Disc healing

[Krypt]

You really shouldn't be doing much tank healing as disc, in a raid anyway. Paladins and shamans are better at tank healing.
@OP Don't look for spirit on your gear, if you find yourself running out of mana, gem int. Once your regen is fine, get your 11% haste for the 1second GCD and then stack your spell power.

[harky]

Viklu, what type of content are you doing? That would help quite a bit in telling you what you may, or may not need to do.


For instance:

stat priority as disc:

spellpower>spellpower>spellpower>crit>haste>int>etc

This is for pure raid healing with no tank healing. Disc really isn't worthwhile tank healing harder fights in ICC, so normally this is what Discipline is trying to do. Damn the stats, go for higher spellpower. It's the only thing that PW:S scales well with.

However, if you're doing lower end content primarily, then the stat priority changes and if you're mainly tank healing then it changes dramatically. Under 258 gear it would be SP > Haste > MP5. If you're above 258, or inside ICC then it changes to Haste > SP > MP5. I'm using only those three stats because they're a reflection of gemming. Now, the reason this changes is because the higher item level gear allows you to change your tank healing rotation and the healing buff in ICC causes higher SP to grow less and less useful the more you get. That's not the case with shields because they do not overheal, but it is the case with heals and when tank healing shields will be <20% of your healing.

But again, I wouldn't advise tank healing as a Priest until the Cataclysm changes to the combat system go live. At that point it will only be a question of if Holy, or Discipline is more suited for tank healing. Alpha info = ban, but Blizz has publicly stated that both will be viable tank healers due to new spells being added and new mechanics. So... yeah.

[axxey]

So many people are determined that a healer must be a tank healer or must be a raid healer.

Disc priests and resto druids are extremely good cross healing, tank support + raid mitigation.

Usually you'll have a paladin with priority on tank healing, disc priest then should be keeping up Inspiration on tank, this is overlooked a LOT. If you have paladins you wont have a shaman with tank priority and disc has easy job keeping it up.

[G l o w y r m]

So many people are determined that a healer must be a tank healer or must be a raid healer.

Disc priests and resto druids are extremely good cross healing, tank support + raid mitigation.

Usually you'll have a paladin with priority on tank healing, disc priest then should be keeping up Inspiration on tank, this is overlooked a LOT. If you have paladins you wont have a shaman with tank priority and disc has easy job keeping it up.

Yep. Discipline is more of a gray area healer. Hitting up Tanks/Low targets with certain spells and then blanketing groups with different spells.

Some small/casual guilds out there don't have access to every spec though, so they might have Discipline Priests that HAVE to be their tank healer, I'm sure that many are in that situation. Still our best use is healing a bit of everyone.

[Viklu]

Alright, regemming for haste and Sp I have 672 haste and 2278 Sp, with a (laughable?) 27k mana pool. I normally run as a tank healer in about 90% of the content I've done (not much, but I don't have a lot of spare time to throw at WoW anymore) with only a few organized guild raids where I normally ran with a Hpal or Rdruid, to where I got a good mix of both aspects of life. I'm not a dedicated anything healer, I just heal, it's why I rolled my priest =]

[Auraye]

Why are you regemming for haste as disc? Is it because you are using the same gear for your shadow spec too?

[harky]

He's tank healing. Haste and SP are basically equal for tank healing as Discipline until you break 665, then haste is actually better than SP once you're able to pull off GH rotations.

[Dharmabhum]

Hey Vik, you're walking the same path I did, except I never actually went down the gemming INT road, just stared at it for a while

As a disc tank healer, I use a lot of SP, SP/Haste gems and don't really worry about mana at all. If you have replenishment, it evens things out a lot in raids, but even without Replenishment you should be able to get by ok using your mana cooldowns. You have a lot more INT than I do it looks like, so if you still feel you have a lot of mana, start knocking out those INT gems with SP/Haste (especially if you can use those pieces for shadow) or pure SP or even SP/INT if you're not comfortable dropping a ton of INT at once.

[Viklu]

Why are you regemming for haste as disc? Is it because you are using the same gear for your shadow spec too?

No.... Shit, I don't have the money to regem my shadow set :P