Anyone got any advice for a first time disc raid healer?Follow

First off, Disc priests are not necessarily tank healers.

In fact, we are quite possibly the best raid healers out there for current content. We have our limitations and problems but generally we're amazing. I will just assume they'll put you on bubble duty eventually because that's what all Disc priests do nowadays, at least from what I have experienced.

That being said, from your armory I can see a few things you should change.
I'll assume you aren't going to fight the Lich King all too soon, so I'll tell you what I'd change gemming and enchanting wise at your current point of progression. You don't want any spirit gems. You obviously need one blue gem to activate your meta, use an SP/MP5 gem wherever it gives you the greatest socket bonus (and ignore socket bonuses that aren't spellpower). For red sockets, keep gemming SP, for yellow switch to SP/Int gems gradually as you see fit (if you find yourself running out of mana, get more intellect). Seeing as you are a tailor, get a tailoring cloak enchant and the cheap leg enchant. Seriously, I wouldn't even have let you into a raiding guild without everything enchanted properly.

Now then, as you progress through ICC you will find that later boss mechanics enable you to exploit Rapture to a point where you don't need any throughput anymore and where 75% or more of your healing will come from Power Word: Shield.
This means that you only need haste till your GCD reaches 1s (which is at 5% with raid buffs, so ridiculously low), crit becomes almost completely worthless because your most important spell cannot crit, and mana regeneration becomes a complete non-issue. Which means you want to gem for spellpower and spellpower only down to the meta and also get a new cloak enchant. This will probably get relevant at Sindragosa at the earliest, mostly it's just a better option for the harder hardmodes.

Your talent spec is also definitely not the cookie cutter for raiding. This is what it should look like by the book, there really isn't much choice. You do not want Divine Fury as Disc as GHeal is really pretty much worthless unless you take all the GHeal talents (thinking Serendipity here), and Penance, ProM and PW:S are still much much better in every way.
Now you can vary stuff a little bit. You can move the talent point from Desperate Prayer into Absolution. You can move the same point as well as the Healing Focus ones into Spell Warding if you want to be a bit more defensive. You don't really want to change anything else.

Spell priority is as follows: Power Word: Shield is your most important spell by far. Use Prayer of Mending as much as possible, too. Really do use it every time the cooldown's up on fights with heavy and constant raid damage like Festergut. Penance is good when you see your tanks drop too low, I find myself using it as often as the cooldown allows on a few fights. It's also awesome for Valithria.
Feel free to use Flash Heal whenever you have breathing room or someone really needs some healing urgently and has Weakened Soul.

If you have breathing room, you can also Renew the tanks.

Don't forget about Divine Hymn! It's awesome for BQL heroic, for example. You should also keep an eye on your other healy/mitigating cooldowns. And Power Infuse the Holy paladins (they are our friends), they love it! Or DPS casters, when there isn't any need for more healing.

Now, that is how I do it and there are some variations since we don't have a set rotation for most fights, but in any case I generally suggest looking at what better Disc priests than you are doing and looking at their logs over on World of Logs. And that tells me that I'm doing something very similar to the Disc priests in the really high end raiding guilds, so I don't think I'm completely wrong here.

Edit: Forgot a couple of things (you're probably thinking of gagging me by now, but it needs to be said).
1. Look at your own logs, and learn from them. Are you using every GCD? Do you find yourself not using Prayer of Mending as much as you thought?

2. IMPORTANT! Welcome to Disc, enjoy the ride.

Edited, Jun 30th 2010 4:39pm by Kalivha

Unless your tanks are crappy, it is, yeah.

I don't use it all that often to be honest, the only place where I use it really regularly that comes to mind is the Keleseth tank on Blood Prince Council.


And yeah, Power Infusion is something that is a complete waste on yourself, unless you use it right before Divine Hymn (my favourite being PI > Inner Focus > Divine Hymn > see everything getting healed back up in no time at all), or before Prayer of Healing on Precious/Stinky.


I should actually go more in-depth on Divine Hymn, I think. First of all, you use it on those pesky dogs mentioned above. Then you will find that in some fights, there is massive AoE at some point - I think LDW's Frostbolt thingy qualifies as the first thing where it makes sense. It will make more sense in heroic modes. Festergut, Valithria and BQL come to mind.

Actually Moz, since my memory is a bit foggy on this, I want to ask - is this even necessary in normal mode? I don't remember doing it, I haven't done the fight non-heroic in over a month since PuGs always either clear her on heroic or don't even get beyond Putricide.

I realise that if healers are undergeared or not very good, it's still a great thing to do but I just don't remember her flight phases being all that problematic on normal.

I disagree. I think you need to have an insanely great healing team to get through the flight phases on BQL heroic without stuff like DH or Tranq without letting people die. Even with those cooldowns, it doesn't always go as planned.

Obviously, it doesn't. But what I'm saying is that every boss fight is technically a formula where the tank's threat needs to be greater than the DPS' threat, the damage done must be at least equal to the boss' health after X minutes where X = enrage timer, and the healers have to outheal Y damage applied to different raid members over duration X.

Realistically and obviously, you don't always get that situation since none of us are robots. But it is possible to get close enough easily enough for the idea to be actually applicable, especially with the buff. Which leads me to say that cooldowns are in no situation really 'necessary'.

I like solo healing level 80 raids.

Heh, not to brag here but I pugged RS10 last night and got all the mini bosses down. A couple of friends of mine actually wiped on Halion on purpose at 2% because he's so easy on normal mode, so I'm kind of disappointed that we didn't get him down, but that was largely due to people not understanding the strategy (which, by the way, is much less complicated than quite a few in ICC) at all.


Anyway, this thread has inspired me to actually look into the math behind the gemming I use - and so I sat down and tried to devise some kind of formula, succeeded partially, then suspected I might really need a spreadsheet if I don't want my head to explode, and got confirmation from a maths teacher (it's really easy to call "number of talent points in Twin Disciplines" t).

So now I am totally motivated to make a comprehensive spreadsheet that enables any lovely disc priests to determine what stat weights are appropriate given their spell distribution as per World of Logs. Let's see how long it lasts.

I've tried finding a good spreadsheet for Disc on the Internet, and there doesn't seem to be one, so if I finish it and get it into a presentable state, I will let you know. And post it here.

I realise how bad spreadsheets are for healing, but it really makes more sense if you've got logs to run through them, apart from just putting in a bunch of random stats.



Oh, also, have you stopped and startled at how ugly the VuhDo config menu is yet? I personally find there are far too little options for some things with it and I don't want to spend any time on that menu. Ever. Again.
So, little bit of advice incoming - and this is really mostly my preference - but get Grid and Clique. Or just Grid and make mouseover macros, if you're not as lazy as most people.
There are a couple of bad things about Grid - mostly the fact that you can't move individual groups within your raid to different positions, and the lack of customisation options when it comes to opacity of various stuff, but generally Grid can provide you with far more information at a glance than any other raid frames I know.
Clique just adds the click-healing thing to it, and I've got macros clique-bound, too, although that is not strictly necessary. Alternatively, use mouseover macros and bind them to your mouse keys via action bars. Actually, since VuhDo seems to have done that for you already, go and get rid of it and get Grid for the awesome display of everything you need to know and more.
Then... action bars in general! Those are not necessary. They try to suck you in and force you to click stuff. That's a disgusting habit. Resist!

Grid doesn't take up much space and gives me the ability to see up to 9 things (buffs, aggro, debuffs, whatever) inside the frame and one as a border. I actually have stuff set up that PW:S overlays PW:F and such to save more space. It also gives you the ability to clearly see tank cooldowns and boss debuffs. I have tank cooldowns set up as the middle icon and boss debuffs (as all debuffs) as the frame. I have them all colour coded and know which colour does what to the affected raid member. I also have low mana displayed as a frame around the unit frame but set it up so that it gets overwritten by any debuffs. I've managed with other unit frames but Grid is the only one where I can have a vital piece of information displayed on 7x7 pixels without having difficulty reading it.


About action bars - I'm a bit of an advocate of Ctrl+Z style UIs, at least to some degree, so I like to not have them displayed.

For cooldowns I personally use CooldownTimers2, I think it's called, for the longer ones and PowerAuras for Prayer of Mending and Penance, as well as showing me when to rebuff Inner Fire when I forget.
On my priest at least, I prefer those because they are not in button form and my Priest UI is really quite button unfriendly. It's all about the bars! CooldownButtons gives it to you in normal format, but you can move them individually and such, as far as I know.