Quick thoughts on Power Word: Shield
Loading ...This is take 2 on this post, because Firefox crashed and QuickPress doesn’t auto-save drafts. So please forgive me if I’m a little brusque.
First: in my previous posts on Haste I’ve completely forgotten about the talent Enlightenment, which grants +5% spell haste. So that’s another 164 Haste Rating you don’t have to stack. I also forgot about Renewed Hope, which grants 4% crit chance to Flash Heals cast on a target with the Weakened Soul debuff. Assuming that only half of your heals are on Weakened-Soul targets, that’s still an additional 2% crit, which gives you something like an additional 1% throughput (given that critical heals heal for 150% of the normal amount).
On to PW:S. Since PW:S doesn’t have a cast time longer than 1.5 seconds, it can effectively take the place of Flash Heal in the last post’s calculations. PW:S “heals” about the same as Flash Heal at baseline (2230 absorbed vs. ~2040 healed), and because of the cast times, both of them get about the same benefit from spellpower (about 80.6% of your total spellpower), but Discipline priests will have talents that let them increase spellpower by 40% when calculating PW:S’s absorption, and that let them increase the total absorption of PW:S by 15%, which boosts its “throughput” above Flash Heal. Unfortunately, there’s no way that I know of to tell how much damage a given PW:S has absorbed, so you can’t get “overhealing” on PW:S, but it’s fair to say that the total “overhealing” will be generally lower than for Flash Heal, since PW:S only “overheals” when its duration runs out before it’s used fully.
Since PW:S is essentially as much damage mitigated as Flash Heal is damage healed, and their cast times are functionally the same for the purpose of GCD timing, PW:S can be effectively interwoven with Flash Heal and Penance in a sequence similar to the one I put forward in the last post. Done properly, this will keep you in Borrowed Time nearly 100% of the time; with this strategy toward healing, a Discipline priest only needs to stack 656 haste rating (about 20% haste) in order to be hitting 1-second global cooldowns in a raid-healing situation.
There are, however, two major drawbacks to this tactic. The first, obviously, is that Power Word: Shield isn’t measured in the healing meters. All you have to do to counter that is remind your healing and raid leader to pay attention to the number of shields you cast during an encounter, and do the math for them to show how much your shields mitigate. The second, and potentially more serious, drawback is that Power Word: Shield can’t crit. This might not seem like a huge deal, but it means that your overall crit percentage is going to drop; instead of 133 direct heals you’ll have a maximum of 67 – 54 that don’t crit, 13 that do (thanks to Renewed Hope), and 66 that can’t crit. That’s a total of 120H + 13(1.5H), or 139.5H total. It’s still 18.5H higher than you’ll get by stacking crit, but you’ll get many fewer Divine Aegises. Then again, with all the Power Word: Shields flying around, you probably won’t need them.
So yes, even when half your casts are Power Word: Shield – which will be possible in 3.1, when we’ll get a talent that reduces PW:S’s cooldown to 1 second – a Discipline priest in haste gear still outheals a Discipline priest in pure +crit, all else being equal.
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The cool down on PW:S is 4s. The new glyph is currently reducing it by 4s. i.e. no CD on PW:S.
With the 3.1 push to use PW:S more one thing to remember is that half the good talents that proc on crit won’t be used. Stuff like Inspiration and Divine Aegis. Also the Weakened Soul Debuff is going to play havoc with Pw:S based rotations.
Healing meters are over rated IMHO.
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@Bob,
You’re right, of course, about PW:S having no true cooldown. I was thinking in terms of the global cooldown, which is a minimum of 1s.
You’re also right that healing meters are over-rated. But they’re used as a crutch by so many people that it seems wrong to not at least start out by talking about them.
If you’re using a Power Word: Shield every other cast, you’ll get a Divine Aegis proc every 11 seconds or so (13 procs in 150 seconds on average). I don’t know any Discipline priests who’ve gone deep enough into Holy to get Inspiration, and I don’t recommend it, because you’re sacrificing some good Disc talents to get a proc that isn’t really very impressive at level 80 (unless you’re healing a druid tank, in which case a Holy priest is a better bet anyway).
In a 5-man group, weaving Power Word: Shield isn’t going to be your best bet, because you are going to be running into Weakened Soul at some point. (At a PW:S every other cast, you’re going to have to spend 5 seconds not casting it before Weakened Soul fades off the first target.) It’s easy to get around this by making PW:S every third cast, and using a PW:S-Penance-Flash Heal rotation, since Penance doesn’t consume Borrowed Time but gets its benefit.
In 10-man and 25-man groups, the time it takes to cast PW:S on everybody on alternate casts is more than enough to let Weakened Soul fade off the first targets. (It’s 20 seconds per PW:S cycle in a 10-man group, and 50 seconds in a 25-man.)
Thanks for commenting!
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You recommend against getting Inspiration from the holy side?!? Are you crazy? Its +25% armour on the tank/s. They rely on high armour values to reduce damage (along with mitigation). Even if +25% armour means only 5% less damage thats still better than any other damage reduction skill that i’m aware off.
I’m pretty sure most Disc priests are taking Inspiration. If your using a build like this http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=bVcbuhxtMxoifRtzxxc then dropping the points in Holy isn’t going to get you much improvement from the Disc tree.
Disc are most often assigned to tank healing as they are good at it. Single target healing means weakened soul debuff is going to be an issue even in raids.
PW:S effectively having no CD besides the GCD will mean its more useful for ‘raid shielding’, but I think with the changes to PoH, Disc priests will find they are still better casting PoH than trying to shield multiple people.
At the end of the day I think the effective removal of a CD on PW:S will be more of a discussion point, than a really useful tool. I might be wrong though. :-)
PS I ment talent not glyph in my first post. But I see you got the idea, even with my brain short circuit.
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Okay, I’m nuttier than a fruitcake; I’d been running on the memory that you couldn’t get all the truly beneficial talents from Discipline and still get Inspiration. Clearly I’m wrong, because I’m actually running with Inspiration on live. It’s even easier to justify on the PTR: http://ptr.wowhead.com/?talent=bVcbuhxVRGsffRt0xxc (I can’t decide between 2 points in Focused Will and 2 points in Aspiration, or 3 in Focused Will and 1 in Aspiration; I think I like Aspiration more).
The issue that I’m actually trying to address here is what I see as the myth that Discipline priests are good at tank healing. My experience is that Discipline priests are seen as being good at tank healing because healing leads are insisting that their heals be objectively as big as Holy priests’, which means that the Disc priests are setting aside anything having to do with speed and agility – the qualities that I think are spec-defining – in favor of heavy spellpower and crit, which in turn limits them to single-target healing because they’re not really fast or agile enough, and they don’t have the Circle of Healing or Chain Heal, to do anything else.
(In fact, their 31-point and 41-point talents point directly at their strength being non-tank healing! Power Infusion is a nice buff when cast on anyone else, but as a self-cast it’s an incredibly powerful tool for increasing – I hate to keep harping on these terms – speed and flexibility; Pain Suppression is clearly meant to deal with non-tank raid members who are getting close to pulling – or have pulled – from the tank. Neither of them make any sense for a class/spec combination whose strength is supposed to be single-target healing.)
Sorry if I’m being didactic about this, but I really think the priest community is coming at this from completely the wrong direction, and I’m trying to figure out how to best address that misperception.
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Disc *are* good tank healers. They are also quite capable of raid healing.
Disc are good tank healers because they have some excellent single target abilities. PW:S (absorption), Divine Aegis (absorption) and Grace (increase healing + damage reduction) and even Penance as a cheap and powerful single target heal.
Disc are decent raid healers because of PoH (AoE Heal), PW:S (absorption, PoM (AoE heal) and because they use small, fast, healing spells which combine with Rapture to be very mana efficient. They don’t however have the smart heals that you mentioned. No matter how hasted you are you’re not going to be able to beat the smart AoE heals for raid healing output.
So because Disc are decent raid healers, not excellent like Holy priests or Resto shaman, they are less likely to be given raid healing duties. Likewise, because they have some good tools for preventing, healing and absorping damage on single targets they are more likely to be given tank healing duties. It’s not that they can’t raid heal, its just that they are less suited to it than others.
I’m not sure about this Disc stacking crit and SP to try and hit has hard as Holy. The other Disc bloggers I read aren’t trying to hit as hard as Holy and it’s never been discussed in my guild that such a thing is a good idea.
re:Pain Suppression, im pretty sure, was originally meant to be used in PvP. It is useable in PvE an any target, however with a 2 minute 40s talented cool down and little sustained heavy damage on non-tank targets it is mostly used on tanks during boss enrages. I imagine it also gets used on non-tank targets such as those Frost Blasted during Kel’Thuzad. The threat component is pretty much irrelevant these days.
Power Infusion works just as well if yuo are spamming heals on one target or many targets. It also helps to improve DPS if cast on a DPSer. I’m not sure I can agree that PS and PI directly point to Disc as being non-tank healers.
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