int stacking vs spellpower stacking as discipline PvE priest

[Zeuq]

I gem for pure SP (except to activate meta :P) and don't run into mana problems and rarely need to use my fiend. Am I geared too much for regen with my Illustration + Solace? :'(

Fair enough. I should have qualified it with "and still gemming for regen."

[Livh]

If you hit 30k Mana buffed in ICC, feel free to gem only SP from now on.

[Surannhealz]

Hi I just wanted to offer an "alternative" style that is at deep odds with the current accepted Disc philosophy. I stacked pure Intellect until I hit 40K mana. Now I am starting to stack Crit. Currently my crit (school:holy) is about 48% raid buffed which would put it close to 55-60% in practice. I get almost as much Crit % from my Intellect as I do from my actual Crit rating.

While the regen in phenominal, I do not do this for the mana directly. I do it for the shields to front load a target against the next hit. This is how I make up for my lack of spell power compared to people that stack spell power. Since crits are based on numbers of casts I do waste mana by spamming Flash Heals and Penance to get Divine Aegis procs. I would define my play style as wastefull and thus that is why I have so much mana. I intentionally try to use all that mana, and using Shadowfiend and Hymn of Hope and even Arcane Torrent (Blood Elf) is normal for me. The only reason you should have a ton of mana is because you are using a ton of mana.

I have zero regard for Spirit or Haste. Due to my desire for Int and Crit I have been having to take "DPS" gear since the Spirit budget is replaced with Hit budget as traditional healing gear has Haste.

DISCLAIMER: Remember I am offering this as an alternative to the spell power style. I know that Elitist Jerks, Gearscore, WoW-Heroes, Rawr will all tell you that spell power is the way to go and I do not mean to take anything away from that. But when I decided to see if I could do this back in Naxx I was told I would never make it out of Naxx. I was told I would never make it out of Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader and now I'm being told it just wont work for Ice Crown. So we'll see. I've heard pretty much every phrase or word that means "you dont know how to play your class" from other players. For me its just fun seeing if something will work.

As far as "gimping" my group, according to World of Logs I have been the top healer ever since we started using World of Logs back in Ulduar. This is due to all my shielding, as well as my ability to just heal any person at any time with no restriction to mana. I even use Prayer of Healing regularly. Now granted WoL may be over generous when it comes to Disc shields, but there is no accurate way to measure us, so its the best I can offer.

TLR: If you stack for pure Int then understand that its giving you more Crit and bigger mana pools. Crits are based off chance and more chances requires more mana. So you must use all that mana for it be a viable playstyle. Gimping your spell power and then just sitting idle with a huge mana pool is not correct. You can either be an artillery cannon and shoot big bullets less often or be a mini gun and shoot a bunch of small bullets over and over. Both will destroy your target.

Sorry forgot to add an Armory link.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...&n=Surannhealz

[Kelesti]

@Surrannhealz
It takes 166 intellect to make 1% spellcrit. By going out of your way in stacking Intellect, you really aren't getting -that- much extra crit. You want to increase the up-ended shields that you're talking about? Crit harder. If your Penance double crits, and my penance double crits (which given the law of averages, both will happen relatively the same), my Aegis will be stronger than yours. Hands down. That's just the way it works, because your shields don't scale with Intellect. They scale with healing done. Healing done doesn't scale with Intellect either, it scales with Spellpower.

Even your strongest buffer, Power Word: Shield, has so little effect from Crit that it's completely redundant, and only Spell Power is really taken into account here. When the average Discipline Priest doesn't go above a 26-28.5k mana pool because it's enough they can start pushing out harder heals that crit just as frequently, but have stronger effects both when they do and when they don't.

I have zero regard for Spirit or Haste. Due to my desire for Int and Crit I have been having to take "DPS" gear since the Spirit budget is replaced with Hit budget as traditional healing gear has Haste.

There's quite a lot of gear that's Crit/Haste with zero mp5/spirit.

But when I decided to see if I could do this back in Naxx I was told I would never make it out of Naxx. I was told I would never make it out of Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader and now I'm being told it just wont work for Ice Crown.

So you decided to see how far your raid will carry you, while they're going full thoroughput and you're halfassedly still sitting on completely redundant regen? There is nothing to be gained by this.

As far as "gimping" my group, according to World of Logs I have been the top healer ever since we started using World of Logs back in Ulduar. This is due to all my shielding, as well as my ability to just heal any person at any time with no restriction to mana. I even use Prayer of Healing regularly. Now granted WoL may be over generous when it comes to Disc shields, but there is no accurate way to measure us, so its the best I can offer.

So the fact that you use completely biased and wrongful logs to justify your place as a Discipline Priest, and attempt to validate your chioces is perfect because you're "on top?" I can be on top too. I can also not do my job properly. Start dropping healers from your raid, one by one. If your group can survive without that healer being present, the DPS helps to sustain everyone's mana pool.

If you step out, with a 40k mana pool but no real effective use for it, would they even notice?

TLR: If you stack for pure Int then understand that its giving you more Crit and bigger mana pools.

Bigger mana pool, more regen through Rapture/Replenishment/Torrent/Mana Tide/Shadowfiend/Hope. The crit portion is excruciatingly negligible (If you count Blessing of Kings/Mental Strength, you get 0.0076% crit per point on your gear.)

Crits are based off chance and more chances requires more mana.

Crits are based off of chance, yes. More chances requires more mana? What? You mean, if you don't crit you have to cast again? Well surprise, that's how any caster in this game works. If the fight's still in progress, but you're not casting you're doing something wrong. But not crit'ing does not require more mana than if you crit, because you should be winding up your next spella lready.

You can either be an artillery cannon and shoot big bullets less often or be a mini gun and shoot a bunch of small bullets over and over. Both will destroy your target.

Or, you can do your job and not gem Intellect but still use your strongest abilities (which are even stronger thanks to Spell Power), throughout the fight, maybe?

Again, take the sit-down challenge. Lemme know if people even notice you're gone.

[Surannhealz]

I get ~13% Crit rating purely from my Intellect and about 15% from actual Crit Rating. So I would say they are pretty close.

I am completely aware of what scales and what doesn't with Crit as Disc. My lack of outright output is made up by increased casting. We have relaxed from 25 mans and now are focusing on 10 mans. Our usual group is me and a holy priest. What most min-maxer's would consider sub-optimal and yet we do it just fine. I do think if I were to sit out it would be quite noticable even if a DPS took my spot. Some of the hardcore raiders, or even you, might be able to 1 heal ICC, but I do not think we are that skilled.

As far as "being carried" and what ever other things you want to say to make me feel bad, I dont know what to tell you. Like I said I have been told NO! 100 times before you and probably 100 times in the future and yet here I am still progressing. I tried to spell out everything very clearly in my post. I said that that there is no accurate way to measure me, but that the way that we use shows that that I do very well, I didn't do that to say "wowzers look at me", I said it show that you dont have to follow the cookie cutter spell power disc priest to perform.

I know you cherish your spellpower man, I know that all the math that you find relevant backs you up. I know that I am not going to change your mind. When I feel like this isn't working anymore I'll switch to something different, but I haven't felt restrained yet.

EDIT: Here is our logs. Since I dont just want to throw the word "logs" out there and not have any substance. I can only offer my personal experience and what the game records. Of note this last weeks showed Saurfang as a try for some reason and not an actual kill.

[Kelesti]

I get ~13% Crit rating purely from my Intellect and about 15% from actual Crit Rating. So I would say they are pretty close. I am completely aware of what scales and what doesn't with Crit as Disc.

If you swapped your Int Gems for crit rating, you'd see a lot more crit effects, but they still wouldn't be stronger.

My lack of outright output is made up by increased casting.

How the hell do you have "Increased Casting"? You cast more spells? Hey look, so do I, and I don't have a 40k mana pool. Infact, with the stronger haste I have, you could say I cast more than you do. And with higher effects.

Every healer, and I mean every, is balanced around the fact their mana pool will last the seven (or whatever) minutes of a fight. But it's balanced around chain spamming. With less regen, but more tools to help it last longer. Giving yourself a larger mana pool and saying it's to "cast more" is completely irrelevant, when even without a 40k mana pool there's not a reason you should stop casting.

We have relaxed from 25 mans and now are focusing on 10 mans. Our usual group is me and a holy priest. What most min-maxer's would consider sub-optimal and yet we do it just fine.

Holy and Discipline do synergize well together, especially in 10's. Nothing suboptimal about it.

As far as "being carried" and what ever other things you want to say to make me feel bad, I dont know what to tell you. Like I said I have been told NO! 100 times before you and probably 100 times in the future and yet here I am still progressing.

Progressing through LOLwer Spire? It's been PuGable content since its release. Yes, even Deathbringer. Plagueworks sucks, and unless people are going to be dishing out innervates to your Holy Priest, (and you're Power Infusion'ing your Holy Priest instead of a DPS) it's going to chew you up with the lack of output from your end. He'll need to make up for it, and there's not much room to do that.

I said it show that you dont have to follow the cookie cutter spell power disc priest to perform.

No, you don't. You can 2-heal LoLwer spire with a Shadow (or even Smite) Priest and anything else in the world (ele shaman bouncing Chain heals once in awhile?). Going up against the brick wall that the Plagueworks is, you're going to want to perform your best. And a 40k mana pool with no output is not your best.

[harky]

A less wordy explanation... Disc doesn't need a 40k mana pool. The only class that does is Holy Paladin. Disc has enough passive regen and other regen tools that they can finish fights with 50%+ mana while casting as often as possible with only 27-30k mana buffed. Leave Int gemming to Holy Priests and Holy Paladins who can actually use that additional mana.

Also... don't gem crit. You may be able to 'top heals' with it... but you admit to spamming shields? Crit has nothing to do with PW:S. You can crit... the glyph proc? That's it. Disc is able to function suitably right now because of Haste and SP stacking, not crit. You get your haste up high enough that GH becomes a consistent heal, then you pump your SP through the roof.

[Zeuq]

I'm gonna have to disagree with you too, Surannhealz. When I run Discipline, I'll tend to have just over 30k mana raid buffed and I can chain cast without concern for my mana through any encounter I've used Discipline on. In fact, on most encounters, I generally don't need to use all of my regen tools available, which means in most cases I actually have more regen than I can make use of. Of course, I tend to run a little Spirit heavy since my main spec is Holy, but that's not something that would take 10k mana to make up for if I traded it out for more Int, Haste, or Crit.

So my question to you is how do you make use of that extra mana? Assuming you have full raid buffs, do you also make good use your Shadowfiend or Hymn of Hope? If not, you can trade that extra regen for more Spell Power, Haste, or even Crit and see much more throughput benefit by just making sure you use your Shadowfiend every encounter. So, unless you're missing some vital raid buff, like Replenishment, I just can't see how you'd make use of all of that extra mana. Maybe if you're chaining PWS->PoH you could burn through that mana, but since you say you tend to run with a Holy Priest, I don't really see the utility of that sort of style

[Chob]

Ive heard of this playstyle that Surann uses before.. basically you're just chaincasting direct heals with high manapool and high crit, proccing Divine Aegis often, mitigating relatively 'small' amounts of damage. This may look good on World of Logs, this is hardly beneficial to the raid as much as you think it is. Small amounts from DA may be helpful to ease off damage a little, but in reality its neglectible when it comes to high tank hits, you will still need high HPS done on tanks from other sources. And this high HPS can easily cover for the small DA procs you are making, instead, they are overhealing.

This is why stacking spellpower vs int is really only a throughput vs manaregen discussion; imo stacking int has no added benefit for 25man endgame raiding. I'm now sitting at 3295 selfbuffed SP, and I can keep tanks alive with much ease, without needing a high HPS holy priest or paladin to assist me.

[AetherMcLoud]

Since crits are based on numbers of casts I do waste mana by spamming Flash Heals and Penance to get Divine Aegis procs.

Crits are based on numbers of casts? What. The. Fuck?!
While not epic, that's still a basic math fail.

Say you have 50% critchance. If you cast only 1 spell that spell has a 50% crit chance. The next spell you cast still has a 50% crit chance. And the spell after that, and the spell after...
Now, on average, over a _very_ large sample size, half of your spells will be crits, and the other half not. That still doesn't exclude 10 (or however much) consecutive casts that crit, or 10 (...) that don't. Each cast is a unique entity and doesn't have anything to do with all the other casts.

TLDR: No, crits are _not_ based on number of casts.

[Zeuq]

TLDR: No, crits are _not_ based on number of casts.

In the context of the rest of his post, where he's generally arguing for building DA stacks, he wasn't talking about Crit rate, he was talking about a total number of Crits because the total number of Crits will mean more DA procs. Total Crits is a function of Crit Rating and Number of Casts. So he can increase his Crits by either upping his Crit rating or upping the number of casts he gets off. Now, I still disagree with his conclusions, as more smaller Crits (stacking Crit and Int) will have roughly the same total effect as fewer larger Crits (from stacking SP) while taking less total itemization to achieve the same effect and having greater benefits also on PWS.

[Balance]

Get an int/sp mix depending on how you perform in raids. On my disc priest I need to have another set of gear with high int, lower spirit, mostly gemmed for SP to keep up with ICC.

[Lenea]

Crits are based on numbers of casts? What. The. Fuck?!
While not epic, that's still a basic math fail.

Say you have 50% critchance. If you cast only 1 spell that spell has a 50% crit chance. The next spell you cast still has a 50% crit chance. And the spell after that, and the spell after...
Now, on average, over a _very_ large sample size, half of your spells will be crits, and the other half not. That still doesn't exclude 10 (or however much) consecutive casts that crit, or 10 (...) that don't. Each cast is a unique entity and doesn't have anything to do with all the other casts.

TLDR: No, crits are _not_ based on number of casts.

I think what Surann was saying was that they would for example chain cast on a full health tank, probably critting a lot and proccing a lot of divine aegis. So they would overall cast more spells (and therefore more crits) than someone who was healing 'normally'. Not the way I would do it but it's all down to personal preference.

I like to balance my stats and swap trinkets for regen/throughput where needed, so i tend to match sockets and use a combination of sp, sp/int and sp/mp5 gems.

[Azyoulike]

I get ~13% Crit rating purely from my Intellect and about 15% from actual Crit Rating. So I would say they are pretty close.

No, you get 8% Crit rating purely from Int from gear. The first 5% was your base crit from your base Int. Does that change your idea of how much throughput all that Int you're stacking is buying?

I am completely aware of what scales and what doesn't with Crit as Disc. My lack of outright output is made up by increased casting.

No it isn't because no competent disc priest stops casting at any point in an encounter. Well except Mimi, even then I preshield 15 secs before the start of the next phase.

[harky]

Oh come on, you stop casting on Putricide too!

[Azyoulike]

Oh come on, you stop casting on Putricide too!

I gamequit after the first week of ToC because it seemed so crappy after Ulduar. I only returned to actively playing a week before christmas so I'm still unguilded and only have the first 4 bosses in ICC.

Sad to say, in 2 weeks of play I'm now more progressed in ToGC than Suran The only reason that I don't have mad-skill on 10 man is because the group I cleared it with had a bad healer before I joined, and wiped 5 times on beasts (yes seriously).

[harky]

Putricide stuns you for 10+ seconds between phase changes, so you can't do anything, not even pre-shield before P2/3. Not that you'd need to, but hey you stopped casting, so Spirit is in fact better than normal in that fight. ;D

[Azyoulike]

Putricide stuns you for 10+ seconds between phase changes, so you can't do anything, not even pre-shield before P2/3. Not that you'd need to, but hey you stopped casting, so Spirit is in fact better than normal in that fight. ;D

WOOT! Now I can justify the spirit cloak I picked up because I preferred it for my holy offspec