Quick Disc Questions

[Darthmatty]

Havent played since ToT and I am looking to start raiding seriously again. Anyways I have a few questions concerning disc.

1. Which cloak do i use? The caster or healing one?

2. The stat priority, I know it used to be you kinda want to average out crit and mastery. Now I see alot of people say full crit but keep mastery within 10% of your crit rating. So if someone could clarify that for me and also what gems do I want. How good is intellect? Should i be putting brilliants in red sockets or potents? For yellows and i going straight crit?

Thanks for the help

[Dracodraco]

Caster cloak.
Full crit. Mastery will follow with the stat allocations of gear. You want nothing to do with pure red gems. Int+crit in red, spi+crit in blue, crit in yellow.

[Fraddi]

Cloak choice is up to you. I go for the healing one simply because of the added spirit and the haste can be reforged into crit.

Until recently it was indeed crit + mastery to a 1:1 ratio. However, more and more top end raiders have found that full crit is yielding better results. With my current gear I'm at a 1:2 (crit:mastery) ratio, but that's simply because I'm still gearing up as I also recently came back to WoW from a break.

[Deleted]

Healing cloak is significantly more healing (in the order of 5-8%).

A lot of people say gogo full crit, but in reality the differences are tiny (except for DPS). I have done the same fight with 25% crit 62% mastery (no time to reforge from holy spec) and 35% crit 50% mastery and my healing is pretty much the same. As long as you have the 2 set and you adjust your play style accordingly you will get pretty much the same results. If you have high mastery you want spirit and greater PWS use (make sure you use up borrowed time).

Timing things up well is a bigger factor in getting good HPS than crit vs mastery. Most of the people who advocate high crit, have never even tried the other playstyle.

Basically get the best gear that is available that has mastery or crit on it. Gem crit generally or hybrid gems with crit. Reforge all spirit to crit. Keep your haste at 2-3k or so.

If DPS is important to you for some reason then caster cloak and crit all the way yields more DPS (in the order of 8-15%)

You may want to ignore the socket color and gem just gem crit if the socket bonus is haste or spirit.

[Fluttershy]

I gem for crit and reforge excess spirit for crit.

No matter what you do, assuming you picked good gear(aka no haste) you'll eventually end up with a 6:5 crit mastery ratio if you gem crit, if you gem mastery you reverse the ratio.

[Deleted]

Healing cloak is significantly more healing (in the order of 5-8%).

A lot of people say gogo full crit, but in reality the differences are tiny (except for DPS). I have done the same fight with 25% crit 62% mastery (no time to reforge from holy spec) and 35% crit 50% mastery and my healing is pretty much the same. As long as you have the 2 set and you adjust your play style accordingly you will get pretty much the same results. If you have high mastery you want spirit and greater PWS use (make sure you use up borrowed time).

Timing things up well is a bigger factor in getting good HPS than crit vs mastery. Most of the people who advocate high crit, have never even tried the other playstyle.

Basically get the best gear that is available that has mastery or crit on it. Gem crit generally or hybrid gems with crit. Reforge all spirit to crit. Keep your haste at 2-3k or so.

If DPS is important to you for some reason then caster cloak and crit all the way yields more DPS (in the order of 8-15%)

You may want to ignore the socket color and gem just gem crit if the socket bonus is haste or spirit.

... it gets 0.8ppm for me with my haste and with almost no overheal I don't know how you're getting that much out of it, the only thing that tends to overheal for me is the 90 talents which pretty much bring people to full anyway and if they don't then the buff won't help (on the miracle occasion it's up to use with it, or the even rarer occasion both meta and it are up for halo)

The DPS gained from cloak reduces the healing you need for fights by a decent amount, be it adds going down faster or ~100k+ dps on a boss.

[Deleted]

It's really your own choice. How your healingstyle is and wether your guild is good enough to stay out of trouble, i.e extra dmg taken.

I reforge like this.

All my items have either, Stamina, Intellect, Spirit and Mastery/Crit. I reforge the Spirit to either Crit or Mastery, depending on what secondary stat the item has. I'd say a good amount of Spirit is 10-12k, once you have everything on farm (Normal/Heroic) I'm sure you can reforge away more spirit if possible.

As for the Healing Cloak, it's either or, the DPS Cloak increases your total DPS by roughly 5-10%, while the Healing Cloak increases your total HPS by 5-10%, not a big difference there.

[Elexx]

You'll want the healing cloak for 25-man, dps cloak for 10m. Reforge how you see fit.

[Darthmatty]

Thanks for all the help. I went into lfr last night with a crit build and smashed another disc priest 25 ilvls above me. I do have one more question though. Which trinkets are best? Would some of the dps ones be viable such as the immerseus one?

[Deleted]

Thanks for all the help. I went into lfr last night with a crit build and smashed another disc priest 25 ilvls above me. I do have one more question though. Which trinkets are best? Would some of the dps ones be viable such as the immerseus one?

It's not useless, but the int proc won't trigger while in disc or holy, it only procs while actually dps specced

[Clebane]

Thanks for all the help. I went into lfr last night with a crit build and smashed another disc priest 25 ilvls above me. I do have one more question though. Which trinkets are best? Would some of the dps ones be viable such as the immerseus one?

There are only 2 viable trinkets for disc from this tier: Prismatic Prison of Pride (Sha) and Dysmorphic Samophlange of Discontinuity (Siegecrafter)
The multistrike and cleave are shit for disc.

[Reptar]

There are only 2 viable trinkets for disc from this tier: Prismatic Prison of Pride (Sha) and Dysmorphic Samophlange of Discontinuity (Siegecrafter)
The multistrike and cleave are shit for disc.

Yulon's Bite from the timeless isle will work as well until you can get these two.

[jason1975]

Havent played since ToT and I am looking to start raiding seriously again. Anyways I have a few questions concerning disc.

1. Which cloak do i use? The caster or healing one?

2. The stat priority, I know it used to be you kinda want to average out crit and mastery. Now I see alot of people say full crit but keep mastery within 10% of your crit rating. So if someone could clarify that for me and also what gems do I want. How good is intellect? Should i be putting brilliants in red sockets or potents? For yellows and i going straight crit?

Thanks for the help

If your healing team is really good, then get the caster one. Otherwise just play it safe and get the healing one.

Crit >> Mastery > Haste > Spirit. Try to shoot for 15k Total Effective Spirit (use askmrrobot.com to estimate proc spirit and get total effective). Err on the side of "too much" spirit rather than "too little". The HPS difference between 28K Effective Spirit and 15K Effective is huge, but the HPS difference between 16k and 14K is tiny. (Because of the way healing works and overheal, there is a diminishing returns like effect on reducing your total effective spirit for other secondary stats . . . it's not like DPS).

EDIT: Yulon's from TI is a good trinket until you pick up something better. Always good to hold onto at least one regen trinket in your bag (horridon's is awesome) just in case you feel you need a bit more regen for a fight.

[Larynx]

I use the caster cloak by default, and swap to the healing cloak on fights with constant damage intake to reduce overhealing. Typically the healing cloak accounts for 0.5-2% of my healing, so its usually useless like on Dark Shamans. I've had it as high as 8% on some fights like Norushen, so I use it there (unfortunately Norushen is also a tight enrage, and that extra DPS could always help so its debatable)

This is for heroics only though. For normals, the damage is so manageable that the either is fine and the slight single digit percent gain is irrelevant.

[Fluttershy]

The DPS gained from cloak reduces the healing you need for fights by a decent amount, be it adds going down faster or ~100k+ dps on a boss.

more like 10-15k.

[Deleted]

more like 10-15k.

Yeah I meant total

Plus cleaving adds is hilarious with bindings proc up

[iKrow]

1) Healing Cloak - Free Healing, what's not to love?
DPS Cloak - AoE Cleave can proc ToF on adds. Pretty much the only advantage to using it as ~1% crit isn't that big.

2) Lots of preference. In SoO raid gear you can gem Crit or Mastery. Ignore Spirit and 60 Int socket bonuses. As long as you're happy with your spirit, you don't really have to reforge anything honestly.

[Nzete]

Overhealing protection assumes that you have someone that needs it to rearrange to. I'm still pretty anti-proc throughput for healing. I have both (8/14H in 10s) and change them depending on the fight (ie the number of adds present) although I tend make the decision based on "kill adds" and "look it is a free reforge to spirit" than taking the overheal rearrangement into consideration.

I go gear for crit, reforge for crit (if the ilevel upgrade was so big I had to take it and there wasn't crit), and gem int/crit, crit, and crit/spi.

[Dracodraco]

Took the chance to use the cloak yesterday on the first 12 encounters, just to see how it'd do (bar Galakras, where I held back by choise to try and let a guildy rank).
Results are:

Immerseus - 8.7% (managed to get procs right before the swelling-debuffs went out, Halo to load up tons of overhealing/shields, then proc unleash'd smarthealing).
Protectors - 3.5%.
Norushen - 3%.
Sha - 4.1%.
Juggernaut - 1.7%.
Dark Shamans - 1.1%.
Nazgrim - 6.7% (got a proc right before a warsong).
Malkorok - 4% (got a proc during the stacking-phase, ran out for a Halo of "LOL HEALS").
Spoils - 3.2%.
Thok - 3.3%.
Blackfuse - 1.6%.

Didn't get to klaxxi/garrosh, will try it out there too. Generally, aside from the insanely lucky procs right before heavy raid dmg with lvl 90 talent ready to use, the benefit seems to be about 2-4%, on average. Outliers here are Immerseus and Nazgrim due to luck.