Aug 31
What Can a Discipline Priest Bring to Your Raid
Posted on August 31, 2009 under Game Mechanics, My Play | 18 CommentsWorld of Warcraft is an ever-changing game. While reading this post, keep the date it was written in mind—changes may have occurred since then!
I’m surprised at how long it’s taking the whole PvE discipline priest mindset to sink in, even among other priests. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been discussing specs with other priests and they say something like “Of course, I don’t PvP,” to which I reply “Yeah, me neither.” The response almost invariably is “Oh… then why aren’t you holy?”
Discipline in PvE is all about healing via mitigation. You won’t have the throughput or super-strong AoE that a holy priest is capable of, but you have plenty of tools to be a powerful healer and a very strong single-target healer. Furthermore, your used-up shields will count for zero overheal (because the damage they absorb uses up the shield before the target starts to take damage again!). Let’s go into detail.
Power Word: Shield
Power Word: Shield is the bread and butter of the discipline tree. A large number of talents are designed around making PW:S faster, more powerful, or cause additional effects. Even Weakened Soul, designed to keep you from shielding too often, ends up providing a benefit in the end. Let’s take a look at some talents in particular:
- Improved Power Word: Shield: Pretty straightforward, directly increasing the amount your PW:S absorbs.
- Soul Warding: One of the cornerstones of the discipline tree, Soul Warding completely removes the cooldown on and reduces the mana cost of PW:S.
- Rapture: Another defining discipline talent, Rapture is one of the primary ways in which you will regain mana during a fight. This is one of the reasons discipline priests gem for intellect instead of spirit.
- Borrowed Time: In addition to providing 40% more spellpower toward your PW:S (it already uses 80.68%, according to WoWWiki), it also provides you with 25% haste until your next spell–and Penance (see below) doesn’t eat the effect.
Divine Aegis
Divine Aegis is, most simply, a miniature Power Word: Shield that appears on a target after you heal them with a critical heal. The mini-shield absorbs an amount of damage equal to 30% of the amount of the heal, including overhealing. Disc priests favor critical strike chance, so this is a very nice talent. If you crit multiple times before DA is consumed, the effects will stack, but only up to 125-times-the-level-of-the-target (10,000 for level 80 targets).
Renewed Hope
Renewed Hope is a very nice raid-wide buff that gets applied whenever you cast PW:S (which is often–this buff should be almost at 100% uptime). It provides a raw 3% damage mitigation to the entire raid. Go to your WWS/WoL log for a fight, look at “damage taken by raid,” and figure out 3% of that. You “healed” approximately that much damage just by casting PW:S every 20 seconds! For my latest Mimiron 10 kill, this was just shy of 100,000 passive healing. It is important to note, however, that the buffs don’t stack with multiple disc priests.
Renewed Hope also increases the critical strike chance of Flash Heal, Greater Heal, and Penance (your three primary throughput spells) when the target has Weakened Soul, easing the pain of not being able to shield the target again.
Penance
Penance is one of the most recognizable healing spells in the game. People who have never seen a discipline priest in action will whisper you, “What is that spell you cast that goes pew pew pew?”
Image courtesy of Wowhead
Penance is a channeled spell. It heals in three ticks, each capable of a separate crit. The first tick hits immediately, the second one second after the start of the cast, and the final two seconds after. Penance is a very strong single-target healing spell, and also stacks Grace (see below) to three stacks all by itself.
Grace
Grace is a buff that appears on a player when you heal them with Flash Heal, Greater Heal, or Penance. Grace can only be on one target per priest at a time, just one of the reasons disc priests excel at single-target healing. At three stacks of Grace, you will heal your target for an additional 9% (other healers do not benefit from the buff). As mentioned earlier, Penance can stack Grace three times on a target in a single cast.
Power Infusion
Power Infusion is a fun little spell that is pretty straightforward–reduce mana cost and increase casting speed by 20% for 15 seconds. I usually find a caster DPS who knows how to use it properly and use it on them every cooldown, complete with an addon that notifies them that they have the buff. (On a side note, it also has one of my favorite looking animations in the game).
Pain Suppression
Perfect for those predictable big-tank-hits, Pain Suppression decreases damage taken by 40% for 8 seconds. It also increases resistance to dispel mechanics, a very PvP-oriented effect.
Typical Talent Spec
Your stereotypical disc healing spec looks very similar to this 57/14/0 spec. A few of the talents, especially in the holy tree, can be moved around, but that is a discussion for another post!
Gearing and Gemming Choices
Discipline priests will focus on critical strike chance for more Divine Aegis procs and bigger heals, intellect for a larger mana pool and better mana regen via Rapture/Replinishment/Shadowfiend, and spellpower for general throughput. You won’t find discipline priests going for a lot of spirit, as it does less for us than our holy brethren. Disc priests usually aim for approximately 10% haste without raid buffs, so that the magic 15% haste (which reduces the GCD to one second) is achieved in raids.
Assessing a Disc Priest’s Performance
Any good healer knows that glancing at the healing meters is not a good way to assess healing performance; however, this is even more true for discipline priests because of the way they do a lot of their healing: via absorbs. Absorbed damage isn’t recorded in the combat logs, and thus not reported on addons such as Recount (however, there are addons and combat log analysis tools that attempt to accurately capture and display this information). For this reason, disc priests will almost always be very low on the meters.
For example, let’s take a look at the same Mimiron 10 kill I mentioned earlier.
As you can see, based on recount’s numbers, I did less healing than the restoration shaman, who was on the raid, and considerably less than the holy paladin, who was on the main tank. Had I been main-tank-healing, my effective healing would be even lower. However, let’s take a look at a graph generated from the numbers provided by World of Logs, a combat log analysis tool that takes disc shields into account:
As you can see, Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis accounted for 429,473 healing, almost 45% of my entire healing for the fight, skyrocketing the amount of healing I did. Also, remember that since shields are damage absorption, any shield or DA proc that is used up has absolutely zero overheal. Here’s a screenshot of my overall healing for the fight, so you can see how things played out a bit more:
I hope you learned something from this humble article. Disc is a very strong PvE healing spec, especially on a single target (such as a tank). Spread the word: discipline priests aren’t just for PvP anymore!
Related posts:
- Changes to Debuffs, Buffs, and Raid Stacking
- These are the People in your Raid
- Foray into Multiboxing: RAF Experiment Done
- Another Change due to PvP Balancing
- Baby Healer Dings 80
