Stay Disc or go Holy?

[harky]

Gratz to your disc priest for quitting. There is 1 fight in all of ICC where holy is even useful over disc(unless you have another disc priest), but even then you said YOU are the holy priest in your guild.

I'm one of the Holy Priests. I go Discipline on four fights in hard modes and none in normal. We heal with 1 Paladin, 1 Druid, 1 Holy Priests, 1 Resto Shaman, with another Druid and another Holy Priest for fights when we use additional healers. Most fights that we 5 heal we do with 1 Paladin, 1 Druid, 2 Holy Priests, 1 Resto Shaman (Druid does substantially higher DPS than the Priest). I go Discipline in hardmodes for Rotface, Princes, Putricide and LK. We do not use a Disc Priest on any other fight. We've experimented with me going Discipline, but the HPS loss is too much when 4 healing.

As far as the 5 man comments? You're pretty off-base. None of what the OP had problems with involved tanks dying, or being in danger. Know what Holy is good at? Healing the whole group. Now, with his gear level he most likely has low haste and he's admitted low SP, so as I mentioned, Discipline is probably the right answer. That doesn't change that you gave him bad advice and made some misleading comments about Holy. Holy wins on Garfrost due to cheaper and harder hitting PoH, which ignores LoS. Discipline can use PoH as well, but you just essentially told him 'heal the tank', huh? Sorry, but you didn't answer anything, you just want to go on about how much you like Discipline. That's nice and all, but not exactly rational.

[Fallacy]

We've experimented with me going Discipline, but the HPS loss is too much when 4 healing.

Wait- you don't go disc because it shows up as low HPS? I was always under the impression that disc will always be low HPS because most of it's healing is actually mitigation through PW:S and DA. Why does HPS matter if you're actually keeping people up?
For the record, it's an honest question, I'm not trying to be an asshole.

[jonish]

I'm one of the Holy Priests. I go Discipline on four fights in hard modes and none in normal. We heal with 1 Paladin, 1 Druid, 1 Holy Priests, 1 Resto Shaman, with another Druid and another Holy Priest for fights when we use additional healers. Most fights that we 5 heal we do with 1 Paladin, 1 Druid, 2 Holy Priests, 1 Resto Shaman (Druid does substantially higher DPS than the Priest). I go Discipline in hardmodes for Rotface, Princes, Putricide and LK. We do not use a Disc Priest on any other fight. We've experimented with me going Discipline, but the HPS loss is too much when 4 healing.

As far as the 5 man comments? You're pretty off-base. None of what the OP had problems with involved tanks dying, or being in danger. Know what Holy is good at? Healing the whole group. Now, with his gear level he most likely has low haste and he's admitted low SP, so as I mentioned, Discipline is probably the right answer. That doesn't change that you gave him bad advice and made some misleading comments about Holy. Holy wins on Garfrost due to cheaper and harder hitting PoH, which ignores LoS. Discipline can use PoH as well, but you just essentially told him 'heal the tank', huh? Sorry, but you didn't answer anything, you just want to go on about how much you like Discipline. That's nice and all, but not exactly rational.

i never made any determination of what solves his problem, but i stated HOW you heal as discipline. It is alot of pre-healing the tank which frees you up to heal the group. you clearly just read things and form your own skewed opinion then make a pointless accusation of what you think i was trying to say. By explaining HOW you heal the tank as discipline it opens him up to spend the majority of his time using prayer /renew/flash heal on the group rather than spamming the tank and watching the group drop. Like i said before explaining how you heal 101 as discipline is a pointless waste of time. Any halfway competent player would already know this information, thus on to my other statement of switching to holy is not going to help his situation.

you can call me pro-discipline all you want but 99% of the priests who heal are in agreement. disc is far superior to holy. math also definitively proves this. The way high end guilds heal encounters also definitively proves this. you and kelesti can be holy fanboys all you want bud but LOGIC proves the point.

oh and i love the "holy is better for garfrost" argument. Not that disc isnt better for basically every single other moment in that instance but that one fight but that holy is better for garfrost. You make garfrost sound like Sindrigosa on hard mode for the purposes of your argument.

[jonish]

Wait- you don't go disc because it shows up as low HPS? I was always under the impression that disc will always be low HPS because most of it's healing is actually mitigation through PW:S and DA. Why does HPS matter if you're actually keeping people up?
For the record, it's an honest question, I'm not trying to be an asshole.

It doesnt. Any competent person knows that discipline numbers are no where near what holy is in "hps". but if you download a mod such as Skada you will see what the real numbers are for disc healing. Because of the way discipline heals it is just s superior way of doings raid healing by pre-covering a large amount of people.

[Cracka_Bob]

You know what holy is the worst at ? keeping the tank healed.

ive NEVER had problems healing single target (namely the tank)

[harky]

Wait- you don't go disc because it shows up as low HPS? I was always under the impression that disc will always be low HPS because most of it's healing is actually mitigation through PW:S and DA. Why does HPS matter if you're actually keeping people up?
For the record, it's an honest question, I'm not trying to be an asshole.

That's including absorbs into the HPS. Disc is simply too far behind on HPS when a lower number of healers are involved.

you can call me pro-discipline all you want but 99% of the priests who heal are in agreement. disc is far superior to holy. math also definitively proves this. The way high end guilds heal encounters also definitively proves this. you and kelesti can be holy fanboys all you want bud but LOGIC proves the point.

oh and i love the "holy is better for garfrost" argument. Not that disc isnt better for basically every single other moment in that instance but that one fight but that holy is better for garfrost. You make garfrost sound like Sindrigosa on hard mode for the purposes of your argument.

Yeah, the only thing the OP was complaining about was Garfrost and the packs before the cave... can't you read? :

Show me any math which shows that Discipline has a stronger filler spell than Renew. PW:S only becomes stronger once a high enough threshold of over-healing is applied to Renew. This means that Holy's potential output is higher. There's no logic in what you're saying.

You want to look at facts? Okay, let's look at two Priests with identical core stats. Both with 4k SP, both with 40% haste buffed, both with 35% Holy crit. One standard 57/14 Disc, the other standard 13/58 Holy.

57/14's PW:S - 1 second execute time, shields for 8,068, glyph hits for 2,149 avg, total 10,217 per cast and 10,217 HPS

13/58's Renew - 1.07 second execute time, heals for 2,294 avg, then 13,024 over time, total 15,318 per cast and 14,316 HPS

This means if you're ever under 30% over-healing, then Renew beats PW:S easily. PoM is also stronger for Holy and CoH is also substantially stronger than PW:S. Note, this is also giving Discipline equal SP to Holy, which will not be the case in game.

So again, what math are you on about? Discipline benefits from one thing: Ignoring over-healing. If you're ever in a very high damage situation Discipline is quickly exposed for having a lack of throughput. If you're in a very low damage situation then Discipline loses its primary filler as a viable option. Sorry, but 'high end guilds do it' is not a valid argument and has nothing to do with logic. You believing that Discipline is amazing does not make it so.

Oh and if you'd like to call me a Holy fanboy, I don't care. If you really want I can show the same figures and include Rejuv, Holy Light and Chain heal, the other three healer's primary filler spells and make Holy look bad as well. It doesn't matter, it's the same result. Discipline shines when you have too many healers and when running with a low number of healers in a high damage environment Discipline is not optimal.

Edit: Fixed math to include DA, because math is hard when eating fish tacos.

[Syenite]

From personal experience:

Disc = facerolling most 5 man dungeons

Holy = only time i found it more usefull than disc in 5 mans was on the packs in PoS and first boss in HoL when pulling everything :P

That being said i prefer playing holy as it gives me more buttons to mash

(about 100 days played since WotLK came out on the priest, so have done most of the content a few times or more in different specs )

Edit: The dmg absorbtion from disc is not about winning meters, it sometimes offers the additional health to survive some massive predictable dmg LK hc and so on 8)

[gaymer77]

I personally prefer having disc as my healing spec because I'm not a full-time healer. I'm mainly shadow but have had a pve disc spec for HM Ulduar runs where we needed an extra healer. Right now I'm at 3226 sp 28.24% crit 567 haste 552 mana regen (314 while casting) and 304 hit (gg having mostly shadow pieces for my healing set lol) in my healing gear & spec and have no problem healing anything but HOR just because its such an AOE healing intensive fight and that's what disc is lacking. What advice I can give you is when you know there is incoming group/raid dmg bubble a group & queue up the hasted prayer of healing and Holy Nova is your friend for some quick bubbles on everyone and quick healing too. That's almost my entire healing rotation for COS lol

Blizzard really needs to work on tracking aborbs, it is not fun having to defend your spec a full year and a half into an expansion

Get Skada instead of recount & you'll see on there "Absorbs and Healing" which tracks absorbs much better than the "guessed absorbs" addon for Recount. It also gives a much better tracking of dmg and dps (dps is calculated as your dmg over the course of the fight you were alive for ie: 1.56mil dmg done over 259 seconds alive of the fight = 6025.5 dps & typically lowers the dps of classes like mages who have no dots and raises that of dot heavy classes like us)

[jonish]

That's including absorbs into the HPS. Disc is simply too far behind on HPS when a lower number of healers are involved.



Yeah, the only thing the OP was complaining about was Garfrost and the packs before the cave... can't you read? :

I can but it is obvious that you cant. I made the point of HOW you heal those packs as discipline which would be the exact same way you would heal garfrost, by preshielding and using renew then prayer. If you failed to comprehend it after i have now repeated it for the 4th or 5th time thats on you.

Show me any math which shows that Discipline has a stronger filler spell than Renew. PW:S only becomes stronger once a high enough threshold of over-healing is applied to Renew. This means that Holy's potential output is higher. There's no logic in what you're saying.

You want to look at facts? Okay, let's look at two Priests with identical core stats. Both with 4k SP, both with 40% haste buffed, both with 35% Holy crit. One standard 57/14 Disc, the other standard 13/58 Holy.

57/14's PW:S - 1 second execute time, shields for 8,068, glyph hits for 2,149 avg, total 10,217 per cast and 10,217 HPS

13/58's Renew - 1.07 second execute time, heals for 2,294 avg, then 13,024 over time, total 15,318 per cast and 14,316 HPS

This means if you're ever under 30% over-healing, then Renew beats PW:S easily. PoM is also stronger for Holy and CoH is also substantially stronger than PW:S. Note, this is also giving Discipline equal SP to Holy, which will not be the case in game.

Gratz bro you can math, but your whole argument is totally rediculous for the simple fact that no HoT ever cast has 100% healing ratio. I would take an extremely rough guess and say between druids and shamans more than half your renew ticks did nothing at all while every bit of that power word shield was likely to be effective absorb on the vast majority of ICC encounters because of the high amount of pulsing aoe in there. Hey maybe in CATA you will be right but right now your wrong dead wrong and I am sick of pointing it out.

So again, what math are you on about? Discipline benefits from one thing: Ignoring over-healing. If you're ever in a very high damage situation Discipline is quickly exposed for having a lack of throughput. If you're in a very low damage situation then Discipline loses its primary filler as a viable option. Sorry, but 'high end guilds do it' is not a valid argument and has nothing to do with logic. You believing that Discipline is amazing does not make it so.

Oh and if you'd like to call me a Holy fanboy, I don't care. If you really want I can show the same figures and include Rejuv, Holy Light and Chain heal, the other three healer's primary filler spells and make Holy look bad as well. It doesn't matter, it's the same result. Discipline shines when you have too many healers and when running with a low number of healers in a high damage environment Discipline is not optimal.

Edit: Fixed math to include DA, because math is hard when eating fish tacos.

what lack of throughput are you talking about , a disc priest can put up just as many renews as a holy priest granted they arent as effective but combined with the pre-shielding it is rediculously more effective and more efficient to boot because of Rapture for both the healer and the person receiving the shield. You are right about one thing though , if there was a room pulsing a constant 10,000 damage every second then a holy priest would be perfect for that encounter, but hey that isnt how encounters are right now. Most of them are set up with huge bursts of damage raid wide followed by low amounts of ticking aoe. Disc is amazing for blocking that big chunk of damage and there renew is sufficient to cover the aoe when combined with the rest of the raid healing.

So you say discipline isnt optimal for low number of healers. Then tell me why it is in every single healer lineup for every single ICC hard mode encounter almost by mandate(other than those deemed a joke at this point via 15% buff).

Go try LK hard mode without a disc and see how far you get. Fraps it for the enjoyment of the forum though please.

Im going to stop replying to this thread after this post as it is just redundant at this point. Unless someone else has any questions or actual useful replies.

[harky]

One ridiculous statement after another, as always Jonish. You claim to be talking about logic, but you can't support a single one of your own ideas. I'm sorry, but hard mode Lich King is the only fight that requires a Discipline Priest. All others have been done without one. You should actually research your claims before making them.

Also, you want to defend Discipline by claiming their Renew makes them just as good as Holy? Then why don't Discipline Priest's even take points in Imp Renew and why aren't they using Renew? I'm sorry, but you have no clue what you're talking about. There's a reason why you can go check WoL and note that Holy is higher than Discipline on nearly all ICC fights and that's because Holy has stronger filler spells. So whenever over-healing is low enough, Holy will come out ahead. That's just the way it is. I also just showed you that it only takes ~30% over-healing for Renew to beat PW:S, but you have to resort to exaggerations about 0% over-healing and Discipline using Renew to contend with that?

Let's make this clear:
13/58's Renew - 1.07 second execute time, heals for 2,294 avg, then 13,024 over time, total 15,318 per cast and 14,316 HPS
57/14's Renew - 1 second execute time, heals for 9,784 over time and 9,784 HPS
If you take 3/3 Imp Renew:
57/14's Renew - 1/1.01 second execute time, heals for 11,251 over time and 11,251/11,139 HPS
Remember:
57/14's PW:S - 1 second execute time, shields for 8,068, glyph hits for 2,149 avg, total 10,217 per cast and 10,217 HPS

This means while Holy needs ~30% over-healing to win, Discipline would need under 10% over-healing for it to be worth casting. Seriously, stop pulling things out of your ass. You're talking about logic and math, but you have yet to post anything that supports what you're claiming. All you've done is exaggerate more and more all based on this idea that because top end guilds do it, it must be the right way to do things.

Reality check: Top end guilds use Discipline on LK because the Infest mechanic by design favors shields. Top end guilds do it on other fights because when trying for server/region/world firsts they often use extra healers to give them a larger margin of error on kills as long as they can beat the enrage timer. When using superfluous healers Discipline is a huge asset because it adds an additional buffer. If you can do a fight with 5 healers, but take 5 healers and 1 Discipline Priest then you've just reduced incoming DPS by ~5-8,000 and given yourself an extra buffer. However, because Discipline's HPS caps out at a lower amount than the other healers when using low healer counts Discipline's value diminishes. This has been commented on many times. When incoming DPS is low in relation to raid HPS Discipline will do very well, but when incoming DPS increases Discipline's effective HPS caps earlier than the other 4 healing specs.

[Deleted]

disc is a faceroll compared to holy
just like resto druid

[Upayidance]

If you dont have a shadow offspecc you can be both like me and switch around

Holy BIG NUMBARS LOL
Disc NO HPS ON MEETER /gkick

or not...

Disc is great, shields cant overheal! You cycle the raid and you can be quick to put it on someone whos in trouble. A shield is a 100% chance to "heal" for the max ammount, a heal can be aswell, but it can be 100% overhealing too. I love playing disc in raids, especialy when i top the healing AND absorbs meeter by a loooong shot, but meeters should be disabled, if pallys dont let tanks drop, and priests dont let the raid drop, who cares about who was lucky and got thier heal 0.1 seconds before the other person or who could mash thier aoe healing buttons the fastest. Really.

Holy is good too for accual healing, but IMO any holy priest can be replaced by a druid when it comes to raid healing, but there is NOTHING anyone here can say that will change the fact that having a guardian spirit is great, and if u say "LOl but if everyone L2P you dont need GS haha nooobs" then you should delete your wow folder, plz.

A solution? Having both a disc and a holy in a raid is benefitial, but if youre the only priest its up to you personaly how you want to play. Look at is this way:

you are a holy priest, and lots of your healing WILL be overhealing. Now lets say you stopped healing for a second, the raid woulnt instantly die would it? no, there is a high chance that some druid hot or a chainheal with hit that target and do your job for you. A shield tho, will cause other people to overheal yes, but for YOU it will count as aspot on healing . Stopping incoming damage or compeeting to press that person first, that is the difference between disc and holy. A ccluster CoH will prolly be good to save some people who were too slow to move out of some aoe, but if they all had a shield on them they woulnt need that coh

the arguments can be endless but if you look at it realistcly, any healer can do a holys job, but noone can do a discs job. so in the end i guess it comes down to you personaly, even tho id favor disc over holy in a raid situation, but if you do, can you be arsed to respecc for Valithra HM every week?

[G l o w y r m]

Answer: Play whatever you have the most fun playing. They are both very powerful specs. Every guild should have 1 uber Discipline Priest and 1 uber Holy Priest. You won't not get groups or anything no matter which you play, they are both very sought after.

For me, Holy has always been the best healing spec. I feel handicapped as disc.

That's weird, Discipline is extremely powerful right now, especially when played correctly to it's fullest (which I don't see many Discipline Priests doing sadly, sticking JUST to the tank? Not the best use of a Disc Priest hehe). I think you probably just enjoy Holy more because it's hard hitting heals quickly to many people at once. Burst AE healing baby! It's definitely cool to combo your spells correctly and see a bunch of green numbers fly everywhere because you just took 10 people from critical to 75% health in 5 seconds lol.

I really love Holy, but Discipline has been my real passion since the end of BC (nothing but CoH spam and SPR stacking got really old in BC lol). With all that aside though, Discipline is no where near gimped. Both specs are amazing in today's raiding scene.

[G l o w y r m]

...I kinda have a hard time to keep everyone alive since the AoE dmg is huge...

That's what the Borrowed Time -> PoH combo is for. Power Infusion + PoH spam is great too and usable pretty often. Those 2 tactics along with keeping PoM out and PW:S's out like you say, you should never have a problem healing 5m or even 10m AE damage for that matter. You always have Divine Hymn for when things get hairy.

Discipline, to me, is all about "weaving", or so I like to call it.

It's all about taking advantage of as many Borrowed Time procs as possible. Cast PW:S, then Penance so it won't consume it, then a PoH or FH, etc...just keep "weaving" spells in between your Shields and you'll be a speed casting demon. So when the AE damage is coming down hard, try and PoH with BT up often, you should be fine.

If you have fun playing Discipline, I say you stick with it and put the time into it that it takes to overcome challenges like these. Try to keep using your arsenal or spells better and better and you should be able to heal almost any situation pre 25m the same as Holy.

Do what you enjoy brotha! I'm just letting you know that it's possible to do what you said you have trouble with, up to you to overcome it now! Good luck brotha!

[Ynna]

you are a holy priest, and lots of your healing WILL be overhealing. Now lets say you stopped healing for a second, the raid woulnt instantly die would it? no, there is a high chance that some druid hot or a chainheal with hit that target and do your job for you. A shield tho, will cause other people to overheal yes, but for YOU it will count as aspot on healing . Stopping incoming damage or compeeting to press that person first, that is the difference between disc and holy. A ccluster CoH will prolly be good to save some people who were too slow to move out of some aoe, but if they all had a shield on them they woulnt need that coh

This part is something I've always found hard to grasp but it's an argument that's often used to defend the discipline spec. "If they had a shield on them they wouldn't need that CoH" Some people claim that this makes absorbs better than healing. But since there is no actual unhealable damage (at least if your raiders know what they're doing) I feel this argument isn't that strong. There is a difference between healing and absorbs, but I think it's hard to claim that one is actual better than the other.

[Decan]

I heal has disc and i love it. I 2 healed ICC 10 man just last night for the first 4 bosses and it was more then fine if you add heals + absorbs I was out healing the druid.

I trying holy one day and didn't like it at all I found i was running out of mana so much in heroics 5 mans. I have 2.7k sp and 27k mana self-buffed in heroics and I never go oom. I have about 3k sp and about 32k mana in ICC and I was very surprised that i didn't go oom once. Mind you i am a BE so i get about 1-2k mana back ever 2 minutes.

I don't gem spirit I mostly gem 24sp and 12sp and 10int.

In the end go with the spec you do the best with, you may find you are better at healing at holy you may not. Just don't let anyone tell you that disc isn't as good as holy.

[Lamiae]

Just finished to raid, and yet again I'm depressed.

Putricide HM

Shaman 3M and 7k HPS
Druid 2.8M and 6.5k HPS

Me + other HPriest 2M and 4,5-5k HPS


I'd even agree on that if they have a complex and difficult rotation to use.

71% heals from Chain Heal
66% heals from Rejuvenation

What's the point of being holy again?

I feel your pain, man ♥

[jifjosh]

I still have about 29% haste, 35% crit, 28k mana, 400mp5 in combat and 2,9k sp. It's not that my gear is gimped and disc is carrying me. I've just not played anything but disc basically. I just don't have any clue at all on how to play as holy.

You'd be surprised, I did t7 and t8 as disc, then my guild decided that disc wasn't a viable raid spot (for some unknown reason). Took a short break, when I came back as casual I just went holy and wow, I could carry people like you wouldn't believe, it's really not that hard of a transition, and esp with dual specs you don't need to totally commit to it, if things get dicey you can always go back to what you are comfortable. IMHO, healing with a little bit of everything helps you understand how your other raiders work and what they can/cannot/should be doing, so you all can work together better. /sing kumbaya.

[sacrypheyes]

57/14's PW:S - 1 second execute time, shields for 8,068, glyph hits for 2,149 avg, total 10,217 per cast and 10,217 HPS

13/58's Renew - 1.07 second execute time, heals for 2,294 avg, then 13,024 over time, total 15,318 per cast and 14,316 HPS

Let's make this clear:
13/58's Renew - 1.07 second execute time, heals for 2,294 avg, then 13,024 over time, total 15,318 per cast and 14,316 HPS
57/14's Renew - 1 second execute time, heals for 9,784 over time and 9,784 HPS
If you take 3/3 Imp Renew:
57/14's Renew - 1/1.01 second execute time, heals for 11,251 over time and 11,251/11,139 HPS
Remember:
57/14's PW:S - 1 second execute time, shields for 8,068, glyph hits for 2,149 avg, total 10,217 per cast and 10,217 HPS

you guys know that HPS means Heal Per Second right? if so, better fix your maths for renew.

as for the debate disc vs holy. pick which you like the most.
i personnaly prefer holy because of all the spells we can use in 25-raid healing instead of shield/pom spamming.
but from time to time, i find it enjoyable to switch to disc when it comes to random dungeons or 10-raids.

[fabian]

you guys know that HPS means Heal Per Second right? if so, better fix your maths for renew.

as for the debate disc vs holy. pick which you like the most.
i personnaly prefer holy because of all the spells we can use in 25-raid healing instead of shield/pom spamming.
but from time to time, i find it enjoyable to switch to disc when it comes to random dungeons or 10-raids.

He's correct. 15 sec duration on 15 raid members ~= 1 : 1 of HPS : Heal of Renew.