Holy Priest bis trinkets & why play as Holy

[Music]

Would like to add to this, I solo heal both mogu sides in our raid (I have doubt that any healer can solo mantid side without excessive external cooldown usage as you need to sustain 300K hps through most of it, along with an added 100K random burst damage due to various abilities), and the damage pattern on mogu lines up just as perfectly for disc as it does on garrosh - spawn big add, then:

I was speaking more for mantid side; I found that I didn't have much trouble keeping up as Holy as long as people were relatively stacked for my Dstar. Of course if I get unlucky with Set to Blow it may be rough, but I found it easily doable. I also don't switch sides and just do mantid/mogu in one go, but even so I didn't really have much of an issue on either side.

That being said, I agree that Disc is stronger for mogu side, for the reasons you stated.

[Dracodraco]

I was speaking more for mantid side; I found that I didn't have much trouble keeping up as Holy as long as people were relatively stacked for my Dstar. Of course if I get unlucky with Set to Blow it may be rough, but I found it easily doable. I also don't switch sides and just do mantid/mogu in one go, but even so I didn't really have much of an issue on either side.

That being said, I agree that Disc is stronger for mogu side, for the reasons you stated.

Ah, fair enough. We may have extra pull-happy tanks, so mogu side does get rather rough (usually the two healers on mogu will both have a higher HPS output than I do alone on mogu side - so more than double the healing required). If you can keep up with holy, then fair enough - I have not yet wanted to risk it with disc (especially as I would never be able to get my raid to stack for Dstar when there's adds and sparks and shit all over the place to cleaved).

[Jimjam38]

You can bicker and argue about who healed who till the cows come home, but the absorb vs throughput, holy vs disc arguement has been tried and tested this xpac and the result is always the same, that disc comes out ahead in the vast vast majority of realistic situations. My first comment on this thread addressed the reasons behind this in detail, but this article http://lifeingroup5.com/?p=3686 , which I found while reading Sonnie's SoO review series on the method website, outlines exactly why absorbs are so powerful, and does a very good job of placing the blame squarely on the fight designers. Anyway, the point is that regardless of what kind of situations involving minimal healers, perfect execution etc, that you can invision to give holy an advantage, disc is still the more appropriate spec in every realistic SoO encounter due to fundamental nature of absorbs and the encounter design of SoO. However, the bottom line is to play to your own best ability, and if your specific situation, whether the result of experience, gear optimisation or attitude, is that you will heal better in holy, then by all possible means, play holy.

Also, im very interested to hear more about this inner focus bug

[Dracodraco]

You can bicker and argue about who healed who till the cows come home, but the absorb vs throughput, holy vs disc arguement has been tried and tested this xpac and the result is always the same, that disc comes out ahead in the vast vast majority of realistic situations. My first comment on this thread addressed the reasons behind this in detail, but this article http://lifeingroup5.com/?p=3686 , which I found while reading Sonnie's SoO review series on the method website, outlines exactly why absorbs are so powerful, and does a very good job of placing the blame squarely on the fight designers. Anyway, the point is that regardless of what kind of situations involving minimal healers, perfect execution etc, that you can invision to give holy an advantage, disc is still the more appropriate spec in every realistic SoO encounter due to fundamental nature of absorbs and the encounter design of SoO. However, the bottom line is to play to your own best ability, and if your specific situation, whether the result of experience, gear optimisation or attitude, is that you will heal better in holy, then by all possible means, play holy.

Also, im very interested to hear more about this inner focus bug

It's not as much a bug as a badly designed spell. Think of it this way -
It gives you a buff that lasts an infinite duration.
When you start casting a spell, the game checks if the buff is up Y/N.
If Y, it'll be a 100% crit.
Due to the latency tool that Blizz put into the game, most people are able to queue their spell casts so that they will start casting the instant that your cast ends - which is a milisecond before the actual spell hits the target. Thing is, your inner focus buff does not actually dissappear untill the buffed cast has hit its target.
This means that for a milisecond, you'll both be finished casting a 100% crit PoH, AND you will queue up another PoH that will have a Y check for inner focus buff, thus giving you 2x PoH's critting for 100%. I am able to replicate this with 100% accuracy at 400 MS custom lag tolerance.

[Jimjam38]

I've probably been doing this without even realizing, but I can certainly make better use of it with this knowledge.

[Deleted]

Irrelevant.

Except my first statement was:

Not quite because Shamans don't have an option for going disc. If you are going for a speed kill and you are solo healing as a priest what would you choose: Holy which can solo heal it more easily or disc which at the gear levels involved can solo heal it just fine but also adds 5% of total damage more than holy?. Now also consider the possibility that you had been playing disc up to that point and your best gear set is for disc. The answer is self evident.

If your healer is a priest and you go for a speedkill, you would be dumb to not have him go disc. If you are healer is another class then you go with what you have.

Going with limited healers is something people do only when they have no other choice. The standard choice for any raid leader is get stable healing. They won't willingly go minimal healers and have wipes to lack of healing. They would prefer to have the DPS being limiting, since that varies less.

And disc is far better than holy to cover these peaks because they can load up their healing before the peak -

I think you need to play holy a little bit. Disc has a very granular output. A huge burst then very little in between. Holy provides a slightly smaller peak, but HPS dips to 50% not 20% in between. That means disc has a clear advantage against certain damage patterns, but in most damage pattern holy provides a bigger throughput even in 25mans, where the level 90 talent is disproportionally larger.

Holy has worse scaling with gear however, due to the interaction between mastery and crit for disc.

Except that's not true.
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...ken&by=ability

Another thing that reinforces what I have said is the fact that the highest ranked disc priest cast 38 prayer of healings - 32 of those were on the same TARGET:
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...01&ability=596
(It is likely that Nnogga would have been in the same group as the other tank, making it 34 PoH's on the same group). So, how exactly do you explain that his average PoH did 550K *DIRECT* healing (never mind the aegis absorbs) per cast? I mean, that's not even possible - there's no way they could possibly stay not topped off. As a further example, look at the feral druid Melthu in the log. His total damage taken through the entire encounter was 7.4M. His total healing taken? 30M. He took 3x essences of ysharj (two of them following each other, just for a good measure). I mean. Come on Havoc >.<.

All healing is absorbed by the barrier and shows up on the meter. Some of this will of course be actual overhealing since the ancient barrier can be overcapped. 150k is ~30% overall overheal (330k effective healing and 150k overheal), which is fairly low.

Your assumption that disc can prevent the loss of the health deficit is based on a false premise. That there will be an absorb on every target at all times. That is plainly wrong. What really happens is disc healing is extremely granular. Some people get a lot more than they need resulting in increased overheal from other healers, while some people get less than they need. Think of it like this you if you have a sieve what would you prefer. A sieve which has every hole small, or a sieve which has half the holes rather large and half the holes extremely small. Which one do you think will let through bigger pebbles? Disc results in bigger hits getting through the ancient barrier. So even if you can expect average health to be lower (it won't because disc also has lower througput and works against other healers), what matters is the kind of hits that are getting through. No one cares if the whole raid is at 50% at phase reset. If everyone is 100% all the time but 5 people have to go through half the phase at 5% health that is a serious problem.

As for thok - not really.

First of all WL or WoL do not filter out overhealing done on pets, which make up a very large chunk of the overheals. Most importantly a lot depends on how the encounter is done. E.g. whether how many stacks of intensity you are taking and how long do you keep him in the kiting phase, how many interrupt immunities you are getting and so on.

For example notice that the phase lasts 51s for Evry and 46 seconds for Dewy. You are then also not accounting for gear differences and on top of that picking the first roar phase skews things.

Not comparing like to like. I think the top holy priest is actual Disc main spec. So I found a holy and disc log of thokk from the same player

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...=11478&e=11794

and

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=1530&e=1805

[Dracodraco]

Not quite because Shamans don't have an option for going disc. If you are going for a speed kill and you are solo healing as a priest what would you choose: Holy which can solo heal it more easily or disc which at the gear levels involved can solo heal it just fine but also adds 5% of total damage more than holy?. Now also consider the possibility that you had been playing disc up to that point and your best gear set is for disc. The answer is self evident.

If your healer is a priest and you go for a speedkill, you would be dumb to not have him go disc. If you are healer is another class then you go with what you have.

Going with limited healers is something people do only when they have no other choice. The standard choice for any raid leader is get stable healing. They won't willingly go minimal healers and have wipes to lack of healing. They would prefer to have the DPS being limiting, since that varies less.

And that's true - because disc is the better choise out of the two when solo healing. My point still stands - if holy was much better at solo healing encounters, you would see far more holy priests doing it. If people are fine with having a resto shaman, with zero dps, then they'd be fine with a holy priest aswell even if disc could dps.

I think you need to play holy a little bit. Disc has a very granular output. A huge burst then very little in between. Holy provides a slightly smaller peak, but HPS dips to 50% not 20% in between. That means disc has a clear advantage against certain damage patterns, but in most damage pattern holy provides a bigger throughput even in 25mans, where the level 90 talent is disproportionally larger.

Holy has worse scaling with gear however, due to the interaction between mastery and crit for disc.

I... Think that's exactly what I have been saying <.<? Disc is weaker at consistency, and better at ultimate burst. You're just restating what I've already said at this point. Holy providing bigger throughput doesn't matter if the raid isn't taking enough damage in the fights where it's healing style is stronger (think healing upstairs on dark shamans).

All healing is absorbed by the barrier and shows up on the meter. Some of this will of course be actual overhealing since the ancient barrier can be overcapped. 150k is ~30% overall overheal (330k effective healing and 150k overheal), which is fairly low.

So basicly, that's you telling me that I'm right, and you then going on to say "but 30% overhealing isn't really that much". Point is though, a shitton of the holy priests healing is pure overhealing. That doesn't happen as easily with disc because most of disc's healing will be relatively small absorbs that will get used up first.

Your assumption that disc can prevent the loss of the health deficit is based on a false premise. That there will be an absorb on every target at all times. That is plainly wrong. What really happens is disc healing is extremely granular. Some people get a lot more than they need resulting in increased overheal from other healers, while some people get less than they need. Think of it like this you if you have a sieve what would you prefer. A sieve which has every hole small, or a sieve which has half the holes rather large and half the holes extremely small. Which one do you think will let through bigger pebbles? Disc results in bigger hits getting through the ancient barrier. So even if you can expect average health to be lower (it won't because disc also has lower througput and works against other healers), what matters is the kind of hits that are getting through. No one cares if the whole raid is at 50% at phase reset. If everyone is 100% all the time but 5 people have to go through half the phase at 5% health that is a serious problem.

No havoc, your assumption is wrong. I never said that there would always be shields on everyone - I said that with a disc priest, the shields provided can provent otherwise "lethal" damage - when we were progressing, anyone sub 20% actual hp would have a permanent shield from me on them incase they did something stupid to prevent them from dying (PW:S, that is). Show me a holy priest able to do that.
Your example is also stupid - it's one you have used tons of times, but on malkorok specifically, it doesn't work. Let me pick it apart for you:

Some people get a lot more than they need resulting in increased overheal from other healers, while some people get less than they need

Untrue on malkorok. On malkorok, everyone has their encounter shields which the throughput healers are keeping up. You can't really atonement well on this fight, which means that disc will be mostly spamming PW:S on people who specifically needs the absorbs (low HP, low shield before an implosion etc) - why you think that people who doesn't need it will get a lot is beyond me, unless you're counting Halo as the main source of disc output.

Think of it like this you if you have a sieve what would you prefer. A sieve which has every hole small, or a sieve which has half the holes rather large and half the holes extremely small. Which one do you think will let through bigger pebbles? Disc results in bigger hits getting through the ancient barrier.

How, exactly? How does disc let bigger hits through the shields? Are you assuming that 4 other raid healers can't actually keep the shields green? Because that's just silly. Disc doesn't let any bigger hits through the shields - the hits are consistent in size. Disc will be able to prevent some of those hits that may have eaten into finite health if played well. Holy cannot.

And last:

So even if you can expect average health to be lower (it won't because disc also has lower througput and works against other healers), what matters is the kind of hits that are getting through.

You are so wrong right here that it hurts. Disc is not working against other healers on this fight. I already explained that as simple as I possibly could, but I'll try again:
Finite health (reach zero and you die - no healer can heal this).
Encounter shield (shield that all throughput healers fill up and work with).
Player absorbs (shield from disc priest/somewhat holy paladins that will be used before encounter shields).
Disc doesn't "work against" the other healers - they work above them. Disc will not be wanting to try to fill the raid's red shields up to green, they will throw a PW:S on the red target and move on to the next, while the other healers fill up the shield. However, because of the discs' shield being there to protect him, despite having a red shield, he is in much lower danger of dying to an implosion while his shield gets filled by the other healers.

The entirety of what you wrote can apply to a normal encounter, but an encounter where actual healing and absorbs are inheritly split up like this? Nope. You're wrong.

First of all WL or WoL do not filter out overhealing done on pets, which make up a very large chunk of the overheals. Most importantly a lot depends on how the encounter is done. E.g. whether how many stacks of intensity you are taking and how long do you keep him in the kiting phase, how many interrupt immunities you are getting and so on.

For example notice that the phase lasts 51s for Evry and 46 seconds for Dewy. You are then also not accounting for gear differences and on top of that picking the first roar phase skews things.

Not comparing like to like. I think the top holy priest is actual Disc main spec. So I found a holy and disc log of thokk from the same player

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...=11478&e=11794

and

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=1530&e=1805

First of all - stop using world of logs. It doesn't show half of the things that WCL does. Apparantly you're not even aware that WCL has a function that says "exclude pets". Want to know the funny part? That totally doesn't matter on thok. Check the option and the only one who loses about 1K hps is the resto shaman because of their large AOE-heal area. Pets tend to want to stand behind the target, where your AOE healing won't actually reach them.
Also, I'm not even sure what you want to show me with those two logs you linked. It doesn't matter if Dewy did less healing as disc - he's clearly better at playing holy (as evidenced by being #1 holy priest and #34 disc). You compare nr 1 to nr 1 because both of those have reached the (current) known potential of the class. What you are doing is the same as if I were to take, say, a rogue and play it on an encounter, then my hunter - and then comparing the two and deciding what's stronger from the results (hint: I'll fucking suck at rogue and rape as hunter).

Second, why does the first roar phase "skew" the results? In fact, shouldn't that phase be great for holy considering it's under bloodlust which boosts holy HPS even more? I'm going to pretend you didn't actually decide to invoke the "but different gear!" argument, considering they are both going to have full upgrades and +587 ilvl at this point. If they had to also have the exact same gear (but how? Different specs need different sets) then there'd be absolutely nothing you could ever compare. And such small gear differences as you'd be seeing here (a different WF piece, maybe no WF piece at all) is really, really inconsequential.

[Music]

Dewy also somehow had nearly 70% crit on his Divine Star, which is extremely high regardless of how much crit he has via his gear.

There's a lot of other factors that need to be taken into account as well, such as raid CDs used, different comp, # of screeches taken etc. You can't just simply link parse v. parse even though they're from the same person and expect everything else to be the same.

You can argue as much as you want that Holy is better for Thok, but it's simply not. That doesn't stop me from playing it though .

[Dracodraco]

Dewy also somehow had nearly 70% crit on his Divine Star, which is extremely high regardless of how much crit he has via his gear.

There's a lot of other factors that need to be taken into account as well, such as raid CDs used, different comp, # of screeches taken etc. You can't just simply link parse v. parse even though they're from the same person and expect everything else to be the same.

You can argue as much as you want that Holy is better for Thok, but it's simply not. That doesn't stop me from playing it though .

It's high, but not extremely so. I have about 50% base, so 10% with archangel. a 10% deviation is on the high side, but not unthinkable :P.

[Music]

It's high, but not extremely so. I have about 50% base, so 10% with archangel. a 10% deviation is on the high side, but not unthinkable :P.

I meant on his Holy parse, I thought I linked it, but I must've forgot to!

[Deleted]

And that's true - because disc is the better choise out of the two when solo healing. My point still stands - if holy was much better at solo healing encounters, you would see far more holy priests doing it. If people are fine with having a resto shaman, with zero dps, then they'd be fine with a holy priest aswell even if disc could dps.

Lets get into the mindset of a raid that is going for solo heals. What do we have in our team? Lets see we got a shaman and a priest. Let us take the priest. What spec should he be in holy or disc. Well he has better disc gear than holy gear and disc can do damage. Can he solo heal it as disc? Of course no problem. Then let him go disc. Oops it turns out the priest can't raid tonight he has a hot date. Ok lets take the shaman. Can he solo heal it? Of course without any trouble at all. Great summon people and lets go.

What you are saying is the discussion should go. What spec is he in? Well he has better gear as disc and disc can do damage. Can he solo heal it as disc? Of course no problem. Nah he had better go holy, because even though he can solo heal it as disc and he has better disc gear it will be better if he was holy instead so he can heal more than we need and contribute no damage.

Does that sound like a logical argument to you? A raid is fine with a shaman, because that is what they have or their shaman is an awesome player and their disc is just not as good. However if they do have a priest, what possible argument can be made that he should go holy?

I... Think that's exactly what I have been saying <.<? Disc is weaker at consistency, and better at ultimate burst. You're just restating what I've already said at this point. Holy providing bigger throughput doesn't matter if the raid isn't taking enough damage in the fights where it's healing style is stronger (think healing upstairs on dark shamans).

Limited healers means you are wiping due to lack of healing. If you are never wiping due to lack of healing you aren't running anywhere near the healing limit.

So basicly, that's you telling me that I'm right, and you then going on to say "but 30% overhealing isn't really that much". Point is though, a shitton of the holy priests healing is pure overhealing. That doesn't happen as easily with disc because most of disc's healing will be relatively small absorbs that will get used up first.

The 30% overhealing limit isn't that much is in comparison to the 50% overhealing you were suggesting. 30% overheal from every healer still means you can drop one healer and comfortably be above. You NEED to be above, because if you are not then the encounter is borderline unhealable. The question is what is the limit where you can heal it without too much wipe. 5-10% extra healing when you are at the limit is a very big deal. Easily enough to drastically affect the number of wipes.

No havoc, your assumption is wrong.

No I am not wrong. If your function in the raid is to put shields on people under 20%, because the other healers can keep the green shield without you then you didn't need to be there at all. You could have been a DPS and if someone does die from being stupid you would still be better off. Your major throughput as disc is Halo and Divine aegis with a bit of help from PoH, not PWS. Most of your throughput is doing exactly what I say it does. You aren't going to run all the way to the other side of the room to PWS someone at low health about to soak a pool either.

The instant kills on malko are combos of getting hit by an orb and then either soaking a pool or seismic slam. That is the main source of large deficits. Otherwise getting hit by 4-6 orbs is not so easy to achieve and for the love of god the phase does not last that long. Seismic slam comes every 20seconds and it is very regular so you know exactly when its coming if you are paying attention.

Getting hit twice by either of those two combos means that you will die even with a PWS on you permanently after the second one. So that does not help unless someone does that and then soaks more orbs. Holy can also use PWS and FFS you can only PWS someone twice per 30s. I have used PWS numerous time on people who have just soaked an orb and I know seismic slam or pools are coming. In fact I would burn a serendipity stack on gheal before putting the PWS on, if I have one or use up an FDCL proc.

Reacting to someone taking an orb before they soak or seismic slam goes out is better done with heals not with PWS. Constant ticking HoTs (lightwell is 60k ticks every 2s) and constant stream of strong healing guarantee that anyone gets hit by an orb will at least get some heals before they get hit by seismic slam, which will keep their health higher though that combo. Disc sometimes does that really well because the person has a big fat aegis and sometimes it does absolutely nothing at all. The person gets zero extra healing from disc. The situation is exactly as I described it. You might fancy yourself the hero for running around keeping PWS at some random person who has screwed up, but in fact you not really doing much at all. While you are doing that someone who has just soaked a pool and seismic slam is incoming isn't getting the heals that will guarantee his shield will be green before he gets hit. If they are getting it despite you not pushing high throughput to keep shields green then WTF are you even there?. No passive healing options, uneven uncontrolled healing and constant lull and burst, makes disc the worst possible healer for this encounter. You can't keep people from getting low that way. You can't even stop them from getting instagibbed by a bad combo. All you can do is make sure they don't die if they fuck up and still get hit by orbs even though their health is low. That is useful, but not as useful as someone who can help reduce the deficits accross the board in the first place.

First of all - stop using world of logs. It doesn't show half of the things that WCL does. Apparantly you're not even aware that WCL has a function that says "exclude pets".

TROLOLOLOLOL. You don't know that WCL exclude pets means healing DONE by player pets like healing stream and lightwell? It does not actually filter out healing done on pets.

I use WoL because I undestand how to use the expression editor to get bits of the log in a nice format that I can process with spreadsheet macros, which are formatted for that output. I don't need someone to provide convenient buttons for me that make large scale analysis take 100s of man hours instead of being automated. If you like living in the stone age more power to you.

I am pretty sure that dewy is disc main spec and uses a lot of disc gear with holy. The fact that he is rank1 holy is simply a testament of people not playing holy at higher gear levels. People might think that crit is good for holy, but it really isnt. It can be easily be demonstrated that crit results in loss of HPS on average, even if a lucky streak can push you ahead occasionally (useful for ranking though if you are lucky).

Healing done on pets is a very big chunk of overhealing on thokk, including both the logs you posted. Disc has more overheal on pets because aegis on them is also 100% overheal and star is a bigger part of the disc throughput, while at the same time being the biggest source of pet healing.

Do I really need to spell it out to you? Disc gets its biggest advantage in the phase from the first 30%. On the first one you have your pre-pot and your trinket proc and your coat proc all lining up on top of heroism (which is mostly in the first 30% of the phase). Also people have so much DPS they no longer push the phases 3 minutes apart so that holy can use divine hymn in every one. The biggest source of healing for holy in the last part of the phase, where sanct and lightwell and Binding heal/PoH actual get a chance to heal for something. Divine hymn compared to barrier is a major part of the throughput difference between disc and holy.

[Dracodraco]

Lets get into the mindset of a raid that is going for solo heals. What do we have in our team? Lets see we got a shaman and a priest. Let us take the priest. What spec should he be in holy or disc. Well he has better disc gear than holy gear and disc can do damage. Can he solo heal it as disc? Of course no problem. Then let him go disc. Oops it turns out the priest can't raid tonight he has a hot date. Ok lets take the shaman. Can he solo heal it? Of course without any trouble at all. Great summon people and lets go.

What you are saying is the discussion should go. What spec is he in? Well he has better gear as disc and disc can do damage. Can he solo heal it as disc? Of course no problem. Nah he had better go holy, because even though he can solo heal it as disc and he has better disc gear it will be better if he was holy instead so he can heal more than we need and contribute no damage.

Does that sound like a logical argument to you? A raid is fine with a shaman, because that is what they have or their shaman is an awesome player and their disc is just not as good. However if they do have a priest, what possible argument can be made that he should go holy?

Again - it doesn't matter. If holy was as good a solo healer as you say (and even better than disc) then we would have seen more holy solo healing logs. Especially during farm. Put it this way -
Disc is the superior spec out of the two right now, yet you still see people going holy for farm. Disc is the superior spec for solo healing right now, yet if holy could keep up as easily as disc, we'd still see holy priests solo healing.

Limited healers means you are wiping due to lack of healing. If you are never wiping due to lack of healing you aren't running anywhere near the healing limit.

And what I'm saying is that the difference between a holy priest and a disc priest will never end up comfortably pushing you above the limit where you go from "we don't have enough healers, we need to add another" to "we can comfortably heal this without wiping". Their throughput difference simply isn't that great.

The 30% overhealing limit isn't that much is in comparison to the 50% overhealing you were suggesting. 30% overheal from every healer still means you can drop one healer and comfortably be above. You NEED to be above, because if you are not then the encounter is borderline unhealable. The question is what is the limit where you can heal it without too much wipe. 5-10% extra healing when you are at the limit is a very big deal. Easily enough to drastically affect the number of wipes.

I never suggested 50% overhealing, though. I never actually put any number to overhealing. And again - you are not going to go from a disc doing 300K, to a holy priest doing 350K, and suddenly be able to get through the encounter with a far bigger success rate. The fact is that while you might think that's how it theoretically works, it'll never work like that in practice due to the randomness of procs and most damage patterns. If there's a part of an encounter you simply can't get through, the current model is to throw a raid CD at it. If you truly believe a disc priest changing to holy will accomplish anything, be my guest. There's just about no guilds in the top 100 that has done that and gotten anything good out of it, especially in 25 man.

No I am not wrong. If your function in the raid is to put shields on people under 20%, because the other healers can keep the green shield without you then you didn't need to be there at all. You could have been a DPS and if someone does die from being stupid you would still be better off. Your major throughput as disc is Halo and Divine aegis with a bit of help from PoH, not PWS. Most of your throughput is doing exactly what I say it does. You aren't going to run all the way to the other side of the room to PWS someone at low health about to soak a pool either.

Again, no. Because Malkorok is an attrition fight. You did this encounter more than a month after it was released, and had plenty of SoO gear. Back during early progression, Malkoroks implosions etc WOULD actually remove the entire shield and hurt your actual healthpool. And your obvious disregard for how progress works whenever we discuss stuff is actually kind of irritating. Let's get something clear:
On progress, people WILL fuck up.
On progress, there WILL be stupid shit to cover up.
On progress, the kill matters. Not how clean it was.

So let me ask you this - if you have 4 healers that can reasonably well keep the entire raid up in the green level with their throughput, would you A:
Add a holy priest to make sure everyone is always green and topped up.
OR
Add a disc priest who can keep shields on the raid to combat stupid things like eating balls (instantly removing entire shields), getting hit by / slowed by languishes, soaking implosions without a full green shield etc.

The far safer decision is the disc priest. Especially as a valiant disc priest can keep any person alive.

The instant kills on malko are combos of getting hit by an orb and then either soaking a pool or seismic slam. That is the main source of large deficits. Otherwise getting hit by 4-6 orbs is not so easy to achieve and for the love of god the phase does not last that long. Seismic slam comes every 20seconds and it is very regular so you know exactly when its coming if you are paying attention.

We're straying away from what healer deals best with an encounter, to how an encounter is appropiately delt with. You don't have to tell me how to play. I did these encounters while you were still dabbling in normal modes. I am aware of how it works. I am also a raid leader, and I know what is to be expected from progressing a boss. Stay on topic - answering "but your raiders should never get hit by XX/YY" isn't a valid reason for holy being stronger.

Getting hit twice by either of those two combos means that you will die even with a PWS on you permanently after the second one. So that does not help unless someone does that and then soaks more orbs. Holy can also use PWS and FFS you can only PWS someone twice per 30s. I have used PWS numerous time on people who have just soaked an orb and I know seismic slam or pools are coming. In fact I would burn a serendipity stack on gheal before putting the PWS on, if I have one or use up an FDCL proc.

Holys shield is pitiful. The fact that you've even got it bound as holy surprises me. That said, obviously, people at a low health will be told not to attempt to soak implosions, but rather try to stay alive - the shield is there as a buffer if something should go wrong. A heal is not a buffer, they already have a full encounter shield. Disc adds EHP. Disc is better for keeping the raid alive.

Reacting to someone taking an orb before they soak or seismic slam goes out is better done with heals not with PWS. Constant ticking HoTs (lightwell is 60k ticks every 2s) and constant stream of strong healing guarantee that anyone gets hit by an orb will at least get some heals before they get hit by seismic slam, which will keep their health higher though that combo. Disc sometimes does that really well because the person has a big fat aegis and sometimes it does absolutely nothing at all. The person gets zero extra healing from disc. The situation is exactly as I described it. You might fancy yourself the hero for running around keeping PWS at some random person who has screwed up, but in fact you not really doing much at all. While you are doing that someone who has just soaked a pool and seismic slam is incoming isn't getting the heals that will guarantee his shield will be green before he gets hit. If they are getting it despite you not pushing high throughput to keep shields green then WTF are you even there?. No passive healing options, uneven uncontrolled healing and constant lull and burst, makes disc the worst possible healer for this encounter. You can't keep people from getting low that way. You can't even stop them from getting instagibbed by a bad combo. All you can do is make sure they don't die if they fuck up and still get hit by orbs even though their health is low. That is useful, but not as useful as someone who can help reduce the deficits accross the board in the first place.

There are *NO* instant spells except for a 3-holy power word of glory/eternal flame, and 1 minute cooldown "makes your next spell instant"-spells from shamans/druids that gives you as much healing as an instant cast as PW:S does.
But please, explain to me how:
Reacting with a 250K heal (that fills up the encounter shield and thus competes with every other healer)
Is better than:
Reacting with a 250K shield (that doesn't touch the encounter shield and lets HoTs/smartheals fill up the encounter shield over time)?

It's not. You yourself have stated many times that when disc is competing with other healers, and thus suppressing their output, it's a bad thing. This is the ONE situation where disc is the best healer, because their main force is their absorbs, that does not interfere with the other healer's throughput.
All the "passive healing" you are describing are smart heals, apart from HoT's - smart heals will always go for the lowest target, which makes them exceptionally bad in this encounter. Your healing stream totem from a resto shaman will keep ticking and keeping the same person full, and the 3 lowest melee will soak up all effloresence healing. You need targetted healing to survive this encounter. Disc does targetted healing and keeping the raid alive well with PW:S spam, and druids/MW/Paladins's does it well with hots that lingers and heals.

Also, your lightwell is on a 3 minute cooldown and heals 15 people. Why do you even bother using a 3 minute CD as an example? That's not sustainable. It's not an instant heal, either. And the constant ticking streams of smart healing from the different healers, as stated before, will end up pooled into the bottom five or six players in the raid, while everyone else gets absolutely nothing. Sure, it makes atonement bad on this fight, but the same goes for every other healers AOE spells.

You described the situation well though - sometimes, disc does protection well because you have a fat aegis/shield on the person who gets hits, and sometimes it does nothing. But in every single situation, a holy priest does nothing. Sure, you can heal the shields after, but I'm sure we both agree it's too late then.

TROLOLOLOLOL. You don't know that WCL exclude pets means healing DONE by player pets like healing stream and lightwell? It does not actually filter out healing done on pets.

Actually, it doesn't filter out healing stream or totems etc, it seems to filter out spirit link, and guardians (blood worms, set procs etc). But fair enough. let's try it another way then.
This is the log for the disc priests' healing. 8.1M of his healing went on pets:
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...ce=4&by=target

Here's the holy priest:
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...rget&source=22
4.7M of his healing went on pets (but he had fewer pets to heal).

It doesn't really change the end result, though - in fact, the holy priest did far more overhealing on the pets than the disc did, for whatever reason.

I use WoL because I undestand how to use the expression editor to get bits of the log in a nice format that I can process with spreadsheet macros, which are formatted for that output. I don't need someone to provide convenient buttons for me that make large scale analysis take 100s of man hours instead of being automated. If you like living in the stone age more power to you.

If you want an option, go ask for it in the thread in raids and dungeons. WOL is outdated. It won't support bosses next tier, the guy who maintains it has gone AWOL. You say I live in the stone age by using WCL, yet you are using a site that hasn't been updated to track all heroic bosses of a tier that's soon to be a year old yet.

I am pretty sure that dewy is disc main spec and uses a lot of disc gear with holy. The fact that he is rank1 holy is simply a testament of people not playing holy at higher gear levels. People might think that crit is good for holy, but it really isnt. It can be easily be demonstrated that crit results in loss of HPS on average, even if a lucky streak can push you ahead occasionally (useful for ranking though if you are lucky).

And yet Crit played a major part in holy even getting this high - as Music pointed out, Dewy's holy log has an abnormally high amount of critical hits. That's why you take the two best and compare - you're sure that you get the luckiest, best performance that has yet to be recorded. This is so far the practical max that we have seen done.
But by all means - go ahead and beat him.

Healing done on pets is a very big chunk of overhealing on thokk, including both the logs you posted. Disc has more overheal on pets because aegis on them is also 100% overheal and star is a bigger part of the disc throughput, while at the same time being the biggest source of pet healing.

As mentioned earlier, disc has more healing on pets than holy because there's more pets. a 3M difference does not even put a dent in disc's advantage (65M vs 53.3M, down to 57M vs 48.6M).

Do I really need to spell it out to you? Disc gets its biggest advantage in the phase from the first 30%. On the first one you have your pre-pot and your trinket proc and your coat proc all lining up on top of heroism (which is mostly in the first 30% of the phase). Also people have so much DPS they no longer push the phases 3 minutes apart so that holy can use divine hymn in every one. The biggest source of healing for holy in the last part of the phase, where sanct and lightwell and Binding heal/PoH actual get a chance to heal for something. Divine hymn compared to barrier is a major part of the throughput difference between disc and holy.

Did you not even take a look at the logs? They both start from 41 seconds. Prepots, procs, cloaks etc have long faded by then. That's also why the holy priest log is 6 second shorter - they phased 6 seconds before the disc log. This is *only* looking at the max throughput phase, not the first five screeches where damage is slowly ramping up, because of course disc has a major advantage during that. Which means that both specs does not get benefit from lust, procs, etc any more than the other does.

As for divine hymn V barrier, Dewy didn't use that in this, but put it like this - his one use of divine hymn did 12.5M. A PW:B can cover 4 screeches on 12 people, the screeches deal about 300K damage per, so that's 14M "reduced" damage. This number doubles if you used it when you stack up. There's also the +healing effect on hymn to take into account, but it's not going to make hymn leap far ahead of barrier. The two are fairly close in terms of "output", you just get to see hymn on the meters, while you don't notice barrier at all. The argument about these two spells have been done over and over throughout the expansion, but you can't with good conscience say that divine hymn is a major part of holy's "burst" compared to disc, if you don't include disc's barrier.

[Jimjam38]

I know I'm one to call TL;DR but yeah... was there anything in that huge barricade of text that I'd actually find useful?

[Deleted]

Again - it doesn't matter. If holy was as good a solo healer as you say (and even better than disc) then we would have seen more holy solo healing logs. Especially during farm. Put it this way -
Disc is the superior spec out of the two right now, yet you still see people going holy for farm. Disc is the superior spec for solo healing right now, yet if holy could keep up as easily as disc, we'd still see holy priests solo healing.

Which brings us back to the relative numbers of healers and the mentality of people who go for solo healing. Disc is the superior spec right now in some of the encounters. In others it is holy. But for solo healing disc is the superior spec everywhere since it can also contribute great damage.

And what I'm saying is that the difference between a holy priest and a disc priest will never end up comfortably pushing you above the limit where you go from "we don't have enough healers, we need to add another" to "we can comfortably heal this without wiping". Their throughput difference simply isn't that great.

You are looking at it entirely from the wrong perspective. That is what I explained above. The difference (in some encounters) is bigger than you think (up to >100k HPS) and enough to push a we wipe most of the time to lack of healing situation to we wipe some of the time to lack of healing situation. Or it can take we wipe some times to lack of healing to we generally don't wipe to lack of healing. This only applies in a situation where the healing is at a limit. As a rule of thumb raid leaders prefer to take enough healers to make sure there are generally no wipes to lack of healing. That is why disc is so much more popular. Not all raids have this option though.

I never suggested 50% overhealing, though. I never actually put any number to overhealing. And again - you are not going to go from a disc

You said the difference between damage and healing done was pure overhealing. I said a good chunk of it is actually due to encounter mechanics. I turned out I was wrong and the biggest chunk was indeed overhealing, but a significant amount is indeed down to encounter mechanics. Reducing healers isn't about overall HPS, but about critical moments, where you don't have redundancy. That is when holy whose output is far more uniform, reaches many more targets per second and does not have such extreme boom and bust has a small but highly significant advantage. At a certain gear level this advantage evaporates, because disc begins to trivialise mechanics. As a caveat to everything I have said I must add that this is also healing combo dependent. Disc works much better with shamans than holy does. Similarly druids and paladins work much better with holy than with disc. So I can't confidently say that in a raid group with strong shaman healers holy is a good idea under any circumstances in any encounter except malkorok.

Again, no...
So let me ask you this -

The far safer decision is the disc priest. Especially as a valiant disc priest can keep any person alive.

A battle of attrition implies a non renewable resource. That is your mistake. The health pools are renewable in this encounter. You get 3 sets of pools and up to 4 seismic slams. You also get to be hit by up to 3 orbs before you are in any danger.

The pools never removed a full green shield. Even the earliest groups never had less than 600k HP. My raid group killed malko with only a tiny gear advantage, due to less farming and a disparity in the starting gear. We also had 600-650k HP average. A barely green shield might be removed, but it will do a tiny amount of damage. Keeping the shield as full as possible is the key to keeping the raid health high. Even in the earliest kill the biggest reason for large deficits was unfortunate double combos, which are sometimes unavoidable. its 450k damage from the pools and 500k from slam but that is physical damage mitigated by armor. Slam can also cause falling damage, which is stopped by the shield, but not by PWS and aegis, making healing even more important for surviving slams.

If 4 healers can keep the shields green comfortably then I would not take another healer you have more than enough. I would take a DPS. Then if someone fucks up half way and dies you are still waaaay ahead on DPS. You are forgetting that you get a strong source of damage every 10s in this encounter roughly (alternating seismic slams on top of pools) and a ticking damage aura every two seconds. PWS lasts on average 4s for me in holy gear. Lets say it lasts 8s for you. PWS is just not as good as a spammable heal for keeping low health people alive. The key thing is actually to stick the PWS on just before a seismic slam is coming. On top of that holy can also PWS someone at low health and you can't really leave your position and run all the way to other side to PWS someone who messed up on that side. I am not saying that PWS is not useful, but rather that its value is fairly low. Most screw-ups or bad RNG cannot be saved by PWS. That is just an illusion. It will occasionally prevent a death and more frequently it will help keep a target at higher health, but on average holy keeps raid health much higher due to the constant ticking nature of its healing, which disc tends to leave gaps, even at the people it is supposed to be looking after. It might sound great, but the key to preventing most deaths is to be able to quickly put some healing in the very narrow gap between a badly timed orb and one of the two big damage sources. In the time it takes for the health to reset it is just too difficult. Malko is the one encounter in this tier where absorbs have very little additional value. The people keeping the raid alive are the ones maintaining the high aoe throughput and the constant stream of heals.

Rememeber that the raid is taking CONSTANT damage. 30k every 2s on top of a big hit for a good chunk of raid members every 10s almost. You need constant ticking heals on people. The shields are never capped for more than a couple of seconds unless you cover everyone with sizeable ticking heals. You also need to burst people very fast to prevent very gibs to double ability hits.


Lightwell is tremendous on this encounter. Especially if you know how to make a macro to keybind lightwell, so you can glyph it. Unglyphed it only heals low health targets. It will keep ticking for a total time of 90s. Since you can cast it before the encounter starts and it won't be used until someone gets to low health it is something you can comfortably keep up the entire encounter.


[quote]
There are *NO* instant spells
[quote]

Reacting with instant spells is woefully inefficient. Having a disc priest rolling PWS on the raid is just pointless. A 250k heal is equivalent to a 250k absorb when someone has no heals. That is because if you are bursting with single target heals that person is in danger of taking damage in the next couple of seconds. It does not matter if you overheal on this target, you are leaving efficiency to the side for a moment because you have to save someone. If you have too many of these moments however you will fall behind on the healing. That is why what does matter is the overall healing on the raid. When your aegis from Halo or PoH goes onto the targets that a druid has just put rejuves on. That aegis is going to suck up the damage aura, but leaving targets without rejuve and no absorbs vulnerable to health loss. PWS is a small fraction of your HPS and it is used on targets where no one cares about interference.

Think for a moment man. Who is in danger of dying the most and who needs a constant stream of heals to make sure they get don't lose anymore health to closely spaced ability hits? Smart heals fulfil an important function on malko (though atonement is the weakest one due to the one target per hit limitation).

The biggest problem in this encounter is those closely spaced ability hits or orbs before a hit. Aegis is obviously fantastic for this, but a) it does not last very long in this environment and b) it often goes on people who don't need it. Holy produces a constant stream of healing on a large number of targets that adds healing ticks before you can even react with PWS. The overlapping healing from many healers produces a constant stream of healing that automatically takes the edge of those double hits before they even happen. Sometimes disc prevents those double hits completely sometimes it lets them through COMPLETELY UNMITIGATED. This never happens because of PWS. Is purely down to aegis. What makes disc so bad is that most of the time the absorbs just eat up the aura damage, which is not what you want!!. This is precisely as I have explained. A sieve where half the holes are tiny and half are large. The analogy couldn't be more fitting.

It doesn't really change the end result, though - in fact, the holy priest did far more overhealing on the pets than the disc did, for whatever reason.

Nope. You didn't calculate aegis expiring on pets. Disc always has more overhealing on pets, because the level 90 talent, which is the major source of pet healing is actually a larger part of disc healing, mostly due to the aegis. The overhealing is more than double what you think it is.

If you want an option, go ask for it in the thread in raids and dungeons. WOL is outdated. It won't support bosses next tier, the guy who maintains it has gone AWOL. You say I live in the stone age by using WCL, yet you are using a site that hasn't been updated to track all heroic bosses of a tier that's soon to be a year old yet.

I dont need a site I just need a conveniently formatted combat log. WoL provides it for now. If it goes I will just reformat my scripts to use the WCL output, but that is assuming I am around for WoD, which is by no means a given.

And yet Crit played a major part in holy even getting this high - as Music pointed out, Dewy's holy log has an abnormally high amount of critical hits. That's why you take the two best and compare - you're sure that you get the luckiest, best performance that has yet to be recorded. This is so far the practical max that we have seen done.
But by all means - go ahead and beat him.

Lucky crit streaks are an even bigger part of top disc logs. Another reason why it is just not a very good way of looking at things, they don't reflect what happens most of the time in a fight and you can't guarantee equal streaks. More importantly holy gets less of a benefit from crit. The maxima of the output due to lucky streaks are going to heavily favour disc. This isn't about artefacts introduced by the way ranking works.

Did you not even take a look at the logs?

Pot lasts 30 seconds. Aegis lasts 15, spirit shell lasts 15. If you time it right you use the aegis from a DS and spirit shell on first roar smite HF (roar) penance to restack archangel then archangel and DS on the second roar. Heroism is on the part of the roar phase where the disc is crushing everyone else, and especially if hymn is not used on every roar phase, because the boss is getting bum raped in 4 minutes it is no surprise that the first spike will be won by disc, especially at this gear level. Your second coat proc tends to coincide with the begining of the first roar phase as well, since it procs at the very start.

As for divine hymn V barrier

Disc barrier is half the value of hymn. You make several elementary errors. A good chunk of healing from DH is EoL, which does not show up as DH healing. On top of that you are looking at effective healing not raw throughput, which is what we are comparing here. The effective healing you get from hymn varies depending on the conditions. Finally you are forgetting that the healing buff is refreshed by DH as you channel it so it lasts for an average of 12s. In half the targets barrier has a quarter of the value of hymn. You generally use barrier at the end when you stack for the last two hits, to minimise losses from the transition, so it does not even cover two screeches. There is no situation where barrier is superior to hymn, if the damage is not enough to effectively insta kill the raid. I demonstrated this mathematically in this very forum. Search for it.

On thokk, disc will produce more healing overall, because the only time that holy gets free reign is at 15-30stacks. In this region of the fight holy is significant stronger than disc, especially when optimised properly in terms of gear and casting strategy. Again the caveat is if you have very strong shaman healers, because they work better with disc and the encounter mechanics favour them greatly.

[Eijnar]

Disc barrier is half the value of hymn. You make several elementary errors. A good chunk of healing from DH is EoL, which does not show up as DH healing. On top of that you are looking at effective healing not raw throughput, which is what we are comparing here. The effective healing you get from hymn varies depending on the conditions. Finally you are forgetting that the healing buff is refreshed by DH as you channel it so it lasts for an average of 12s. In half the targets barrier has a quarter of the value of hymn. You generally use barrier at the end when you stack for the last two hits, to minimise losses from the transition, so it does not even cover two screeches. There is no situation where barrier is superior to hymn, if the damage is not enough to effectively insta kill the raid. I demonstrated this mathematically in this very forum. Search for it.

If you are going to point out minor errors take a look at your assumption in A vs. B where one is a cast, and your assumption is that the disc does fuck all during PW:B, which will only happen - never. Furthermore, PW:B is effective the entire time you are taking damage where as your healing buff from Hymn loses all it effectiveness if a person is at 100%.

[Dracodraco]

A battle of attrition implies a non renewable resource. That is your mistake. The health pools are renewable in this encounter. You get 3 sets of pools and up to 4 seismic slams. You also get to be hit by up to 3 orbs before you are in any danger.

The pools never removed a full green shield. Even the earliest groups never had less than 600k HP. My raid group killed malko with only a tiny gear advantage, due to less farming and a disparity in the starting gear. We also had 600-650k HP average. A barely green shield might be removed, but it will do a tiny amount of damage. Keeping the shield as full as possible is the key to keeping the raid health high. Even in the earliest kill the biggest reason for large deficits was unfortunate double combos, which are sometimes unavoidable. its 450k damage from the pools and 500k from slam but that is physical damage mitigated by armor. Slam can also cause falling damage, which is stopped by the shield, but not by PWS and aegis, making healing even more important for surviving slams.

First off, the amount of things you can get hit by before you are "in danger" has nothing to do with what the best approach is. It's an individual raid thing, which you can't base assumptions and theories on. You can't plan for a "best case" scenario on progress. You plan for the worst case scenario and you prepare for that - if it happens, you can pull through, if it doesn't, no harm done.
The biggest reason for large deficits is taking an orb by accident, then soaking a pool or getting tossed. Both of those scenarios can happen at any time before the real damage happens.

If 4 healers can keep the shields green comfortably then I would not take another healer you have more than enough. I would take a DPS. Then if someone fucks up half way and dies you are still waaaay ahead on DPS. You are forgetting that you get a strong source of damage every 10s in this encounter roughly (alternating seismic slams on top of pools) and a ticking damage aura every two seconds. PWS lasts on average 4s for me in holy gear. Lets say it lasts 8s for you. PWS is just not as good as a spammable heal for keeping low health people alive. The key thing is actually to stick the PWS on just before a seismic slam is coming. On top of that holy can also PWS someone at low health and you can't really leave your position and run all the way to other side to PWS someone who messed up on that side. I am not saying that PWS is not useful, but rather that its value is fairly low. Most screw-ups or bad RNG cannot be saved by PWS. That is just an illusion. It will occasionally prevent a death and more frequently it will help keep a target at higher health, but on average holy keeps raid health much higher due to the constant ticking nature of its healing, which disc tends to leave gaps, even at the people it is supposed to be looking after. It might sound great, but the key to preventing most deaths is to be able to quickly put some healing in the very narrow gap between a badly timed orb and one of the two big damage sources. In the time it takes for the health to reset it is just too difficult. Malko is the one encounter in this tier where absorbs have very little additional value. The people keeping the raid alive are the ones maintaining the high aoe throughput and the constant stream of heals.

Rememeber that the raid is taking CONSTANT damage. 30k every 2s on top of a big hit for a good chunk of raid members every 10s almost. You need constant ticking heals on people. The shields are never capped for more than a couple of seconds unless you cover everyone with sizeable ticking heals. You also need to burst people very fast to prevent very gibs to double ability hits.

No, you very much would take a fifth healer because of the second phase where he does 25% more damage with everything, and would thus need to up your output by 25%. You just don't notice that anymore because of killing him before too quickly.
PW:S can easily last it's full duration (I can't proc rapture outside of casting it on tanks) when it crits, which is about 65% of the time in my gear. Even then, PW:S is by far the best snap-heal you have available in all of the healers toolboxes. You say it is weak because it only lasts 8 seconds - I say that's 8 seconds where the encounter shield isn't touch, and where a HoT can get time to heal the person up to full. It's a shield. It does exactly what it's supposed to - it absorbs the damage so the other healers can get to top the person up with no danger to him dying.

As for positioning, your healers should all be standing on the "inner circle" of the room, which means you'd be out of range of maximum 2, MAYBE 3 people if you've got a lot of ranged. Besides, you have to run into the middle to Halo anyway.

We can keep arguing about this, but suffice to say, your reasons are bullshit - Absorbs on Malkorok are just as powerfull as on any other encounter, if not more so, because they do not interfere with the other healer's throughput. A healer having to cast direct heals on a target that eats an orb, vs a disc casting an instant shield on someone that just ate an orb, what will be quicker/put more healing on the target? A 400K PW:S.

Lightwell is tremendous on this encounter. Especially if you know how to make a macro to keybind lightwell, so you can glyph it. Unglyphed it only heals low health targets. It will keep ticking for a total time of 90s. Since you can cast it before the encounter starts and it won't be used until someone gets to low health it is something you can comfortably keep up the entire encounter.

No one are going to click the lightwell. There's enough going on in the encounter as is.
If it keeps ticking unlimited for 90 sec, then fair enough - it's tooltip states 15 heals, and I assumed it would heal multiple people at once. Not one at a time. Which then sort of makes it just another healing stream that might not only target the lowest person.

Reacting with instant spells is woefully inefficient. Having a disc priest rolling PWS on the raid is just pointless. A 250k heal is equivalent to a 250k absorb when someone has no heals. That is because if you are bursting with single target heals that person is in danger of taking damage in the next couple of seconds. It does not matter if you overheal on this target, you are leaving efficiency to the side for a moment because you have to save someone. If you have too many of these moments however you will fall behind on the healing. That is why what does matter is the overall healing on the raid. When your aegis from Halo or PoH goes onto the targets that a druid has just put rejuves on. That aegis is going to suck up the damage aura, but leaving targets without rejuve and no absorbs vulnerable to health loss. PWS is a small fraction of your HPS and it is used on targets where no one cares about interference.

Wait what? A 250K absorb is equivelant to a 250K heal at *any time* during this encounter. Worst case scenario, the 250K shield absorbs the ticking aura, that then does not further diminish the encounter shield, giving the other healers ample time to have their HoT's heal the encounter shield up to full. You just mentioned yourself that you'd expect my shields to last 8 seconds due to the ticking aura, which means that the aegis etc will be gone even quicker. There's no "interference" to speak of - this encounter synergises absorbs and healing exceptionally well compared to most others.

Think for a moment man. Who is in danger of dying the most and who needs a constant stream of heals to make sure they get don't lose anymore health to closely spaced ability hits? Smart heals fulfil an important function on malko (though atonement is the weakest one due to the one target per hit limitation).

Smart heals are still best used on CD, but they are woefully inefficient because you need to keep the entire raid topped. Not just the five or six lowest people. Shamans can't chain heal as it'll always jump to the same people, one healing rain+efflo keeps melee topped, it basicly leaves the healers spamming their highest singletarget throughput heal.

The biggest problem in this encounter is those closely spaced ability hits or orbs before a hit. Aegis is obviously fantastic for this, but a) it does not last very long in this environment and b) it often goes on people who don't need it. Holy produces a constant stream of healing on a large number of targets that adds healing ticks before you can even react with PWS. The overlapping healing from many healers produces a constant stream of healing that automatically takes the edge of those double hits before they even happen. Sometimes disc prevents those double hits completely sometimes it lets them through COMPLETELY UNMITIGATED. This never happens because of PWS. Is purely down to aegis. What makes disc so bad is that most of the time the absorbs just eat up the aura damage, which is not what you want!!. This is precisely as I have explained. A sieve where half the holes are tiny and half are large. The analogy couldn't be more fitting.

So you're telling me that you're too slow to react to someone losing their shield and casting a PW:S on them in the next global, to protect against implosions/knocks etc? Yea, no, not buying it. I do that every single week. Just because you can't react quickly enough and think that it's all dependant on RNG from aegis does not make that correct - you might just need to pay more attention to your raid frames.
Besides that, the overlapping healing is fairly inconsequential in being able to keep a person from losing health if it does indeed happen as quickly as you suggest, with no time to react.

Nope. You didn't calculate aegis expiring on pets. Disc always has more overhealing on pets, because the level 90 talent, which is the major source of pet healing is actually a larger part of disc healing, mostly due to the aegis. The overhealing is more than double what you think it is.

Actually, I did. Please just take a look at the logs before you dismiss something. The 8.1M overhealing from disc includes divine aegis.

Lucky crit streaks are an even bigger part of top disc logs. Another reason why it is just not a very good way of looking at things, they don't reflect what happens most of the time in a fight and you can't guarantee equal streaks. More importantly holy gets less of a benefit from crit. The maxima of the output due to lucky streaks are going to heavily favour disc. This isn't about artefacts introduced by the way ranking works.

No, they reflect the best possible scenario that has ever happened so far, which is the best we can hope for, and thus the best ones to compare. Comparing two specs will always end up with fallacies no matter how you do it. This is by far the best way, though, because both people have had incredible luck and have achieved the max potential of the specs as has been recorded so far.

Pot lasts 30 seconds. Aegis lasts 15, spirit shell lasts 15. If you time it right you use the aegis from a DS and spirit shell on first roar smite HF (roar) penance to restack archangel then archangel and DS on the second roar. Heroism is on the part of the roar phase where the disc is crushing everyone else, and especially if hymn is not used on every roar phase, because the boss is getting bum raped in 4 minutes it is no surprise that the first spike will be won by disc, especially at this gear level. Your second coat proc tends to coincide with the begining of the first roar phase as well, since it procs at the very start.

And again. FUCKING READ, Havoc. The comparisons have been made from the 41 second and on, because that's when he starts roaring every 2-3 seconds (and thus, the intensive phase), NOT the full first phase. Disc was crushing the holy priest even during the intensive phase where you couldn't divine star every roar. It's very nice that you know how to open up as disc to get the max output, but it's completly irrelevant to the discussion. You can complain that disc has a giant advantage due to absorbs all you want for the first 40 seconds, but I LITERALLY LEFT THAT OUT so there wouldn't be anything unfair about it. IT IS *JUST* the intensive part of the phase.

Disc barrier is half the value of hymn. You make several elementary errors. A good chunk of healing from DH is EoL, which does not show up as DH healing. On top of that you are looking at effective healing not raw throughput, which is what we are comparing here. The effective healing you get from hymn varies depending on the conditions. Finally you are forgetting that the healing buff is refreshed by DH as you channel it so it lasts for an average of 12s. In half the targets barrier has a quarter of the value of hymn. You generally use barrier at the end when you stack for the last two hits, to minimise losses from the transition, so it does not even cover two screeches. There is no situation where barrier is superior to hymn, if the damage is not enough to effectively insta kill the raid. I demonstrated this mathematically in this very forum. Search for it.

Now you're the one making a ton of "elementary errors"

First off, I was never comparing raw throughput. The hymn on the log I've been using as an example did 12.5M healing. The average screech did 300K damage.
I did get the numbers wrong though, so it's only 4M or so saved for half the raid for 4 screeches, or 8M for the full raid.
Thing is, your EOL and +healing benefit along with the raw power of hymn only benefits as long as people have lost HP (he used it during a kite phase where everyone was low as far as I can see) - not to mention that the time spent channeling hymn is spent casting stuff for disc aswell, adding to their throughput.
And I'm not "just going to search for it", because you have given me absolutely nothing to search for. Not even a topic, or a phrase from the post itself. How the everliving fuck would I be able to search for it.

On thokk, disc will produce more healing overall, because the only time that holy gets free reign is at 15-30stacks. In this region of the fight holy is significant stronger than disc, especially when optimised properly in terms of gear and casting strategy. Again the caveat is if you have very strong shaman healers, because they work better with disc and the encounter mechanics favour them greatly.

Except there's no difference between 5-20 stacks, and 15-30 stacks. And the two logs are both looking at 05->whenever they phased (+25) stacks. And disc won.