Holy Priest bis trinkets & why play as Holy

[Thirteen]

Being mad doesn't change the fact I am right though. Disc pulls ahead on the meters by preventing damage before other healers can get to heal -there's a fine difference between this and what you described, but I don't expect you to get it.

No one's mad, and no one needs to be an ass. As long as people aren't getting oneshot, there's no difference. Holy has a drastically higher healing output than disc, which is why it'll always pull ahead of disc (and possibly others) on encounters where you need consistent throughput (Thok and Malkorok come to mind).

You can choose to gimp yourself, but a competent disc >>>> competent holy for any heroic fight any day of the week.

Sorry, but this just isn't true; already explained why. Holy is a high-risk, high-reward spec. If your raid makes fewer/no mistakes, it lets you get away with putting another DPS instead of a healer (see: Holy solo-healing most SoO fights). Obviously, YMMV.

Holy and disc play differently. One will always be better than the other on a given encounter. Putting them both on opposite extremes is just silly.

[Deleted]

Did my first full clear as disc (usually shadow somewhere). I can honestly say that the only point I felt disc was stronger was for using barrier on an ironstar on Garrosh. At every other point I felt that the extra healing from holy would have more than made up for the mitigation from disc, and would in some cases have prevented some deaths where we fell behind on throughput. Even on the same fight (Garrosh) I wish I had been holy to better deal with whirlings and annihilates.

All of that not including the DPS disc brought, which possibly helped although enrage is never a concern.

[Dracodraco]

No one's mad, and no one needs to be an ass. As long as people aren't getting oneshot, there's no difference. Holy has a drastically higher healing output than disc, which is why it'll always pull ahead of disc (and possibly others) on encounters where you need consistent throughput (Thok and Malkorok come to mind).


Sorry, but this just isn't true; already explained why. Holy is a high-risk, high-reward spec. If your raid makes fewer/no mistakes, it lets you get away with putting another DPS instead of a healer (see: Holy solo-healing most SoO fights). Obviously, YMMV.

Holy and disc play differently. One will always be better than the other on a given encounter. Putting them both on opposite extremes is just silly.

Actually, only Norushen (and obviously garrosh, although it's been forever since so rankings have fallen off) is tracked as having been solo healed by a holy priest. That makes two (Link: http://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings...h=heal.1-7.2.1 )
Meanwhile, disc has done... Every single fight except for immerseus and spoils.
That makes twelve (Link: http://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings...h=heal.1-7.1.1 )

The thing is, unless you are severely undergeared, there's just no moment where the throughput of holy will make up for it's weaknesses (prone to overhealing, mana intensive etc), while disc is good at both lower gear levels (not reliant on spirit, heals "unhealable" damage with absorbs) AND high gear levels (Scales a lot better than holy because of the no spirit thing).

So yes, he's completly right. Assuming the disc and the holy priest are both equally as good as each other, there's absolutely no situation this tier where you would pick the holy priest over the disc. Not even malkorok, considering that fight is pure overhealing, and thus shows nothing except raw potential output (that'll never be realised) which is irrelevant*.
All that aside, the highest disc on malkorok sustains 610K vs 750K in 25 man, and 350K vs 393K in 10 man. This is not even *close* to being enough to drop a healer in either raid size - simply put, if the fact that a holy priest has 10% higher throughput in 10, or 20% higher throughput in 25 means you are able to drop a healer, then you WERE ALREADY able to drop a healer.
Oh, and also, why do you mention thok? There's one holy priest in the top 100 on Thok 10 heroic, and two in 25 man. The best 25 man is about 20% behind the best disc, and the best 10 man is 30% behind the best disc. That fight is a *paradise* for disc.



*(Take the #1 holy priest, Amity, from Vodka - 750K hps. Their raid did 490M healing combined, but the raid only took 265M damage. Even assuming every single raider had 1M HP, that's still 200M healing more than there was available to heal up).


Redsparowe - you might feel more comfortable 2 healing garrosh heroic as holy, but it sure as shit isn't because holy is stronger for the fight. Here's a list of the priests that, so far, has 2 healed garrosh 25 heroic (and gotten a rank for it):
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings...&search=heal.2
Music's the only holy priest shown, and Music's at the very bottom of the list in terms of output. Almost anything "hard" about the fight to heal is covered in raid CDs, or are combatted three times as efficiently by shelling and shielding than trying to burst the damage as holy. Heck, Music and I even discussed it and arrived at the conclusion that, despite the other healer ALSO being a disc, it was probably just as good to 2 heal as 2x discs if not better, than disc+holy. Make your co-healer a druid, shaman, paladin or MW and this just becomes even more evident.

Simply put - if you feel that you fell behind on damage, it's because you aren't used to the fight yet and aren't using spirit shell or divine star correct. I went ahead and pulled your disc log of Garrosh from yesterday, and compared it to one of mine with a similiar time (this week's was sloppy, our main tanks were both gone, and had 2x boostees, so didn't skip the terrace intermission):
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...6&type=healing
vs
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...5&type=healing

The main difference you'll notice is our divine aegis (70M vs 100M) and our divine star healing (34M vs 29M). Some of it will be gear as you're usually shadow, so mine will be better - but you're using your divine star *after* damage has happened, instead of using it to *prevent* damage to happen. You're using it as if you were holy. You want to get it in the second whirl starts so you heal up the first tick of damage, not towards the end (so you waste aegis but benefit from the full heal). You also used far fewer casts (17 vs 28) which means less shielding/holding on it.
Your spirit shell usage is good (mine was off on this kill because we pushed garrosh too fast for it to be ready for the empowered whirl), so that's not the issue. I wouldn't even be PoH'ing in the intermission (you use shell there), but to each their own.
Essentially, your divine star usage is what's making you feel less in control than you should be. Fix it, and report back :P.





Everything said here aside, people keep saying "if your raiders perform well", and "if you don't take lethal damage". I mean, that's just not a likely scenario at all. Mistakes will happen, and disc can save people from those mistakes. Our raids survivability took a noticeable hit without a disc priest because sometimes you're just gonna get fucked over by laser+drill+richochet on juggernaut (as an example), and there's nothing any of the other healers can hope to do about it. It isn't even because of bad play - it's because the game is designed to try to burst people down quicker than healers can react.

[Deleted]

Appreciate you looking into the logs. No doubt I'm better at holy than disc anyway so that would certainly skew it, my gear is also better itemized for holy (4set, all the mastery+spirit offpieces, thok trinket). That said I still don't see disc out performing holy on Garrosh (ignoring damage contribution). Holy spells heal for more per cast, no way of avoiding that. Looking at those logs it looks like you have about 10% more crit than I do, that's quite significant for disc. So it looks like you're overhealing with divine star before the damage for the aegis, where I'm using the star on the first tick for the heal and then getting the aegis. Which would explain why you have about 45million more overhealing from DS than I do. But I don't see the advantage of doing so? You lose the heal and gain nothing? Or maybe I'm missing what you do during whirling?

So you star before whilring, then do what during whirling? D:
At the end of the day, we had a wipe previously where we lost people during annihilates, and another before where people died during a whirling, due to lack of raw healing throughput; neither of which would have happened if I was holy. People didn't get one shot, they ticked down from each hit without getting enough healing. Obviously we did eventually kill it when I was disc by rearranging CDs. But holy's extra throughput would have been enough (it was only 3-4 people on the last tick of whirling and only the last annihilate hit that killed people).

I'm not saying disc is bad by any means, it's also totally viable. The damage contribution is brings more than makes up for it's shortfalls, and as shown, using CDs to cover discs lack of throughput works just fine. The point I want to make is holy is just as viable, for different reasons.

EDIT;

I've been comparing holy and disc for myself for a while now, (http://tinyurl.com/p76q8gz). With my current gear options, even with proper reforging etc my holy spells all heal for ~20% more per cast, when combined with HW:S / lightwell etc it's a pretty hefty difference.
However, comparing my HOLY to your disc gear, your disc gear heals more per cast. Just as an example; on average (including crit+mastery etc) my disc flash heal is 310k per cast. Yours is over 390k. When you start expanding that to spells like divine star it becomes pretty silly. (hitting 25 targets, twice, with no overhealing). Mine averages 7.4m, yours is over 9m. Obviously this is just paper theory.
I realize this is all a bit petty, but from your perspective, going holy probably wouldn't add much throughput because of your itemization for disc. With my gear, going holy is a significant throughput bonus.

I think if I had access to your disc gear I'd be a lot more inclined to play disc, I simply don't get enough DA out per cast for it to be worth using over holy.
EDIT2; it actually looks like there's only a few item changes needed to make the difference. Pretty much having 4set forces me into holy, the itemization + bonuses create a 20%+ gap between the spells of each spec. However. swapping say... tier helm and tier gloves to immerseus helm + blackfuse gloves closes that gap to less than 5%. The extra crit alone makes a huge difference. Pushing that further... say, paragons bracers and shamans boots on top of the tier changes actually pushes the spell casts of disc above that of holy. Once disc is healing more per cast than holy then indeed there is no benefit to healing as holy. So I concede that an optimal disc priest will always be the prefered choice, however, it is gear dependent.
If a player is missing the optimal pieces (ie, crit pieces) then holy is likely to offer a significant throughput increase

[PosPosPos]

Sorry, but this just isn't true; already explained why. Holy is a high-risk, high-reward spec. If your raid makes fewer/no mistakes, it lets you get away with putting another DPS instead of a healer (see: Holy solo-healing most SoO fights). Obviously, YMMV.

Holy and disc play differently. One will always be better than the other on a given encounter. Putting them both on opposite extremes is just silly.

Holy is a high-risk, high-reward spec. If your raid makes fewer/no mistakes, it lets you get away with putting another DPS instead of a healer (see: Holy solo-healing most SoO fights).

Holy is a high-risk, high-reward spec.

In the meantime, Disc is a low-risk, high-reward spec. Guess who is better then?

Hint: there are pretty much no fight that disc cannot solo heal that a holy can. Go ahead and try naming one if you can.

[Thirteen]

[snip]

You know as well as I that those logs are extremely biased for more than one reason:
-A LOT more priests play disc than holy (easily more than 5:1)
-Players are at a much higher item level than at the start of the tier; disc benefits from this a lot more than holy
-Atonement...
But that's far from my point. I never said anything on the lines of "Always go holy, it's so much better". My point from the start was: If you want to go holy, do it. Don't feel like you need to be disc. Holy is fine (if you play it well).

[Dracodraco]

Appreciate you looking into the logs. No doubt I'm better at holy than disc anyway so that would certainly skew it, my gear is also better itemized for holy (4set, all the mastery+spirit offpieces, thok trinket). That said I still don't see disc out performing holy on Garrosh (ignoring damage contribution). Holy spells heal for more per cast, no way of avoiding that. Looking at those logs it looks like you have about 10% more crit than I do, that's quite significant for disc. So it looks like you're overhealing with divine star before the damage for the aegis, where I'm using the star on the first tick for the heal and then getting the aegis. Which would explain why you have about 45million more overhealing from DS than I do. But I don't see the advantage of doing so? You lose the heal and gain nothing? Or maybe I'm missing what you do during whirling?

So you star before whilring, then do what during whirling? D:
At the end of the day, we had a wipe previously where we lost people during annihilates, and another before where people died during a whirling, due to lack of raw healing throughput; neither of which would have happened if I was holy. People didn't get one shot, they ticked down from each hit without getting enough healing. Obviously we did eventually kill it when I was disc by rearranging CDs. But holy's extra throughput would have been enough (it was only 3-4 people on the last tick of whirling and only the last annihilate hit that killed people).

I'm not saying disc is bad by any means, it's also totally viable. The damage contribution is brings more than makes up for it's shortfalls, and as shown, using CDs to cover discs lack of throughput works just fine. The point I want to make is holy is just as viable, for different reasons.

Nono, you seem to be casting divine star after about 3-4 ticks of whirling (say it ticks 6 times, once per second it channels), while I cast it before the first one has even gone out so it hits exactly as the first tick happens. This means the outgoing hits the first whirl tick, shield second, returns on third, shields fourth. You seem to be hitting fourth, shielding fifth, hitting sixth and then ??? no aegis.
A lot of my overhealing is because I used it about 75% more than you did (28 vs 17), mainly to break out MC's/heal them up.
As for ticking down slowly, that's where I'd say "why didn't you use a raid CD?" - AG was used twice (once on first whirl, once on empowered), could have fit it in during the intermission and done second whirl/emp whirl aswell. Thae healing tided twice (third whirl and somewhere in P4), both shadow priests only VE'd once etc... Basicly, you have a ton of cooldowns, so you could cover the intermission easily, but they're just rather oddly spread =P. Rallyings basicly covered entire P4 for some reason, zero devo's, three smokebombs, etc

[Deleted]

Nono, you seem to be casting divine star after about 3-4 ticks of whirling (say it ticks 6 times, once per second it channels), while I cast it before the first one has even gone out so it hits exactly as the first tick happens. This means the outgoing hits the first whirl tick, shield second, returns on third, shields fourth. You seem to be hitting fourth, shielding fifth, hitting sixth and then ??? no aegis.
A lot of my overhealing is because I used it about 75% more than you did (28 vs 17), mainly to break out MC's/heal them up.
As for ticking down slowly, that's where I'd say "why didn't you use a raid CD?" - AG was used twice (once on first whirl, once on empowered), could have fit it in during the intermission and done second whirl/emp whirl aswell. Thae healing tided twice (third whirl and somewhere in P4), both shadow priests only VE'd once etc... Basicly, you have a ton of cooldowns, so you could cover the intermission easily, but they're just rather oddly spread =P. Rallyings basicly covered entire P4 for some reason, zero devo's, three smokebombs, etc

That's still relying on CDs to do what my holy spec could just heal up (due to my gearing giving holy so much extra throughput than disc). If I had better disc gear then it probably wouldn't have mattered anyways.
No doubt I wasn't using divine star optimally. Still though, what do you do during whirlings? Like, your active casting time over those few seconds? I notice very little PoH in your logs. obviously prestacking spirit shell, precasting DS, then what? Not trying to have a dig, I literally don't know - I don't main a disc priest :P

[Dracodraco]

That's still relying on CDs to do what my holy spec could just heal up (due to my gearing giving holy so much extra throughput than disc). If I had better disc gear then it probably wouldn't have mattered anyways.
No doubt I wasn't using divine star optimally. Still though, what do you do during whirlings? Like, your active casting time over those few seconds? I notice very little PoH in your logs. obviously prestacking spirit shell, precasting DS, then what? Not trying to have a dig, I literally don't know - I don't main a disc priest :P

Sure, it would be if holy can match the throughput of a raid CD. I have my doubts, though - as pointed out, even on the "best" holy fight to show pure throughput, Holy is only 20% ahead of disc... And that's with constant damage to heal, no downtime. On a boss like Garrosh where it comes in sudden pulses (like the whirl), I really can't imagine holy actually bursting higher than a spirit shelling disc over 6 seconds.
For intermissions, there may be something about it, but then again, your throughput is a lot lower than "needed" - here's your intermission healing vs mine during annihilates:
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...5&end=12272393
and here's one of my good annihilate phases (where we didn't really use defensives/healing cds etc):
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...2&end=10287969

As you say, gear is set up for holy etc, but I fail to see how holy's going to be far enough ahead - when I compared to music's duo healing back in the day he wasn't really ahead of what I can push, and that's with one healer less.

And for whirls, I atonement, basicly. One tank, so someone needs to keep him alive as he dips lower than the raid etc :P.

[Deleted]

I play a holy priest since I dont like disc that much as other priests... right now the ilvl is 560. I've been healing soo 10N raids with no problems, almost always better than discs. But I still have some questions about some items, could someone give me a tip about what are the bis trinkets for Holy? if not bis, the best ones... right now I use the trinkets that drop from thok and nazgrim (will change from nazgrim to sha when it drops). I also have 16.5k spirit and its on my confort zone...

The reason you play as disc, is because its (maybe) easier? because you help doing dmg on bosses? why do you choose disc over holy?

There are only two fights where a holy priest can spank an equally skilled discipline priest on the meters assuming you run minimal healers: Malko Hc and Thokk. The rest of the encounters the mechanics and the gear avaialble at the moment prevent you completely from "winning" the meters. That does not mean holy is no good. On the contrary it is an awesome spec. It is just that everyone else has a mechanic to counter overhealing and you don't. As far as I am concerned for dealing with the damage patterns the optimal specs for heroic SoO per encounter are
immerseus (disc)
protectors (both good, but holy is better if you run with very few healers)
Narushen (both good, but holy better for minimal healers), Sha of Fear (Disc awesome, holy terrible)
Galakras (both good, but holy better if you run with very few healers)
Juggernaught (Disc is better for p1, Holy is better for p2)
Shaman (Disc, holy is bad)
Nazgrim (Disc, holy is bad).
Malko (Holy),
Spoils (Disc, holy is bad)
Thokk (Combo dependent, disc better with shamans)
Siegecrafter (Disc, holy is bad)
PAragons (Disc, holy is bad)
Garrosh (Both good)

Note that is not about meters, but about just dealing with the lethal damage and common mistakes. Disc will naturally edge ahead of holy in most encounters unless you run with less than the optimal number of healers. In some encounters holy just does not have the right tools.

The optimal trinkets for holy change with the encounter. Thokk's trinket is BiS by a huge margin on any stacked encounter. I have had the proc do 15% of my healing on thokk. Use the siegecrafter trinket or the multistrike trinket for spread encounters. The Amp trinket from sha is BiS in the second slot.

16.5k spirit is a bit high. I generally have 12k and don't feel penalised unless I have to cast mass dispels.

In general Holy priests and shamans are the highest raw throughput specs at the moment. They are also he class with the most powerful smart healing. Unfortunately holy is the only spec in the game without some sort of mechanic to deal with overheal. Disc is the spec to choose on any encounter with very bursty very spikey damage or encounters that have a great deal of single shot mechanics.

[Deleted]

All this talk of 'equally skilled' imo should be replaced with 'equally geared'. A disc priest without crit rating is just garbage - I'd suggest it's much easier to gear as holy, get 4set and whatever pieces you want. If you don't have the crit for disc then it really isn't bringing much to the group.

[Aparthia]

A disc priest without crit rating is just garbage - I'd suggest it's much easier to gear as holy, get 4set and whatever pieces you want. If you don't have the crit for disc then it really isn't bringing much to the group.

A disc priest without crit is pretty gimped. But I fail to see how that's ever an issue in heroic SoO. Even if you end up with a gear set that has no crit on it what so ever(which is pretty difficult), between reforge and gems you can still easily hit 40% crit or more, which is plenty of crit for SoO. At that level of crit discipline is undoubtedly able to compete with a holy priest.

[Deleted]

Actually, only Norushen (and obviously garrosh, although it's been forever since so rankings have fallen off) is tracked as having been solo healed by a holy priest. That makes two (Link: http://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings...h=heal.1-7.2.1 )
Meanwhile, disc has done... Every single fight except for immerseus and spoils.
That makes twelve (Link: http://www.warcraftlogs.com/rankings...h=heal.1-7.1.1 )

People solo healing encounters are probably going for speedkills, in which case you wouldn't pick holy to solo heal. Also not everyone uses warcraft logs.

The thing is, unless you are severely undergeared, there's just no moment where the throughput of holy will make up for it's weaknesses (prone to overhealing, mana intensive etc), while disc is good at both lower gear levels (not reliant on spirit, heals "unhealable" damage with absorbs) AND high gear levels (Scales a lot better than holy because of the no spirit thing).

So yes, he's completly right. Assuming the disc and the holy priest are both equally as good as each other, there's absolutely no situation this tier where you would pick the holy priest over the disc. Not even malkorok, considering that fight is pure overhealing, and thus shows nothing except raw potential output (that'll never be realised) which is irrelevant*.
All that aside, the highest disc on malkorok sustains 610K vs 750K in 25 man, and 350K vs 393K in 10 man. This is not even *close* to being enough to drop a healer in either raid size - simply put, if the fact that a holy priest has 10% higher throughput in 10, or 20% higher throughput in 25 means you are able to drop a healer, then you WERE ALREADY able to drop a healer.
Oh, and also, why do you mention thok? There's one holy priest in the top 100 on Thok 10 heroic, and two in 25 man. The best 25 man is about 20% behind the best disc, and the best 10 man is 30% behind the best disc. That fight is a *paradise* for disc.



*(Take the #1 holy priest, Amity, from Vodka - 750K hps. Their raid did 490M healing combined, but the raid only took 265M damage. Even assuming every single raider had 1M HP, that's still 200M healing more than there was available to heal up).

Everything said here aside, people keep saying "if your raiders perform well", and "if you don't take lethal damage". I mean, that's just not a likely scenario at all. Mistakes will happen, and disc can save people from those mistakes. Our raids survivability took a noticeable hit without a disc priest because sometimes you're just gonna get fucked over by laser+drill+richochet on juggernaut (as an example), and there's nothing any of the other healers can hope to do about it. It isn't even because of bad play - it's because the game is designed to try to burst people down quicker than healers can react.

There is a reason why garrosh was solo healed by a holy priest. Discipline was not able to do it, because it lacked the throughput, so that first statement cannot be true. There is clearly a point where the extra raw throughput from holy makes the difference. For certain damage patterns disc will be able to reach a given HPS threshold at a lower gear level than holy, due to being able to use dead time to cram more healing into bursts. For MOST damage patterns holy will be able to reach a given HPS threshold faster than disc. So at the low limit there are more situations where holy is clearly the better spec, IF you run with the absolute minimum healing. This is more evident in the less progressed undergeared raids.

There are three things to consider here.
1) The HPS requirement isn't as straightforward as you think. Lets say your raid is taking 100k DPS over 6 minutes. If the maximum healing your healer team can push out over 6 minute is also exactly 100k HPS, then the encounter is absolutely unhealable. It is impossible to have zero overheal and the average DPS does not reflect the entire encounter. You almost always have peaks and throughs in damage. The healing requirement is determined by the amount of healing that you need to RELIABLY survive the peaks.
2) If say on average you need to supply exactly 100k HPS to survive a particular damage pattern. That means you will wipe due to lack of healing a certain proportion of the time since damage isn't constant between attempts. That means to always survive a damage pattern you need to provide healing sufficient to counteract the maximum damage not the average damage.
3) The number of healers is granular. If you need to supply 100k HPS to have a fighting chance of healing past the encounter and you have 3 healers who can supply 33k each, then you need another healer and that is that, even if that brings your total to 131k, which is more than the minimum.

Now number 3 is tricky, because although it might appear that the extra healing is wasted, it may not be the case. Remember that even if you wipe sometimes due to lack of healing the encounter may still be doable. So having extra healing above the lower limit means less wipes. This is the key to understanding the issues at hand and why I took the time to explain those three factors individually.

That means that a situation where you run with the absolute minimum achievable number of healers, may actually not be the best way to do the encounter. In fact it is probably not, because of the way healing and DPS is tuned. This is what really makes the holy advantage evaporate. Yes at the lower gear limit you can potentially get by with holy in situations where you can't make it with disc (e.g. 1st solo heal hc garrosh 10man), but there is little point if you can kill the boss more reliably by taking more healers. Running the minimum achievable number of healers (i.e. having several wipes due to lack of healing) is in fact something that is generally avoided.

Some of the rest that you wrote has some key mistakes. The amount of damage taken and the amount of damage healed on Malkorok is different because a massive amount of damage is absorbed by the encounter mechanics. The amount of damage healed on malkorok is related to the damage taken by the following formula

Total effective healing done = Total damage taken + (number of ancient barrier resets)*(total ancient barrier size) - (remaining raid health deficit) - (health/absorb lost due to deaths).

At the start of the fight and after every phase reset you have to restack ancient barrier, which shows up on the meters, but has no damage equivalent. It is the same like having a mechanic which increases maximum health, every so often, but you have to fill the healthbars up to the new maximum everytime the buff goes up. When the buff is lost that effective health is lost but it does not show up as damage. In addition any deficit people have at the end of the fight from the maximum that includes the biggest possible absorb from the ancient barrier was not healed and will not show up. Finally if someone died they will have taken damage that was not healed up. It is mainly that second factor from the ancient barrier resets that causes the total healing and damage to not tally. That does not mean that this healing is not needed. On the contrary it is vital to keeping people alive. It would be the same as an ability that sets the HP of your raid to 50%, without it counting as damage and then you have to heal it up.

When looking at whether it is possible to drop a healer, looking at effective healing is beyond pointless. You need to isolate the peaks and look at overheal. You will find at even at the peaks overheal is very large for all healers, except disc. Typically over 25%. That means up to 25% of each healer is available as additional output, if a healer is dropped. What you are trying to do is look at the effective throughput of a healer that is competing with other healers for the available damage. That is an irrelevant number. What matters is the difference in the raw throughput between n healers with a disc priest and (n-1) healers with a holy priest during the damage peaks. You will find that for malkorok there is a massive difference in the gear thresholds required for dropping a healer if you have a holy and disc priest in the raid.

The argument of comparing effective healing from top logs as a metric for determining whether there is sufficient throughput to drop a healer, is completely invalid.

A similar problem arises on thokk. Disc has more throughput easily, but the points where it has more throughput are the bits which are already healable with less healers. At the peaks of the damage holy has considerably bigger throughput. The dominance of the logs by disc is down to high gear levels.

[Music]

Coming from someone who plays Holy on literally every fight, Disc is undoubtedly better on pretty much every fight this tier. The only fights you can really argue that Holy performs better would be Malk, Spoils(if solo healing a side), Garrosh, and possibly Thok.

As Havoc mentioned above, Holy can potentially be better if you use less healers, but in most cases Disc is going to pull ahead regardless.

Regarding Garrosh, Draco and I talked about that quite a bit in a previous thread, but the conclusion was that Disc is clearly better because the damage pattern is perfect for Disc. In my specific case, Disc+Holy v Disc+Disc resulted in inconclusive evidence as I really dislike playing Disc and really only had one sample to compare my Holy parses to. But in all other cases: Disc+X v Holy+X, Disc is certainly going to come out on top, except possibly with a Holy Paladin.

[Dracodraco]

People solo healing encounters are probably going for speedkills, in which case you wouldn't pick holy to solo heal. Also not everyone uses warcraft logs.

Irrelevant. If holy really was as strong/good at solo healing as people claim, we would be seeing more solo healing holy priests. There's plenty of shaman solo healing logs for almost as many encounters as disc, yet shamans provide no damage for speed kills - heck, holy paladins have more representation than holy priests.

There is a reason why garrosh was solo healed by a holy priest. Discipline was not able to do it, because it lacked the throughput, so that first statement cannot be true. There is clearly a point where the extra raw throughput from holy makes the difference. For certain damage patterns disc will be able to reach a given HPS threshold at a lower gear level than holy, due to being able to use dead time to cram more healing into bursts. For MOST damage patterns holy will be able to reach a given HPS threshold faster than disc. So at the low limit there are more situations where holy is clearly the better spec, IF you run with the absolute minimum healing. This is more evident in the less progressed undergeared raids.

Except my first statement was:

The thing is, unless you are severely undergeared, there's just no moment where the throughput of holy will make up for it's weaknesses

So clearly, my statement is true - in an extremely undergeared raid, holy did have its niche in 10 man. This doesn't mean that it will in 25 man (where the burst of a single healer is largely irrelevant, and dropping 5->4 healer won't be depending on a disc going holy, but rather, if you have more raid CDs), though.
Thing is, the only raid this entire tier where holy has been a better choise than disc was Paragon - the very first to beat garrosh, at an severely undergeared level. No one else has had this situation, and since then, Garrosh has been much more easily solo healed by disc priests because of another 6-7 item levels.
Not to mention the only reason they ever did solo heal was because their DPS was lacking.
All that being said, Garrosh is a prime example of a fight where disc is stronger than holy for everything but intermissions - and it just so happens that this was a dealbreaker for beating the encounter. During whirls, empowered as non empowered, I refuse to believe that holy has a bigger burst capability within 6 seconds, than disc has with preshields etc - holy simply works better in a constant damage, high movement enviroment like the intermission compared to disc which has a rather weak AOE-healing toolkit.

There are three things to consider here.
1) The HPS requirement isn't as straightforward as you think. Lets say your raid is taking 100k DPS over 6 minutes. If the maximum healing your healer team can push out over 6 minute is also exactly 100k HPS, then the encounter is absolutely unhealable. It is impossible to have zero overheal and the average DPS does not reflect the entire encounter. You almost always have peaks and throughs in damage. The healing requirement is determined by the amount of healing that you need to RELIABLY survive the peaks.
2) If say on average you need to supply exactly 100k HPS to survive a particular damage pattern. That means you will wipe due to lack of healing a certain proportion of the time since damage isn't constant between attempts. That means to always survive a damage pattern you need to provide healing sufficient to counteract the maximum damage not the average damage.
3) The number of healers is granular. If you need to supply 100k HPS to have a fighting chance of healing past the encounter and you have 3 healers who can supply 33k each, then you need another healer and that is that, even if that brings your total to 131k, which is more than the minimum.

And disc is far better than holy to cover these peaks because they can load up their healing before the peak - holy cannot. Holy has to keep up with the peak. To use your own example, holy might be able to sustain 25K healing and burst to 40K during the peaks for a longer time, settling in at 33K - disc can sustain 20K, and burst to 50K during the peaks for a short while because they can set up their healing early. Garrosh is a fight where you don't need more than the 20K hps outside of whirlings/intermissions, and for the whirlings that are relatively short, disc's short term burst is far stronger. For the intermissions that can last upwards of half a minute, holy is stronger as they can sustain their peak for a longer time.

Now number 3 is tricky, because although it might appear that the extra healing is wasted, it may not be the case. Remember that even if you wipe sometimes due to lack of healing the encounter may still be doable. So having extra healing above the lower limit means less wipes. This is the key to understanding the issues at hand and why I took the time to explain those three factors individually.

That means that a situation where you run with the absolute minimum achievable number of healers, may actually not be the best way to do the encounter. In fact it is probably not, because of the way healing and DPS is tuned. This is what really makes the holy advantage evaporate. Yes at the lower gear limit you can potentially get by with holy in situations where you can't make it with disc (e.g. 1st solo heal hc garrosh 10man), but there is little point if you can kill the boss more reliably by taking more healers. Running the minimum achievable number of healers (i.e. having several wipes due to lack of healing) is in fact something that is generally avoided.

And adding to this, disc is the ideal "fourth" healer because they can sustain about 35-40% singletarget dps of whatever dps they're replacing - EG 180K or so in current gear, 100K back in the day. Disc can keep going by their day doing their 20K-sustained atonement (and thus the raid has 119K of the minimum 100K required HPS, if using your former example), while still actually providing a very healthy portion of damage. If the encounter spikes, disc can spend five seconds beforehand setting the raid up aswell to counter that spike.

Some of the rest that you wrote has some key mistakes. The amount of damage taken and the amount of damage healed on Malkorok is different because a massive amount of damage is absorbed by the encounter mechanics. The amount of damage healed on malkorok is related to the damage taken by the following formula

Total effective healing done = Total damage taken + (number of ancient barrier resets)*(total ancient barrier size) - (remaining raid health deficit) - (health/absorb lost due to deaths).

At the start of the fight and after every phase reset you have to restack ancient barrier, which shows up on the meters, but has no damage equivalent. It is the same like having a mechanic which increases maximum health, every so often, but you have to fill the healthbars up to the new maximum everytime the buff goes up. When the buff is lost that effective health is lost but it does not show up as damage. In addition any deficit people have at the end of the fight from the maximum that includes the biggest possible absorb from the ancient barrier was not healed and will not show up. Finally if someone died they will have taken damage that was not healed up. It is mainly that second factor from the ancient barrier resets that causes the total healing and damage to not tally. That does not mean that this healing is not needed. On the contrary it is vital to keeping people alive. It would be the same as an ability that sets the HP of your raid to 50%, without it counting as damage and then you have to heal it up.

Except that's not true.
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...ken&by=ability
You can see that the Miasma is ticking stably through the entire encounter, picking off the shields - same with the implosions. Shielded damage DOES count as damage taken - let's just make sure we agree on that.
Now, you are saying that a difference of 235M healing is made up through barrier resets. This is impossible. There's not even close to that much healing needed. Let's say your average raider has 750K hp (which is on the high end, but accounts for tanks). That'll be 19M healing done to fill up the shields for every reset.
We have a reset at the start (19M).
We have a reset after the bloodrage (19M).
Let's be very generous and say that we have a third reset right before the fight ends to account for your deficit at the end of the fight - that's another 19M.
We're now at 57M out of 235M.
Soaking a miasma orb will reset the shield to zero. They took 22 orbs outside of the blood rage phase. Let's be generous and say that those orbs were all soaked with 100% full shields, so 22*750K healing that wouldn't show up as damage taken. That's 16.5M+57M= 73.5M.
We're accounting for less than a third of the overhealing while being extremely generous to your theory. There's still 150M damage "Missing" from the picture.

Another thing that reinforces what I have said is the fact that the highest ranked disc priest cast 38 prayer of healings - 32 of those were on the same TARGET:
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...01&ability=596
(It is likely that Nnogga would have been in the same group as the other tank, making it 34 PoH's on the same group). So, how exactly do you explain that his average PoH did 550K *DIRECT* healing (never mind the aegis absorbs) per cast? I mean, that's not even possible - there's no way they could possibly stay not topped off. As a further example, look at the feral druid Melthu in the log. His total damage taken through the entire encounter was 7.4M. His total healing taken? 30M. He took 3x essences of ysharj (two of them following each other, just for a good measure). I mean. Come on Havoc >.<.

When looking at whether it is possible to drop a healer, looking at effective healing is beyond pointless. You need to isolate the peaks and look at overheal. You will find at even at the peaks overheal is very large for all healers, except disc. Typically over 25%. That means up to 25% of each healer is available as additional output, if a healer is dropped. What you are trying to do is look at the effective throughput of a healer that is competing with other healers for the available damage. That is an irrelevant number. What matters is the difference in the raw throughput between n healers with a disc priest and (n-1) healers with a holy priest during the damage peaks. You will find that for malkorok there is a massive difference in the gear thresholds required for dropping a healer if you have a holy and disc priest in the raid.

The argument of comparing effective healing from top logs as a metric for determining whether there is sufficient throughput to drop a healer, is completely invalid.

A similar problem arises on thokk. Disc has more throughput easily, but the points where it has more throughput are the bits which are already healable with less healers. At the peaks of the damage holy has considerably bigger throughput. The dominance of the logs by disc is down to high gear levels.

First off, the fact that most healers are stumped by a huge amount of overhealing already kind of proves my point - you won't be able to drop an extra healer just because you make a disc->holy switch. You would be able to because the other healers aren't working at full potential. You could switch the disc with any other healer and still manage the throughput requirement just fine, because you aren't actually reliant on the holy priest to make up a difference - you are relying on the other healers to no longer overheal.
As for your comment about malkorok, refer to above. Holy is living high on overhealing being counted as healing. On this fight in PARTICULAR, a disc priest will outshine a holy priest in terms of raid sustainability, mainly because disc provides a buffer. Look at it this way:

In the malkorok encounter, you have 3x healthpools -
Standard health (finite resource, hit zero and you are dead, can't refill).
Encounter shield (can be restored, dissappears if you eat a ball of derp).
Healer shields (same as any other encounter, will be smaller than encounter shield so will be used up first).

Most abilities in this fight is designed to "oneshot" you if you do not have your encounter shield - and after the first blood rage phase, everything does 25% damage, so now it doesn't just remove your entire/most of your shield, it also removes a little of your finite resource (health).
This is why disc is better than holy on this fight - every other healer is capable of topping off the shields with direct heals, hots and the like. Only disc (and to some extent, paladins) are able to provide a buffer that ensures that the finite resource is never touched. If people have a 400K divine aegis sitting on them during soaking a pool, they'll go to orange shield instead of red/having it fully removed. Disc provides the same buffer in this encounter as it does any other encounter, and during progress, I can safely say that a spirit+mastery heavy disc that could spam PW:S on any target that didn't have a green shield was invalueable for survivability. Not to mention that soaking a ball of derp completly removes encounter shield AND deals 150K damage (so basicly, a "hit 4 and you're dead-kind of thing). Disc shields does not care.


As for thok - not really. The highest performing disc priest beats the highest performing holy priest by a wide margin. Here's the isolated logs for the first roar phase (started after the first roar, finished on the last):
http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...8326&options=8

vs

http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...4616&options=8
(Note that both of those links include raw healing - not just effective healing).

You can argue that parses are irrelevant for judging healers all you want, but it won't really make it true. I much prefer to look at real-world scenarios / data than a hypothethis that can't really be reproduced. After all, we're arguing what is stronger for an encounter - we have data where we can see this. That one spec in a very specific case if everything goes right might be able to overtake another, and it can therefore be argued that it is "better" because it is the strongest when all stars align is irrelevant. You will never face this situation.

Coming from someone who plays Holy on literally every fight, Disc is undoubtedly better on pretty much every fight this tier. The only fights you can really argue that Holy performs better would be Malk, Spoils(if solo healing a side), Garrosh, and possibly Thok.

As Havoc mentioned above, Holy can potentially be better if you use less healers, but in most cases Disc is going to pull ahead regardless.

Regarding Garrosh, Draco and I talked about that quite a bit in a previous thread, but the conclusion was that Disc is clearly better because the damage pattern is perfect for Disc. In my specific case, Disc+Holy v Disc+Disc resulted in inconclusive evidence as I really dislike playing Disc and really only had one sample to compare my Holy parses to. But in all other cases: Disc+X v Holy+X, Disc is certainly going to come out on top, except possibly with a Holy Paladin.

Would like to add to this, I solo heal both mogu sides in our raid (I have doubt that any healer can solo mantid side without excessive external cooldown usage as you need to sustain 300K hps through most of it, along with an added 100K random burst damage due to various abilities), and the damage pattern on mogu lines up just as perfectly for disc as it does on garrosh - spawn big add, then:

First hit: Inner focus(bug allows 2x 100% crit PoH's, one on each group)..
Second hit: Halo (heals up).
Third hit: Aegis from halo covers the raid.
Fourth hit: Spirit shell.
Fifth hit: Inner focus
And so forth. I think that there's maybe one hit every 8 that you can't shield the raid against, which I guess you'd want to use a raid CD on (if you get that many from one - the downtime between new spawns resets the cycle easily. We barely ever get four from ours nowadays). Outside of the big adds, zero AOE damage goes on the raid (random pulses from sparks, random debuffs etc), so disc is better at handling that with atonement aswell.
I'm sure that pretty much any healer can do mogu side alone as long as they can control their burst healing, but I have doubts if holy would be "better" than disc.

[laplacedemon]

About disc having more solo heal logs... I don't think there are many 10m guilds left, who are good enough to solo heal and didn't transition to 25s yet. Besides, even at the start of the tier, you could count the number of holy priests in 10s with one hand. And 10m holy pretty much needs its own gear set where you go for 13k (or 18k) haste. It seems quite normal to me that there are pretty much no solo healing holy priests.

And about holy's niche in 10s. It's not only the undergearedness, but also the lack of raid cooldowns holy priests can tolerate but disc used to have a problem with. This was our (I think) second kill on Spoils (it used to be the top log, but it's still #4 so that also shows how many holy priests there are): http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/9.../?s=963&e=1476
We definitely weren't undergeared, but thanks to bad play (SS instead of EF from our paladin tank, no meaningful Devo Auras, Tranq not used -although probably not necessary since I was holy) I had 0 external cooldowns. Our paladin tank back then was also quite keen on keeping the Mantid bosses alive while opening other boxes, so the raid damage continued longer than it should. I couldn't keep up with the damage as disc, especially if I got the bombs and have to run; healing people up was a big issue. While it was a player created issue, I think it shows the strength of holy; its constant Renews + Cascade coupled with BH & super-PoHs act like a raid cooldown. Comparing it to when we (finally) reached Garrosh (http://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/...5&type=healing), I didn't need to go holy though, because we had Devo, Vamp. Embrace, Ancestral Guidance, Healing Tide, Smoke Bomb and warrior cds -and we were quite overgeared so we needed much less raid cds for whirls anyway...

This kind of a problem of course doesn't even exist on 25s...

[Dracodraco]

You'd imagine that we'd be seeing far more holy priests now, on farm, when people have had the time to farm dedicated holy sets though, Laplace - it's far more accepted to use an underperforming but "fun" spec when it isn't actively working against your progress. Not to mention that while 10 man guilds might be fewer, alt runs from heroic 25 guilds are more common (we have one that's doing 14 heroics every week).
But as I said, the point is kind of irrelevant - IF holy priests were as much stronger than disc as is being claimed, more people would be playing holy, and we'd be seeing far better results from holy. We aren't, though, which makes all "theoretical" evidence that holy should be better moot - it just isn't.

As for your log, 145K sustained HPS is *a lot* for spoils. Your side was doing something *majorly* wrong, which is also evident by the other side having the resto druid putting out only 100K hps (usually you'll be around 80-120K on spoils). I'm not saying that holy didn't possibly end up being the dealbreaker for you - it might very well have been in your specific case - but I'm confident that disc could heal a side alone in the gearlevel just as well as holy, while adding another 100K dps to help meet enrage timers. That said, if your group stays close enough to let PoH hit all five targets every cast, there should have been no problem either way.
(Also, halo actually IS a raid cooldown with it's 300K-on-everyone hit every 40 seconds :P!).

[methz]

There is a reason why garrosh was solo healed by a holy priest. Discipline was not able to do it, because it lacked the throughput, so that first statement cannot be true.

A disc priest did it a couple of weeks after paragons pulled it off, and it was done by a holy priest because it was paragons. That means the raid group wasn't spastic, used proper defensive cds, clicked the lightwell, used healthstones...
And really, this being an argument of holy being 'good' is kind of silly. "This encounter was solo-healed by a holy priest in an elite raid group that minimizes damage taken on a fight that already has a ridiculously low HPS requirement, so holy is fine!"
It's not. Play whatever you want, but if you don't think you're gimping your raid by going holy on anything but a couple fights in SoO, you haven't been paying attention.

[dusselldorf]

You can also raid as a marksmanship hunter, demonology warlock or subtlety rogue if you want... nothing stops you from playing sub-par specs in the game.

It's when you do progression that you need to push numbers that it's important. Absorbs are too strong this tier to not use them.

Only fight where holy is better is Malkorok.

Sub par? Wasn't a single holy priest part of a group that solo healed soo 10m first? I'd hardly call that sub par. Now, if all you care about is sniping heals and padding meters, that's another story.

- - - Updated - - -

I tried to raid as holy and found it so frustrating - you simply can't keep up with the other healers, and you end up working your ass off for sub-par results.

This is why healing meters should be banned. They are not a measure of raid performance and all they do is skew the effectiveness of healers. Nothing beats the throughput of holy, and on a high damage fight, throughput is what maters, not who healed small amounts of damage first.

[laplacedemon]

But as I said, the point is kind of irrelevant - IF holy priests were as much stronger than disc as is being claimed, more people would be playing holy, and we'd be seeing far better results from holy. We aren't, though, which makes all "theoretical" evidence that holy should be better moot - it just isn't.

From my PoV, there was a difference in output between holy and disc while we were progressing, but it was almost never something anyone would actually need (exceptions being in Paragon on Garrosh or doing something wrong and lacking raid cds like we did on Spoils). Holy is able to hold high output for a long time in 10s (I don't have logs from that time, but healing Jade Temple transition as holy is miles easier than disc for example), but realistically speaking, none of the encounters demand it anyway so I don't think many people even tried holy this tier. Disc already worked on every boss, why get an extra set of gear and try something only two people ever used.

But I actually agree with you on holy not being much stronger than disc. The difference in hps got already covered by the current gear levels (or even old gear levels to be honest) and even if it still had an edge, there are no encounters to take advantage of that anyway.

(About our Spoils log... It was pretty much me covering the bad tanking and dps switching to new mobs instead of finishing the bosses -second Mantid boss was up for almost 2 minutes in our first kill. I remember doing it with our DK tank, me doing under 100k hps as disc and realizing how bad our first two kills were. Halo indeed is a raid cd though -better than Revival!, just wasn't enough in that case)