Discipline Healing Guide - 4.1.0 Cataclysm

Introduction

To start, I believe that in the current state that discipline priests in primarily i346 gear or higher who correctly prioritize their healing can, with some knowledge of predictable damage, heal equally or better than all other classes providing they use the proper spec and healing rotations. This varies by encounter, as discipline really shines in constant, raid wide AoE situations where Divine Aegis from PoH can be fully utilized, whereas Holy Paladins have cooldowns on AoE healing but are capable of much larger bursts. One caveat is that at lower gear levels, it is difficult to maintain healing for long periods of time due to our major regeneration talents scaling directly with our mana pool.

The below information is by no means exclusively of my own derivation, but rather has been taken from discussions with priests on my own server, on several forums (most importantly the forums at EJ), and testing done within the body of this thread (Special thanks to Khendra). The purpose of this thread is to provide a concise summary of helpful healing tips to those who are struggling to heal through heroic content and early raids. I'm not sure how Sticky Maintenance is dealt with, so please continue to "like" this thread if you find the information useful.

Ideal Spec:
http://wowtal.com/#k=veyUg6Jh.a8t.priest.-TYi8g
There are two extra points which I put into darkness, but some prefer to place in soul warding to reduce cooldown on PW:S. Those concerned about longevity could potentially place those points into Veiled Shadows.

How to Heal Efficiently:
There are three basic healing styles for discipline which depend on the type of incoming damage, and are as follows. If you cannot heal the encounter with these strategies, you cannot heal that encounter at your current gear level OR you have DPS taking unnecessary damage. These rotations are produced by examining the efficiency of each heal in your repertoire, and considering the types of raid damage.

Efficiency (highest -> lowest; no overheal):
Divine Hymn > Prayer of Mending > Prayer of Healing > Penance > Smite (i346+) > Greater heal = Heal = Binding Heal = Smite (i333) > Binding Heal > PW:S >

Smite scales very well with gear, and at raid quality gear outstrips Greater Heal and Heal.

heals which have very poor mana efficiency given the spec and glyphs listed include flash heal, renew, and holy nova. These can be used situationally, but there are often better choices.

1. Low, predictable damage:
Main heal: Smite (Atonement) + Penance + PW:S for Rapture ONLY. + PoM if sufficient AoE to benefit. At high gear levels, Smite will outstrip Heal in efficiency when combined with effective Evangelism management (see bottom of post)

2. High, single target damage (3 or fewer targets in raids):
Main heal: Greater heal (making use of Train of Thought for reduced Inner Focus) + Penance + PW:S for Rapture ONLY, + PoM

3. AoE Raid damage:
Main heal: Prayer of Healing (Inner Focus) + PW:S for Rapture ONLY + PoM. This is a good time to use Power Infusion.

Inner Fire vs. Inner Will
Because the above healing strategies utilize very few instant heals (PW:S every 12 seconds, PoM in AoE situations, and the very occasional renew) Inner Fire provides superior efficiency compared to inner will and should be used in almost all situations. Inner will can be situationally useful for the movement speed, and in fights with a large amount of movement, however.

Miscellaneous (but very important) Healing Points:
1. Use Power Infusion on yourself exclusively, typically to boost throughput during AoE phases and increase your efficiency when you know you will cast a series of high mana cost heals (PoH/Gheal).
2. Renew is a low-efficiency heal, however can be sparingly used to top up raid members when you must focus most of your attention on tanks.
3. Make use of Pain suppression. It is very useful to give yourself breathing room to top a tank back up OR can be used to "catch up" by allowing AoE healing of the raid when the tank is still taking substantial damage. PoH will keep a pain supressioned tank alive, where one would normally die.
4. with Train of Thought, at i346 greater heal has the same efficiency as heal. For this reason, there is no reason to ever use heal, as you can be doing similar healing with Smite while adding damage.
5. Fade is a wonderful skill which will set your agro to 0 for the duration of the spell. Whenever you have adds on you, Fade and stand in Concecrate/DnD/Tclap range. This will allow you to keep damage on the tank and not yourself, making use of the tanks higher avoidance values to minimize healing.
6. Power Word Barrier is an excellent ability that can be used to mitigate large amounts of raid/group damage and can also be used as a tank healing cooldown if placed around the tank.

Important Regeneration Mechanics:
1. Rapture (3/3): Returns 6% of your maximum mana when a shield is completely absorbed or dispelled. This cannot occur more than once every 12 seconds. This is discipline's most important regeneration mechanic and should be used on cooldown. However, becuase of PW:S's low efficiency, it is not prudent to cast PW:S when rapture is on internal cooldown. A mod to track this cooldown can be found at curse: http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/ingelasrapture.aspx
2. Archangel: Returns 5% of your maximum mana and increases healing by 15%. Use this to increase the efficiency of smite healing AND proc archangel before predictable AoE damage for substantially increased healing.
3. Hymn of Hope and Shadowfiend: Both should be utilized on cooldown, and must be utilized to maximize healing longevity. Hymn is substantially more difficult to use given that you must channel and therefore not heal, so save it for periods of low damage. If shadowfiend is used directly before hymning, more mana can be obtained due to your increased mana pool. Throwing Pain supression on the tank before Hymning can ensure that you have time for a full hymn without having to prematurely cancel to heal the tank. In addition, Hymn benefits from haste, and should be used following PW:S for borrowed time.

Important note for heroic healing: Mastery typically is less useful in heroics given that divine aegis procs on non-tanks will fall off unused. In this situation, Mastery > Crit > Haste

Mana Tide and Core of Ripeness
This is such an important synergy that it is worthy of it's own section. The combination of Mana Tide (increases spirit by 350%) and Core of Ripeness (+1920 on use spirit) allow for the regeneration of approximately 45-50% of your mana pool (spirit dependent) every 3 minutes. This is a game changing mechanic which eliminates mana dependence for priests above i346 gear level in raid environments. If you raid with a Restoration Shaman, this is a mandatory first item pick-up, and will remain best-in-slot until a time at which mana is a non-issue. If you do not raid with a Restoration Shaman, I would suggest finding one.

Important Macros
Inner Focus should be macrod into both Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing in order to fully maximize the effect of Train of Thought. This following macros will use Inner Will on cooldown. A current bug will prevent you from deriving benefit from Inner Focus when it comes off cooldown mid-cast, therefore spamming Gheal and PoH can reduce the effectiveness of IF. An alternative is to manually track IF using Power Auras. What is more efficient will depend on your playstyle and attention.

#gettooltip Greater heal
/cast Inner Focus
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear(); UIErrorsFrame:Show()
/cast Greater Heal

#gettooltip Prayer of Healing
/cast Inner Focus
/script UIErrorsFrame:Clear(); UIErrorsFrame:Show()
/cast Prayer of Healing

Archangel Usage Strategies:
Use of Archangel is a difficult decision because you must trade 5 stacks of evangelism for the Archangel buff. As a rule of thumb, if you are smiting, you should keep your evangelism stack and put off using Archangel until you are going to swap to a different healing strategy that cannot benefit from the mana efficiency.

Evangelism: 5 stack of evangelism provides: 20% increased damage to Smite (and penance, but we don't use this for DPS), and a 30% mana cost reduction to both spells.

Archangel: 5% of maximum mana, and 15% increased healing.

Effective Utilization of Archangel:
1. You are about to switch from a low single target damage phase (smite/atonement) to a burst AoE healing phase (PoH/PoM) and no longer require the reduced mana cost of smite. Pop Archangel (and power word barrier, and Power Infusion) and begin Prayer of Healing spamming with 15% increased healing.
2. DPS burn phase with DPS modifiers (more for raiding content, but think Rahj's recharge in HoO) Pop Archangel for the DPS increase, and immediately reapply Evangelism with smites.
3. The tank is about to take a lot of damage. Pop Archangel and Power Infusion and start laying down your Gheal/Penance Rotation.

Stat Weights for gear decisions
Discipline Priests benefit most from Intellect, given that our regeneration mechanics scale off of total mana. Spirit is the next most important stat, followed distantly by all of the secondary stats. This means find trinkets with intellect on them, and make sure all items have spirit as a secondary stat.

The following stat weights are rough approximations given full Tier 11 359 gear without factoring in borrowed time, utilizing a single-target healing rotation. In addition, please keep in mind that stacking one secondary stat will raise the value of alternative stats due to synergy with the other secondaries

Burst:

Intellect 0.94
Spirit 0
SP 0.77
Critical 0.47
Haste 0.41
Mastery 0.24


Sustained:

Intellect 4.20
Spirit 3.36
Spell Power 0.80
Critical 0.48
Haste 0
Mastery 0.25


These weights suggest that reforging to critical strike is the correct choice for maximizing throughput and sustained healing. Haste is a very close second, followed distantly by Mastery. Keep in mind that the value of haste increases (in a complicated and non-linear fashion) with Multi-target healing as your mastery increases, as crit is not required to proc DA, however overall Crit is superior. Problematically, this makes switching between discipline and holy specs difficult as Holy has opposite stat weights.

Optional Healing Strategy: Mouseover Macros

Healing is a task which at times requires very quick reaction times in order to ensure that you keep you tank (or a bad dps) alive when they take damage unexpectedly. Traditionally, three actions must take place before you can heal a player taking unexpected damage. First, you must click on that player's unit frame. Second, you must press the keyboard or mouse button which you have heal bound to, and third, you must depress that button, as blizzard polls the release of the button as having ordered an action. Together, these actions take between 100 and 500ms. In order to reduce the amount of time spent targeting and ordering actions, and therefore increase your throughput, mouseover macros eliminate the need to click a specific action bar before you cast a heal. Instead, you must have your cursor hovering over the unit frame (or the player itself) who you wish to heal. The one caution is that this necessarily prevents you from 'clicking' your action bars. Rather, you must have all heals bound to keybinds.

The following macro will attempt to cast the spell attached to it on your mouseover target, and if that does not exist, will cast the spell on yourself:

#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover,exists] "Spell"; "Spell"

With no quotations around the spell's name, for example:

#showtooltip
/cast [target=mouseover,exists] Greater Heal; Greater Heal

Guide taken from Mnemo from Magtheridon