Avoidance&Disc synergy

So I've been thinking a bit and chatting with my favorite disco priest, and came across an idea, which is quite obvious, but still I think it's worth a second thought.

Basically, I just wonder if anyone ever thought of the way it works together. Since disc bubbles work from all healing, including overheals(hi Divinity => 5% more bubbles!), when you avoid some 5 hits in a row, the priest can stack up silly amounts of absorption on you, and thus pretty much neglect half the hit that eventually lands even on the hardest hitting bosses in ulduar.

Since the arguement most people have against stacking avoidance is the fact you actually take the a few consequent hits, the point of this post is, the avoidance stacking tank will most likely avoid more hits before that => get more absorption stacked up, and it will probably be more than enough to offset the HP difference.

For an example, I usually survive a hit from vezax with surge of darkness without any cooldown when something goes wrong, and, i know it can't be proben by SWS or something, but I can assure you it saved me plenty of times that i absorbed 15k out of a hit, thus survived it. It actually happened on our first Vezax kill even, when a priest was slow on suppression.

Seeing my combatlog parses, depending on luck of avoidance, the difference between avoiding 55 and 65% is average 4, respectively 6,5k damage absorbed on average. It's far from accurate, but better than nothing, and on hard hitters as vezax or XT002, it's actually enough to make a difference between surviving 2 hits and dying.

So whaddya think? Or it that too obvious to even discuss?

DA bubble is 30% of each critheal stacking up to 10k for all priests. Absorbing 15k hits must mean you also had some PW:S and possibly sacred shield on you.

To get 10k DA bubble you'll need to get (over)healed by crits from disc priests for 30k. Assuming ~35% holy crit that means around 85k healing in total. You'll need a loooong avoidance streaks to get DA bubble to that size with only a single disc sitting on you. With 2-3 it might be better but they will definitely want to spend some of their time spamming shields on other targets to get some regen.

Disco Priests own, true story.

My priest has always been disc even back when when it was not even considered a healing spec. Ive always just liked the bigger mana pool and mana regen. But now its just ridiculously good. In essence, every crit heal is = like + 2-3k more health to the tank, stacking. Plus the regular bubble absorbing another 4k or so. You might as well just say, having a Disc priest healing you gives you 10k more health.

Disc priests are very powerful in their current form as they are very centered around "absorbs". It's sometimes hard to convince your guild to start using them as they sometimes are lacking the "throughput" on the meters, but they more than make up for it with their unique healing method. Rather than a regular healer who simply "refills" or "resets" your EH. Disc simply gives you "temporary EH". As long as the pw:s or divine aegis is up on the tank, you can count it into your EH. This is very worth the drop in throughput, and can really take a load off the healers on healing intensive fights.

Not to mention renewed hope stacks with BoSanc, making them another 3% less raid damage, which is very good.

I would go far enough to say that pretty much any raid without a disc priest is making a significant error and is decreasing their chances of successfully completing the encounter.

My priest alt is shadow/disc dual spec, and her disc gear is a mix of 200/213 epics, with some sub-optimal gear for healing that I'm currently sharing between the 2 specs (crit bonus meta in my only helm ). I healed the last 5 bosses of 10 Naxx with her the other day for a PuG, and I checked out Recounts "Guessed Absorbs" module after the run. I'm not sure how accurate that module is, so I'm not sure how well this applies. But the log showed my PW:S absorbing ~5980 max dmg on each of the 2 tanks and a threat happy ret palladin (fully consumed in one hit probably) and lesser amounts for other players where the shield wasn't used up. My max Divine Aegis stackage occurred on the MT on KT, up to around 7700 IIRC, according to Recount. Not sure if it stacked that high from me healing him up during the phase change, or an avoidance streak, or that time the melee got him frost blasted and I had to heal him through it.

Either way, along with my PW:S he had about 13.5k worth of bubbles stacked on him at that point, which is actually pretty impressive. IIRC I was only around 2k spell power and 25% crit, so IMO a well-geared disco could stack some very impressive absorption on an avoidance-heavy tank. Seems like a great synergy to me.

glorfindell wrote:My priest alt is shadow/disc dual spec, and her disc gear is a mix of 200/213 epics, with some sub-optimal gear for healing that I'm currently sharing between the 2 specs (crit bonus meta in my only helm ). I healed the last 5 bosses of 10 Naxx with her the other day for a PuG, and I checked out Recounts "Guessed Absorbs" module after the run. I'm not sure how accurate that module is, so I'm not sure how well this applies. But the log showed my PW:S absorbing ~5980 max dmg on each of the 2 tanks and a threat happy ret palladin (fully consumed in one hit probably) and lesser amounts for other players where the shield wasn't used up. My max Divine Aegis stackage occurred on the MT on KT, up to around 7700 IIRC, according to Recount. Not sure if it stacked that high from me healing him up during the phase change, or an avoidance streak, or that time the melee got him frost blasted and I had to heal him through it.

Either way, along with my PW:S he had about 13.5k worth of bubbles stacked on him at that point, which is actually pretty impressive. IIRC I was only around 2k spell power and 25% crit, so IMO a well-geared disco could stack some very impressive absorption on an avoidance-heavy tank. Seems like a great synergy to me.

Yeah, I figured this out a couple of months ago and began rolling a Disc priest. I am very into the idea of avoid & absorb. Hell, thats what we are all about! So I decided then that I would prefer a pro-active absorb to an "oh crap he's almost dead" heal. I dont like my health bar going like a yo-yo.

Anyhow, Just got him the shoulders, and am teaching the ways of the pally tank to my brother in law. Since I understand Prot so well, I bet I would be one kick arse healer for him (he is my main healer when I am playing prot).

Just to calrify on the mechanics here. The bubbles absorption amount is counted after all the other mitigation stuff right?
I mean if a mob hits me for 10k cuz im squishy, but hits the tank for 5k. A 10k bubble will last one hit for me, and 2 hits on the tank right? This goes for blocked hits too im hoping.

Disc is awesome for any type of tank really. Bear tanks who take less damage per hit would use less of the bubble per hit right? Palys would would add another 1.5-2k to the bubble by blocking everything.

Its just delicious for everyone.

I never paid a lot of attention to it, but I was under the impression that absorptions always took the full hit, then you get damage, and reduce it. So, so 10k bubble vs 12k hit bubble takes 10k you get hit for 2k-mitigation. I could easily be wrong though =P

I've taken 2k Hateful Strikes with a disc priest on me.

Well I've just started levelling my priest with the intention of trialling a raid disc spec. This threat makes me happier about my "wacky" decision

Bundy wrote:Just to calrify on the mechanics here. The bubbles absorption amount is counted after all the other mitigation stuff right?
I mean if a mob hits me for 10k cuz im squishy, but hits the tank for 5k. A 10k bubble will last one hit for me, and 2 hits on the tank right? This goes for blocked hits too im hoping.

Well I haven't actually tested it in some separated enviroment or anything, but i'm almost sure yer right and the bubble is consumed after mitigation effects. Or else our priest would have to be capable of creating up to 70k bubbles pretty often, I doubt it

So as Disc if the Tank is avoiding alot of hits but you know when he does get hit its gonna be a good chunk. You still heal him even though hes full right? To get some bubble up for when he does finaly get hit.

Reason I ask is, I was in a OS 10 grp, we were trying it with a drake up, but when the drake came down he one shotted me and then of course the tank died due to lack of heals. Anyways this happend 3 times, and even though I asked everytime why the drake wasnt being picked up by the OT I was obviously ignored.

So we ended up just doing it with no drakes and cleared it easy. I won the bag of spoils and the Tank started bitching saying he cant believe the guy who caused 3 wipes wins something. So I was like WTF, over? then he proceeded to post overhealing charts showing 60% of my heals being overheals. I tried to explain how Disc heals work but he didnt want to hear it of course.

I just wanted to confirm that assuming mana is not an issue at all, you heal tank with at least Penance on every CD regaudless of his current HP. I havnt readanything on it either way, I just assumed.

Also, the other healer was also a Disc priest, and he kept freaking shielding my Tank, and it was pissing me off and throwing off my rythm. I mean you always start off with a PW:S, Penance, FHeal/Gheal right? Well when I never get a chance to PW:S my Tank, it throws you off ya know? I asked him and he said he only did it once on accident. Pffffttt

What you have there Bundy is a lack of Disc Disc synergy. I roll with 2 disc priests through Ulduar 10. It took a while for them to get used to each other's shielding but a week later they were very cooperative and never messed with each others rotations.

Recount is a great tool for live stats but doesn't not show Disc prowess at all. Using Loggerhead + World of Logs shows me every time how much of a gem each of my Disc priests are.

I still remember a tree healer in Naxx 25 saying that he was showing the highest healings on recount when we had my ulduar healers in the group. Later when I checked the logs his effective healing was only half of the disc healers.