hello healers,

I was reading Worldofraids and the front article was regarding the effectiveness of a disc priest in a raid... I have always been skeptical of them because its hard to measure just where the stand on the other healers scale...

I currently have a priest and have recently been using grid on my paladin, I havent pushed grid onto my priest until im satisfied with how it plays out on my paladin... Somethings about grid frustrate me and others can be very nice. For instance debuffs, its easy to add the debuff in there that shows something that needs to be cleansed but lets say I shield a target and they gain "weakened soul" debuff... i know that i can add the debuff in the list, but lets say someone gets a disease ... which debuff has the higher priority and will be shown? Say for instance Necrotic plague and Weakened soul are on the same target.... in the raid frames what will i see? .

oh I would like to try disc, but I was wondering if i could get some tips on addons / ui enhancements or rotation tips...

I figured it would be, pennance, shield, flash, flash, pennance for a single target and shield spam for the raid on aoe stuff..

Disc priest's shielded damage now shows up on world of logs as effective healing - it's just Recount that doesn't recognize it. Disc priests are awesome, I plan to heal as Disc when I get my 78 priest to 80. :)

RE: grid..
Here's how I've organized my grid. I use GridStatusRaidIcons, which shows the raid markers. I have it set to priority 90. I also use GridStatusRaidDebuff which will show the icon of a debuff in a raid encounter, eg Necrotic Plague. I set this to priority 99. These are the only two items I have on my center icon, and they're filtered by priority so I never have an issue where I am unable to see the debuff (which is almost always more important; unless you're healing Penetrating Cold. in which case, you need to see the Icon, not the debuff. For this, you can go into the settings for GridStatusRaidDebuff and lower the Priority for Penetrating Cold *only* to anything under 90).

By default, you can use Top Left, Top RIght, Bottom Left, and Bottom RIght corners on each health bar. You can set each of these corners to dispellable debuffs (eg Top Right - Blue - Magic debuff; Top Left - Green - Poison debuff, etc) for all four corners.

You can also download GridIndicatorSideIcons, which will ad a small square, just like you'd see in a corner, on the right and/or left side of each health bar. You could assign these to buffs you cast, such as Weakend Soul or Renew.

You can also use Borders - so that a health bar will show up with a border of a color you specify for a particular buff/debuff.

Also, you're using Clique to heal on Grid, right? :) It's vastly superior to targeting->pressing a key, imho.

Umm I would definitely suggest grid. The way I would suggest doing your debuffs is as follows:

Have all the major debuffs or cleanseable debuffs as center icon (such as like penetrating cold.. umm beacon on sindragosa, etc.. or cleansable stuff your in charge of like plague on Lich King). Then you can set up the stuff you want to know about in the corners.

For instance I have the upper left corner of every frame as the shield, so when they have a shield its solid white square, and when the shield is used but they still have weakened soul it turns grey (and neither is just blank). I also have renew in the left hand corner so you're not renewing the same person twice on accident, etc.

I didnt like using grid at first either, but once you go through the hassle of setting it all up it is very nice (or just steal someone elses from their UI.)

And Disc priest are very effective. They do look like shit on the healing meters, but if you look at World of Logs they're often top healing. They have virtually 0 overheal (since shields will almost never overheal unless you're putting them on people who wont use it, which you shouldnt be doing in the first place) and can prevent a lot of deaths with their shields (each shield will be about 8-9k dmg absorbed) making life a lot easier for the other healers and 'slowing' the heal pace down a bit. Also, disc brings a lot of nice buffs to the table (PS, Power Infusion, 3% reduce dmg) where holy brings little (just guardian spirit).


And then for rotation it depends. If you want tank healing or raid healing. Raid healing you're just spamming shield the entire time, on 25 man this will keep you busy the entire time and the only other thing you should actively be doing is pom'ing on cooldown. Also keep an eye out on the tanks even if you're not assigned to them, a pennance to the tank can save their life.

And if you're tank healing keep weakened soul on them the entire time, as well as renew, pennace and pom on cooldown and spend the rest of the time flash of healing (some people prefer greater heal but now with the tier 10 2 piece its pretty much ruled out.). If you're ever assigned to tank healing you definitely want to be Disc. Not only higher heals but 8k absorb from shield and a ~10kish absorbs from DA make it a lot easier on other healers again by not making it as up and down on the tanks health.


edit: what Amorene said basically =) And yes definitely use clique in conjunction with grid (for disc I have shift - click as shield so you can just shift click all over grid basically, or as renew as holy same thing)

I just use mouseover macros for shield and renew... Seems to work out well. Shield is easier to manage imo since you just can't cast it on people when they have Weakened Soul. Also, I kinda of just use a rotation when I'm shield spamming people.

For raid healing... just shield when the person doesn't have shield... and flash heal when they have weakened soul.

Penance is really awesome. If tanks are being kept up, it doesn't do much as I just cast it as a preventive heal when the tanks might take some dmg... but it's a good quick heal for people in trouble.

But, shield, DA, mace proc? Mitigationnnnnnnnnnn....

At least WoL makes it look like I'm actually doing something >.>


EDIT: From WoR. "Right now, a lot of top guilds are working towards the last fight in the game that hasn't been done yet: The 25-man Lich King hard mode. Interestingly enough, this fight apparently requires multiple discipline priests in the raid. With Infest hitting for around 15 000 damage, shields seem to be the way most guilds choose to handle it. "I don't like the fact that this completely negates the 'Bring the player, not the class.' No one can do LK 25 hard mode without shields," Poptisse says."

Yeah for the mouseover macros! (My personal favorite, my fat fingers hate hitting the shift and alt keys...)

On another note, when is lemmings going to recruit a competent disc priest?

I use grid side icons for my priest buffs/debuffs.

There are a few things that make grid awesome.
Enabling center text 2 - This gives you another text field, which means you can drop the persons name lower, and have a second area for some sort of text (and see names of people who are dead, etc)
Dispellable buffs (or fk'ing important) in center icon.
Use the corner indicator/color combination for things you need to track. I track agro, rejuv's and pom's this way.
Grid Side Icons is awesome. This allows you to set icons to display on each side of each cell. I use these for priest buffs/spells.... Right icon shows PWS/Weakened Soul. Left Icon shows renew. I use power aura's to track bounces on PoM remaining.

Disc priests are awesome, as a mage I love them... (as both Veld and Janya can attest, I pester them constantly). Recount doesn't show absorbs... so it doesn't do them justice, as mentioned above. Healing with a disc priest is extremely noticeable though...