Hybrid Healing

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[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]

Neuroplasticity

One thing that repeatedly surprises and frustrates me during prog (and into farm) is and how much difficulty many raiders have with adjusting to a new strat or cooldown timings, and how that translates into raid leaders being unwilling to try what could possibly be a better, more consistent strat for the long run. How can moving a single assigned cooldown result in poor awareness and confusion across the whole fight? But it does happen, and I've seen it happen with many different people in many different guilds.

I posit that the ability to stay flexible and focused about what you're doing during a pull is also a skill - and it is hard to quantify until you see someone struggling with it. Learning curve and developing muscle memory the first time are one thing, and both are important for prog, but maintaining "control" and agency over your actions is also very important to avoid falling into a rhythm of going through the motions to the point where rather than learning the fight from a top-down level, you've only succeeded in engraving a habit.

This is also one of the differences between raiding at RWF level - trial and error and changing strats on the fly are common, unlike later guilds that most likely are arriving at a boss with a game plan already mapped out long in advance by copying further progressed guilds' logs.

Is this a trainable skill? I don't know, but I would start by playing multiple different playstyles/roles in raid. Even doing so in a lower difficulty is still helpful. Each spec and role has different things they need to pay attention to, and together they will provide a fuller understanding of an encounter. In theory you want to know a boss well enough where you can be dropped into any pull, with your abilities at any amount of cooldown remaining, and be able to know both what you should doing right then as well as when you'll use your cds next.

[unfocusedwill]

to be a raider at different levels

Inspired by this post by Matticus.

It’s been a long time since my last post for a variety of reasons, but most notably a culture of self-censorship as I had been raiding in a guild that preferred to keep its affairs intensely private. For better or worse, that chapter of my raiding career is over as of DF.

I’ve stepped back from pushing HoF on a 4 day schedule to raiding 2 days a week for CE. We reformed/started the tier about a month late but finished out the tier at around US 150 - ironically, right around the same rank as my 3 day guild from Legion. We’ve come full circle boys.

Since then, I’ve been enjoying the less rank-focused atmosphere and just having fun in the game. However, the level I play at as the player has not changed. I level capped a mage on a RP server last week and solo geared/pugged my way to aotc over the course of 4 days. I did this for fun and also as an ‘experiment’ because I was curious to see what the path to aotc might be like for a solo player, or maybe someone getting into raiding. I wanted to see how groups would react if I didn’t link achievements or queue up with high ilvl.

The fun part was accomplished, but that’s about it. I may have hidden my account achievements and unlinked my main on rio, but I still have all the knowledge of someone who’s played this tier since day one with a focus on gearing for raid as efficiently as possible. I reached 385 from farming Forbidden Reach rares on day one, hit 396 in normal later that night, 400 from pugging heroic on day 3, and finished out aotc a little after midnight into day 4 and ended the week at 401. This is in sharp contrast to the casual guild I joined on server, which had many long time players stuck at sub-400 ilvl and still progging heroic. The difference in gear and raid progression speed was surreal. But, no matter how much I may have been RPing being a “new 70″, that’s because it wasn’t progression for me. I knew how to gear and had the focus to farm rares. I actually overestimated the minimum ilvl people expected for normal and heroic pugs and had no trouble getting into premade finder groups despite no logs or rio. Being a mage buff helped. I targeted groups, especially groups advertised as “alt runs”, preferably of people with mythic kills on their mains, that had no mage - and almost always got an invite. All of this in and of itself is acquired knowledge and skill in navigating groups and raid comps. And of course, I knew the boss mechanics, so if anyone was kicked from groups for failing mechanics or grossly subpar dps it wasn’t me.

So many players are still genuinely trying to attain aotc, progging heroic for hours each week, and might still rely on make a wish community initiatives to get it before the end of tier which is rapidly approaching.

I don’t know whether to be depressed or empowered by the experience, really. It really drove home how impactful the knowledge, mindset, and skill set of the player is. Even if I wiped all of my existing records and started on a new account under a completely new identity, I know I would still climb back up to CE+ in short order because that is the level I’m at as a player.

---

In reference to Matt’s post, I want to stress that being a aotc or CE (or HoF) player and playing in an aotc or CE guild are two entirely different things.

The level of the guild you play in determines the minimum requirements you must meet to pass trial and stay on the roster in that guild. The level of player you are is determined by your personal skill cap, problem solving ability, and how above and beyond you go, even when your guild doesn’t require it. You’re raiding at the right level for you if the skill level, time investment, goals, and expectations of you and your guild are aligned.

As you go up the ranks, the minimum amount of commitment and performance expected of you increases, yes. I ask of you, where does the motivation come from? Are you adjusting your behavior and expectations to meet expectations set by the guild (because you want to raid in that guild), or are you this way as a player because that’s what makes sense to you and how you prefer to play the game?

Many mythic and CE guilds struggle from its raiders having differences in commitment. Chasing after the ‘slackers’ to do their weekly M+ for vault, for example, or not putting in the effort to learn how to play their rotation correctly. Over-performers resenting other raiders for not trying as hard as they do. Or worse, raiders who blame the rest of their team for ‘holding them back.’

A mythic guild is mythic (but not CE) because it’s dealing with a mix of aotc and CE players under the same roof, and either unwilling or unable to replace or improve the aotc players. A CE guild likely won’t have more than a few “aotc-level” players, but they are still quite common up and down the rankings due to the ever-so-common favoritism that tends to happen in guilds everywhere. Basically, they’re there because a friend or significant other in a position of power is guaranteeing them a spot, and at the CE level it is possible to do just that and rely on the stronger players on the team to carry them indefinitely.

HoF (previously Horde, and bifactional going forward) is where things kind of start evening out and people start being on the same page. Carries aren’t totally unheard of but... well, if they’re holding the guild back that much, then they wouldn’t have reached HoF to begin with. Let’s not talk about Alliance HoF.

Hard work matters but to anyone looking to raid “at a higher level,” I would strongly encourage you to first figure out your own level and consider whether the mindset and playstyle of a higher level player is something that resonates with you. Not everyone enjoys it. It’s not as simple as “just keep at it and eventually you’ll be world first material.” I for one know that I will never raid at the WF level (and you would have to pay me a lot to even consider it.)

a note on Endurance

Endurance isn’t a one way street. I find that I have more or less infinite patience for high pull count bosses... if wipes are meaningful and what we learned from each wipe brings us closer to killing the boss. Wiping because someone on the raid team is horribly inconsistent or still haven’t learned how to deal with a mechanic they’ve already seen many times? Not so cool. This creates an interesting paradox for me where my focus and endurance increases exponentially with the level of the players I’m raiding with. On the flip side, I have very low patience for groups where the raiders themselves are the affix.

Lastly, I would like to briefly touch on the value of having an analytical mindset. A high level raider is or has developed analytical and good independent problem solving sense. I do not think this is up for debate. Even if you don’t log dive after every wipe (and yes, it is definitely possible to get lost in the weeds of logs and miss the bigger picture) a high level raider knows what questions to ask, how to find the information to answer it, and how to use that knowledge to play even better in the future. All top raiders are data analysts, basically. You can list off specific things that a higher level raider should do, but it’s more important to understand why those things are important, and understand how it all fits into and enables a higher level of success/consistency/performance as a raider. A checklist will only take you as far as the items on the list itself. A mindset will take you everywhere.

[unfocusedwill]

I wrote a guide on Spirit Shell

If you’re an actual disc main, this guide is useless to you. It’s designed to be a short and easy way for offspecs/alts to get started with the SS build in raid. It does not cover “advanced” play or decision-making. SS has been performing strongly in Nathria (even running 2 discs in some cases). Some guilds may ask their players to swap to disc for progression. This guide, hopefully, will help those players get set up and running as quickly as possible.

Read it here

[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]

(Alpha) Covenant Soulbinds

Between corruption and ultra wonky healing design, I haven’t had much to say about Ny’alotha. Now it’s time to look ahead to Shadowlands!

Wowhead made a post today with the soulbinds for every covenant currently on alpha. Here are my early thoughts on the systems and interactions as a priest healer. At the time of this post it appears that the devs haven’t started iterating on the priest specs yet, so the opinions and conclusions drawn here are still very much subject to change.

Whereas Conduits have class-specific effects, Soulbinds are themed around the covenant as a whole and its signature covenant ability. Each covenant has 3 different soulbind choices, each with its own ‘theme’.

Kyrian

Phial of Serenity (conjured item, 3): Restores 15% health and removes all diseases, poisons, curses, and bleeds affecting you.

Boon of the Ascended: Draw upon the power of the Ascended for 10 sec, granting access to Ascended Nova (spammable aoe), replacing Smite with Ascended Blast (empowered smite with cd) and increasing your movement speed by 50%. Upon expiration, releases an Ascended Eruption (i.e. Azshara staff proc). 

Kyrian is a strong throughput covenant and essentially gives you another raid cd, but loses out on the much-hyped mobility of Venthyr or Night Fae.

Mikanikos (PvP) Phial gains a knockback effect when used, and auto heals+aoe stuns when dropping below 35% HP. Reduced stun/incap duration when standing still. A pet Bron is summoned to attack every 120 spells casted. 2% haste on damaging a new enemy is probably underwhelming in most cases, especially since the buff only lasts 10 seconds and you’d only get it a finite number of times per combat. As a priest with levitate, the fall damage DR doesn’t really do anything either. Armor durability repair is irrelevant. This soulbind seems to have been designed for PvP. Ultimately, it offers very little meaningful value in PvE.

Kleia (Healing) This soulbind is fantastic and buffs healing while also providing quality of life by shoring up some of priest’s utility weaknesses. All your healing causes a minor 5% Echo-like HoT. An AoE HoT on “nearby” allies for every 40 times that you or a nearby ally crits. Up to 5% passive crit depending on number of units nearby. Start combat with a free 10% HP absorb shield. Raidwide +5% HP>90 lets us briefly pretend that PW:Fort wasn’t nerfed, but not terribly important. 15s immunity to most non-magic debuff types is never a bad thing, and could hard counter certain specs in PvP. You could even precast Phial to counter hex, for example.. BfA had several dispellable curse mechanics so this could also come in handy for PvE. 1.5 RPPM 30% slow lasting for 20s may help you chase down fleeing players in warmode, if you’re into that kind of thing. And last but not least, a 10% mounted movement speed buff>90. Neat!

Pelagos (Open World?) Honestly I’m not really sure what they were going for here. This soulbind provides 5% vers with a brief ramp-up time. Phial heals for an additional 20% HP total, but becomes a 10s HoT. ‘Defeating an enemy’ grants movement speed and reduces the cd on Phial and the other Steward abilities. You get free crafting materials. Gain a 5% mastery buff when you cast the class ability (Boon of the Ascended). I suppose you would want to take this soulbind to reduce downtime on an alt that you use for farming. This seems underwhelming compared to the more consistent and diverse benefits of Kleia.

Necrolord

Fleshcraft (4s channel): Form a shield of flesh and bone over 4 sec that absorbs damage equal to 20% (or up to 50% if near a corpse) of your maximum health for 2 min.

Unholy Nova: An explosion of dark energy heals allies within 15 yards for (150% of Spell power) and infects nearby enemies with Unholy Transfusion (deals DoT and heals allies for a fixed amount when attacking the target, with ICD). 

Necrolord is also a throughput covenant, but Unholy Nova has lower potential than Boon of the Ascended and no synergy with either disc or holy toolkits. Fleshcraft is strictly inferior to other covenant signature abilities due to the channel time and conditional shield size.

Heirmir (Open World) This seems similar to Pelagos in that it provides gathering mats and procs movement/healing upon defeating an enemy. ‘Thorns’ DoT is basically useless since the only time a priest will be hit by melee attacks is in open world or PvP, or the rare add fixate. Forgeborne Reveries seems like a way to get kill credit on world quests even if there’s a lot of enemies nearby. There’s pretty much nothing impactful about this soulbind.

Emeni (Tanking) Max HP buff, extra hearthstone, movement speed/haste buffs based on nearby enemies and defeated enemies. Absolutely not worth taking.

Marileth (??) Immunity to CC while channeling Fleshcraft, 10% movement speed that requires standing still for quite some time to gain the buff, shield when dropping below 50% HP. 10% damage increase for 5 seconds, once per target, only one target at a time. Lockpicking and armor durability repair. What??? No. Don’t take this, it’s terrible.

Night Fae

Soulshape: Turn into a Vulpin, increasing movement speed. You may reactivate Soulshape to teleport 10 yds forward. While out in the world, this effect has a 12sec duration before it wears off, but lasts indefinitely while in a rest area.

Fae Blessings: Surround yourself with helpful sprites, causing your next 10 spell casts to aid your target depending on your chosen spell. (Direct ST heal applies 10% DR, PW:S provides target with 2% mana or 20% resource, AoE heal reduces the cd of a major ability by 3s for each target.)

Soulshape is a fun ability with a vanity collection of different shapeshift forms, but much weaker than Venthyr’s Door of Shadows since it only teleports 10yds to DoS’s 35yd and has a longer cooldown. Fae Blessings is very very bad. There is no throughput benefit to the priest and the buffs granted to allies aren’t nearly powerful enough to make up for it. Plus, the resource granted by casting PW:S is actually less than the mana used to cast it.

Dreamweaver (??) Soulshape expiration grants 15% movement speed buff to nearby allies for 15s, 5% vers buff that bounces between you and nearby allies, empowered CC (assuming you have CC spells, that is. *laughs in priest*), overhealing stored as an absorb shield up to 15% of your HP, auto-slowfall, increased gold from WQ, cheat death on a 30 min cd. Weird mix of abilities without a coherent theme.

Korayn (Tank) Soulshape activation grants 10% movement speed buff to allies within 40yd. Able to initiate combat by using Soulshape to charge. 10% physical DR from standing still, 2% DR from facing target, execute dmg on enemies below 35% HP. Gets extra big if an ally dies, just like ret paladins but on a 5 min cd. The DR and positional requirements make it obvious that this soulbind is intended for tanks.

Niya (Warmode) Shadowmeld effect, soulshape CDR, movement speed, slow, up to 10% mastery buff, small offensive and defensive buffs. I could see this being an interesting kit for open world solo PvP, but not really raiding. I wonder if Sylvari Mantle’s “conceal” is equivalent to stealth, because that plus Soothe Mind and Fade could make for some interesting skips.

Venthyr

Door of Shadows: Wend through the shadows, appearing at the targeted location. (35yd range, 1s cast, 1m cd)

Mindgames: Assault an enemy's mind, dealing Shadow damage and briefly reversing their perception of reality. For 5 sec, the next -- damage they deal will heal their target, and the next -- healing they do will damage their target. Generates up to 40 Insanity. Reversed damage and healing restores up to 4% mana (Disc/Holy).

While conceptually cool, mindgames will probably be difficult to use well and is also dependent on the tuning of how much damage/healing is reversed. Currently not a compelling choice for throughput. Door of Shadows, however, is giga mobility for any class. It’s superior to the void elf Spatial Rift (30 yards, must be planned further in advance, 3m cd) and looks to the strongest mobility obtainable by a priest.

Draven (Balanced) 10% crit buff upon interrupting or dispelling, 30s ICD - Sephuz 2.0?? Gain 10% stam and 4% healing from standing still. Gain movement speed increases from allies, up to 30%. 10% vers for 10s upon using Mindgames. The tooltip isn’t clear but it also seems like you gain a stacking mana regen buff above 80% HP. This soulbind is pretty much all stat buffs, plus movement speed. The crit buff requires something to dispel, so the uptime is probably not going to be that great. I doubt the grab bag of buffs will be enough to outweigh the throughput power of the Kyrian covenant, but within Venthyr soulbinds this seems like a solid choice.

Nadjia (ST PvP?) Large movement speed increase tied to Door of Shadows, 15% increased weapon enchant/food/flask effects, reduced movement cc duration, 4% damage increase to one target, and a 20% increase to the speed of ‘everything’ for 10s every 1.3 minutes or so. Interesting and possibly attractive to certain specs, but not particularly geared towards healing.

Theotar (Utility?) Door of Shadows cc break, instant cast with longer CD. Increased combat potion duration. Positional 10% mastery buff proc, minor absorb shield with 20s ICD. Free herbs, cheat death, and... free transmog. These are all weirdly specific effects that have more minor or niche uses. In particular, procs are not as attractive for healing let alone a mastery proc where you have to stand within the proc area. Cool idea but I’d rather go for the more consistent benefits offered by Nadjia or Draven.

My guess is that at the end of the day, it’ll come down to picking between Kyrian and Venthyr depending on whether you want to commit to throughput or mobility. I’m not sure about the encounter design philosophy in Shadowlands yet, and how impactful it’ll be to have improved mobility. I doubt they would design a fight that REQUIRES very strong mobility from the entire raid, however. For now, since I play a void elf, I’m tentatively leaning towards Kyrian.

[unfocusedwill]

presented without comment

[unfocusedwill]

Build: Pareto healer

What corruptions should a healer run? If you consult any spec guides or ask in a class discord you’re probably going to be recommended Siphoner (leech) > stat procs > everything else. The reasoning is simple: leech is the best HPS stat point for point, stat procs are better than nothing, and the remaining other corruptions don’t benefit HPS.

I’ve already gone on at length on this blog about HPS (and why its importance is overrated/misunderstood by many players) so I’ll cut to the chase - valuing corruptions solely based on their HPS contribution is a narrow and shortsighted way to look at corruptions, especially in the context of progression raiding where healer DPS helps defeat bosses.

We aren’t really in a situation in WoW raiding where it is necessary to fully stack HPS output at all times. While healing capability is more important now than it was last tier, it’s not so tightly tuned that it becomes your one and only priority. That means there’s room to optimize and get the best of both worlds (DPS and HPS), and I think corruption is the most efficient way to do so.

The title of this blog post is named after the Pareto principle, aka the 80/20 rule, which observes that “20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results.” WoW class design generally follows this principle, as evidenced by high-impact cooldowns and fire mages. If you play spriest, I’m sorry. Every healing spec has a variety of different healing spells available in their toolkit, some of which are more or less efficient. Effective use of your most efficient heals will net you far more HPS (and cost less mana!) than spamming your less efficient heals. With external mana you could do both, but at the cost of dps globals and lower overall contribution to the raid group.

80/20 applies to gearing and loadout too. As BfA has added more and more build customization systems our build options have also gotten more complex. Besides stat, talent, trinket, and azerite choices, we now also have to make choices for essences and corruptions. The objective is to optimize this in a way where your build runs the most impactful choices to maximize composite HPS and DPS.

If we want to talk about “point for point” value, the dps proc corruptions are insane. I’ve repeatedly seen them being compared to Legion legendaries both in terms of RNG acquisition and power level. Tuning on specific corruptions continues to change but it’s safe to say that even dps specs are willing to drop lots of ilvl in order to obtain dps corruptions. It’s even more pronounced for healers, since our baseline DPS isn’t as high. Thus a dps corruption will account for a larger % DPS increase for a healer.

What about leech and stat procs? If you don’t have leech already, the leech corruption can seem quite attractive. Until you remember that it’s still possible to get leech as a tertiary stat without it costing corruption. I would say that taking leech corruption is acceptable if you’re truly low on leech, but it’s not ideal from an overall raid benefit point of view.

Corruption stat procs suffer from the same issues as regular stat proc effects on trinkets etc. that make them unattractive to healers - the unreliable timing of procs. They might not proc when you want it to proc. Thus the value is somewhat difficult to quantify, but is unlikely to consistently benefit healing.

So we are deciding between impactful HPS (leech) that is obtainable outside of corruption (through tertiary leech), questionably impactful stat procs, and impactful DPS corruptions.

Contrast this with essences. DPS essence options for healer specs are extremely limited and generally consists of Crucible, C&S, Visions, and maaaaaaybe Formless Void in specific circumstances. Healing essences, on the other hand, are highly impactful and offer effects that corruptions can’t replicate - mana from Lucid, on demand burst from ERT, extra mini raid CD from Ward or LBI..

If you wish to optimize both healing and damage, it is my opinion that running dps corruptions and healing essences/talents is now the way to go. Back in EP, if you wanted to do DPS you ran Crucible major and dps trinkets. Corruptions are completely passive, meaning there is little to no GCD opportunity cost - assuming that you’re ABC and weaving in some dps here and there. For how little you’re giving up, the amount of DPS you’re gaining is huge. In fact, it frees you up so much that you can emphasize healing more and further fine tune your healing setup & choice of major essence to better suit the encounter. As disc, whose healing requires the investment of GCDs to spread atonement, this means I can ramp more, or more flexibly, while still doing as much dps as if I hadn’t spent all those globals ramping but had no corruption. The end result is gaining a lot of DPS without losing much (if at all) healing, or gaining healing without losing DPS - can you really say that some unreliable stat procs are better than that?

(And let’s be clear - in terms of healing, how you spend your GCDs as disc is going to make a hell of a lot more difference than how geared you are.)

[unfocusedwill]

Build: Battle Priest (DPS)

I’ve spent most of this tier running dps builds during farm. Many bosses in TEP have such wonky healing requirements that it’s often possible to drop a healer or “.5″ heal with one healer dpsing for most of the fight. Traditionally this was the 3x Igneous Potential battle shaman, but the introduction of essences and Mechagon in 8.2 has made it possible for many healer specs to successfully be a “battle healer.” This is a post on the builds that I ultimately settled on running.

Disc vs. Holy

As of 8.2, disc is about 5-10k dps higher than holy running full dps setup and doing no ramps. Schism affecting Cyclo and Crucible is a major factor. Note that this is being nerfed in 8.3 (as it should be).

Other differences between disc and holy from a .5 healer context is that holy can scale their healing output more flexibly while disc brings DR/EHP from barrier/LB and PS.

Best Battle Healer?

Personally, I think disc is actually the worst choice if your raid is running a battle healer. This is because whether it’s a mini ramp or big ramp, disc still has to commit to windows of atonement healing. If part of that window is unneeded overheal, it’s created an inefficient overlap. Other specs have an easier time of easing off the healing as soon as it’s not needed. The whole point of running a .5 healer is to optimize the raid comp by converting extra hps into dps that helps kill the boss faster, without sacrificing the safety net of having healer CDs or additional healing if needed. I ramble more in depth about optimizing healer dps in this post.

Disc dps also shares a lot of build similarities with a standard raiding disc setup because you already want to buff damage as part of disc healing. You would gain less dps by having the disc priest go full dps than you would by having another spec go full dps. At the time of this post, looking at WCL for Mythic Azshara (a fight that commonly see the use of a battle healer) you could gain about 15k from a disc going full dps, 20k from paladin, 20k from hpriest, 20k from druid, 30k from shaman, and bench your mistweaver (sorry). These are rough estimates based on the difference between top dps and 75th percentiles for each spec. Note that for a paladin dpsing really just means putting your holy shocks into the boss instead of on your allies!

The reason I’m using top dps for this estimate as opposed to 90 or 95 percentile (to lessen the effect of outliers caused by padding) is because some non-meta specs, such as holy priest, are so underplayed at Mythic endgame that the sample size is too small to draw from a lower percentile. Out of 192 publicly logged holy priest Azshara ranks, only 3 have dps above 10k. THREE. Anecdotally it doesn’t feel difficult at all to reach 10k dps while healing normally if you have any dps essence and/or trinket, so take those logs with a grain of salt.

Anyways, back to actual builds before I get too off topic.

Battle Disc

As mentioned earlier dps disc is very similar to regular disc. In fact, it’s likely that you’re already running the correct gear, talents, and trinkets.

Stat Priority: Crit/Vers > Haste > as little mastery as possible. Vers is good because trinkets and essences scale off vers and they are a big part of your dps. Haste is relatively less important.

Talents: No change. If you don’t need to do any Evang ramps, you could even consider taking LB. (I don’t recommend LB on Orgozoa.)

Trinkets: The biggest Cyclo you can get, and a Lure.

Essences: Crucible major, C&S minor, and choice of Vision/ERT minor. ERT procs off healing - so ERT is only a good choice if you intend on weaving in some healing semi frequently. I prefer Vision because the Shadowfiend CDR is impactful on its own, and the flat vers provides a constant benefit. I do not recommend Lucid because its vers proc can be pretty random and might not line up well with your Crucible/trinkets. Based on my own logs Lucid’s vers uptime is 20% or less, which actually makes it less average vers gained than Vision as well.

Azerite: Anything that buffs damage - preferably some combination of Undulating Tides, Death Throes, M+ traits, and inner rings. UT is in theory the most damage outright; whether it’s worth stacking (namely, whether to use Incubator’s Bellcap) would depend on how well you’re able to keep your health above 50%. For example, Za’qul is notorious for proccing UT!

Important tips:

(Until 8.3) Always combine Schism with Cyclo and Crucible. After 8.3 nerf, use them outside of Schism.

Never cap on Crucible charges.

Wait for the first Crucible DoT to expire before casting a second charge of Crucible on the same target.

If you’re not going to cap on Crucible charges, it could be worth waiting for C&S stacks before spending your second charge.

Use Penance to spread PtW where possible.

Halo is arguably valid if you can time it to hit multiple adds. However I’d say this is a case by case basis and borders on padding; PtW is better single target or sustained multidot.

Holy Nova can be the play if there’s enough adds in range, but unless it’s an insane number of adds (e.g. Azshara’s Devoted), you’re probably better off prioritizing Schism’d single target over Nova spam. I’m sure there’s a mathematical breakpoint at which Nova is “more dps” but again as per the padding discussion, it might not be the most beneficial for your raid.

Battle Angel (Holy)

(I hope you don’t actually turn into an angel during the pull otherwise you’re doing it wrong.)

Stat Priority: Crit/Vers > Haste > as little mastery as possible. Same reasoning as disc.

Talents: Halo. Apotheosis if Salv isn’t needed anywhere.

Trinkets: The biggest Cyclo you can get, and a Lure. Even without Schism Cyclo is still great.

Essences: Same as disc. Maybe Lucid minor. Vision isn’t as standout for holy because the CDR is for Hymn, but the raw vers is still good if you don’t want the rng of Lucid procs. (Or if you want to Hymn more frequently, I guess.)

Azerite: UT and M+ traits. None of holy’s spec traits improve damage, so you’re pretty free to just go for whatever stat proc or damage proc universal traits you’re able to get your hands on. Note this means that at least one of your outer rings per azerite piece won’t contribute to dps, which is ok. Try to go for good healing traits in those rings so they’re useful for those moments where you do need to heal.

Important tips:

Prioritize keeping Holy Fire at 2 stacks over anything else in your rotation, but don’t go out of your way to fish for HF resets.

If you’re already at 2 HF stacks you can be conservative and wait for pandemic before refreshing.

Use your trinkets and Crucible charges before entering Apotheosis.

Halo can be delayed to hit more targets.

Holy Nova can also trigger HF resets. In a 4+ target situation that means you can fill with Nova while maintaining HF on a primary target. (Notable example: Orgozoa.)

[unfocusedwill]

Reflection: the Eternal Palace

From the amount of disc and glimmerdin stacking to the benthicc dps tuning and not-so-healery fights, TEP was a pretty weird tier. I enjoyed the tier as a whole, but not as a healer. In fact, I felt more like a utility dps on multiple progression kills. Essences gave us the ability to diversify but also created designated healers and off-healers based on who is running crucible major. Healer parses are even more meaningless than usual this tier since you’re essentially comparing logs across players who are investing very different amounts of priority on hps vs. dps. The fact that the endboss Azshara had very little to heal and was more about LOS and mechanical coordination also made it pretty unfun to progress on as a healer.

I do have to give credit to this tier for bringing considerably more attention to healers contributing dps, which is something that I feel hadn’t been openly valued or discussed enough in the WoW raiding community. Unfortunately it was done in a heavy-handed way which led to the stacking of discs and glimmers as opposed to encouraging healers of all specs to weave dps into their filler gcds. I would love to see some encounters in the future that are more like the healer mage tower challenge from Legion or bosses with separate realms/rooms like Norushen, Kilrogg, Dragons of Nightmare, etc. where it’s less about the spec and more on what you actually do inside that room.

I have made no other posts this tier because I genuinely have nothing else to say. The healing didn’t get much more complex than simply setting up cd rotations for Ashvane’s waves, Orgozoa P1, Court and Za’qul dreads. For everything else.. it was mechanics and getting your dps pushes to line up correctly. I am looking forward to the announcements at Blizzcon this year and have high hopes for the next tier.

[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]

I hate ERT

Not Exorsus raid tools. Raid tools are cool. I mean the other ERT.

One of my absolutely favorite sayings as an INTP is that “taking a concept to its logical end is rarely logical or relevant to the matter at hand.”

I’ve been fairly secluded since patch 8.2 and it’s all because of ERT. For some reason people just love to endlessly discuss what the optimal ramp sequence is with ERT. From spell queueing tricks to blowing pain sup or gripping an ally for an extra stack of ERT in chase of the fattest parse, ERT is the next hottest thing to overanalyze since healer stat weights.

Yes, I’ve been running ERT on Mythic bosses this week. No, I haven’t spent any time thinking about how to min-max my cast sequence. It’s true that ERT adds additional complexity to the spec. However, much like the hyperfixation on the “ideal ramp” that’s been messing with disc players since 7.2.5, theorycrafting an ideal ERT ramp is low-hanging fruit that distracts from the reality of less-than-ideal conditions. Disc is a spec that can be played quite flexibly, but only if you let it - and that means avoiding being tied down by always striving to emulate a “standard” ramp sequence.

Things that are more important than caring about a set cast sequence:

Movement during ramp and/or during burst

CD availability to match encounter patterns

Spell timing to match damage patterns

Mana (aka can you afford to ERT mini-ramps, or just big ramps?)

Cohealers/overheal

ABC

[unfocusedwill]

Mythic The Restless Cabal

*laughs in Luminous Barrier*

[unfocusedwill]

how to heal week 1 as disc

On the release of a new raid, a lot of disc players opt to play holy during week 1. The reason is obvious - without familiarity with boss mechanics and most likely inaccurate timers, it’s easier to play a reactive healer spec.

Should you wish to undertake the trial by fire of playing disc on week 1, be prepared to do a bit of prep work and to have an adaptive mindset.

Read the dungeon journal and set up your raid frame indicators. I find it useful to do these things together. I have a system of Grid2 indicators that I use across all healer specs/boss encounters which make it clear what a boss ability does, based on the way/location/size it’s displayed on the frames. I might do a separate post on this someday.

Prune your bossmods! Remove notifications for things irrelevant to your strategy as disc. Timer bars for abilities that don’t affect your planning, such as Void Crash (purple ground swirlies) and the obviously telegraphed Cerebral Assault (MC cone) on Restless Cabal, can be safely disabled. The cleaner you can get your bossmod, the better. I also take this time to add countdowns and different sound notifications.

If you’re forgetful or more of a hands-on learner like me, it might be useful to create your own private strategy notes (RT Note, AA, WA, etc.) In this I tried to record the damage patterns of important mechanics - or my best guess based on the tooltips, anyways.

Decide what talents you want to use based on your prep work so far. For RC I went with Evang because Storm of Annihilation is a very obvious and controllable time to ramp, and its duration is long enough for full Evang value. For Uu’nat, because damage events appeared to be bursty and rather short, I took LB. (In retrospect, people were also spread and running around like headless chickens which would’ve ruined Barrier value.)

Iterate! I didn’t tryhard by watching dayraid streams - aside from the dungeon journal-based prep mentioned above, I went in otherwise completely blind. The self-learning process is fun to me and one of the reasons I play week 1 disc. When your raid starts pulling, be ready to fill in the gaps in your knowledge and adjust/solidify your strategy based on new information. As an example, I hadn’t been aware of how exactly the dot damage from Gaze of N’zoth (beams) would work - I thought it would be a dot that I reactively atone. After seeing it, I would consider that a potential mechanic to proactively ramp.

All of these steps are beneficial regardless of spec. Disc just amplifies it to a more noticeable degree.

Yes, it’s a bit of work and yes, you could just play holy instead. At least for me, though, it strikes the right balance between effort and fun.

[unfocusedwill]

Defining “Optimal”

Before I picked up disc, I was a dps main. Playing “optimally” as a dps was essentially based on two things: swapping to priority targets (and/or doing mechanics) to ensure that they don’t cause a wipe, and then doing as much damage as possible. When to hold CDs, what talents to take, etc. could all be traced directly back to those two objectives.

Now, what about healing?

Keep the raid alive 1.1. don’t go oom, so you can keep healing 1.2. cast spells efficiently, so you don’t oom early

Do mechanics

Do as much damage as possible 3.1. cast heals efficiently, so you have more globals to DPS

Optimizing healing is complicated because at the raid level, you’re trying to optimize an entire team of healers to each contribute the right combination of healing, utility and dps to meet the three objectives above. You could also discuss optimizing healing at the individual level, either in the context of contributing to an optimized raid team or in the context of maximizing your own personal contribution. They aren’t always mutually exclusive - but neither do they always go hand in hand.

I’m going to leave disc out of the discussion for now because disc is fairly unique in how it commits to ramps and periods of healing output, and its interaction with dps.

Suppose you have an encounter and raid whose gear/player skill/etc. is tuned to require “50% healing efficiency” from 4 healers. (this is an entirely arbitrary number, and there is no formal definition for “healing efficiency”.) Let’s also assume that there aren’t any particularly unique damage patterns suited to certain healer specs over others and that all healing CDs are interchangeable. (Or just assume all 4 healers are the same spec, whatever works for you.) In other words, assume all variables are constant except for the percentage of time each healer chooses to spend on healing vs. doing dps.

To optimize this particular team of healers, you could have any combination of healing and damage breakdowns so long as it averaged out to 50% healing time across all 4 healers.

Some possible combinations:

2 healers healing 100% of the time and 2 healers dpsing 100% of the time

3 healers healing 66% of the time/dpsing 33% of the time and 1 healer dpsing 100% of the time/only popping their raid CD when assigned (p.s.: this is the setup my raid has had for the last couple tiers,)

3 healers, and drop the 4th healer for an actual dps

etc.

To state the obvious: “healing efficiency”/output is NOT linear. That is to say, assuming that overheal is constant, spending all your time healing will not result in double the healing compared to if you spent half your time healing. Similarly, because CDs are a thing, using your hardest hitting spells on CD is more impactful than spending the same amount of time dpsing but only pressing your filler. I choose to use the concept of healing efficiency as opposed to raw healing numbers because 4 healers healing efficiently while weaving dps is going to result in more net dps, for the CD/non-linear dps increase vs. time reasons mentioned above. I describe “healing efficiency” as if it’s linear, which is incorrect, but it doesn’t change the point of the hypothetical. If this still doesn’t make sense or you think this premise is invalid, then feel free to stop reading now.

Still here? You’ve been warned!

Optimizing healing at the raid level is hard because you want every healer to do just enough healing at the right times to keep the raid nice and healthy, and then dump everything else into dps. In practice, “perfect is the enemy of good [enough].” Overheal is going to happen, healers are going to target the same person with a heal, the healers don’t read each others’ minds, etc etc. It’s better to accept those losses than to ‘penny pinch’ and end up failing the basic healer objective of keeping people alive.

My point is, trying to fully optimize healing and healer dps at the raid level, or even discuss it, is pretty ridiculous because you’re only ever going to be able to take the blunt approach of assigning healer CDs and hoping everyone intuitively scales their output appropriately. Expecting the finesse of not all healing the same target, or "taking turns healing” when each healer’s most efficient spell is off CD, is patently unrealistic.

How about optimizing on the individual level? I describe it simply as “seeking value.” The individual can affect raid optimization in a couple ways.

most obviously, raid CDs are a major efficiency bump that should be coordinated with others.

you can positively affect the mana usage of the other healers (especially reactive healers) by contributing healing when their efficient spells are on CD and/or otherwise “making it so that they don’t need to cast a second, more inefficient spell.”

That last sentence is important. Recall that by my reckoning, optimizing as a healer is not about maximizing hps or drps - it’s about contributing to the ultimate goal of a boss kill by keeping the raid alive, optimizing time/gcd usage, and doing dps.

If a spell would make the difference between life and death, that is the spell you need to use. It is valuable, regardless of ‘efficiency’.

If a spell makes it so other healers don’t need to and do not spend as many globals on healing (and therefore don’t go oom and/or are able to spend more time dpsing), then it is efficient and valuable. (important: in practice, co-healers may cast additional healing spells anyways - maybe to parse, maybe because we’re not mind readers, or any other number of reasons. Even if a spell is efficient on paper, if it hasn’t caused an efficient effect in practice, it has not created value.)

If none of the above apply then maximizing personal contribution simply means healing efficiently/minimizing overheal and doing dps, not much else to say there.

Barrier is interesting because it could fall into either or neither of the above conditions. Examples of the life or death application include healer checks such as siegebreaker+high stacks on Jaina, reckoning on Champions, high energy tantrums on Grong, Blockade if an Ire soak is going to be missed. Examples of the efficient value application include fire/mist on Jadefire, death realm healing on Rasta (could also be life/death if people fail to clear stacks and get targeted by the healing absorb), reactively on Mekka if a bomb clips the entire raid, or on Blockade when lightning is going to hit the ranged stack.

As I have alluded to in previous posts on Evangelism/LB, Shadow Covenant, and parsing, just because something results in high hps according to logs doesn’t mean it’s ‘only’ a pad talent. Furthermore, it doesn’t mean that the talent is morally wrong or that no true mythic raider would take that talent. It’s certainly true that some people may take those talents for the sake of parsing, but to generalize all usages of the spell as selfish padding is bad logic.

Attempt to define your objectives and, when possible, use math and actual logs to determine what is optimal. When dealing with how to cooperatively heal with your co-healers, a healthy dose of intuition could be more useful than getting mired in trying to analyze an overly complex, abstract and non-generalizable healing environment.

[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!

[unfocusedwill]

defining the value of Atonement Duration

An updated version of the azerite trait chart was published over the winter holidays that ranks the atonement duration increasing traits (EL and Depths) quite highly. As the duration increase effect does not stack, it is of course not recommended to stack multiples of either of these traits. With 2x outer rings per azerite piece in Battle of Dazar, it should be all but inevitable that you will end up with at least one of each of these traits without going out of your way to do so.

That is not what this post is about though. In this post I attempt to provide a quick conceptual overview of the nature of atonement duration modifiers in general.

+Atonement duration affects:

The theoretical upper HPS output during your burst window - assuming no/low overheal - assuming you are able to fit additional atonement healing events in those extra second(s).

The amount of time (leniency) you have in ramping for a planned damage event.

The maximum number of atonements you are able to have out at a given time. - Note: it’s not always wise to aim for 20 atonements, even if you ‘can,’ due to both mana and fight pattern/throughput budgeting constraints. See also my post on atonement count.

The benefit of +atonement duration is affected by:

Number/throughput strength of co-healers. Extra atonement healing is useless when it goes to overheal, or is otherwise not needed. This is a very important factor and one that informs my trait choices (as of 8.1 Uldir I run triple Archive) since I play with some very strong healers.

Damage patterns. While a single/short burst damage event is subject heavily to the previous point, on a fight with constant damage and/or long DoTs (e.g. AbT Varimathras, Mythic Aggramar) +duration objectively extends your coverage during periods of needed healing.

Haste - not that important but mentioning for the sake of completeness.. if you happen to reach a breakpoint that allows you to cast an extra smite during your burst window, and it doesn’t go to overheal, that is of course more healing.

a note on Evangelism

I thought about writing a separate post about Evang a while back, but at least in Uldir it didn’t seem substantial enough to be relevant. Since Evang is also an atonement duration-modifying effect, however, I am including it in this post. Evang is subject to the same effects and limitations outlined above. A big difference however is that Evang competes with DR(Lenience) and reverse revival(Luminous Barrier)/loss of Barrier on its talent row, while EL/Depths compete with various stat increasing effects, for the most part. EL/Depths can be evaluated simply by asking whether you will be able to make good use of the increased duration. Evang/Lenience/LB includes an additional evaluation of what contributes more overall value.

LB is unsurprisingly a common pick on Taloc, since raidwide damage events are so few and far between, and the raid isn’t stacked - though the damage does pick up somewhat in the last phase, and Evang helps with raw throughput when solo healing.

Late into farm I also switched from Evang to LB on Vectis, which you may or may not find unbelievably offensive. This is a very unpopular pick that I honestly would not recommend without a good understanding of why I took it and whether or not it applies to you. The long and short of it is that while Evang would provide a stronger/more drawn out burst on a single set of Immuno/Contagion per P1, my raid a) 3-heals Vectis and b) no longer assigns set raid CDs to each Immuno/Contagion. That means I don’t need increased throughput to cover “my” CD, and as previously mentioned I play with strong healers that top off the raid in a matter of seconds.

How about Barrier? Besides the stacked raid positioning requirement, Barrier vs. LB can be direcly mathed out based on how much damage was prevented. There is a clear breakpoint at which Barrier prevents more damage than what LB absorbs.

As a quick case study, I will use this log. With 0 stacks of LI, Contagion hit me for 41905. Barrier would reduce that by 25%: a reduction of 10.5k. Mastery buffed LB absorbed 27.8k, while non-mastery LB absorbed 24.5k. For Barrier to be superior, not only would everyone need to be in its area of effect, but it would also need to prevent an additional 329.5k damage (calculated assuming a ramp of 15 atonements). 4x Omega Vector, the only other source of damage on Vectis, does 7x ~26k damage over 10 seconds. Over the full 10-second duration of barrier, this is a 182k damage reduction. Higher LI stacks on a second Barrier’d Contagion at the end of the pull is still not enough damage to draw even with LB’s absorb. Combined with the possibility that not everyone might be within Barrier’s area of effect (especially later in the fight, where some people have 6+ stacks and need to stand away from the raid) it’s quite obvious that LB outperforms baseline Barrier.

Also remember that the INT values of the azerite/trinket charts are from a purely healing perspective - investing into stat increases (other than mastery) also improves your dps, which is arguably just as valuable as--if not more than--being able to pump out a bit more HPS under ideal conditions.