"Beta is beta..." "Balanced around level 90.." "Wait until you get raid gear..."

[Deleted]

Please go play it and post for 10 man too. You will see similar results in 10 man too. I did a looooooot of testing and played around a lot.

AA is and will always be mandatory, unless it becomes useless not so because of HPS but more due to HPM considerations. You are mana limited and that means you will heal a lot more with archangel than you will without, because you get more bang for your back. Its effect is greatest when its used to store up healing for burst, but even in a sustained HPS sequence, AA is important. People who think that 5% and 10% drops are ok are deluded.

[Chromu]

Personaly i feel discipline will have troubles at 90 as it stands because it doesn´t has a "WTF buttom" - POH is way weaker without the glyph hot to fill the casting time and it is very limited aoe heal.

The 90 talents do not compensate the removal of divine Hymn - halo needs positioning and cascade isn´t a "wtf" buttom.

Spirit Shell is badly a raid cd, you need to be very proactive for make it a viable raid cd - and most discipline AA priest are reactive oriented, you just burn the AA buff when the damage hammer is already starting, not to prevent one and spirit shell is to prevent one.

Not to mention poor glyph choice if you compare with holy.

[Crusier]

With Discipline knowing the fight makes us much more effective. The Spirit Shell is used blanketing the raid before damage comes out and stopping a huge chunk of people from loosing HP. Therefore making us super viable and I would like to add that the best "o shit" button is not having to use a "o shit" button.

I dropped my holy paladin to play Disc this xpac and people can call it the worst healer all they want, imma be the best of the "worst"

[Kirse]

*grabs popcorn, eyes peeled to the screen*
...I never thought that math could be so engrossing...
Thank you for working so hard to demonstrate your views you two, it's a very interesting read

[Venaliter]

When you hit 90 you will have the worst mana regen, lowest healing output and shields with no dispel protection, and of course cloth armor. Basically you won't be able to heal through the burst and will drop. Pretty much like how disc was the beginning of cata before they fixed it.

I suspect this will be true, Disc needs a passive like unshakable faith to make Pw:s undispellable, like Shamans have. Or something.

I hope Lucette is either joking or referring to low level random battlegrounds where they are indeed very strong. Disc is one of the weakest pvp healers at 90, and it didn't help that they removed mana burn.

It looks like that.

*grabs popcorn, eyes peeled to the screen*
...I never thought that math could be so engrossing...
Thank you for working so hard to demonstrate your views you two, it's a very interesting read

It was indeed.

[silvertitan]

at 85, it's amazing, but at 90 on the beta it's a little weak.

[Crzed]

I have been personally struggling with my viewpoint over the past couple weeks on disc's place in T14. I have had both optimism and pessimism about MoP over the course of the beta as well. I have finally come to the conclusion that disc's sustained AoE hps is currently detrimental to its position as a reliable healer in T14. That is not to say that it won't have its niche on certain fights, but I feel that without a buff to our potential throughput we will likely be a hindrance to a raid team. Currently, our AoE throughput is incredibly reliant on our ability to utilize PoH which has great potential to be unreliable on many fights. Furthermore, even working at it's full potential, PoH is still falling behind other class' aoe capabilities in multiple circumstances (mobility/stacked healing especially) I have been flip-flopping on the idea of disc viability a lot, not necessarily ever declaring what I thought, but I now feel that I have enough evidence from multiple sources to our short-comings.

My Spreadsheet
http://www.2shared.com/file/p68RrB4Z...readsheet.html

The current values for this spreadsheet are based on 463 dungeon gear that everyone will have access to before the first week of raiding, as well as respective gems/enchants/buffs.

AA usage

I have been up and down with how I have felt about AA over the course of the beta. The nerf to penance was a hard hit to disc priest longevity and throughput potential (the extent to which I don't think was understood at the time). I think you're mis-attributing the cause of the nerf to the players (whom, myself included, were discussing why AA had become mandatory) in the solace thread, when it was actually the devs whom had decided to go through with the nerf despite the multiple posts following that had warned that it was unnecessary. It did reduce the hps/hpm gain that one experiences from using AA (GC's proposed goal), but at the cost of reducing disc's already low throughput potential.

I find that AA is a small boost to HPS (unless you are using smite) but more importantly a massive improvement in HPM in the order of 10% or more.

I have also found this to be true (see spreadsheet). Especially as you cut smite out of your stack building rotation and add in offensive penance/more HF. I had previously posted (on the US forums) that smite should be rarely used in the stack building rotation, but it can be an important tool in minimizing the time spent building stacks while in AA if penance is being utilized for grace. Correlating 90 talent usage with AA usage also further increases the throughput potential achieved from AA. One cannot, in gear levels going into T14, just ignore AA altogether and expect to play optimally (the hpm gain and slight hps gain from using AA is too significant), although the actual uptime on AA will be dependent on burst healing requirements and spirit shell usage. Ignoring AA altogether may be possible when we are no longer mana-capped in our throughput, but not now.

AoE Throughput

Our niche currently lies in our ability to offer a large portion of burst mitigation through spirit shell coupled with PoH. Spirit shell (with reasonable stat levels) will buff PoH throughput by >40% and is a significant cd. However, outside of spirit shell our AoE throughput is quite lacking compared to other classes at similar gear levels (especially in stacked situations). This situation is exacerbated by the party mechanic of PoH, and its mechanic-specific limitations. Furthermore, our AoE rotation, despite being the most mana-efficient method of healing for disc, is much less sustainable than other class'. In pre-raid gear levels we will likely be spending upwards of 15% of the fight idle just to support our mana expenditure which I have not been able to liken to any other class in similar gear. The mana situation really is quite volatile since throughput is currently throttled so much by longevity that gear increases could correlate to differences in playstyle across tiers (not a new concept, but one worth mentioning).

Single Target/Triage

The value of our single target healing arsenal is significantly decreased by the relative inefficiency that the spells exist at in relation to the rest of our toolkit (again, see spreadsheet). Currently it seems that our triage kit will consist of BT-hasted renews on groups which have < 3 people in need of PoH (higher hps/overheal potential compared to heal with insignificantly lower hpm when glyphed). We do have a decent tank-healing toolkit (grace being incredibly important), but it just currently is not a sustainable rotation. I had seen someone suggest that Spirit Shell>Beacon as a reason we excel at tank healing. While this is somewhat true, if a disc priest is not using Spirit Shell for AoE mitigation, he/she is hemorrhaging both efficiency and throughput potential.

Things I would like to see changed: (most of these are not my ideas)

-

3 stacking penance, make spirit shell refresh aegis, reduce pws cost slightly and fix divine insight/ToF for disc.

These changes would be very nice, though I doubt there will be any talent changes this late in beta. As it is, ToF doesnt increase spirit shell healing and divine insight lets us cast PW:S more (because that's what we want to do right?). PI is really our only option atm which is pretty ironic, seeing as it was pretty much baseline pre-5.0. It is very annoying to lose DA when you pop spirit shell (likely low damage phase). The PW:S cost I don't really mind in its current form.

-At least a 15% buff to PoH throughput would likely bring our sustained AoE potential into non-laughable terms in comparison with other healers. In concert with the above changes, it would hopefully remove the necessity of our "niche".

-A slight decrease in GH mana cost coupled with a significant decrease in Heal mana cost. We should not be forced to forgo direct healing out of mana-related necessity to save it for PoH.

-Renew application should apply/refresh grace (1 stack).

Disclaimer
I am not trying to influence anyone to "jump ship". If you enjoy disc and you aren't pushing progression I don't think there is enough reason to give it up to play a spec you don't like as much. It is perfectly capable of doing 5 mans/normals. That said, disc is also requiring a lot more effort to yield respectable throughput in comparison to other healers, possibly detracting from the appeal of the spec to a lot of people.

Here are some screenies for tsulong a fight that really has a lot of sustained damage.

Honestly, Tsulong has to be the worst encounter in the entire tier to use for healing balancing purposes. There is both a +healing and mana return mechanic which skews the data. The dark phase is fine if isolated (not really accurate alone as they are only like 2 mins each), but the fight on the whole is a terrible model. I agree with a lot of points you make in your post, but just find another example to use. Also, logs speak about 10x louder than skada pictures.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/2...?s=1596&e=2128

That's me on my monk (Crazins) gaming the healing buff w/ enveloping mist. Not very helpful numbers imo. Also, the enrage timer bugged and we got an extra 2 night and 1 day phases (pretty bad dps, probably due to unfamiliarity with mechanics).

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/y90yj75sezoe07wv/

There's Terrace on my priest (No Sha of Fear kill). Note: one of the other priests (Isherya) is utilizing both T12 and T13 2pc which generally accounts for about an extra 5k mp5. I also spend a large portion of one attempt on Lei Shi as disc and Tsulong as holy dead due to a stray add/breath. I do not have access to logs from any post-buff heroic testing (all private or pre-buff).

All of your parses are 25-man. Disc priests are better for 10, Holy for 25. It has always been that way.

It's true for any raid size. Pretty amazing that you tried to discredit the whole post with that ironclad logic.

[twistedmynd]

Hey hey hey, I prefaced everything that I said with, "Havoc12, don't be offended."

Our numbers differences
But you linked your thread from the EU forums, which I would have never seen otherwise, and this is a very good thing. Because my numbers are coming from a different place. Here are some of the differences:
-you're modeling prayer of healing with 4 targets. Everything I've said about the other healers is with the assumption that we are stacked up, which would mean a guaranteed 5 targets with prayer of healing. We're modeling theoretical max hps, so we have to stack to be sure that holy paladins, monks, and resto shamans aren't crippled. And positioning should always be adjusted to try to maximize 5 targets if you want to maximize your sustained aoe hps regardless. If you aren't running any addons that show range checks for prayer of healing and you aren't calling out to people who are way out of range in vent, your hps is going to suffer tremendously.
-You're using ilevel 448 values. I'm using this profile: mop.wowhead.com/profile=34868421 which is a 489.5 average ilevel. My values are 26,449 spellpower, 16% crit, 10.47% haste, 47% mastery absorbs, and 10,300 spirit after reforges, enchants, and gems.
-I'm fully raid buffed, including int food, an int flask, and all raid buff multipliers (which stack multiplicatively now).
-I'm using inner fire for my max hps calculations and you're using inner will.
-I'm not calculating halo/cascade because we're stacked up. The 80% effective in your cascade modeling is assuming people are spread out enough for that. I suppose I could use divine star in my model, but in my mind it's so close to the hps and hpm of prayer of healing, I left it out. These talents would boost AA healing however, and my non-AA hps is so close to AA hps that using these spells during AA would push sustained hps from AA higher than non-AA PoH spam. Either way, it's less than a 5% boost of hps at the cost of a very ridged rotation.
-My models are in an environment with 0 overhealing (or sniping from other healers). It's a vacuum environment because I want to just see under perfect conditions how the healers are comparing to one another, before a million other variables skew the data.

I think even without checking this math, you could see how much these changes would inflate hps compared to your hps calculations. If anything, I think we're both looking at some interesting scaling numbers because:
-we both agree that archangel will always be more efficient healing per mana. Well, duh, obviously. The mana costs in our models are fixed and spirit regen scaling is linear.
-we disagree that sustained healing per second is either better or worse with AA aoe healing.

Just stepping back and thinking about this makes sense to me. Think about it, prayer of healing's spellpower coefficient is going to scale higher than holy fire and penance spellpower coefficients. Because PoH is a slower cast, it will scale better because of haste. However, with enough haste you should (theoretically) fit more PoH's in during the fixed 18 sec AA duration. This means, that AA will start out to be better at low gear, but will be soon passed up by raw PoH spam. Then, at a certain plateau, AA will be better sustained aoe hps again. So since you're modeling low gear and 4 target PoH, you're going to think it's always a hps gain to use AA. I'm modeling high gear with 5 target PoH, so I'm always going to think AA is a sustained hps loss.

As to why I'm modeling at a higher ilevel: I don't plan on hanging out in normal modes for very long. Our group is the server first, so we're already looking at a plan of attack for getting through normal mode as fast as we possibly can. I felt it was more worth my while to look at heroic mode modeling instead.

[Deleted]

200k PoHs with 17-20% haste is definitely not achievable even in hc modes. You can probably get it to 80k HPS max, so I am not sure your values are correct. Please post your formulas and exact values.

Also I am 100% certain your model is wrong if you think the scaling of PoH is higher:

Penance:
Inner will: 16998
Inner fire (10% more spellpower): 16053

improvent: 1.058867501402

PoH
Inner will: 17938
Inner fire: 16940

improvement: 1.058913813459

Ever since cataclysm spellpower increases the effectiveness of all your spells by a fixed amount. I think 1000 spellpower is a 4% improvement accross the board. 0.003965053763 per spellpower point to be exact, but you catch my drift.

The results that I posted are going to be exactly the same over a very wide range of spellpower values. I will say it again post your formulas and let me see. I am sure you made a mistake somewhere.

You need to be thinking of senarios relevant to the fights at hand. Sustained damage does not mean that the raid is constantly at 50% HP. What really happens is many ppl in the raid get hit for 20-30% every so often you get a large raid wide hit. Many fights have anti stacking mechanisms and even more fights have movement.

PoH must be modelled at 4 targets always. Anything more than that is automatically invalid.

Basically AA when evangelism is stacked mostly with penance and a little bit with holy fire will always be a small to moderate HPS improvement depending on how the fight goes. It will always be a moderate boost to HPM. Since mana will be limiting until we reach over 13k spirit, AA will be mandatory for max throughput for a very long time.

Also PoH spam is not our max HPS rotation. PWS/cascade/PoH (with PoM in certain cases) is our max HPS rotation. Since HPM is critical we need to be in inner will. Since cascade has a CD and you can kinda synch it with AA, so that hte improvement is larger than with just poh.

========================================================================================== ==========
Yes tsulong is a gimmick fight, but that is why I am posting snapshots at the right times.

[Freia]

Hey hey hey, I prefaced everything that I said with, "Havoc12, don't be offended."

Just a note, that never works and usually has the opposite effect.

All of your parses are 25-man. Disc priests are better for 10, Holy for 25. It has always been that way.

I disagree with this a lot.

[Dhi]

I still remember cata start was really bad for disc heal, for them to neglect Disc at the start of another xpansion tells me either the ppl incharge of disc dont know waht they are doing or they just dont care ;( guess time to reroll if they dont fix

[Deleted]

Divine star is roughly 5% more hps per target than poh, but if the raid is stacked you can hit the whole raid so minimum 20 targets, which makes it 420% more HPS than PoH.

Dont forget that divine star heals twice, one on the way there and one on the way back and it is instant. the 15s CD means you can synch up to 2 casts with archangel. With divine star instead of cascade AA is even more valuable.

PoH adds 0.671 healing per target per spellpower point.

With 14878 it is 16940 base so with 26449 spellpower it is (26449 - 14878)*0.671+16940 = 24704

24704*(1+0.16*(1+0.9*(1+0.47))+0.3*(1+0.47)) = 44 780

HPS = 44780/2.5*1.1047 = 98 936.932 as you expect.

However this is not hc mode progress. Hc mode progress will be in ilvl 465-468 initially and maybe 470-475 later on. You need full hc gear to reach 489 and by that time you will have probably cleared the content.

Also you have really stacked your gear for HPS, but its completely not viable. At that stage spirit is better return than intellect for sure.

I really don't understand why people think 5% is small. Its bloody massive. The penance nerf has really cost us 10% HPS or so and we were already lowish before that.

[Maleric]

I still remember cata start was really bad for disc heal, for them to neglect Disc at the start of another xpansion tells me either the ppl incharge of disc dont know waht they are doing or they just dont care ;( guess time to reroll if they dont fix

Ah, the good old days of patch 4.0. Power Word: Shield absorbed about as much as Heal healed for, AA/A was trash because Smite was the only thing that stacked Evangelism, Penance sucked, and Prayer of Healing did too. But disc priests couldn't go holy because PW:B absorbed 40% and was on a two minute cooldown, and holy didn't even have a buffed Divine Hymn.

[Alilei32]

There are no bad specs only bad players. Its a game so play whats fun for you. If you like Disc then play disc. Just finished a DS run and was doing 28-38k HPs depending on the fight. No other healer was even close.

[Kingradio]

There are no bad specs only bad players. Its a game so play whats fun for you. If you like Disc then play disc. Just finished a DS run and was doing 28-38k HPs depending on the fight. No other healer was even close.

That's great, but as has been stated about 10 times in this thread, the concerns are for level 90, not 85.

[Soulstrike]

i want mana back from Arcangel :/

i miss having oshit divine hymn button :/

i miss having huge mana back from rapture :/

but we shall see when we hit lvl90 and how much we do well/suffer

[Deleted]

i miss having oshit divine hymn button :/

I'm heartbroken by this change...

[Venaliter]

I'm heartbroken by this change...

We were more then compensated by Spirit Shell.

[twistedmynd]

Divine star is roughly 5% more hps per target than poh, but if the raid is stacked you can hit the whole raid so minimum 20 targets, which makes it 420% more HPS than PoH.

Dont forget that divine star heals twice, one on the way there and one on the way back and it is instant. the 15s CD means you can synch up to 2 casts with archangel. With divine star instead of cascade AA is even more valuable.

PoH adds 0.671 healing per target per spellpower point.

With 14878 it is 16940 base so with 26449 spellpower it is (26449 - 14878)*0.671+16940 = 24704

24704*(1+0.16*(1+0.9*(1+0.47))+0.3*(1+0.47)) = 44 780

HPS = 44780/2.5*1.1047 = 98 936.932 as you expect.

However this is not hc mode progress. Hc mode progress will be in ilvl 465-468 initially and maybe 470-475 later on. You need full hc gear to reach 489 and by that time you will have probably cleared the content.

Also you have really stacked your gear for HPS, but its completely not viable. At that stage spirit is better return than intellect for sure.

I really don't understand why people think 5% is small. Its bloody massive. The penance nerf has really cost us 10% HPS or so and we were already lowish before that.

I guess I'm looking way down the line instead of immediate progression because I was modeling our normal mode tier gear (496). I am using a lot of purified gems instead of only spirit gems to grab bonuses, which isn't something we can do in this first tier. So I'd have to agree with you that spirit>int, for now. I'm going back to int stacking when the 509 drops start coming in.

At least my numbers aren't wildly off. I still think 5 person prayer of healing isn't as rare as you think, but that's just a differing opinion. You pretty clearly illustrated some good examples in previous posts of when this isn't the case. But I would say don't completely disregard it from your calculations.

And I never said the nerf to evangelism stacking with penance wasn't a big hit. It was a substantial hps loss. But I do think it was a good change. Before the change, there was no question that archangel was necessary. Now it's still 'sort of' necessary, but just not as punishing to avoid using it. This is why I made that disc public service announcement video: youtu.be/4HpPUm2XRLY

I just get concerned with your posts because you're almost always speaking in absolutes. And by providing logs and screenshots, you're saying to the community, "listen to me, I know stuff." And I don't want people closely following this thread to get the wrong impression that discipline is unplayable. Discipline has some flaws, but they aren't bad enough to reroll a different healer, which is the impression this thread and many others give.

If you just straight up have all 5 healers and you need to pick one for progression, just go for the one that will complement the other healers in your raid comp. And consider gear distribution with your other raiders in general. Also check out a buff tree (especially for 10 man healers) and see if you can bring something to that isn't being provided. Even at the cutting edge, this can be a bigger factor for progression. Remember, our spread of hps is closer to a 12% window now. In firelands, it was 27% because resto druids were just high hps, but the world first comp was still priest, druid, paladin.

And even with those considerations, even though I have all 10 classes at least normal mode geared for each new tier, and even though I'm in the server first pve raid group, I play a priest because it's "the one." The class if fun, I really like the mechanical differences, and healing with it is simply my thing. You know how it feels when you find "the one" in this game.

[Deleted]

I do know what I am talking about. Your results prove the points I have been making. I recognise that LFR is a very different environment from an organised raid and that disc requires some organisation to make best use of PoH, but at the same time, I have been a priest long enough to understand a pattern when I see one. Before the penance nerf I was the first one to say we are mostly fine, its the penance nerf that broke disc. The underlying problems were there, but they were not as important. The penance nerf added more clutter to an already cluttered play style and it reduced our HPS, which was already slightly lower than other classes. We went from slightly lower to noticeably lower and that is just not on.

Its dead easy to solve the problem: Allow archangel to be used without evangelism at 10% and then each stack of evangelism can add 3%. We achieve a better equalisation of the atonement vs no atonement playstyle, but without nerfing disc and without screwing around our rotation.

I strongly disagree with you. We are mana limited so HPM is a big thing and it really does matter in most encounters. For example think of Feng. His epicenters in P1 are a major source of healing for disc, but they come every 30s. You can use spirit shell for the first and archangel for the 2nd and have a big CD ready every time. Modelling the fight and testing it myself tells me ignoring archangel is a 8% drop in HPS and 13% drop in HPM.

I am not sure you have done justice to the rotations of the other healers, by picking the right secondary stats/talents. Obviously I won't bother comparing my own personal experience, because the difference in throughput I am experiencing could be due to gear choice and talent choice issues, but when I calculate it as objectively as I can (I am not that familiar with shaman healing) is that we are 15% or so behind paladins and 20% behind shamans in stacked healing. Monks are disgustingly OP atm, so I am sure they will be nerfed.

This is assuming a 5 person PoH, which is practically non existent. A burn phase on elegon, 2nd boss in the dread approach and that is it I cannot think of other encounters where you are hitting more than 4 ppl per PoH average. All other encounters have spread out mechanics or worse the constant damage is uneven.

Paladins and shamans, have cheap ways to produce a lot of healing, while saving most of their mana for bursts. They can maintain much high HPM averages. Since all healers are mana limited at the moment, the gap is magnified. Remember that PoH is slow and hits only a few targets, while all other healers have powerfull instant or fast ticking raid wide HoTs. The result is bursts are healed very rapidly by these classes, but due to the uneven nature of PoH and the high amount healed per target, disc just does not get as much from the bursts as these classes do, unless we pre-stack absorption. That means our HPM is even lower than expected.

This is another reason why using archangel is essential. IF you just think about it. Penance on the boss on aoe healing is essential in itself, even if you dont end up popping archangel.

We are back to where we were a long time ago. Our healing is only competitive in a narrow niche and our purpose in fights is to bring good cooldowns. The healing style that we need to adopt for maximal performace is also frankly terrible. No synergy just clashes.

If you are happy being a tank healer or a CD whore in 70% of fights and don't care about competitive healing then disc is ok. Otherwise its not. That is my personal experience. It is possible that having proper gear and proper consumables and an organised raid might change things, but I doubt it.

I am almost certain that after raiding starts my fears will be proven correct. Disc priests will continue to be useful, but those of us who like to heal competitively with disc will be disappointed and why, when the fix is so easy....

Aside from that you just can't replace aegis stacking with spirit shell. Disc really suffers when we can't keep aegis up and we already have the illuminated healing from paladins screwing up with aegis by being absorbed first and messing up our timings. Spirit shell refreshing aegis really is a really needed change that will finally bring some synergy into disc healing. You can't possibly argue that it is not needed.

========================================================================================== ===========
I was wrong about divine star, its healing is divided by the number of targets to a maximum of 4. Thus its not worth using on few targets and on 20 targets its just 5% more than PoH in HPS. The main advantage is that its healing comes really fast and is uniform, which circumvents a major issue with disc.

Prayer of mending is not as good for disc as it is for Holy. It does not get the chakra buff and it does not benefit fully from mastery. Its useful enough and I glyph it but it is not a big priority for disc. Penance on the boss on the other hand is extremely good. Three smart heals and the same mana efficiency as PoH with 5 stacks of evangelism or better if aegis does not get absorbed.