HOLY CRAP IT'S UPDATED!

Thread Purpose:
Eliminate Clutter of multiple "Whats my purpose?", "How to Justify?", "What to Gem/Enchant?" Threads.

About Me:
I'm a PVE Raider from US-Tichondrius and I regularly dual spec from Holy to Disc to fill the role in my guild. As such I feel I know some of the nuances of going from Holy to Disc.

*Warning Blatant EJ Forum Ripoff:*

Simple Questions, Simple Answers:

1q) Why all the hubbub about disc all of a sudden?
1a) After 3.1 discipline has received a major face lift. Discipline provides consistent damage mitigation, strong single target healing, this coupled with our utility spells: pain suppression and power infusion make for a powerful healing class.

2q) What spell rotation exists for Disc?
2a) None really. There are however some best practices that can be consistently applied to most situations. These are:

Keep Borrowed Time up as much as possible.
Learn to “weave” spells and shields to maintain the 25% haste bonus.
Decide whether the fight requires consistent use of penance for throughput or whether it should remain off cooldown for reactive spike damage.

3aq) Why am I healing for so much less?
3aq) This is a subjective question. Healing in the traditional sense you are likely going to be bottom of the healing meters. But you make up for this with shields + divine aegis procs as well as Renewed Hope's innate 3% damage reduction. (Albeit the 3% from renewed hope is moot if you have Blessing of Sanctuary.)

Generally there is no effective manner to calculate our mitigation through absorption mechanisms. This is because the combat log does not distinguish what ability is absorbing damage. The CL simply rolls it all into a single absorb effect.

3bq) But Vagus what about the power word shield glyph can't we simply multiply the resulting total heal by 5 to get the amount of shields we threw out?
3bq) Yes and no, PW:S glyph is an excellent glyph in its own right, some people like to use it as a measure of how large their shields are, unfortunately this is inaccurate, the glyph can crit, it is effected by aura's such as Tree of Life and the increased heal portion of Guardian Spirit. It is by no means an effective measure of shield size.


4q) Gearing? What do I gem? What are my main stats?
4a) Generally as a rule of thumb basic stats we would strive for would be:

2000 Spell Power
20% unbuffed crit
13% haste unbuffed.

As for base stats: Generally for discipline much of our mana return comes from Rapture. And after the 3.1 passive mana regeneration changes this becomes increasingly important. Since rapture returns a percentage of maximum mana intellect becomes quite important. Generally when dealing with gearing Intellect thought of as more important than spirit until approximately 1400 intellect after which spirit becomes more important. 1.4:1 Int/Spirit ratio is something to shoot for.

5q) Flash Heal or Greater Heal?
5a) Well there are two schools of thought, the argument is main based out of cast times vs. result as you can roughly cast 2 flash heals in the space of a single greater heal the following arguments can be made:
More Flash Heals = More chances to keep up divine aegis until it is consumed.
More Greater Heals = Larger more useful divine aegis procs.

This argument still holds true.

HOWEVER: Due to the Improved Flash Heal talent, I would say that while weaving a loose alternation of PW:S and Flash Heals would provide greater dividends and allow for much higher hpm to hps ratio (heals per mana/second.)

Secondly:

Divine Aegis: Divine Aegis effects will now stack, however the amount absorbed cannot exceed 125*level (of the target). It will also now take into account total healing including overhealing.

According to this multiple divine aegis effects can stack upwards of 10,000 health, that said while gheals would create larger Divine Aegis bubbles, you can reach the same effect by stacking multiple smaller flash heals.

Now this is where opinion diverge, having a single large heal procced bubble that is immediately consumed by an otherwise tank killing hit would be more useful than a small bubble that is still awaiting a second heal to reach the same potential bubble size.

Again the healing style is up to you to decide dependent on the fight/tank/healing team.

6q) I thought that was supposed to be a simple answer.
6a) Shut up.

7q) Pain Suppression should I use it on a tank?!
7a) 40% less incoming damage is always nice, especially when you have another healer on the target since a heal is incoming. 5% threat is a hefty chunk to lose, however that 5% threat is generally not life threatening since it requires 10% threat to pull from a boss, so effectively unless a class is riding 5% threat ABOVE the tank, it is easily safe to use.

8q) Glyphs?
8a) With patch 3.1 we have many more glyphs to choose from however a few are almost made mandatory due to the way it changes the feel of the class.
Glyph of Penance: This glyph reduces the cooldown of penance by 2 seconds to a total talented cooldown of 8 seconds instead of 10. This is phenomenal, almost required. The ability to have penance up when you need is immeasurable.
Glyph of Power Word:Shield: This glyph heals your target instantly for 20% of the total absorption of your power word: shield. The effect can crit, but does not proc DA.
Glyph of Flash Heal: This glyph further reduces the mana cost of Flash Heal by 10% this is absolutely fanastic when coupled with improved flash heal. Together it brings the mana cost of flash heal down from 18% to 14% of base mana.
Glyph of Holy Nova: Having very few aoe heals this glyph brings Holy Nova up to the efficiency of an unglyphed CoH, ignoring non-smartheal and out of party limitations of course.
Glyph of Prayer of Healing: This out of party heal has become a very powerful heal for a talent spec that is lacking many party aoe heals, the glyph adds a hot component to an already powerful heal. Coupled with Borrowed Time, PoH is fantastic for raid healing.
Glyph of Dispel Magic:  This glyph is still viable in pve if you are an assigned dispeller, coupled with absolution this makes a great heal/dispel combo. Many Ulduar fights require debuffs to be dispelled instantly or risk raid wiping situations.
Glyph of Renew: Disc priests gain so little from renew from talents but this glyph is an interesting one, sacrificing a long hot for more power makes this a great glyph if you renew a lot.
Glyph of Pain Suppression: A strange glyph in pve, this glyph does work during PVE boss stuns making it an odd choice but a viable one in certain circumstances.

More questions/answers to be added in the future.


Talent Trees:

This section will not contain full specs, however we will go over the various "must have" and "meh" talents in both holy and disc trees. (Presuming that you are spending atleast 51 points in discipline (to get penance) some tier 4 and higher holy talents are not included)

Discipline Talents:

Twin Disciplines: For PVE it's basically a must have, increasing the throughput of your instant cast spells is a great thing to have, effects the following spells (again only disc available spells in list):
Power Word: Shield
Renew
Prayer of Mending
Desperate Prayer
Holy Nova
Shadow Word: Pain
Shadow Word: Death
Devouring Plague

Improved Inner Fire: Increases armor and, after level 71, spell power. A great talent since discipline priest often have less spell power due to lack of spirit spell power conversions.

Improved Power Word: Fortitude: Increases the effect of Fort by 15/30% excellent to have atleast one priest with this in a raid setting, also gives a self buff of 4% extra stamina.

Silent Resolve: Given tank threat is so high now and the lack of encounters where buffs are dispelled by pve elements this talent is generally not used often. However if you have undergeared tanks or have trouble and are pulling threat by all means this is a great way to reduce threat.

Improved Power Word: Shield: Generally you'll be shielding a lot, especially to keep Borrowed Time up as much as possible and weakened soul up on the tanks as much as possible. This talent is very useful to increase overall absorption of your PW:S. Does effect the heal portion of Glyph of Power Word: Shield.

Inner Focus: Often thought as a must have talent for priests with 3.1 changes the idea of taking a clear casted mana nap is changing. However a free heal with an increased chance to crit is *always* nice, special note that when combined with channeled Divine Hymn, the critical strike bonus is applied to every tick.

Meditation: Mana regeneration while casting straight up. Basically a mandatory talent for all specs including shadow. With the 3.1 regeneration changes, you'll see that your oo5sr regeneration has dropped while your i5sr regeneration is about the same.

Absolution: A glyphed dispel is still a very solid heal, however unless you are dispelling quite a bit talents can arguably be better spent. In Ulduar there are several encounters where many debuffs must be dispelled, so your mileage may vary depending on progression.

Mental Agility: Solid mana reduction, helpful to reach higher in the discipline tree.

Mental Strength: Fantastic talent. Increasing mana pool, increasing crit chance, and increasing rapture mana returns is always welcome.

Soul Warding: This is arguably most critical talent in the lower half of the discipline tree, reducing your PW:S cooldown to just the GCD has changed the face of this specialization. Must have talent in many ways. It has likely changed the face of Discipline PVE.

Focused Power: Solid talent that increasing healing by 4% for 2 talent points. Faster Mass Dispels are situationaly useful. 

Enlightenment: Increases Spirit and Spell Haste. 6% haste is the key for many people in this tree at three points this is very valuable.

Power Infusion: Reducing mana cost and increasing spell haste makes this a wonderful on use spell. I keep two of these macroed on my bar: one macroed to myself as the benefactor, and another I give to a dps class if I don't need it myself.

Improved Flash Heal: Reduces the mana cost of your flash heal by up to 15%. This alone makes the talent very powerful for 3 points. The secondary effect is increasing flash heals crit chance by up to 10% on targets below 50% health. Again very useful for flash heal spam or shield flash shield penance weaving.

Reflective Shield: The important part of this talent is that the dmg done only procs off shields on yourself. This makes the talent somewhat lackluster.

Renewed Hope: Crit is very important to Disc priests, being able to boost it in anyways is well worth it. With a buff/debuff monitor keeping up weakened soul on the tank not only ensures maximized pw:s use but also increase critical strike rates. The 3% damage reduction now effects all raid targets. This means if player A casts PW:S on Player B then Player's A,B, and C (along with any other party/raid members) receive the 3% damage reduction for 20 seconds.

Rapture: This talent was reworked in 3.1 it now gives you 2.5% mana when PW:S is absorbed. Also energizes the target with 2% mana/8 rage/32 runic power/16 energy etc. It has an internal cooldown of 12 seconds. Certainly still valuable but not overpowered as it was before 3.1. Don't expect the bulk of your regeneration to come from rapture procs anymore. It is important to note that you can multi-pop bubbles to gain huge chunks of mana back. Icehowl's Massive Crash is a great example that if you bubble as much of the raid as possible and since the damage occurs simultaniously if no other bubble has popped in 12 seconds then you receive rapture procs for all the popped bubbles. I've gone from 40% mana to 70% mana from this alone.

Aspiration: Reducing the cooldown of penance alone is well worth this talent point. Being a primary snap heal having it up when needed is crucial.

Divine Aegis: Creating a maximum bubble size of 10,000 on a max level character, allows you to raise the effective health of a target beyond it's normal value.

Pain Suppression: Pain Suppression is a great spell for foreseeable incoming damage, Sarth 3D flame breaths is the quintessential example of PS being used in a raid environment. So called “oshit” buttons are becoming more of a vital mechanic of fights than ever before.

Grace: Proccing off nearly every major cast single target heal, a fully stacked grace can increase your healing by 6% and reduce incoming damage by 3%. When large hits are in the 20k range for bosses 3% is a significant reduction of incoming damage. Damage reduction portion does not stack with Blessing of Sanctuary.

Borrowed Time: Apart from straight up increasing your PW:S absorption amount (and your glyphed pw:s healed amount). The Borrowed Time spell haste buff is fantastic, especially when you need a fast large heal.

Penance: 3 pulse channeled heal where the first pulse is instant(!). The Divine Aegis proc is based off the pulse not the cumulative value for the whole channel. Healing upwards of 12-13k with a critical heal pulse, this is an excellent emergency large heal.

Holy Talents:

Healing Focus: With the changes to spell pushback this talent has lost much of it's greatness. However, still a great talent if you are finding yourself getting interupted a fair amount.

Improved Renew: Renew is a spell that has no gains (outside of mental agility) for a discipline priest. Some members of the forums like to keep it up at all times as a solid "background" heal while maintaining a normal cycle of penance, flash heals, and greater heals.

Holy Specialization: With Divine Aegis and Surge of Light procing off critical strike 5% extra crit is a fantastic talent for both Holy or Discipline spec.

Spell Warding: Reducing 10% incoming spell damage is often incredibly favourable in massive spell aoe fights, Sapphiron are Twin Valkyries are great examples of this.

Divine Fury: Depending on whether you use flash heal or greater heal this talent becomes mandatory. Some priests skip it if they favor flash heal over greater heal, other use it for greater heal spam.

Desperate Prayer: Gaining from both Mental Agility and able to crit Desperate Prayer can save the healers life in many cases. Some players never use it, while others cannot live without it.

Inspiration: If you are ever going to heal a tank...take this talent.

Following talents are assuming you only have 51-53 points in Disc:

Holy Reach: Mediocre Talent, might be more useful when Prayer of Healing is group castable. Arguably useful when using with a glyphed Holy Nova.

Improved Healing: Getting to this talent sacrifices so much utility (at the top end of disc) for extra throughput makes it a difficult choice. However it does reduce the cost of greater heal and penance by a significant amount.

Full Talent Builds:

57/14/0 - http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#bVcbuhhVRIsffRt0xtc
Basic Cookie Cutter build...favors greater heals due to Divine Fury.

57/14/0 - http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bVcbuhxtMxoifRtcxt
Favors renew, in lieu of inspiration.

57/14/0 -http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#bVcbuhhVRIsffRt0Ezc
Replaces Divine Fury with Spell Warding for higher survival

Other builds to come upon suggestion of others.

Basic Macros:

Power Infusion (Self Power Infusion on Shift Modifier):
/cast [modifier:shift] Power Infusion; [target=player] Power Infusion

Quick Emergency Heal requires several clicks:
/castsequence Power Word: Shield, Penance, Inner Focus, Greater Heal

Quick Raid Heal
/cast Inner Focus
/cast Divine Hymn

More to be added by others (I don't use macro's too often.)

How to Convince Your Guild AKA How To Trick Your Guild Into Letting You Have This Much Fun and Still Get Loot


Sorry I couldn't help the title whenever I play my disc priest I always think I'm the most devout. Back on topic this section delves into the idea of why should your guild allow you to go from the stable classic and versatile role of Holy Priest to a new alien and tank healing role of Discipline Priest.

Since generally there are a few primary concerns to a raid leader when it comes to healer selection beyond skill lets look at discipline strengths:

1) Strong reactive healing.
2) Proactive critical healing when overhealing is not wasted through Divine Aegis. If your a holy priest and you over heal a target on a crit there is no benefit as discipline you gain a portion of that crit as a damage shield.
3) Extremely high mana efficiency with rapture and passive regeneration. The more efficient the heal (the less overhealing,) the more efficient our mana cost gets.
4) Excellent buffs: Grace, Renewed Hope, Rapture, Power Infusion and Pain Suppression are all very powerful tools in a raid environment.

Clearly we bring a lot to the table.

Well healing throughput through raw healing is always judged highly amongst raid leaders, but in a lot of cases no amount of healing can save a wipe or a situation if it comes at the wrong time. This is certainly one of the key points of discipline healing. Penance (talented to 10 second cooldown) gives us an outstanding reactive ability of delivering a large amount of healing onto a target within the span of a little over a GCD.

But paladins can already instant holy shock and instant flash of light when properly specced. True they can, but that healing method, without a macro, is clunky at best. Casting Holy Shock and invoking a gcd then casting flash of light, is not as easy as simply pulsing 3 3-5k penance pulse onto a target. The burst healing capability of a Power Infused, Borrowed Time Penance followed by a Greater heal would be enough to top up a dying tank to near acceptable health levels within 4-6 seconds, less depending on haste and latency.

You won't win as a discipline priest on meters, at least if the other healers are doing their job correctly. You will win at properly timing your heals to save the day.

Discipline As a Raid Healer:

At higher endgame levels maintaining consistent single target healing on a tank is important, but given the massive amounts of aoe damage in certain fights, sometimes a discipline priest can focus on healing the raid. Twin Valks is a excellent example of consistent damage hitting the raid.

Given Borrowed Time we can create a raid bubbling cycle of:
1xProm
9xShield

This gives massive ehps, and keeps low targets alive by ProM intelligently moving to low health targets.


Links

http://www.discpriest.com - Recently featured on snarkcraft (shameless plug for Seri and Jov, I expect my payment in cookies) this site has resources to many disc related questions. Albeit it is a little lightly traveled, things could change and it could become a very viable and widely used discipline priest resource. Good site to keep an eye on.

http://elitistjerks.com/f77/t54629-disc ... um_v3_1_a/  - EJ Discipline Priest Raiding Compendium excellent resource for advanced discipline mechanics.

http://lootrank.com - Excellent loot parser that can find gear based on your own stat allocations and various settings.

http://www.worldofmatticus.com/category ... ft/priest/ - Matt share's his infinite wisdom with the masses.

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f207/ - Tankspot.com healing forums. Healing from the other side of the fence basically Cosmo for healers. (69 Sweet tips on what your tank *really* wants.)

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 6393&sid=1 - Nightshrouds quintessential Lux et Umbra: A PVE Priest Handbook. This is the FAQ that started it all.

Sections to Come:

Addons
A proper Gemming/Enchanting/Consumable guide
How to interpret WWS/Recount/WoL to get a sense of what your effective healing/absorption is.
Mathcraft. (May need some help here.)

Good FAQ. Sticking.

Just what I needed /love! ^^ since I cant sticky, I bookmark it

Edit:

To make your first macro more general: This will do the same trick



The [targer=player] targets you regardless of what your target it

You may want to note that Grace does not stack with Blessing of Sanctuary.

The damage reduction doesn't stack with BoS, though the increased healing to target does.

Edited for both. Thank you

http://www.wowhead.com/?forums&topic=68238&p=725586

The link to to a "modified" version of recount that counts DA and PW:S towards healing ... for anyone feeling bad about meters.

And I don't know if you plan on divulging into addon usage or not but Grid + Clique with PI on a clique bind is a lot more useful than a macro, imo. Unless you mouseover macro it ...

Excellent, I'll add that to the addon's section I'm writing up. I'll have the next section up probably tomorrow afternoon. IRL sucks lol.

excatly what i needed! TY!

This is a good sticky, however I'm interested..



Where'd you get that? General consensus? By who? Granted it's not a "bad" advice but where do you get this general consensus? I don't remember reading this kind of consensus reached on EJ for example. You can argue keeping MT with a weakened soul as both a plus and a minus, definitely - but I'd say it's far from talking of a general consensus. The fact is PW:S is an instant buffer that works as a great tool when a tank's HP goes low, in combination with penance or/and gheal/flash heal. If you keep Weakened Soul on the tank you'll be ripped away of shield + BT hasted penance to save the day. Yes, it increases your crit on the target, and should increase your mana efficiency. However, I really doubt either outweights the emergency tools you restrict yourself from. I'd say the same arguments apply for penance as well. It isn't a bad way of getting a full stack of grace however. If I'm assigned a role - say heal the off-tank and the MT on Kel'Thuzad, I wouldn't follow this advice. I'd keep grace up on both tank keeping both penance and shield off cooldown to save a situation. Healing isn't about providing constant HPS - Moreso on discipline. Why would you turn yourself away from these "utilities" that are pretty much the only thing that diffrentiates you from a paladin? In a tank healing situation, if you keep these abilities on a CD you're no more than a paladin that does inferior HPS.

Granted that advice has its places. On Sapphiron for example, discipline is pretty much best used if you use PW:S on every cooldown, prayer of mending every cooldown, and use flash heals in-between. But even then I wouldn't use PW:S on the tank till' he actually needs one to provide a health buffer in a crucial moment, same for penance.



Greater Heal provides more HPS. Granted, even then you've got to consider overhealing, number of healers on your target, and what-not. Flash heal would seem the right choice for most of the current content. If you have other healers on your target you're likely better off with flash heal, simply because of the fact you're likely to end up with better results with spamming flash heals instead of constantly overhealing your target for 90% of your heals. I still do assume the role of Greater Heal cancel-casting priest to get those big heals off when the tank gets a larger streak of hits that the constant heals from druids/paladins won't quite cover (Thinking of Patchwerk here). Allthough granted, that might better done with shield+penance. By no means is flash heal spamming the wrong choice here either. Sadly I don't have personal experience of this, but, when talking of - say, Sarth 3D, and you are healing the MT, you probably need to switch over to Greater Heal simply because of the HPS needed for the fight.

Hopefully I didn't sound too offensive. Pretty good thread overall, I just found the "general consensus" and lack of of reasoning a bit annoying, so had to point oút my opinion.


As for...


One should realize that this meter is by no means accurate. It gives a decent estimation however, but I definitely wouldn't be spamming my raid leader or raid chat with the recount figures of that modified recount... (Not that I do in general) There is no definite way (at least in common knowledge) to figure out accurate amount of absorped damage by your shields. The addon assumes full depletion of every shield you cast and every Divine Aegis proc you get. So it might give you seriously off numbers.

For the build list.. this is what I'm currently using http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bVcbuhxtMxoifRtcxt
Yes, I'm one of those Renew users tho I found myself not using it as often anymore as I thought. Depending on what 3.1.0 brings I might reconsider.

And thanks, it's a great Q&A and I think it also helps a lot of people and guilds to maybe understand Disc a bit better and give it room within the raid content.

Great post! Just a couple things though:



I would add on Q5 something about overwriting DA is a greater (more frequent) possibility with Fheal.

For Q6 I'm pretty sure PS is 40% reduction... but its still nice ^_^

Ok back to reading

ETA: I tend to keep PW:S on CD and on the tank anytime there's no weakend soul. Keeping weakened soul up at all times means you always have that increased chance to crit on that tank. If there's an emergency while the tank is afflicted w/weakened soul we have enough "oh crap" buttons to compensate and hopefully you have other healers with you that you can trust in a pinch. I'd just as soon toss my penance (which heals for anywhere from 13k - 16k) before I toss a shield that absorbs about 6.1k anyway. Or make use of PS while the other healers are tossing heals, then I can PI myself and go to work.

Another way to look at it is, the more damage your tank absorbs rather than eats, the smaller the possibility that you'll have an emercency in the long run. Also makes for less damage other healers need to heal which cuts down on "I'm OOM heal the MT" emergencies a bit as well.

Each emergency is different, but I don't personally see saving one (or two) of our bread and butter spells as an emergency button as a thing to do. YMMV

(This is a reply to the previous post)

The analogy of "the more you apply your shield, the less there is chance for an emergency" is something I personally feel is strange. When there indeed is a large spike towards a tank, shields cast on every cooldown has small chance of doing anything - as in, the shield's duration has low chance of absorping the damage spike instead of steady incoming damage. Concentrating that burst instead of limiting yourself for 15 seconds of not having a shield at your disposal seems more preferable to me. As for any tank healer going OOM - ...Really? Any decently geared healer shouldn't go out of mana at current levels of regeneration unless the raid/player is having larger issues.

I do get your point of less chance of an emergency during a long fight if you use PW:S each and every time Weakened Soul fades. However, I'd like to have the tool to myself instead of relying on RNG to increase my raid's success rate. Also, let me offer a counter-point: Having PW:S and Penance ready to be used on your targets of responsibility offers more chances (if the encounter permits) to ease up the load elsewhere: You could ease up raid damage/save other targets while being able to react to large amount of incoming damage. This, I feel, is is one of the strengths of a discipline priest.

I am not saying you should keep PW:S and Penance for extreme emergencies at all, however. It's up to every healer to judge for themselves what they see as the best action to take. But I personally am not mindlessly using both of the spells on CD.

That said, it also comes largely down to your own personal way of playing, your raid, the..."trustworthiness" of other healers, so by no means am I saying your points are in any way or shape flawed.

Hopefully I'm not detracting the thread too much from its original purpose.

True enough. Most of my assumption that this was general consensus came from personal discussion with fellow discipline priests (albeit most of which are restricted to a handful of servers) and personal extrapolation from a myriad of other threads. Trying to find a consensus amongst the general priest population on personal healing style would, of course, be nigh impossible.



Of course having a 5-8k PW:S to save the day in addition to a penance would be ideal. Generally my personal view on keeping weakened soul on the tank is for the critical strike chance and while PW:S is an excellent mitigation tool for using emergency healing, I would much rather spend the initial gcd when a tank is endangered on an instant healing penance which would have a higher critical strike chance. I have however casted a pw:s on myself to get a BT hasted penance --> greater heal on a target when the target is already effected by weakened soul.

Whether or not this is a universal best practice is not really the purview of this thread, which was to help healing experienced holy priests transition to the new roll of discipline priests (Hence the thread title Holy to Disc.) A common assumption I had throughout this thread is that the reader is an already capable healing priest, whom has a basic understanding of situational spell selection.



This is in essence my school of thought, especially for newly minted discipline priests, I find that more we label a certain spell an emergency button the less likely a new player is to hit it, for fear that the current situation is not a true emergency. A similar analogy would be new dps classes avoiding using on-use trinkets to save them for when burst is needed, but then never using them since it does not become a "natural" reaction.




And this is where my personal style would vary from yours, seeing how a discipline priests fits with the rest of the healing team depends greatly on the team. I've been in encounters where healing roles are strictly enforced, and I have been in others where heal sniping was the only hard and fast rule. I see how you shouldn't keep PS:S and Penance for only extreme emergencies but that's when the rubber meets the road in practice I feel if we tell new discipline priests that X and Y skills are your emergency buttons they fear using them at the wrong time rather than using them as often as possible. (Often being when the situation warrants it of course.) Since I assume most readers are healing experienced but simply unfamiliar with discipline healing I simply wanted them to use the abilities to as much as possible to determine when and where it fits into their own healing style.

Edit: I am *very* pleased with the direction of this thread, it's been far to long since we took a hard look and talked discipline practices in a single area on plusheal.com

Nice FAQ,
I used to be Discipline before but respec more Holy lately, I admit that I'm having trouble finding the right spec (I've respeced 13 times so far!). I think that the Penance spell is probably the best spell in the entire Priest talent tree. Having done some heroics as a Discipline priest, I feel that people in the group generally don't trust my heals and some tanks can get nervous about last minute emergency heals that puts their life from 1 to 25,000 in a few secs (even if you saved their ass). In addition, when the entire group is taking damage, you cannot heal the entire group fast enough (no CoH) and you make the choice to save only the main tank. In raids, Disc priests are seen more as backup healers and not really raid healers.

Have some people done some heroics or raids as a Disc priest? how do they feel about it?

I tried Discipline yesterday, and for what my meagre experience is, I found myself keeping a shield on the tank (and as many other people taking damage as I could), and saving the penance cooldown.

That clarifies your post for me then. I don't mindlessly use them at every cooldown, but I do seem to use them at every cooldown 90%+ of the time.

Thus far, when I'm tank healing I haven't had a need to hold back a shield or penance cooldown. Who knows what the future will bring?

I definitly agree that in the end the way you heal comes down to a variety of outside factors.



Hold back the lasers?!?!? WHY?!?

OK sorry to detract from the VERY GOOD FAQ here. Again, great work!



I have glyphed for PoH and HN and I use them recklessly in Heroics. I haven't ran a heroic for a while... and I have a lot better understanding/experience as disc and better gear... so when I run H-HoL (the final test) I'll let ya know! We don't have CoH... big deal... until they up the healing on it the six second CD renders it fairly meh. PoH is great, esp under borrowed time... in emergencies w/PI... etc etc

On loatheb my group (normally all healers for 25 mans or healers/ranged DPS for 10 man) is always the "healthiest" at the end of the run. I'm the only healer that doesn't DPS on loatheb because I'm shielding everything until its time to start pre-casting PoH.

/derail thread
Clearly we are all discipline for our swirly healing laser pew pew!

/rerail thread