#feelycraft

[unfocusedwill]

Lessons from 2025 (MFO)

I made this blog as a way to chronicle my insights as I improved and learned new things as a healer. I'm a self taught disc/holy priest main that swapped from DPS to healing at the start of Legion. Although I will start with guides when looking to quickly pick up an alt class, it's extremely important to have a direct understanding of how my main specs play, without relying on others to "solve" it for me first, if I want to be capable of breaking new ground and playing at the highest level.

With time I had less to post about - "new" thoughts don't come by as frequently as they did when I was just starting out. Much of learning is front-loaded, after all.

Before Midnight(/the addon apocalypse) hits, here is one final retrospective from MFO.

On S3 Holy

TWW S3 was one of my favorite iterations of holy. DF S3/4 takes the cake but TWW S3 hits many of the same notes (PoM uptime, high impact, efficient, instant cast GCDs, flexible healing/buff stacking, satisfying dps integration).

Holy priest has always had a reputation for being the "basic" "easy" healer spec but this tier there is enough complexity for it to have quite a skill ceiling, if you care to look for it.

Throughout this tier I have been quite surprised how many CE and even HoF hpriest mains I have observed either playing "wrong" (aka: too many PoHs) or not capitalizing on the multiple ways to min max the spec. I will go over some of them in this post.

On Premonition Crimes

Premonition works on just about everything except PI. This has enabled some unconventional CD timings. Although getting extra PoMs/Penances is generally understood to be the best use of insight charges, committing one of those charges to a major CD instead can sometimes also make the difference between having it up for a damage window or having to sit on it for a long time/losing an entire use. Is that really worth trading for 1 extra PoM? Some examples in MFO:

Evang/Fiend on Plexus Sentinel (reliably ramp 1st Matrices and 1st intermission, even if your guild doesn't stay in intermission for long)

2min Hymn on Nexus King (cover both the damage on pull at 0:03 and Invoke the Oath at 1:56)

various configurations of Apotheosis and Hymn on Dimensius, depending on your guild's push timings

Disc can also split premonition charges into multiple smaller ramps if machine-gunning Penance is overhealing too much on your big ramp, or if you see an obvious gap in other healers' CDs that you can cover with a stronger mini ramp.

While some of these may seem suboptimal on paper, it could be the correct play for your specific raid team. I've said this before and I'll say it again - tailoring your gameplay to the environment you are in is always going to be a better choice than blindly copying the timings of a top log. Even if you don't have confidence in your ability to make the right decision, it still gets you thinking about why - and that's the first step to being able to arrive at the best answer. It's fine to use lorrgs as a starting point but at the very least you should take the time to evaluate how applicable that log is to your reality (comp, push timings, strat, etc.)

To quote the front page of lorrgs:

Maximizing raw HPS is meaningless if too much of it goes to overheal. If you come at me talking about raw HPS I'm gonna roast you.

On Spell Sequencing

This section is the main reason I wanted to write this post. To be optimal is to take the most effective action at any given time, avoid waste, and taking the steps needed to prep for it beforehand. Naturally, this means optimization goes hand in hand with planning ahead. This is true for all of movement, survivability, and throughput.

Oracle Holy has two passive talents that make PoH instant. They are also regularly forgotten - and not even mentioned on the Icy Veins/Wowhead spec guides. (Wowhead briefly mentions Divinity but is essentially just reading off the tooltip.)

This may not sound terribly interesting right now but hear me out. Due to these buffs being linked to Premonition and Apotheosis respectively, it means you're dealing with them at the same time that you're prioritizing other important parts of your kit.

Not taking advantage of the instant cast portion of these buffs is a mistake I see regularly on logs, even from experienced priests. On paper this has no impact on HPS, but playing around these buffs to maintain uptime can be an optimization during periods of high movement.

(Waste no) Waste No Time

Whether it's due to pairing Piety with Apotheosis or intentionally using Premonition to CDR Apotheosis, it's possible to end up with both PoH buffs active at the same time. Your next cast of PoH will consume a charge from both buffs, so you end up with 1 fewer instant PoHs. The solution, if timers allow for it and there is healing available, is to consume WNT before activating Apotheosis.

(Not just) PoM after Premonition

Guides and common sense suggest spending the next 3/4 globals on PoM after activating Premonition, and you generally aren't wrong for doing so.. but suppose you know the raid will be topped off quickly, or PoM comes up a few seconds later than you want it?

PoH doesn't consume charges of Insight, meaning you can weave it (as well as Holy Nova, Flash/Heal, and Smite) as a filler global between or before PoMs! Keeping this option open can greatly increase your flexibility to adapt to different game states without missing a beat.

Consider 2:00 into M Dimensius. Alas, Premonition can't CDR itself, so we don't have time to cast all 4 PoMs prior to the burst of damage from Antimatter.

You can spend your next 2 globals spot healing 2 people with the 2pc effect and letting PoM bounce ..or.. you can PoH before consuming your remaining Premonition charge(s).

Doing so changes your healing profile into frontloaded aoe healing that is less likely to step on the toes your co healer if they've prepped a raid CD. (I play with either rsham or evoker - there's either Cloudburst into HTT or Dream Breath rolling for the entirety of the soak.) When there's no spot healing triage needed, it doesn't make sense to prioritize pushing a few targets to high health (& a shield). It also griefs Cloudburst since the totem is a single burst of healing divided evenly between all injured targets regardless of health, and results in the players you targeted with PoM being mostly overheal/less healing going to the more injured targets.

Leaving PoH for later also increases the chance that it will overheal against your cohealer's CDs in general, whereas PoM is always an efficient GCD regardless of when you cast it. Finally, while health pools should be high enough this late into the season that someone eating a Spatial Fragment (small stun circle) shouldn't ever be lethal, aoe healing provides more of a buffer against such avoidable damage compared to the hit or miss of spot healing.

The con of doing so is leaving PoM off CD for a few more seconds. How impactful is this compared to shaping your healing profile to the incoming damage? Something to consider.

As always, you should aim to get a feel for your cohealer's healing pattern and play around that. Understand that this is a tier with a lot of constant ticking damage, which PoM will always snipe. Balance this with ensuring your other spells are also efficient.

Feelycraft (responsibly)

When I write posts like this I'm often reverse engineering what was initially a gut feeling that I later tested and confirmed by comparing logs and/or napkin math. Sometimes it turns out to be wrong, but it's also resulted in me cooking up numerous new CD timings over the years that actually worked and were eventually validated & copied by other players.

Rather than trying to fully solve a boss before ever pulling it, I look at the results as I'm playing and think about what felt ineffective. Being sensitive to visual feedback as it happens (HP bars on raid frames) and maintaining an openness to experimentation goes a long way towards guiding me in the right direction, both when learning a new spec and when optimizing a spec I've played for years. Just remember to stay humble and check your work - and never forget that gut feelings draw upon (and are thus limited by) the extent of your accumulated knowledge and experience.

[unfocusedwill]

Spirit Shell: it’s not about raw HPS

I must be the only disc main who isn’t happy about Luminous Barrier being replaced by Spirit Shell on the lvl 60 talent row. Make no mistake - I think it’s a high impact talent and one that will undoubtedly see more use than LB, and one that will be selected instead of Evang in more situations than LB ever did.

I have a problem with SS because it messes with the ratio and frequency of absorbs to direct healing in the disc toolkit in a way that could ruin the experience for other players. Strictly speaking, it’s a throughput loss to sacrifice both Rapture and Evang just for the ability to convert entire ramps into absorbs. But it was never just about throughput.

Effective healing = (throughput - overheal) * timing

Timed correctly, SS can reduce the amount of overheal in a ramp. Absorbs get first dibs on incoming damage. It can’t be sniped by Revival/Cloudburst and doesn’t compete with other healer’s throughput at all. Great for the disc priest, but toxic for the priest’s co-healers. On farm or any situation where the amount of overheal is high, the disparity between proactive absorb healing and reactive healing is magnified.

On both raid and M+ progression, SS is a welcome source of an eHP buffer that can be combined with barrier to... will you look at that, make disc even more impactful compared to throughput healers!

SS is also on a 1 minute cd, which may or may not line up well depending on fight timers.

Last but not least, because SS applies to all atonement healing it means raid absorb coverage is wider. Instead of large shields on 8 players, you end up with smaller shields on ~15 players. This is also conducive to sniping and shield efficiency.

The way this plays out in practice will depend on the frequency and intensity of damage events in Shadowlands encounters, but SS has the potential to be very strong on both prog and farm.

[unfocusedwill]

Primer: Gearing

I don’t like writing about gearing because 1. it’s boring, and 2. chances are that if you’re looking to improve as a player, gear is merely a distraction from more fundamental ways of improvement.

That being said, here’s the only post I’ll ever write about how to choose gear as a disc priest (or healer in general).

Stat Priority

Forget about sims (healer sims are a joke). Unless one stat really scales particularly well or poorly, it’s not worth splitting hairs about which stat(s) is best. Furthermore, unlike dps, we have more factors to consider than just “by how much does this improve my dps?”

A quick search of public class resources will tell you that ilvl > secondaries and that all secondaries are fairly close but haste is ‘preferred’, but how do you pick between equal ilvl? or ilvl vs socket? Questions like this pop up in public discords all the time. Since there are no formal stat weights (and theoretical weights would change depending on playstyle/spell usage anyways), it’s hard to give a purely objective answer.

You can either attempt to napkin math it by assigning ‘educated guess’ weights to each stat, or trust your intuition. Ultimately, it won’t make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things. Make the choice that helps you sleep at night!

I prefer to avoid mastery because it isn’t a dps increase and isn’t superior to crit/haste/vers for healing. However, if you don’t care about your dps (you should care!) then it would make sense to value mastery higher than I do.

Besides mastery not contributing to dps for healers, you should also think about factors such as vers’s damage reduction on prog/high M+, more stam on higher ilvl items, and (in the case of leech gear) whether the fight’s damage patterns make it worth dropping ilvl for leech.

Trinkets

The disc community does a decent job of creating trinket rankings based on how they perform in actual logs. That being said, there’s a variety of trinket effects and healing patterns. Rather than blindly following what ranks higher on the trinket chart, also consider matching the trinket effects to what you’re trying to accomplish on a boss. Trying to push DPS? Consider cyclotronic, a dps trinket, or a stat stick. Need more mana? Alch trinket/Fangs. If none of the above apply, both Jellyweed and Deferred are good all-purpose picks this tier with part-passive effects that heal for a lot.

[unfocusedwill]

Flow

aka feelyplay

Flow, or being “in the zone”, is “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.”1

This is a psychology concept that’s been on my mind for a while. I approach disc raid healing from a state of flow. Aside from micro posts, I don’t care to discuss “how” to play disc in the more general sense because 1) there’s plenty of disc resources out there already, and 2) most general disc discussion reads like an opinionated pursuit of theoretical perfection, but at the cost of practical use.

I wanted to write a post on flow because the intuitive play that comes from flow is seemingly at odds with the algorithmic, pre-planned style of disc. Or is it?

Intuitive sense doesn’t come out of nowhere. A cartoon artist could quickly draw a character and make it look good, but first they spent years building a strong foundation by doing realism studies, going to art school, etc. I feel that it’s the same with disc.

Developing flow: Guides and resources are a fine starting point for learning any class/spec... but who guides the guide writers? Who guides the WF guilds? If you want to someday be no longer dependent on others to figure out how to play your spec, you need to constantly ask yourself not just “what should I cast”, but “why should I cast that?” Take it a step even further and play the devil’s advocate with yourself/the written guides: “is there any case where I wouldn’t want to do that?”

Over time, this builds the foundation where you understand how your spells work together, and what your kit is or isn’t capable of. My goal with disc is to play it as a standalone healer spec that can plug-and-play in any raid team, with any healer comp. It’s true that disc’s throughput can reach disgusting new heights when provided with an environment that caters to it, but that’s quite frankly toeing the line of cheese/farm strats -- and distracts from the reality of other less-than-ideal situations, which are far more common.

Playing with flow: There’s a lot about the healing environment that’s difficult to feel fully simply from looking at logs or by studying disc gameplay under ideal/”sim” conditions.

Healing patterns: How quickly do your cohealers react to expected (or unexpected) damage? Do they attempt to top people off right away, or trust in HoTs? Do they snipe?

Damage/mechanic patterns: During a healing window, how often does the damage tick? Every 0.5, 1, 2,... seconds? Is there a point during your burst where you’ll have to move, e.g. to dodge the frog during Pa’ku’s winds on Conclave?

Healing x damage patterns: How much of your atonement window is going to overhealing? Would you get more out of an extra upfront global of atonement healing, or the direct heal from a well-timed Radiance? Should your ramp complete before the damage begins, or as it begins? Should you Schism-Solace-Penance-Smite, in that order, or switch it around? Delay your next cast half a second? Or even dare refresh SWP/PtW during your atonement window.. or Schism before you cast Evang?

For me, flow is a combination of the principle of Always Be Casting and a passive awareness of the dynamics of cohealer healing output x raid damage intake x mechanical constraints. I feel a sense of flow because I’m always doing something, and always sensitive to what’s going on around me. Most importantly, forget about the “rules” of disc. What you cast is unimportant. What matters is what you are able to accomplish with your casts.

If I were to receive log analysis from anyone ‘well known’ in the disc community, they would find no shortage of things that I do “wrong.” My ramps are often quite weird. I play “suboptimally” or completely out of order. I refresh dots during my atonement windows, I Evang before casting my second charge of Radiance, I apply atonements during my burst. I unironically take Luminous Barrier sometimes. You name it - it’s probably in there somewhere.

If we were all playing in a vacuum with ideal conditions, where following a textbook ramp->burst cast sequence would always result in the best performance, they would be right. You can probably see where this is going..

Some TCers might carefully respond that there’s “always exceptions”, but that the recommended ramp sequence/talent setup/etc. is generally correct. I dislike this phrasing because it creates the mindset that one way is the standard. It encourages blindly following a formula unless told otherwise, instead of living and adapting to the evidence before your own eyes.

I think it would be fair to say that more than any other healing spec, playing disc requires balancing many different moving parts. The boss encounter and your co-healers are also moving parts, so include and react to them as a core part of your play, not just as an afterthought!