Disc Priest varying performance help if possible!

[Erikklk 0]

Hello there i'm fairly new to the Disc Priest where as i have always mained Restoration Shaman until now when i decided to switch to Disc healing which has been a great amount of fun. The problem however i'm facing is that my performance seems to be VERY inconsistant where i can at on one boss be extremely active predicting damage etc and then another boss where i just lose all my momentum (Helya in Trial of Valor as an example)

So i decided to post here for maybe some advice on how i might be able to improve. Here are the logs from our last raid
Note my name is "Visaman" in these logs and i have absolutely no clue how to read Warcraftlogs in the slightest
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/qzLfJm4ChXydFgWA#comparesearchplayer=12&comparesearchmetric=hps&type=summary

Here is also and armory link http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/character/chromaggus/Visaman/simple

As said before if at all possible i could get some tips on how i might fix this issue i seem to be having i would be delighted and grateful for any help at all!

If i missed to include something please do tell!
 

[Dradreydreys 3]

First thing I notice is you tend to save light's wrath as an emergency heal in fights you don't know.

While that's kind of fine (because you don't know the fight) it's going to drop your HPS quite a bit only using 2 Light's Wraths against Helya, for instance.  LW is free, so it's an extremely mana efficient burst when you have a decent chunk of Atonements out.  Don't be afraid to use it if you know the Raid doesn't take a ton of damage for a while.  For instance, with Helya, the raid generally doesn't take much damage through the Add phase unless someone screws up badly.  So it's OK for you to Light's Wrath during tentacles + breaths for the tanks, then save it for phase 3 during add phase.  In your log, it looks like you never used it at all until you hit phase 3, period.

Second thing: It's OK to use shadowmend in fights like Helya or Il'gynoth (except Il'g mythic, that one's totally a burst healing fight with added mechanics).  They're much more about spot healing than burst, and your best spot healing ability is Shadowmend.  It might not be the optimal way to play in all fights, but if you look at current top logs on Helya normal you'll notice a decent chunk of priests using Shadowmend.   Unless you notice spiky damage patterns throughout the fight because of the way your raid plays or something, don't be afraid to utilize it.  Granted, doing so is probably going to require you pick up a decent ilvl Amalgam's Seventh Spine from BRH.

You also might want to drop Twist of Fate/Mind Bender.  Mind bender is very much a choice thing.  If you're OK with losing the huge mana efficiency of Shield Discipline then MB can be an OK cooldown.  But looking at your logs, Twist of Fate's uptime is pretty bad in the fights you do poorly in.  Contrition is a great alternative, as it gives your atonement 20% extra duration.  In any fight with consistent damage (Dragons, Helya) it's a pretty significant boost to have.  

A significant portion of Disc healing is just learning the fights and knowing when to be bursting, though.   For ToV currently that's:

Odyn -

• Ramp up just as adds die and Odyn starts casting Unerring Blast.  After the blast, use Light's Wrath or Penance+Shadowfied/MB
• Try and keep a decent chunk of atonements up during phase 2 when shatters are constant and keep purge the wicked on Odyn+his add.  If you can't, make sure to Halo after shatters.

Guarm-

• Ramp up slightly before (and while standing in) the three breaths.  Use Light's Wrath afterwards.
• Ramp up before he leaps to do his charge.  During charge, use penance and as the charge finishes, Halo+Shadowfiend/MB as he comes back.
• Keep 100% Atonement uptime on both tanks as they'll always be taking high damage.

Helya- 

• No "great" ramp up points in this fight.  If you don't have all kinds of reduction cooldowns to soak tentacles, use your bursts and a PW:S on anyone soaking them.  
• Prioritize anyone who has the debuff for Atonements.  Even moreso if you didn't have enough dispels for one or two targets.
• During wave phase, you can blow rapture if your raid soaks some waves or looks like they'll be late getting up to the platforms.  If they don't, you can still use it there to soak the random minion aggro damage.
• If Mariner ever looks like he's going to cast, you need to burst the raid.  Either with LW, or if it's on CD, Shadowfiend/MB

Also, your trinkets aren't very great choices.  

DPS trinkets are almost always bad on Disc right now because Blizzard nerfed them into uselessness specifically for the spec.  Plaguehive is only OK because of the large amount of haste on it, but you're better off with Amalgam's Seventh Spine as I said before.  Even high ilvl DPS trinkets are just terrible on us.  You can also grab Darkmoon Deck: Promises at 855, which is your BiS until nighthold.  Brinewater Slime in a Bottle is also a fairly good trinket right now for us, too.  

Edited November 19, 2016 by Dradreydreys

[Erikklk 0]

First of all thank you for taking ur time to respond "Dradreydreys"!
I'm amazed as to what someone can pick up just from looking at logs!

(Quick note about those logs that day on Odyn we decided to have some fun and see how much damage i could contribute if i just stayed on damage all the time seeing as we had 5 healers on at that point. I'll post last night's logs here from out Odyn Heroic attempts aswell https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/2AdqH69hRVZfj1gF) these logs should cower anything about the Odyn fight that you might have overlooked so sorry for the inconvinence.

Right then let's go into some of the choices i use and why i use them. You see "Mindbender" while i know it's not the most efficent mana regainer atm i personally like it because of the added healing it's damage does on people which i already have attonement on. And the thing is whenever i do go low on mana i always start thinking that if i were to use "Shield Discipline" and if i go low with it on that's it ima stay low throughout the rest of the fight, while with "Mindbender" i know in 1 minute i can get some mana back to keep healing. I've wanted to try "Power Word: Solace" for quite awhile now just cuz of the way i think how i use Mindbender. but last night we were missing one of our main healers in our Heroic Odyn attempts which is why i didn't wanna experiment with something new i'm not used with yet. I think as far as the level 60 talent choice that's my stand on it as to why i'm using "Mindbender" over any of the others

As for the level 75 talents i've always seen "Contrition" as u mentioned gives attonements a 3 extra seconds before disspearence as a bother the way i think is that if i were to use that talent and get those 3 extra seconds on my targets will i actually do some healing to those targets in those extra 3 seconds? like by the time those 3 seconds are added the target will have most likely already been healed up to full, which is why i generally want my attonements to end quick so i can focus on other targets that need the healing without wasting too much mana on it. I think that about cowers it for the "Contrition" talent as for "Power Infusion" i reckoned would be the strongest in this tier the thing about it is that i don't really see when i would need to use it like do i use it for burst? emergency healing? or when would the most optimal to use it. Things like that i have a very hard time to decide (Which you may notice on my "Rapture" casts) So with "Contrition" out of the question from the way i'm thinking and "Power Infusion" being well there i suppose it was only logical to me i'd go with the passive healing/damage increase from "Twist of Fate"  

As for the trinkets well where as the talents u can't really say what's a right or wrong talent personally atleast trinkets is a whole diffrent side of that. I've never been good at figuring out what the "best" trinkets would be for me as a Disc Priest whereas i just try to follow the Haste > Crit > Mastery prio as much as possible i thought the mana trinkets you mentioned was well kinda underwhelming since they don't contribute anything to my healing besides giving me slightly longer before going OoM which is suppose is a valid argument. But as for the trinket i would probably agree with you it's not the best setup atm personally i think it's my weakest part of my gear so far. Where if i got to replace one of them i'd probably replace the "Swarming Plaguehive" because i think "Naglfar Fare" is decent enough for just giving people some free absorbs from time to time. And well the "Swarming Plaguehive" i'm only using for the Haste really. I think that's about it on Trinkets aswell

Right into the gameplay then shall we?
You're definatly right about me using "Light's Wrath" as an emergency heal most of the time. I don't think i'd ever use it outside of an emergency heal or burst for whatever is coming up. Seeing as for fights like Helya from the 2 kills i've got on her now is what i could gather there are at no point in which i can "predict" raidwide damage where i can use "Light's Wrath" and maybeh as you said i should use "Shadowmend" on those kind of fights. Atm i only use "Shadowmend" as a real emergency heal on anyone going really low or know that damage are coming and that person won't survive otherwise but other than that "Shadowmend" i've personally just seen kinda like a waste to be honest. And maybeh that's something i gotta change on my way of thinking on using it i'm not entierly sure.

Anyways i think that about cowers most of the things i wanted to reply with i'd love to hear more responces to this if at all possible and see how i'd go and improve these inconsistant healing i've run into.

Either way i'm very grateful that "Dradreydreys" you took ur time to look through some of the logs and reply with as much info as you did truly amazing dude!

Again if i missed anything please let me know and i'll try to reply as fast as i can!
(Please note if anything is not coming of as a clear message to you i'll just blame it on that English isn't my first language and Swedish is screwing me over) ^^'

Edited November 19, 2016 by Erikklk

[Dradreydreys 3]

7 hours ago, Erikklk said:

And the thing is whenever i do go low on mana i always start thinking that if i were to use "Shield Discipline" and if i go low with it on that's it ima stay low throughout the rest of the fight, while with "Mindbender" i know in 1 minute i can get some mana back to keep healing. I've wanted to try "Power Word: Solace" for quite awhile now just cuz of the way i think how i use Mindbender.

As I said, taking Mindbender is a choice that's valid to make.  If you feel you need the minute cooldown for the burst healing, that's fine.  However, it will always generate less mana than Shield Discipline OR Solace.

I wouldn't recommend picking up Solace, though.  It does more damage than Smite and is a decent source of mana, yes.  But it also uses a GCD, which makes our burst window feel a little unwieldy, and Smite DOES have an absorb shield (even though that shield isn't very significant in raids) that will likely out-heal it unless you have a significant number of Atonements out.   Solace is a talent that's sitting right on the edge of being good, but Mind Bender is probably the better choice for consistent healing, and none of the talents in the tier even touch Shield discipline in raid Mana efficiency.  

As far as running out of mana while using it, here's another way to look at it:

In your logs last night (The heroic Odyn logs, using wipe 14, because it was the longest fight you had), Mindbender gave you 473,000 mana back.  (You can see that here: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/2AdqH69hRVZfj1gF#type=resources&source=3&fight=14&spell=100)

Now, count up the amount of Power Word: Shields you used (you can see that here: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/2AdqH69hRVZfj1gF#type=casts&source=3&fight=14)

Shield discipline returns 11000 mana per cast right now on max level Disc priests.  You casted it 74 times.  That means that it would have given you  814,000 mana back in that fight.  

814-473 = 341.  

That's 341,000 mana extra that you would have had.  The longer the fight goes (and the more PW:S casts you have) the further Shield Discipline will pull ahead.  The idea of Shield Discipline isn't to be a good mana generation talent, it's more so that you can just make better use of your mana overall.  You should have a much harder time actually running out of Mana while using it. :)

 

 

7 hours ago, Erikklk said:

like by the time those 3 seconds are added the target will have most likely already been healed up to full, which is why i generally want my attonements to end quick so i can focus on other targets that need the healing without wasting too much mana on it. I think that about cowers it for the "Contrition" talent as for "Power Infusion" i reckoned would be the strongest in this tier the thing about it is that i don't really see when i would need to use it like do i use it for burst? emergency healing? or when would the most optimal to use it. Things like that i have a very hard time to decide (Which you may notice on my "Rapture" casts) So with "Contrition" out of the question from the way i'm thinking and "Power Infusion" being well there i suppose it was only logical to me i'd go with the passive healing/damage increase from "Twist of Fate"  

In Raiding fights like Helya, or Dragons (ESPECIALLY Mythic Dragons) You likely will still be using the healing on those targets, as damage is pretty constant throughout those fights.  So yes, the extra 3 seconds is useful to have. :P  I agree with this notion more in 5-mans, as you're generally not going for really long duration fights in 5-mans and PI and ToF are significantly better than Contrition there.

When it comes to Power Infusion, It's generally worse than contrition right now, but if you take it, it should be used before you start building up Atonement.  Essentially, once you want to start casting Power Word: Radiance to blanket the Raid in Atonement (for a LW or Shadowfiend/MB burst) you'd want to use PI before it.  It makes the mana cost significantly lower, and will get the Atonement out faster so that when the burst actually happens you can cover it immediately.  

However, when it comes to that talent tier in raids I'd recommend taking Twist of Fate on hard content, but if it looks like you're not getting the buff often enough in the fight (below ~23%ish buff uptime), then take Contrition instead.  If you want to see how much uptime you have on Twist of Fate in your logs, just click your name in the healing or damage sections (so the top left says "Visaman", instead of "all allies", then click the Buffs tab.  It'll show you all the buffs you had in the fight as well as how much uptime you had on them.

 

 

8 hours ago, Erikklk said:

I've never been good at figuring out what the "best" trinkets would be for me as a Disc Priest whereas i just try to follow the Haste > Crit > Mastery prio as much as possible i thought the mana trinkets you mentioned was well kinda underwhelming since they don't contribute anything to my healing besides giving me slightly longer before going OoM which is suppose is a valid argument. But as for the trinket i would probably agree with you it's not the best setup atm personally i think it's my weakest part of my gear so far. Where if i got to replace one of them i'd probably replace the "Swarming Plaguehive" because i think "Naglfar Fare" is decent enough for just giving people some free absorbs from time to time. And well the "Swarming Plaguehive" i'm only using for the Haste really.

Sticking to the stat priority is fine, but Swarming Plaguehive's damage is really low on a Discipline priest.  Blizzard basically made all damaging trinkets do 1/3rd of the damage they normally do on Disc priests because that damage contributes to healing.  As a result, basically every damage trinket is worse than just Int/Haste gear.  

The reason mana efficiency trinkets are so good right now is simply because Disc can turn mana into healing much more than any class can.  Having more mana in a fight means you can cast more Power Word: Radiance.  And PW:R is extremely expensive on Mana, but when used properly to blanket the raid can basically cover every burst mechanic in the game and contribute a LOT of healing.

 

 

8 hours ago, Erikklk said:

You're definatly right about me using "Light's Wrath" as an emergency heal most of the time. I don't think i'd ever use it outside of an emergency heal or burst for whatever is coming up. Seeing as for fights like Helya from the 2 kills i've got on her now is what i could gather there are at no point in which i can "predict" raidwide damage where i can use "Light's Wrath" and maybeh as you said i should use "Shadowmend" on those kind of fights. 

How Light's Wrath is normally used is to build up a TON of atonements (like 17-20 Atonements) then use Light's Wrath to cover any raid-wide burst.  For example on Nythendra, as soon as the second rots go out, you can use either Rapture, then bubble a ton of people or use 5 Pleas into Power Word: Radiance spam until Volatile Rot happens on the tank.  When Volatile rot hits the whole raid, you immediately Light's Wrath and heal all the damage at once.

It's basically one of the two big bursts you have (the other being Penance->Shadowfiend/MindBender) 

So it's totally fine to use it the way you have, which is predicting damage then blowing it while you have a number of atonements out.  That's the way it's normally used!  

But on certain fights, damage phases like that just don't happen.  And when they don't, you have to determine when the best time to use Light's Wrath is, because it's still one of your best healing tools, so you still want to be using it on as many bursts as possible.  This is more why I said you should look at using it more.  It's fine to use it as you have, but on Helya, waiting 7 minutes to use it at all is kind of a waste! :P  

If you want an example of a fight without any real predictable damage, here's my Mythic Dragons Fight:  https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/gafcYLkxqbCAvmzV#fight=5&type=casts&source=15&pins=0%24Separate%24%23244F4B%24casts%240%240.0.0.Any%24151613150.0.0.Priest%24true%240.0.0.Any%24false%24207946

I linked this specifically to the "casts" section, so you can see how many times I casted everything, and a pinned Light's Wrath casts, so you can see when exactly I used it.

For the first 2 minutes I didn't use it because that time is somewhat low damage (outside shadowburst, which I dispelled).  But I also knew that damage would be coming pretty soon.  As the medium damage phase started (about 2 minutes in) I started using Light's Wrath almost on cooldown (about 30s off on one of them) just to do some burst healing, even though there was no huge predictable damage phase.

You can also see I use a lot of Shadowmend there, where normally on regular fights I don't use it much at all (here's my Ursoc Parse, where you'll see I do a ton of Radiance spam, but very little Shadowmend: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/8LxybWMqnNGj9pQh#fight=9&type=casts&source=14)

You're using it perfectly fine on fights like Odyn, though, where it always synced up with an unerring blast hit!  The only problem I think on that front is you could definitely have more Atonements out before you use it! 

[Lavish 0]

Dradreydreys, I made an account just to say thank you for those 2 posts! It's the most useful information on disc raid healing that I've found to date.

[Cheekyfinger 0]

I stopped playing Disc due to Guild requirements, but reading all this Dradreydreys has me levelling my Disc Priest again, just have to sneak her in to raids now. Good read with good insight.

[Erikklk 0]

Hello again!

Dradreydreys! i'd like to thank you for all the amazing insight you have given me back then, i personally feel like my healing has inproved alot since ur last reply.

Here are some logs on our Nighthold progression https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/xW97mGThyqDV1J2Z
I've been trying to get into how to read logs aswell and i do belive my healing has been on point!

I just wanted to come here and say thank you for all the amazing tips u've shared with us! Since i forgot todo that before (My bad mate)