World of Warcraft Discipline Healing for the Rest of Us

So I have never been one who liked HOLY spec on a priest it is too much easy mode to me (NOTE: this is a personal preference not a judgement). I come from an Everquest healing background which allowed me to have diverse options when healing and also be a preventative healer which I prefer to spamming one/two heals over and over.

With the introduction of Penance coupled with Power Word:Shield Disc has become a very viable raid/tank healer. In my opinion more tank then raid but I will get into that a little later.

My one huge recommendation to you should you choose to spec Disc is know that most of the time other players are not going to understand how effective you really are. You will usually (NOT ALWAYS) be second to a holy priest or pally this is due to very little information about how awesome we are, and RAID leaders doing little to no research on viable classes/specs and still raiding like this is Burning Crusades. Take it with a grain of salt as you are able to get in to RAIDS and even Heroic 5 mans people will become more educated and you will be asked back.

Second big thing IGNORE meters they can not possible tell your effectiveness in a RAID and any raid leader using them to make decisions about healers is not doing their job properly.

So lets get into stat stacking because the question is asked over and over and argued about everywhere. Generally it is Holy speced priests not understanding the stat stack is DIFFERENT and that what may be good for them might not be good for their disc counter part. So lets go with the most important stat first

Spell power (SP): By far and away the most IMPORTANT stat to stack. For the most part you can not have enough. When ever possible you should be gemming and enchanting for it. I have been known on occasion to drop a socket bonus to use a Runed Cardinal Ruby especially if it’s some stupid bonus like Spirit. It is going to raise the effectiveness of everything you do as well as allowing your PW:S to absorb just a ton of incoming damage.  With that being said you of course can not ignore the other stats we need.

Intellect (INT): Ok so the major debate that lies here and how to weight it  and BLAH BLAH BLAH… a lot of talk without a whole lot of easy to read reasoning behind it. Here is what I see first and foremost your mana pool is directly based on this stat so in order to cast you must have it. Second it will add to crit which is one of the stats we will work later. (On a side note this secondary crti thing not as big a deal as you would think since you need 166 int to get 1 percent crit)

Ok so now we move into the seriously debated stats CRIT/HASTE/SPIRIT/MP5

First if we are talking a RAIDING disc priest lets just get sorta ignore MP5 and SPIRIT. The reason is that you will get all you need from gear. You never need to “stack” those stats. The reason being that first of all we should very rarely be outside the 5 second rule (which is the nice way of saying we should be perma casting) and because of this spirit does very little if nothing for us. As far as MP5 in a raid situation you will have sick mana regen because of all the raid buffing and Rapture.

(mana pool) x Return Percent from rapture(1.5/2.0/2.5) / 12 * 5 = X MP5 (stolen from Ejerks)

For the nitty gritty facts lets just say that if you mana pool is in the 21k range and you are SW:P the tank when ever possible then you will see a return of like 150MP5 added to your current MP5.

So all that being said when possible you should chose MP5 gear over spirit gear and never ever gem/enchant for either.

Now this is the the area we differ greatly from holy priests, stacking spirit is something they do.. why ? I don’t know and frankly I don’t care I don’t spec holy I don’t heal holy and truth be known if it were the only option for priests with healing like back in the day I wouldn’t play a priest.  Ok mini rant over .. moving on…

So what do we have left ? CRIT and HASTE

Critical Strike: Ok in my opinion this stat is more important then stacking haste. Once you get haste to about 11 percent is it useless for us .. so good rule of thumb stack crit and hope the gear will have enough for you hit the 11 percent cap. Divine Aegis is one of the main reason to stack crit where you can and when given a choice over haste or crit gear you should pick crit. A free bubble is a free bubble. The other reason is a critting flash heal is just awesome. It is low cast time, low mana and just be spammed like crazy. This stat right now is the one I am working and I will tell you it has helped my through put  a ton I am critting for near 8k on a flash heal. So I Flash heal, crit and now they have divine aegis which lets me be able to take a moment to bubble (Power Word:Shield) another raid target.

Haste: So yeah a lot of talk about GCD (Global Cool Down) which in easy terms is the time it takes for your spells to be able to be cast again. Even instants cant be rapid fired. With haste you can drop the GCD to 1 second but that is as good as it is going to get on that. Haste will still continue to drop cast times of your spells though. This is important because even though it is not as effective as a Holy Priest for us to cast Prayer Of Healing/Greater Heal sometimes it is just a must and dropping the cast time of these beast healing spells will help the Raid in the long run. A good rule of thumb on haste is cap it at 11 percent.

On a side note today is the release of 3.3 patch so I will have to take sometime and see how much this effects our healing and if the new encounters are making anything different.