Disc 101
April 30, 2009By request! Disc is your new dual spec. O snap! Now what?
GLYPHS:
Penance
Flash Heal
PW:Shield
Minor glyphs are mostly pretty useless, but don’t forget your Levitate, because everyone loves them some levitate.
SPELLS:
The ones you are mostly going to worry about are Penance, PW:S, Flash, and Prayer of Mending. This is assuming, of course, that you are tank healing.
Penance is your main heal, and when the tank’s got enough hurting to worry about, use it! It is tasty. If the tank’s only taking piddly little hits, well, Flash is also nice. If you’ve got an OMG TANK IS DYING moment, PW:S + Penance + GHeal = win. Yay Borrowed Time!
Prayer of Mending every time it’s up. Yay, frisbee!
Keep PW:S on the tank at all times. If there’s AoE damage or something else you might get hit by I like to keep it up on myself, too, because I have the bad habit of not watching my own health. I also like to use it on the resident Suicidal DPS. There’s always that rogue that likes to die on every pull.
Renew is not something we use too much, but I’ll keep one on the tank for ouchy fights, especially when movement is involved.
If you know that something is about to put some serious hurting on the tank (enrage, etc), then Pain Suppression is your friend.
Power Infusion is another little talent of ours. Some like to use it on themselves for a bit of a haste buff. I like to use it on the DPS so the boss dies faster. Mages love me!
You can macro Inner Focus to Prayer of Healing, but I prefer to macro it to Divine Hymn for those Oh God We’re All Dying moments.
STATS:
Spellpower > Int > Crit / Haste > Spirit/MP5
There are a couple of stances when it comes to disc healing. One (the path I currently follow) is crit heavy and haste light, for more procs but less thoroughput. I hover around 6% haste or so. Others like to have more haste for faster heals. Pick whatever you like! In my case, haste gear just hates me, so it wasn’t so much about choice as necessity. Stupid loot gods.
Gem for spellpower more so than anything else, though spellpower + int/crit are also solid choices. Gemming for spirit or mp5 kills kittens.
SPEC:
Here’s a mana conservation build.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?priest=0503203130300512301323231151205050030300000000000000000000000000000000000000000000&glyph=000000000000&version=9806
Here’s one with a little more crit.
http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?priest=0503203130300512331323231241205050030000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000&glyph=000000000000&version=9757
And those are the class=”mceItemHidden”> class=”hiddenGrammarError” pre=”the “>very very very “>very very very basics of disc priest healing.
Renew is also helpful on fights when you know there will be silences involved.
And I like hitting Inner Fire + Divine Hymn for some raid damage moments.
Good tips above!
As a Shadow Priest that just switched back to Disc for the need of the guild, this post was a huge help. Thank you. Fast quick tips are great.
I also find Renew is helpful followed after a shield on the all too many movement fights in Ulduar. Usually once you can stop moving the shield/renew has healed them up. Non movement fights usually a raid healer will just overwrite it with a heal topping the person off.
Hmm … I always thought our Suicidal DPS was a warrior.
I recently switched out my Glyph of PW:S for Glyph of PoH. I have to switch between tank healing and raid healing so often in Ulduar that I really needed a buff to my only group heal. Also, the Glyph of PoH really makes a lot more of a difference than the PW:S one–it just doesn’t heal for all that much, and I’m generally throwing out shields preemptively. Also, now that PoH can target any party it has become much more valuable. I actually use it quite often now, especially on fights like Hodir or XT.
Of course, my Ulduar 10 group consists of me, a resto shaman and a holy pally, so I’m much more capable of switching from tank to raid than the pally. However, if you’re running with two other raid healers, PW:S might be fine.
[...] to some very helpful bloggers, I think I’m getting the hang of this healing [...]
Love your blog. It has (and continues to be) a great help for a shadow/disc priest who is new to the game. I was wondering what a good disc healing rotation would be. Much obliged and many thanks!
There is no true healing “rotation”, alas. It is not that simple!
For tank healing, I usually keep bubble/renew on them all the time. Penance when called for, flash when not. Gheal only comes out if penance is on cooldown and the tank neads OMG BIG HEALS. Pain Suppresion for “oh crap” moments. Power Infusion on some lucky caster on cool down. :)
Nice blog!
I’ve got an issue with a bear…how does PW:S affects bear rage generation in 3.2? This bear guy is always complaining about me bubbling him. I’m talking about Ulduar 25-men boss tanking.
I’ve been looking through many many forums, blogs, blue posts and such and information in very contradictory, mainly not up-to-date. So, I was glad finding your blog so I could finally get some real information about PW:S and bear rage generation in 3.2
No warriors complaining, blue post confirmed that since 3.1 warriors get rage when damage is absorbed, but nothing about bear rage found…
To the poster above me, all rage generation was fixed so that bubbles don’t prevent it anymore, and that includes bears. So that bear tank just doesn’t know what he’s talking about and he should be thanking you for those bubbles! My only concern with bubbles is a pally tank because afaik they get mana back from being healed, and if you’re preventing dmg instead of healing it, they are getting less mana back.. but I’m not 100% sure on that.
@Alex
As a paladin tank, I can assure you that any major boss fight, we are getting MORE than enough mana to tank properly. We have our own talents & buffs to recieve mana (Blessing of Sanctuary gives us mana back every time we are hit). If I’m really hurting for mana, we have Divine Plea (which prevents more damage when used) giving us 25% of our mana back every minute or so.
If a paladin is giving you grief about your bubbles, don’t bubble them & let them die. They’ll shut up after that ;)
I think that was on a Friday flow chart.