Theories on a Disc/Holy Smite Spec

[Balance]

Hello and thank you for viewing my post! I am fairly new to the priest class, and while I feel that I might not really have the experience or knowledge of the class to be doing theorycrafting this early, I would like to give it a shot and see what I can come up with. The final thing to be noticed by this spec (a hybrid spec that takes neither the Holy or Discipline top tier abilities) is that mastery is affected by the talent point spent. For clarification on this you can check the GM quote here. http://www.mmo-champion.com/news-2/m...ystem-preview/

With this said I will begin outlining the points put into each spec from the most up to date talent calculator for Cataclysm at the time of writing this post. http://www.wowtal.com/#k=d0Oi3y7utDODjN.9dw.priest


The Talent Specialization is HERE: http://www.wowtal.com/#k=d0Oi3y7utDODjN.9dw.priest
**There were some misunderstandings on this spec, it is based mainly on damage with healing and utility as a minor focus. **



Discipline:
5/5 Twin Disciplines – Increases damage and healing done by instant cast abilities, as well as the absorption of Power Word: Shield by 5%. (Has an effect on Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, Renew, Power Word: Shield, Shadow Word: Death)

3/3 Penitence – Increases the critical effect chance of your Smite and Penance by 15%.

3/3 Improved Inner Fire – Increases the effect of your Inner Fire spell by 45%.

1/1 Inner Focus – When activated reduces the cost of your next spell cast by 100% and increases it’s critical strike chance by 25% if it is capable of a critical strike.

3/3 Improved Power Word: Shield – Increases the damage absorbed by Power Word: Shield by 15%.

3/3 Atonement – When you deal damage with Smite, you instantly heal a nearby low-health friendly target within 40 yards equal to 45% of the damage dealt.

2/2 Evangelism – When you cast Smite you gain Evangelism, increasing the damage done by your Smite, Holy Fire, Holy Nova and Penance spells by 4% and reducing the Mana costof those spells by 6% for 15 seconds. Stacks up to 5 Times.

3/3 Mental Agility – Reduces the mana cost of your instant cast spells by 10%

1/1 Archangel – Consumes your Evangelism effects, instantly restoring 3% of your total mana and increasing your healing done by 3% for each stack. Also allows you to channel Penance while moving. Lasts 18 seconds.

3/3 Enlightenment – Increases your total mana and total health by 6%.

1/1 Power Word: Barrier - Ability is subject to changes, nerfs, and (hopefully) rank-ups, so I will skip the description at this time.

2/3 Soul Warding – Requires 1 point in Power Word: Barrier – Reduces the cooldown of your power word shield ability by 2 seconds and reduces the mana cost of your Power Word: Shield by 10%.

1/1 Power Infusion – Requires 2 points in Enlightenment – 30 yard range – Instant Cast – 2 min cooldown – Infuses the target with power, increasing spell casting speed by 20% and reducing the mana cost of all spells by 20%. Lasts 15 seconds.

[Balance]

Holy:

2/2 Holy Focus – Reduces the pushback suffered from damaging attacks while casting any holy spell by 70%.

3/3 Searing Light – Increases the damage of your Smite, Holy Fire, Holy Nova, and Penance spells by 12%.

5/5 Divine Fury – Reduces the cast time of your Smite, Holy Fire, Heal and Greater Heal spells by .5 seconds.

2/2 Divine Accuracy – Increases the chance to hit with your Smite, Holy Fire, Holy Nova, and Penance spells by 20%.

3/5 Empowered Healing – Your Greater Heal spell gains an additional 18% and your Flash Heal, Heal, and Binding Heal gain an additional 9% of your bonus healing effects.

3/3 Improved Renew – Increases the amount healed by your Renew spell by 15%.

3/3 Inspiration – Reduces your target’s physical damage taken by 10% for 15 seconds after getting a critical effect from your Flash Heal, Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal, Prayer of Healing, or Circle of Healing spell.

3/3 Improved Healing – Reduces mana cost of your Lesser Heal, Heal, Greater Heal, Divine Hymn, and Penance spells by 15%.

2/2 Holy Reach – Increase the range of your Smite and Holy fire spells and the radius of your Prayer of Healing, Holy Nova, Divine Hymn and Circle of healing by 20%.

1/1 Spirit of Redemption – Increases total Spirit by 5% and upon death, the priest becomes the Spirit of Redemption for 15 seconds. The Spirit of Redemption cannot move, attack, be attacked or targeted by any spells or effects. While in the form the priest can cast and healing spell free of cost. When the effect ends, the priest dies.

2/2 Surge of Light – Your spell criticals have a 25% chance to cause your next Smite or Flash Heal spell to be instant cast, cost no mana but be incapable of a critical hit. This effect lasts 10 seconds.

3/3 Holy Concentration – Your mana regeneration from spirit is increased by 50% for 8 seconds after you critically heal with Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal or Empowered Renew.

1/1 Lightwell – Lolwell needs no description.

2/2 Improved Holy Nova – Reduces the global cooldown of your holy nova spell by .5 seconds and increases its critical effect chance by 50%.

2/2 Body and Soul – When you cast Power Word: Shield or Leap of Faith, you increase the target’s movement speed by 60% for 4 seconds, and you have a 100% chance when you cast Cure Disease on yourself to also cleanse 1 poison effect in addition to diseases.

5/5 Chakra – When you use Prayer of Healing, Renew or Heal 3 times in a row you will enter a Chakra state empowering you for 20 seconds. You can only be in one Chakra state at a time. Prayer of Healing increases your area-of-effect healing by 10%, and reduces the cooldown of your circle of healing by 2.5 seconds. Renew increases the period haste effect of your Renew spells by 15% and reduces the global cooldown of your renew spell by .5 seconds. Heal increases the critical effect chance of your Heal spell by 5% and your heal has a 100% chance to refresh the duration of your Renew on the target. Smite increases your total damage done by Shadow and Holy spells by 12%. Starting at Rank 2 – Increases spell power by 10% of your total spirit. Rank 3 changes the talent to Spiritual Guidance – Increases spell power by 25% of your total spirit.

2/2 Empowered Renew – Your Renew spell gains an additional 15% of your bonus healing effects, and your renew will instantly heal the target for 15% of the total periodic effect.


This spec offers an almost ridiculous amount of utility. You first have the chance of dpsing using Smite, DoTs, AoE (Holy Nova/Mind Sear), and Shadow Word: Death. You do miss out on Penance because of the hybrid spec. Modifiers to your Smite include flat out damage percent modifiers, reduced cast times, and Chakra. Chakra from its description will increase the Damage done by Holy and Shadow spells by 12%, as well as increases spell power by 25% of your total spirit.

I must clarify here: This hybrid spec will REQUIRE spirit to function at it’s best.

After you look at the damage possibilities of this hybrid spec you must look at the healing possibilities. Firstly you have the option often of casting Flash Heal instant with 100% mana cost reduction thanks to surge of light. Because of Chakra and the points put into improved Renew and other healing talents, at any point of time you can throw Improved Power Word: Shields out with their Body and Soul effect which increases the speed of the person bubbled by 60% for 4 seconds, you can renew which has a chance to proc Holy Concentration as well as Surge of Light and will tick faster once Chakra kicks in, or just throwing out situational heals as Blizzard wants. This spec has almost limitless utility.

Pros – This spec would be an amazing utility spec, as it has amazing healing capability and very nice damage utility. Even the main nuke that this spec would DPS with heals for almost 50% of the damage done.

Cons – Firstly this spec could end up doing dps that is not up to par. This spec would be difficult to gear, and most likely have a high skill cap considering that you aren’t just spamming Smite and attempting to utilize it to it’s fullest. This spec could easily run OOM if not used correctly, and there is always the factor of it being too good to be true if it does work as expected.

I will go more into detail later, but it is currently 3 am and I felt I had to get my feelings out on paper and see what other people had to say about them.

[Balance]

That is all. Post Away.
Final reservation just in case.

Note: Attempting to fix the problem of part of the guide overlapping, but MMO seems to be lagging a bit at the moment.

[Izenhart]

The first thing I noticed in reading the new talent tree is the really huge step up in Holy damage abilities

[Lianora]

Nice posts, I am thrilled with the possibility to take smite as my offspec in Cata I played as smite the entire duration of TBC and I was extremely disappointed to see it go in Wrath. It looks to me that the new Cata smite priest build(s) have much more healing potential and utility than in TBC and some pretty decent dps potential. Waiting on more polished builds and number analysis to see if the dps/healing would be even remotely competative in a raid environment. So far it seems like a great build for blasting through heroics or lower tier raids. Frankly I'm not sure I care if it's viable in a raid, If the tree's stay similar I'll likely pick it up as my offspec for soloing and heroics/non progression raiding with a full fledged healing spec as main. Either way, I'm thrilled to see a comeback!

[Seriousmile]

How im gonna make a talent tree?! WTF blizzard .... I hate tank healing Worst talents ever ...

[draticus]

Yeah, I was looking at http://www.wowtal.com/#k=d0MPLZttJW2YUiz2.9dw.priest

I don't want to bother over analyzing this because I'm sure everything with change quite a bit before Cata but it looks like there will be some kind of smite spec that raid heals via atonement. I'm just curious to see whether it'll work best to throw the extra points into shields, renews, power infusion, or going 10 points into shadow for 26% increased dmg from SWP and 20% from DP.

Will the dmg and healing be enough to outweigh shadow with imp VE for raid utility though? Bliz already said they want to do away with the concept of parties within raids. They don't want any spells to effect "party" rather than raid so I'm assuming we'll see some kind of conversion of VE to raid wide or a small smart heal on 3 or more raid members.

[fabian]

http://www.wowtal.com/#k=d0Osjv7il3EgKb_.9dw.priest

If you do need to heal, using instants like PoM, renew and PW:S. PI for personal DPS CD.

[Mandible]

Try taking the smite glyph into consideration as well - 20% more damage on smite while target is affected by holy fire. Sure not alot, but would still give some boost to healing those around the target and possibly make it abit more changing to be healer in that sense.

Personally I like the idea as disc to slap shields up, smite abit when in need of some extra mana / healing and then move on as usual. Or smite away if people slack in getting damaged.

[Balance]

Try taking the smite glyph into consideration as well - 20% more damage on smite while target is affected by holy fire. Sure not alot, but would still give some boost to healing those around the target and possibly make it abit more changing to be healer in that sense.

Personally I like the idea as disc to slap shields up, smite abit when in need of some extra mana / healing and then move on as usual. Or smite away if people slack in getting damaged.

Actually seeing a lot of these modifiers, it begins to possibly form up a bit of a rotation. Depending on if there are any new spells or new bases added to this spec, it could actually do well. Also a 20% modifier on a spell like smite that already has so many +damage abilities in the tree is definitely a good thing.

[G l o w y r m]

Personally I like the idea as disc to slap shields up, smite abit when in need of some extra mana / healing and then move on as usual.

It sounds weird, but I do hope that a smite here and there to use Evangelism and Archangle works out. I mean, I hope that our healing is still competitive with a few Smites in our rotation, you know?

[trebor]

I like your theories. Personally (at least to maximize dps) my spec would be something like this http://www.wowtal.com/#k=d0MPTObTZRbsgl.9dw.priest

This spec is mainly thought up for dpsing but it gives you the option to pop a shield whenever you like (the shield in this case adding to your dps as well because of Reflective Shield)

Of course it's still to early to see if a spec like this is actually viable for dpsing, but one can only hope

Edit: for some reason the talent calculator seems to add extra 5 points to the holy spec and I can't seem to fix it, the spec is correct except for the talents in the 8-9th tier of the holy tree, which are not supposed to be there (except for Chakra of course)

[pickley]

I see disc becoming more of a hybrid dps/heal spec, Smite x5 then heal for massive....damage? Should be great for quick 5 man groups.

[Frmercury]

My theory is that this is all a wonderfully cruel practical joke being played on you. You'll see all of these Smite / HF targeted talents be refined through Beta, Rejoice when Beta testers report on great numbers.

Then Cata hits, they're not there and GC laughs at the hundreds of thousands of people who got all excited about them.

Yes, the Smite enhancing talents we put in the Disc and Holy Priest talent trees was the biggest developer troll in the history of World of Warcraft.

/hope

[Lucky_]

Pros – This spec would be an amazing utility spec, as it has amazing healing capability and very nice damage utility. Even the main nuke that this spec would DPS with heals for almost 50% of the damage done.

Cons – Firstly this spec could end up doing dps that is not up to par. This spec would be difficult to gear, and most likely have a high skill cap considering that you aren’t just spamming Smite and attempting to utilize it to it’s fullest. This spec could easily run OOM if not used correctly, and there is always the factor of it being too good to be true if it does work as expected.

I will go more into detail later, but it is currently 3 am and I felt I had to get my feelings out on paper and see what other people had to say about them.

I do hope this is some sort of a joke? You're effectively claiming that you can properly heal on PW:S without 3/3 B&S and on renew, while completely missing key talents from disc such as borrowed time, divine aegis and rapture, as well as guardian spirit from holy?
This goes beyond "low mastery". It is borderline general cluelessness. We priests LIVE by our top tier talents in both holy and disc which you happily pass to get a bit more smite damage. You can properly empower smite by going cookie cutter disc spec and just shoving a few more talent points in searing light. Not to mention that it will probably completely eclipse your spec on damage between healing because of 25% BT haste on smites when needed.

This is throwing the baby out with the water. Just use a PvP spec with smite glyph (if that doesn't change). It works almost as well on damage, and unlike your spec, it can actually do proper healing.

[Bigslick]

The basic idea is you can choose to add some damage to your healing if you are soloing, in PvP, or even raiding encounters which aren't particularly demanding for you to heal. For those situations where you really need to heal, you'll do better with a talent build that focuses on healing. Source

So if you're brought on as a primary healer, you shouldn't be speccing into smiting. But you can't maximize your ability to deal with spikes of damage without speccing into and casting it. Make up your mind, Blizz!

[Nalnik]

My theory is that this is all a wonderfully cruel practical joke being played on you. You'll see all of these Smite / HF targeted talents be refined through Beta, Rejoice when Beta testers report on great numbers.

Then Cata hits, they're not there and GC laughs at the hundreds of thousands of people who got all excited about them.

Yes, the Smite enhancing talents we put in the Disc and Holy Priest talent trees was the biggest developer troll in the history of World of Warcraft.

/hope

Freddy, I hope you are dead wrong.

However, if it is a huge troll, or they snatch it away between the last patch and Cataclysm, someone at Blizzard would need bodyguards.

If it turns out to just be a spec that is too clunky and weird to work, that may be a concern, but I still want to have a chance to try it.

I think almost every priest has looked at it as a passing fancy and some have tried to make it work, however, when we saw the new talents, I think everyone thought "I'm trying Smite"

If they go and crush the hopes of an entire class, I'm switching to something else.

[Xelaeno]

My theory is that this is all a wonderfully cruel practical joke being played on you. You'll see all of these Smite / HF targeted talents be refined through Beta, Rejoice when Beta testers report on great numbers.

Then Cata hits, they're not there and GC laughs at the hundreds of thousands of people who got all excited about them.

Yes, the Smite enhancing talents we put in the Disc and Holy Priest talent trees was the biggest developer troll in the history of World of Warcraft.

/hope

Lol looks like someone's overreacting, Smite won't match shadow in damage, so what's with the uneasiness? Blizzard is trying out new approaches, it'd be fun.

Anyway, I posted this on my blog but I'll post it here as well. The first build I came up with after seeing the talent trees is this:

35/41/0

The idea here is that you are a primary damage dealer but has the ability to immediately switch to healing when entering a particular damage heavy boss phase or some unfortunate nuke phase where healers suddenly drop dead, I call it the First-Aid spec.

The tools you have are:

PW: Barrier, No-cooldown PW: Shield, Circle of Healing, Power Infusion, Light Well, Chakra, and Archangel.

You need 3/3 in Divine Aegis because your smite will crit a lot when you deal damage. If 45% of your damage is converted to healing, that healing will similarly be critical hits, you will have tons of DA stacking on multiple targets when you deal damage, further enhancing your "healing on damage" utility.

Archangel from a smite perspective is very interesting. It's similar to a spirit tap button when you dps. You do not use it when you dps, only after everything's dead, then you "tap" it and get some mana back, as re-stacking the mana reduction buff is inefficient. It is also the first button you press when you go into first aid mode. You lose your dps buff, but gains a healing buff and some mana back, very useful.

I could just imagine this spec go insane in a raid situation. Oh shit moment? No worries, just drop PW: Barrier, activate power infusion, CoH + PoH spam, after PI finish, you use your no-cooldown PW: Shield and bubble everyone up. If there's AOE opportunity, you start spamming holy nova, not only does it do damage with 50% more crit, but it also heals AND proc divine aegis. O__O

[Frmercury]

Xel, you should know my seething hatred for Smite DPS and all it stands for by now.

[Nalnik]

You need 3/3 in Divine Aegis because your smite will crit a lot when you deal damage. If 45% of your damage is converted to healing, that healing will similarly be critical hits, you will have tons of DA stacking on multiple targets when you deal damage, further enhancing your "healing on damage" utility.

Quick question, are you sure that the heal will translate into a crit? I don't know anyone in the Alpha/Beta/whatever-stage-it's-at, nor manage to keep up with all the blue posts that I should, but has it been confirmed to crit if Smite crits?

My first thought is that it is like Vampiric Embrace. I don't always pay attention to numbers, but doesn't a crit damage with VE just translate to a larger heal and not a crit heal?