Aug 31
What Can a Discipline Priest Bring to Your Raid
Posted on August 31, 2009 under Game Mechanics, My Play | 16 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
by Sid, on September 1 2009 @ 8:20 am
Very nice post about Discipline Priest.
Luckily in my realm nobody questions the usefulness of Disc in PvE. But it’s still a very informative article.
by WTFspaghetti, on September 1 2009 @ 9:18 am
Very cool article!
I posted it on my blog…all people need to know the usefulness of a Disc priests!
by Dboy, on September 14 2009 @ 3:24 pm
Thanks for crunching the numbers on that one – it’s great to see some empirical data about how well we fare with our mitigation included.
Any chance of seeing the numbers from a few different fights? I’d be particularly interested in a VoA fight (as I’m used to running that for, you guessed it, PVP gear), although Naxx, Ulduar and any heroics would be good too!
(I was directed here by the Twisted Nether Podcast and have subscribed to your blog – keep it up!)
by Essential, on September 17 2009 @ 11:49 pm
This is just what people need to know about disc priests. Every guild should have at least one.
by Gruurk, on October 5 2009 @ 10:24 am
I have a holy priest very well geared. Sorry, I don’t agree. Bubbling isn’t healing. Thus it should never be counted is if it was. I know that recount seems to claim it does; at least that was the winning debate from our guild by going through the numbers. If you remember that and remove those numbers. The discipline priest goes right back to where it was. Bubbling isn’t healing! It would be like a holy paladin tossing up a divine shield on every one if they could! So toss this in your minds and think about it. If you have a 10 man raid with 3 discipline priest doing this same action. What do you think the odds of wiping would be? And did they really heal? The answer is you will wipe 95% of the time and no, no they didn’t heal jack. If you still don’t get it. It would be the same as when I tanked BC all the time and I used Greater Ward of Shielding. Did I just heal for 4k? Why not? If bubbling for a discipline priest is counted for healing then why not? Because as a warrior I didn’t heal. I put on a ward. So it shouldn’t ever be counted. If I had a discipline priest again in my guild my first order to them is “Go respec to Holy or leave the guild”. I don’t waste time with this trash. You know I think I’ll see if I can run a simulation on this. No healing, all bubbling say for Crazy cat lady in a 10 man. Nah, we know what the numbers will say. Wipe!
by Ed, on October 6 2009 @ 1:37 am
Gruurk is wrong, Its might not be actual healing, But they are dam usefull. Being able to stop damage before it happens can take the edge off the big hits, making it easier for other healers to manage. Bubbles are applied before the damage is taken so effectivly damage that would have been taken is absorbed instantly rather than waiting 1 second for the healer to catch up.
I personaly would definetly have one in my raid, especialy if you have a Holy priest or resto shammy to do the raid healing. Im a holy pally thinking about re-specing diciplin to help my guild out, as we have too many holy priests.
Damage absorbed is damage not taken which would have been healed if the priest wasnt there, just becasue they dont show off with their chart topping doesnt mean they didnt contribute.
Yes, a group probably will whipe if you have 3 diciplin priests, the same can be said if you have 3 resto shammys or 3 holy pallys, you need class variaty to bring diffrent buffs and diffrent attributes to the raid. I hate raiding without a pally, druid or shammy
by BinaryMuse, on October 7 2009 @ 10:32 pm
Ed is correct. Shielding isn’t *technically* healing, if your definition of healing is “making missing health come back.” Using Gruurk’s example with 3 Disc priests healing a raid, all you have to do is take away the inability for PW:S to be chain cast (ie, take away the Weakened Soul debuff) and the raid could potentially take no damage at all. Did they heal anything? No. Did any damage need to be healed? No. No wipe.
What we are talking about here is the idea of “effective healing.” Shields prevent damage that would otherwise have to be healed up (assuming a shield is used up, which it almost always is when used on a tank or when there is high raid damage–if the shield ISN’T used up, then it is not counted toward effective healing, at least not completely).
And Gruurk, as for ‘If I had a discipline priest again in my guild my first order to them is “Go respec to Holy or leave the guild”. I don’t waste time with this trash,’ please let me know what guild you run so I can make sure not to join it. Ignorant statements like this–the kind made in a fit of passion with no research–is what makes a bad player and a horrible guild officer or leader. Do a bit of Google searching and you will find many, many resources explaining why PvE Disc is a good thing (from casual blogs such as this all the way to posts by Elitist Jerks).
by Ed, on October 12 2009 @ 12:07 pm
I ment to say im a holy priest in my post above
, but I have now spec’ed Holy/Diciplin and loving the PvE diciplin spec, Its awsome. Now im gona put some stats out here to show you how good this spec is for PvE.
These calculations are taken from the comments on wowhead.com, so its their calculations, not mine, but they seem to be correct.
A Diciplin priest on 2k Spell power, correct tallent spec, PW:S absorbs 5590 damage, and heals for 20% of the damage absorbed (1118 non crit) in total 6708 effectivly healed of an Instant cast spell with only 2k Spell power. Now I am fairly sure any Diciplin priest here can get 2k unbuffed, now add +174 for Inner fire, +46 for food buff and +125 for flask. thats probably >400 extra spell power if you include shammy totums.
Also, they really do well at keeping mana, I rarely ever run out of mana, even when spam healing, very strong healing class.
by Clemency, on November 4 2009 @ 8:35 am
I have never played as a disc priest, so I don’t assume to know anything about them.
All other healers, I will end fights with full mana, but just with her, I’ll run out very quickly.
I currently tank as a prot paladin (and I have defense cap and whatnot). My issue is
our guild’s main healer who runs most heroics with me is a disc priest. This Divine Aegis seems to hurt me more than help. I’m constantly getting bubbled and having damage mitigated to the point where I don’t need healed and thus continuously run out of mana. I have never had this problem when running with a holy priest or holy paladin (well, obvious reasons there). Is it the DA causing the problem or is she just casting her heals incorrectly? I’ve never checked but given her gear lvl, I’m wondering if maybe she is just casting greater heals because I get way low sometimes
Granted by that point I have pretty good threat, but everyone else is still building threat while I’m just swingin’ my weapon. I even stop using holy shield when she is healing in an effort to take more damage.
by Noemi, on November 5 2009 @ 3:09 pm
Clemency, this is a common problem with Disc priests. It has nothing to do with your priest healing “incorrectly”, it’s just the mechanic of the class. DA and PW:S will prevent you from taking damage, and therefore reduce the amount of healing required to keep you at 100% BEcause you don’t take as much damage, you get healed less, and when you get healed, DA pops up again.
If you really find it that frustrating you can do 1 of 3 things:
1. Stop running with a disc priest, no other healing class has this mechanic
2. Ask your priest to shield you less (or not at all) it will put more strain on her PoM and Penance but I’m sure she’ll cope
3. Ask her to drop crit when she’s running 5mans, she will proc DA less and therefore need to heal you more
I personally go with #2 when I run with pallies, but it’s personal preference
by Brian, on November 21 2009 @ 12:35 am
Nice post! Gruuuk i almost feel bad for anyone in you’re guild. 1) You are obviously ignorant
2) you are narrow minded 3)You show no means of adaptaion. Because you are good with you’re holy priest thats great,however i missed the part where this forum bashed holy priest.If i was any class/spec i wouldn’t want to be in you’re guild.To not let some one atleast try a build in you’re guild because you dont think its a good build can only mean two things in my eyes
1)You tried it and sucked at it,which just means you are fail as a priest all together.
2) You never tried it at all.
Ashame how you didnt post you’re guild info or you’re armory so we could of seen you’re progression.
Ohh well guess there will always be haters in life.
Once again though great post.
Popamidnight Alterac Mountains Horde
by Adorno, on January 1 2010 @ 7:52 pm
I’m discovering this blog late, but this topic still stands, sadly. I recently had it out with a shaman for giving me the same line as Gruuuk, and he further said that you can’t compare absorbs to healing in any sense whatever — as if the damage absorbed wouldnt need any positive healing if the negative healing didnt mitigate it.
One thing about this blog that I would argue against is that disc “won’t have the throughput or super-strong AoE [of] a holy priest.”
Just check the ICC scoreboard and you’ll see that disc tends to out-heal holy on the same assignments — http://www.wowmeteronline.com/rank/clazz/ehps/pri/9/6/3/0
by Adorno, on January 1 2010 @ 7:55 pm
I’ve also written on the strength of disc vs holy, in a little more detail feel free to check it out: http://one-priests-opinion.blogspot.com/2009/12/one-priests-opinion.html
by Pippi, on January 7 2010 @ 8:09 pm
Can you tell me how weakened soul benefits your target?
by Brandon Tilley, on January 8 2010 @ 10:56 am
If you take the talent Renewed Hope, Weakened Soul increases the critical strike chance of your Flash Heal, Greater Heal, and Penance on the debuffed target (by 4% at max ranks).
by NME, on January 29 2010 @ 9:32 pm
I just had to comment at the idiot above that said that shielding is not healing.
Whats the difference between 6k damage absorbed.
And 6k damage taken then healed?
None….besides the fact that in one of those circumstances one of the players stayed at 100% health the other jumped to 80% for a time before being healed back up.
If it was possible, Absorbing 100% of the damage in a fight would be truely superior to healing 100% of the damage in a fight.
And stacking disc priests is dumb, due to weakened soul.