WotLK Disc Priest Guide

[Aliena]

Hello and welcome to the Tankspot Discipline Priest Guide! My name is Aliena, and in this guide I'll cover everything you need to know about discipline priest talents, gearing choices, gemming and basic spell usage and rotations.

This guide is up to date as of patch 3.2.2., and some info may become irrelevant or even false in the future.

Priests are the only class capable of healing that has not one, but two talent trees dedicated to healing. Currently, holy priests are usually seen as raid healers while disc priests fill the niche of prevention and tank healing. That isn't to say that disc priests can't raid heal - especially on fights with a lot of predictable damage such as Ignis in Ulduar, disc raid healing is very effective. Our main healing tools are:

* Power Word: Shield
* Penance
* Flash Heal
* Prayer of Mending

Those should have spots on your main action bar and be easily accessible. Less commonly used but good to keep keybound and memorized are:

* Prayer of Healing
* Renew
* Greater Heal
* Divine Hymn
* Desperate Prayer
* Binding Heal

Also, you have two very useful utility spells at your disposal with a cooldown each. Those are:

* Pain Suppression
* Power Infusion

Being a good disc priest means knowing when to apply each tool in your toolbox, keeping an eye on your cooldown timers and being aware of how your talent choices change your base spells, since the disc tree turns some otherwise pretty weak base spells into amazing healing tools.

==Spells==

Let's have a look at those spells! The numbers in this part of the guide are based on 2100 spellpower as an average gearing level.

Power Word: Shield is a clear prevention heal that puts a protective bubble on a raid member for 30 seconds that absorbs incoming damage based on your spellpower. With 2100 spellpower it absorbs 6500 damage before wearing off. Once a person has been shielded, they get a weakened soul debuff placed on them that prevents the re-application of Power Word: Shield for 15 seconds. That also means it's a good idea to pre-shield your tank before he pulls so you can apply a new shield right when the old one wears off.

Penance is a channeled spell on a 12-second cooldown that either deals damage or heals based on who your target is. If it's friendly, Penance will heal it three times in two seconds for roughly 3000 damage each tick and 4500 on a crit. The first tick is basically instant and each tick has a chance to crit based on your crit percentage - and Penance, like every other spell, is affected by 25% spell haste from the Borrowed Time talent after casting a Power Word: Shield. Each tick also applies a stack of Grace which I'll talk about later on.

Flash Heal is our filler spell. This should be used to heal single target damage when Penance is on cooldown and you currently have no assigned target without a weakened soul debuff. Both Penance and Shield always have higher priority than Flash Heal. Flash Heal has a 1.5 second cast time and heals for about 4000 on a non-crit and 6500 on a crit.

Prayer of Mending is an amazing spell that no other class currently has an equivalent to. Once used on a target, it'll take effect once that target takes damage and after healing it, will bounce to another raid member in range that currently has the lowest health. Prayer of Mending has 5 charges and will bounce until either its charges run out or the current target does not take damage within thirty seconds. it's on a 10-second cooldown and should be used frequently on a tank or someone else that will predictably take frequent damage. With average gear, it heals for about 3500 on a non-crit and 5500+ on a crit. If you're running with another healing priest, make sure to watch who they tend to put Prayer of Mending on so both of them keep rotating.

Prayer of Healing is a party-wide AoE healing spell with a 3-second cast time, a 30 yard range and a hefty mana cost. With average gear it heals for about 3500 on non-crit and 5000+ on a crit. This should be used whenever whole parties have taken big chunks of damage and will predictably not take anymore damage in the near future so shielding them would be useless.

Renew loses a lot of its value for discipline priests since you cannot pick up Empowered Renew nor the related procs, so it'll never end up being one of your main spells, but especially if you pick up Improved Renew in the holy tree with leftover talents, it has limited use as a filler spell used on tanks. HoTs never hurt. A basic renew with the improved renew will heal for about 1400per tick and cannot crit.

Desperate Prayer is a potent instant self-heal with a 2-minute cooldown that should be used as an emergency heal when you see your own health dipping low quickly, or when you know you're about to take an inevitable chunk of damage. It heals for about 6500 on a non-crit with average gear and 10000 on a crit.

Greater Heal has certainly seen better days. Currently it's a fairly slow, weak and inefficient single target heal that will find little to no use outside of 10-man raids and emergency tank heals. With average gear it heals for about 9000 on a non-crit and 13000 on a crit. At best and at the expense of five talent points it has a 2.5 second cast time.

Divine Hymn is an extremely potent and smart channeled AoE heal on a 10 minute cooldown timer. This is comparable to a druid's Tranquility spell, except every tick it'll pick the three nearby lowest-health targets to heal regardless of party. It'll tick a total of 4 times on up to three people each time and heals for roughly 5500 non-crit and 7500 on a crit.

Binding Heal should be used whenever you take damage at the same time as another person. In encounters where the raid takes constant damage it can take the role as filler spell instead of Flash Heal. While it's fairly expensive as far as mana goes, it's a lot more efficient than Flash Heal when it heals its full potential. With average gear it heals for about 4200 on each target on a non-crit and 6000+ on a crit.

Power Infusion is a handy little tool that increases the target's casting speed by 20% and decreases the mana cost of all their spells by 20% for 15 seconds. Generally it's best to use this on caster DPS to increase their throughput - good examples would be a shadow priest or lock or mage during add AoE phases. In select situations it may be most beneficial to target yourself or a fellow healer with Power Infusion, but you should only do that if you're indeed in a troubled moment. PI is an altruistic spell first and foremost.

In the event you can predict big damage spikes on a tank, Pain Suppression is your best friend. Often you'll be asked to use it in a sort of cooldown chain to counteract high damage abilities bosses do, but sometimes you'll be able to apply it at your leisure. Either way, Pain Suppression reduces the target's damage taken by 40% and increases its resistance to dispel mechanics by 65% for 8 seconds. It also reduces the target's threat level by 5%, but these days that shouldn't phase a tank much if he's doing his job correctly.

That covers just about any healing spell you'll ever need to know about for raiding purposes.

==Spec==

Next up are specs. Discipline specs are pretty straightforward and basic. You don't have a whole lot of wiggle room in the disc tree, it's recommended to put at least 57 points into it and almost all of them are staple talents. What you pick up in the holy tree on the other hand is almost completely up to you.

Let's start in the discipline tree and work our way down. In the first tier, as with any priest spec, Twin Disciplines is your talent of choice. Even though disc priests use less instants than holy priests do, you'll gain some benefits from it and the alternative is next to useless in PVE.

In the second tier, pick up Improved Power Word: Fortitude and Improved Inner Fire. As with holy, if you find yourself in a situation where you're pondering picking up Silent Resolve, your tank is not performing up to par.

The third tier is where we're moving from convenience talents to actually useful ones! Pick up Meditation, which is a staple talent to all priest specs since most if not all our gear comes with spirit on it and would be rather useless to us since the WotLK spirit nerfs if it wasn't for Meditation. It's also a good idea to pick up Inner Focus right next to Meditation, which makes your next spell free of mana cost and gives it 25% additional chance to crit. This is a really good talent in combination with Divine Hymn and other expensive spells. Lastly, pick up Improved Power Word: Shield, also in the third tier, to get a 15% increased absorption amount on each shield you cast.

In the fourth tier, grab Mental Agility to reduce mana cost of instant spells by 10%. This comes in handy for Power Word: Shield, Prayer of Mending, Renew, PI and PS.

In the 5th tier, Mental Strength and Soul Warding are your staples. Mental Strength increases your total Intellect by 15%, which especially coupled with a paladin's Blessing of Kings is quite a chunk of mana and becomes more valuable as your gear level goes up, and Soul Warding is one of the defining talents that makes disc shields a viable play style as it takes away the 4 second cooldown on casting Power Word: Shield as well as 15% of its mana cost.

Both Focused Power and Enlightenment in the 6th tier are staple throughput talents - 4% additional healing and 6% haste for a total of 5 talent points is an amazing steal.

Power Infusion in tier 7 and Improved Flash Heal should both be no-brainers. Flash Heal is one of your staple heals and any improvement to it is nice. Focused Will in the same tier is an additional 3% crit on all your spells at the expense of 3 talent points. It's part of most disc priests' spec, but if you absolutely want to pick up something that's more valuable to you at the expense of Focused Will, go ahead.

Moving on to tier 8, Rapture is a big part of the reason disc priests are as mana efficient as they are. Everytime your Power Word: Shield is completely used up, you gain 2.5% of your total mana and the target of your shield gains free mana, rage, energy or runic power. An absolute staple talent and part of the reason you should be using shields as much as you can when there's a chance of your target taking damage soon.

Renewed Hope is yet another talent woven into the disc tree to make Shields a staple - halfway through the disc tree it's already gone from an expensive 3500 damage absorption on a cooldown to a reasonably cheap 7000 damage absorption without a cooldown that triggers a whole bunch of amazing effects on both you and the target. Renewed Hope reduces damage taken by you and all friendly party and raid targets by 3% for 20 seconds after casting a shield.

Aspiration is very useful if you use Penance a lot (which you should be) and the reduced cooldowns on PI and PS are an added cookie.

Pain Suppression in tier 9 is also a clear staple. Divine Aegis gets triggered on a critical heal and absorbs 30% of the amount healed within the next 12 seconds. A worthwhile investment for 3 points. Grace is a clear tank healing throughput talent that stacks a buff on the last target you healed which increases healing received from you by 3% per stack. You can stack it up to three times for a total increase of 9%.

Borrowed Time in the 10th tier is the last talent that turns Power Word: Shield into an absolute great spell. Everytime you cast a shield, your next spell will gain 25% spell haste in addition to the haste you already have. Additionally, your shields will absorb an amount equal to 40% of your spellpower on top of what it already absorbs. If you run with our 2100 spellpower example from earlier, that's an extra 840 absorbed damage per shield.

To finish up the disc tree, pick up Penance. Staple heal. Get it, get used to its cooldown, apply & love it!

Now you should have somewhere around 14 talent points left for the holy tree. How you split those up is really entirely up to you apart from two things. You really want to pick up Holy Specialization in tier 1 and Inspiration in tier 3. 5% extra crit chance on holy spells and 10% less physical damage taken after you crit for your target - especially if your target is a tank - is incredibly useful.

Disc specs, as mentioned, have very little wiggle room, but if you absolutely want to grab a talent that I haven't introduced because you feel uncomfortable without it in your playing style, go right ahead and pick it up. What I've shown you is the cookie cutter disc spec, the one that has to be comfortable using it is YOU.

There are only 4 useful glyphs for discipline healing, and one of them I only include in the odd case that you're a disc priest almost entirely assigned to raid healing. That glyph would be Glyph of Prayer of Healing. Should that not be the case, you should run with a setup of:

* Glyph of Penance
* Glyph of Power Word: Shield
* Glyph of Flash Heal

Glyph of Penance reduces the cooldown of Penance by two seconds. Combined with Aspiration, which reduces it by another 20%, you end up with an 8 second cooldown which isn't half bad. Glyph of Power Word: Shield instantly heals the target for 20% of the amount it will absorb. This effect can crit. With our 2100 spellpower that's around 1200 health healed per shield cast. Glyph of Flash Heal reduces its mana cost by 10%.

Minor Glyphs will not directly affect your throughput or efficiency, but Glyph of Levitate and Glyph of Fortitude are usually good picks for convenience. Also, Glyph of Shadowfiend is moderately useful if you tend to summon the bugger in the wrong moment and it dies instantly to some sort of annoying AoE.

==Gearing, what to aim for==

As one of three cloth caster classes, you'll always face gear competition. It's all the more important to know what you want and look for in gear. Lots of stats are good for us, I'll list them in
the order of how I rate their importance.

* Intellect
* Spellpower
* Crit/Haste
* Spirit/MP5
* Stamina

Since Wrath of the Lich King, Intellect has been the most potent and useful regen stat we have. Not only does it enlarge your mana pool, it also greatly affects how much mana you regenerate from replenishment, shadowfiend and hymn of hope, increases your critical strike rate (around 150 Intellect equal 1% critical strike rate) and gives you additional MP5 based on your total Spirit and Intellect. There's been the question of how much Intellect is enough Intellect, but this is a really tough one to answer. I almost want to say "never!", because really, you can't go wrong with intellect, but it also depends on the level of content you raid and your usual raid setup. If you only raid normal modes and have constant access to innervate and mana tide, your need for intellect will be a lot lower than mine, so instead I'll say: If you don't run out of mana and are comfortable with your mana pool, you have enough intellect and should instead stack:

Spellpower. Spellpower is the easiest and most straightforward throughput stat. The more spellpower, the bigger your heals. Also, the bigger your heals, the bigger your overheals, but on the whole spellpower is the most direct throughput increase you can get. Not to mention it also affects your Power Word: Shield absorption and hence the glyph heal.

Critical Strike Rating and Haste Rating are nice for a disciple priest just like any other class, but you should pick up plenty of both of them through gear and talents as is. Don't forget to factor in Borrowed Time, which should be in effect for most your actual spell casts and Focused Will as well as Holy Specialization for an extra 8% crit.

Unlike Holy Priests, we don't gain anything from Spirit other than mana regen. Our spirit is not converted in part to spellpower, so there's no reason for us to be picking up spirit other than what we already get on our gear. The same goes for MP5. If you need mana regen, improve your Intellect.

As for Stamina... we all need it. Stamina automatically goes up as your gear level increases. Unless your gear level is way below the level of content you're doing, you'll pretty much always have enough of it.

==Enchants and Gemming==

Discipline priest enchants are very straightforward. I'll list what's generally considered the best choice for each slot.

Head: Arcanum of Burning Mysteries, the 30 Spellpower/20 Critical Strike Rating, available at the Kirin Tor Quartermaster at Revered Reputation would be the best choice. Alternatively you may prefer the Arcanum of Blissful Mending, which adds 30 Spellpower and 10MP5 and is available at the Wyrmrest Accord Quartermaster at Revered Reputation.

Shoulder: Greater Inscription of the Storm, which adds 24 Spellpower and 15 Critical Strike rating and is available at the Sons of Hodir Quartermaster at Exalted Reputation would be the number one choice, or alternatively Greater Inscription of the Crag, same place and rep.

Back: Darkglow (for mana) or Lightweave (for throughput) Embroidery for a tailor, 23 Haste otherwise.

Chest: 10 Stats would be your best choice.

Wrists: 30 Spellpower is the surpreme bracer enchant.

Weapon: 63 Spellpower for a One Hander, 81 for a Staff.

Hands: 28 Spellpower is pretty much the only useful caster enchant to gloves.

Legs: Brilliant Spellthread, which is 50 Spellpower and 20 Spirit is your go-to option.

Feet: Tuskarr's Vitality which adds 15 stamina and a slight run speed increase or alternatively 18 Spirit.

As far as gemming goes, there are different ways to gem your character. You can stack just one stat that you're lacking or that you favor and neglect all others or you can choose to gem for socket bonuses. Gemming pure spellpower is very viable for disc. If you choose to go for socket bonuses though, you should gem Runed Cardinal Rubies in red slots and Luminous Ametrines in yellow slots if you have a chance at the socket bonus for that piece. You'll need at least one blue gem to activate your meta gem, but other than that you may find it best to ignore socket bonuses featuring blue gems and putting Runed Cardinal Rubies instead.

There are several meta gems that you may find interesting. Widely considered as the best choice for healers is the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond, which gives you 21 Intellect and has a chance to restore 600 mana on spellcast. That effect, assuming you cast a spell about every 2 seconds, nets around 75MP5 on average.

Another valid throughput choice would be Ember Skyflare Diamond which gives you 25 spellpower and 2% Intellect and slightly less valuable but still valid - Beaming Earthsiege Diamond, which gives you 21 critical strike rating and 2% Mana.

That about covers the basics of successful discipline priesting. Thanks for reading!

[Goomba]

woot! awesome!

I would add the link below to another forum on tankspot for info about learning some spell rotations for taking advantage of the talents listed above, especially for those just switching to disc for heals, this one is awesome...

http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f207/...sc-priest.html

some personal nuances- I don't use flash of light...at all....ever....I'm considering respeccing to try it again with the 3 talents and glyph, but I just can't get into flash of light....I'd rather boost toss Prayer of Healing out and give more than just my tank some divine aegis action or toss a renew out there...I may change that, and my 10-man isn't downing toc hardmodes, so I may have to reconsider later, but that spell just always seemed like a waste of casting time and mana....that probably means I need to spend some time working with it, but hey...I'll take that challenge another day...

renew- I'm guessing my attachment to this spell is leftover from my days as a holy spec, but I find it to be useful enough to grab a glyph for.....again, a lot of disc folks will say that I should swap that out for flash of light in my thinking, but I haven't found it to work better for my playstyle...spamming shields and renews periodically just helps on some fights...

also, having run holy, shadow, and disc, I've found that disc is more nuanced than any spec I've run, meaning it has a learning curve for maximizing output and effectiveness that feels steeper than the others to me....might just be personal, but that's my experience....I can spam shields, etc, but getting all the synergy out of this spec has taken more time for me....and I doubt I'm there yet...

I use power infusion on myself quite a bit, either to boost throughput when I can't spam shields or during burst dps phases like on Icehowl when other healers have raid dmg under control.....very effective, but situational, as Aliena points out...


finally, STICKY THIS THREAD! ALIENA'S GUIDE ROCKS! THANK YOU FOR DOING IT!!

[Chamenas]

Thanks for the guide. I read a decent bit of it, but I imagine it will be read a lot more as my priest reaches level 80. Disc healing looks like a lot of fun and I expect it to be my primary spec with holy second. Guides like these help people jump into their role faster, rather than being forced to learn all of it through trial and error.

[Refusetoheal]

Back: Darkglow (for mana) or Lightweave (for throughput) Embroidery for a tailor, 23 Haste otherwise.
I thought I am the only strange guy to use <Lightweave> for healing.

Purified Dreadstone might be a good choice for blue sockets if bonus are +sp and if your running disc/holy spec for raids like me.

Very nice Aliena. after reading both your holy / disc post, it just reminds me on why I always love healing on my priest.

[Doc309]

LOL what happened to the trolling about real healers being holy?

Doc

nvm it's in the holy guide....

[Matthras]

Back: Darkglow (for mana) or Lightweave (for throughput) Embroidery for a tailor, 23 Haste otherwise.
I thought I am the only strange guy to use <Lightweave> for healing.

Nope. I use Lightweave too mainly because I don't have mana regen issues. In all honesty, the only things you should really modify if you're having mana regen issues would be your trinkets (there's a few more complexities and exceptions, but I'll keep it simple for now).
For healers starting out Darkglow is pretty much a given, and then as your gear gets better start to wean off it.

Personally I don't think anything is difficult to learn. You just need to have an open and malleable mind.

I'd suggest an addition for the two different roles of Disc healing in raids, but I think that's covered in another thread.

[Ollin]

There are several meta gems that you may find interesting. Widely considered as the best choice for healers is the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond, which gives you 21 Intellect and has a chance to restore 600 mana on spellcast. That effect, assuming you cast a spell about every 2 seconds, nets around 75MP5 on average.

Another valid throughput choice would be Ember Skyflare Diamond which gives you 25 spellpower and 2% Intellect and slightly less valuable but still valid - Beaming Earthsiege Diamond, which gives you 21 critical strike rating and 2% Mana.

Another good meta for disc priests who leverage crit over haste is the Revitalizing Skyflare Diamond. Not for the 11 mp5, but rather for the +3% crit heal effect. With as much to gain from the size of our heals as we have, it's not a bad choice if you don't run out of mana even without an Insightful Earthsiege (and easy to activate at 2 reds).

[NewfieDave]

Good job covering the basics. Here are some more advanced Disc tips:

1) Making proper use of Borrowed Time procs: every time you cast a PW:S you will get 25% haste. This effect ends after 6 seconds, or after you cast any spell with a cast time (ie. Flash Heal). Instant casts and channeled spells still gain the 25% haste benefit, but do not consume the buff. This means that a "rotation" of PW:S > Penance > PoM > FH will allow all three spells following the PW:S to gain 25% haste. You can maintain very high Borrowed Time uptime if you learn to weave your heals/shields effectively. This greatly reduces the need to gear for haste, allowing you to focus more on crit.

2) Raid frames: I use Grid for raid frames, but other addons will do the trick. The goal when setting up your raid frames is to be able to clearly see who has PW:S and weakened soul at a glance. PW:S is your go-to spell on any target without weakened soul; not knowing who you can/can't target with it will result in wasted time.

3) Divine Aegis stacking: With DA fully talented (and it should be), your crits provide absorbtion equal to 30% of the amount healed. Using Aliena's example FH crit of 6500, this would provide a bubble worth 1950. That might not seem like a big deal, but these bubbles stack with each other up to 10k absorb. It is important to note that overhealing DOES proc DA bubbles, even 100% overhealing. It requires 33.3k worth of critical healing to achieve the 10k bubble. This can be done easily while waiting for a pull by simply spamming Penance on your tank every cooldown. Just watch the DA buff on your target to make sure it doesn't run out of time, and cast a few FHs between Penances if Penance doesn't crit.

4) Spam Healing: Building on the last point about DA stacking, the most effective method of tank healing in a Disc Priest's arsenal is to spam the tank with Penance/FH. A high crit rate (35% or more raid buffed is preferable in decent gear) will result in a steady stream of DA procs, and this has the same benefit as increasing the effective health of your tank. No other class can smooth out tank damage like a Disc Priest.

5) Renew and Greater Heal: I don't usually use either as Disc, but they aren't without value given the proper circumstances. Renew is greatly outshined by PW:S, and the value of one more HoT on the tank is marginal if you raid with Resto Druids. It's mostly a waste of mana and a global cooldown without any chance to proc bubbles. GH is a hottly contested topic. Theorycrafting shows it's better HPS and HPM than FH, but at the cost of needing 5/5 Divine Fury and 3/3 Improved Healing to prop it up. GH also becomes more valuable as you gain more and more haste, compared to FH which will cap out at 1 second with only 154 haste rating given full raid buffs and Borrowed Time. GH would require 2442 haste rating to hit the global cooldown cap. Bottom line: if you are on the cutting edge of progression and struggling with tank damage then you might want to try a spec that includes all the GH talents. All other content can be healed just fine without using GH at all (and some people argue that even the cutting edge content doesn't need GH).

[Ruilo]

Thanks

[gabbu]

I have one question to ask. Where does POM sit in disc arsenal, do you use it every cd or what?

[Ollin]

I have one question to ask. Where does POM sit in disc arsenal, do you use it every cd or what?

It's still the single most efficient HpM spell in our spellbook, and while it benefits from grace it doesn't affect the stack.

Prayer of Mending gets used every cooldown weather it's finished bouncing or not.

...then there are fights like Hodir, Ignus, and Twin Valks where it's so stupid-good it's almost worth tossing out when you're shadow.

[Goomba]

and anoob's leeching swarm on toc25.....it procs faster then the cd, but always worth it...

after some misgivings and practice and trial and error, I admit I'm giving up renew and taking my points from some greater heal stuff in holy tree to put into flash heal in disc tree....I know there's a lot about how awesome this is, but I didn't see the evidence, but now that my haste is at 300ish, flash heal is sick, and a million times better than renew

ty to all the advocates of this who talked about why it works so I could understand how to spec to help this out...

[chun]

Great Guide! Thank you for posting it.


I have a question with regards to pre-shielding the raid.
Let's use Hodir 10 as an example (frozen blows). It's not
too bad to get the raid shielded, but as the shields wear off,
is it best to reshield then renew, or just reshield and move to
the next target? Particularly in the case of the disc priest being
more on the raid.

It's a holdover from my level 70holy days, but I still use renew on
occasion, and am not sure if that's the right decision. The one
good thing about bubble/renew is that method lets me keep grace
stacked on the target I want.

Grace seems pretty important, but keeping it stacked on the right
target gets problematic!

Oh, and with regards to the PoM discussion above, I've found
"prayer of mending tracker" to be a handy add on. It helps
me decide when I want to recast since I can see the #of jumps
left, and the current PoM target (and then determine whether they
will be taking damage soon).


Thanks again and cheers.

[Splug the Priest]

I've been looking for a mod (or setting in a mod) to track the current size of a Divine Aegis on a target. Does something like this exist? Am I blind?

Also, I'm finding that on fights that have a lot of AoE damage, or high predictable damage (Heroic Beasts/XT Hard) the synergy between mass PW:S'ing the raid and a good resto druid is amazing.

[oraculum]

As a Disc/Holy Priest I find I generally go Disc for one of 3 reasons.
1. Faction Champs... interrupts are not fun.
2. The tank is getting smashed... really hard and needs more EH. So I spam heals on him (think alagon).
3. The raid needs more effective health via PW:S, to give healers and them more time to react to large bursts of damage.

The 3rd is the reason I spec Disc the most. My advice for a disc priest who is a PW:S spammer, that you aim for enough haste to bring your GCD down to one second with Borrowed time up (12% haste from gear should be enough to do this). After that, since I never seem to have mana issues, SP seems to be the best stat to stack.

As a Tank healer, I still enjoy the haste but focus more on Crit as my DA does nothing until I crit. I usually aim for about 45-50% raid buffed crit when I am tank healing.

[oraculum]

I have a question with regards to pre-shielding the raid.
Let's use Hodir 10 as an example (frozen blows). It's not
too bad to get the raid shielded, but as the shields wear off,
is it best to reshield then renew, or just reshield and move to
the next target? Particularly in the case of the disc priest being
more on the raid.

Honestly the only reason you should renew the target you just shielded is if you are on the move or you know they will be taking more than 7k dmg in the next 3 seconds or they are low on HP when you shield them.. but even then a direct heal following the shield is probably the better solution.

As far as pre-shielding, you should almost never have shields expiring.
Lets take heroic Beasts for example.

You know Gormakk the impaler will do his stop every <30 seconds, so just preshield the melee. And tank heal inbetween shields to tank advantage of your bonus haste.

When the worms come out, you know all the melee on the immobile worm will get smashed with a whirlwind. To prevent gibs, if you preshield them before this happens, not only will they take little to no damage from the spin, but they will also be protected from getting insta-gibbed by a whirl+acid combo.

Finally on icehowl, you know when he'll crash, so start applying shields <30 seconds beforehand. Assuming no one gets breathed during that time, then his crash will still pop the bubble. If someone does get breathed, then you helped prevent a breath + crash death

[oraculum]

I've been looking for a mod (or setting in a mod) to track the current size of a Divine Aegis on a target. Does something like this exist? Am I blind?

The best a mod could do is track the absorption you put up on the target. It would not be able to track your absorptions used. The reason for this is that there is simply no way to track who absorptions are attributed to via the combat log.

[Goomba]

I've been looking for a mod (or setting in a mod) to track the current size of a Divine Aegis on a target. Does something like this exist? Am I blind?

Also, I'm finding that on fights that have a lot of AoE damage, or high predictable damage (Heroic Beasts/XT Hard) the synergy between mass PW:S'ing the raid and a good resto druid is amazing.

on the Divine Aegis size, I haven't seen anything mod-wise that tells me how much it is, I just kinda run the math in my head...if I know I just critted flash heal, I know they just got a shield for around 2k....rough math works on this because there are additional damage reducers (inspiration for example) that make this impossible to make precise, and not useful on the fly if it is precise, imo.....I kinda just know that penance, pw:s glyph, and poh will Divine Aegis for 500-1k, flash heal for around 1-2k, and greater heal for 2k+.....but this can all vary by how much spellpower I'm running and buffs, procs, etc....so again, in my head, its a little one, medium one, and big one...lol

and woot to the synergy thing....disc priest and resto drood is amazing....i thought droods were awesome before I went disc, but now I'm in love with this team, personally....I do find that this synergy is there with most cross-class/spec healers from the disc priest, but resto drood/disc priest sure is a strong one in my experience

[Splug the Priest]

Yeah, many of the "major panic healing" situations like XT's tantrums on Hard and people getting more than 2x stacks of the fire debuff on Heroic Beasts (Yes, I know it shouldn't happen, but it does) suddenly become a non issue with a big PW:S and a druid rolling hots.

Its fantastic.

[Moloch]

Thanks for the guide. I was noobing up disc priesting a bit more than I thought I was.