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!

Seriously, you’re going to hurt yourself.

I have three feeds from WOW Insider going: The Queue, The Daily Quest, and anything tagged “priest” (that last one can get really annoying when the authors/editors of, say, All The World’s A Stage decide to spam every possible tag they can on So You Want To Be A Herbalist). Today, in the Priest feed, the Forum Post of the Day came through. It was about Discipline priests in raids, and how a raid leader was singling out a Discipline priest because his healing on the meters was under par. Amanda’s final comment really rang true: “It’s not about being a star, or a prima dona [sic], raiding is about working together as a team to accomplish a common goal.”

This is going to come as news to a lot of raid leaders (go on, raise your hand if you are one), but really and truly, Ulduar is not Galaga. Galaga is about getting the highest possible score; that’s the whole point of the game. Raid leaders tend to treat raiding like it works the same way – they see the healing and DPS meters as high score charts, and penalize raiders who don’t get onto the charts. The problem with that is that unlike Galaga, World of Warcraft raiding actually has a very concrete win condition: did you defeat the boss? If you defeated the boss, the entire raid wins. If not, the entire raid fails.

If the raid isn’t failing – if you’re successfully downing the bosses you want to take down – then there’s no reason at all to single anyone out on the meters. You met the win condition! Clearly everyone is doing at least as well as they need to be, or else you wouldn’t be successful.

If the raid is failing, everybody needs to step up a little more. It’s really tempting to go through the high scores – sorry, the meters – and identify the people who aren’t scoring as high – sorry, doing as much damage or healing – and try to “fix” those people. (In the example in Amanda’s post, the RL asked the priest to go Holy to increase his HPS.) Unfortunately, that simply won’t solve the problem. Unless you’re being actively sabotaged or someone’s doing something incredibly dumb, fixing a single person isn’t going to make the raid go from not killing the boss to killing the boss. When a raid fails, nobody is exempt. If the raid isn’t doing enough DPS but the healing is okay, the healers can look at ways to keep the raid alive a little longer after the enrage timer hits, or to damage the boss between heals. If the raid is doing enough DPS but important players are dying, the DPS can work on staying out of the fire or taking the adds down a little faster. I don’t mean that the DPS is exempt from improving in the first scenario or the healers are exempt in the second; I mean that everybody shares the responsibility of a failed attempt.

(If you are being actively sabotaged or someone’s doing something incredibly dumb, the meters aren’t going to help you anyway.)

I’m not saying that meters are useless. The best – perhaps the only valid – use of meters is to check your own performance in the raid (and even then it’s not necessarily accurate, like the Discipline priest example above, which is why WOW Web Stats is handy), and to look at other raid members to see what you could be doing differently. Raid leaders, though, should be paying attention not at individual raiders – because I will guarantee that there isn’t a single player in the raid who can’t improve something – but at the statistics of the raid as a whole. It’s obvious, but damaging to the egos of the other raiders, that if you think a single person is holding you back enough that you can identify them as the cause of your wipes, it’s actually the whole rest of the raid that needs work.

I’ve done some testing, and BobTurkey and Jedimax, who commented on Math is Hard asking about whether Borrowed Time reduces the global cooldown, will be pleased to know that, in fact, it does. Also, interestingly, Borrowed Time begins when you cast Power Word: Shield, and is not consumed until the spell it affects has finished casting, so it reduces the global cooldown both of PW:S and of the spell it affects. In other words:

1. You cast PW:S, and Borrowed Time takes effect as soon as you cast. The global cooldown triggered by PW:S is reduced to 1.2s (assuming no other haste effects).
2. You cast Penance, which is affected by Borrowed Time but does not consume it. The GCD triggered by Penance is 1.2s.
3. You cast Flash Heal, which has a 1.2s cast time. Since Borrowed Time doesn’t wear off until the spell is successfully cast, the GCD triggered by Flash Heal is 1.2s.
4. Borrowed Time wears off, and the GCD on the next spell you cast is back up to 1.5s – unless the next spell is PW:S, in which case GOTO 1.

This feature of Borrowed Time, in fact, makes its effect on the GCD particularly easy to test for yourself. Cast PW:S on yourself and then cast Flash Heal; since FH’s cast time is normally 1.5s, and the GCD is normally 1.5s, Flash Heal’s cast time should end just as the GCD does no matter how much haste you have.

As always, if I’ve done something wrong or you have a different experience, let me know.

Here’s me: Theande of Aetherial Circle on Drenden. Yes, I’m not in the best gear (but check out my shiny new shoulders from XT-002 Deconstructor!). I’m at 425/433 haste rating, which is good to know (I hadn’t actually looked until now); at this point I can start gearing for crit.

Here’s my talent spec, which I think is pretty standard for Discipline priests. I specced into Desperate Prayer because it was recommended to me, but honestly I never use the spell, so the point would probably be better spent in Healing Focus or Unbreakable Will. You’ll notice that I have Glyph of Dispel Magic; this is because I haven’t been able to find a Glyph of Penance!

Comments and questions are welcome, but to reiterate, “you’re doing it wrong” isn’t welcome here.

So, I’ve been talking about Haste like the calculation you want to determine how much Haste you need is 1.00 – (Desired Cast Time / Current Cast Time). It’s not. It’s (CCT/DCT) – 1. When I said that you needed 33% Haste to get to a 1.0s global cooldown, I was wrong. I was using the first calculation, 1 – (1.0/1.5), or 0.33. I should have been using the second, (1.5/1.0) – 1, or 0.5 – that’s 50% haste, and quite a bit harder to get to than I’ve been saying.

So, sorry for misleading you – mea culpa.

For the record, you already have 6% from Enlightenment, and another 25% from Borrowed Time. Haste percentages stack multiplicatively (Haste Rating is additive, and then you multiply the percentage you get from HR into the rest of the haste percentages you have), so between Enlightenment and Borrowed Time you get 32.5% haste. Since haste is multiplicative, you can divide your target haste (1.50) by the existing haste (1.325) to get the haste you need; that’s 1.132, or 13.2% haste from gear and buffs. That ends up being a little under 433 Haste Rating. That’s still eminently do-able, but not nearly as simple as I’d made it out to be.

Thank goodness:

As of today’s patch notes:

• Divine Hymn: Healing and healing scaling reduced by 30%. Buff on affected players changed from 15% to 10%.
• Renewed Hope: Effect can no longer be dispelled.
• Soul Warding: Mana cost reduction is now 15% down from 30%.
• Glyph of Mass Dispel: Now only decreases Mass Dispel cost by 35%.
• Glyph of Penance: Now increases critical strike chance by 5% instead of its old effect.

One by one:

Divine Hymn: Significant nerf, but Divine Hymn was so completely badass in 3.1 that it kind of needed a nerf.
Renewed Hope: Largely an arena change; doesn’t affect PVE at all.
Soul Warding: This makes Power Word: Shield slightly less mana efficient, but at least the cooldown reduction isn’t going away.
Glyph of Mass Dispel: Does anybody actually have this glyph?
Glyph of Penance: I am redacting my first reaction to this nerf because this is nominally a PG-13 blog. At full usage – using Penance every time the cooldown is up – the previous version of the glyph (reduced cooldown by 2s) effectively provided a 33% increase in Penance’s throughput. The new glyph provides a 2.5% increase in Penance’s throughput (since healing crits heal for 150% of the normal amount). The new glyph, therefore, sacrifices 30.5% throughput for an additional 1/20 chance per tick to proc Divine Aegis.

Honestly, with this change to Glyph of Penance, and now that Prayer of Healing is targetable, I might recommend Glyph of Prayer of Healing over Glyph of Penance for Discipline priests.

Click the image for full-sized heuristics!

(The font used is Titillium, an open-source Futurist sans-serif typeface.)

Khaeli has a couple of good posts up on Shadow Weaving: Gearing your Discipline Priest in 3.1, where she talks about the theory behind gear choices, and Khaeli’s (Ulduar) Gear Wishlist, where she lists the actual gear she’s looking at. Along the way, she pointed out the Tier 8 healing priest set bonus (I hadn’t even looked at T8 yet); the 2-set is nice for Discipline priests, but the 4-set is fabulous for this style of healing, since not only will PW:S give us haste, it’ll give us extra oomph behind our healing spells as well.

Some comments on comments:

tom jones: Glyph of PW:S is definitely useful, but it’s actually not as geared to this play style as it looks like it ought to be. The trick is that we’re using PW:S largely for mitigation and for the speed bonus; a lot of the time, we’re going to be shielding people who aren’t actually taking damage, so the glyph isn’t going to be useful. However, when we do shield someone who’s taking damage, that 20% healing is going to be handy. As for PW:S and DA being rage sinks, they’re not anymore; at least according to some early patch notes, damage mitigated by magical shields now counts for the purposes of rage generation. (Original comment)

Tsark: I’d actually forgotten about Enlightenment when I started writing that post! The low amount of Haste you actually need, between Borrowed Time and Enlightenment, to reach the 33% soft cap means that you can easily get it from enchantments and consumables (more rigorous math over on Khaeli’s blog, linked above, leads to a figure of 77 Haste Rating), leaving you free to make gear choices based on other criteria like Crit Rating and Intellect. I’m not sure that I’d recommend getting haste gear at all – certainly not more than one piece – given how easy it is to hit 33% with this play style. (Original comment)

caladein: I haven’t been able to make it past Flame Leviathan so far (my guild raids on Wednesday, Sunday, and Monday, and on Wednesday night we were plagued by server crashes), but from what I’m hearing, you’re right on the money with your comments about Mimiron and Kologarn. I’m hoping that the pattern stays the same throughout Ulduar, in terms of making Discipline priests useful like this. (Original comment)

Let’s start from the beginning. (I’m told that it’s a very good place to start.)

Right now, the conventional wisdom is that Discipline priests are for single-target healing and should stack crit (for Divine Aegis and big heals), and that Holy priests are for multiple-target healing (and should stack Spirit for the spellpower bonus and mana regen). I’ll say up front that this is a perfectly valid way to play the class. I don’t think that either of these assessments are untrue; Discipline priests are strong single-target healers, and Holy priests are strong multiple-target healers.

However.

Just because Discipline priests can be strong single-target healers doesn’t mean they can only be strong single-target healers. WOW itself has an excellent example of this kind of dichotomy: just because Feral druids can tank doesn’t mean that’s all they’re good for. I see another approach to Discipline healing, which focuses less on talents like Divine Aegis and more on talents like Borrowed Time and Renewed Hope.

Think about the distinction between fast and slow weapons in WOW for a moment. At a given level of DPS, slow weapons hit harder but less often; fast weapons hit far more often, but for lower amounts. With proc-per-minute weapon buffs, a fast weapon has a much lower chance per strike to activate its effect than a slow weapon does, but since the fast weapon is hitting more often, it evens out. Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

So it is with Discipline healing. The conventional-wisdom method is equivalent to a slow weapon: it doesn’t cast very fast, but it heals for a lot. However, talents like Borrowed Time, Improved Power Word: Shield, and Renewed Hope, and the Glyph of Power Word: Shield, make a fast-but-weaker option both viable and desirable. Instead of stacking crit like CW Disc priests do to increase their chances of getting Divine Aegis off, fast-but-weak Disc priests stack haste. These priests don’t heal for as much as their crit-heavy brothers, but they are much more agile in any environment, and specialize in hit-and-run healing.

Note that this is a question of approach, of philosophy, not of gear. It’s actually improbably easy to reach the soft haste cap with this philosophy; assuming that you have Borrowed Time and Enlightenment, it only takes 66 Haste Rating to reach the 33% haste cap after you’ve cast Power Word: Shield. This cap is based on reducing the 1.5s global cooldown to 1.0s, which is as far as it will go; at 33% haste, multiply your spell’s cast time by 0.67 (1-0.33) to get the actual cast time. This reduces the cast time of Flash Heal to 1s, the channel time of Penance to 1.3s (a tick goes off at 0s, 0.67s, and 1.34s), and the cast times of Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing to 2s. Further Haste Rating will increase your haste (and lower your casting time) even more, and it’s possible to reap some advantage from this, but more haste has a diminishing effect (because of the

The idea behind this approach, therefore, is that you’ll be casting Power Word: Shield at just about every opportunity. This will both ensure that Renewed Hope stays up on your targets (both the -3% damage buff and the +4% crit chance) and allow you to cast your heals as quickly as possible. You’ll also do a lot of mitigation of damage, and since you’ll be keeping the Weakened Soul debuff up on a lot of players at once, you’ll also have an increased chance to proc Divine Aegis when you do have to heal someone.

There are, of course, drawbacks to this approach. The first and most obvious is that it goes through a lot of mana. This can be mitigated by a high Intellect and mana regen rate, and even without those advantages, I had little trouble in 10-man fights when I tested this approach last night. Another objection at first glance is that by by relying on casting Power Word: Shield before you cast your heal, you’re effectively adding to your cast time (the half-second shaved off your Flash Heal is offset by the 1-second GCD from PW:S). My only response to this is that it’s better to be casting PW:S almost constantly. By doing that, you’re keeping yourself in Borrowed Time for when you do need to heal somebody.

I admit that this is an approach that feels strange to a lot of healers, myself included; spell haste is for caster DPS, and PW:S is for emergencies! I think that’s a Burning-Crusade, Holy-style healing mindset, though, and getting used to Discipline as a healing spec means getting rid of some of our preconceptions about what it means to heal as a priest. We can start with allowing for the possibility that PW:S and our caster stats can be used differently than we’re used to.

(Yeah, I’m kind of bad at conclusions.)