[6.2.3] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Floopa]

You might cast flash heal to save someone with Weakend Soul on them?

[EAA] PoH isn't trash, but healers that think it is might be.

obviously i dont play disc well, but i can't imagine you'd find much difference between a good disc (me) and an amazing disc priest. all i do is spam PWS, i just AA whenever it's available (even at 1/2 stacks of evangelism) cus that's how i roll. never using smite, just solace

[PosPosPos]

obviously i dont play disc well, but i can't imagine you'd find much difference between a good disc (me) and an amazing disc priest. all i do is spam PWS, i just AA whenever it's available (even at 1/2 stacks of evangelism) cus that's how i roll. never using smite, just solace

That's essentially the playstyle difference separating good and exceptional disc priests - the ability to know when to pop AA regardless of Evangelism stacks just to 100% PoH.

[Dracodraco]

why would you ever cast flash heal or PoH lol

PoH is trash cus of how the spell works (group based...)

PoH isn't trash because it's group based. Your UI might be if you don't have cluster trackers to ensure you don't cast it on less than 5 targets, though.

[inarukja]

I'm new to priest and new to this mmo-champion forum.
I currently rolling as Disc. I really like the mechanics so far (after been Resto Sham for 3xpacs).

I need and advice here. I like to look at top ranked Disc logs from worldoflogs and warcraftlogs.
I've seen that many ranked Disc have no CoW in their logs at all ? or only few cast per fight.
But when I play, I cast CoW sooooo often on tank. My other spells usage are quite different from those ranked logs.

Am I doing DISC correctly or I can continue healing with this style?
I'm afraid that if I'm doing Disc incorrectly then I might be used to this way of healing and will be struggled later.

ps. sorry for bad English

[emni]

I'm new to priest and new to this mmo-champion forum.
I currently rolling as Disc. I really like the mechanics so far (after been Resto Sham for 3xpacs).

I need and advice here. I like to look at top ranked Disc logs from worldoflogs and warcraftlogs.
I've seen that many ranked Disc have no CoW in their logs at all ? or only few cast per fight.
But when I play, I cast CoW sooooo often on tank. My other spells usage are quite different from those ranked logs.

Am I doing DISC correctly or I can continue healing with this style?
I'm afraid that if I'm doing Disc incorrectly then I might be used to this way of healing and will be struggled later.

ps. sorry for bad English

It completely depends on your healer composition, raid damage patterns etc. Especially if you're healing with a paladin or another disc, you can drop CoW almost completely because it simply isn't needed. It really depends. The golden rule with disc is that the more damage you can anticipate, the more healing you will do, and then it's about knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your spells.

If your healer composition doesn't have strong tank healing and relies on you to do it, then don't let the tanks die just because you were chasing meters by spamming PW:S on the raid. At the end of the day, healing is about keeping people alive. If you like numbers, roll a WW monk.

[Dracodraco]

It completely depends on your healer composition, raid damage patterns etc. Especially if you're healing with a paladin or another disc, you can drop CoW almost completely because it simply isn't needed. It really depends. The golden rule with disc is that the more damage you can anticipate, the more healing you will do, and then it's about knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your spells.

If your healer composition doesn't have strong tank healing and relies on you to do it, then don't let the tanks die just because you were chasing meters by spamming PW:S on the raid. At the end of the day, healing is about keeping people alive. If you like numbers, roll a WW monk.

To add to this, druids and monks are better raid healers than disc, period. Never let them be on tank healing duty - they can't sustain it. Paladins are "okay", but with their double beacons, they're better left trying to snap heal the raid while passively keeping the tanks up, rather than trying to heal the tanks. That really leaves resto shamans and disc priests as the "viable" tank healers right now - resto shaman due to their mastery kicking in on tanks and healing them for huge amounts (and earthshield - 200K crits aren't unheard of), and disc due to absorbs. Discuss with your resto shaman whom of you will be spamming the tanks if you have one. If not, tank heal. It's that simple - meters doesn't matter fuck all right now because tanks actually take meaningfull damage, and can't just be kept up through passive cleave.

[Evry]

Never let them be on tank healing duty - they can't sustain it.

Do you have math for this?
I'm pretty confident Druids (when talented for it) bring more single target throughput than disc with better (but not by too much) hpm. Mistweavers with the Envm buff are better yet but I'm not sure how much less HPM it works out to be over Druids.
Excepting Tranq vs Barrier, disc pws spam is more than competitive with Druid raid healing. It's only behind MW, and not by much.

The strength of disc tank healing is the utility of the absorbs, not the sustain, which doesn't necessarily require sticking the priest on the tanks the whole fight. We've done pretty well in Heroic Highmaul without having a dedicated tank healer (and no Holy Paladin) but 2 druids and a disc priest keeping hots/absorbs on them.

[inarukja]

It completely depends on your healer composition, raid damage patterns etc. Especially if you're healing with a paladin or another disc, you can drop CoW almost completely because it simply isn't needed. It really depends. The golden rule with disc is that the more damage you can anticipate, the more healing you will do, and then it's about knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your spells.

If your healer composition doesn't have strong tank healing and relies on you to do it, then don't let the tanks die just because you were chasing meters by spamming PW:S on the raid. At the end of the day, healing is about keeping people alive. If you like numbers, roll a WW monk.

Yes, I just want to heal my raid to get through the fight. I didn't want to reach high HPS. But I see most Disc logs with no CoW.
The point is, Does CoW weak ? should I practice to cast fewer CoW ?
but I can't find a way to keep Tank alive without using CoW due to long "Weakened Soul" debuff.
Maybe those Disc aren't assigned to heal the tank and they just spam PW:S to raid members.

I can think of one reason. I might had a feeling that "TANK HP should always FULL!!" then I panic to the Tank HP bar and cast CoW to prevent the HP bar to drop.
My raid composition is 2 resto druids, 1 Disc(me), 1 HPriest, 1 HPal, and 1 Shaman(offspec).
Should I let the Tank HP to drop just a little ? rather than "always full" and let the druids' HOT / HPal do the job, While I PW:S other raid members.

[Dracodraco]

Do you have math for this?
I'm pretty confident Druids (when talented for it) bring more single target throughput than disc with better (but not by too much) hpm. Mistweavers with the Envm buff are better yet but I'm not sure how much less HPM it works out to be over Druids.
Excepting Tranq vs Barrier, disc pws spam is more than competitive with Druid raid healing. It's only behind MW, and not by much.

The strength of disc tank healing is the utility of the absorbs, not the sustain, which doesn't necessarily require sticking the priest on the tanks the whole fight. We've done pretty well in Heroic Highmaul without having a dedicated tank healer (and no Holy Paladin) but 2 druids and a disc priest keeping hots/absorbs on them.

Nothing but personal experience. Have you guys just been running one main group multiple times to get a feel for the fights? Can find you in all the logs on your WCL pages, and it might skew my experience that we've been running with half the healers and tanks severely undergeared in both our runs. It's also worth noting that even if throughput healers can get higher numbers, obviously disc will end up being far more efficient because of the nature of absorbs (doesn't matter if the druid can sustain 50K singletarget HPS on tanks if he ends up overhealing a ton doing it, while disc never has to, but only gets 35K).

It's true that, excluding tranq/revival, disc can compete with the best of them on a pure output based comparison, but then again, they have tranq/revival for a reason. Our first butcher kill where we did a fucked up tactic, it felt much more reliable for me to just keep spamming tanks (mainly, the 633 ilvl undergeared one), while the druid/MW sustained ~60K hps both (link to log: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...N#type=healing ).

Same went for Brackenspore, where it felt much easier to just let me handle the tanks (and by proxy, the necrotic breath) 24/7 while they delt with the mushroom - sure, absorbs works on the mushroom, but it has such a huge healthpool that it ends up being largely irrelevant anyway.

Disc synergises well with MW/druid, as the shields do not exclude hots from healing up wounded players in general, and there's no reason a druid can't keep lifebloom/rejuv running on a tank. What I ment was that it seems a waste for them to be spamming the tank single target style, when they are probably the best at refilling the HP of the raid. The issue with disc is that you need to make sure that the shields are actually effective when raid healing - our imperator kills relied on us basicly taking the damage from adds/novas, then slowly refilling HP with healing rain, effloresence, wild growth, healing stream, renewing mists... low cost heals in general (I actually got a few nova's in!), because there's a large amount of time untill the next damage starts comming at us. A disc priest is largely useless for that because shields just protects against incomming damage.
Pile the fact that disc's mana regen seems to be in a much better place than most other healers, and our relatively cheap tank healing (CoW + PW:S barely costs anything and does a huge amount) on top of that, and we just found it the easiest way to distribute the healing.

TL;DR - disc works extremely well on tanks even if druids/shamans/MW/paladins keeps hots/beacons on them to refill lost HP, because priests ignore the HP pool altogether, making tanks very easy to handle. Druids/shamans/MW/Paladins refills healthbars against next wave of incomming damage, disc only temporarely protects against soon-incomming damage. Irrelevant on high attrition fights (Korgath, Butcher), but very relevant on Imperator/tectus as an example.

[Floopa]

it's hard to say how strong healers is when you combine logs due to how different guilds do bosses

i think you're taking way too much damage on your mar'gok kills for example

[Deleted]

The entirety of Imperator allows for excellent usage of Triage healing. During P1, 2, and 3, people only take damage during two parts of the fight - when the add is out (low, pulsing AOE dmg that should never bring the raid below 70%), and the nova (which should never take more than 50% off). Everything in between doesn't actually hurt (traps, mark bounces between two designated soakers), giving you more than enough time to triage heal everything back up to full before the next damage comes.

Intermissions and P4 is where you end up burning mana to stay alive.

Also, if you did heroics in previous tiers, triage healing was a thing - go rewatch some of the 3-healer heroic ragnaros videos from back then. You'll notice people sitting at less than full HP for +20 seconds, because the only non-avoidable damage are traps in P1, and seed explosions in p2. It's why resto druids were so fucking powerfull that tier, actually.

Only a third of our HC raids were mains, so the gear was subpar, and if we would be very mana conservative and let Healing Rains to bring the raid up, we would have no room for errors (someone getting avoidable Branded was common, and someone detonating a mine happened few tries as well...).

And that is not actual triage. Actual triage includes postponing healing of people that would be too much effort to save, if that effort is needed elsewhere. So for instance in Temple of Kotmogu, triage means that if team is in the middle and waiting, with one of orb carriers at 80%, then sure, I will bring him up. But if the carrier has a lot of stacks and we get attacked, I will not waste resources healing him, and using mana/time/cds on other people instead, letting him die. And only IF the carrier somehow survives the attack, I will drink mana to full and then start to heal him.

In PvE situation, that is not really acceptable.

In our kills, it was rare for people to be at less than full HP for +20 seconds. It MIGHT be a thing in mythic, but in HM H/N, not really.

[Dracodraco]

it's hard to say how strong healers is when you combine logs due to how different guilds do bosses

i think you're taking way too much damage on your mar'gok kills for example

A bit of that might be the fact that we opted to just leave a mage up through P4 to nuke whomever he pleased, and get straight onto the boss, lust and burn. Worked out well with undergeared DPS that couldn't manage to kill all 3x adds before the phase was over, and got us into P4 with basicly none of the small "blow up" adds.
That aside, the only way to take less damage on Margok is getting through the force nova quicker, or killing the AOE-add quicker. As we could casually let people heal up through rains/effloresences and the likes, it didn't really seem important to stress it more - rather have people focus on not blowing up the raid with traps, fucking up branded, or get hit by shit they weren't supposed to in general, than try to stress them out by minimising damage from passive auras that we could easily slow-heal up.

Only a third of our HC raids were mains, so the gear was subpar, and if we would be very mana conservative and let Healing Rains to bring the raid up, we would have no room for errors (someone getting avoidable Branded was common, and someone detonating a mine happened few tries as well...).

And that is not actual triage. Actual triage includes postponing healing of people that would be too much effort to save, if that effort is needed elsewhere. So for instance in Temple of Kotmogu, triage means that if team is in the middle and waiting, with one of orb carriers at 80%, then sure, I will bring him up. But if the carrier has a lot of stacks and we get attacked, I will not waste resources healing him, and using mana/time/cds on other people instead, letting him die. And only IF the carrier somehow survives the attack, I will drink mana to full and then start to heal him.

In PvE situation, that is not really acceptable.

In our kills, it was rare for people to be at less than full HP for +20 seconds. It MIGHT be a thing in mythic, but in HM H/N, not really.

That's bullshit, though - of course you're not going to let targets die in PvE. That doesn't mean it isn't "triage", just because you don't let people die to save others. You prioritize the important people (tanks, branded targets) with direct healing, and let everyone else get ticked up by splash healing over time to conserve mana. Spamming direct heals on the raid just makes you go OOM, which ends in fatalities. Thus it's the definition of triage:

a : the sorting of and allocation of treatment to patients and especially battle and disaster victims according to a system of priorities designed to maximize the number of survivors
b : the sorting of patients (as in an emergency room) according to the urgency of their need for care

2
: the assigning of priority order to projects on the basis of where funds and other resources can be best used, are most needed, or are most likely to achieve success

(from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/triage )

Triage does not involve fatalities - triage involves priority targets and maximizing the benefit of the available resources (mana).




Likewise, that might just be a difference in guilds - in our two heroic kills, we triggered one trap (it spawned inside the corpse of one of the trash-ogres, and one of our raiders didn't see it beneath the big fat ogre), and we had 2x people assigned for the branded mechanic to bounce it and get rid of it, thus we always knew which 4 targets were the priorities - the two ranged doing the brand, and the two tanks. And the trap wasn't during an intensive phase, which ment we could still just let the raid tick up - https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...16&end=2517882 here's the healing from when the trap exploded and untill the add that spawned 7-8 seconds after died.
Don't know what the monk's spells are like, but from priest/shaman/paladin/druid, they used one expensive heal (PoH with AA for ensured crit) combined, the rest is just passive AOE healing from shrooms, healing rain, WG, the efficient heals etc... Mainly because we knew that we didn't need to top off the raid. We needed to save mana for intermissions.

So if you don't want to play around having possible fuck ups, then yea, you're gonna need to spend more mana, and shit's gonna be hard. That's a thing now - the better you play, the less gear you can afford to hand to your healers, and the better you'll do on DPS checks etc during progress.

[Symmone]

I havent really had a chance to try the PWS spam play style yet. I am pretty much the dedicated tank healer so I often dont find time to PWS anyone else. I am at about 1k spirit unbuffed and in a lot of normal fights I find that mana isnt an issue. Heroic fights I usually run low right at the end which is ideal imo.

I decided that brackenspore is a fun fight because I can Lulz PoH spam again! I was neck and neck with our monk healer during that fight but I fell behind because I had to focus tanks. boohoo!

But in any event, Im feeling more comfortable with Disc healing etc etc...but I still wish they would fix HN! There are many moments where that would be perfect to use.

[Evry]

Have you guys just been running one main group multiple times to get a feel for the fights? Can find you in all the logs on your WCL pages, and it might skew my experience that we've been running with half the healers and tanks severely undergeared in both our runs.

Yes, for trash farming, getting more familiar with heroic mechanics, and working out mythic strats (since we don't get to beta test).

Our first butcher kill where we did a fucked up tactic, it felt much more reliable for me to just keep spamming tanks (mainly, the 633 ilvl undergeared one), while the druid/MW sustained ~60K hps both (link to log: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...N#type=healing ).

If you remove tranq and revival, both the MW and Druids are doing ~40k hps. A disc priest can easily put out ~50k raid hps. I just don't see how, outside of Raid CDs, druids have a notable edge here. On Butcher or any fight with raid damage.

Brackenspore is an obvious case where you want a disc priest on the tanks. The absorbs are too strong for Necrotic breath, and those other healers with more raw single target throughput are more useful on the mushrooms.

If your tank isn't taking more than 30k dps I don't see why it matters which healer you have on them. If they're taking significantly more than that, overheal on Lifebloom, CenWard, Living Seed, mushroom, start to matter much less. I don't see how you can say Druids aren't useful for tank healing. We had at least one of ours running cen ward when we use 2.


(ps - holy nova isn't efficient for anything but building WoM stacks)

[Dracodraco]

Yes, for trash farming, getting more familiar with heroic mechanics, and working out mythic strats (since we don't get to beta test).


If you remove tranq and revival, both the MW and Druids are doing ~40k hps. A disc priest can easily put out ~50k raid hps. I just don't see how, outside of Raid CDs, druids have a notable edge here. On Butcher or any fight with raid damage.

Brackenspore is an obvious case where you want a disc priest on the tanks. The absorbs are too strong for Necrotic breath, and those other healers with more raw single target throughput are more useful on the mushrooms.

If your tank isn't taking more than 30k dps I don't see why it matters which healer you have on them. If they're taking significantly more than that, overheal on Lifebloom, CenWard, Living Seed, mushroom, start to matter much less. I don't see how you can say Druids aren't useful for tank healing. We had at least one of ours running cen ward when we use 2.


(ps - holy nova isn't efficient for anything but building WoM stacks)

There's no reason to remove tranq and revival, though. They're very much part of druid/MW's final output - disregarding them would be silly. Our butcher strategy revolved around not healing at all for the first 5 cleaves, then the druid covering the next 2 cleaves while popping the first group from 10-20% to full health with a single tranq. Because we no longer have powerfull DPS-raid cooldowns, the healer raid CDs are much, much more important, and sadly, barrier isn't "great" on most fights (butcher and brackenspore, Margok intermissions are the only ones I can think of where it's majorly usefull).
We agree that disc has excellent AOE output, when damage is actually happening. On a fight where there's heavy damage that won't kill you for awhile, then nothing for +20 seconds (such as a single tectus raid-AOE), there's no real point to spamming shields versus just letting healing rain, efflo etc tick them up.
We also agree that druids, and *any* class, can tank heal. I just don't see how putting a throughput healer, which is vulnearable to overhealing and a tank dodging/parrying a few hits in a row and thus wasting mana, is a better choise than a disc priest that has neither of those problems, *and* provides the tanks with a giant cushion, when the druid has a comparable/easier time on raid healing.

Remember, the entire thing with shields is that they have to be up before damage is taken. That can be achieved, and logs absolutely reflects that, but it's also versus what is a good usage of shields and what isn't - I'll repeat myself from somewhere, but if Imperator's add takes about 30% of the raids HP off, and the nova also takes 30%, and that's the only raid damage going out, and they happen every 40-50 seconds or so, that gives us half a minute to top the raid off. Spamming shields is just sniping damage for the sake of it - I'd rather focus on the tanks and the branded targets, and let effloresence, healing rain, HST, renewing mists etc heal people up over time and conserve mana, than I'd want to try and block the damage. If someone is about to die, obviously they'll get a shield - but if they're sitting at 90% hp when add AOE starts, that's not dangerous.

Ps: I'd rather cast a holy nova if the tanks are both shielded/has debuff, have full HP, and there's no raid dmg comming in the next 15 seconds, than I'd like to throw out PW:S. It's the only way to refill people's HP apart from singletargetting with heal.


Lastly, I'd like to note, that I already said that it might just be because of full main groups - you have more gear than we do, meaning you might not need to play as efficiently, your tanks aren't going splat, and most important, you have 6 people less - meaning it feels more impactful to throw out shields. Just like PoH spirit shell and PW:S spam in 10 man heroic felt incredibly much more powerfull in 10 man, because you could literally cover the entire raid in maximum absorbs, the fewer people you have in your raid, the more powerfull singletarget shielding will feel, because you can cover a bigger percentage of the raid efficiently with absorbs.

[Evry]

There's no reason to remove tranq and revival, though.

If you keep in tranq and revival you need to factor in Barrier, but since we're talking about sustained raid healing, there's no reason to consider any of those. A druid currently tank healing can tranq a raid mechanic as readily as any other druid.

-
You're severely undervaluing effective health on the raid. There's a difference between spamming pws haphazardly and targeting intelligently. The way smart heals work now increases the value of PW:S during sustained raid damage. It's not worth arguing about, though. The main point is that neither druids being bad or inefficient at tank healing nor disc being worse at raid healing are the case.

Ps: I'd rather cast a holy nova if the tanks are both shielded/has debuff, have full HP, and there's no raid dmg comming in the next 15 seconds, than I'd like to throw out PW:S. It's the only way to refill people's HP apart from singletargetting with heal.

Well we can't all be good at simple arithmetic, I guess.

[laalipop]

Has anyone had issues with Warcraftlogs lately? I logged everything I did last night and nothing showed up, just showing empty logs.

Also I'm having a problem with the mushrooms on Brackenspore. We had two disc priests last night so I decided to let the other one handle the tanks and I spent the majority of the encounter on the Mushrooms, I had two problems:

• The mushroom kept disappearing from my boss frames.
• Skada was registering absolutely none of the absorbs on the mushrooms.

Is anyone else having similar issues?

[shanthi]

• Skada was registering absolutely none of the absorbs on the mushrooms.

This happened for me, too, but WarcraftLogs still captured that effective healing (I didn't have the WCL issues you are, obviously).

[Floopa]

PWS gains a lot of strength if your raid is taking unnecessary damage too i feel, so much of the dmg you see absorbed by PWS is just people taking unnecessary damage

like i dunno how healers are doing 40-50k+ hps on mar'gok, the highest i could do (when i topped healing) was 28k hps lol

[Symmone]

Everyone talks about having super steroided PWS's..but mine never seem to be that strong. My average PWS is about 56k.

My CoW hits are either at that or lower.