MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide Part 3 - Spell Usage (Cooldowns)

Welcome to this second part of my part 3 (yeah I know it's confusing) on Spell Usage as a disc priest. 

In this part - Cooldowns

If you're interested in my previous posts, they're here;

Talent Choices
Stat Choices
Spell usage (Heals & Absorbs)

So let's get right to it
You normally turn to handling cooldowns once you feel like you've got a rudimentary idea of what your healing skills do and when you should use them. Although cooldown usage to some part also is about good reflexes and knowledge of your class, I personally feel like you get the most out of your cooldowns with careful planning and studying the fight you're about to tackle in advance. If you decide to jump into a fight and use your cooldowns ad lib, that is whenever you think is the best moment, you often end up realizing that you could've needed it even more ten seconds later. Or even worse, you end up not using them at all (or too little) for fear that a better situation will arise.

Over the years I have definitely been more of an improviser than a planner, simply because I thought that was more fun. I love the challenge of going into a situation largely unknowingly of what was  going to happen and see just how quickly I could work out a problem. I love the trial and error aspect of healing that way, but of course it will test the patience of everyone around you and not all guilds accept that. I've had to get more and more into the pre-planning style of healing (and especially cooldown usage) the more "serious" my raiding got, for obvious reasons.  But I do miss those olden days of just throwing yourself at a fight and work it out there and then.

To be able to plan your cooldowns correctly you of course need to know what they do, and in many cases also how you can connect them to the cooldowns of other players in your group or other cooldowns in your arsenal. Combining for instance Hymn of Hope with Mana Tide might be a good idea, or not, depending on the situation (or at least used to, now they don't really work together anymore). Some cooldowns can only be used roughly once per fight, whereas others can be used several times and so need different kind of planning and maintenance/build up. Overall however I find that cooldowns are in fact easier to get a grip on than the basic heals, exactly because you can plan their usage (at least mostly). Of course planning and execution are two different things, but that is where practice comes in. I will repeat the whole "planning ahead" part of cooldowns a bit throughout this post, just so you know.

- Archangel
Archangel is such a great cooldown it should definitely be used as often as possible. I find the real challenge to Archangel is often to keep the stack up, waiting for that best moment to use it, rather than knowing when to use it, because unlike most other cooldowns Archangel requires constant maintenance to be used properly. There is nothing more annoying than keeping up a 5-stack and seeing it drop off because there is an event or somethingother preventing you from refreshing it just before you really need it. This doesn't happen often fortunately.

I used to have real trouble keeping track of my Evangelism stack, it was one of 50 things I needed to keep track of and I just didn't glance up in the buff corner often enough. I highly recommend using some sort of buff tracking addon to make this job a lot easier. I use one to keep track of the Evangelism buff and one to keep track on the cooldown of Holy Fire, since overall I tend to only use Holy Fire to rack up a stack - unless I needArchangel quickly of course in which case I also throw in some Smites if possible.

I find the biggest mistake people can do with Archangel is often to not use it often enough. With a 30 second cooldown, and unless getting a new Evangelism stack is really a challenge, there is rarely any reason to save Archangel solely for the really big healing situations, it could and should be used for medium ones as well and heck even minor ones. As long as you make sure that it is available to you for the big ones you should use it as often as possible.

mrwallpaper.com

The big drawback of Archangel is knowing how it interacts with your absorbs and damage heals/Atonement, which after all constitute a big portion of our overall healing. It always annoyed me that Blizzard would give us a tool that wouldn't affect half of our healing, somehow that just felt like bad design to me. In the world of Blizzard programming, Archangel sometimes affects absorbs/damage heals and sometimes it doesn't, depending on which patch/bug sequence you're on. As far as I know, at the moment Archangel works with Atonement (damage healing) but not with pure absorbs like PW Shield and Divine Aegis. But I could be wrong, you would always want as fresh information as possible on that.

Because of the way Spirit Shell works (a heal transformed into an absorb) we can at least rest assured that Archangel will affect this skill, meaning that these two in combination basically is God Mode for any discipline priest - it wouldn't surprise me if some healers even have them macroed together.

- Desperate Prayer (talent)
I've written about Desperate Prayer in my talent section of this guide already. Personally I normally don't even go for this cooldown, but it is good to use in combination with for example Void Shift. Otherwise it is pretty straight forward and should be used any time you're in danger of imminent death. The trick is only really to remember to use it.

- Dispel Magic
Although not technically a cooldown skill, I've decided to put it here with similar skills rather than in the heal/absorb section of the guide.

The function of dispelling changed quite a lot in MoP, before this current expansion us priests had Dispel which would remove up to two magic effects, harmful on allies or beneficial on enemies. It also had no cooldown. Strangely enough, I doubt anyone considered this OP, except maybe anyone facing healers in PvP. I still remember having "dispel-wars" with other priests in different battlegrounds, thinking back it was kind of silly. I'm not for or against the changes made to Dispel, I accept them and understand why they were made although I overall didn't think there was much wrong with how things worked either. Clearly Blizzard was of a different mind and decided that Dispelling should require more thought and tactic to it than it had, which again is understandable.

Back before the changes, there was no real risk to using Dispel because you couldn't cast it on someone who had nothing to dispel (friend or foe alike). If the Dispel was needed it would go through and if it wasn't you hadn't wasted your mana or gcd on nothing. This is probably the change made to Dispel that still annoys me the most. There is simply more on the line when using Dispel now, since there is a real chance of uselessly wasting mana and time on a skill that wasn't needed because someone got there before you. What this all means is that rather than letting Dispelling be ffa, which it used to be (we occasionally assigned it just to make sure someone was on the ball, rather than being worried about overusing it we were worried about underusing it) Dispelling has now turned into one of all those things many healers like to plan and assign well in advance, making sure that any bad stuff that needs to be removed doesn't have every healer dropping everything to do it.

Overall however, the way we use Dispel hasn't changed overly much (focusing just on the "removing beneficial effects on enemy"-part that is). In a raid you should be well informed and communicated with other players in your group who can Dispel regarding what needs to be removed and by whom, making good usage of the skill a matter of remembering when to use it rather than a matter of any quick thinking (or skill tbh).

- Hymn of Hope
HoH has been pretty much the same since we first got it. Apparently it was a priest racial initially (ie only available to one race of priests), but I don't even remember that. It has had a few tweaks to the mana return and cooldown length, but all in all it's still a one-time-per-fight use skill that returns some mana to you and a couple of your friends. With good timing it can be used several times per fight, although rarely more often than twice. And timing is what this baby is all about, making it one of my favorite cooldown skills. A simple rule of thumb is that the longer the cooldown is on something, the more important it is that you really know when to use it properly. This is obvious since if you miss-use it you probably won't get a second chance that fight. Timing is just maybe even more important when you're dealing with a channeled spell.

wow.joystiq.com

There are several factors to consider when trying to figure out the best time to cast a Hymn of Hope. In order of importance;

1. A window of time long enough - no need to move around or having to cast any other skills that would force you to interrupt easrly and so basically waste your cast.
2. Combining it with other skills for greater effect - For example Shadowfiend for more mana return or haste effects for faster casting.
3. Combining it it with other players skills for greater effect (for them or both of you) - For example Divine Plea for paladins.

The way I normally use HoH is that I find a good window of opportunity to make sure I have the 8 seconds (modified by haste) to channel. A good way to use it at the end of a Power Infusion for instance, to tap in to the haste gain. I also announce well ahead of time that I will cast it, to allow other players to adapt to it in case they want to use some cooldown of their own at the same time. For example I will say "after this aoe I will use HoH" or "I will use HoH in 10 seconds" - although I rarely actively try to time my HoH with other players skills unless it is vital for the fight, simply because it's not often practical to do so. I will weigh in requests, for instance if I intend to use the HoH in the next 10 seconds and the paladin asks me to wait two more seconds for his Divine Plea I will see if it is doable. Overall I consider it more important to get the cast done, and preferrably as often as possible during a fight rather than accomodating one other players needs. Try to see when the earliest possible time to use it is so that you can get two casts in to the same fight, for really long fights you might even get in three (first at ~1 min mark, second at ~7 min mark and third at ~13 min mark for example). Ideally you want an idea ahead of time of possible windows of opportunity and also how long the fight can be expected to be. After that it's just trial and error until you've found the perfect spot, and it's quite rewarding when you really get a HoH in good.

- Inner Focus
Since the cooldown on IF isn't overly long, and you can further shorten it with skills like Train of Thought, I normally don't give my IF usage more thought than making sure I use it as often as possible. If you know there is a big heal required shortly, trying to time it can often be a good idea, especially for the added Divine Shield bonus that it wields, or combining it with Spirit Shell, but overall you'll see the most use out of it if you use it off cooldown - at least that is my personal experience. I remember some priests used to have it macroed with PoH, maybe even I did at some point, to make sure to save it for those big aoe heals when needed. This is not necessarily a bad idea, but again - this comes off cooldown often enough that I rarely consider it needing much tactical thought behind it. By using it off cooldown you ensure to get the most hps gain from it (obviously that doesn't mean wasting it when it would only turn into overheal). Rather use it one time too many than one time too few though.

- Mass Dispel
Priests are the only ones lucky enough (?) to have a skill like Mass Dispel, allowing us to dispel several targets at once, be it friend or foe. It too, just like Dispel overall, has gone through some changes but historically this skill hasn't been used very much anyway. This is probably because Blizzard didn't want to make it mandatory to have a priest in the raid, rather just a benefit for the few times when Mass Dispel could come in handy. The instances where a large group of enemies or allies needed dispelling have because of this simply not been that many. Most of the time it has been a case of saving time, rather than mana and I can only think of one really good example of where Mass Dispel is a way better choice than a simple Dispel/Purify, which would be the petrify debuff cast by the trash mobs in Mogu'Shan Vaults (iirc). As mentioned, this is more often a convenience thing than an actual necessity. Obviously there are opportunities where Mass Dispel is the better way to go, but normally they are quite obvious - Mass Dispel is to dispel many targets quickly, to save time and mana from using several single target casts instead. By reading up on the skills in a certain encounter in advance, you should be able to figure out whether a Mass Dispel will be more beneficial to the raid as a whole than handling it the old fashioned one-by-one way, and after that it's just a matter of remembering to cast it (and also to notify your raid that you've got it covered to make sure no one else wasted their mana).

- Pain Suppression
PS looks pretty straight forward at a first glance, and the tricky parts really come down to execution. Unlike many other cooldowns that you can plan and time well in advance, PS normally requires a lot more minute timing and adapting to current situations. You might know exactly which powerful skill from the boss you want to save you tank from, but timing the PS is still not always an easy thing to do - especially since you want to make sure PS doesn't run out before the skill is being done.

wow.tcgplayer.com

As with most tank cooldowns, you will probably have had word from your raid leader (or otherwise responsible for cooldown assignments) on the proper time to use it. If this is the case you need make sure you have your gcd ready for it exactly when it is needed. There will also be times when you're allowed to use PS "as requried", which is where the real challenge, and fun, is. As with most cooldowns, with some knowledge of the fight you will have a general idea as to where a PS probably will be useful, and as with most cooldowns I will advice you to not be afraid to use PS in fear of wasting it and then not have it ready when it's "really needed". Getting the feel for the fight will allow you to determine, as quickly as possibly preferrably, whether your healing team can deal with a damage situation or not. If not, use PS, that is what it is designed for - a dead tank won't help the raid in any way and you should consider a dead tank and an unused PS a failure. If you have the mental capacity for it, it's also always a good idea to announce PS usage, so that others healers know what kind of damage they can expect to have to deal with, and whether they want to use a cooldown on their own. It is annoying when several healers accidentally use powerful cooldowns at the same time, but that is part of raiding. Again, you don't want to be the healer standing with unused cooldowns when the raid wipes.

- Power Infusion (talent)
I've written about Power Infusion in my talent section of this guide already. Personally, I'm all for using PI as often as possible, I just hate seeing cooldowns not being used. As with most cooldowns however, there will most likely be situations in the encounter where you simply want/need that extra output and trying to combine PI with other cooldowns such as Spirit Shell or Archangel (or omg, both!) will make you a proper Terminator. But reversed, since you're healing.

- Power Word: Barrier
PWB was rumored already for Cataclysm and I remember totally loving the idea of a group wide bubble. At first I didn't expect it to be a big raid cooldown, although that does make sense, but more of a Prayer of Healing with just a bubble/absorb component (which is kind of what we got in Spirit Shell instead). What PWB turned out to be, an expansion later, is quite good and it has joined the lines with all the other raid cooldowns, siding next to the Divine Hymn that holy priests have (disc priests used to have both raid cooldowns, but DH was much better for holy priests). As such, it should be viewed as pretty much any raid cooldown - it has its drawbacks and benefits that makes you want to consider when to use it but most likely you will be on an assignment, just like with Pain Suppression.

Not as safe as this - en.m.wikipedia.org

If you like to help out with proper usage assignment it's worth noting that PWB has a group up requirement that is pretty limited compared to other raid cooldowns - it has a shorter range than for instance Tranquility and Devotion Aura. On the other hand it is one of the few raid cooldowns that is placeable, meaning it doesn't necessarily emanate from the caster. This makes placement easier in some cases. I also find that PWB works better as a single target cooldown than many of the other raid cooldowns. This means that if you're in a fight where there isn't any particular aoe damage to mitigate, PWB can also double as a very useful single target (most often tank) cooldown. It's also not channeled like Tranquility or Divine Hymn and can be used on the run. The most dangerous thing you can do with PWB is overestimating its usefulness. It's a good skill, don't get me wrong, but it "only" reduces damage taken by 25%. Sometimes, this turns out to be a lot less than you anticipate (especially since they nerfed it from the initial 40% and some *me* had difficulty adapting to this change). As with any absorb, PWB suffers from not actually being a heal - which is both good and bad. Because of this, PWB is often best used in synergy with an actual healing raid cooldown, such as Divine Hymn or Tranquility.

- Purify
Purify used to be meshed with Dispel Magic and called simply Dispel, as mentioned already under Dispel Magic. The friendly dispel has changed more than the hostile one, most notably adding a cooldown. This means Purify has the same tactical properties to take into consideration as Dispel Magic, but adding not just risking wasting mana and time, but also run the risk of not having the skill ready off cooldown for the next time.

To me, this has both added and removed from the fun of using Dispel. Back in the day, I used to take pride in being a sniper dispeller or the healer assigned to do all the dispelling. It was a job I considered important, and it was! I remember the dispelling you had to do on Iron Council, if you were half a second too late one of the tanks would be dead from the debuff. There are many examples like it, where quick  dispelling reactions could make or break a try. The changes to Dispel haven't necessarily changed that fact, they've just forced it to be every healers business rather than just ones. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, but I personally always found extra enjoyment in being able to pull off a good job on a personal assignment. With the way Purify works nowadays, it's just another skill added to the long list of "things to time in the ballet-routine that is raiding". Obviously it's a personal opinion of mine, but I've always enjoyed the encounters that allowed for a bit of personal judgment and touch more.

Because of this, what I said earlier about Dispel Magic is even more true for Purify, so I'll just quote myself;

"In a raid you should be well informed and communicated with other players in your group who can Purify regarding what needs to be removed and by whom, making good usage of the skill a matter of remembering when to use it rather than a matter of any quick thinking (or skill tbh). "

- Shadowfiend/Mindbender
I've written a bit on the usage of Shadowfiend/Mindbender under the talent section already. As with Hymn of Hope, Shadowfiend is a skill you should aim to get out as often as possible during a fight. A bit easier to time than Hymn of Hope, Mindbender still has its drawbacks that you need to take into consideration, most notably the fact that it requires a target to hit on to actually do any good. This might sound easy enough, but you'd be surprised how difficult it can be to find a suitable target for your little crawler when you need him, without it diverting too much time and effort from everything else you're doing. I've miscast Shadowfiend a trillion times, simply because I'm thinking he is easier to use than he really is. It doesn't actually take very much to properly use this skill however, and once you're into the routine of the encounter you should know exactly when to cast it - a pro tip is trying to time it with a Hymn of Hope cast, something you really should try and do if it's a mana intensive fight.

- Spirit Shell
Spirit Shell - also known as that "bitchin' cooldown that made disc priests OP and awesome again". Spirit Shell is yet another skill implemented in MoP in an attempt from Blizzard to make Disc Priests more about absorbtion healing, than just the old Shield. I know Blizzard have been struggling, basically since since the creation of the game, to figure out just how to do this without overpowering the class, and rumours have been going high and low over the years of possible skills, PWB being one of them as mentioned earlier. Overall, I am very pleased with the changes they've made and Spirit Shell is definitely a part of that. It's a great cooldown to complement PWB and allowing us disc priests to really make a choice between healing and absorbing, bringing something unique to the healing table - which is why I love disc priests so much.

It's so good, even Bleach has it - bleach.wikia.com

Spirit Shell itself is fairly simple in concept, it converts your heals into bubbles instead, and as with most cooldowns it mostly comes down to timing and identifying when absorbtion is the better choice over healing. All the usual rules apply - remembering that absorbtions aren't actual heals and therefore a "before the fact" rather than "after the fact" healing method. Keeping this in mind is the key to using Spirit Shell successfully, and to be honest this should be hardwired into your backbone if you've chosen to play a discipline priest any amount of serious. You will want to use Spirit Shell to bolster your targets for incoming heavy damage, be it aoe on the raid or heavy swings on the tank. 

The difficulty normally comes down to finding a good window of opportunity to load up some absorbtion on your target of choice, you don't want to do it too early so that the bubbles wear off before the damage comes in and not too late so that you don't get full use of the cooldown. One of the few big drawbacks and really annoying things about Spirit Shell is also ending up having wasted a lot of mana on building up shields that then don't get absorbed. As with most other cooldowns, the more you know about the fight the better you will be at using Spirit Shell. Here are a couple of things to keep in mind;

- Can be used with Inner Focus for extra output.
- Can be used with Archangel for extra output.
- Stacks, up to a percentage (60%) of the casters max health.
- Overrides Divine Aegis.

Combining cooldowns like Inner Focus and Archangel with Spirit Shell is a good way to boost its effectiviness, and tinkering around with these cooldowns to time and line them up with eachother is one of the fun challenges to getting the most out of them.

- Void Shift
I haven't really figured out why Blizzard thought this was a necessary spell for us priests to have. Discipline already has Pain suppression, added with the possibility to use PWB and Spirit Shell as single target cooldowns as well. Holy priests "only" have Guardian Spirit, so maybe it was more to bolster their tank saving capabilities than disc priests. However it may be, I consider Void Shift one of the trickier tank cooldowns to use - mostly because one of you will still be very close to death when you decide to use it, meaning you will need to be very careful and probably prepare well ahead before popping it. Using it whenever the tank isn't dangerously close to death probably isn't necessary, and when he is and you use it, you'll end up with 25% health. 25% health isn't necessarily an extremely bad position to be in, unless you're the tank - but for most raiding encounters it's still something you want to avoid. Saving the tank just to have the healer die two seconds later isn't going to help the raid much in the long run either.

Because of this, I consider Void Shift even more of need of planning and preparing than most other raid cooldowns. Personally I find it a lot of fun to be able to use PS, PWB and most other cooldowns mentioned above at my own disposal as much as possible, but Void Shift not so much. If you have Desperate Prayer, macroing these two together (first using Void Shift, then Desperate Prayer) could be a very good idea. Otherwise, making sure you have a Shield and announcing that you'll soon be low on health is definitely recommended before using it. In any case, be absolutely sure that there isn't any kind of damage incoming that will have you take more than 25% damage in the few couple of seconds after a Void Shift that you are the most vulnerable.

I might make it sounds like Void Shift is impossible to use, which of course it is far from. Some fights definitely make it more difficult with a lot of aoe damage going around. I think the priest community is still somewhat divided on the usefulness of Void Shift - the pvpers think it's awesome and most pvers find it a bit too risky. Like I said, I do consider it among the trickiest raid cooldowns to use, but I'd still advice you to not count it out. Always keep it handy in the back of your mind in case something happens, and it will probably end up saving the day at some point. I think I've said it plenty in this post already, but it's fitting that never has it been more true than when using Void Shift, the ending skill of this post - the more knowledge you have the fight beforehand, the better you can time your usage wisely!

MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide - Part 3 - Spell Usage (Heals & Absorbs)

Welcome to the third part in my guide to how to disc priest heal, full with personal anecdotes and small history lessons, just the way we love it, right? This time I thought I'd talk a bit more on skills/spells (I use it pretty interchangeable in this context), how and why to use them, love them and treat them like they deserve, good and bad. I realized this post was growing out of proportion (yes, that is why it has taken such time to write) and decided to cut it up into smaller pieces in turn, bear with me if you will.

I've often argued that priests probably is the healing class that has to juggle the most skills around when healing. Whether this is, or ever was true, is up for debate and it definitely depends on what you mean by "use while healing". Some healing classes have use of, for instance, some attacking skills while healing occasionally (setting aside the obvious Atonement usage of attacking skills) so question is what should be counted towards a normal rotation. Paladins for instance might have fewer heals but instead have a lot of cooldowns to keep track off. Overall the score board is fairly even across the healers and in either case there are definitely a lot to keep track off. Some skills are used continously throughout a fight, some are used only once or twice in a fight and some are used once or twice in a raid (Divine Intervention is a good example, although it doesn't exist anylonger). Being able to acknowledge which skill to use when is the essence of healing and what sets a skillful healer apart from a newer one. Preferably this will eventually sit in your backbone, where you'll react with instinct based on experience on a given situation rather than thought, since thinking is sometimes too slow.

From wowwiki.com

I can still clearly remember the feeling of being a new healer, and this feeling is also refreshed each time I try to heal on a class I am not as familiar with as the priest. Most of the time things go easy enough, but every now and then you'll end up in a situation where you'll require some quick reactions and ever quicker thinking. When this happens, remember that one of the key rules to healing is;
"It's always better to do something rather than nothing". Even if you panic and use the "wrong" heals, wrong being a less appropriate heal than another one, it is still always better than not healing at all. There are very few instances where this is not true, the only time I can think of are the rare occasions where healing actually does damage instead (Anub'arak in Trial of the Crusader comes to mind). If it turns out you made the wrong choice and you eventually have to pay for it by ooming (which is mostly how you pay for a bad usage of skills), at least you might have saved your raid some time to get more practice on the fight (including yourself), or your instance group some time to salvage the situation. Otherwise, you'll learn more quickly that you chose the wrong spell when you see people quickly dying around you. I make it sound worse than it, since in fact this risk is nothing exclusive to healers. Every class has their task to make sure the boss goes down - the triforce of tanking, spanking (dps), and healing.

If you're really interested in becoming pro at healing, try to see every failed situation (ie wipe) as a possibility to try out a new, better way to tackle the fight. Think about your choices and try and figure out if you could've used a skill differently somewhere. Was Flash Heal the right choice or should I have gone with Greater Heals? Should I have waited another ten seconds with the Power Infusion? Maybe if I use a Shield first and then cast a heal? Even after 6 years of raid healing, I still love to analyze my own skill usage and I often find things I could do slightly differently to up my game.

I can honestly say this has helped me a lot with keeping my patience when I've had wipe nights that go on for hours. Even when the dying has nothing to do with what I'm doing, I know there is always some little thing I can tweak or do even better to ease things up for the people around me. Ideally, if you use your skills good enough, it allows some leeway for the rest of the group to do those occasional mistakes that are almost inevitable. This is what I really love about group efforts in mmorpgs - seeing how the dynamic of group and individual skill eventually is rewarded in achieving your goal (hopefully, at least!).

Knowing what each skills do is obviously the first step towards knowing how to best use them, after that comes loads of practice, but don't worry - healing is fairly simple to learn, but challenging to fully master. This is why it never really gets boring (or at least I don't think so).

So let's get started with the skills, sorted by alphabetical order and type;

In this part - Heals/Absorbs

Categorizing heals and other skills used while healing isn't such an easy task. A skill like Penance for instance can be used for both healing and dpsing, and a skill like Power Word Shield isn't even a heal in the technical meaning. Penance also has a cooldown and PW:Shield causes a debuff which in some situations work as a cooldown, so where do they fit? I have chosen to categorize them in the area they normally work under. Although Penance can be used to dps, that is rarely how it is used when raid healing, and the cooldown is too short to make anyone really think of it as a proper cooldown skill (imo same goes for Cascade, Divine star and Halo although their cooldowns are even longer). The absorbing feature to discipline healing is a big part of how we heal, so I thought it be simplest if we consider them heals in a way. In the end it doesn't really matter which category a skill falls under, the important thing is that you understand what it does and doesn't do so that you can get the most out of it.

Also from wowwiki.com (they be handy)

- Binding Heal
I have somewhat of an ambivalent feeling toward Binding Heal. Although it's actually quite a handy heal and I use it quite frequently, it just not one of my favorite heals. It doesn't feel like it fits in with the other "heals", Heal, Greater Heal and Flash Heal, but it does actually fill its very own little niche and I know I love having it when I really need it (which sounds obvious). I often have the feeling that Binding Heal isn't strong enough or too expensive and that the work can be better done by combining other heals instead - sometimes this is true. But one should not underestimate the power that lies in being able to heal yourself while healing everyone else - in fact one of the first things I really struggled to learn was to remember to heal myself (as I have mentioned before). The problem with Binding Heal is that it takes a while to learn how to use it, when does it apply and when could I indeed be better off using other heals. It's easy to either completely forget about this underestimated gem or overuse it in the idea that it is extremely mana and time effective.

In reality, Binding Heal costs just less than Greater Heal or Flash Heal and heals a bit less as well. Since the heal is split between you and your target, in a way, it's important to think about that it won't save the day but rather give you another moment to think when things are getting hectic.

The trick is trying to wedge in BH between the times you need strong single target healing and strong aoe healing. BH is often a good choice for mild to moderate aoe healing or when you somehow end up being the one taking a bit more damage. So the way I usually end up using Binding Heal is when I'm the one who needs some healing but there are also targets around me that could use a little fix-me-upper. By throwing around a couple of BH's I've healed up myself and made sure no one is too low at the moment. Another great time to use BH is when you're actually being focused for damage, since it's a good way to keep yourself alive while also still helping out on the overall healing, as long as the damage on you isn't too high for BH to handle obviously. BH more than many of your skills might require some experience before you feel like you fully know where it fits into your healing arsenal, but it should definitely not be ignored just because it seems out of place. When used correctly it is one of the heals that makes me grateful to be a priest.

- Cascade (talent)
As mentioned in my previous post, Cascade is the 6th tier talent I've ended up liking and therefore using the most. Not only is Cascade a good heal when used at the right time, it's also very pretty (don't underestimate the importance of this!). Jokes aside, the visuals of Cascade will often lure you unto using it more often than what is actually called for, since it not very useful when the raid gets grouped up - this is when you should use Prayer of Healing instead. Cascade should be viewed as exactly this, a supplement to Prayer of Healing, especially for a spread out raid that PoH might have trouble reaching or for heavy aoe where you want Cascade to jump around doing its magic while you also cast PoH. What to think of isn't the damage incoming as much as the positioning of the raid. If there is any form of aoe and the raid is fairly spread out, you're probably well off using Cascade.

- Divine Star (talent)
I'll be honest straight away and say that other than for lulz when it first came out, I have never really used Divine Star. It just doesn't appeal to me, although the requirements for using it succesfully aren't necessarily stricter than for the other two (Halo and Cascade) - it's all about the placement of the raid. Like I mentioned above when talking about Cascade, and also mentioned in my Talent section of this guide, I think that tier should complement the usage of Prayer of Healing. The reach of PoH is one of its biggest weaknesses, compared to Cascade and Halo, a weakness it would only share with Divine Star (the other weakness being the group targeting, but that can be handy at times as well). This means Divine Star and PoH are meant to be used in roughly the same situations, and I prefer to diversify my healing arsenal to cover my bases. Also, Divine Star is further "replaced" by any holy paladin in your group who has Light of Dawn, a skill that works very similarly to Divine Star. Of course, if you know you're getting into a fight that is all about the stacking, ie making skills like Cascade and Halo pretty much useless, Divine Star is the way to go. Personally that is how I think Divine Star should be viewed, as an option to Cascade when Cascade simply isn't usable. It probably won't happen often.

- Flash Heal 
FH has gone from being our bread and butter heal in Wrath to rarely being used at all in early Cataclysm. Back in Wrath, FH was the spell you spammed - it was quick, fairly cheap and healed for a decent amount. In Cataclysm they decided to change all the "Heals" (Greater Heal, Heal and Flash Heal) to actually work the way their names intended, meaning Flash Heal instead became a quick and expensive save-the-moment heal rather than the staple heal it had been. In fact, FH was so expensive in early Cata I considered it barely usable with lowbie gear, which was a dramatic change from it had been. Instead we had to work with the re-instated Heal (more about that on Heal), and the difference could barely have been bigger.

From something called dmz-gaming.com

I remember going from loving FH to hating it in mere days, and the feeling of disappointment over the new function of FH is a blow that I simply have not really been able to get over. In hindsight I realize something had to be done, FH had taken over completely by the end of Wrath and GH barely saw the light of day (Heal was thrown into the basement long ago). But the feeling of FH suddenly being so difficult to use in early Cata made me scorn it, and eventually almost forgetting it all together. As my gear eventually got better and FH actually became a viable spell to use in the right situations, I really had to struggle to get it back into my rotation. I had locked it out somehow, working in other skills to replace it, and still today FH is one of the few skills I don't consider myself fully profficient at - thankfully I love a challenge.

So how are we supposed to use FH today? The easy way to think of it is - whenever you need a GH but don't have the time to cast one. The only thing Flash Heal has over the other Heals is its speed, and when speed is what you need, FH is what you will want to use. With good knowledge of the fight and some planning, FH isn't used that often - mostly to save up a doozy someone in the raid might have made. Since Fh is so mana-inefficient, it is important to know (intuitively preferrably) that another spell doesn't work as well, unless someone is on the brink of death and about to take another hit (in which case you might want to Shield them first anyway), I've often found that a Greater Heal might do the trick, unless your haste is really, really bad. Like I mentioned, I ended up replacing FH for other skills in the situations I would normally use FH - often a GH and/or a Shield will work out as good or better. After some time you will most likely get a feel for it since it depends on things like your casting speed, assignments and a dozen other things that are personal to your raid environment. So again - use FH whenever you want a GH but just don't have the time for one.

- Greater Heal
Back in the day, GH used to be the spell that replaced Heal at around level 40, rendering Heal virtually useless for the rest of the game. For some reason, Blizzard thought of GH as a rank upgrade to Heal rather than its own skill, which was something that always confused me. It seems they've decided to think otherwise since Cataclysm, where Heal became a heal in its own right meaning we had to find a somewhat new area for GH to fit into. Fortunately, the step wasn't big - GH is still pretty much "the bigger Heal" although nowadays not necessarily the better choice as it used to be.

At the beginning of Cataclysm, Blizzard wanted every healer to have a couple of base heals in their arsenal - the fast but expensive heal, the slow and cheap little heal and the slow and cheap big heal. Mana consumption wise, Heal is among the cheapest skills but as soon as your gear starts getting better you will most likely still substitute Heal for Greater Heal (and also especially since everyones hp pools get bigger and Heal just overall seems like a waste of time). I realize there is equally much said about Heal as Greater Heal here, but they do really go hand in hand in much. The way you use Heal in early game is most likely how you end up using Greater Heal in later game.

Greater Heal is a very good base heal, but it does require knowledge of timing to be able to be used properly, especially in more pressing situations like progress raiding. It is comparatively slow and the way I end up mostly using it is either to top people off when things are a bit more relaxed or to get that bomb heal on someone after first securing them with for instance a PW:Shield. The biggest mistake you can do with Greater Heal is using it when you don't really have the time for it, something that is surprisingly easy to do. Like mentioned, this is often when a FH comes in handy instead.

- Halo (talent)
As with the other tier 6 talents, I've said most I had to say about Halo already in the talent section of this guide.

This is unfortunately not what Halo looks like in-game.

- Heal
I've already mentioned Heal quite a lot in conjunction with Flash Heal and Greater Heal, so a bit will be repeated here. Until Cataclysm, Heal was pretty much a useless spell past level 40 ish, when you got Greater Heal that completely replaced it. They were basically the exact same spell back then, only GH was bigger, leaving no reason to use Heal. Back when spellranks were still around, rank 1 of GH was still better than the highest rank of Heal, as I mentioned it seemed like GH was pretty much designed to actually replace Heal, which might explain its rather uninventive name.

But that was then and Heal has been allowed in from the cold since. Come Cataclysm, Blizzard probably realized the silliness in letting us priests have an entire skill in our spell book that we never, ever used. In early Cata, Heal was pretty much our "carpet-heal", ie meant to be spammable and giving us a tool to top people up without having to use up too much mana, a role that FH had previously held. This was especially interesting to us disc priests since Renew wasn't as useful to us as to Holy priests, and because our other cushion spells had become a lot more expensive (FH and PW:Shield).

The usefulness of Heal depends a lot on your gear however, as I came to realize. When Blizzard first implemented the changes I was thrilled as to the idea around their new function, although a lot less thrilled about how they practically turned out to work, which was shit. With really bad gear, which you normally have before you start raiding (comparatively), Heal turned out to be too weak and too slow to do what Blizzard wanted it to do - with better gear however you soon had the mana and eventually mana regen (when mana pools became same sized) to use Greater Heals instead, leaving Heal a very small niche to fill. At first you're basically forced to use it because your gear probably won't allow you to use too many GH, FH or Shields, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's very good.

The way I ended up using Heal was to literally spam it as soon as time allowed me to do so, saving mana for the more hectic fights. This means especially during easier encounters and inbetween fights. Whenever someone takes too much damage for Heal to handle, and that happens quickly, you'll have to resort to more expensive spells. Fortunately, in the best of worlds you'll mostly end up using Heal in dungeons where you'll be allowed drinks inbetween fights (who am I kidding though, that never happens). When I started raiding, my mana regen and mana pool had become good enough for me to be able to keep using Heal all over the place until I had something more important to do, in that sense it made me feel a lot like a Holy Light spamming paladin. But eventually Heal was yet again replaced by Greater Heal, and that has been especially true in MoP to me, where I've basically stopped using it alltogether for most raid encounters.

From wow.joystiq.com

- Penance
Penance is one of, if not the most, iconic spells of the discipline priest (rivaled only by the Shield). Penance has always been one of our strongest heals with both good hpm (heal per mana) and hps (heal per second), limited by a cooldown. It's one of hell of a restriction though, but on the other hand it makes Penance pretty easy to use - every cooldown. Unless you're tackling aoe damage, or obviously when no one is damaged enough, there is rarely any reason not to throw off a Penance. Penance has long been used to quickly stack up Grace on a target, mostly the tank, which is very useful if you ever happen to be tank healing.

Penance is so handy it's easy to rely too heavily on it, forgetting that it is actually a really quick hot and not a "proper" heal. This does matter, because when your tank is taking really big blows (or anyone else for that matter), a well timed GH might be more needed than a Penance, if the Penance can't get your targets health up quickly enough. It's easy to think that a 1,5 sec really strong hot should get the job done, but if you only knew the amount of times people have died while I've had a Penance going on them that very moment. What you need to remember is that for all its strengths, Penance is not instant, and sometimes it needs to be cast a bit more ahead of time than you'd think.

EDIT: Reader Shanthi pointed out a notable change to Penance that is possibly the most useful way to use Penance in current content (~patch 5.3), since Atonement healing overall has become a much more used tool by discipline priests in this expansion.

"Penance is actually quite useful in raids cast as an offensive spell. It used to be clearly the best way to use it, but Blizzard nerfed it's atonement power a bit (90% healing power as Atonement) but it's still worthwhile. It adds a stack of Evangelism and ends up as three smart heals, going to the people who need it most. Which means it is actually useful to cast on cooldown even during AoE damage, as it's almost like a PoM that jumps three times instantly."

This is thanks to two important changes made to Atonement healing in this expansion;
Patch 5.0.4 (2012-08-28): Now also includes damage from Penance.

Patch 5.1.0 (2012-11-27): Healing range increased to 40 yards, up from 15.

(wowpedia.com)

Especially the last change, increasing the range, made all the difference to Atonement healing as before this change Atonement was basically only for (unreliable) tank healing and therefore only used for very specific fights (like Halfus in BoT back in Cataclysm). With these changes however, Penance works just like Shanthi describes, giving us even more use out of this already great skill.

- Prayer of Mending
PoM is definitely one of my favorite healing spells overall. I think the whole "smart healing" function has allowed me to anthropomorph it, imagining it might actually have its own personality. Maybe this also says something about how Forever Alone I am if I try to befriend my own spells. But I bet most of us have done it... right? Anyway, I just love the feeling of seeing my PoM jump around doing its job while I do mine. But there are reasons to love it even if you don't give your spells names like I do.

PoM is very mana efficient, and has historically been worth using even if you only expect it to jump once (especially with the glyph that increases healing on the first jump). In most environments you can expect PoM to jump at least twice or so, and there is rarely any reason not to keep this up off cooldown.

- PW: Shield
Discipline priest signature spell, the Shield has had a bumpy ride throughout our healing history. Back in Vanilla, the weakness (and confusion among Blizzard devs what absorbtion healing was really all about) of Shields and absorbtions in general  made discipline priests basically impossible to play. Ever since then the Shield has gone from being too powerful to being too weak, and still Blizzard seems to have a hard time balancing this skill. The whole idea of absorbing damage instead of healing it after the fact is already putting discipline priest at an advantage, which is why the Shield has come with a couple of disadvantages over the years. We have Weakened Soul, a talent to lower the cd on Weakened Soul, a cooldown on the Shield, a talent to remove the cooldown on Shield and more, talents that increase our healing on targets with Shields and so on. Blizzards trouble has probably been to make sure the Shield is a good tool for the discipline priest to use while not making it too powerful for the holy priest to use.

Because of constant changes to the balance of the Shield, it's gone from being spammed all over the place (like the heroic Lich King fight) to being used only every 12 seconds for the Rapture proc. Overall however, the Shield has served us well, and I've always been one of the people to promote its use. I still do, to a big part because if you're doing progress raiding, the Shield is one of the best skills you will have in your spellbook. It is easy to overuse, and it can burn through your mana like no business at all. Personally I find that your goal should be to be able to have a mana pool that can sustain your usage of Shield in a regular raid fight, including any mana returns you might have. 

This doesn't mean that I'll tell you to use it without any thought. But a Shield can pretty much be up on the tank (or other main damage taker) as soon as the Weakened Soul debuff is gone. Whenever you know someone is going to take damage, I don't see any reason not to use a Shield on that target. Earlier, before we had Barrier, I would've told you to cushion as many people in the raid with a Shield before a big aoe. Blizzard wanted to change this behavior and mana nerfed the Shield enough to make that a punishing act. Then they gave us an option in Barrier, which obviously is what you should go for when aoe damage is concerned. But whenever point damage is what you're dealing with, a Shield is a good way to start.

Keep in mind however that for all its awesomeness, the Shield doesn't heal any damage. This might seem obvious but is actually really important to remember, because it makes the Shield useless unless you know that your target is going to take damage within the next 15 seconds (which used to be 30 *sob*).

Also from wow.joystiq.com - I would never play a nelf priest.

- Renew
Renew is in a sense the opposite of Shield. I don't mean that in a mechanical way, but more in how you should view it as part of your arsenal-way. To a discipline priest, Renew is weak and most of the time not worth your gcd. That doesn't mean Renew is completely useless to us. As long as you have low level gear you might have trouble keeping up Shields and Greater Heals, keeping a couple of Renews on your party is a very good substitute. Renew is also, not counting PoM, our only instant heal. One of the biggest strengths of the Shield is that we can cast it on the run, allowing the discipline priest some mobility when healing. As soon as you end up in a situation where people don't take continuous damage but still need to be healed up however, the Shield won't help you anymore. If you're at the same time also on the move, Renew is pretty much all we have to go to. When does this happen? Whenever the encounter requires the raid to move continously from some sort of damage for instance - it can be difficult to tell who is going to take damage (ie fuck up) and who is not, making Renew an overall better choice for healing than the Shield. The air phase or rings on Atramedes is a good example, but many boss fights have these kind of encounters.

Closing Word For This First Part of Part 3
It would be typical me to have forgotten a skill in my eagerness to write everything that came to mind about them all - feel free to correct me if you notice anything like that or anything else you don't agree with. Keep in mind that most of my suggestions are based on an overall style of healing rather than one that is suited for whatever might be the endgame progress raid dungeon when you're reading this. This allows, at least to some extent, for the ever coming changes to classes that occur in a game like WoW to still fit this guide somewhat (I hope). The aim is for it to fit MoP as a whole, rather than a specific raid and give you a general feel for a spell rather than how to use it in a specific encounter - that I leave up to you to find out on your own this time (that is half the joy of healing!). Look out for the next part, in which I will talk a bit more about our cooldowns! And hopefully that won't take as long to produce, no promises however.

MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide - Part 2 - Stat Choices

Welcome to my second part of How to Disc Priest, this time we'll take a closer look to one of the favorite subjects for any disc priest to argue about - stats. More specifically what stats to choose, and why.

Previous post in this guide;
- Part 1: Talent Choices

Over the course of WoW, what stats you want to go with as a disc priest has rarely been set in stone. Even Icy-Veins state that;

"The statistic priority as a Discipline Priest is very much subject to personal preference. Your final choice will depend greatly on your spell usage, healing style, and encounter requirements, and we encourage you to experiment until you find what works best for you."

Most of the time there has been a primary stat we want to stack as much as possible, and the secondary stat has mainly been up to playstyle. There are usually recommendations as to which stat is overall the best one, overall in this case meaning "for most encounters" and/or "for most playstyles". And that's in the end what it really comes down to - what are you fighting (dungeons, pvp, raids) and how are you playing your priest? Other factors that will affect your choice somewhat are raid composition, for instance which other healers you run with, and your gear level. If this all seems like too many factors to think off, don't worry - hopefully it will be somewhat clearer once I am done here (I'll try at least).

What are stats anyway?
So how do we know what stats we want to use? Is it fine to just read what someone says in some think-they-know-it-all-blog (like this one) and smack it all on to my gear? Maybe, but wouldn't it more interesting to know the reason to why you want a certain stat over another? I've always thought so, and it has helped me greatly to adapt to certain encounters and raid groups over the years. It has meant going against the stream on several occasions, but most of the time it has worked out better for me rather than just assuming that the general advice will work solidly regardless.

Stats do one thing - boost our output. Be it passively via stamina or spirit, or actively via spell power, in the end stats are all there to make sure you can do your job for as long and as much as possible (obviously I'm not thinking of strength or agility or other stats that don't do anything for us). You should be able to look at any stat and think "how much more healing will I get from 1 more point of this?". Sometimes the answer is straightforward - 1 more spellpower might give you 1 extra heal point. Most of the time however the answer is heavily dependant on outside factors and this is exactly why you need to know more about each stats function to make the right decision and this is something I've written about before.

Take stamina for instance. By 99,9% of the healing community not even mentioned when talking about stat choices. That is because nowadays, most of the time you get enough stamina passively to not ever have to choose stamina over almost any other stat. This does not mean stamina is a meaningless stat worth ignoring however. I remember back in Wotlk (I think it was), casters were required to have more than 10.000 hp for certain encounters, or they were just too difficult to keep alive. Some had to actively enchant/gem/gear for stamina to get up to those numbers. In many ways stamina can be considered the very basic of stats, which without all the other stats are completely meaningless, because a dead healer won't heal anyone. No matter how much spell power, intellect or haste you might have, if you can't stay alive you're worthless to the group anyway.

Now I am not trying to tell you to throw every other stat out the window out the window and stack stamina, I am merely trying to point out that stats might seem simple at a first glance, but they often correlate both to eachother and outside factors that make them worth giving many extra thoughts. Rarely is that more true than for disc priest, who have many skills that are affected differently by different stats. Most of the time this is something I have enjoyed about being a priest, sometimes however it has been quite frustrating.

As you can see I am clearly in favor of adapting your stats to your playstyle rather than adapting your playstyle to your stats, although of course overall a good balance is the best. But, this must never mean that your choices should handicap your raid in any way (this is especially important in progress raiding, less important in whatever you deem to be easy content). Don't pick a stat just because "it's more fun" or "I like to crit" like one shaman told me when I had some questions about her gearing. Let there be thought behind your choices and even more important, firm results. Play around, but make sure that you in the end are able to perform the job you're there to perform. Disc priests have the benefit of being allowed a lot of leeway in their stat choices, but if something turns out to work a lot better for you, you should definitely consider running with it even if it's not an immediate favorite of yours. I have on occasion been allowed to try out some weird ass ideas, but that is because I've had a lenient raid group. Don't do that without asking first.

To wrap up this rant somewhat, here are a couple of things to keep in mind about disc priests and stats just to give you an idea as to the complexity;

• Stats affect our spells differently. Some spells benefit more from a certain stat than others. We have skills that are more actively affected by mastery (fx PW:Shield) and more passively affected by mastery and actively by haste (fx Prayer of Healing). Because of this it's important to consider spell usage and the encounter when choosing stats.
• Some stats boost eachother, so that having more of one makes another better. The more mastery you have, the better haste becomes. The more crit you have, the better mastery becomes. The more mastery you have the better crit becomes. There are correlations between most stats.

You're probably thinking "yeah that's all swell, but what does it mean?". Or maybe you skipped that wall of text up there and jumped straight to this section. Either way, let's get to the actual stat choices.

What do our stats do?

Intellect - Has long been our go-to stat, since we used to have a big portion of our mana regeneration through intellect via Rapture, back before it was nerfed to only proc once every 12 seconds and worse, when they locked our mana pools to set amounts. Intellect is still a very important stat to us, it's just had to make some room for spirit as our mana regen stat instead. My personal stand point on Intellect is that it is the most important stat for us right now, but only if you have enough spirit to be comfortable with you mana regeneration. Intellect will give you bigger heals, which in turn means you have to throw less heals and therefor might need less spirit. It's important to find a good balance here, but overall, start to really stack Intellect once you've reached your spirit comfort zone. More about that up next.

Spirit - Spirit is both one of your most important stats and least important stats. Without enough of it, all your other stats are pretty useless, since you won't have the mana to cast them. Once you do have enough mana regen however, any additional spirit is basically useless since you only need as much mana as you need to keep everyone alive for whatever you are killing. How much that is of course totally depends on your playstyle, whether you're doing mostly raids or dungeons and raid composition (if you happen to do regular raiding). I found that a good benchmark to aim for was crossing the 10.000 combat regen mark for raiding. After that you will need to simply estimate based on whether you oom a lot or not if you need more spirit or not. As long as you still have trouble with your mana pool, pile up some more spirit (or consider if you're using your spells wrong, more on that in spell usage in another part). As soon as you notice that you end the encounters with some mana, without struggling throughout the encounter to not oom, no need for more spirit!

Disc healing 25man Cho'gall

Mastery - Mastery has historically been pretty much on par with haste, and it has basically been down to personal preference. Do you want to cast faster heals or have bigger absorbs? Although the disc community has seemed to lean slightly towards favoring Mastery since what seems like forever, I've always been a haste-fan myself. It's simply felt better, and trust me, I regularly tried gearing/gemming mastery to see which seemed better. Come MoP and especially enter Spirit Shell, and I feel like things have changed however. Back in Cata my heals consisted of roughly 10% shields and 15% DA. 75% of my healing was unaffected by mastery, while only 10% would be unaffected by haste. These numbers did not change much with mastery heavy gearing, because Prayer of Healing was such an important spell to us back then (as it still is) and it loved haste more than mastery.

Nowadays however, mastery also boosts our healing, meaning it is less of a one-or-the-other choice that it used to be. Because of Spirit Shell combined with Shield and DA, absorbs now also make up a much bigger portion of my, and probably your, healing than it used to. Spirit Shell is one of the most powerful tools a discipline priest has when wielded correctly, and boosting its output is definitely recommended.

Haste makes you cast out spells and thus get up Spirit Shell faster, but you risk only wasting Spirit Shell absorbs this way since it doesn't stack. With Mastery on the other hand, your Spirit Shell will become stronger, which you definitely want. Because of this, and the general awesomeness of Spirit Shell, I recommend going for Mastery as your main secondary stat.

Haste - Haste has been my favorite stat for most occasions, and only rarely did I spec mastery (and never crit). Because of the resent changes to the discipline spell book and choice of spells (read: inclusion of Spirit Shell and even more preference towards absorbs), mastery has overtaken haste in MoP. A lot of priests would even put crit, a stat I've always scoffed at, higher than haste now for the same reasons (and more about crit in a second). Personally I still prefer haste, since crit, unless you have shit tons of it, is still an unreliable stat whereas haste affects almost all of your spells no matter how much or how little you have.

Crit - So let's talk a bit more about crit. As I just mentioned, crit has come in from the cold in MoP because of a couple of changes to it made in MoP. A critical cast now gives roughly 200% heal rather than the old 150% (or something like it), unless you are a discipline priest. If you are (and I think you might be), you get a Divine Aegis proc equal to the amount healed. Divine Aegis is affected by mastery, which you should have a lot of and therefor they are great. You want many Divine Aegis.

Crit still suffers from the major drawback of its unreliability however, meaning that even if you have loads of crit there will be occasions where you don't crit. Theoretically you could do a whole fight without crits. It won't happen, I know, but it points at a flaw of the stat I simply don't like about it. Haste is now considered weaker, but at least it delivers. When I have one point of haste, that haste will give me haste to all my casts (with few exceptions), whereas a point of crit might only benefit me occasionally. And maybe not even when I actually want it to. Crit is dealing with probabilities, and I've always wanted to cut uncertainties out from the equation.

There is obviously a point where crit is so useful that the stat on average outweighs its own uncertainty, in the end this is something you have to notice for yourself depending on your playstyle.

TLDR!
So to conlude, here is my personal suggestion for how you should prioritize your stats. You might not agree, your friend might not agree, some other blogger somewhere might not agree - this is my personal preference, it works very well for my playstyle and I couldn't recommend you more to test different things yourself if you have the time and interest;

1. Spirit (until satisfied with combat mana regen)
2. Intellect
3. Mastery
4. Haste
5. Crit (crit being the joker here, you either love it or hate it).

And what should I gem/reforge/enchant to?
The obvious answer is that you should reforge/gem to whatever boosts the stat you need. Below are some suggestions, there is also the Perfect cut of the green quality equivalent. Here is a good list too.

Red - Brilliant Primordial Ruby (320 int)
Blue - Sparkling River's Heart (320 spirit)
Yellow - Quick Sun's Radiance (320 haste) or Fractured Sun's Radiance (320 mastery) or Smooth Sun's Radiance (320 crit)
Purple - Purified Imperial Amethyst (80 int + 160 spirit)
Orange - Reckless Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 haste) or Artful Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 mastery) or Potent Vermilion Onyx (80 int + 160 crit)
Green - Energized Wild Jade (160 haste + 160 spirit) or Zen Wild Jade (160 spirit + 160 mastery) or Misty Wild Jade (160 crit + 160 spirit)
Meta - Revitalizing Primal Diamond (432 spirit and +3% crit effect) or Burning Primal Diamond (216 int and +3% crit effect).  

 For enchants I suggest you check out Icy-Veins list, it's good and probably better than anything I could produce.
 

MoP Disc Priest Healing Guide - Part 1 - Talent Choices

Welcome to Zinn's Disc Priest Guide for 5.2!

I won't claim this to be the ultimate guide for all you struggling (or not so struggling) disc priesters out there, and there are plenty of good resources to go to if you want someone elses information. Here are some suggestions;

Icy-Veins - Very good and simple guide.
Elitist Jerks - More of a discussion forum, of varying quality but good information can be found.
Noxxic -  Similar to Icy-Veins, concise.
HowToPriest - Another discussion forum about everything priestly. Here is their guide on disc priests.

This will be a more personal style guide, with comments and little discussions around skills, talents and stats, to hopefully give you more of an idea not just what you should spec or what spells to use, but why and how you should think about them. I've always thought that the more in depth understanding you have regarding these things, the better you'll be at adapting to new situations. Also, it's interesting facts if you're more interested in the priest class than just the basics! The most important thing to remember about any healing class is that eventhough timing is essential, few other classes require as much quick thinking and decision making as healing because you're not just dealing with the encounter, but also the actions of your group.

Don't let this deterr you, this is what makes healing so much fun! Discipline priests can seem confusing at a first glance, what with their absorbtion techniques and damaging healing spells (although they have gotten company from Mistweaver Monks in that area lately). Beside the standard questions any healer asks themselves, things like - "Which stat is the best?", "When do I best use my cooldowns and how do they really work?" and "Do I spam aoe heals or do I focus big heals?" to mention a few, discpline priests also have to work with questions like - "Do I use mostly absorbtion heals or regular heals?" and "How much should I use Atonement?". I hope to answer these kind of questions, and most other you might have about discipline priest healing in this current content, which at the moment of writing this is patch 5.2 in Mists of Pandaria. I'll gladly answer any questions you might have also in the comment section. In this first part we'll take a closer look at our Talent Choices.

Talent Choices

The proper term should probably be Skill Choices since Blizzard made away with talents as we know them and replaced them with the form of skills that we have now. But I suppose people would get that confused with the more traditional skills, and so we just kept calling them talents. Eventhough I like the new system, I sometimes miss the good old fashioned talents, they just gave a pretty good feeling of progression. The problem with talents however was the talent point inflation that occurred somewhere around the third expansion. The increasing amount of levels forced Blizzard to give us more things to put our points in, and so they had to give us some that weren't overly necessary. I can still remember when discipline had Wand Specialization in the first tier of their tree, which increased wand damage with 5%. Holy had skills that increased the healing by Greater Heal by 5% and stuff like that. In the end we had many talents that didn't make much of a difference, especially considering it cost 5 levels to spend in (and later on 10 levels when they changed it so that you got a tp every other level). Blizzard tried a couple of different systems but in the end decided they'd just give us a few, important skills to pick from and get rid of all the filler points. I use the word "important" because the choices we make now actually make more of a difference, depending on fight and whether you're a pvper or pver. So enough of the history lesson, and let's look at the choices that are interesting from a disc pve healing perspective.

Classic tree. No one played disc in Classic though.

Level 15
Nothing in this tier actually matters much for dungeon or raid healing, so here you can basically choose whatever you like or whichever you think might work best for you solo-needs. Personally I've gone with Void Tendrils, it's kind of fun and handy while I do quests or stuff like that.

Level 30
Here we get our first skills that might actually make a difference. Most people choose between Body & Soul and Angelic Feather, whereas Phantasm is more of a pvp skill simply because there are like no movement impairing effects of significance in dungeons or raids. So which should we go for, B&S or AF?

The big difference between these two is that B&S gives you more control over when, how and who will get the speed boost - this can then either be something you want or not depending on the encounter. More control also means this is something you need to keep more track off, also timing B&S hinges on you not having used a shield just prior since then the Weakened Soul debuff will prevent you from casting it again. If you know someone else in the raid needs a speed buff and you don't want to spend brain power into keeping track of when and perfectly timing a shield, it is way easier to place a feather in the right place instead. Also, a fellow player might not be ready for a sudden speed boost through B&S, while they'll know they're getting one with AF. With AF you give more of the speed boost control over to someone else, in the end you have to decide which one works better for you. In short - B&S responds quicker to situations if you're fast, AF is easier used by people around you (and requires less of your attention overall).

Burning Crusade, where playing discipline was made viable. I first really tried it out in Zul'Aman, and loved it.

level 45
At this level we get a choice of three good skills that all intend to save your mana in different ways. Which you decide to choose will largely depend on the encounter you're at. For dungeons and unless your mana regen sucks ass, Mindbender is probably the simplest because of it's set and forget nature. For raiding, your choice here might require a bit more thinking.

A lot of maths has been done around which of these three skills will provide the most overall mana, but it's important to remember that it really depends. From Darkness Comes Light (FDCL) requires you to be doing point healing, Mindbender requires you to have a suitable target for your little worm to hit on and PW:Solace requires you to be able to hit something (I will continue to call it that, although now the talent is actually Solace & Insanity. The actuall skill is still PW:Solace though). Now, they've changed PW:Solace from how it originally worked - before one of the big problems with Solace used to be the fact that you had to basically pause your healing to dish out some casts to regain mana. This meant the usefulness of Solace depended heavily on how much the encounter allowed you to do this, varying from almost nothing to quite a lot of the time. Because of this I often swapped between Solace and Mindbender (I will explain shortly why I never really use FDCL).

Now that Solace has been changed however, the requirement to pause your healing and spam out some dps has basically vanished. Now that Solace has a cd and a healing component it is a lot more comparable to the Mindbender, which also has a cd - both require a target and will when used every cd return a set amount of mana, so which will give more? You can read some maths on it here and here.

These are some things to consider;

• Mindbender replaces Shadowfiend, which means if you go for Solace you can have both Solace and the Shadowfiend.
• Mindbender and Shadowfiend are often preferrably used in conjunction with Hymn of Hope.
• Solace also procs (ie gives a stack) of Evangelism. 
• Solace heals, whereas Mindbender allows you to heal as normal when used.
• Mindbender is affected by haste whereas Solace with the glyph (which you will want if you have this skill), is not.

Simply, Solace is best if you're using Atonement healing and Mindbender is best if you're not. But even if you don't like Atonement healing (I don't use it overly much so far in the expansion) I still recommend always keeping a stack of Evangelism ready to boost your healing with Archangel when needed, and for this Solace will come in handy. A problem I often have with Mindbender is also that I don't have a target for it when I need it, that also will stick around long enough for my Mindbender to get full use of its duration. Solace is just easier to time well, assuming you can spare the gcd. Like I said, most of the time you will want to use a gcd every now and then to keep up an Evangelism stack anyway (which usually is Holy Fire that Solace replaces) meaning you're basically enhancing your regular rotation.

So why not FCDL? I've never been a fan of FDCL, admittedly it is far from awful but it's just nothing like how it worked in Wrath. Back then, if I remember correctly, it was called Surge of Light. The concept was similar, with crit heals having a chance of giving a free, instant Flash Heal, but the proc rate was very much higher - something around 30-50% - and it procced off of any heal. It had some nice bugs like proccing off other priests crits and having the free heal crit occasionally, proccing another free heal. Yeah, it might sound op, and it probably was, but you can see why I loved it so. I can understand the changes they made to the skill, especially since they made Flash Heal so much stronger than it was in Wrath (where it was basically what Heal is now). The problem I have with it now is that it's just too unreliable to feel comfortable in regular healing, not to mention the factor of it requiring me to use spells that are not in heavy use in normal raid healing. Let me put it this way, it's a proc and it's not procced from our most commonly used skills, and it should be pretty clear. The other two choices simply offer more control and in the end probably a lot more mana return.

Straight off, I'd recommend going with Solace. I can see two reasons to want to go with Mindbender instead; 1 - You don't have a problem with your mana regen and are lazy (ie, don't want to use your Atonement) or 2 - the fight just doesn't allow you to use that many gcds on Solace because you need to spam Prayer of Healing the entire fight (a scenario that will rarely happen, so really there is only one reason).

Wotlk talents. These are getting long now. Disc was really good in later Wrath.

Level 60
At this level you'll get to choose your defense talent, it's basically a choice between Desperate Prayer and Angelic Bulwark since Spectral Guise just isn't as cool (or useful) as it sounds. When I first read the description I hoped it would work by shifting me out of existence, thus renderring me impervious to damage for the duration. No, that's not how it works, and if I hadn't been stupid about it it's pretty obvious, since it says that taking damage will actually break the effect (after 3 hits). Even then I thought "direct attacks" still might mean it would work against aoe, but before I make this rant more boring than it already is, you can safely ignore this skill unless you're a pvper. If you're reading this guide that's not what you want to know about anyway.

So on to the interesting ones - Desperate Prayer or Angelic Bulwark? As with the Body & Soul vs Angelic Feather talents, one is leaning more towards personal responsibility, and thus flexibility (Desperate Prayer) whereas the other works automagically and therefor doesn't require you to divert brain power when you probably have the least of it to divert anyway (Angelic Bulwark).

Desperate Prayer is a strong talent and allows you to choose for yourself when you really need it. This obviously means its effectiviness highly relies on your capabilities to use it properly.

Personally, I am a big fan of Angelic Bulwark. It has the drawback of possibly proccing when you don't really need it and then not be off cd when you actually do. But instead it has the benefit of actually saving you from certain death automatically. Desperate Prayer is an after the fact heal, like any other heal, and if you're playing a disc priest (and I dare say you are if you've come this far into this guide) you should know how powerful and overall more useful absorbs are over heals. Angelic Bulwark has saved me from insta-death and even once saved what could possibly otherwise have turned into a complete raid wipe. I even have video proof. It's slightly less flexible, but on the other hand more reliable - at least I think so. So generally I would recommend Angelic Bulwark, but of course there are fights where having the control yourself with Desperate Prayer is more handy. I just haven't noticed it.

Level 75
This is your output level, and the choice here can be a bit more tricky than in the previous levels. All the skills in this talent tier are good, so let's take a closer look at each one of them.

Twist of Fate - This one works in a pretty obvious way, and is a strong skill if you know that you're going to fight something that will have your raid (or more rarely your dungeon group) down below 20% health for long or many portions of the encounter. If you're doing progression raiding or you simply all have shitty gear, ToF will end up being a nice output boost. Obviously this relies heavily on said factor, that you'll be healing a lot of people below 20% of health. This is slightly similar to how shaman "Deep Healing" mastery works, and if you've heard the amount of whining coming from them regarding that you'd think that it's a shitty thing to aim for. The difference is obviously that they don't have a choice, leaving a big portion of their healing reliant on something they are actively trying to avoid (ie having their targets on low health). We, on the other hand, have a choice, and ToF is definitely worth considering for those fights where everyone just seem on the edge of dying all the time. It's also worth noting that damaging an enemy below 20% will also give you the buff (eventhough it clearly says in the tooltip it is easy to forget as a healer). This of course means any low health adds or the last 20% of the boss, making this skill great when used in the right encounters.

Power Infusion - My personal favorite, partly because good old PI and I go way back. To me it's always just felt great knowing I have a special "god mode" button to press for when shit really hits the fan. It has a 2 minute cooldown, which really isn't much and it also lowers you mana usage by 20% which is exactly what you want when you start throwing out extra amounts of healing. For most fights Power Infusion is a safe card to have up your sleeve, with the only real drawback being the same as with Desperate Prayer - it's usefulness is first and foremost based on how skillful you are at using it. Power Infusion puts your output control into your own hands, and with output control is such an important thing to have. As long as you know how and when to time it, and consider the combination of cds you can use (Archangel, Spirit Shell and Power Infusion for the really big blows for example) Power Infusion is a very powerful tool indeed.

Divine Insight - I've never really considered DI overly useful for discipline, let me explain why: DI is procced off of Penance, which has a 12 sec cd but most of the time is used off cooldown (except when there is heavy aoe damage, this matters) and procs being able to cast another Shield on a target that already has Weakened Soul on it. Weakened Soul has a 15 sec cd, where you might be wanting to throw another Shield on your target. When does this happen? Blizzard have long wanted holy to be the aoe healers while discipline where the strong single target healers. In the end, discipline where ever only rarely better at single target healing than for instance Paladins or even Shamans and were mostly put on aoe healing duty because they, just like holy priests, had the pretty awesome Prayer of Healing.

Now, DI will make your disc priest a better single target healer than without it, but the single target healing is still mostly handled better by other healing classes and is in most raid fights I've fought rarely the big problem to deal with when healing. Disc priests as aoe healers is further established since Blizzard gave us the all-might Spirit Shell, a skill so over used that Blizzard has recently felt the need to nerf it. Even with the nerf, Spirit Shell is probably among the strongest aoe healing tools there are in the game at the moment, when used properly. This simply boils down to disc priests very rarely being put on single target healing duty. What you want to have out of this tier is a skill that further boosts your aoe healing, because that is what you are most likely going to do.

TLDR on Divine Insight - Unless you know you're going to be put mainly on tank healing duty, this skill is not as useful to you as the other two ones will be.

Overhaul of the talent point system reduced the size of the trees again.

Level 90
And finally, the last tier of talents. Which one of these you want largely depends on which encounter you're facing and how big a group you're healing.

Cascade - This is the choice of many, if not most, discipline priests (though I base this off of discussions, not statistics). I used Halo briefly, but since I swapped back to 10 man raiding Cascade has turned out to be a lot more useful. What you have to consider is the mechanic of the skills. None of the skills in this tier are "smart" heals like Prayer of Mending, and either one you choose will often end up being mostly overheal. Cascade is medium expensive mana wise and fairly easy to use. It doesn't require overly much thinking, just to remember that the more spread people are the more it's going to heal (as long as people are within range obviously). It is the simplest when it comes to positioning and use, to get the most out of it, and this is probably the main reason it seems to be the most popular choice.

Divine Star - Divine Star is somewhat similar to the paladin heal Light of Dawn, in that it requires people to stand in a line in front of you to be able to get much use of it. If you choose to use this skill you will chime in with the paladins about making sure the raid stacks properly, and it also means this skill is pretty useless whenever they're not. Cascade and Halo have the opposite problem, with being pretty useless when the raid is stacked. Divine Star is the cheapest of the three skills in the tier, and in fights where the raid stacks a lot it might be worth considering. In most raid encounter however, being spread out is more often the name of the game than anything else. Also remember that for stacked groups (or groups that stand somewhat close to eachother) we priests already have a tool - Prayer of Healing - and complementing that might be more interesting than adding to it.

Halo - Halo has one massive drawback, as I realized when using it in my 25 man raid. When unleashing it on a 25 man raid group it has tremendous healing power, if you're positioned in the right place. This might seem like a small if, but it's a pretty big if. The last thing you want to think about when your raid needs big aoe healing is whether you're standing in the exactly right place to use your skill. Both Divine Star and Cascade can also be used as hostile attacks, but both of them are very simple to avoid using so that you accidentally attack a mob you don't want to. Halo not so much. In fact, one of the biggest risks when using this skill is that you will also accidentally break some cc or pull some extra pack standing close by. This means that whenever you want to use it you might first have to re-position yourself to make sure you're not going to hit any mob. I am sure most of you have done runs where an oblivious shadow priest (it's mostly them who end up speccing Halo) has pulled extra packs, this is a risk you run as a healer as well when using this skill. It also makes Halo really hard to use at all in certain fights.

Halo is the most expensive skill out of the three, making it too expensive really to want to use in anything less than a 25 man group. The net average healing per mana just isn't worth it when compared especially to Cascade, or so my experience says anyway.

And now, we have this.

Conclusion - TLDR
So if you simply want a simple answer to the question: What the heck should I spec then? Here is my answer;

15 - Void Tendrils
30 - Body & Soul
45 - PW: Solace
60 - Angelic Bulwark
75 - Power Infusion
90 - Cascade

• Angelic Feather for fights where you want to give boost control to raid members.
• Mindbender for when you're lazy or don't use Atonement at all.
• Desperate Prayer for more self healing control.
• ToF for fights where you dont' feel like timing Power Infusions or now you'll have a lot of ToF uptime.

Personally, I pretty much run with the same setup for any raid fight I do, and it has worked well for me. Once you're comfortable with your healing style you can tinker around yourself depending on the fight, but the above suggestion is a pretty solid one for most fights you can encounter.