Disc Priests and Healing MetersFollow

I did my first raid today as Disc spec (OS). I felt I managed to keep people alive as well as the druid and shammy in the group. We had some wipes (low dps said raid leader, so much so he booted one of them) but I wasn't the first healer down and in fact on a few occasions managed to keep both the other healers up. Also the off tank only died after I did never before so I was quite proud. However on healing meter I suck. I had 20% ish of overall healing compared to the 40% ish of the others.

I know the others have greater gear than me both having about 200-300 extra spellpower which adds up when you are churning out the heals and I also know I was throwing round a LOT of shields as well as pain suppression etc especially onto the cloth casters. The question is how do you know if you are doing well when your healing output on meters sucks so bad? Should I just trust my instinct? I kept my off tank alive whilst also throwing out the odd POM, pulling other healers and the main tank up with penance a couple of times and also throwing out several shields. It all sounds good to me especially as being disc spec half my buffs are designed to help reduce the damage others take as well (like grace which was almost perma on my offtank) so I do not need to heal as much as I might otherwise.

Am I destined to suck, or do I suck at all or should I reflect on the fact that healing meters will never be my friend? I'd be interested to know if any other disc priests can get themselves high up on the healing meter and how on earth they do it...

Eh.. Moz pretty much summed it up. We had a discussion in guild chat the other day, with the usual "pallys are the best healers, blah blah blah, disc is cool but the heals are too little, blah blah". I call BS. I healed pretty much every heroic as disc with just the bare minimum stat requirements. There were some very challenging moments, and some wipes, but the spec is not flawed.

I find that as disc, I am much more in control of how I spend mana, and where I spend it. I wait for tanks to take damage before I throw out a shield (longer if a warrior or druid). My shield will heal them to full before they start taking damage. DPS takes some dmg? A shield for them if it's a big chunk, or maybe just a renew. Spent too much time on the DPS? A nice pennance will do the trick on the tank. Lots of people getting hit randomly? PoM. Big AoE, I'll begrudgingly use PoH. I took some damage? Binding heal.

All it takes is an over-eager healing partner to pretty much toss these strategies in the toilet. Disc isn't going to win the healing meter battle. I'd be interested to see a comparison of the ratio between tank dmg taken vs damage healed (with overhealing indicated) given a disc priest vs the rest. I think when we start to see content that isn't all about AoEing stuff down while spam overhealing tanks, disc might get the respect it deserves.

Yes, you can heal pretty much everything. The spec howewer IS flawed, just as much as Recount (or any other meter) is.

Discipline needs crits to function, as well as a full stack of Grace. There is however little to nothing in the talent tree that would actually boost your healing based on the stats you're required to be stacking. You're not getting a talent that would actually significantly increase your crit chance. You're not getting a talent that would increase spell power based on intellect. You're not getting a talent that would increase the amount healed by crits by more than 50%.

On the Holy side, though:

Spiritual Healing - flat 10% increase
Empowered Healing 40% from Spellpower for GH, 20% for FH
Test of Faith - 6% healing, 6% crit w/o need for Weakened Soul
Divine Providence - 10% for AOE heals and 30% reduced PoM cooldown

Just to get up to the benefits of Spiritual Healing, you need to have a full stack of Grace. Thanks to the hilarious 8 second duration, you won't maintain that stack on more than one person unless you're spamming the already fairly inefficient Flash Heals.

To get up to the amount healed by a holy priest, you essentially HAVE TO use your effective PW:S in your "rotation", HAVE TO crit to proc Divine Aegis (since shields are heals after all). Thanks to cooldowns on PW:S and Penance though, in addition to Weakened Soul - which won't let you use PW:S as often as you should, you're more or less gimped about half the time, doing inefficient things while waiting for cooldowns to expire. Having PoM proc Aegis on somebody who has only taken some splash damage is a waste and plain overhealing.

Still, I'm playing Disc for it's mobility and dynamic, something I have yet to find on the holy side of things. Just sometimes thinking that I'm paying a fairly high price for that - compared to what I'd get from a holy spec (and it sure is more than CoH)


Now the problem with Recount and such is that they don't count shields as heals. You pretty much have to add every crit that proc'ed DA, have to keep track of YOUR PW:S and it's amount absorbed, and add it to your total healing done. Good luck though on figuring out how much of that was effective healing and how much of it was overhealed. I'd say it's impossible.

IMO meters don't matter as long as the boss goes down, and most wipes are caused either by plain stupidity, lack of coordination, or simply bad luck rather than lack of healing.

Not to diss your healer Horsemouth, but that's a classic example of what I mentioned in that other post. As MT healer you should be using Penance, no excuses. He was using Flash Heal as it's a little bit faster and doesn't have a CD.

Yes, it got the job done, but he wouldn't have been as high if he had used Penance (assuming there were others healing you as well).

So, last night I applied to two raiding guilds on my server. Both were pretty eager to talk to me, so I don't think priests have a totally bad rap just yet as I had feared in a previous post.

However, disc is still not widely respected as a good healing spec. Both delicately suggested that if I wanted to heal, I'd have to go holy. It wasn't just "disc isn't good at healing," it was "holy is the only healer." I didn't want to sound like a prat, but in both instances, I tried to gently assert that disc is not just for PvP anymore. After it was clear that my message wasn't getting through, I decided to leave well enough alone and respec holy. Granted, I wasn't talking to the priest class leader, and I don't expect every officer to follow discussions like these.

Still, I'm a little sad. I love holy, it's why I rolled a priest in the first place, but man disc is fun!

I'm not moving my spec for anyone. I am lucky in that the GM is a pala tank, another is a druid healer and the third is a hunter. Two of them also have multiple high level toons including a priest so they do understand what I am about.

I was offtank healer and this will probably stay my role for the moment rotated with another player who is a Holy Pala. We also have a resto druid & shaman and another priest coming up to 80 who is Holy specced who will rotate the other roles. The druid is MT healer as she is the best specced and the shaman was healing the group.

I think looking back there wasn't anything else I could have done. I managed to heal heroic UK ok despite never having done it before and having no other healers in the group. I am just going to keep reading up so I can learn to make the most of my spec. I think the druid realised how I heal when we went through those portals on the bosses in OS and when all we came back through to her and the main tank her health was badly dented and my well timed penance saved her.

Practice makes perfect as they say so I'm going to trust my instincts and keep going. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

Other healers will also enjoy a 6% boost in their numbers when they heal targets that discipline priests have so graciously placed a full stack of grace upon.

Your welcome (=

I think this is sad. As soon as patch 3.0 hit the priest officer and another of the top priests in our guild immediately started playing around with Disc, and the second they hit 80 they were switching back and forth with each other on unofficial Naxx runs, not only to check out the new toys, but to see if and how a Disc build fit in with our raiding, how it meshed with other healing classes and specs, etc. It was a lot of fun to watch them innovate and experiment and get excited about something new to the class. That is how leadership should behave.(*) They should be the first to into the fray of a new change, not change-resisters.



*Of course, not all of us are leaders or innovators. Some of us sat back and watched and stayed Holy the whole time. Some of us are considering naming the next family dog Circle Of Healing.

My mistake, I misread the tooltip. Still, I am getting a bit concerned about the ability to accurately gauge a discipline priest's abilities. Surely a disc priest seems lacking when compared with a meter to other healers. The tools that disc talents offer simply can't be historically tracked at the moment. Reflective shield is simply a mana sink as far as Recount knows (or I might have misunderstood again; the damage reflected causes no threat, but is the priest attributed the damage?)

I agree that a gut-check is a better gauge for healing. I'd rather be like an umpire... nobody notices you unless you ***** up.

Very much so. They're gimmick healers just like pallies, shamans, or druids. Need to press twice as many buttons and meet half a dozen conditions in order to be only nearly as effective as a straightforward holy priest.

It's the same way shadow priests or moonkins play catch-up with mages, hunters, and warlocks.

Penance is quick after getting the haste bonus from Borrowed Time. It heals for a lot after stacking Grace. But not only is Penance on a cooldown, but PW:S as well, and keeping Grace stacked on more than one target is rather unlikely.

Disc benefits from using PW:S, but there is nothing in the tree that would reduce it's CD or debuff. Idiotically you need the debuff to be active in order to gain some crit.

Disc benefits from crit, but there is nothing in the tree that would increase crit chance - other than Renewed Hope, which is yet again tied to PW:S or Inner Focus with it's CD.

Disc benefits from haste, but other than Power Infusion - again on a cooldown - or Borrowed Time - tied to PW:S - there is nothing in the tree other than the hilarious 5% you might get from Enlightenment.

The discipline tree in it's current state is a total mess, with little to no synergy in between talents, resulting in paying a rather high price for a bit of mobility.

Grace needs it's duration increased and should be shared with other healers.
Aspiration needs to include PW:S and/or Renewed Hope needs untied from Weakened Soul.
It needs a talent that boosts the effectiveness of Flash Heal, maybe by increasing it's chance to crit significantly (note that a druid has at least 60% crit chance on Regrowth)

Unless some of these things fall into place, you just have to accept that Disc is a very specialized off-spec that excels at single-target healing, offers great mobility, but at the price of being utterly inefficient otherwise.

Holy has more to to offer in that regard, has perfect synergy between talents, and more healing overall - without needing half a dozen things to fall into place first.

If it wasn't for having to play the mana-regen game by standing in one place and cancelcasting, I'd be playing holy myself in PvE. Mobility has a higher priority for me, though, so I'm accepting the shortcomings of the Discipline tree.

I wouldn't expect a guild to agree with what's just MY preferences, though, in the same way I don't expect anybody on this board to share my critical views on what appears to be the flavor of the month.