At this point, it’s generally accepted that Discipline is an effective healing spec in PVE. It’s also generally – although less so – known that Discipline relies on shields and other mitigation to get much of its healing done. What doesn’t seem to be well-known is why Discipline priests love them some shields, and here I’m going to try to correct that. As always, correct me if you think my math is wrong or my conclusions aren’t sound.

Shields mitigate damage.

“Well, duh.” Sure, this one’s a gimme, but it’s also the most important aspect of shielding. Discipline priests aren’t the only ones who gain a benefit to their shields from spell power – the damage absorbed by your Power Word: Shield is increased by 80.68% of your spell power. But we also have a lot of ways to buff our shields. We get Improved Inner Fire in our second tier, which increases the contribution to spell power from Inner Fire by 45%; we have Improved Power Word: Shield as a tier-3 talent, which increases the damage absorbed by 15% after spell power is applied; we get Mental Agility in the fourth tier, which reduces the mana cost of our instant-cast spells by 10%; we get Soul Warding in the fifth tier, which reduces the mana cost of Power Word: Shield by a further 30%; and we get Borrowed Time in the 10th tier, which adds another 30% of our spell power to the amount absorbed. (Sadly, Focused Power doesn’t improve PW:S – thanks to Rilgon for clarifying.)

A Discipline priest with all of these talents, and 2000 spell power – which is about average for a beginning raiding priest, in my experience – can cast shields that absorb about 4580 damage for 560 mana, or about 9.25 damage absorbed per mana spent. (For reference, our Flash Heal is about 5.46 healing per mana.) That’s a powerful, efficient mitigation tool, especially with the Glyph of Power Word: Shield, which heals the target for 10% of the potential damage absorbed (that is, the full 4580, not the damage that’s actually absorbed), and is affected by Focused Power.

And that’s just PW:S. Divine Aegis, our other major shield, costs us nothing at all (and scales nicely with spell power; we get 1 damage absorbed for every 10 healing on every critical heal we cast); the only drawback is that we can’t control when it goes up. Our third mitigation ability, Pain Suppression, is less often used, as it has a long cooldown and is reduction in damage rather than damage blocking like the shields.

Our shields don’t just mitigate for the target.

Every time a Discipline priest casts Power Word: Shield, the entire raid takes 3% less damage for 20 seconds. 3% damage mitigation to everybody in the raid, on top of the 4580 absorption for the actual target, can be the difference between a wipe and a successful boss kill. Sadly, Renewed Hope doesn’t stack, but at the least it means that PW:S should be used once every 20 seconds. However…

Our shields are fast.

The other key ingredient of Soul Warding, mentioned above, is that it reduces the cooldown on our Power Word: Shield from 4 seconds to 1 second – essentially, we can cast it as often as we want, since the global cooldown (normally 1.5 seconds) is always going to be at least as long as the Power Word: Shield cooldown. We don’t have to worry about whether we’re wasting a cooldown on the DPS who’s in the Slag Pot just in case the tank needs it in three seconds, because we can toss out shields as fast as the GCD will let us. Speaking of which…

Our shields make us faster.

Borrowed Time also increases our spell haste by 25% for 6 seconds or until the next non-instant spellcast. (Channeled spells, like Divine Hymn and Penance, count as instant-cast.) That improves not only the speed at which we can cast our spells, but our global cooldown as well. With Enlightenment (another 6% spell haste) and some minimal +haste gearing, we can get off a PW:S – Prayer of Mending – Penance – Flash Heal combination in 4 seconds, a burst of healing that can bring a tank from 1% very nearly back to viable health. (With proper macros or add-ons, all four spells can also go to different people, making us decent raid healers as well.)

Our shields restore your energy.

Speaking of restoring tanks, Rapture, in tier 8 of our talent tree, restores 2.5% of our total mana when one of our shields is dispelled or completely spent (but not when it wears off without being used up), and restores 2% total mana, 8 rage, 16 energy, or 32 runic power to the shield’s target. That restoration alone is a reason for us to want shields up on as many players as possible (even though the effect has a hidden cooldown), especially in AOE fights like Loatheb, XT-002, and Ignis.

Our shields, in short, are awesome.

Any questions or comments? Have I missed anything? Let me know in the comments!

Be Sociable, Share!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.