World of Warcraft General Discussion

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11482

Disc is awesome. I dropped my Holy spec in favor of Shadow so I could DPS in randoms (rather than heal), and don’t miss it.

I recommend checking out the Elitist Jerks forum thread on priests, but here’s the highlights:

  • Glyph for PW:S and Penance, the other should be either PoHealing or Flash Heal, depending on which you use more.
  • Follow their spec suggestion, and absolutely don’t skip Soul Warding or Renewed Hope. The former causes a huge reduction in cooldown for casting PW:S, and the latter gives the whole group/raid a damage reduction buff that lasts a minute, each time you cast PW:S.
  • Penance and PW:S are your friends for tank healing.
  • Penance, Flash Heal, Greater Heal will add a temporary healing bonus buff on your target via the Grace talent.
  • Critical heals proc the Divine Aegis talent, another damage absorber.
11483

I’ve never run a Holy priest (well not past level 31), so I don’t have a basis for comparison.

When I run Disc I generally try to make sure that the tank has
Prayer of Mending
Power Word Shield
and Renew

on him as much as possible. I use Flash Heal as my go-to spell with Penance as my nuke (and Binding Heal substituted as appropriate). If I need to use Prayer of Healing I try to shield someone random first to get the haste boost; I normally don’t bother haste-boosting my flash heals. I almost never use Greater Heal. If I know there’s going to be a lot of aoe damage in a fight, I also shield up as many players as possible beforehand and during, depending on how the tank is holding up (obviously the tank takes precedence).

And that’s about it. I’m not good at remembering to put Power Infusion on a dps; I really need to remember to do that more often.

11484

I’ll definitely check back. It’s going to take a while to get from 73 to ICC geared, regardless of how many Hs I chain run. D:

And thanks for the tips! What I do as holy:

  • Roll PoM on tank, if it jumps to me, use a SW: Death to get it off.
  • Renew on everyone as a backup (or as main heal since I have Renew talented/glyphed)
  • Keep Serendipity up via FH
  • CoH/PoH for AOE heals
  • Use Greater Heal as my nuke (in conjunction with shield/Serendipity)
  • Shield+Renew then a spare FH or two (usually for DPS)

What I’ve found myself not using though is Binding Heal for a few reasons: It’s new. It isn’t affected by Serendipity. I need to use it, but I’m not sure where it’d slot in my current arsenal.

Comparing this to Tom’s list, it seems like I may not have as much of a problem switching toolboxes although I’m going to miss Serendipity since it comes in really useful when you need it.

From what I’ve read, though, Holy and Disc have sufficiently different stat priorities so that I’d end up having two sets of gear. This isn’t that far different from my PVP/PVE set as a hunter, so I’m used to it.

11485

Binding Heal is really useful since it’s basically a Flash Heal on you and your target at the same time. If I’m taking damage or am a couple K’s short of full hp, I’ll throw out a BH instead of a FH.

My method is basically shield, PoM and Renew on the tank (and Spirit of Redemption if it’s a boss or large pull). Then renews/flash heals as needed on the tank or dps, and CoH/PoH for AoE damage.

I don’t use Greater Heal much at all unless the tank takes some spikey damage – usually I keep shield/renew/PoM up and Flash Heals are enough to keep him topped off.

I’ve never intentionally triggered Serendipity – I just let it do it’s thing and don’t really watch it.

11486

I don’t know about other dungeon quests, but I just did all the Maraudon quests a few minutes ago, and every single one of them counted towards Loremaster. (Except shadowshard fragments, I didn’t feel like picking that one up)

11487

Missed edit window: I also haven’t turned in the Seed of Life quest you get after killing Princess – it’s a long flight to Moonglow, so I’ll do it later.

11488

Just went through Dire Maul for the King achievement. Decided I may as well pick up the quests in Feralas and do those as well. They all counted towards Loremaster.

Either Blizz changed it so dungeon quests count, or
I just happened to get lucky and pick the 2 dungeons in which quests count, or
There’s some heinous misinformation being spread :slight_smile:

Either way, if you’re struggling through Classic Loremaster and you haven’t done these two instances, there’s a good 8-10 quests to be had here.

11489

Blizzard has just been remarkably inconsistent as to whether or not dungeon quests count toward Loremaster, and I haven’t been able to figure out any distinguishing features that separate those that count from those that don’t.

In any case, my main is now sitting at 654/700 toward Loremaster of Kalimdor and 2968/3000 toward The Seeker. I’ve found buttloads of quests to do in Feralas, Felwood, and Winterspring (and a couple days ago I was flabbergasted to find 3 quests in Northshire, the human starting zone, that I somehow didn’t do back in December 2008 when I started this toon. With the recent changes to starting zones, though, I was able to do something I couldn’t have done back then. On that quest to whack the named Defias guy in the shack over near the vineyard, since no starting zone mobs are hostile until attacked, I walked up to him, said hello … and then punched him in the face :smiley:

ETA: Oh yeah, and I bought a bunch of cooking recipes on the AH … I only need 7 more for Chef de Cuisine.

11490

Grats to all.

Dinged 69 on my lock last night to finally catch up with my former levelling partner who I stopped levelling with when my son was born, all that afk from me a bit annoying. It’s great I now have two dumb meat shields, I mean two brave willing ‘companions’ to stand behind while I curse and throw shadowbolts around.

New guild plan for everyone to level up alts (has to be a dwarf or elf) has rather scuppered my plan of getting to 80 on my lock soon however.

11491

I did that quest during the Ancestry event, so I just used the convenient holiday teleporters to turn that quest in.

11492

I did the quest (and the Classic Dungeonmaster achievement) on my druid, so I cast Teleport: Moonglade. :smiley:

11493

Woot! Finally finished Glory of the Icecrown Raider (10 man version) last night and got my Bloodbathed Frostbrood Drake! I am a happy mage. :slight_smile: (And upgrading my bracers from 245 to 264 made it even nicer! :smiley: )

11494

The Burning Dog Legion weekly alt dungeon run is tonight, 8:45 server time. The plan tonight is to do Caverns of Time: Opening the Dark Portal aka Black Morass. Anyone level 68-73 or so is welcome to join us.

Note that to be eligible for this, you need to have done CoT: Escape from Durnholde. If we get a group together and not everyone has done Durnholde, we’ll do that first.

11495

Loving all this Disc Priest discussion. I’ve got a poor neglected one somewhere in his 50s, and this is great stuff to know.

Grats to folks on dings and to **winterhawk11 **on the sexy, sexy drake.

11496

I’ll add my 2 cents worth as a disc healer. I haven’t run any raids, but have about a 4.5k GS and ran H HoR the first (and so far only) chance I had without a problem. So anyway, keep in mind this is all in relation to 5 man heroics.

First, if you are bad about putting PI on a DPS, then go ahead and add it to a macro to cast on yourself. Better to be selfish with it than never use it at all :slight_smile: (Also, since I just do heroics, fuck em.) I currently have it set on my Flash Heal. But make sure you add a target=player, otherwise it won’t cast on you and may end up on some undeserving DPS! Oh, and it has no global cooldown, so you don’t even have to think about it. If anyone is interested I can post my exact macro when I get home. It has all the tricks in it to hide the error text and sound for when PI is on CD.

If you don’t have one already, get a timer to show your Weakened Soul debuff. I use DotTimer. As often as you’ll be bubbling (PW:Shield, obviously) people it is very helpful to know when you can bubble em again. Also helpful is an addon to show who is currently shielded. I use a built in feature in Xperl. This isn’t as necessary though, as at decent gear levels and properly specced, your bubble costs next to nothing to cast. So I don’t worry about bubbling over an existing bubble.

My rotation:
PoM and bubble the tank
Bubble the guy below him
Bubble the guy below him
Bubble the last guy
Bubble yourself
If you see or hear PoM go off that means the tank’s bubble is broken
Go ahead and pop a renew on him
If his Weakened Soul debuff is gone, bubble him again
If his weakened soul is expired, start rebubbling everyone in the same order as before
???
Profit!

So there you have it, in a good group that’s just about all you need to do. In a bad group, stick with that general idea, but add Flash Heals, Binding Heals, Penance, Greater Heals and Prayer of Healings as needed. Oh, and if it’s a situation where the tank holds aggro well and there is no AoE damage do this: PoM and Bubble tank. Go grab yourself a beer. Make a sandwich if you are hungry. Return to the fight to watch it end and get credit for “nice heals!”

As for stats, from what I’ve read it’s:

Int
SP
MP5
Haste

Spirit isn’t as important to us as it is to Holy Rollers. We use MP5 instead. I’m not gonna go anymore into stats though, as I’d just be regurgitating what I’ve read online.

Oh, one last thing, and this is only for total newb healers (read: me a month ago) +hit is useless to a healer, as all heals will hit every time.

11497

Hey, thanks Lily. That’s a good intro do Disc healing. I’m glad to see that +Int is the primary Disc stat, too, since I’ve been stacking that on my Holy priest which means the gear might be good enough to get me by as Disc, even though I probably have a lot more Spirit than needed.

11498

Honestly, whatever gear you have I’m certain will be fine for running dungeons. Again, I can’t speak to raids, but if you can pass Blizzard’s gear check and enter a dungeon, you can heal it. Well, your gear won’t stop you at least :slight_smile: It may be a bit more of a challenge on some occasions, but you’ll be able to get emblems so fast it won’t be a big issue. And if you aren’t running heroics yet, then it’s even less of an issue. I respecced from Holy to Disc in around lvl 75 and had no trouble with my Holy gear.

Hell, I started healing at 71 wearing all shadow gear and didn’t have any issues as holy. As far as I can tell, until you get to higher end heroics and raids, as long as you have some sort of caster gear on and a good spec you’ll be fine. And really the beauty of starting with shit healing gear is that once you do get good gear you’ll be amazed at just how easy it can be. Well, until you get in a group with a shit tank and DPS that refuse to reduce damage to avoid aggro that is.

11499

Also, if you use Grid, it might be worth playing with the GridStatusShield addon. It’s not perfect; it can only estimate the remaining amount of shield left by taking the PW:S shield total and subtracting absorbed damage found in the combat log, which can be prone to errors. But in the short time I futzed with a priest, I found that it was darn useful as a general percentage guide.

11500

I just checked my Disc spec on the armory and realized that when I switched my off-spec from Shadow to Disc, I never replaced my glyphs. So the one time I did heal in Disc I did it with Glyph of Shadow and Glyph of SW: Death. :smack:

11501

Yep. There must be only about a dozen late nighters in my battlegroup (think 12-3AM PST) so I wound up with the same ones several times last night in 4-5 runs. As a result, I’m getting sick of Azjol-Nerub. Although it’s nice to know now that on reg I can survive Herald V’s evil mes very easily - bubble, renew, dispel cc, psychic scream, and then by that point the others can come save my bedsheet-clad ass.

Thanks for the extensive disc info, GildedLily! I have to ask though, what’s PI?

As far as Weakened Soul goes, I have Grid set up with numbers + indicators in the corners, and WS is displayed as a little bluish-purple square so when it falls off the tank I know to slap another bubble on. Another Grid plug-in that I’ve found to be very nice is GridStatusHots which basically puts a little timer in another corner that ticks down from 30sec, plus is colored to show how many bounces are left (from bright blue down to red and then gone). That way I can see who’s got PoM currently and how long it’s got left.