Please Help Me Improve My Disc Raid Healing

[Mil3High]

I feel that my healing as a discipline priest is simply mediocre. I joined the second raid group of my guild, which just before raids opened, had 0 healers. I had a level 18 Shadow artifact, with minimal, but not 0, investment in Light's Wrath. I switched to maining Discipline to fill our gap. I am a healer at heart, which made the decision easy for me. I am still 15k AP away from Sins of the Many, but I don't think that's the major issue.

Our raid has been progressing at a rate that I am extremely happy with. We just finished Normal EN on 9/29, but I have started to feel like almost a burden to the group (though the RL has never called me out on anything). I'm in roughly the 60th percentile for Disc Priests in this content. My HPS is generally around 170k and DPS in the 45-50k range. My item level was sitting around 845 for these fights, and my crit is at 23%, haste at 24%, and mastery at 21%. I would love to post logs, but I haven't posted enough on these forums to allow me to post links.

I am concerned with the fact that my DPS is extremely low for a Discipline Priest, and I believe my healing is suffering because of that. I also know that my timing of burst healing could be better, but it does get better as I become more familiar with the fights. I don't know if my gear is poorly optimized or if it's simply low uptime on PtW/SW:P or if I am just being too conservative with Smite. I am not OOMing incredibly early, generally. The other Discipline Priest in my raid has significantly better gear than I do, so I expect him to be ahead of me. I do think having two Discipline Priests is not ideal.

I appeared to do much better on Il'gynoth, I think mostly because I change my talents from the normal PtW and PI to Grace and ToF.

Even while overgearing heroics, keeping SW:P uptime significantly higher, Smite-spamming like crazy, and using Penance on CD, I still rarely break the 100k DPS I see that other Discs are doing.

Thank you, and any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Ethris]

I haven't really begun raiding much yet, but Legion-era disc is definitely the hardest healer to play properly. I have several theories about where we belong in a healer role, and its essentially large-damage recovery on focused targets. We are by no means sustained healers on anything more than 3-5 man group (keep atonement on tanks, maybe two other people, etc).

My HPS is generally around 170k and DPS in the 45-50k range.

That's fine as long as you're not going oom. Looks like you're shadow mending more than atonement healing, so that's fine too.

We just finished Normal EN on 9/29, but I have started to feel like almost a burden to the group (though the RL has never called me out on anything).

Don't worry about it then.

I don't know if my gear is poorly optimized or if it's simply low uptime on PtW/SW:P or if I am just being too conservative with Smite.

From my experience, smite is not typically worth casting unless there is low damage and you have nothing to do. PtW/SW:P cannot be undervalued as a Disc Priest, because it's an extremely potent source of healing that scales with the amount of active atonements. We may not have the gear for it now, but I have a feeling that PtW is going to outpace Grace as gear gets better. So yes, work on your uptime, and multi-dot to maximize the effectiveness of your passive healing. Pretend to be a druid and think of PtW/SW:P as a HoT that you grant to people through atonement. You have to work a little harder for it, but it's what we got.

Disc Priests seem to not be designed to top meters; you'll go OoM and have trouble managing your cooldowns if you try. Rather, we're a gap-filler healer, and we should focus on spot-healing and assisting recovery from damage spikes. There are two main build variants that I am playing with:

Standard: Mindbender, Power Infusion, Grace
This is what I use for mythics because you can't beat the value that comes from Grace for a small group. Especially when damage is very high and you're the only one who can handle it. It's reliable even for a raid setup because you can spot heal decently with Grace, presuming you set up a quick atonement beforehand. I like this setup, but it's boring. This setup is preferable for smaller raids and 10-man content, however.

Experimental: Power Word: Solace, Twist of Fate, Purge the Wicked
I don't like Power Infusion anymore because I have enough buttons to press as it is, and Disc cannot take advantage of the buff uptime in the way it was intended. It's nice for 5-man Shadow Mend Spam, but it does nothing to help you set up atonements. In a large raid setting, Power Infusion would be used for two things: chaincasting Power: Word Radiance to blanket the raid with Atonements, and helping you get more damage in during the duration. However you're only either doing worthless token healing with Radiance, or you're spamming damage until your Atonements fall off and you waste the rest of Power Infusion. The throughput increase from Twist of Fate seems better, with less micromanagement on your part.

However, here we're attempting to take maximum advantage of our atonement healing for a small group. Casting Power Word: Solace on cooldown complicates the damage rotation a little bit, but it gives you on-demand mana, and provides a decent Atonement heal which can be cast while moving (hugely important). I really like having Mindbender, but at least we still have Shadowfriend. Lastly, Purge the Wicked is a vastly underrated talent. It does not have the throughput that Grace provides, but your playstyle in a large raid is not conducive to Grace healing anyway. You will notice the difference in passive healing which comes from the increase damage and uptime, so multi-DoT everything in sight, and weave Atonements between DoT casts. You may only be healing 3-5 people in this way, but the health buffer will be significant; and the other healers will notice the relaxation on their mana.

I appeared to do much better on Il'gynoth, I think mostly because I change my talents from the normal PtW and PI to Grace and ToF.

Il'Gynoth is better with PtW due to the burn phase and the large amount of adds.

I do think having two Discipline Priests is not ideal.

Yeah it's not. Don't stack disc priests, this isn't Wrath haha.

tl;dr don't try to top meters as disc. Trust your other healers, and triage the raid rather than try to heal everyone and going OoM in the process. Use your powerful cooldowns to keep people alive.