Best Disc talent

[Deleted]

Not that interesting considering its pretty crap. Even if mana would be semi stable without either of the mana talents the actual procs you get from the smites you do is just not worth it compared to getting a mana talent that allows you to throw more shields around when its actually needed.

[Deleted]

Isn't raiding about maximizing your whole team's performance? I mean Shadow Priests are DPS but even though they aren't always Number one, they remain useful for Raiding because they also do some healing.

OT: Interesting that From darkness comes light is not even mentioned.

The additional dps gained from mindbender over solace is extremely small, while the additional healing you could provide with the mana saved from solace is quite significant.

With PW:S being cheap enough to use outside of rapture I kinda feel like flcd doesn't serve much of a purpose anymore, you're simply better off just throwing a shield on the target in most cases (with the additional mana gained from solace), PW:S and flash heal from fdcl kinda serves the same role. Might give it a shot some day though, I have to admit that it's been weeks since I specced it, but I think I'd rather trade more spirit for output stats than getting an instant flash heal now and then.

[Deleted]

My minbender usually does around 1.5% of total raid damage. I don't think the dps gain is small at all.

[Deleted]

My minbender usually does around 1.5% of total raid damage. I don't think the dps gain is small at all.

No offence but that just means that your dpsers are horrible, it should take very specific circumstances for mindbender to deal more than 1% of the raids damage. It's also not about mindbender, it's about the difference between mindbender and shadowfiend. Said difference is indeed very small compared to the extra mana (and now healing) that solace provides you with.

[Deleted]

Isn't mindbender's damage related to your stat prio? I notice my mindbender has around 40% crit chance like me, and I also have quite a bit of haste, which would increase his attack speed. Mastery on the other hand would be worthless. I have over 14k crit and only 60 mastery, doesn't that make it more powerful?

The dps in my guild isn't bad at all. If I look at other disc priests with that talent, I can see their mindbender does considerably less damage. I can hardly imagine they simply forget to use their pet.

[Deleted]

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Isn't mindbender's damage related to your stat prio? I notice my mindbender has around 40% crit chance like me, and I also have quite a bit of haste, which would increase his attack speed. Mastery on the other hand would be worthless. I have over 14k crit and only 60 mastery, doesn't that make it more powerful?

Yes crit increases your damage, which is very useful for 10 mans and one of the reasons why I gear for that over mastery on my disc. It does also marginally (since the crit would boost your sf as well) increase the value of the mindbender talent, just not really enough (in my opinion) to sacrifice a significant portion of regen (and some healing). If you don't feel like you need the additional regen from solace it just seems more useful to keep it and gear for more output stats, which'll boost your healing and damage (slightly compensating for the loss of mb).

The dps in my guild isn't bad at all. If I look at other disc priests with that talent, I can see their mindbender does considerably less damage. I can hardly imagine they simply forget to use their pet.

If you have some logs showing off your mindbender that'd be very interesting to see, that you have 14k crit kinda hints that your gear is a fair amount better than mine so that might've something to do with it, but that should also mean that your dpsers have significantly more gear so it still doesn't quite make sense to me.

[Deleted]

Tonight mindbender did 1.35% of total damage for kills. Of course, his damage is more important on single target fights. So on a fight like Megaera he does 1.45%. His crit damage is clearly bigger than his hit damage.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...one/?enc=kills
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=7709&e=8045
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r.../13/?enc=kills

No wait, he actually has more crits than hits. 132 vs 128. So his crit chance should be over 50%? If we can ignore the glances?

[Deleted]

Tonight mindbender did 1.35% of total damage for kills. Of course, his damage is more important on single target fights. So on a fight like Megaera he does 1.45%. His crit damage is actually bigger than his hit damage.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...one/?enc=kills
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=7709&e=8045
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r.../13/?enc=kills

Doesn't look as strange to me now really, the mindbender being so high on Horridon I assume is because you dump it there every time and he has a damage buff, as your dps mash on the adds resulting in it's share being a bit inflated. On other ones it's a bit above 1%, which still seems kinda high to me, but not insanely so considering that you have a fair bit more dps stats than most disc at your raids level (I really like your gear setup actually, been using a similar now and then^^).

Mb deals roughly 80% of shadowfiends damage if I remember correctly, meaning that it in total deals 2,4 times the shadowfiends. Assuming that it deals roughly 1,1% of the raids damage (seems like a fair estimate) you'd lose about 0,65% of the raids dps by changing to shadowfiend, if we assume a million raid dps that's a 6500 dps loss which admittedly is a fair bit more than I thought it'd be (though with your gear it'll be a bigger part than for most, especially since you seem to 3 heal everything which does lower the raid dps a fair bit).

Comparing that to the gains of Solace, you'll get roughly 0,5% more healing from using solace over holy fire (obviously varies depending on solaces amount of your healing, assuming ~5%, assuming that the healing from solace still is 100%, if not I'd love for someone to correct me), which is about 500 hps (assuming 100k hps) and you'll gain 3780-5400 mana/cast+3k restored per cast. Lets assume that we're smite spamming (using solace exactly on cd, and with 5 stacks of evengalism, most other healing methods would result in more mana saved/cast due to evengalism not being fully stacked) and the mana restored/cast will be 6780x6x3=122040/3 minutes. In addition to that we have shadowfiend, which attacks 9 times for you (you are just below the haste required for an extra sf attack and just above the req. for an extra mb which kinda skews the numbers in mb's favor), which results in 81000 mana. In total the sf+solace combo gains 203040 mana in 3 minutes.

Mb on the other hand gets 1,43% mana/hit and hits 12 times at your haste rating resulting in 154440 mana gained in 3 minutes. The difference is hence 48600 mana/3 minutes or 1350 mp5, which if we assume a rapture roughly every 15 seconds is equal to about 1300 spirit (0,56 mp5*spi+spi*1,5/3).

6500 dps vs 1300 spirit+500 hps. It's actually not entirely black and white, I'd personally pick the spirit+healing for most fights but there's definitely some merit to speccing mindbender on farm content/a fight where you don't need much regen (but cba to reforge/gem down to a lower amount). That being said, for this math/your stats there are several circumstances favoring mindbender over solace. Both your haste and crit rating inflate mindbenders value significantly and we're assuming a "worst case scenario" for solace with 5/5 evengalism at all times (admittedly also that we cast it every 10 seconds, but different realistic numbers here would favor solace). For most players it's probably safe to assume that the numbers will be a fair bit different, maybe 5k dps vs 2k spirit+500 hps.


Disclaimer: I'm tired, did it all by mental aritmetic and didn't double check anything, so I've probably screwed up the math somewhere.


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It'd be a bit interesting to see how much hps/dps 1.3k/2k secondary stats actually would add (if you'd be able to use said spirit for crit or even int) but I'll leave that for some other time. Doing some estimations/guesswork (absolutely no actual math done, and it'd obviously depend heavily on your stats) 2k crit would probably be around/just below 2k dps/hps assuming that you do pure atonementing.


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No wait, he actually has more crits than hits. 132 vs 128. So his crit chance should be over 50%? If we can ignore the glances?

If we count the glancing attacks as normal hits we get a crit rate of about 39% which seems to correspond a lot better with yours (which would be close to 38% in a raid setting). Question is what this actually means. If a crit roll actually turns a glancing attack into a crit that'd mean that your mindbender benefit slightly more from crit than expected, which might explain why your mindbender deals so much more damage than the average priests. I'd be cool to look into this a bit more tomorrow.

[Deleted]

I don't understand that much about glancing attacks to be fair. Since WoL mentions another 60% crit damage, I asume the crit chance should be higher than 39%?

My Evangelism uptime is usually above 99%, but I don't use holy fire on cd. Usually my rotation is: penance - holy fire - smites - penance - smites - penance - holy fire, etc. Because of glyph of smite, I try to use holy fire just before the smite spam and not in the middle of it. Though I use holy fire a bit more often on heavy movement fights. In the end I only use it every 15-16 secs.

Can you link the haste breakpoint sheet for mindbender/solace please? I've been looking for one for quite some time now. With the LMG, a BL and a haste trinket I go oom in about 5 mins now, so if I could reforge some haste to spirit, that would be awesome.

[Deleted]

I don't understand that much about glancing attacks to be fair. Since WoL mentions another 60% crit damage, I asume the crit chance should be higher than 39%?

Looking at the numbers I'd assume that there either first is roll to determine if an attack becomes a normal hit or a glancing attack, and then a roll to determine if the normal/glancing attack becomes a crit or stays in it's previous state. Considering your crit rating this would make the most sense of the numbers, and also means that a crit for mindbender/sf is a ~110% damage increase instead of a 100% like every other spell.

My Evangelism uptime is usually above 99%, but I don't use holy fire on cd. Usually my rotation is: penance - holy fire - smites - penance - smites - penance - holy fire, etc. Because of glyph of smite, I try to use holy fire just before the smite spam and not in the middle of it. Though I use holy fire a bit more often on heavy movement fights. In the end I only use it every 15-16 secs.

I did some estimates on that a while back and I think I pretty much concluded that getting holy fire back up quicker was superior to delaying it more than a gcd to fit more smites in the window, which does make sense considering that it increases the overall uptime of debuff, and especially now that the smite glyph no longer increases your healing. So I'd recommend that you use your holy fire over smite whenever possible, but the difference in damage should be extremely small regardless.

Regarding evengalism, every time it isn't at 5/5 and you cast holy fire it puts solace further ahead in the mana department. Having an atonement focused playstyle does minimize the amount of times this happens but even then solace is still slightly more ahead of mb than my math shows in any realistic situation. If you'd swap to Solace and still use it every 15-16 secs it'd still be slightly ahead of mindbender when it comes to regen, but not by a huge amount.

Can you link the haste breakpoint sheet for mindbender/solace please? I've been looking for one for quite some time now. With the LMG, a BL and a haste trinket I go oom in about 5 mins now, so if I could reforge some haste to spirit, that would be awesome.

Here it is, credits to Aica, I think: http://oi41.tinypic.com/21mfcw3.jpg


Something else worth noting about your gearing, despite being quite fancy (crit on every piece and 60 total mastery), is that an extremely high amount of crit and low amount of mastery does pull mastery significantly ahead of crit (and every other stat) when it comes to healing output. Just something to think about:P.

[Deleted]

You don't lose any GCD if you pick Solace because you're already supposed to be casting Holy Fire

Do you use Holy Fire on cooldown during periods of extreme raid damage when you should be using aoe heals?

[Deleted]

Do you use Holy Fire on cooldown during periods of extreme raid damage when you should be using aoe heals?

Depends on my mana state, but for shorter periods of aoe damage I usually don't use it, however delaying it for a few seconds a few times per fight isn't enough to bring mindbender anywhere close in regen. For longer periods of damage, yes I do, since I need to have archangel ready to go as soon as it's off cd and it's a higher hps way to get evengalism stacks up than using smite. There's no realistic situation where mindbender will come close to or ahead of solace in regen.

[Deleted]

I did some estimates on that a while back and I think I pretty much concluded that getting holy fire back up quicker was superior to delaying it more than a gcd to fit more smites in the window, which does make sense considering that it increases the overall uptime of debuff, and especially now that the smite glyph no longer increases your healing. So I'd recommend that you use your holy fire over smite whenever possible, but the difference in damage should be extremely small regardless.

But what about Train of Thought? Isn't the 0.5 secs reduced penance cd more important?

[Deleted]

But what about Train of Thought? Isn't the 0.5 secs reduced penance cd more important?

It doesn't really have enough impact to bring smite ahead of holy fire in hps, if it did we wouldn't even be casting holy fire right now if our goal was to maximize hps (since the smite glyph no longer buffs our healing). Holy fire/solace is actually a quite high hps spell and scales incredibly well (I actually think it has the highest scaling of any of our spells now with offensive penance nerfed). The value of train of thought also varies a fair amount depending on your spell usage/specific haste amount, but the majority of the time an extra smite (=0,5 off Penance) will only mean that it comes off cd as you're casting something else/is on the gcd.

That being said, if the 0,5 sec does allow you to Penance a gcd earlier (or if you'd just sit around waiting for 0,1-0,5 sec) it's a significant hps increase. However since we don't really have a set rotation, our fillers have different cast times and there being a lot of temporary haste buffs (e.g. borrowed time/lmg) it's hardly possible to gear for a specific haste amount where this occurs frequently.

[Deleted]

On a lot of fights you have to do some movement anyway. So with glyph of penance, I can move after the last smite, continue to move while using penance (waiting 0.1-0.5 secs for it) and holy fire. I only have to stop for the smite spam. That's about 3 seconds of free movement. Wouldn't that be better than getting an occasional gcd to move?

[Deleted]

On a lot of fights you have to do some movement anyway. So with glyph of penance, I can move after the last smite, continue to move while using penance (waiting 0.1-0.5 secs for it) and holy fire. I only have to stop for the smite spam. That's about 3 seconds of free movement. Wouldn't that be better than getting an occasional gcd to move?

If you mean delaying your holy fire by a global or two since you know that you'll need to move for more than a global soon that has some merit. If you aren't talking about a specific situation casting holy fire on cd obviously gives you more total time to move than ToT giving you a very slight increase in the amount of Penances.

[Deleted]

There's also the time you're not casting anything because you're waiting for penance to come off cd. That style would save a bit of mana too. I guess with fluctuating haste levels the best approach changes all the time.

[vanityking]

Even in heroics, there is no period of such extreme damage that my using 1 GCD on Solace will cause someone to die. I don't use Solace when I'm preparing a Spirit Shell, but even if you exclude that one GCD every minute (assuming you're using Spirit Shell on cooldown for whatever reason) Solace still provides more mana than Mindbender. The blues even tweeted that it and FDCL might be getting a buff in 5.4, probably because a lot Shadow priests and or Disc priests are picking Solace for most fights. The one fight I pick Mindbender on, like someone posted, is heroic Horridon, because of how easy it makes handling the pink cryceratops.

[Soraka]

If you're the only priest or you can't time things with other priests' Hymn of Hope, Solace has an added bonus since you get more mana back with one Hymn of Hope with shadowfiend than you do with mindbender

[Vicarious]

If you like me are using the horridon trinket, no second regen trinket, LMG, lightweave over darkglow, reforging away from spirit to under 10k, int/crit gems, int food/flask, int pots etc and still have no mana issues I suggest using mindbender as it is simply less to think about and gives your raid more damage.(it really helps to be able to more frequently add to your raid's burst potential on many fights)