Please help me with disc!

[Solacium]

Hi Everyone!

Throughout the entirety of Tier 15 I have struggled with my throughput and feel like there must be something I'm doing wrong. If anyone has some advice it would be greatly appreciated! I run in a 10m group with a resto shaman and holy paladin when needed.

Armory: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/bleeding-hollow/Awesomemark/advanced

Logs: http://worldoflogs.com/reports/4wzzidv4g0pn1hi7/rankinfo/

[Mythricia]

Well it can be hard to tell just from logs, there's many variables that dictate why a log for a kill may look the way it does.

But comparing to my own logs (~522 priest currently 5/13 HC, so not entirely comparable I guess), I'd say you're not Atonement healing enough by a large margin.

Now I'm not going to say that the following is a "rule" or even good advice, but from my own experience progressing, Atonement and Divine Aegis (As procs by critical Atonement heals) should be your #1 and #2 source of healing, by a large margin - around 50% or more of my total healing done in any given raid, is a combination of Atonement and Aegis as procced by atonement.

Obviously a good priest / player still uses all his/her spells available - I still use my cast-time heals, shields, spirit shell, etc, in most fights, but Atonement should be your default action. If there's not enough damage going on to warrant casting PoH or shields, you should be Atonement healing. It's more efficient than cast-time healing, it's faster, it's smart - and much more importantly, you're doing DPS. You should not underestimate the huge important that Disc DPS can have in a 10man raid. I can't count the amount of times my personal DPS as a Disc priest in 10man HC progress raiding has made the difference between a kill and a wipe - sure it's only 30-50k DPS depending, but over the course of say 8 minutes, that's still 20 million damage done. Next time you kill a boss with half the raid dead and Enrage 10 seconds out, ask yourself if you'd have killed it, if the boss had 20 million more HP.


DPS concerns aside, Atonement is simply the optimal way to heal many fights - and there's always room for it, in every fight. It's not that I am trying to do DPS specifically, I just happen to do that simply by healing the optimal way. Don't be fooled by someone telling you to gem pure Crit, reforge out of Spirit, and only ever cast DPS spells.... they're crazy. But still: simply spamming Penance > Holy Fire (Or, Solace, should be your default choice 90% of the time now) > Smite, I can do a good 80k HPS. So it's not like you're trading healing for DPS - you just... add. You just do both, and you do both really well. Which means you should be doing that. You're being 1.5 players, instead of just 1 players. You heal as much as any other healer in the game (practically), while also doing about 30-40% of the DPS a real DPS player does - so, you're basically one and a half player, if you know how to juggle Atonement vs other spells properly.

I guess part of the difference between a good and a bad disc priest is learning when and how to atonement heal, and when and how to heal with actual healing spells. But that's really too big a topic to cover in a reply here.


If you want some logs to look at the healing breakdown, here's a few of my logs (Picked out Normal ones mostly since they compare better to yours) - as you can see, Atonement is nearly always the top healer (pay attention to the fact there are 2 separate entries for the Atonement spell - one from the Disc passive, one from Solace):

Megaera 10N
Dark Animus 10N
Ji-kun 10HC
Durumu the Forgotten 10N
Primordius 10N (If you wanna kill this boss easy - let a Disc priest mutate early in the fight, then let them smite the boss senseless - massive healing, plenty damage).

[Solacium]

Thanks for your input!

I really appreciate the time you put into your post! I didn't even consider PW:Solace as in T14 I took mindbender to help with mana issues. Now I find myself having too much mana all the time. I thought maybe I should shed spirit for more int but I wasn't sure if that would be a great idea. Looking over your logs I see that solace can benefit me greatly as I don't find myself in need of mindbender as much. Comparing our armory's pretty quickly seemed to indicate that I'm not going in the wrong direction in terms of stat weights, but it does appear that my talents require some adjustment. I think my main problem is adapting to the changes our class has gone through patch after patch. Thanks again for the information as its helping me a great deal.

[Mythricia]

Glad to be of any help, friend.


You're right about Mindbender - it was the go-to choice in T14 - and it's still quite good. Comparing Mindbender versus Solace (and normal Shadowfiend) - it's a tradeoff, you get more DPS with Mindbender, and more mana with Solace (Nearly twice as much, actually).

Solace has a few sneaky reasons as to why it's so good. Most people look at it and say "Hey! It gives 1% mana!" and don't think much about the rest. But it also deals damage, and it also heals. It's a literally free heal. And it's not small, either - I crit for a solid 120k with it. So that's a 120k heal + 120k Aegis (or well, more, I'm not good with the scaling math). For free, instant. And consider this - Holy Fire costs mana, Solace does not. So there's a hidden mana gain there, too.

This is why I personally won't be swapping out Solace unless there's a really exceptional situation where Mindbender is better.


My armory is probably not the best thing to look at - I can swap gems / reforges depending on what Heroic fight I'm progressing, but generally I still go for all-out Spirit, while picking up socket bonuses with Spi/Int or Spi/Crit hybrids. My occasional co-healer priest Celao is much more Int focused, and he does very well so... At the end of the day, it's somewhat down to personal choice. I want lots of mana, because my playstyle lets me spend mana when I need to. But that's me.


As for talents, Twist of Fate, Solace and Cascade are my default choices - Divine Star on fights like Megaera and other tight-stacking fights. But that said I change glyphs and talents on nearly every boss, but the gist of it is that Solace and Twist of Fate is really really good. (ToF specially good once you learn to snipe low-health adds to keep up a +20% healing boost. Even if you never do that, you're still guaranteed to have the buff for the last 20% of the boss health - which is not a bad uptime compared to Power Infusion. But they're both good. Situaitonal).


Good luck figuring it out, there's been a lot of changes for Disc, this is true.

[Jhazrun]

Your Atonement is low. Grab Solace, put it and Penance on [@focus] macros, focus the boss, and press them on cooldown.

Drop the PW:S glyph. It's eating 20% of every shield you put on a full-health target.

Consider glyphed Binding Heal for spread-out high-damage situations while Penance is cooling down.

You're not using Archangel. Pop it on cooldown as long as something's happening, and spam PW:S (it gets the +25%) and high-power heals between Penance/Solace cooldowns.

You're also not using Inner Focus. Use it with ProH.

[luciusvlm]

Hi jhazrun i heal with mouseover macros so i have solace and smite on focus macro and penance like

##showtooltip Penance
/cast [@mouseover,nodead][@target,nodead][@player] Penance

is poosible to penance the focus and mouseover heal the group?

[Jhazrun]

I use separate macros for offensive and defensive penance, but if you want them in a single button,

/cast [@mouseover,noharm,nodead,exists][@focus,harm,nodead,exists] penance; penance

accomplishes what you want it to.

[luciusvlm]

thx it worked