[6.1] Disc Priest Guide

[PosPosPos]

And his hps blowed.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...9&type=healing

Because it isn't normal for healers to have an agreement to take turns to let each other parse on farm. Or that there are always people who don't care about parsing well even though it's on deep farm - which is more than perfectly fine, if not a very commendable attitude as far as healers go.

From a mana perspective? Sure i can see how their regen would be better with MB but they will still cripple their Penance usage.

And why would that matter when PW:S has a higher HPET value compared to defensive Penance? It's obvious when you have better regen, you get to cast more expensive but more effective spells.

[TehCrab]

Not to sidetrack this thread as we already have one dedicated to MB vs. Solace - but as mentioned there, and what I see first hand from my Mythic BRF experience is that yes ON PAPER MB may be better (for both mana return, and freeing up GCDs for more PW:S) BUT using Solace allows you to Penance which in 'real world' (my experience at least) I come out on logs/throughput ahead with Solace due to defensive Penance.

Comparing directly from one farm week to the next (MB vs. Solace) my Penance heals go from 7-10m down to barely anything due to having the majority of Penance's as Offensive. That extra shield every 'x' is simply not making up for it in MY raid team.

Again, personal observation (in my raid enivorment) and no doubt will be picked apart.

[Spotnick]

Well, nothing stops you from using Holy Fire if you want to keep your defensive penance. Must say it's a really hard habit to lose, I should definitively remove Smite/HF from my bars lol.

[Kalarae]

Generally reasonable guide, but a few points that I disagree with.

Firstly - stat prios - You mention a "cast based" rotation - I wasn't under the impression such a thing was ever viable? CoW is useful, but PoH is generally (always?) a throughput loss unless it's under EAA and flash is an emergency heal.

I'd lean towards Pos' priority list also, haste isn't bad, it's just throughput at the expense of mana, so has a spirit requirement attached to it. Also I was under the impression that MS>crit, not >=, simply because of EAA being 100% crit? I know the numbers are tight, but it's probably a destinction worth making.

I'd personally remove any suggestion that Glyph of PW:S is anything other than trash. There's a potentially nice relationship with ToF, but until that buffs shields also then it's not even worth mentioning imo.

A few things, MS > Crit is only just barely and probably will be Crit > MS depending on our gear next tier. From what I remember about MS it's only better than crit, and just barely better like (.1 to .099) until around 1.5k rating and then crit becomes top. This has to do with multistrike's DR even with the 100% EAA crit. There's also the side effect from our passive where we get 5% more crit, so we only actually need ~105 crit per 1% which equates to around 1.1-1.15% increase assuming 50% mastery.

The stat priority is a different thing. Haste, as I mathed out earlier, is incredibly strong and just barely loses to mastery. However, it comes at the hidden cost of spirit being tacked on. If you are not running oom on a fight and has excess mana to spare then haste is better. But if you are going oom, more haste will only lower your numbers as it is less beneficial than any other stat if you need more spirit to keep up. There is also a side effect of haste that pos forgot, quantity != quality which matters a lot more for progression. Sure it won't matter for a fight like kromog when you're doing nothing but spamming shields but how about a fight like Blackhand, like I mentioned earlier. When you're limited in who you need to shield, getting more oomph into your shields is more important than being able to cast one more every 15 seconds. At the end of the day, haste is terrible for disc on progression but is great for farm. I'll actually be going for DPS pieces and grabbing more haste/mastery for fights that are ending relatively quickly.

Lastly, the cast oriented build is an actual thing. It has nothing to do with not casting shields or even speccing into CoW. Just look at the majority of logs that Pos linked, almost all of them cast around 2x as many PoH, if not more, than they cast Archangel and not all of them are using the 4 set. PoH, simply put, is our highest HPET spell by a long shot. it is slightly over 1100% spell power, outside of EAA has 10% increased chance to crit, and is cast in the time it takes to get out 1.66 shields. Those 1.66 shields are only 761% spell power and benefit less from crit than PoH does.

Not to sidetrack this thread as we already have one dedicated to MB vs. Solace - but as mentioned there, and what I see first hand from my Mythic BRF experience is that yes ON PAPER MB may be better (for both mana return, and freeing up GCDs for more PW:S) BUT using Solace allows you to Penance which in 'real world' (my experience at least) I come out on logs/throughput ahead with Solace due to defensive Penance.

Comparing directly from one farm week to the next (MB vs. Solace) my Penance heals go from 7-10m down to barely anything due to having the majority of Penance's as Offensive. That extra shield every 'x' is simply not making up for it in MY raid team.

Again, personal observation (in my raid enivorment) and no doubt will be picked apart.

I just talked about this with someone on reddit but defensive penance isn't bad and has a lot of use if you absolutely need the single target heal. If I'm not mistaken, 3 penances and using arch angel at 3 stacks would still be more worthwhile overall. I think one huge problem with solace in "real world" as you said is not its theoritcal GCD usage but in how we actually use shields. We generally want to spam over a 10-20 second window depending on the mechanic and you have to decide if the GCD at that time is actually worth it. At least for me, when I bender in p1 and 2 of blackhand almost no damage is going out and the tanks have shields/weakened soul so I'm not actually losing anything with the GCD whereas you can't say the same for solace. That said, if you need to tank heal, you need to tank heal and should use penance defensively.

I should probably add that somewhere in my guide, if you want to parse you should probably stay away from defensive penance except in downtime but if progression is your goal that do what keeps your raid alive and thats really up to you to know when you should be penancing defensively.

[PosPosPos]

There is also a side effect of haste that pos forgot, quantity != quality which matters a lot more for progression. Sure it won't matter for a fight like kromog when you're doing nothing but spamming shields but how about a fight like Blackhand, like I mentioned earlier.

So you have different stat priorities for different fights. What a surprise. Progression isn't limited to Blackhand and even then, there are plenty of suitable targets to shield if you know what you are doing that the quantity is comparable to quality.

If anything, being able to shield more targets with a slightly weaker shield is more useful, as your job is to cushion the impact of incoming raid damage on as many targets as possible.

Shielding 10 players with a 100k shield is better than shielding 9 players with 111k shields because you effectively gave a health buffer to 1 extra person.

Haste gear also generally comes with Mastery attached as you have mentioned previously, so you aren't losing quality when you obtain quantity.

When you're limited in who you need to shield, getting more oomph into your shields is more important than being able to cast one more every 15 seconds. At the end of the day, haste is terrible for disc on progression but is great for farm. I'll actually be going for DPS pieces and grabbing more haste/mastery for fights that are ending relatively quickly.

When you are limited to who you need to shield, you run Clarity of Will. Like Maidens. Of which Haste scales even better because you want to spend more time being able to move than not.

At the end of the day, your incredibly flawed argument falls down to two major points:

1) Haste is bad for progression - which is false because you access your burst healing faster, which is the only thing that matters on progression
2) When one itemizes for Haste, it can only mean they are going for quantity instead of quality and not both - which is false because many Mastery pieces come with Haste, and Disc has amazing synergy with Haste via Borrowed Time and Mindbender.



This is also why I cannot take this guide seriously - claims on one hand that progression-oriented healing is of paramount importance, but fails to comprehend and respect the value of the best progression-oriented stat - Haste.

This is not including the countless instances of backtracking, goalpost shifting, handwaving top parses in one post, then proceeds to use the same top parses to leverage arguments.

P.S. The haste versus mastery calculations in your earlier posts are completely wrong.

Incoming Wall of Text (by the way, the majority of people you linked are either in shadow gear or are trolling. I.e. the priest with 2 rings with multistrike enchants, no cloak enchant)

They were in shadow spec, but wearing disc gear, and only one was decked out in holy priest gear. But keep nitpicking, it's working out well.

Haste sucks, period. Let me quickly provide you with some napkin math to show you why:

Lets assume you have enough haste for 11 casts per 15 seconds ~13.5% haste raid buffed with borrowed time. That is roughly 546 haste. To get one additional cast your raid buffed haste needs to hit 25%. This requires 739 additional haste. So now you're casting 12 times. So for posterity's sake, what is that amount to as say crit or mastery. 739 Mastery is equal to a 10% increase in shields and 5% increase in direct healing. 739 multi is equal to a 7% increase in crit. So lets say at a base each cast absorbs 10k. 11 casts with 739 mastery is equal to 121, 11 casts with 7% crit is equal to 117.7. 12 casts with 25% haste is equal to 120.

So it's pretty obvious Mastery wins out but I was actually kind of surprised at haste having such an advantage over crit until I remembered HPM.

The thing is, this assumes a low mastery base. If you already had a 10% mastery base(base mastery is 12.8%, so I am discounting it a lot as is), the calculations look like this:

11 casts with 739 extra mastery = 132k 12 casts with 739 haste = 132k

If you already had 30% mastery after buffs(10% with gear, and ~20% from base mastery + mastery raid buff)

11 casts with 739 mastery = 154k 12 casts with 739 haste = 156k

If you have 44% mastery after buffs(which I do, without needing to drop my haste)

11 casts with 739 mastery = 169.4k 12 casts with 739 haste = 172.8k

So what we can take from this is, as Mastery increases, the value of haste increases; and that you fail to account for a practical value of mastery(i.e. what sort of mastery value one would run this tier) when factoring in multiplicative stats.

Is your current mastery that low that 1 point of Mastery is more valuable than 1 point of Haste? Let me answer for someone who hates haste and definitely has stacked mastery to the maximum - it's a no.

*lots of non-arguments that don't have anything to do with progression healing

That's nice, on progression though, you can just opt to pad meters less and move healing to a point where it is actually needed. For example, it's pretty much padding to shield during Gruul's intermission when you can just let cheap HoTs and raid healing deal with it.

So yes, in your own words, please stop padding meters and parsing.

[Kalarae]

I honestly don't even know how to convince haste is bad at this point since you have a completely broken idea of the healing model.

First of all, to address the last part of your post, you're again calculating haste with just its cost. You cannot calculate haste w/o the extra cost in spirit, there is just no way.

So I'll just go ahead and use your last calculation to further prove my point:

If you have 44% mastery after buffs(which I do, without needing to drop my haste)

11 casts with 739 mastery = 169.4k 12 casts with 739 haste = 172.8k

Let's go ahead and mix it up a bit. The 11 casts would be either with 1159 Mastery OR 739 Mastery and 236 int. This is because, as I've said countless times, you can't count haste without counting its spirit cost. With using mindbender, the spirit cost for this much haste would be 420. Since most people have been using full gear with spirit, their only option for extra spirit is on the trinket where 420 spirit equates to roughly 236 int. (Almost all the people you linked were using a spirit trinket so let's see if it actually played out). So I'm going to have to change it up a bit from using that 10k I posted earlier to using actual values. I'll continue on with my current numbers. My shields, currently, are 70k. With 50% mastery and 7.5% vers. This is a raw shield value of 43.4k. Each point of int is * 1.05 (kings) * 1.1 (SP buff) * 1.05 (armor spec) which would total up to 286 spell power. That is a 1312 increase in raw shield values. Let's use that with my numbers and see what we get.

Base Shield: 43.4k
Vers: 7.5%
Base Mastery: 50%

11 casts with 1159 Mastery (a total of 67.4% mastery buffed) = 859.2k.
11 casts with 739 Mastery (61% mastery) and 236 Int (44.7k raw shield value) = 851k (Lower but more consistent with what you'd be replacing spirit for)

12 casts with 739 Haste = 840k

Do you need more proof? If you keep trying to do the math of purely haste being better then guess what, you're right. No one is disagreeing with you from a point by point basis of haste being better at increasing numbers ON IT'S OWN. But again, for progression unless you're overhealing or you're overgearing, you will go OoM even without haste. So now that I have, yet again, shown that haste is inferior for progression and for numbers if you'd have to take extra spirit, lets go over the rest of your post.

So you have different stat priorities for different fights. What a surprise. Progression isn't limited to Blackhand and even then, there are plenty of suitable targets to shield if you know what you are doing that the quantity is comparable to quality.

If anything, being able to shield more targets with a slightly weaker shield is more useful, as your job is to cushion the impact of incoming raid damage on as many targets as possible.

Shielding 10 players with a 100k shield is better than shielding 9 players with 111k shields because you effectively gave a health buffer to 1 extra person.

Haste gear also generally comes with Mastery attached as you have mentioned previously, so you aren't losing quality when you obtain quantity.

No no no

First of all the end goal of people raiding in this tier is not to kill blast furnace or maidens and call it a day. You go for the end game, the boss that will take you the longest to progress on. While you might be progressing on maidens, the gear decisions you make are more vital for blackhand. Unless you're spending a lot of time progressing and clearing farm which would allow you to rack up different pieces of gear to tailor make each fight, you choose the gear that's best suited for the last boss. That being said, no gear choices I make with my stat priority change from fight to fight. The stat priority only changes when you are able to overgear the content and then haste becomes more favorable. Otherwise, it's pretty static. As far as quantity being equal to quality, if you don't realize how wrong that is then you've yet to see phase 2 or phase 3 blackhand. The mechanics are staggered, it's not although all of a sudden 10 people have a debuff and need a shield. You have plenty of time with a low haste build (I know cause I can do it and I run 2% unbuffed haste) to get shields on everyone. So that time you save by having more haste means those shields are weaker and the shielded players will take more damage which actually very well could kill them.

As far as shielding is concerned, I'd shield 5 people with a 200k shield over shielding 10 people with a 100k shield because it simplifies the healing field for ALL other healers. The only thing shielding more people will do will increase the chance other people in your raid will overheal. Why? Because a lot of heals that healers can send out are the new "injured players" type heals or indiscriminate HoTs. When more people have taken less damage (aka extra shields), spells like Uplift, Rejuv, LoD, Chain Heal, all have a higher chance to overheal. You're also increasing the chance that these injured player heals will heal someone who isn't in need of one because they had an absorb. Going from 10 to 11 shields per 15 seconds is 2% extra mana (10% more) every 15 seconds that you're hemorrhaging for lower shields and lower throughput (assuming you needed spirit to compensate for the mana loss). So not only are your other healers overhealing more and tossing out more 'injured' heals out on people that don't need them, you're also healing less overall and dumping mana at a 10% faster rate. None of that is good for progression in any way, shape, or form.

As far as your last part is concerned, 1 piece of gear has mastery attached to haste with no other other mastery options (disregarding BH's helm). If you're going haste you can't afford to give up the spirit and I'm fairly certain the multistrike/spirit gear would be BiS (multi is low on our gear, has more spirit than the crit pieces). There are 4 pieces that have haste/mastery: Tier legs, BH helm, Beastlord belt, Oreo gloves. Of those 4 only 2 don't have a second option with mastery on it and one of them is the BH helm which unless you get from a cache you won't see till progression is over. The tier legs can be replaced with crit/mastery from Maidens, the gloves with Vers/Mastery from kromog (and they have more mastery).

When you are limited to who you need to shield, you run Clarity of Will. Like Maidens. Of which Haste scales even better because you want to spend more time being able to move than not.

At the end of the day, your incredibly flawed argument falls down to two major points:

1) Haste is bad for progression - which is false because you access your burst healing faster, which is the only thing that matters on progression
2) When one itemizes for Haste, it can only mean they are going for quantity instead of quality and not both - which is false because many Mastery pieces come with Haste, and Disc has amazing synergy with Haste via Borrowed Time and Mindbender.



This is also why I cannot take this guide seriously - claims on one hand that progression-oriented healing is of paramount importance, but fails to comprehend and respect the value of the best progression-oriented stat - Haste.

Lets prove both of those "major flaws"

You at one point said if there are limited targets just run CoW. When there is one target that needs shields, maybe 2, you can reliably do it. But how about 8, how about intervals of 4, 3, 3? Are you going to run CoW on beastlord just to give people that got rend and tear a bigger shield? What about on furnace, about 10 people get volatile fire in waves of 5, are you going to give them Cow too? The fact you even brought up CoW for that further showed me how flawed your view of the current healing model is.

So I could go further on as to why haste is bad for progression, but I've told you more times than I can count:
1) It's less overall healing when you have to add in spirit (even at very high gear levels)
2) It offers no benefit for limited targeted abilities, like inferno slash, when you could get a shield on every player that would be hit
3) On fights where it could be useful, other healers will overheal more
4) Haste hemorrhages mana; you have to give up a lot of other stats just to accommodate haste.

That should clear up your first point.

As for the second point, I've already shown earlier that it is indeed the case that you have a direct choice between pieces of loot. If you're running haste all the haste/mastery secondary pieces are offlimits to you. Not only are you a healer who won't see those during progression, you also need the spirit from the multi/crit spirit secondaries just to sustain your casts. As far as Mindbender and haste goes, Mindbender only subsidizes the cost of haste somewhat. Yes they synergize together but at the same time going from 11 to 12 casts is at best 100 spirit. I included that in my calculations, so it took overall less extra spirit on gear, and haste still lost.

That's nice, on progression though, you can just opt to pad meters less and move healing to a point where it is actually needed. For example, it's pretty much padding to shield during Gruul's intermission when you can just let cheap HoTs and raid healing deal with it.

So yes, in your own words, please stop padding meters and parsing.

Shielding in Gruul's intermission is not padding. Your shields are just as cheap as everyone else's cheap heal. And again even if shields were half as strong you'd still shield during this phase because its an extra chunk of health to the people you put them on. If you're going to use that philosophy, then on iron maidens you might as well just spam the Blood Ritual/Blade Dash/Dark Hunt target the whole fight and ignore tanks, stop healing when bombs come out cause other healers can handle that. Padding on gruul is not casting shields to prevent people from taking damage, it's casting PoH after people have taken damage and other healers have hots rolling on them.

I understand what you're trying to argue but you're cherry picking evidence to support it. You use logical fallacies to prove your points and you misinterpret the evidence that I have posted. When my math was, admittedly, wrong, you did math that only suited to prove your point instead of doing the correct math to calculate the value of haste (including spirit, reducing the spirit cost for extra mindbender hits). When all you do is follow what the top 10 parsers do without actually understanding why they do it in the first place.


I hope all this information I posted about haste served of some use to someone even if it served no use to you.

[PosPosPos]

I honestly don't even know how to convince haste is bad at this point since you have a completely broken idea of the healing model.

First of all, to address the last part of your post, you're again calculating haste with just its cost. You cannot calculate haste w/o the extra cost in spirit, there is just no way.

I will just leave this snippet right here:

But your overall HPS increased overall because of it, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much HPS you're pulling before something happens like say, a man at arms. If you aren't bursting as high as your potentional for the parts of the fight that require healing then you aren't doing your job as a progression healer, end of story.

So Haste, a stat that allows you access your highest burst potential at key points of fights at the potential cost of healing during low damage portions of the fight, goes against your own stated philosophy....oh wait.

So I'll just go ahead and use your last calculation to further prove my point:



Let's go ahead and mix it up a bit. The 11 casts would be either with 1159 Mastery OR 739 Mastery and 236 int.

Yet another reason to not take you seriously. You just shifted goalposts and added another pointless factor into the equation. If you want to compare Mastery and Haste, you are deliberately obfuscating readers by refusing to control all other factors. The base heal just needs to be "x" where x equals to sp scaling*passives*crit*MS*versa*mastery*haste and you tweak the Mastery and Haste knobs accordingly to compare the two.

But again, for progression unless you're overhealing or you're overgearing, you will go OoM even without haste. So now that I have, yet again, shown that haste is inferior for progression and for numbers if you'd have to take extra spirit, lets go over the rest of your post.

Sorry, but which world do you live in? Which guild still on progression doesn't overheal or overgear the encounters they are attempting?

"Underhealing" and "undergearing" the encounter only exists for top guilds. You are fucking writing a guide for players who are closer to average, aka they raid ±9 hours a week, range from progressing on heroics to having downed a handful of mythic bosses and farmed the easier encounters each week.

My guild for one, downed their first Iron Maidens with at least 10 average ilvls over the top 5 world guilds. What, if anything, is this not outgearing the encounter?

And what about the more casual guilds behind us, which are guaranteed to spend more weeks on the easier bosses to shore up as many chances to make the upcoming challenges easier?

First of all the end goal of people raiding in this tier is not to kill blast furnace or maidens and call it a day. You go for the end game, the boss that will take you the longest to progress on. While you might be progressing on maidens, the gear decisions you make are more vital for blackhand.

Last I checked, the thread title is: 6.1 Disc Priest Guide, and not 6.1 Mythic Blackhand Guide for Disc Priests. But of course, if you wish to shift goalposts for the umpteenth time, please go on right ahead.

Unless you're spending a lot of time progressing and clearing farm which would allow you to rack up different pieces of gear to tailor make each fight, you choose the gear that's best suited for the last boss. That being said, no gear choices I make with my stat priority change from fight to fight. The stat priority only changes when you are able to overgear the content and then haste becomes more favorable.

Refer to the part about overhealing/overhealing on progression, the fact you are so out of touch of reality is staggering.

Otherwise, it's pretty static. As far as quantity being equal to quality, if you don't realize how wrong that is then you've yet to see phase 2 or phase 3 blackhand. The mechanics are staggered, it's not although all of a sudden 10 people have a debuff and need a shield. You have plenty of time with a low haste build (I know cause I can do it and I run 2% unbuffed haste) to get shields on everyone. So that time you save by having more haste means those shields are weaker and the shielded players will take more damage which actually very well could kill them.

This assumes one has to trade in the best secondary stat aside from spirit and another throughput stat for a nominal value of Haste. Which isn't the case for everyone else who isn't stuck in the same well as you - they can have their cake and eat it as well.

As far as shielding is concerned, I'd shield 5 people with a 200k shield over shielding 10 people with a 100k shield because it simplifies the healing field for ALL other healers. The only thing shielding more people will do will increase the chance other people in your raid will overheal. Why? Because a lot of heals that healers can send out are the new "injured players" type heals or indiscriminate HoTs. When more people have taken less damage (aka extra shields), spells like Uplift, Rejuv, LoD, Chain Heal, all have a higher chance to overheal. You're also increasing the chance that these injured player heals will heal someone who isn't in need of one because they had an absorb. Going from 10 to 11 shields per 15 seconds is 2% extra mana (10% more) every 15 seconds that you're hemorrhaging for lower shields and lower throughput (assuming you needed spirit to compensate for the mana loss). So not only are your other healers overhealing more and tossing out more 'injured' heals out on people that don't need them, you're also healing less overall and dumping mana at a 10% faster rate. None of that is good for progression in any way, shape, or form.

This only applies if trading Haste for other throughput stats result in shields not breaking at all so you indeed do have more targets who are viable options for soaking "smart" heal quotas. In fact, you would rather a player break your shield, take 10k damage and soaks a "smart" heal, than a player break your shield, takes 1 damage and soaks a "smart" heal. Which is worse, healing for 10k, or healing for 1?

I do believe you need to prove that dropping a mere 500-800 haste rating in favor of other throughput stats like crit and multistrike(because you sure aren't sacrificing mastery on any slot except maybe the legendary ring slot) makes the difference between breaking your PW:S and not.

As far as your last part is concerned, 1 piece of gear has mastery attached to haste with no other other mastery options (disregarding BH's helm). If you're going haste you can't afford to give up the spirit and I'm fairly certain the multistrike/spirit gear would be BiS (multi is low on our gear, has more spirit than the crit pieces). There are 4 pieces that have haste/mastery: Tier legs, BH helm, Beastlord belt, Oreo gloves. Of those 4 only 2 don't have a second option with mastery on it and one of them is the BH helm which unless you get from a cache you won't see till progression is over. The tier legs can be replaced with crit/mastery from Maidens, the gloves with Vers/Mastery from kromog (and they have more mastery).

If you have to discredit Haste that you have to bring in Versatility into the equation, you must be getting rather desperate.

Lets prove both of those "major flaws"

I am not counting on it given your track record in this thread so far, but at least there's some entertainment value watching you grasp at straws.

You at one point said if there are limited targets just run CoW. When there is one target that needs shields, maybe 2, you can reliably do it.

I can do 4 with CoW. And it only gets easier with Haste.

But how about 8, how about intervals of 4, 3, 3? Are you going to run CoW on beastlord just to give people that got rend and tear a bigger shield?

No, I just reshield them every 10 seconds. Their shields are going to break early regardless of whether I run 800 Haste or 800 crit and/or multistrike.

What about on furnace, about 10 people get volatile fire in waves of 5, are you going to give them Cow too?

Shield 5, cast other spells in arsenal like Cascade, Penance, Mindbender/Solace, Prayer of Healing, Shield 5. With haste, I spend less time on fillers and have a bigger window to pre-shield target.

The fact you even brought up CoW for that further showed me how flawed your view of the current healing model is.

The fact you had to resort to strawman arguments(by limited I meant less than 5-6), shows not just me, but any reasonable spectator that you don't really have a valid point to make.

So I could go further on as to why haste is bad for progression, but I've told you more times than I can count:
1) It's less overall healing when you have to add in spirit (even at very high gear levels)

Oh oh oh, time for someone's famous words:

But your overall HPS increased overall because of it, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much HPS you're pulling before something happens like say, a man at arms. If you aren't bursting as high as your potentional for the parts of the fight that require healing then you aren't doing your job as a progression healer, end of story.

2) It offers no benefit for limited targeted abilities, like inferno slash, when you could get a shield on every player that would be hit

If you carry on shooting yourself in the foot, you will run the problem not having feet to shoot at all at some point.

This happens to be a mechanic where without sufficient haste, unless you are running like, only 5 melee including tanks total, you can run out of time to shield all targets or completely drop the notion of channeling Penance/cast solace to generate sufficient Evangelism stacks or casting EAA PoH for the next time AA comes off CD.

3) On fights where it could be useful, other healers will overheal more

Citation required. Needs more empirical evidence that 800 haste to a combination of crit/ms means the difference between shields breaking and not on Mythic.

4) Haste hemorrhages mana; you have to give up a lot of other stats just to accommodate haste.

That should clear up your first point.

And for the third time, I leave this here

But your overall HPS increased overall because of it, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much HPS you're pulling before something happens like say, a man at arms. If you aren't bursting as high as your potentional for the parts of the fight that require healing then you aren't doing your job as a progression healer, end of story.

As for the second point, I've already shown earlier that it is indeed the case that you have a direct choice between pieces of loot. If you're running haste all the haste/mastery secondary pieces are offlimits to you. Not only are you a healer who won't see those during progression, you also need the spirit from the multi/crit spirit secondaries just to sustain your casts.

This only applies for guilds that are of Method/Paragon/"insert top 100 guild name here" quality - guilds that competed for the world top spots in the first week or two and had little choice but to start progression with whatever gear they had scrounged up in Highmaul and the black market auction house and the one week in heroic/normal BRF before Mythic opened. Do you think your guide's intended audience is part of the "mad rush"?

You know, the thousands of other guilds who will have plenty of weeks farming the earlier bosses and having multiple copies of each piece drop. Our guild has had 2 Gruul Lip Rings drop off every kill for the 6 kills we have done - and that's just one outlier example, going back our loot drops we have had, we have disenchanted at least 1 haste/mastery cloak, 3 times the hands off Oregorger, 2 times the belt off Darmac. I don't think that is very much "offlimits" to me, especially for the less progressed guilds who will spend more weeks on the earlier bosses.

Shielding in Gruul's intermission is not padding. Your shields are just as cheap as everyone else's cheap heal.

It's not even remotely potential lethal damage, I can't see why shield blanketing during Gruul's intermission, or a better example, blanketing the melee group for Torrent on Flamebender outside of wolf phases would be anything BUT padding meters.

And again even if shields were half as strong you'd still shield during this phase because its an extra chunk of health to the people you put them on.

Of course I would, because padding meters is fine as long as it doesn't tax the other healers. It has always been your point that healing where it's not needed doesn't matter, which resulted in your proclamation that spirit was bad for progression.

So don't even try to pin this on me.

If you're going to use that philosophy, then on iron maidens you might as well just spam the Blood Ritual/Blade Dash/Dark Hunt target the whole fight and ignore tanks, stop healing when bombs come out cause other healers can handle that.

I maintain Weakened Soul on the tanks and occasionally hit CoW on them when I have spare GCDs outside of shielding soakers. Unlike you, I can trust my holy paladin to do his job and keep our tanks healed, so yes, I can spam Blood Ritual/Blade Dash/Dark Hunt targets the whole fight. With my haste value, I can easily juggle healing the tanks and soakers and while padding meters on those mechanics.

During bombardment phases, I just go back to a mana positive rotation, it's not like the active tank takes any damage unless it's during the push to kill the Sanguine Strikes girl.

Padding on gruul is not casting shields to prevent people from taking damage, it's casting PoH after people have taken damage and other healers have hots rolling on them.

Again, you have to do better than that and prove that an extra ~800 haste over crit/ms is the difference between shields breaking and not. Otherwise, in both cases, it's still padding meters by your standards that it snipes all the other healers' hots.

I understand what you're trying to argue but you're cherry picking evidence to support it. You use logical fallacies to prove your points and you misinterpret the evidence that I have posted.

No, I simply played your game, your rules and came out the better for it. The one who resorted to logical fallacies by shifting goalposts(discussing haste versus mastery, and suddenly crit and int comes into the picture; discrediting the value of haste, when by his own standards haste would indeed be the best stat that clearly covers all his reservations, brings in mana longevity when it clearly doesn't matter if one stops padding meters) and bad math, was you.

When my math was, admittedly, wrong, you did math that only suited to prove your point instead of doing the correct math to calculate the value of haste (including spirit, reducing the spirit cost for extra mindbender hits). When all you do is follow what the top 10 parsers do without actually understanding why they do it in the first place.

That was your point, I might remind you for the umpteenth time:

But your overall HPS increased overall because of it, that doesn't matter. It doesn't matter how much HPS you're pulling before something happens like say, a man at arms. If you aren't bursting as high as your potentional for the parts of the fight that require healing then you aren't doing your job as a progression healer, end of story.

The extra mana cost of Haste is easily made up for during periods of downtime. By downtime, periods of trivial raid damage.

I hope all this information I posted about haste served of some use to someone even if it served no use to you.

It wasn't clear before, but it is now until I have read this asinine statement of yours: your thread/guide, and by extension you, have serious identity issues.

You want your guide to cater to aspirant disc priests who are either 1) just starting out 2) progressing late heroics/early mythics 3) halfway or nearly completed the tier, but the only due consideration to factors given by you, is to what factors only cutting edge guilds face when they do progression raiding(undergearing and underhealing fights in bid to push all bosses down before everyone else).

So what exactly is it you are trying to do here? Are you really trying to cater to an audience of players who will undoubtedly never face the conditions you set and base your entire guide on? Or is this some rather hilarious borderline troll attempt to teach your grandmother(top raiders who have already cleared the tier in the world top 100s) how to suck eggs(your own narrow and myopic style of disc healing)?

[DeezeNuts]

It's threads like this that makes people not want to be a part of the Priest community. People pretending they know everything in a game that's always changing while giving off a passive aggressive attitude and arguing over math/healing meters.

[Deleted]

Hey guys, I don't mean to derail the *cough* friendly discussion you two seem to have going here but I am finding myself with too much haste for my liking (through the randomness of drops, not by choice) and something Kalarae said stood out to me:

As far as your last part is concerned, 1 piece of gear has mastery attached to haste with no other other mastery options (disregarding BH's helm). If you're going haste you can't afford to give up the spirit and I'm fairly certain the multistrike/spirit gear would be BiS (multi is low on our gear, has more spirit than the crit pieces). There are 4 pieces that have haste/mastery: Tier legs, BH helm, Beastlord belt, Oreo gloves. Of those 4 only 2 don't have a second option with mastery on it and one of them is the BH helm which unless you get from a cache you won't see till progression is over. The tier legs can be replaced with crit/mastery from Maidens, the gloves with Vers/Mastery from kromog (and they have more mastery)

It got me thinking I had missed something and was going for the wrong pieces so I took a look again at my alternatives:

BRF gear with haste/mastery (though it is possible to wear HM pieces over normal/heroic BRF gear obviously):
1. Cloak - Runefrenzy Greatcloak - no other option w/ mastery
2. Boots - Cavedweller's Climbers - no other option w/ mastery
3. Ring - Uk'urogg's Corrupted Seal - no other option w/ mastery
4. Gloves - Toothbreaker Grips - versatility/mastery is another option though since everyone seems to agree that versatility is the worst stats not sure why we should prefer this
5. Helm - Slagbomber's Hood - no other option w/ mastery but most people won't get it on mythic unless it's from cache (only including this because I got it from cache already)
6. Legs - Tier - crit/mastery is another option if you don't need tier for set bonus
7. Neck - Gruul's Lip Ring - no other option w/ mastery
8. Weapon - Dagger of Blazing Radiance or Inferno Flame Staff - only other option w/ mastery is off Blackhand which most people won't get on mythic
9. Belt - Seeking Ember Girdle - no other option w/mastery

Looking at the above from a purely selfish and personal perspective as it applies to ME and MY guild and MY raid makeup, I'm left confused as to how I can avoid haste at all, which I think makes a good case because my progression (7/10M) and raid makeup (always 1 extra healer) atm I feel is pretty reflective of the average mythic raider who raids 2-3 days, from what I can see on wowprogress.

Because we never underheal, and I have a spirit trinket (Autoclave) even though it has haste proc, I never have any mana issues and find it a waste to give up mastery cloak/ring/belts for the spirit ones when I'm already swimming in mana for the most part.

So from the point of view of a very average non-theorycrafter mythic raider, assuming this guide isn't meant for cutting edge guilds (as I doubt they need guides in the first place), haste is nearly impossible to avoid and now with reforging/gems not providing any diversity anymore, all this discussion about minuscule differences in stats seems overkill for the intended audience of this guide.

[Deleted]

only other option w/ mastery is off Blachand which most people won't get on mythic unless it's from cache[/B]

Just letting you know, you can´t get weapons from cache

[Deleted]

Just letting you know, you can´t get weapons from cache

Thanks for letting me know so that limits my options even further =(

[Kalarae]

It's threads like this that makes people not want to be a part of the Priest community. People pretending they know everything in a game that's always changing while giving off a passive aggressive attitude and arguing over math/healing meters.

I don't know why you say people, it's more so him if you read his last post vs mine. Anyhow I was hardly arguing over math/meters but the utility of the different stats. I merely included the haste math because that's the point he's brought up everytime he's posted in this thread. But as you said, there is really no point in continuing this argument which is why I chose not to respond to his wall of text.

Hey guys, I don't mean to derail the *cough* friendly discussion you two seem to have going here but I am finding myself with too much haste for my liking (through the randomness of drops, not by choice) and something Kalarae said stood out to me:



It got me thinking I had missed something and was going for the wrong pieces so I took a look again at my alternatives:

BRF gear with haste/mastery (though it is possible to wear HM pieces over normal/heroic BRF gear obviously):
1. Cloak - Runefrenzy Greatcloak - no other option w/ mastery
2. Boots - Cavedweller's Climbers - no other option w/ mastery
3. Ring - Uk'urogg's Corrupted Seal - no other option w/ mastery
4. Gloves - Toothbreaker Grips - versatility/mastery is another option though since everyone seems to agree that versatility is the worst stats not sure why we should prefer this
5. Helm - Slagbomber's Hood - no other option w/ mastery but most people won't get it on mythic unless it's from cache (only including this because I got it from cache already)
6. Legs - Tier - crit/mastery is another option if you don't need tier for set bonus
7. Neck - Gruul's Lip Ring - no other option w/ mastery
8. Weapon - Dagger of Blazing Radiance or Inferno Flame Staff - only other option w/ mastery is off Blackhand which most people won't get on mythic
9. Belt - Seeking Ember Girdle - no other option w/mastery

Looking at the above from a purely selfish and personal perspective as it applies to ME and MY guild and MY raid makeup, I'm left confused as to how I can avoid haste at all, which I think makes a good case because my progression (7/10M) and raid makeup (always 1 extra healer) atm I feel is pretty reflective of the average mythic raider who raids 2-3 days, from what I can see on wowprogress.

Because we never underheal, and I have a spirit trinket (Autoclave) even though it has haste proc, I never have any mana issues and find it a waste to give up mastery cloak/ring/belts for the spirit ones when I'm already swimming in mana for the most part.

So from the point of view of a very average non-theorycrafter mythic raider, assuming this guide isn't meant for cutting edge guilds (as I doubt they need guides in the first place), haste is nearly impossible to avoid and now with reforging/gems not providing any diversity anymore, all this discussion about minuscule differences in stats seems overkill for the intended audience of this guide.

Personally, I think going for the autoclave was an incredibly bad idea, especially for progression. Proc trinkets are awful, especially for disc priests. The basis of the huge chain of posts earlier was about the utility that disc brings and that comes at set points in the fight and proc trinkets are awful for this. So basically you're using a trinket only for it's spirit, that's why I progressed (until BH died) with candle and chewtoy. As far as the gear goes, I personally wouldn't have said no to haste/mastery gear, except for the belt (multistrike is incredibly low on our gear and it buffs up Enhanced PoH) but they always go to DPS first (at least the offpieces). Healers, on average, should be able to do the content at a lower ilvl compared to the dps, at the very least DPS should get them first. You're honestly hurting your raid more by trying to take that gear over dps for progression. I also think as far as progression goes, the multi/spirit off pieces are really good even if you're drowning in spirit but that's only because I find multistrike to be one of our better stats especially with how low we have it on our gear. But that being said, if you're not going OoM the haste/mastery are probably going to be BiS for you. It just provides no additional effective health but will increase your throughput.


Also the boots are crit/mastery not haste/mastery.

[carabaci]

I'm not saying no to haste/mastery I think you misunderstood my post or I wasn't able to express myself clearly. I said I was going for haste/mastery because they were the only decent options with mastery for 5-6 slots for me, unlike only for 1 spot as you said. (And this is totally beside the point but just for my own sanity, Ive never "taken" anything from anyone in 10 years I pass almost every single item to people who need it more )

Which is why I said the discussion you guys had over haste felt like a moot point for the intended audience of this guide, which I assumed to be the average mythic raider, based on the title, the content and the things you said in your previous posts and the fact that high end mythic raiders don't need guides in the first place. If I was mistaken maybe might want to clarify who it's intended for because it's a great guide which is being derailed by irrelevant discussions that probably belong in a different thread. (for example the "how much haste do we want" thread, not able to link)

This is Nixee btw, different username

[Kalarae]

I'm not saying no to haste/mastery I think you misunderstood my post or I wasn't able to express myself clearly. I said I was going for haste/mastery because they were the only decent options with mastery for 5-6 slots for me, unlike only for 1 spot as you said. (And this is totally beside the point but just for my own sanity, Ive never "taken" anything from anyone in 10 years I pass almost every single item to people who need it more )

Which is why I said the discussion you guys had over haste felt like a moot point for the intended audience of this guide, which I assumed to be the average mythic raider, based on the title, the content and the things you said in your previous posts and the fact that high end mythic raiders don't need guides in the first place. If I was mistaken maybe might want to clarify who it's intended for because it's a great guide which is being derailed by irrelevant discussions that probably belong in a different thread. (for example the "how much haste do we want" thread, not able to link)

This is Nixee btw, different username

Fair enough on your first point, I definitely agree that thise are you best options but that might have been lost in my ramblings about haste. As far as the haste discussion goes, I completely agree. I feel I got lost in math and hyptotheticals that I didn't look past the fact that there are limited options for our gear.

I needed your post or I probably would've argued till the ends of the earth about haste. Thankfully posts like yours can keep me level headed by slapping some rationality into me.

If anyone has any questions about my guide or otherwise I'm here to help