Darkmoon Card: Tsunami

A guildie was kind enough to provide me with a Darkmoon Card: Tsunami the other day (thank you long time!) and I immediately wanted to test it. Some friendly commenters over at Wowhead have provided alot of information on this trinket both about priests and other healers so check that out if you're interested (link further down). I thought I'd make a comparison between disc and holy, and yet again disc comes out short.

The Tsunami deck gives 321 intellect and a 5 stackable buff when casting a direct healing spell of 80 spirit (ie 400 spirit total).

The trinket has a 10 second ICD, which means that if you've got one proc, you'll have to wait 10 seconds before you can get the next one. If you throw 5 heals at once though, like with PoH and CoH, that will give 5 stacks at once. This will bug when casting Penance, more about that further down.

We're yet again stuck with a mechanic affected by something Blizzard have chosen to call "direct healing spells". They're not 100% consistent in what constitutes a direct healing spell, which means any guessing made from testing will probably lead you into the dark sooner or later. The best way is to simply test all your skills one by one, and note which ones will proc it. In the end this won't matter much anyway of course, you'll heal as you've always healed and hope the trinket procs keep up. It does matter when you compare specs though, since we notice that it's alot easier to keep this trinket fully procced as holy than disc. It's also easier to get a full stack fast as holy than disc.

Spells that will proc the trinket;

• PoH and CoH = 5 stacks
• Binding Heal = 2 stacks
• Heal/GH/Flash Heal/Serenity = 1 stack
• Sanctuary = same amount of stacks as there are people affected by the spell (up to 5)
• Penance = 1-3 stacks depending on target

Spells that won't proc the trinket;

• Divine Hymn
• Renew
• Prayer of Mending
• Power Word: Shield
• Smite (or rather, Atonement)
• Lightwell
• Holy Nova

(Thanks to Limez at wowhead.com for some of this information)

Holy
We might be bummed by the fact that renew doesn't proc by this trinket, but as we have noticed by now, renew isn't used even nearly as much as it used to. Holy healing is mostly about using Heal, Circle of Healing and Prayer of Healing, with at least two skills that will stack the trinket fast and easy. During a raid you can count on this trinket being up 100% of the time, especially since we throw in a whole lot of CoH then as well. In fact you might want to start out by throwing a CoH just to have a 5 stack ready and going as soon as you start the boss fight.
As holy this trinket gives me nearly 400 combat regen (fully stacked), which is nearly twice as much as it gives me when disc.

Disc
As usual (no I'm not bitter at all) disc falls behind when it comes to effectiviness compared to holy. Unlike holy, we see that some of our most important spells don't count towards proccing this talent. Smiting, shielding and Pomming won't do anything, and that's some 30% of our healing, so all we have to rely on is Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing. I can see that in raids this matters a little less, since we'll probably use PoH alot anyway. But in heroics Greater Heal is our main spell, and stacking this trinket with GH takes nearly a minute. Compared to one gcd of CoH when you're holy. Keeping it up isn't as easy either. As soon as we're running this proc risks dropping off. We can't throw an instant CoH on the run! And as I mentioned above it is currently bugged, or something, with Penance. Penance will stack the trinket three times when used on any player but yourself. But if you use it on yourself, the trinket counts Penance as a single spell, instead of three hits and will only stack once (at least most of the time, I managed to get two stacks once. Maybe more haste will remedy this!) This is not a huge problem, but still one of those annoying and unecessary problems that disc doesn't need.
As disc this trinket gives me 235 combat regen (fully stacked), which is nearly half that of holy.

This is a great trinket, no doubt about it. It's slightly better for holy, but that doesn't mean it's bad for disc. It's easier to maintain as holy, which means we'll get more out of it, and also spirit gives more regen for holy than disc. But spirit is more needed when you are disc for this very reason (ie we need more to get to the same regen). I just wish Blizzard wouldn't balance everything to work based on holy priest healing, and think about the poor disc priests every once in a while too.