First, let me say how weird it is to be playing MoP again – it’s kinda the same, but not really?
Tl;Dr: So, disc has been nerfed a lot but I frankly don’t think it’s an issue unless you’re pushing cutting edge content.
Sidenote: we’re painful in arena and I do think we need a hot fix to address how rough it is for us ATM in pvp, specifically arenas.
Anyways…
I somehow stumbled into raid leading a group on classic. We’re not amazing, but we’re not terrible. We’re currently still on normals, but damn have I been proud at the group killing bosses well – 1-shot spirit kings, 2-shot final MSV boss. We were waiting for a tank and tried out the first boss of HoF and got it to 15% with 9 people. Grabbed another DPS and downed it quickly.
So let’s talk about disc nerfs. I personally think they’ve been overblown because what we excel at is mitigation. Who cares about throughput right now?
We eat the damage before it arrives – I’ve been arranging a lot of pug world boss fights, beyond my own weekly lockout, and it’s amazing practice for spirit shell due to stomp timing. We run as many healers as we can but I am basically doing 50% of the healing for Garelon due to spirit shell.
He’s great practice.
So back to MSV and HoF:
To maximize spirit shell absorbs, you want to be using inner focus and all of your archangel stacks. This will make your next prayer of healing incredibly strong and build absorbs.
Actually timing effects well will mitigate damage your team is taking, so your healing numbers will then shoot up. Avoid any team focused on these sort of numbers – you’re just doing absorbs. Someone like a resto shaman will pair well and shine because their mastery will pop off (they’ll heal more when people are low health).
Could disc be better? Definitely.
Is disc as bad as people are claiming? Imo, maybe they aren’t playing disc as it’s intended to be played…
First, hey! You only need 50 lesser charms to get your 3 weekly Mogu Runes of Fate. Seems Blizzard realizes that the dailies are…not being done daily. I may actually get mine each week. My raid team will be happy (shh, don’t tell them, I’ve just been feigning horrid luck).
So, a post. Since I’ve been lazy.
1. Jin’rokh the Breaker: This fight is actually a fairly simple one. It took my team 2 pulls to down him, and that was the first week with Tier 14 gear. The trick is just managing where you drop the ball lightning (hint: the grates at the edge of the area are all outside of the puddles) and healing through lighting storm.
This fight is GREAT for a disc priest. First, when your tank gets slammed across the room, a pool forms underneath him. Standing in that increases your healing AND your DPS. Hello – atonement! Lightning storm is a great time to use barrier and it happens every 2ish minutes, which means that you can preblanket the group with spirit shells every time (and the spirit shells benefit from your increased healing from the pool!).
1.5 Bridge Trash: The banshees here put a debuff on everyone, reducing healing done, so once you get 5 stacks for archangel, when she is at 75%, spirit shell for a few prayer of healings to eat up the damage before it gets to your team (and is subsequently harder to handle since the healing gets eaten by the debuff).
2. Horridon: This fight is more about properly dispelling and add management and is fairly relaxed as a healer. Atonement works well as a low-mana spot heal. If your team is having issues getting all the dispells off, switch to the glyph of mass dispell to help there – remember MD and purify are on their own CDs so, glyph or not, you still have 2 dispells to work with. Just be wary of overextending yourself mana wise – MD completely eats it up. Spirit shell is best used here as a tank CD (I like to pop it when I have 2 from darkness comes light procs) and it can also be helpful during the venom phase, when the second priest comes out, as you should see an increase in AoE damage there. At the 4th gate, when people have the reflective damage curse, it’s also useful to mitigate the damage they are doing to themselves, since DPS are lazy and bad. >_> Switch to atonement once Wargod Jalak is dead, as the raid gets a DPS boost at that point.
3. Council of Elders:Disc can be helpful on this fight if your team is having trouble burning Suul before his phase. Our DPS, although low, can definitely contribute. Aside from that, both holy and disc work quite well for this fight. For disc, use barrier at the very first empowerment from Malak to eat the damage from his empowered frost dot; follow that with spirit shell and/or bubbles on the 3 people splitting that. Make sure to put bubbles on the people with the dot when he is not empowered, and spirit shell if desired. I tend to leave spirit shell for a tank heal, with FDCL procs, especially when the tank gets stunned and can’t mitigate.
4. Tortos: Great fight for disc, as every time you kick a turtle shell at Tortos, you get a 30% temporary DPS increase! Keep bubbles up on the tanks and (at least) on yourself before quake stomp. The few seconds before that can be good for spirit shelling the team up, but the hectic nature of that fight makes that hard in actuality, especially once more than one wave of turtles has gone out. FDCL procs + bat tank sprit shells are a good alternate use which is much easier to do while remaining mobile.
Ignore the skeletons…
5. Megaera: I think this fight is DESIGNED for disc. Spirit shell can (and should) be used every rampage. What I do is power infusion for the 1st ramage, barrier for the 2nd, power infusion again on 3rd, and the 4th (THE ONLY RAMPAGE I CAN’T COVER OMG HOW AWESOME IS THAT COVERAGE!) is handled by our Shaman. Then barrier again! This fight works so so so nice with our CDs.
6. Ji’Kun: I pretty much exclusively heal up top during this phase, but atonement is great for helping kill the hatchlings/healing quickly. Spirit shell is great for quills. The fight itself is pretty basic, as a healer. I use barrier as needed (usually when we get a downdraft into pools because WHY DIDN’T YOU INTERCEPT THEM DPS ARRGGHHH).
7. Durumu the FORGET IT: I have a crappy computer, so I hate this guy SO. FREAKING. MUCH. Can barely see the maze. Anyways, disc is very useful for this fight – pop spirit shell during the beam phase to eat up damage your team will take from red. If I have any FDCL procs, I’ll convert those into shell as well before disintegration beam just to give me a bit more wiggle room with running the maze.
8. Primordius: We really only pulled this guy once so far, and he died, so. But, from a theory standpoint, I like holy better for this fight. I think disc can potentially be potent if you snag all the empowerments, but until that point, you’re going to be switching targets a ton while also being mobile (Primordius himself takes reduced damage unless you get buffs). Bubbles and spirit shell are good for caustic gas to mitigate damage, as well as for the single dot that gets slapped periodically on people.
9. Dark Animus: This fight is fairly easy from a healing standpoint, with the only heavy lifting coming in at the end. Use bubbles on the matter swap people and dispel them as soon as the bubble is there (it’ll be about 7-8 seconds on the debuff) – this will ensure that the person with the debuff is taking the majority of the damage, which your bubble then mitigates! Use spirit shell before interrupting jolt (make sure to stop casting before it hits), both to mitigate AoE damage and in case your fellow healers (but never you!) get interrupted and can’t heal for a bit.
And! This is as far as my team has gotten. Hope this is helpful!
So I’ve been sucked back into MUDs and have only been playing WoW a bit every now and then between raids – my guild is now up to 3/6H MSV, 6/6 HoF and 4/4 ToES! Huzzah! I intended to post this ages ago, but it might still be helpful for other teams given how 5.0 raid content will still remain semi-viable for gearing in 5.2.
Spirit shell is, in my opinion, the best trick up discipline priest’s sleeves right now. I loved the spell since the moment we got it, even with all of the initial wonkiness and awkward feeling it first had for use. It rewards intelligent foresight, which I think is a core aspect of discipline priest play – we don’t just heal reactively, but we also use our knowledge of the fight and our raiders to blanket the raid before the damage hits.
So, here’s my quick breakdown of the best spots to pop spirit shell in each fight this tier:
Mogu’shan Vaults
Stone Guards – Excellent to use before an overload if your tanks identify that they are going to be unable to execute a juggle with the dogs. This can and does prevent a wipe. I ran holy for this fight due to the better mobility until I got better gear (plus disc was bad off back then), but spirit shell can have moderate use here. For heroic, the mines do enough damage that using it whenever you have a free CD can mitigate raid damage – however I saved mine for when I had From Darkness Comes Light procs and used it on tanks due to the immense amount of damage they take.
Feng – Perfect for every phase of the fight. If your tank missed grabbing an interrupt, use it for epicenters where nullification barrier is off CD. Use it at the start of draw flame that nullification barrier isn’t eating (draw flame damage ramps up, so starting the shell at the start of draw flames is good timing). For phase 3, use it for the arcane velocities that are not mitigated by nullification barrier.
For heroic, you can use it for a general damage blanket during throw shield (though the damage is a bit spotty, so atonement covered that quite nicely).
Gara’jal – Spirit shell is stupid awesome in this fight. Voodoo doll damage almost always starts at the tank, so use bubble and spirit shell to absorb that damage off the bat with spirit shell and flash heal (even better with From Darkness Comes Light procs, but remember to save 2 for when you go in totems). The other voodoo dolls will take minimal damage.
Spirit Kings – Great right off the bat to absorb Qiang’s massive attacks. Spot heal until Meng is active and use spirit shell before maddening shout.
Elegon – Use early on to mitigate damage from Total Annihilation. A good timer for this is to start blanketing right after the celestial protector spawns. Atonement is amazing in this fight because of the dps and hps boost, so smite and offensive penance are your prime heals for most of this fight (especially since THOSE heals can reach the other side of the platform during draw power, whereas your direct heals can’t reach). I usually toss in another shell (or do a hymn of hope) while pillars are being taken down, just to absorb any splash damage from adds. Finally, in the last phase, spirit shell is obviously useful against the constant damage – try to get it out during that moment your team is grouped up at the console, so everyone goes in blanketed in absorbs.
Will of the Emperor – Use right before titan gas, obviously. However, there is time for 2 shells between titan gas phases, so I pop shell when I get FDCL procs to give the tanks extra absorbs.
Spirit (binder) shell(s)
Heart of Fear
Vizier – AMAZING before force and verve. For timing, I do instant holy and 4 smites to get full Archangel and then shell and prayer of healing. Timing is perfect to eat most of the force and verve – follow with a cascade or halo during the active F&V.
Bladelord – If you can get the timing down, this is great to use before unseen strikes. It makes a huge difference and can prevent wipes if people are slow to stack. Also, start shelling around 25-23% of the bosses’ health to give your team a nice blanket that absorbs nearly all of the damage from storm unleashed (during which you can’t heal!)
Garalon – Start shelling when your pherome carrier is around 15 stacks, assuming you switch in the early 20s. Or just shell whenever it’s off CD, since the constant raid damage is just that nuts. The trickiest part of this fight is being able to heal people in range, since there is a lot of movement from the melee DPS. Bonus points – stand in the blue ring and smite/penance the legs. 200k heals for each penance tick? Yes, please!
Windlord – Shell before rain of blades, especially in the later parts of the fight. The trick to this is that the DBM timer shows you the ability’s CD, not actually when the ability is about to happen (the actual ability is several seconds after that) so shell once that CD is at 0, instead of anticipating having a shell up at 0 on the timer.
Amber Shaper – Use bubble and shell, especially with FDCL procs, on people afflicted with parasitic growth (and tell your other healers to stop freaking healing the people). In the later stages of the fight, this can and does save lives! Also be very wary of atonement if parasitic growth is up during phase 3, due to the smart-heal nature – a quick shell, however, can ensure that the person with growth remains with higher health than others, allowing you to smite away!
Empress – Shell is excellent to blanket the raid before a dissonance field pops. You can also use shell to absorb damage from cry of terror when targets are inside the dissonance field. For phase 3, damage is fairly constant, so you can just use it on CD.
Terrace of Endless Spring
Protectors of the Endless – The best use of this (especially if you are going for elite, which you should! It’s especially doable with a disc priest!) is to eat the increasing raid damage from corruption. Use it more heavily as the fight goes on and the damage builds up.
Tsulong – Simply use on CD during night phase to mitigate constant raid damage. Bonus points – during day, save your inner focus and 1-2 FDCL procs for sun breath. Start casting greater heal shortly after he begins casting sun breath (so your greater heal casts RIGHT when he starts breathing). You can get several million healing each breath this way.
Lei Shi – I use my FDCL procs with spirit shell to give tanks extra absorbs, especially during the spawn elementals phase. Ideally I’d use this for get away, but it’s really impossible to predict when that’s coming. 😦
The Sha of Fear – UGGGHHHH. Hate this fight. I use spirit shell when I’m on the main platform to give extra absorbs in case people get hit by the adds’ bolts.
I’ll write up a version of this for the next tier, once we start raiding. Happy priesting!
a little bit of everything all of the time 