Disc healing in Shadow gear

[Freek]

Ok so first post here...but been a very long time lurker

So i have a newly 80 priest that ive been gearing up with a couple of friends running just randoms...only took me a few days to get 2pc t9 and a piece of t10 along with various other pieces of gear...going for all t10 eventually just gotta collect all those JP

but my question is as a newbie priest thats mainly shadow...can i heal sufficiently in shadow gear at lower gear lvls?

as of right now im using a mix of gear that has int/stam main stats with haste/crit sub stats and pieces of gear that have int/stam/spr main stats and crit/haste sub stats

i would say its about 60/40 items with spirit on them..so its leaning more towards i guess holy gear more so than anything...but im trying to balance it out now with gear that will allow me to play both shadow/disc with the same gear set sans maybe trinket

i understand that i wont be playing neither spec to their fullest potential but i want them to be decent for what they will be doing...this is my 8th 80 and is just an alt that i want to have fun with running randoms with friends

Thanks for taking a read and hopefully someone can shed some light on this

TL;DR the main question is...can i disc heal in pure shadow gear or do i still need to mix in some spirit gear

[Xs]

For just heroics you should be fine, you can still get a lot of regen from pure int so spirit isn't such a problem.

Just have to play slightly more conservative than if you were in full healing gear.

[Tricki]

If you're thinking of doing 5 mans and the odd "DPS with Healing o/s" for some raids you'll be fine.

[ramennoodleking]

Sure, I heal heroic 5 mans, barring a low-gear tank, in shadow spec and gear.

I would reccomend you stick to either a disc or holy spec, of course, until you get very good gear, but you should have no problems at all healing in shadow gear. Obviously this will start to show problems if you attempt to heal current raid content, but for heroics and old raids, shouldn't have too big of a deal.

[Tryinmilkme]

You can heal 5 mans like this ( maybe not HHOR). If you duel spec I would recomend disc because holy requires alot more spirit.

It really doesnt matter if you have spirit or not as disc. The spec is extremely mana friendly. Just make sure you take crit>haste so you can proc all the shields. I would just gem int in red, int/crit in yellow, int/spirit in blue and with 6 spl pwr bonus otherwise int in blue. Use whatever gear has the most spl pwr and crit>haste.

Not stroking E peen but just as an example 3 months ago when I started playing again I healed the first wing of ICC 10hm with TOC 25 off set pieces and no set bonuses. Disc is very strong, you will enjoy it as an off spec.

[harky]

If you're in T9+ gear you can heal not only in Shadow gear, but as Shadow. Switch for the ICC instances, but anything else? Meh. A PW:S from a Shadow Priest is usually enough to keep a tank alive through trash and bosses typically do less damage than trash pulls. If things go wrong spam Flash Heal.

Err.. and neither Holy, nor Disc requires much spirit at all to do well. Int is our primary regen stat, not spirit. Holy liked spirit pre-4.0 because it gave regen and SP. Now it no longer gives SP, but now Int does. Which is great, because Int also gives more regen than spirit... and Crit isn't better than Haste as Disc. Especially if you have under 700 haste. At ~245 ilevel: Int > Haste (to ~700) > Mastery > Haste (to 1269) > Crit > Spirit. Only change at higher gear levels is that Mastery becomes better than Int.

[Freek]

awesome thanks everyone for the great replies

yeah this will only be to heal 5ms with the occasional run into ToC or VoA 10...and even then i will try and get in as shadow...but i was to have a back up plan

as of now im rockin 2pc t9 shadow and im about to buy 2pc t10 shadow...gemming int/spr in blue...sp/haste in yellow and int in red

as of right now i have a ton of spirit on my gear(at 30% hit with all the damn spirit i have in shadow) cuz ive just been grabbing whatever caster type gear i can to fill gaps...and im doing fine as healing as disc...still new to it so im probably over healing and wasting mana more than i should...but i was just concerned that if i finally we all out getting shadow gear that i may lose more of the necessary disc healing stats and end up gimping myself

but thats good to know i can get by healing in shadow gear...will make my life a little more easier when it comes to choices for gear...and hopefully at some point ill have enough points just to buy a healing set

[Superfresh]

If you're in T9+ gear you can heal not only in Shadow gear, but as Shadow.

+1 for sure

Most of us queue as healers just to skip the queue times and just go in as shadow.
As long as you watch the tanks health, you can go about the majority of the instance just keeping the group up from the reciprocal healing from your damage as shadow.

Just spam FH if you get in trouble, but yeah - you dont even have to bother switching specs.
Thats how awful heroics are

[Tryinmilkme]

If you're in T9+ gear you can heal not only in Shadow gear, but as Shadow. Switch for the ICC instances, but anything else? Meh. A PW:S from a Shadow Priest is usually enough to keep a tank alive through trash and bosses typically do less damage than trash pulls. If things go wrong spam Flash Heal.

Err.. and neither Holy, nor Disc requires much spirit at all to do well. Int is our primary regen stat, not spirit. Holy liked spirit pre-4.0 because it gave regen and SP. Now it no longer gives SP, but now Int does. Which is great, because Int also gives more regen than spirit... and Crit isn't better than Haste as Disc. Especially if you have under 700 haste. At ~245 ilevel: Int > Haste (to ~700) > Mastery > Haste (to 1269) > Crit > Spirit. Only change at higher gear levels is that Mastery becomes better than Int.

I have never been one to go crazy about stat values as to know when x is better than y kinda thing. With that said I was thinking about pre 4.0.1 when you just shielded someone every 5 seconds and used the haste from borrowed time. the 25% haste buff was more than sufficient to allow you to stack crit so you get shield procs and crit ticks from penance and POM, FH.

[harky]

Disc's best bet is still spam shielding at 80. It'll change at 85, but yeah... haste was better pre-4.0 as well. There were a lot of fights where using PoH in particular was very helpful. Before 4.0 hit I was at the hard GCD cap (1012 at the time). The problem is that neither cirt or haste benefits PW:S noticeably once you reach the soft cap on haste (~700 now), but everything except PW:S benefits more from Haste. So haste wins up being better. With reforging it's a bit of a moot point though, we can tailor to be at the soft-cap on haste and then reforge crit/spirit (whichever is higher) into Mastery.

Then again if you're only shielding every 5 seconds Haste will be even better. The stat priority above is tailored more towards people casting a PW:S non-stop unless PoM is off cooldown, or Penance can hit someone at mid-to-low health.

[babylon]

u can heal perfectly fine in shadow gear with disc specs.
not only (as some wrote) in 5mans, but also in raids. since archangel change didnt show up in live as yet and mana pools atm are huge, you should be fine with mana so you can sod all that useless spirit as for now.

it was quite popular for disc priests before the patch to use 2 items of holy and 2 (3) items of shadow 264-277 tier gear, with changing to holy set for bonus (when it got redesigned) for fights with constant dmg on full raid (was nice to get that extra bit of haste for hc fights like sarufang (when assigned to mark) or dreamwalker (when left out to heal raid))