Proving Grounds

[Basmothh]

The goal of Disc is to pre-empt damage, and do as much DPS as possible. Go for ToF and Mindbender to maximize damage. Atonement spam, and use AA/SS to anticipate damage. The main thing to deal with is Chomp, as a mishandled debuff can quickly lead to things escalating out of control. Also, use Penance defensively to keep Grace on the tank if he's taking damage and/or before you SS.

[Venara]

I managed to beat Endless 10 as Holy -> Rank 60 @ http://www.wowprogress.com/char_stat...r/class.priest atm.

Best advice I can give everyone: Treat it as if you were healing a Cataclysm Heroic.

As Holy, use Chakra: Serenity and try to limit yourself to Heal, Holy: Word Serenity, Renew, Lightwell & cooldowns. Only use other spells if absolutely necessary. Exile Flash Heal from your bars and bindings. You cannot afford the mana in Proving Grounds.

Other than that, try to get a feel for each wave. I found I was managing mana a lot better after I knew what happens in each wave and planned my healing and cooldowns accordingly.

[Deleted]

Tried bit again last night, experiences:
- Helmet with spirit meta gem and spirit flask seemed to help lot
- Got gold as disc pretty easily, almost full mana before 9th wave but burned there all for some reason, not sure what happened. Feels sometimes bit random. Used FDCL talent as getting free flash heal procs from smiting seemed very helpful. And ToF as it seems to be only talent that tier which helps with mana, according to healcalc disc pw:s is not mana efficient outside rapture uses so that would make PI pretty useless. Divine star as last talent, seemed to be pretty mana efficient and good.

Did also "You're Doing it Wrong" achievement, was really easy with holy+red chakra. Often holy's strong sw dot was enough to kill one mob alone while I was nuking other mops.

[Deleted]

I went to the proving grounds more or less in a lulz mode. Bronze and silver were pretty easy, and I went into gold with 5k spirit, no food or flask and using halo. Needless to say, I was oom by wave 5-6. First I reforged what little spirit I could, and then used a spirit flask - getting to 6.5 k spirit made a serious difference. Talents wise - I ran with solace (more mana if used on cd than mindbender), twist of faith (I had it and seemed just fine) and Divine Star (ended up not using it due to how spread the npcs always were). I timed my hymn a bit more careful, and I ended gold with about 40% mana left after wiping a fair few times with 5.5 k spi on the last wave. Also, I tried to be careful with smite spamming, the extra dps didnt seem to make any difference for my group, and it was wasting mana.

I didn't try the endless grounds but looking forward on a day with a lot of free time.

[Slazky]

I feel that the proving grounds is next to impossible as a priest (holy atleast, I really don't like disc, so haven't tried it seriously). The best I've managed is to wipe at wave 20 of endless. I've watched my friend who is a druid (who is of my own skill, maybe slightly better), and he has a much easier time keeping the group up while using less mana than me, and he got 30 waves yesterday. I REALLY like the concept, and I love the challenge it gives, but I just feel that my time is wasted in there as a holy priest, since all our heals on that level of gear is really expensive and really don't heal that much.

I didn't have much of a challenge getting gold, but it's simply too hard for this class to get 30 waves IMO when the tank dies with guardian spirit up while I channel Divine Hymn in the correct chakra. But again, very cool concept which should be expanded upon.

[Anastacy]

There's some discussion on the level of "changes" made to healer PG's recently.

As noted in patch notes, some changes were made to stop healer PGs from crashing the server. What specific changes were made is unknown, yet having done many PGs today, I've noticed: the Mage never AoE's anymore, and never runs into melee.

Whether or not what I have experienced is linked to what is in the following link, changes were made that may or may not be affecting your success and mine: post.

[Angelicat]

Anyone with any tips for getting endless wave 30 as holy?

[Thirteen]

I managed to beat Endless 10 as Holy -> Rank 60 @ http://www.wowprogress.com/char_stat...r/class.priest atm.

Best advice I can give everyone: Treat it as if you were healing a Cataclysm Heroic.

As Holy, use Chakra: Serenity and try to limit yourself to Heal, Holy: Word Serenity, Renew, Lightwell & cooldowns. Only use other spells if absolutely necessary. Exile Flash Heal from your bars and bindings. You cannot afford the mana in Proving Grounds.

Other than that, try to get a feel for each wave. I found I was managing mana a lot better after I knew what happens in each wave and planned my healing and cooldowns accordingly.

Also, I'd recommend using the Dispel Magic glyph, it's not liked the others are much better anyway. And I'd also consider using Greater Heal. If my memory serves me well, it's the same heal:mana ratio as Heal.

[Lovestar]

And I'd also consider using Greater Heal. If my memory serves me well, it's the same heal:mana ratio as Heal.

It is not. It's much better than other healers' "nuke heal" * in terms of HPM and sheer super-nuke amount of health restored, but it will run you OOM much faster than Heal.

GHeal in PGs is for when the tank will die if you keep spitting-in-the-ocean with Heal. Sometimes you need to whip GHeal out for blowing a Rabbit bleed off a DPS, too. But in general you try to fill with Heal as much as possible to stretch out your paper-thin mana.

*It has to be, since Priests can't supercharge it as much as Shaman, don't have the resource gimmicks of Pally, and aren't regenerating tons of health through hots like Druid. And Monks don't even count in this discussion.

[Slazky]

http://www.wowprogress.com/char_stat.../?class=priest Just compare the amount of priests with 3k+ score to any of the other healers.

[MyCelar]

wave 49 in endless as disc. I think 65+ should be doable if I just dont make a silly mistake.

[Deleted]

Any particular tricks that you have been finding helpful to get that far?

Oh, and congratulations on getting so far!

[Lovestar]

wave 44 in endless as disc. I think 65+ should be doable if I just dont make a silly mistake.

This is what always destroys me as Disc — slipping up and making a few GCDs worth of mistakes. Once you let yourself fall behind, it's really hard to catch back up as Disc.

I've had good results with both DI and ToF, but currently I'm leaning toward ToF. The nice thing about ToF is that it strongly incentivizes you to keep Smiting like crazy, and heavily buffs your Atonement in the process. Exploiting ToF + Atone + being smart about preventing damage can keep Disc's mana surprisingly high. This is good, because then you have breathing space to spam GHeal when you really need to.

I find this method relies on counter-intuitively ignoring Archangel except in dire emergencies (ie, situations you can't hope to get any Smites in anyway) since the advantage of ToF Atone XPS'ing is partially in its mana efficiency (things die fast + party gets tons of healing). Trying to use Archangel liberally seemed to actually hurt my progress in the long-term; I fell farther behind in healing and lost a lot more mana.

I still really dislike FDCL as Disc, because it "wastes" a GCD on free Flash Heals that could have been spent doing damage to one of the dangerous adds. Not sure which I prefer between Mindbender & PW:Solace, they both have + / - features.

Getting far as Disc has definitely been one of the hardest PG Healer trials for me, but it's also been very interesting.

[Deleted]

I feel that the proving grounds is next to impossible as a priest (holy atleast, I really don't like disc, so haven't tried it seriously). The best I've managed is to wipe at wave 20 of endless. I've watched my friend who is a druid (who is of my own skill, maybe slightly better), and he has a much easier time keeping the group up while using less mana than me, and he got 30 waves yesterday. I REALLY like the concept, and I love the challenge it gives, but I just feel that my time is wasted in there as a holy priest, since all our heals on that level of gear is really expensive and really don't heal that much.

I didn't have much of a challenge getting gold, but it's simply too hard for this class to get 30 waves IMO when the tank dies with guardian spirit up while I channel Divine Hymn in the correct chakra. But again, very cool concept which should be expanded upon.

It is harder but not impossible. I was consistently getting to wave 29 in the PTR. Wave 30 is not going to be a problem if I improve the gearing a little and do better with CCs on the 9th wave. It is much easier for druids than priests, but it is not

[Blachshma]

I did gold as holy, but it was pretty challenging, especially keeping mana up. Tank damage is pretty big and I found that the key to do this properly is to get rid of the bleed effect as SOON as possible. This will give you quite a bit of time to focus on the tank as the rest of the group damage isn't so big and all they need is the occacional Heal/Renew.

As disc I couldn't even pass wave 3, but I have to admit, all my gear is gemmed/reforged toward Holy, so I assume disc would become easier once I reforge properly.

[Deleted]

As disc I couldn't even pass wave 3, but I have to admit, all my gear is gemmed/reforged toward Holy, so I assume disc would become easier once I reforge properly.

I actually consider gemming a set of older gear as I would for holy, as the amount of spirit I get from my regular disc gear downscaled is about 5k - and it did not work. Crit dowscaled is not high enough to count on it, so it becomes an RNG fest. I managed to get the gold after reforging all I could to spi and getting a spi flask, at which point gold was fairly "easy" (as in finished the gold with 40% mana, while using my cds properly). Smiting with 5k spirit is not really sustainable, I had to cut down on it.

A friend started the endless attempts and is doing it as holy with 10-11 k spi, even if hes disc mainspecced. He said he's not even considering disc for now. I know disc priests got good results too, but I'm not so sure it's easier than holy.

[Blachshma]

I actually consider gemming a set of older gear as I would for holy, as the amount of spirit I get from my regular disc gear downscaled is about 5k - and it did not work. Crit dowscaled is not high enough to count on it, so it becomes an RNG fest. I managed to get the gold after reforging all I could to spi and getting a spi flask, at which point gold was fairly "easy" (as in finished the gold with 40% mana, while using my cds properly). Smiting with 5k spirit is not really sustainable, I had to cut down on it.

A friend started the endless attempts and is doing it as holy with 10-11 k spi, even if hes disc mainspecced. He said he's not even considering disc for now. I know disc priests got good results too, but I'm not so sure it's easier than holy.

Well, as holy I have about 10k spirit (after downscaling gear), since I pretty much gem and reforge everything to spirit and where I can't I got for mastery, also used spirit flask and mastery food. For disc I imagine I won't need that much spirit, but atonment heals for nothing and PW:S spam is expensive and spamming it is not a very smart thing to do. I'm not a great disc priest as I'm a reactive healer in my mind, so I don't really know "how" to get the party up as Renew is so ineffecient as disc and all I can use is GH. SS on tank sounds like it'd be very, very strong, but I do think I need atonment as part of my rotation so I need to get that heal for more.

Keep in mind I don't have anything legendary, not meta, not cloak, nothing.

[Minaah]

Tried this yesterday for first time as my 505 disc priest and was rudely awakened. Going from 12k spirit buffed, to barely 7k hurts.. My monk and druid breezed thru to attempts on gold w/no problem, but I struggled w/even bronze in the few attempts I had time for. Will try some of the tips posted here and reforge / respec a bit and see if things go better.

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Tried Silver:

After a few bad cycles of RNG and stupidity of the npcs, I got thru bronze and to the last wave of silver, before crashing and burning... Not sure what to do to push that last little bit out of my poor priest to get silver done. Am consistently hitting a wall btween wave 6.5 and 8.5. Am running Mastery heavy reforge, after getting all the spirit I can --- pushed it up to just under 9k stead of barely 7k after re-reforging and swapping some gems around. Am mostly atoning, spirit shelling before large grp damage spikes etc. At the later waves, the poor tank just gets wrecked and the mage / hunter become amazing retarded in their positioning / over-agroing etc.

Any tips, greatly appreciated.

[Deleted]

PoH is essential to success, because it has a much higher HPM than heal, even in sanctuary, but most important it procs DI. DI procs are so efficient and so incredibly useful for dealing with the bleeds that you really want to be using GH and PoH a lot with holy. For gold it does not matter, but gold is stupidly easy anyway. On thurs before the raid I quickly one shotted gold and 10endless with 6.5k spirit before the raid started.

I will get spirit and haste to the first breakpoint and try for wave 30 later on.

Disc can make the waves easier by killing things faster, but for holy the key to success is CC and procs. You gotta have a clear plan of when you use your CDs and for what and figure out a plan for dealing with the rabbit bleeds on the tank.

I don't think wave 50 is possible for holy.

[Deleted]

I'm getting to the point where I am simply tired of the RNG crap you are hit with. Trying Endless only to be hit with enrage / burrow at the same time on the tank really isn't fun as disc. Then there are times when the NPCs simply don't spawn, or the tank turns his back mid fight and more often than not, the DPS hit whatever they want. The first add dies and the others are around the 35% mark. Had I been in a group with such people back during TBC or Cata heroics, they would have been getting reminded to do their job properly.

Perhaps I am just a much worse player than I thought but I was under the impression that 30+ waves was supposed to be the challenge, not sub ten. Time for a breather from this. I was really looking forward to PGs but, so far, they are pretty disappointing. I'll be back when things aren't super dependent on RNG.

Comparatively breezed through the DPS PG on Gold, despite playing shadow once in a blue moon.