A few Discipline questions.

[Brolite]

Alright, being in a 10-man guild with a Resto Druid and a Holy Paladin as the other two healers, I was wondering what would be more beneficial for me, as Disc. Should I go all Haste? Mastery? Right now, I have a large amount of haste, since I just made the switch from Holy and I preferred Haste over Mastery when I was Holy. I'm also taking into consideration the gear for my Shadow spec, which I have in a very good spot gear-wise right now. I can't afford to really reforge away the Haste on my bracers, boots, belt (although I wouldn't ever really want to anyway in that case) as those are also shared by my Shadow spec. I was also wondering if someone could point me in the way of a good add-on for Rapture tracking.

Search Brotherlight-Terokkar US on the armory to get a little more understanding on my gear. Would have posted a link, but it won't let me.

Sorry for my rambling and thank you for any help :P

[Ellumina]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/characte...light/advanced
^ Link to Brotherlight's armory

Since your Holy Paladin will probably be your main tank healer, haste > mastery as a raid healer. I run with the same comp as you and currently have 16.37% (2096) haste and 12.65 (834) mastery with 0/3 Darkness, and I also keep in mind my shadow gear as well. Reforge away from crit and mastery first. Your gear all looks fine in terms of reforging and enchanting (but replace that pvp ring! ick =P)

I recently picked up the Ingela's Rapture addon to track my Raptures. It's very simple and easy to use and have found it very useful (looks like this, but you can obviously change around its location and colors and whatnot).

[Brolite]

Don't hate on my pvp ring! Guess what that ring replaced? The 365 pvp ring :P Sadly, I haven't had any luck whatsoever getting PvE rings and it's much better than a blue 346 ring :P

It's also quite funny how I downloaded that add-on before you even posted. Already have it set up, very light weight.

Quick edit. Is there any particular reason you passed up Inspiration in favor of Veiled Shadows? A little explanation for this would be appreciated.

[Ellumina]

Don't hate on my pvp ring! Guess what that ring replaced? The 365 pvp ring :P Sadly, I haven't had any luck whatsoever getting PvE rings and it's much better than a blue 346 ring :P

It's also quite funny how I downloaded that add-on before you even posted. Already have it set up, very light weight.

If you want a 359 ring option, you could get the JP caster ring, Band of Secret Names (190 int, 127 crit, 127 haste). Lose 50 int, 96 spirit. Gain 63 haste, 127 crit (which I suggest you reforge, so you would be losing 46 spirit and gaining 77 crit). Just putting it out there ^^

Edited due to your edit =P
This was my Heroic Majordomo spec (which I haven't changed since yesterday). This is the more typical spec I run with (occasionally 1/2 Atonement and 2/2 SoS, or favoring 1/3 Inner Sanctum over Atonement). I found that Domo was very Atonement and Archangel friendly so I picked it up and dropped Inspiration in order to do so. I feel that I have enough haste atm, and preferred Veiled Shadows for the shorter Shadowfiend CD. I could probably drop Veiled Shadows on normal fights, since normal fights do not generally push my mana (but I also run with particularly high spirit, ~2700), but for heroic fights like Beth'tilac, I find it more necessary to have my Shadowfiend up since that fight is quite a mana leecher for me.

Double edit: Now that I think about it, I probably should've dropped Veiled Shadows for Inspiration on Domo. I was extremely efficient on mana that entire fight, and I figured I would have had more mana issues. We did it in one night's attempts and I had respecced into this spec prior to our first attempt.

[Syri277]

since you are already trying to get the most haste, i think you should replace Train of Thought with Darkness.

[Brolite]

I was under the impression that Atonement was the raid healing spec (I'm assuming moreso for the Archangel, I don't see why a single-target smart heal is anything wonderful for raid healing). As of right now, my guild is just doing normals until we can get a bit more geared (especially me, they're 7/7 now, I've only downed Rhyolith when their main priest wasn't on :P) so for a raid healing normal mode Disc priest, do you think I should change my spec? Or leave it as is?
I was also wondering if you could give me any fight-specific tips for normal mode. Especially Baleroc, being the healing gimmicky fight that it is.

[Ellumina]

I was under the impression that Atonement was the raid healing spec (I'm assuming moreso for the Archangel, I don't see why a single-target smart heal is anything wonderful for raid healing). As of right now, my guild is just doing normals until we can get a bit more geared (especially me, they're 7/7 now, I've only downed Rhyolith when their main priest wasn't on :P) so for a raid healing normal mode Disc priest, do you think I should change my spec? Or leave it as is?
I was also wondering if you could give me any fight-specific tips for normal mode. Especially Baleroc, being the healing gimmicky fight that it is.

Running with Archangel (or Atonement at all) is a personal preference. It's definitely not necessary to raid heal, but if you find you have a lot of downtime with raid healing, it might work well for you.

How is your mana on fights? Usually, Majordomo is the biggest pain on mana, Baleroc, and possibly Beth'tilac P2 if your DPS is slow. If you're good with mana, you could take basel277's suggestion to put your ToT points into Darkness. If you struggle on mana, keep ToT. On a related note, do you have Inner Focus macroed to the spells that trigger it? If not, do so ^^ It helps a lot.

For Baleroc, I would advise speccing out of Archangel and Atonement. I find very little downtime in that fight, because you're almost always constantly healing someone (whether it be a tank or shard person). Darkness or Veiled Shadows (if you have mana problems on this fight) would be more favorable.

Otherwise, I think most other fights would be reasonable in your spec. I don't spec into AA because I'd rather put my points elsewhere and not be dependent on needing downtime to Smite in order to have the increased healing.

[Brolite]

Feel free to check back on this thread Sunday (like I said, I haven't done much Firelands raiding yet and one of our tanks had to go out of town this week for his job >_>) because that's when I'll have a few boss kills under my belt. As for speccing out of Archangel and Atonement for Baleroc, how necessary do you think that is for a normal mode the rest of my guild is already comfortable doing? I think it'd be a bit of a hassle to respec for one fight. Anyways, your help is greatly appreciated

[Ellumina]

Feel free to check back on this thread Sunday (like I said, I haven't done much Firelands raiding yet and one of our tanks had to go out of town this week for his job >_>) because that's when I'll have a few boss kills under my belt. As for speccing out of Archangel and Atonement for Baleroc, how necessary do you think that is for a normal mode the rest of my guild is already comfortable doing? I think it'd be a bit of a hassle to respec for one fight. Anyways, your help is greatly appreciated

It's by no means necessary to respec (I've only started respeccing for specifics fights for heroics). The fight is pretty easy to heal and you shouldn't have much of an issue with your current spec. And you're welcome ^^ Glad I could help!

[Serraphis]

You wont need to spec out of Atonement/Archangle for Baleroc Brolite. Once you get the rhythm down he's pretty simple and lots of fun (6 didgit heal crits WEEEE!). A good tip for him is to watch your Vital Flame buff when you are healing the tank. Just as it falls off find the dps with the Torment debuff (note: Torment not Tormented) and pop a pennace on him/her even if they dont need the healing and then back to the tank. When Vital Flame expires it reverts back to the Vital Spark buff until you heal the tank again. This means when you heal the dps you're going to increase your Spark buff with will increase your Flame buff when you go back to the tank.

[zakaluka]

AA/A feels really awesome and I love it. I tried and tried though to make it work for FL content, and it is just plain hard to stack up evangelism / pop wings at the right times. You have to plan things out well in advance, how exactly you're going to fit in holy fires and at what point during the AoE ramp-up. I believe it can be done but you know fights never go as planned, and I just never could get those AAs to pop when I wanted. I always missed my most important timing, and then I wasn't pulling hard enough when the real AoE started going out. Maybe I'll try it again sometime in the future when I'm more confident disc healing.

Next, it feels just plain silly speccing into SoS if you aren't tank healing. That was my initial reaction.

Something you have to remember, though, is that if you're AA specced you gain fair less benefit from grace / renewed hope than if you're SoS specced. I felt like I was losing a predictable 15% throughput cooldown for, what? a tank healing buff? Seemed silly. But if you look hard at your logs after switching to SoS you'll notice right away that your spell crit on Gheal goes up pretty significantly. Spell crit on PoH will inch up slightly too. As you can imagine, that has a huge effect on the stat value for mastery during gheal, as well as just your overall HPM/HPS.

It's really hard to math out the effects of Grace and Renewed Hope on raid healing, because it depends a huge amount on your healing behavior. But, do give it a try - you might like it. Despite how skeptical I was, I am now 100% convinced that SoS raidhealing is the way to go for FL.

Another benefit this has is to hugely relieve strain on your holy pally. Maybe you'll steal a little bit of hps from him - maybe you won't - but choosing one spec over another isn't really about 'how much hps can i do' but more 'am I pulling my weight/how smoothly are the fights going/is anyone in the healing comp struggling with mana?' If the druid struggles more with mana, holy may be the way to go. If the pally struggles more with mana, SoS specced priest will take some of the strain away.

[TheTrueM4gg0t]

I run with the same comp as you and currently have 16.37% (2096) haste and 12.65 (834) mastery with 0/3 Darkness

I would take darkness. It doesnt really make sense to go for a haste gear setup and not take darkness.

what many may not know: Darkness does not give 3% haste. it gives more.
When you have 0 haste on gear, it increases your haste by 3%: 100% (obviously base cast time) * 1.03 = 103%. => 3% haste.
but if you have 100% haste on gear, you have 200% cast speed. 200% *1.03 = 206%. it would then give you 6% haste.
so the more haste you have, the better is darkness. It doesn't make a big difference on our gear level, but just for clarification :-)

[Brolite]

Whelp, I killed some bosses Got some nice gear, changed my spec. AA/A was pretty much crap. The only times I found myself able to Holy Fire/Smite was on Staghelm's cat phase and going up top on Beth'tilac. Every other fight I really only found time to smite for one or two stacks of evangelism, I couldn't reliably stack it. Thanks all for your advice (I'm totally up for more if you have it)!

Should I buy a wand next? Or go for my 4 set asap? Can anyone give me some info on the 4 set regarding how good it is? I need some help deciding how to spend my valor.

[Ellumina]

Whelp, I killed some bosses Got some nice gear, changed my spec. AA/A was pretty much crap. The only times I found myself able to Holy Fire/Smite was on Staghelm's cat phase and going up top on Beth'tilac. Every other fight I really only found time to smite for one or two stacks of evangelism, I couldn't reliably stack it. Thanks all for your advice (I'm totally up for more if you have it)!

Should I buy a wand next? Or go for my 4 set asap? Can anyone give me some info on the 4 set regarding how good it is? I need some help deciding how to spend my valor.

Yeah, I wish AA/A were a little more viable for Firelands (and I'm actually going to try running AA/A on a few more bosses this week to try it out) but I usually don't find enough downtime to ramp up my Evangelism.

I always believe in going for tier pieces before other pieces, especially since this tier isn't very Priest friendly with the lack of spirit cloth. I would say get your either your tier gloves or pants next (I personally went with gloves before pants first because I preferred the spirit/haste itemization over spirit/crit, and then I got REALLY lucky because the next week, Occu'thar dropped me some healing pants <3). The 4set bonus is nice to have. Based on some logs I've looked through, the 4set bonus adds ~4-6% healing to your total healing (although it counts as a separate entity on WoL). I quite like our 4set bonus (in comparison to the other healer's 4set bonuses, I think Holy Pally bonus does maybe 1.5-3% of their total healing) because ours is really just "free healing" and it heals for a nice amount. I believe the ICD is ~45 seconds, and procs about once a minute from what I've read (so 50k free healing per minute, and the heals can crit but will not be affected by DA). I wish I had my own logs to show, but I just received my 4set bonus after killing H Domo this week, and I forgot to record logs for Rag I can link you my logs in a few days to show you how much healing the Cauterizing Flame does if you'd like.

EDIT: Oh, I also decided not to go for pants before gloves because I wasn't going to be next on the conq leg tier token (from Shannox). If you're close to dealing with H Shannox, you might want to save for pants before gloves for a chance on the token (H Baleroc drops glove token, not as easy as Shannox).