LoDBlog

Welcome to the land of the bubble.  In Ulduar hard modes disc priests began to learn the value of Power Word Shield (PWS) and ToGC offers a wonderful opportunity to push the usefulness of this spell to new levels.  Disc priests can really break out of their Single Target Healer mold in this instance and often take the crown for best raid healing priest spec, and possibly best raid healing class/spec overall.  By using PWS aggressively, intelligently, and without mercy disc priests can push 10k+ HPS in these encounters.

Here’s how.

Northrend Beasts –

The first encounter of ToGC gives us plenty of opportunity to use PWS effectively.  In P1 Gormok will be using Staggering Stomp on a predictable cooldown, shielding the melee groups along with your tanks will absorb the majority of this damage.  Melee taking the brunt of raid damage is a common theme in raid encounters.  Because preventing damage is often dependant on knowing when and who will be damaged, learning this lesson is important for a disc priest.

Phase one’s major concern is tank deaths, so you might want to wait until a later phase to focus solely on bubble and instead spend more time spamming tanks with penance, greater heal, and PWS.

Phase two is all about the melee again.  Paralytic Toxin is most dangerous when multiple melee get it.  Your ranged raid members can spread out and avoid many applications of the toxin, but your melee will invariably get themselves in trouble if they’re bunched.  Simply keeping PWS on all melee going into P2 is a smart idea, if you apply it before the worms even come out then weakened soul will wear off quite early into this phase.

This is an example of a disc advantage over other healers.  During transitions while other healers are simply resting on their laurels the disc priest can use this time constructively.  Looking for these opportunities is paramount to having success as a disc priest.

Phase three has more raid damage than you’d think.  Between whirl, massive crash, and arctic breath your raid members actually have a decent chance of dying.  This is the first instance of ToGC where we can apply the “If I shield this target, the entire shield will be used” rule.  This is an important rule in deciding how to spend gcds in this instance.

If your entire shield will be used then PWS offers huge HPS for the priest.  Simply spamming PWS on every raid member will prevent a lot of arctic breath + massive crash related deaths, on a phase where the DPS requirements can be quite tight for newer raids.  Since tank damage isn’t too intense during this phase the disc priest will get a lot of mileage out of bubble spamming.

Jaraxxus –

There isn’t a lot of healing that needs to be done on this encounter in general.  Bubble spam really shines on encounters with a lot of periodic or heavy random raid damage.  The only opportunity to bubble spam effectively on Jaraxxus is when volcanoes and infernals are up.  Pay close attention to DBM or whichever boss timer you’re running, the melee groups are once again good targets to bubble prior to the volcano and once more when their weakened soul debuff runs out.  The damage can come quickly for a few moments following the spawn of multiple infernals and keeping all your dpsers alive will be key in limiting the overall number of add phases and adds per phase.

Faction Champions –

There are a number of healing strategies which are viable as disc here.  You can be a mass dispel bot, a shield bot, or single target heal.  I feel that the value of mass dispel, aside from getting the initial heroism off the mobs, is overstated by many priests.  Yes this fight mimics arena to a degree, yes mass dispel is good in arena, and yes it can be good in this encounter.  But there are many more valuable things you could be doing as a disc priest to help your raid rather than mass dispelling.

The danger in this encounter is focus fire damage on your raid members.  Getting a few scattered dots off your raid with MD is not going to keep anyone alive.  Deaths come from 4-5 mobs focus firing on people.  The two other focuses (bubble spamming + single target healing) are much more helpful in keeping raid members alive than MD will be.

The bubble spamming method involves simply spamming your entire raid with PWS.  This is an encounter where most everyone can be expected to take 7k damage over 30s, so once again you won’t run into too many wasted bubbles.  That really isn’t our concern with this encounter though.

What we’re most concerned about with bubble spamming is artificially increasing everyone’s health pool by 7-8k.  This is what you’re doing when you bubble someone.  It now takes an extra 8k worth of attacks before someone gets insta-gibbed, and healers will have a moment more to react to this incoming damage on anyone.  If you have reactive healers assigned to the raid, functioning in a bubble spamming role will help give them time to react to target swaps by the mobs.

If you’re interested in single target healing I highly recommend /focusing a dangerous mob.  Typically I /focus the warrior, rogue, or hunter as they seem to be the mobs most responsible for deaths in our raid.  By focusing on the warrior I can see his target the very moment he switches.  Rather than reacting to the first or second attack by the warrior on a new target, and by that time it may be too late, I’m simply reacting to the switching of targets and I’m able to heal that person preemptively.  Having 1-2 healers /focus mobs in this way has been very helpful in our kills.

One more bit on MD in this fight.  It certainly has uses, cleaning off heroism/bloodlust being most important, but I don’t think that any of the damage or HoTs you’re pulling off are going to make or break the encounter.  Your DPS focus target should be continually stripped of buffs by your shaman and shadow priests and removing HoTs from mobs that aren’t being focused is worthless.

Removing DoTs from your raid is valuable, but DoT damage isn’t going to be responsible for any deaths in your raid, it’s the focus damage that’s more concerning.  Spending a gcd MDing a few DoTs off your raid is NOT as good a use of a gcd as healing the raid member currently being focus fired by 4-5 mobs.

Twins –

This is my favorite fight as disc in ToGC!  There have been a lot of misconceptions about Disc since it became raid viable in 3.0, people like to pigeonhole disc into being a single target healing spec and holy into being the raid healing spec.  This is more wrong than people realize.  Disc is a GREAT raid healing spec.  The strength of this role for disc has nothing to do with hasted PoH and everything to do with PWS.

With raid buffs my PWS heals/prevents for 10-11k.  Hasted PWS takes 1s to cast.  On Twins your entire raid will take at least the minimum 7-8k over 30s for each PWS to be fully used.  This means that every PWS I cast will prevent/heal for 10-11k.  That’s 10-11k HPS.  If you use ProM on cooldown you can expect to add another 3-4k HPS.

Disc priests should be using a 9x shield, 1x ProM rotation on Twins.  Simply go down your raid list spamming shield, it’s that simple.  This strategy allows you to remain mobile, since shield and ProM are instants, and guarantees you very little overheal.  A druid or holy priest spamming rejuv/renew on the raid might have 8-10k HPS, but they suffer from a large amount of over heal using HoTs.  Bubble spamming is the easiest HPS to capture on this encounter and every raid group should have one priest in this role.

Anub –

Disc priests have an important, yet ultimately limited, role for this encounter.  Penetrating Cold healing involves 5 targets getting a debuff which will kill them in 3s unless they receive a heal.  A disc priest shielding targets is highly effective in preventing these deaths.  LoD uses two disc priests for Anub and has the raid split by groups so that each disc priest handles a different portion of the raid.  One priest shields groups 1,2,3 and the other priest shields 3,4,5.

Using this strategy you have to be pretty quick to realize that if your groups don’t have a lot of PC people, or none at all, you’ve got to help the other priest with their groups because they have all five people.  Some raids might heal PC by healing off raid symbols or other assignments, every strategy probably has their advantages and disadvantages.

There really isn’t a lot of healing to do in P1 or P2 on Anub, it’s basically about executing your penetrating cold healing, limiting healing otherwise, and pushing DPS in P3.

Unfortunately absorbed damage DOES heal Anub, so you can’t simply shield spam your way to victory on this fight.  Oh well, 4 of 5 encounters where you should beat every other healer by spamming one spell isn’t bad.

Bottom Line –

In Ulduar and ToGC there are many encounters where spending every gcd on PWS is an absolutely viable and effective strategy for a disc priest.  PWS offers very high HPS when fully absorbed (10k+) and does not often suffer from over heal in this day and age of massive raid damage.

Remember to stay aggressive with your casts, look for opportunities to shield during phase changes and downtime, and always anticipate damage.  Study the encounters, know who will be most likely to take damage (melee on 99% of encounters, warlocks on faction champions, etc).  It takes a pro-active disc priest to beat traditional healing specs in raid healing.

If you’re a disc priest being pigeon holed into tank healing, struggling to break 3k HPS, or you’re made to go holy because “this encounter has lots of raid healing”, think about unleashing your potential with a new bubble spamming role.