- Absorbing damage is a unique and important part of discipline healing.
Introduction
A discipline priest is a strong tank healing class which helps ensure the raid takes less damage that needs to be healed through. This is only going to scrape the surface of discipline priest healing so those who are not too familiar with this way of healing can use this as a point of reference for the remaining parts of the healing series.
Discipline spells
As a priest you will find that you have a lot of healing buttons. Some of these you will be using quite a lot more frequently than others. I have included a large selection of spells used by discipline priests and of course included specific spells that only this priest spec can use. (It is the spell rank used at level 80 that I’ve linked to.)
Power Word: Shield – OK, so this is a generic priest spell, but no one uses it as much as a discipline priest. The reduced cooldown is great. Rolling shields is a great way of preventing massive AoE damage for example. It is particularly nice having it glyphed so it instantly heals for 20% of its absorption.
Penance – Who wouldn’t love a healing spell that looks painful?! A channelled heal with a short cooldown which needs a little planning. Not a great idea to start casting this as you’re about to take AoE damage forxezample as it may get interrupted. A fully channelled Penance is quite powerful.
Pain Suppression – When the tank is suddenly taking massive damage, this is the spell to get thrown on quickly. Its damage reduction on the target lets both you and other healers relax a bit more in those awkward situations where the tank is taking a right beating. It is worth noting its threat reduction though, so you may want to be careful using this on the tank in a threat sensitive fight.
Prayer of Mending – Ping pong healing can sometimes do the job for you while you are tabbed out reading random websites. It is a very useful spell that heals when the person who currently has it gets hit. It does a lot of healing in constant AoE situations and can also jump nicely back and forth between the two tanks and/or melee. This is a heal that is very powerful and doesn’t require a whole lot of work. Nice!
Renew – A decent hot to keep ticking while you use other spells on the tank. It is also good for healing a caster back up.
Power Infusion – Some caster is going to love you long time if you keep using this spell on them. You can choose to use it on yourself if need be as well.
Flash Heal – A pretty fast reasonably sized heal you will find yourself using quite a lot. It is good for both healing tanks and topping of others in the raid.
Binding Heal – This heal will heal whoever you target and yourself at the same time. (You could compare this with a paladin where you are the one beaconed.) It is of course ideal for when both you and others are taking damage at the same time, and that is also the only time it’s a good heal.
Greater Heal – As it is a larger heal it will often over heal for quite a bit and the effective amount it heals per mana used is generally lower than Flash Heal and therefore not used as frequently. There are of course exceptions such as when a person is taking massive amounts of damage repeatedly.
Prayer of Healing – As you are not a typical AoE healing class you are hopefully teamed with somebody who has greater abilities in this area. However, if you do need to throw out AoE heals, Prayer of Healing is decent option. It’s got a fairly long cast time and not a super sized heal which will eventually drain your mana.
Gear stats
As with any healer, spell power is great stat. Intellect (and also MP5) is valued over spirit as it intellect provides a nice mana pool and MP5 gives mana regen. Spirit, on the other hand, doesn’t give any additional stats like it does for a holy priest for example so not much point stacking it for the sake of it. Additionally, crit is very nice stat that you want to get plenty of. A healthy amount of haste can be nice, but crit is better for you. Of course, as a clothie there isn’t much else you can use other than cloth. You will often find yourself battling DPS for gear upgrades.
Mana regen
Shadowfiend is a summoned pet that will DPS whatever the priest tells it to attack. However, as it is a pet it can take damage and die, although this has been changed in recent patches to make it take less AoE damage. It will regen mana for15 seconds or until it dies.
Hymn of Hope is the second priest ability to regenerate mana. Additionally, it will increase the party’s mana pool for 8 seconds. This is a channelled spell which makes it important to time when to use it. Starting to channel it as AoE damage is imminent for example is not a brilliant idea.
Strengths and weaknesses
Tank healing is where a discipline priest often excels. As with any class their primary role in a raid will depend on who they heal with (a future episode will touch on this subject). However, their uniqueness lies in their ability to absorb damage and make the other healer’s job easier. In a balanced group a discipline healer is generally at the bottom of healing done because these absorbs are generally not counted as healing. By having an additional add on installed such as Recount – Guessed Absorbs you will find that a good discipline healer can keep up with any other healer if you combine their healing done and damage absorbed.
The main weakness I found as a discipline priest was the lack of AoE heals. If you know where or when the damage is about to occur you can easily soften the blow by shielding the players who are likely to take damage. However, it is not always that easy. It is mostly OK in a heroic, but can prove difficult in a raid situation and may require some experience with the specific encounter.
In heroics with a decent group, a priest healer can be seen as more fun to play as they are one of the strongest DPS classes as healers. Holy Nova and Smite are far more fun than having to swap forms as a druid or as shockadin DPS.
Levelling
In order to play a healer at maximum level you have to get there first. I found the first 35 levels quite slow as you are lacking spells that make killing mobs very efficient. Thankfully levelling as been sped up since my priest was running around the starting areas. The three possible specs for levelling are discipline, holy and shadow. Personally I levelled as holy until level 35 when I gave in and levelled as shadow. Shadow is the strongest levelling spec of the three as it does most damage and you eventually get both Vampiric Embrace (which you can also improve) and Vampiric Touch (lower ranks do less damage) talented to get you back both health and mana while levelling.
Levelling as disc is something I personally haven’t tried, but although it is quite probably slower than levelling as shadow I don’t think it would be too bad some more PvP oriented talents are chosen over a possible raid talents. Reflective Shield could come quite in handy. Because you can keep yourself shielded a lot of the time you generally will not be interrupted so much while casting spells. You are also not very likely to die if you level as a healer. Lastly it’s worth noting that obtaining gear as a priest while levelling is relatively easy.
Useful websites
Here is a short list of links to information about discipline priests that are far more detailed than I have been in this introduction.
If you know of other good websites related to discipline healing you are welcome to link to them in a comment to this post.
Summary
In a balanced group a discipline healer is generally at the bottom of healing done. Unfortunately this gives some people who don’t understand the mechanics of discipline healing the impression that this is not a particularly good healing class. This is certainly not the case. Discipline priest is a very strong and unique healing class, even if they are often misunderstood. Absorbing damage eases the job for other healing classes considerably.
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The next episode in the healing series will be on the Holy Priest.
Tags: disc, healing, mana, opinion, priest, spells, stats, WotLK
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As a disc healer myself I like your brief guide – nicely done! I’d like to give a tip that applies to all healers – if you do hymn of hope and then release your shadowfiend you’ll get more mana back since the shadowfiend gives a percentage of your pool back.