This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
I was unable to find a way to spec disc heals that wouldn't take Smite-improving talents, so I decided to just embrace it.http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#bVI0uGhckhoffRt0E0cfzoc00000M:AbdzV0(Edit: Bah, the links to the cata calculator are broken. I took all the smite talents, all the deep Disc talents except improved Flash Heal, which was only 1/3, and I maxxed Healing Prayers, Improved Healing, Deliverance and Spirit of Redemption in Holy.)I was interested to know what kind of role smite will play in the Cata raids, so I did some math.Smite will cost 672 mana at level 85 (if the current pattern holds) and be worth 3% of max mana from Archangel in return. Thus, ignoring the mana cost reduction from Evangelism, Smite has a net negative mana cost if a priest has at least 22420 mana at level 85, which is more than reasonable, particularly for Disc. With the three big Smite talents, Smite heals someone for 45% of the damage dealt, and gives one stack of Evangelism, which lowers your mana consumption. Then those stacks can be exchanged for 3% max mana and 3% healing for 18 seconds via Archangel. With the healing build above, Smite will have a cast time of 2.0 seconds.To maintain perfect uptime on Archangel's healing boost, a player will spend 37% of their time smiting, assuming 50% haste. If a smite heals approximately 30% of what a flash heal does, then maintaining archangel is a 15% net loss of healing per second, but a 10% gain of healing per mana, and restores 15% of max mana per 18 seconds. So as I see it, keeping Archangel up is for regenning if mana is dangerously low, NOT for increasing throughput.Next I considered keeping Evangelism stacked, but NOT using Archangel. Keeping Evangelism up requires 1.33 seconds per 15 seconds, and yields a 6% healing per second loss, but a 40% healing per mana increase. I think preventing Evangelism from falling off is likely to be our default state, and then we can use Archangel as a throughput cooldown for things like Festergut's three-stack.Finally, I considered a more extreme case: Smite spam for the regen component, popping Archangel every 5 spells. It yields triple the regen of keeping Archangel up, but offers a whopping 77.5% reduced healing. This is similar to using your Hymn of Hope; you're getting mana but doing effectively no healing.(Edit again: Hymn of Hope is still much better for mana than smite spam.)So I think Smite is here to stay. Expect competent Disc priests to be doing about 150-200 DPS if everything is fine, and about 1500 DPS if they're oom or no one needs heals.
Espoire: Nice analysis. I like you. Welcome to the Priest forum. Please stick around.
Why the $%^& did they need to nerf disc and holy while not doing enything to those annoying shadow priests, i mean they just run at u fear u dot u mind flay mind blast and its done, while disc and holy is slow and fun, they just needed to nerf healers didnt they -.-
All I have to say is: Shadow priests now have face-melting orbs flying around them, and can conjure shadow clones that explode on impact. Can you say hell yes?
OK I can confirm that at level 80, with 51 points spent in Discipline, you start off with a base 20% bonus absorption from Mastery. Once you start adding Mastery rating, the absorption gets higher. The first two mastery components of the tree (the +healing and +regen) will not be affected by the Mastery rating.As an example, adding one piece of gear with 68 mastery rating will give you +3.71% bonus to your absorption effects.