Strength of Soul debate

[Deleted]

Yes but you need 5 points for AA. Plus the glyphs. That's quite a chunk of...stuff, devoted to something that you will only use in *some* fights *some* of the time.

You lose no talent point of value, SoS is weak and so is Veiled Shadow or Darkness. You lose no glyph of value since they are just major glyphs and they aren't even strong ones.

[Kelesti]

You lose no talent point of value, SoS is weak and so is Veiled Shadow or Darkness. You lose no glyph of value since they are just major glyphs and they aren't even strong ones.

Strength of Soul is not weak. I don't know why people can't see it for the strength it has.

[Deleted]

Strength of Soul is not weak. I don't know why people can't see it for the strength it has.

Why is it not weak? When is it good to have? What makes it strong?

[Rawrzer]

I find it is an excellent way to keep a bubble up nearly all of the time on a tank. I just cast Heal on my target and rebubble when the debuff goes away. I keep my overheal to a minimum and always have a bubble ready for damage spikes or heavy damage phases.

[Demonixx]

why are u just tank healing..... disc are probably the best raid healers in the game with pws and divine aegis.... if u have tons of mana your doing it wrong.... my goal is to be just about oom when the boss dies.... mastery is what you stack.... it goes... int spirit/mastery worth about the same until higher gear levels... and then haste crit. whoever is telling you otherwise is misinformed atonement is fine especially when you get dmg increases on fights like valiona halfus etc. the goal isnt to keep it up 100 percent becuase in hardmodes you wont likely have the chance to keep it up.... the best way to do it i use it right before heavy dmg phases... i usually pop aa and then use pi and bubble poh bubble poh etc....

[Deleted]

I find it is an excellent way to keep a bubble up nearly all of the time on a tank. I just cast Heal on my target and rebubble when the debuff goes away. I keep my overheal to a minimum and always have a bubble ready for damage spikes or heavy damage phases.

Keeping bubble on tank all the time is mana inefficient. There is a reason we can't spam bubble anymore. Other classes are better than disc priests at tank healing.

Atonement is lackluster, it's usable in very few scenarios. I just tried to use it on hc Alakir, guess what, the boss is so large that noone ever gets a heal from it...

Wrong. Atonement is great on Magmaw, works on Omnotron, good on Maloriak, decent on Atramedes(holy fight thanks to B&S), good on Chimaeron, excellent on Nefarian. Excellent on Halfus, works on V&T, bit weak on Ascendant(holy fight thanks to B&S and all the movement and frost orbs), good on Cho'gall. Not so good on Conclave.

Don't think Atonement is useless because of the way it targets, it is not a weakness that matters.

And you should try Holy on Al'Akir HC since discipline is really really weak on that fight compared to holy.

[Kelesti]

Keeping bubble on tank all the time is mana inefficient. There is a reason we can't spam bubble anymore. Other classes are better than disc priests at tank healing.

1 point alone in Strength of Soul allows you to take advantage of Rapture's 12 second cooldown, instead of 15 on Weakened Soul. As a tank healer, that alone is an increase to your sustainability. But as a Tank healer, there are phases when you want to say "to hell with it" and amp up max output. "Use" trinkets and Power Infusion come to mind here, especially when Barrier and Pain Suppression aren't available. Hell even when they are up, pushing max output is damn near mandatory (Heroic Cho'gall when you missed a tick of Worship, for example).

Or even if your tank had an avoidance failure, having shield ready to burn off the Rapture timer stops him from going splat, even if it's mana inefficient. A dead tank seems to be worse on the blue bar, wouldn't you agree?

Strength of Soul makes your Power Word: Shield "scale" (sort of) with haste, giving you not only a Greater Heal's worth of output instantly (and one that can't overheal) as well as hasting your next one again.

"Other classes are better than disc priests at tank healing"... that's pretty debatable actually. Discipline's single target output is huge. Bring Strength of Soul into the equation, and you can effectively put Paladins to shame when it comes to 1-target healing.

As an atonement spec'd raid healer, more than one point is a waste, and even then on pretty much every fight you can get away with 0/2, but as a tank healer there is no excuse to not run Strength of Soul. None. Period.

[babylon]

Keeping bubble on tank all the time is mana inefficient. There is a reason we can't spam bubble anymore. Other classes are better than disc priests at tank healing.

confusing. shield on tank kinda guarantees that the shield will be broken = not wasted = rapturing. its not just mana efficient, its actually returning us mana, if following rapture cd. when on tank, i use sos spec and dont use rapture timer anymore, thats only showing how i dont have to care about mana when shielding tank.

i dont see how keeping shield always on the tank is related to spamming bubbles.
and i dont see reason why we cant spam bubbles. in avg 364 gear on 10man heroic modes i often get over 30% of my healing from shields, i dont run oom and only healer competing with me on meters is a druid. its not a show off, im just showing that disc is really powerful and saying that (at some gear level) we cant use some spell is just silly for me :/

as for the tank healing, i often heal tank and... had no problems with that? to the point where i dropped inspiration, cause tank healing in cata seems that easy? dont see why other classes should be better than discipline priest on tank healing.

[Deleted]

I tank heal with atonement, no SoS. It's not really a big deal whether you have it or not - most of my healing still comes from atonement and penance, not from shielding the tank. Holy fire landing 20k+ heals for 1.5k mana is pretty hard to beat for sustainable throughput.

I'm not sure that being able to instantly shield the tank is that relevant anyway. If his health is dropping fast I'm more likely to use the gcd for pain supp than shield, and then burn a flash heal (lots of atonement means IF is often off cooldown so that flash is free).

[Deleted]

1 point alone in Strength of Soul allows you to take advantage of Rapture's 12 second cooldown, instead of 15 on Weakened Soul. As a tank healer, that alone is an increase to your sustainability. But as a Tank healer, there are phases when you want to say "to hell with it" and amp up max output. "Use" trinkets and Power Infusion come to mind here, especially when Barrier and Pain Suppression aren't available. Hell even when they are up, pushing max output is damn near mandatory (Heroic Cho'gall when you missed a tick of Worship, for example).

Or even if your tank had an avoidance failure, having shield ready to burn off the Rapture timer stops him from going splat, even if it's mana inefficient. A dead tank seems to be worse on the blue bar, wouldn't you agree?

Strength of Soul makes your Power Word: Shield "scale" (sort of) with haste, giving you not only a Greater Heal's worth of output instantly (and one that can't overheal) as well as hasting your next one again.

"Other classes are better than disc priests at tank healing"... that's pretty debatable actually. Discipline's single target output is huge. Bring Strength of Soul into the equation, and you can effectively put Paladins to shame when it comes to 1-target healing.

As an atonement spec'd raid healer, more than one point is a waste, and even then on pretty much every fight you can get away with 0/2, but as a tank healer there is no excuse to not run Strength of Soul. None. Period.

As a tank healer, yes that is pretty good. But my whole point is that there are other classes better at tank healing than discipline priests are. Of course we can put out much throughput if we constantly shield and spam GH/Flash to reduce Weakend Soul but tell me that you don't go out of mana of that and if that was the case, why even bring paladin healers? So all your point with SoS being good IF you tank heal is not relevant to me as I see that there are other classes more suited for the job and therefore SoS becomes near useless.

Hardly ever do we see a discipline priest tank heal in any of the top guilds (yes, I am using them as reference) and if discipline were so good at it, why wouldn't they use them for tank healing?

There are very few occasions where you can't use PW:S on someone else to keep your Rupture uptime as high as possible. So that argument for SoS is flawed.

[Verth Aeyta]

As a tank healer, yes that is pretty good. But my whole point is that there are other classes better at tank healing than discipline priests are. Of course we can put out much throughput if we constantly shield and spam GH/Flash to reduce Weakend Soul but tell me that you don't go out of mana of that and if that was the case, why even bring paladin healers? So all your point with SoS being good IF you tank heal is not relevant to me as I see that there are other classes more suited for the job and therefore SoS becomes near useless.

Hardly ever do we see a discipline priest tank heal in any of the top guilds (yes, I am using them as reference) and if discipline were so good at it, why wouldn't they use them for tank healing?

There are very few occasions where you can't use PW:S on someone else to keep your Rupture uptime as high as possible. So that argument for SoS is flawed.

I think the point is that when you can you use Heal rather than GH to get the Weaked Soul Debuff down it's more mana efficient than our other 2 heals and plus you have Penance you should be using on CD, you should FH only when you need an oh shit button. I can see how SoS is an important tank healing item as I am always the Nef tank healer in our Nef fight. Of course we run 10 mans so we run 1 H Pally, 1 R Shaman and me a Holy/Disc Priest though I'm probably hurting myself by not having SoS but I may have to look at it now that I'm really thinking about it.

[babylon]

As a tank healer, yes that is pretty good. But my whole point is that there are other classes better at tank healing than discipline priests are. Of course we can put out much throughput if we constantly shield and spam GH/Flash to reduce Weakend Soul but tell me that you don't go out of mana of that and if that was the case, why even bring paladin healers? So all your point with SoS being good IF you tank heal is not relevant to me as I see that there are other classes more suited for the job and therefore SoS becomes near useless.

Hardly ever do we see a discipline priest tank heal in any of the top guilds (yes, I am using them as reference) and if discipline were so good at it, why wouldn't they use them for tank healing?

There are very few occasions where you can't use PW:S on someone else to keep your Rupture uptime as high as possible. So that argument for SoS is flawed.

1. tank healing - dont spam flash heal. if i use 1 fh per boss fight, thats like max.
but spamming shields, gh and penance (i use 4 piece) and bh when im not topped, i never run oom. when tank is fine i use 'heal' to remove debuff. still it doesnt take me oom.

2. sos - it can be amazing. try solo tank healing on maloriak hc, on black phases with and then without sos. difference is huge. with sos i can actually still help on raid healing and almost don't care when breath debuff is off.

or ods heroic, when boss, which your tank is tanking, has shield on, you wont smite there, sos all the way.

or council heroic, when tank healing on first phase, with dmg and moving there sos can be live saver.

also many discipline priests, including me, stack mastery. shield absorbing over 30k dmg + heal from glyph is our strongest tool. having possibility to be able to put it on tank more often than 15sec debuff is a huge bonus.

3. why often discs are on raid - while discipline priests are perfectly fine tank healers, they can be also amazing raid healers.
think of, for example, magmaw heroic or valiona heroic, any muppet can heal tanks there (lets not pretend that mangle is a big deal). but on those fights, with some armageddon/twilight adds fails, raid healing might get a bit more challenging and probably better suited for discipline tools. so you put any muppet on the tank and discipline on raid.

its not that other classes are better tank healers then discipline priests. its the fact that discipline priests can be really good raid healers on many fights, beating shamans and paladins on that.

i am not saying that sos is always great or that atonement healing is bad, what i say is that there are occasions when one of them is highly better than the other. i would never say that any of those is always useless.

[Kelesti]

I tank heal with atonement

Going to stop you right there. The words I want to use are a little too profane to pop up here.

(lots of atonement means IF is often off cooldown so that flash is free).

And that shows you don't know what Train of Thought does. Smite gives you faster Penance, Greater Heal is Inner Focus. They're seperate effects.

---------- Post added 2011-06-09 at 10:21 AM ----------

As a tank healer, yes that is pretty good. But my whole point is that there are other classes better at tank healing than discipline priests are. Of course we can put out much throughput if we constantly shield and spam GH/Flash to reduce Weakend Soul but tell me that you don't go out of mana of that and if that was the case, why even bring paladin healers?

Because your Paladin healers are all raid healers, go ask them in their forums dontchaknow.

On a more serious note, not all raids actually have Paladins. Secondly, we outclass them single target. Yes, single. Priest > Paladins on one target. Toss in two, and Paladin wins thanks to Beacon. Toss in raid healing, and you really expect a Paladin to handle that? That's why if you have Paladin/Priest, the Paladin goes on the tank even if the Priest is better at it. If you have Priest/Shaman, Priest/Druid, or Holy/Discipline, that Discipline Priest is better at tank healing, and all the rest can go to full-time raid heals.

So all your point with SoS being good IF you tank heal is not relevant to me as I see that there are other classes more suited for the job and therefore SoS becomes near useless.

"I don't take these talents because I view them as bad, and without them our role is inferior." Cyclical argument. Please try again.

Hardly ever do we see a discipline priest tank heal in any of the top guilds (yes, I am using them as reference) and if discipline were so good at it, why wouldn't they use them for tank healing?

Firstly, top guilds were bringing Discipline when it was crap (shield was 9k? Penance was... 14? Atonement was an embarassment to spec for?), because of Barrier. Back when top guilds were actually clearing the content, Strength of Soul also used to only apply to "Heal" which made it lacklustre, because you could only use it to increase your "efficient" output (shield was terrible but cheap at the time), and not actually increase your top-end, which matters more. People cleared the content as Discipline was buffed. Strength of Soul now affects a lot more than just Heal, so while you can still burn it off in low time to keep Rapture at 12 instead of 15, you can also burn that timer to cover a second hit.

Secondly, again, the reason top guilds don't use Priests, is because where would you put the Paladin? It's that even Discipline is adapted and well suited to a variety of tasks. Paladins, on the other hand... are still tank healers that can pretend, two GCDs every 20.

There are very few occasions where you can't use PW:S on someone else to keep your Rupture uptime as high as possible. So that argument for SoS is flawed.

So you'd use a shield on someone else efficiently, and then let a tank go unshielded for at least 9 seconds after Weakened Soul falls off? You do realize just how strong Shield is, in your arsenal, right?

[Wuga]

As a tank healer, yes that is pretty good. But my whole point is that there are other classes better at tank healing than discipline priests are. Of course we can put out much throughput if we constantly shield and spam GH/Flash to reduce Weakend Soul but tell me that you don't go out of mana of that and if that was the case, why even bring paladin healers? So all your point with SoS being good IF you tank heal is not relevant to me as I see that there are other classes more suited for the job and therefore SoS becomes near useless.

Hardly ever do we see a discipline priest tank heal in any of the top guilds (yes, I am using them as reference) and if discipline were so good at it, why wouldn't they use them for tank healing?

There are very few occasions where you can't use PW:S on someone else to keep your Rupture uptime as high as possible. So that argument for SoS is flawed.

PWS is actually one of the best single target heals in the game, both in terms of HPM and HPCT, so I don't see why you think it would oom you while "spamming" it on the tank via SoS. It's much more efficient than heal/GH and only modestly worse than penance, plus it's far less prone to overheal. If you are just tank healing you can pretty much PWS-GH-GH all day long.

Also, there are a lot of fights where you can't reliably proc a rapture on a non-tank within 1-2 seconds of casting the shield. You can get it to proc eventually, but it might be several seconds after your rapture timer comes up, which is a pretty massive mp5 loss.

[[-Spiritus-]]

Hardly ever do we see a discipline priest tank heal in any of the top guilds (yes, I am using them as reference) and if discipline were so good at it, why wouldn't they use them for tank healing?

(1)Because bubblolspam with straight MST stacking is still the most powerful thing any healer can do in the game, so they hook up their Disc priests to multiple Innervate IVs and time other external regen tools [MTT, HoH] around the Disc mana pool. This is why Innervate is getting the nerf bat.

(2) See 1, but also Paladins are fantastic tank healers, but still cannot perform the function of primary raid healer in a top guild. So, why would a top guild have their Disc priest tank heal, even if they are really good at it?

Also, news flash, Disc priests in "top" guilds prefer bubblolspam b/c it causes the encounter design and raids to work around them. A bubblolspamming Disc priest doing his thing in an encounter that is designed to be a challenge for a raid w/o a bubblolbot makes the encounter significantly easier. A bublolbot Disc priest doing his thing in an encounter that is designed to be a challenge for a raid w/ a bubblolbot becomes irreplaceable. When you are competing for one of 10 -20 spots in your server region, that becomes a pretty big deal.

[Deleted]

Going to stop you right there.

And that shows you don't know what Train of Thought does. Smite gives you faster Penance, Greater Heal is Inner Focus. They're seperate effects.

Thanks for being patronising, very justified to be sure.

I'm well aware what ToT does, my point (maybe not that clear) was that since I'm not using IF that often, it's usually off cooldown when I need it. If you're spamming a lot of GH and using IF on cooldown then chances are it'll be on cooldown when you need a big heal. If you're not casting many GH/FHs then it'll usually be up. Of course you could save IF without using atonement, but then you're nerfing your mana consumption.

Of course you'll likely disregard this as obviously I'm a rubbish tank healer as I don't have SoS.

[Kelesti]

I'm well aware what ToT does, my point (maybe not that clear) was that since I'm not using IF that often, it's usually off cooldown when I need it. If you're spamming a lot of GH and using IF on cooldown then chances are it'll be on cooldown when you need a big heal. If you're not casting many GH/FHs then it'll usually be up. Of course you could save IF without using atonement, but then you're nerfing your mana consumption.

The funny thing about Inner Focus, it doesn't make the heal bigger. So how would having it on cooldown stop a Priest from being able to reach for a bigger heal? Greater Heal + Inner Focus = Greater Heal without. Sure it's a higher crit chance, but chance is still RNG, Inner Focus doesn't guarantee a crit (unlike Paladins).

Of course you'll likely disregard this as obviously I'm a rubbish tank healer as I don't have SoS.

The rubbish value of being a tank healer without SoS is that you're limiting your options, but that can be changed. The rubbish value of you, however, is:

I tank heal with atonement

No exception.

[[-Spiritus-]]

Of course you'll likely disregard this as obviously I'm a rubbish tank healer as I don't have SoS.

Right, but... it is rubbish to be a tank healer w/o SoS. Think of it this way. PW:S is an instant cast GH that never overheals with a 15sec CD. You have a talent that drops said CD to 7.5sec by casting two heals, FHs, or GHs during the CD. You seriously cannot see how unbelievably powerful that is for single target healing?

[Kelesti]

Right, but... it is rubbish to be a tank healer w/o SoS. Think of it this way. PW:S is an instant cast GH that never overheals with a 15sec CD. You have a talent that drops said CD to 7.5sec by casting two heals, FHs, or GHs during the CD. You seriously cannot see how unbelievably powerful that is for single target healing?

He's of the mindset that his Holy Fire (the one that's going to be missing the tank a heckuva lot more in Firelands) is enough.

And sure, to 3-heal normal content, he might be right.

[Wuga]

I'm not sure that being able to instantly shield the tank is that relevant anyway. If his health is dropping fast I'm more likely to use the gcd for pain supp than shield, and then burn a flash heal (lots of atonement means IF is often off cooldown so that flash is free).

A bit OT but just FYI, pain sup is off gcd (as are AA and PI). I think PWB is also off gcd but I'm not sure about that one.