becomes so easy that it doesn't matter, but we're not there yet. A good example of that is 5 mans. They're so easy that Shadow Priests can heal them, so the idea of being 'the best' is kind of moot. Everyone is tied because the bar is set so low.

Healing is about who you heal, when you heal and with what you heal... not about how much you heal....

This made me laugh. Is that strike-through meant to be an underline? If so what an awesome Freudian slip.

Someone with 30k is being hit for 15k every 2 seconds. You heal them every 2 seconds for 10k. Does how much you heal for still not matter? That person will die after 8 seconds of combat... They'll be taken to 15k, healed to 25k, taken to 10k, healed to 20k, taken to 5k, healed to 15k, then killed on the next hit. Does HPS still not matter?

[Blizzro]

That's part of the problem. You need not only a strong understanding of Discipline, but also of the specific fight mechanics involved. You need to know how the Priest is healing, who the Priest is healing and what the Priest is using to heal. Because the combat log does not allow this to be displayed accurately in any case, it's very hard to quantify how accurate a meter is.

Some examples in VoA when PW:S spamming:
Archavon- Will be completely inaccurate. At best 20% accurate. Will depend completely on the meter being run how inaccurate it is.
Emalon- You can expect this to be 60-70% correct.
Koralon- This will be in the 40-60% correct range.
Toravon- This will be in the 80%+ range.

However, that's a very loose way to look at it and it assumes that the Priest is not casting anything except PW:S and is never over-writing PW:S.

Same examples, but this time playing properly:
Archavon- Will not be mildly accurate in terms of absorb amount, but the absorb sources will be completely incorrect. Divine Aegis will be your top absorb and most likely top healing source.
Emalon- This too will be somewhat more accurate, but only in terms of absorb amount. Tell melee to stay in and shield them and the tanks only. Absorbs will be 15-20% of your healing and perhaps 80% accurate.
Koralon- Same story here, the absolute value will be more accurate, but the sources will be less accurate.
Toravon- Here it will be about the same as before, but will most likely be considered less accurate because you will use heals occasionally making the accuracy of the absolute value the same, but the sources less accurate.

Basically if you're using primarily PW:S spam the healing sources listed will be more accurate, but the overall absorb amount will be less accurate. The more AOE damage there is the more accurate the absolute value will be, but the less accurate the sources will be. Using more healing spells will further reduce how accurate the sources of healing are.

That's the issue though, people who do understand this issue also understand that it's almost impossible to analyze. The combat log prevents us from getting an accurate view of both absorb sources, targets, etc. We can make assumptions based on fights, but that's as far as it goes.

Here's what it boils down to and also why people think I don't like Discipline: Fights with very high margins of error on absorbs are due to fight mechanics not favoring an absorb mechanic with a 15 second per target cooldown. Since Discipline is only competitive when they can use PW:S for ~75% of their healing this means that any fight where the margin of error exceeds 25% is not a competitive fight for Discipline. Essentially any fight where Shield spam is not optimal for at least 65% of the fight is a bad fight for Disc. This is because Discipline's absorbs when healing normally function as about 20% of their healing, so if you can PW:S spam for 65% of the fight then your other absorbs will compensate when this isn't possible.

I've provided a list in the past of ICC fights where this is the case, but people typically won't like seeing what that list entails. Discipline is competitive on Marrowgar, Princes, Festergut and LK in normal modes and Saurfang, Rotface, Putricide in hard. Disc is extremely good on LK-H, which stands alone as Discipline's 'big fight'. If you consider 'competitive' being better than Holy, then that only occurs on Princes is normal (due to having no raid damage to heal), and Rotface, Princes and LK on Hard. In all Disc is competitive with the other healers on 8/24 fights in ICC normal and hard and better than Holy in 4/24 fights. Will people accept that? No, but it is what it is. As soon as Discipline gets to a fight where other spells exceed the value of PW:S, Discipline falls behind. This means that when AOE damage is very high, or very low that Discipline does poorly.

Very sorry to quote the whole post, but I just wanted to emphasise that although this is a lot of text, this man speaks gold that a lot of us already know, or should know.

[ebrandsberg]

Here is the thing about disc:

1) you can't accurately track what caused an absorb, just that it happened
2) absorb effects cast and used inside of 1 second don't get reported in the logs at all as having been cast--this impacts pw:s to some extent but DA on say a tank, it occurs way more often than you would expect. The effect of the absorb will be reported, but it will be impossible to accurately track what is what.
3) The size of the absorb effect isn't reported.

These combined basically allows you to paint a fairly accurate picture of absorption if you have one and only one disc priest in the raid, and no other priests are casting pw:s. A few effects will skew the numbers a little but, but not by enough on most fights to matter.

With that in mind, the total absorption of a disc generally shows within a few percent. It doesn't report on "guessed" shield strength, which many people mistake, but only on the actual "absorb" value reported in the combat log, so unless there is something else causing absorbs, it is your disc priest doing it.

The other interesting thing about absorbs is that it takes first crack at "healing" incoming damage. Druids argue that because of that, it just makes hots and such go into overheal. The same could be said that direct heals cause hots to overheal. If a druid hots up someone to top them off, then a pally comes in and does it, the hots are lost as well. The difference with a shield is that in effect it is a "perfect" 30 second hot. The tics happen when damage hits. Show me one druid hot that is always perfectly timed when needed.

The next aspect is that a disc priest's absorbs+heals will outshine other healers when there is less stress on healing overall. If a disc priest's numbers are way higher than other healers, you have too many healers. All equipment being equal, a druid should be top under stress. The reasons? pw:s will always be able to take 30s to "find" damage to heal, while other healers only get a chance to heal what is left. If a disc priest covers 100% of the damage incoming, then other healers have 0% left to heal. This is an interesting thing to look at in raiding--if a disc priest is pw:s spamming and getting 30% higher numbers on heals (counting absorbs), you can probably remove at least one healer from the raid and fill the spot with a dps.

[Upayidance]

Skada is an excellent addon for showing Heals AND Absorbs.

Most fights when i play disc i will top that meeter, by alot, and if its true that some of the absorbs dont even show up, well that just makes it even better than what shows doesent it?

and ebransberg, how are you going to heal tanks when cycling 20+ shields?
and take any aoe fight in ICC, your shield goes up, absorbs ~10k in 4 seconds, then there will be nother odd 10 seconds where you wont do any "healing" to that person cuz you cant put up another shield and you are NOT going to start putting renews on people, you still throw out your PoMs but while WS is up on a person you are totaly reliant on other healers to keep them up untill the debuff drops.

Disc are there to help the whole raid, and if it causes the other healers to overheal for a short duration they will have to take it cuz a 10k instant damage block is just pro.

And on the other hand, why even have meeters installed than having secret competitions over button mashing. the boss dies and the healers keep everyone alive, who really cares about meeters, they are soooo relative its almost impossible to judge people fight to fight with it. If you did good one raid but the next you didnt do as good on meeters, did you magicaly become a worse healer overnight? The only real use of meeters is to see if the healers are even on there, if theyre not, then you know something is wrong :P