Theories on a Disc/Holy Smite Spec

[Lucky_]

A spec that can do decent dps and heal is so cool. Who gives a damn about min/maxing? I know you'll see me smite spamming my way through heroics and bgs lol. It's like mage with dispel/heals/better shields.

You do realise that pretty much every single decent disc priest already has been doing this since ulduar patch? As in since tanks started overgearing instances so much, you could just preshield, pom, renew and spend rest of the time pretty much DPSing with shield refresh and occational penance on tank?

And if you haven't been using smite in PvP... well you're just plain bad. Priest without holy fire + smite is like a paladin without judgements or a shaman without shocks.

[Strykie]

Full Smite DPS spec would pull ROUGHLY 11-12k DPS in ICC25 and i assume Smite heal would be a smart heal, being quite nice utility.

[Balance]

On the contrary, while it can't be "run", it can be theorycrafted very easily (which is your real implication here). Since you missed the point despite what looked like obviousness, I'll hammer you with some facts in hope that you understand the point.

1. You are trying to make a damage spec based on SMITE. Smite spamming nonstop with holy fire use every time it's off CD does approximately 3-4 times less damage then shadow at the moment (depending on encounter).
2. Spell damage coefficients are highly unlikely to change. This because disc priests already do far too much damage with holy fire + smite, something that everyone in PvP knows very well. Buffing smite damage coefficient compared to other skills would be a horrifying mistake for PvP balance, making priests essentially in a class of their own as healers. It will not happen.
3. As we can safely assume that 2. will ensure that smite coefficient will not be beneficially modified, we can assume that it will remain largely untouched. This means that equivalent shadow spec with similar buffs will still do somewhere between 3 and 4 times the damage depending on the encounter.
4.New talent buffs listed include 15% buff in disc tree (which will be taken in PvP), 20% from chakra, extra 2% from searing light buff (taken for PvP) and 15% crit buff from penitence (taken for PvP), as well as instant cast but incapable of crit from surge of light.


Last point damns your spec, and general idea of pure smite spec for damage in PvE. Even with all the new buffs, the damage increase is still well under 50% instead of 300%+ required for competitiveness, and one of the two talents you want to pick is of a VERY questionable value outside PvP, as surge of light makes smite incapable of critting, while reducing cast speed from 2 sec to 1.5 sec GCD. I CBA to do the math, but it doesn't require much crit before it becomes a DPS reduction talent, or at least it's damage addition value would get reduced to nearly nothing.

Essentially, you're trying to create the classic "bastard child" spec. It wouldn't be good at anything at all, being horribly inept at both DPS and healing in spite of being able to do both, and as such it will never become an acceptable raiding or PvP spec.

Conclusion: Smite talents are for PvP, and PvP only. That's where it shines, and is one of the premiere class-defining skills. Not in PvE. And PvP disc, the currently only viable PvP healer spec lives and dies by penance and PS, while any holy build would live and die by GS (should holy ever become viable in PvP), as it is the only proper survival cooldown the talent tree has.

Ah, that makes much more sense to me. I apologize for you having to spell it out for me but what you were saying earlier went over my head. I fully understand what you mean by "bringing back the bastard child spec", but although your arguments for why it won't work are completely valid at the time, I must say that I don't understand the point of Blizzard adding all of these smite modifiers in trees if they weren't attempting to make it viable for some aspect of raiding. After reading what you said I am willing to say that I might have been mistaken in assuming that they were bringing back smiter spec, but I will continue to look for possibilities for it in the hope that they will.

Again thanks for the explanation, and I will take it to account in further research.

Full Smite DPS spec would pull ROUGHLY 11-12k DPS in ICC25 and i assume Smite heal would be a smart heal, being quite nice utility.

Might I ask where this is from? I will have to make sure it is valid before testing numbers in comparison and using these numbers in this or a future thread.

[Lucky_]

I must say that I don't understand the point of Blizzard adding all of these smite modifiers in trees if they weren't attempting to make it viable for some aspect of raiding.

Most likely trying to make holy PvP viable to some extent by adding more damage and instant smite to the spec. Holy's biggest problem in PvP is lack of powerful instants and haste after all.

Might I ask where this is from? I will have to make sure it is valid before testing numbers in comparison and using these numbers in this or a future thread.

About the only way to get those numbers as holy or disc is mind searing the trash with proper raid buffs. Shadow can pull 20k+ in those pulls easily. It has nothing to do with smite.

[Blakkeyez]

I must say that I don't understand the point of Blizzard adding all of these smite modifiers in trees if they weren't attempting to make it viable for some aspect of raiding.

Don't just assume every talent or talent build has to be aimed towards raiding. The added dps utility gives healing priests tools that can be useful for both levelling, farming and 5-man dungeons where there is a lot of idling once the playerbase have moved past the initial difficulty by gearing up.

You may refer to Ghostcrawler's bluepost on the topic f ex:
"As to the actual topic, as we've posted several times, those talents are designed to be optional. Any healer spends some amount of time in almost any instance standing around when nobody needs healing. Some healers want to be able to perform solo or in small groups without having to switch to a dps spec. We are trying to get away from trees where every talent essentially says "increases your damage or healing by 5%." A talent that is non-mandatory should be by definition optional. If you don't think you'd like or use that particular chunk of utility offered by a talent, then skip over it. Or go ahead and get it knowing that you'll still get a passive benefit that improves your healing."

[Tokyotosho]

Optimally i'd love to see a smite dps/healer hybrid spec become viable. Being a 10 man raider most fights seem to want 2 healers for about 90% of it and a 3rd for another 10% of the fights duration. It would be great if blizzard could design around having 2.5 healers for a fight for normal difficulty, with 2 healers being comfortable if your raid is top notch aware and 3 healers for guilds or groups that feel they struggle in some places. That way the hybrid specs/specs classes could assist in healing during some phases. I'd love to see the 6th dps assisting on healing during a 20 second phase more often, or switching to full healing mode if another healer goes down and is waiting on battle res or whatever.

Make raiding about group performance again instead of having all dps locked into a roll starting at recount.

[canobil]

They funny thing im noticing here is how mutch this thread reminds me of a simmilar one. A thread posted arund 8 months ago. That post conserned a whole new thing at that moment, the now dead "Prot holy paladin pvp spec". Some guy had come up with the idea, but a lot of people in the thread called him a jerk, and said that a paladin spec without holy shock was absulut crab, and that his idea would never work out side paper.
And what happend ? The most overpowered 2s pally spec was born, and it was soo good, that blizzard had to nerf it to the grund in the upcomming patch.

So again, dont be all to negativ at therycrafters.

( btw, i think the ide sounds cool, with all the + damage smite recives. But as i see it, the problem is hit. you get 10%, but the rest of it isent present on cloth gear in cata, becurse they made those talents converting spirit into hit, wich this spec dosent have.)

[Vurrin]

( btw, i think the ide sounds cool, with all the + damage smite recives. But as i see it, the problem is hit. you get 10%, but the rest of it isent present on cloth gear in cata, becurse they made those talents converting spirit into hit, wich this spec dosent have.)

Cloth DPS caster gear with Hit will still exist. You'd gear a spec like this like any DPS caster except shadow. Hit till cap then haste/crit gear everywhere else. I'm not expecting these changes to make it live as is, and I would expect this build to have mana issues since no tools like imp-Spirit Tap or Dispersion. That said it would be hilarious if a build like this could do roughly 3/4 a actual DPS's DPS and Heal for 50% of an actual healers DPS you could make some pretty hilarious comps with like 12-14 Smite Priests. Mainly failing because smart heals would be unlikely to get a tank above the "one shot" threshold on encounters like sindragosa where there is excessive raid dmg and the boss hits hard. Of course on encounters where the tank could survive hits while hovering between 25-45% the throughput would be more than sufficient to out heal a bosses's dps.

Anyway I highly doubt we'll ever see the scenario above, but it would be fun for a while, and it might even be viable as the .5 healer in 10 mans where you need a bit more healing than 2 healers can provide, but don't want to lose an entire dps class for another healer.

[GrumpyJester]

I'm keeping my fingers crossed that the "purists" don't get these talents removed or nerfed.

However, post-launch there is an even bigger threat: people trying to play their Priests as Holy Mages. Once this becomes a trend and people flok to the forums to complain about Priests that can't/won't heal, the talents will be gone as well

So please Priests: don't get carried away. These talents are great for what they're designed to do, but you're not an Elemental Shaman.