WotLK Disc Priest Guide

[Razilius]

...and other times you will want to only bubble the tank and stack flash heals for Divine Aegis and use Penance where necessary (e.g Saurfang 25).

Bubbling members with Boiling Blood also helps a lot, just saying. :P

[Sebadoh]

TOLSTOY BELOW - READ AT YOUR OWN PERIL

To necr... I mean, revive an old thread, I'm interested in hearing some people's opinions on the new Disc changes.

I myself am not able to log on until either Friday or next Monday/Tuesday (new computer being shipped, this POS I'm using can't handle WoW), and did not play the PTR or Beta, so I am unable to give any first-hand experience. So this is largely educated guessing based on changes made, not the definitive account. Feel free to reply and disagree with my assertions!

You may notice a distinct lack of QQ. That's because I'm eager to break out of the bubblebot role and into something more interesting, which this patch appears to deliver.

Power Word: Barrier looks like an amazing cooldown. For PvP, the uses should be pretty obvious - throw it over people taking damage, especially yourself. Use it liberally. For PvE, I can see it being extremely handy in many situations. For example, if you don't have a lot of bubbles up for an Infest phase on LK (perhaps you were just released from a Valk) and there is not a Defile soon (so everyone is relatively grouped up), you could drop it in help keep that Infest from sticking. Another example would be, well, anytime melee are taking lots of damage - maybe multiple Marks on H Saurfang, or perhaps Sindra phase 3. Since it's more powerful than a regular bubble, it will probably see use as an emergency tank-heal as well.

Holy Nova no longer is party-only, and instead divides the amount healed equally between all the people within its range. This, coupled with the new Holy Nova major glyph (reducing its GCD by .5 seconds), makes it much more useful to a raiding Disc Priest. I can't testify to its power, but it now has an interesting mechanic and the potential to become a staple of Disc healing. I'm eager to hear others' opinions and experiences with it!

The changes to Heal and Greater Heal, along with several new or reworked talents, make our single-target healing potential much much higher. Again, I'm interested in hearing others' opinions and experiences with our new single-target arsenal - which heals are most effective for different situations, and how powerful they are compared to other healing classes.

From what I've read, Holy Paladins got a nerf to their single-target healing (especially with the Beacon change, a single Holy Paladin can no longer keep up two tanks by themselves) with some nice AoE potential to make up for it - and all the other classes recieved serious boosts to their single-target healing capacity, especially Holy Priests. Discies seem to be one of the specs best-suited to taking up the tank-healing torch in the abscence of Paladins (who are still very strong) thanks to DA procs and talents like the new Renewed Hope.

Rapture has been changed. It returns 2.5% of total mana with a cooldown of 6 seconds (down from 12 seconds), but no longer can trigger multiple times at once so the much-loved Rapture Trick is kaput, and it no longer invigorates your target with mana or whatever resource they use.

Speaking of mana, Shadowfiend and the Replenishment raid buff both return substantially less mana than they did in 3.3. Spirit now returns substantially more, and of course MP5 has been converted into Spirit. I doubt we'll be seeking out Spirit, especially since most of our mana regen is still based on our maximum mana. This may change at 85, as I said I have yet to play the Beta.

Our haste has been changed drastically. Borrowed Time only grants 14% haste (down from 25%), and the Enlightenment talent, which granted an addition 6% haste at all times, is gone. This means we need, with full raid buffs and 0 points in Darkness, approximately 25% haste from gear to be GCD-capped. If you are a bubble-spammer, get ready to reforge or otherwise seek out more haste rating.

I'm also interested to hear people's experiences with a Smite/Atonement spec, be it for soloing, PvP, heroics, or raid bosses. While it is possible to not pick up Atonement and Archangel, the question is will we need it or not.

A lot of our spec decisions are also based around how useful Heal and Greater Heal are, as there are two talents late in the tree that rely on their usage. More on this when I actually get to use those spells in their new form!

That's all I can think of off the top of my head.

[Hygeia]

I have read a lot of topics yesterday and today since the release of the new patch, and alot is stating that as disc priest we will not be bubblebots anymore...Now my question is what will be our main job in raids as it seems we dont have the AOE heal abitlity like holy priest, nor hot ability's like Druids not even single target healing like pally's . I went with the Smite Archangel build for now to start getting the feel for it and trying to optimize my stats to get to the soft cap on haste. I haven't touched reforging into mastery as yet as i really dont know if it will be worth it for now.
Also do anybody have some feedback how disc fares in a raiding environment, or will we soon see Disc priest dissapearing....rerolling or going holy

[Spiritus]

I see disc and paladins moving into a similar niche. Strong tank healers with good raid support.

Considering possible tank damage patterns, disc finds themselves well suited for tank healing:

(1) Sustainable healing through Heal with a bonus of DA.
(2) PW:S can be either used preemptively before a large hit (eg-- breath) OR rotationally with the Strength of Soul talent.
(3) Very efficient & powerful burst heal in Penance, with a relatively short CD.
(4) PS is as good as ever (well, a slightly longer CD, but I'm sure that is being balanced).
(5) Nice talent synergy for landing big, slow heals (eg-- BT + IF + GH).
(6) PW:B is both a fantastic raid OR tank CD depending on placement.
(7) Inspiration is almost a neccessity buff in the Cata environment.
(8) ProM is still a strong tank heal tool to be nestled with PW:S before a known big hit.
(9) Evan/Arch has the potential to be a strong tool for guilds that may employ a "sustained" tank healer and "burst" tank healer. If you are unfamiliar, basically on fights where there is one tank taking damage at a time, and incoming damage is spiky, a raid may assign one tank healer to put out continuous healing (e.g.-- Heal-esque spam). That healer's job is to never run out of mana and keep the tank stabilized. Healer 2 is there for burst healing. They blow large chucks of mana when it is needed and "regen" when not. The evan/arch (+maybe atonement) disc priest regens mana very quickly with a x5smite + arch after a certain size mana pool, plus adding in some DPS on target. This would make them well suited to spam FHs when a tank gets a huge spike.
(10) Ahhh, I went this far so I need a 10. Oh, spirit will be huge. You need it. Mana pool based regen got kicked in the pants for Cata and is no longer a viable source of regen (unless you are planning to do so w/ evan/arch). For a standard disc healer, however, I would stack spirit on all gear to start, then see what damage patterns look like in the first instances. FH and GH are HUGELY expensive. Casting just 5-8 will put a huge dent in your bar comparatively to WotLK.

EDIT: (11) PI becomes a very nifty CD to use on yourself in a world where mana matters and big spells are expensive.

That all being said, disc is still a good raid healer, they just have a different role. A disc priest becomes the ultimate triage raid healer. A timely PW:S here, and desperately needed penance there, PW:B for the big raid hit, ProM doing its thing, PoH still will be a strong tool, HN, as mentioned, has a greater upside now.

This will be a crucial role in the new healing environment and disc fills it the best, IMO. What disc does not do well anymore is raid blanket. The raid blankets will be the realm of Holy priests, druids, and shaman (who actually have the best tool in the box for what a Cata "blanket" will need to do in Healing Rain). Holy paladins will have more AoE tools than disc, but will lack better triage spells.

[chun]

My "alt" is a disc priest, and I've had a chance to play a bit with him and test out a few things, so can at least give you a little more info while you wait for your new computer (grats!).

Mastery: Directly affects all disc absorb effects, so shield, divine aegis and barrier. I found trading spirit for mastery on gear worked well. I kept my crit and most of my haste.

I went with the smite/atonement spec. If you do this, you MUST get the smite glyph which gives +18% hit to smite -- so you don't worry about misses ever. For 5 mans, when it worked it was easy, I would keep PoM bouncing, maybe a shield or two, and then just smite. Some folks reported that atonement wasn't working, or worked too well at times, so I imagine blizz is working on bug fixes for it.

I had no mana issues at all in heroics, and sit a little over 40k mana.

I tested out "heal", "flash heal", and *gasp* "greater heal" for mana efficiency, simply by spam healing myself. (no archangel, no rapture, no replenishment etc)

With "heal", I can literally cast forever without going OOM. I want to say it was around a 4k heal with 6-7k crits. It did keep divine aegis stacked.

With "flash heal", I would go OOM relatively quickly. I certainly don't think I could sustain it for a 5 minute boss fight. I want to say I was around 8k with it, with 13k crits.

Greater heal is 3x the mana of "heal", but has the same cast time (2.1 sec for me). I was able to land some big fat 22k crits with it, and just started laughing since that added a 7k aegis. I was able to heal quite a long time with it, and didn't feel any mana issue. I believe it was normally 13-15k non-crit.

EDIT: here's a more accurate view of the data.
BASE HEAL -- 347 mana, avg heal: 4.8k avg crit: 7.2k 2.13 sec cast time
FLSH HEAL -- 1081 mana, avg heal: 9.9k avg crit: 14.5k 1.28 sec cast time, could cast about 54 before going oom
GRTR HEAL --1043 mana, avg heal: 13k avg crit: 19k 2.13 sec cast time, could cast about 80 before going oom

Given the above, penance felt almost obsolete. I guess if you are focusing on one target, you could weave it in, between heal and greater heal, for any times you need a flash-heal like burst.

In a raid setting, I think I would use archangel for a nice source of mana replenishment. It seems like it will be overpowered as mana pools grow.

Lastly, about power word barrier. For me I think it is around 42k, but absorbs a max of about 8k at a time for any one person. So, let's say only a tank is inside it, and gets hit for two consecutive 20k hits. It would absorb 8k from the first, 8k from the second, still leaving you with 24 k to heal. the barrier would still have (42-16 = 26k) absorb left though.

There's debate as to whether it should be used as a tank cooldown, a random burst cooldown, or for AoE. In a 25 I don't think it will last long enough. In a 10s, it may help for "tick" damage for certain groups. Ie. If on Sindragosa the healers stood within it, they could focus more on the tank/raid for awhile.

Just my thoughts so far, but I am enjoying it atm.

[chainsawal]

My 2 cents on the PW:Barrier used in PvE. Not real impressed.


Even though you get a 10% healing buff in addition to the 50k HP it absorbs, the shield is gone almost instantly in any situation where people are taking a lot of raid damage... and since it caps out the shield of any one person, I am not sure it ads a ton of value.


We are 11/12 Heroic ICC, and I thought Barrier would be great for people targeted by green slime on Heroic PP, or Infest when we are stacked on LK. But the shield is literally only up for a second or two in Heroic mode. So the 10% extra healing is kinda a joke.


I have over 50k mana now and do like some of the other new features... just think Barrier has been the biggest disappointment of the change so far. Sounded great... in practice has been mediocre for PvE (but it looks cool).

[Ollin]

I think calling PW:B useless in a raid prevention role just because it goes away real fast is a bit preemptive. Like anything with a cap, it seems as though if you go over the cap with one big hit it will let you overkill the cap (cap = total damage prevented overall...not per hit).

Sure it will go away quickly, but if you can stuff a large number of people under the barrier at the right time, it will prevent a far larger amount of damage than stated in the tooltip.

In terms of large, unavoidable raid damage that comes in one single large burst (festergut exhale for example), PW:B will be the goto ability for raids willing to plan their strat around their raid's capabilities for such situations.

PW:B would have been extremely useful for Hodir, as an additional example, to help mitigate frozen blows on the ranged.

Then on top of this, it looks like they plan to at least try dropping the CD to 2 minutes.

Regardless of any misgivings, I do think that declaring anything "useless" is a bit unfair at this stage.

On a similar note, if PW:B were a heal, how hard would other classes QQ to get a one-button, instant cast spell that did the same amount of healing that PW:B does prevention?

One button.
50k damage stopped.

Who cares if the graphic doesn't complete before it goes away?

[Maèl]

Smite/Atonement currently has the same problem as Heal.
It doesn't heal enough in WotLK raid encounters. Atonement and Heal heal roughly the same for me.
So most of the time it is very dangerous to use Atonement/Heal because due to the ability queue and the relatively slow cast you will switch too slowly from light to heavy duty healing. But I can see how this will work in Cata and I'm quite happy we get the active choice to use Atonement or Heal spam.

For the time being we are back to bubble bot with the occasional FH/Penance/ProM spam. New to this set is Renew since this too can now proc Aegis.

As Disc I wouldn't just reforge spirit to anything. Last saturday I was on a LK10/normal run and I ran oom in phase 3. I had used all my cooldowns(granted, mana hound only once) and drank a mana potion. I could Smite/Archangel a lot in phase one and some in phase two.
I'm seriously considereing restoring all the Spirit I reforged.

I didn't reforge into mastery because Aegis had seemed a little bit bugged. It seemed like Aegis capped out to a portion of my life instead of my targets. Being only a lowly priest it stuck at 6.7k or something total absorb no matter how much mastery I threw at it. Haven't tested this after the last hotfixes, tho.

[Niki]

I'm just going to give my observations (an my opinions) about what I have noticed so far as a disc priest, post-patch. Keep in mind, my healing and examples are my Heroic ICC 25 experiences, I'm not really concerned with healing heroics, the disc priest can still handle that, LOL.

The days of bubbling are all but gone on most of the fights, but I am seeing on 25 man HLK, the bubbles will still mostly prevent and dispose of the infest, though now we are using 2 disc priests as opposed to one, yay? (It's a little harder with some people not getting it off right away, but it's still healable). With that being said, sadly, I'm sitting with my disc priest and lamenting the fact that we have seemed to otherwise have lost our healing role completely on most of the fights. The PW:Shield is cool looking, but I have to agree with a previous post that it's really not viable with the CD, it's lukewarm all-over heal and the fact that you have to save it for all-over raid damage. The bubbles can not handle the damage on the raid from most bosses and yes, I tried a full reforge into the Shield Mastery (Don't do it, it's a waste of time & gold).

As far as tank heals, we still have the same abilities (POM, Penance, PWS, Greater & Lessers, etc.) but the fact is, we are very similar in that healing as we were pre-patch (which imo was not really strong, hence we were the bubblers).

When I read the above post about disc/pally heals being "Strong tank heals" I was just cringing... 25 man ICC HLK Soul Reaper? I can assure you, the disc priest will always get an ass kicking from the big guy, we have never been strong tank heals, and we haven't been given such a buff that we could handle that (even with a pally helping). Sadly, I feel even more bad for the pally's ~ I have NO idea what they are criting for now, but I do know that a lot of holy pally's are either close to or are getting outhealed by shadow priests, it's a little sad...)

The Smite Spec was fun before they "fixed" the Atonement, LOL. Now, it can barely muster a heal on one target for 100% and I have noticed they changed the verbiage to "Sometimes heals the caster for 50%" ~ Yeah, it's not very often ~ So much so, I felt the urge to open a ticket to ask if it was broken (Yeah, I was being kind of a smartass, but still, I was a little curious).

So basically, in my mind, if Blizz wanted to create a hybrid spec, they succeeded WAY too much and now I can see myself changing specs from boss to boss ~ This one should be holy, this one should be this, this one should be that. Sadly, MOST of the fights I can not validate going disc for anymore.

I don't want to seem elitist at all, and I post here because (as I have said on many other forums) I am almost waiting for that moment where I do the /facedesk and say "OMG, I can't believe I missed that!! NO WONDER I was having such a problem healing!" but sadly... I have yet to find it, and it seems as though are class is undergoing a transition in which we are somewhat broken right now. I sat back and was just bothered that last week on heroic ICC 25 bosses, the shamans and druids were very happy with the changes, doing 5 million in absorbs & healing and I was sitting at 1 million absorbs and 900k healing... Obviously, I'm still thinking "What am I doing wrong???" but I just don't see it as I have tried re-specs, different numbers, glyphs, reforging, smiting, not smiting, penances, heals, greaters, bubbles, etc.. you get the picture :P

Any other thoughts & ideas? Am I the only one that feels like the disc priest has been dropped into the 3rd dimension of Azeroth?

[Worthun]

kinda agree with u niki, i dare say the disc was not nerfed at all, it just didnt got as OP as the other healers.
well when i say "didnt got nerfed" im excluding the 1 seg CD that the disc got to PW:S now, it takes at least 10 segs to bubble the raid, considering that u dont even have to move to do it... i honestly loved when haste had efect to bring GCD below 1 seg, and PW:S had no CD, now at massive aoe dmg, im kinda limited to bubble the raid, for the whole battle, and since the PW:S is abosorbing more than it was, the other healers are now counting on it to be up nearly all the time.
well thats how i felt yesterday, tho is has its advantages: with the rupture talent, will be realy hard to run oom if u focus on bubbling everyone.

ive got a question to u guys, ive reforged nearly all my itens to get to ~10 mastery points, witch brings my absorption bonus to 25% (up from 20%)..... come on? 5% nearly all item to get a aegis 5250 up from 5000... in icc, 250 dmg is kinda.... worthless, ive reforged em all to get mor crit, at least now i can hit the aegis cap with 2-3 heals...
was it a bad call? at first i freaking loved the mastery, was totaly into it, but yesterday i realized how much ive lost in crit, haste and spirit, to get miserable 5%...
so the question: am i being dumb, for underestimating 5%, cuz its awsome? ( meaning, keep ure mastery ratings!)
or is it not THAT usefull for disc, and reforge ure items to get other stats? (meaning forget mastery for now)???

im realy no shure what to do now, what do u guys think?

[Spiritus]

Judging specs & classes in this flux period on fights designed for a 3.3 world is, at best, hasty.

The opinions I present are from experiences from beta and how healing will work in the Cataclysm paradigm.

In a world where tank healers are spamming stability spells (Heal et al) and casting reactive spells on spikes, disc shines with DA and Penance. Adding in PW:S used in a preventative manner for known spikes, or even woven using Strength of Soul, is a very strong compliment.

Fights like LK where a BiS tank gets rocked from 100% to 5% in one hit will be a thing of the past. Judging the post 4.0 specs and classes by the 3.3 model is apples and oranges.

As much as I hate to say something like this, the period between now and the expansion is Wonderland. Nothing will make sense and everyone is mad(as in topsy-turvy, not upset). I wouldn't speculate on what is "best" until at least a month into Cataclysm when most of the balancing issues have been ironed out.

[Maèl]

Spiritus, that's what I'm hoping for. In a world where tanks aren't two shot the mana efficient shall be king. And I think this spot still belongs to the Disc priest.

But the problem that Disc priests didn't scale as well with spell power(now int) as other healers still is there. While Aegis is awesome it's a bit too random to base the class on. I dare say that in the future 30% crit while maintaining massive haste/mastery and spirit is a thing of the past. Which is a bit of a downer when it comes to Aegis. In WotLK we had to care about mana regen(spirit and mp5 never were on the same item), crit and haste stats. In Cata we have to care about regen, crit, haste and mastery. And with smite/heal becoming more important while bubble spam is gone I dare say haste has become much more important than it was before. Same goes for mana reg.

Our item budget pool has become diluted.

WotLK raiding is for the time being not very well balanced when you compare healers. We are not raiding in a Cata environment with bigger health pools and decreased likelyhood that tanks will be two shot. The efficient heal is at the moment unusable. Tanks have lost armor(most +armor pieces I gathered with my warrior only give pityable amounts of armor). Disc priests have lost Inspiration, which is a biggie. But we still have the clunky uglyness that is disGrace(my pet peeve). We still have a talent that screams tank healer without having the burst to deliver in WotLK raiding. So for the time being I only raid for fun and stay the heck away from the bleeding edge.

One or two months into Cata there will be another overhaul once the second tier guilds have started raiding. Remember WotLK and Replenishment and the change to Rapture? Yeah, I expect something like that for Cata. Until then things are a bit borked. Which, in all honesty isn't a big deal if you don't plan to do 25 man heroic modes.

While I really, really like the Atonement mechanics I wished I could somehow preselect the target of my healing or they could increase its range. I've been throwing out the odd smite since the masice priest changes in 1.10 so this is exactly my play style. Love the concept. I could live without the randomness and they could include Holy Fire in both the precision glyph and the talent.

I can't wait until I get to use it. Hardmodes in ICC sure ain't the place.

Barrier is nice and all but the cooldown is too high for what it currently does.

In the current raids I'm not very comfortable with the new cooldown of pain suppression.

In all honest we got some new amazing tools which propably will become very relevant. Atonement/Archangel, Heal/Weakened Soul, Smite/Penance, GH/Inner Focus. If we get to use all of this, Blizz does some tweaking and the encounters support it then we have 3 valid healing strategies. Which is awesome. Before we had FH, PW:S and Penance(with ProM, PoH and possibly Renew woven in). In WotLK pallies and shaman stole too much of our tank healing thunder.

[Worthun]

any one figured what regulates the shields cap? ive done some testing with diferent forgings and trinkets and came to a (amateur) conclusion that its determinated by intelect, even more than the discipline's mastery.
ive only done each test once (ill do 10 tests of each at the weekend), but what i got is:

Aegis: has a cap, determinated by INTELECT, apparently, discipline's mastery increases the shield of each crit heal, but not the cap, same goes for spell power (tested with +600 SP trinket) since it causes you to heal more. onlie when i changed the INTELECT stat i got a improve on the cap. (havent tryed for crit rat, nor spirit yet)

PW:S always shields the same ammount on every cast (with same stats, i know thats obvious...), got a higher increase by raising mastery rather than intelect... here are the maths:

+26 int = +20 shield = 0.768 shield per int
+20 mastery = +60 shield = 3 shield per mastery
+599 sp = +399 shield = 0.565 shield per SP

next i tested to check if all the bonus shield int gives, comes from SP:

+7int = +9SP = 1.285 SP per int
+1 int = 0.768 shield
+1.285 sp = 0,7260 shield

so yes it does (with a error of 0.04 shiel per int poit, with 1k int that gives a 40 shield gap... i guess its not relevant)

finaly the mastery:

45.85 mastery rating = 1 mastery point = 2.5% shield increase
0.0545% shield increase per mastery rating

ok so i see myself searshing for SP, int and mastery, to get nice shields, since my raid has a holy priest already.
now guys, im really really anoyed by the fact that my gcd ends half a seg (maybe 1/3 seg) before the PW:S cd, so ill change some haste to mastery and crit... is that a bad idea? are we still needing alot of haste (i got 20.0x%)
of course this is all about 4.0.1, cuz when cata cames out, well need to smite more, since im not using evangelism in raids now, but im pretty shure ill need it at cataclysm.

*all thouse maths was done amateurly, plz correct me politely in what im whrong XD *

sry for the lazy english too... im open to advices, realy, kinda needing some XD

[CoolNitro]

I'm not sure if someone answered this but can you stack Aegis PW:S and Barrier on any one target like a tank and does anyone know which of the absorbs will be taken first, like will DA take the first hit and the remainder damage absorbed into your shield or Barrier individually or will the whole lot act as one massive absorb?

Or will they negate each other by having a max absorb cap on any single target?

[Spiritus]

I haven't seen nor done any research on that.

What I can tell you is that there is not an overall max absorb cap. So, a 10k aegis, 5k PW:S, and 5k sacred shield will absorb 20k of a 30k hit.

I will see what I can do about trying to figure out the order of magnitude. It could be chronological in that the newest or oldest absorb is factored first. It could be based on spell priority (i.e.- PW:B->DA->PW:S). It could be based on overall absorb-ability, either weakest or strongest first.

My purely speculative guess is that it works like dispel in that it takes off absorbs newest to oldest, as that is how it was calculated in 3.3. The most beneficial system would be oldest to newest, and I would be pleasantly surprised if this change was made.

[Dirtysocks]

Hello, I am Happy how disc is good in 10 man but disappointed with 25 man. Only reason ppl want disc in their raids is LK to prevent infest and maybe PI on best dps which is sad.
Think that in icc everything is increased by 30% In Cata during raids you will have 2- times more int and with massing mastery on items I think we can get up to 30K shield and tanks having around 140K heal absorbing 20% on their HP is not bad, considering with every heal you can lower debuff from shield by 4 sec, giving a not bad tank support healer with shield up every cca 6 sec. Atm it seems we are behind as always in 25 and used on 1-2 encounters. Will be intesting if blizz improved us and not nerfed because we were too usefull on LK. Anyway one more month to enjoy LK as disc and learn holy in meantime. Looks like disc is getting closer to paladin and holy with renew chakra to druid... Let's hope every hard core guild will want a disc priest in their 25 man.
Cya

[Liliyah]

Hello, I am Happy how disc is good in 10 man but disappointed with 25 man. Only reason ppl want disc in their raids is LK to prevent infest and maybe PI on best dps which is sad.
Think that in icc everything is increased by 30% In Cata during raids you will have 2- times more int and with massing mastery on items I think we can get up to 30K shield and tanks having around 140K heal absorbing 20% on their HP is not bad, considering with every heal you can lower debuff from shield by 4 sec, giving a not bad tank support healer with shield up every cca 6 sec. Atm it seems we are behind as always in 25 and used on 1-2 encounters. Will be intesting if blizz improved us and not nerfed because we were too usefull on LK. Anyway one more month to enjoy LK as disc and learn holy in meantime. Looks like disc is getting closer to paladin and holy with renew chakra to druid... Let's hope every hard core guild will want a disc priest in their 25 man.
Cya

Damage prevented/absorbed > Damage healed after it happens. Any group who can't see that is shortsighted. My GM has already stated that he wants a disc priest in every 25 for Cata for that very reason.
I still feel extremely valuable(even on fights that aren't LK) and will likely continue to feel valuable in Cataclysm. As for being behind, I'm still beating all my guildies on WoL . Shield spam is still king.

[Dirtysocks]

Yeah, went ICC 25 HM this week and can say my previous comment was totally wrong. Going in ICC 25 where is a lot of raid dmg is avesome for disc. After changes I have 46K mana and all spirit reforged into mastery. No mana problem on most of fight only LK HM where I have to regain all my mana back in transactions. I am not using GH most of the time. FH crit for 16K without archangel. and 30% absorb from 16K is about 4K + mastery so it can be let's say 5K. 16+5 is 21K every time you crit 1.2 cast, and that is awesome, adding to some aoe healing with trinket etc... barrier is good even does not stay long and normal shield as awesome also, even they are down nearly instantly they absorb quite a lot of dmg for insta spell. With ulduar legendary it must be awesome atm as disc. Not sure how it will be in Cata, but atm Disc priest is better then holy from my point of view. POM POH with inner focus heal and absorb quite a lot and that makes Dpriest finally something usefull in 25 man.

[Sebadoh]

Did you guys read about the change to Power Word: Barrier? Its duration was reduced to 10 seconds, down from 25 seconds - it no longer absorbs a given amount of damage, now reduces all damage done to friendly targets by 30 percent.

So basically it's an AoE Pain Suppression. I think I need to change my pants