The Unbearable Lightness of Being… Discipline

Hope everyone had a great holiday weekend! Going to skip the mod feature for this week in light of more important things (don’t you love the holiday disruption?). I failed to make note of this in the Friday post but…

DING! I hit 80 on Thursday! Woot!

And immediately after, I headed to Ironforge from Dalaran to respec and buy training. The time for healing raids was nigh. It was time to say farewell to my short getaway and come back to the “real” world. But lo and behold, I had a couple of things to look forward to.

I’ve always been the MT healer so this time around, I decided to take a look at the discipline PvE spec and modified it to fit my needs for the moment. The one I’m using is here. Yes, I know the Imp Divine Spirit buff will be useless in raids when it gets overwritten but I’m running heroics right now, trying to gear for mana regen/spell power/crit so I need all the help I can get while I’m doing so (the first few heroics were not pretty).

The first day, it took a little getting used to. I’m afraid I was a little too comfortable with the mechanics of being holy that it took a while to realize that discipline was an entirely different animal. Penance isn’t that hard to adapt to – it’s the mindset that causes a problem. Holy healing is extremely reactive.

“Hey, this little square box on my UI is showing -4k health. I should land a Greater Heal on this little box.”

Discipline is still reactive but to a lesser degree. From the way the talents are shaped, you can see that Blizz intended for reactive healing to be a last resort, in a way. The tree is all about damage mitigation (not so much prevention as you’re not really going to prevent damage from being dealt to the target – semantics, really). Let’s break it down now.

Divine Aegis – Welcome to the hamster-in-a-ball effect. Is your mean bully classmate going to kick your hamster halfway across the classroom? No problem! With this brand new, indestructible hamster ball, your hamster will be safe and any damage taken will be reduced by 30% of the amount healed when your heal crits! Available now for the low price of 40 talent points if you call withinin the next 49 levels!

Ok, so what this means is when your heals crit (Greater Heal, Flash Heal, Prayer of Mending, Prayer of Healing, Penance – the whole shebang of heals capable of critting), it will make this perfectly spherical bubble around your target that will absorb damage equal to 30% of your crit heal.

In level 80 dungeon blues, this is what you can expect the bubble to absorb:

1. On a Greater Heal crit (I’m seeing 11k crit heals at 80), we’re talking about 2.8-3.3k.
2. Flash Heal & Prayer of Healing will get you 1.5-1.75k.
3. Prayer of Mending will get you 1.2-1.5k.
4. Penance will get you 1.2-1.3k PER volley.

Now Penance is basically 3 small heals in under 2 seconds (it says 2s but Disc priests will also spec into Enlightenment and Borrowed Time). When you’re using Penance off every cooldown, you’re pretty much going to be bubbling and hasting up the butt. More crits, more bubbles, more damage absorbed, more hamster deaths prevented!

Of course, we run up against the age-old debate of bubbling tanks (especially Rage users) and how you should never do it, plain and simple. It causes problems with threat generation and maintaining aggro. Well, that’s why the devs boosted threat generation in 3.0! They saw this coming and it was all in an effort to balance the game!

In a 25-man raid, the bubbles are not going to be a problem. Tanks are eating up so much damage that your bubble won’t even absorb 100% of the damage from one swing on bosses, maybe even trash. In 10-man raids, you might see a noticeable effect but not enough to be a problem. The smaller raids are easier and geared towards those who are relatively early in the end-game. Normal and heroic dungeons might be a different story but so far, I haven’t experienced a problem.

I have a pocket tank and we usually run things sitting next to each other. I’ve asked him if PW:S still gives him problems with rage generation in the middle of a fight. He said yes so I didn’t PW:S him unless things got hairy (Die, Ichoron, DIE!). And you know what? He didn’t notice a difference otherwise.

Now before we go thinking this is all peachy, I will say that I only have ~8% crit so I don’t crit nearly as much as I plan to be with better gear once we start raiding so I would take all of this with a grain of salt.

Grace – This has the potential to reduce damage taken by up to 3% and increase healing done by the priest by up to 6%.

Now, after you’re done considering the potential of all these new talents, you’re going to have to remember to turn to your old friend, Inspiration, which is a nice complement to our new mantra of damage mitigation.

I also have the gear list available in an Excel spreadsheet format. If you want the file, drop me a comment or send me an email and I’ll send it to you. And if you don’t trust the file, just open it up in Google docs so it never opens on your computer. Here’s what it looks like:

The only thing I haven’t had time to do is translate how much spell power and MP5 you get from the amount of spirit on the item. I also included additional info, such as the types of gem sockets and trinket equip/use effects.

What I found useful was that I would filter by the item slot, then prioritize them (label “1″ for the item that I would want to wear into a raid, “2″ for the next best item, and so on and so forth) within that category. When I was finished doing these for each slot, I would then filter the “Priority” column to show only the 1’s. I would then be able to see the entire set of healing gear I would would want from all the normal and heroic dungeons. I’ve only included gear from level 80 normal dungeons and have not included those in the upper 70s bracket.

That’s it for today. Happy hunting!