Last night I had a humbling VoA pug experience. For the first time in months, I tank healed alongside another Disc priest who actually knew what the hell she was doing - and that is an incredible understatement.

I know this, because her tank target actually had weakened soul on them the whole time. In fact, one time I was slow on the uptake, my tank target's health plummeted, and she shielded my target. I imagine she was probably wondering what the hell I was doing, and, while hesitant about shielding my target, figured it was better to be annoying than dead. She was the best Disc Priest I'd seen in a raid in a very long time.

But what has me totally fascinated, is that she's not a raider - she's a PvPer.

She was in full PvP gear (966 resilience). She carried a PvP heavy disc spec. Her glyphs and talent choices and gear priorities were nothing I would ever recommend for a PvE healer. Her gems were full of resilience and stamina. She had 128 hit rating. Everything about her gear, talent, gem, etc choices screamed PvP. And she healed just as well, if not better, than I did.

Her spellpower: 2569. Mine? 2840.
Her haste? 162. Mine? 716.
Her crit? 17.5%. Mine? 31%.

She matched me almost exactly on pure healing output, though I had significantly more mitigation/absorbs from peppering bubbles throughout the raid (because rapture procs make me smile). This makes sense, because her spellpower, crit, and haste are lower. She would, in theory, spend a little more time casting and have less Divine Aegis procs.

But the end result was the same. In full PvP gear, she matched my healing ability, and her tank stayed up just as well (sometimes better) than my own.

I shot her a whisper after we finished the fight, and told her she was amazing, and it was nice to heal next to someone who actually maintained weakened soul on the tank. She laughed and thanked me, and I'm sure she'll never see this post. She'll be too busy in Arena, kicking everyone's ass.

You might see her doing her daily random heroic, accruing emblems of frost. It looks like she does the weekly raid every week, and obviously pugs VoA (not surprising for a PvPer anyway). I'll think of her next time I see someone laughing at another pugger's PvP gear.

As someone who is completely oblivious about PvP, I admit being pretty jealous of the people who are good at PvP - I am awful at it. I personally think it requires a lot of quick thinking and maneurvering at which I am simply awful. So, I'm not ashamed I was, in my mind, out-healed by a PvP Disc Priest. I am, however, a little embarassed that I was surprised.

I might just do a whole buncha posts today!

First things first though... Wednesday night I did an interview with Exanna at OMGpriest! for her podcast, and it was pretty fun. I sound so tired and goofy, so all of you haters will want to listen to it and give me hell for it!

In all seriousness, it's a fairly short interview just talking about some of the basics of Discipline priesting... things you might want to know if you're switching from Holy to Disc. Listening to it now, I keep thinking of all these other things I should have said, but alas, hind sight is always 20/20. It can be rough making the switch, but Exanna and I went over some of the basics that a fresh Disc Priest may need to know.

Check it out on her page: OMGpriest!!

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And speaking of newbie Disc Priests, I want to leave you with a lesson I learned in a ToC25 pug tonight - It is far better to do nothing but cast Power Word: Shield as a Disc Priest than it is to go through entire fights without casting it once.

I've run into this a lot lately in pugs - other priests healing tanks with me, and me feeling that I needed to shield their tanks because they just weren't doing it themselves. Yes, Penance is an awesome spell - and you could argue that Penance is a bigger staple of the Disc Priest diet than even Power Word: Shield. But the foundation of Disc Priesting is mitigation - SO USE YOUR SHIELDS OR I WILL CRINGE.

And then I'll blog about it.

But at least I don't name names. I'd like to think that if you are a Disc Priest, and you read this blog... you know better.

From a healer's perspective, there's a lot of fancy schmancy terminology in WoW. You've got people discussing throughput, mana management, mitigation, effective health, AoEability, clustering, stacking, proactive, reflexive, reactionary, etc etc etc. Sometimes when I want to feel good about myself, I just start throwing around these words like how I used Foucaultian terms in grad school. Makes people think you're smart or something.

Inevitably, these terms will get confused and misused. People will use one term when they mean another, or perhaps not understand the difference between two terms. And that's fine – after all, knowledge is relative. What one word means to you is not necessarily what it means to me. But I won't bore you with critical theory and philosophy today (I always get especially philosophical at 6 am, I have no idea why).

Let's look at a primary example of a word that is often misused or misunderstood conceptually. Fulguralis calls me a word nerd for a very good reason!

Mitigation.

-verb

1. to lessen in force or intensity, as wrath, grief, harshness, or pain; moderate

2. to make less severe: to mitigate a punishment.

3. to make (a person, one's state of mind, disposition, etc) milder or more gentle; mollify; appease.

4. to become milder; lessen in severity.

Disc Priests are the king of damage mitigation amongst the healing classes, and I don't think there's any argument about that. However, I often hear of Druids being referred to as damage mitigators as well, and this grates on my word nerdiness, and does not accurately reflect the power of the HoT. If you say that Druids are damage mitigators, then it could be interpreted that a Disc Priest + Resto Druid is a poor healing combo for a ten man raid. This is absolutely untrue – Disc Priest & Resto Druid is a fantastic ten man healing combo.

I have been unable to find a term that adequately describes the purpose and power of the Druid HoT. The word for Disc Priest is, of course, mitigation, but I cannot conceive of a proper alternative for Druids. I understand, therefore, why people often refer to them as mitigative (lawl I will not be put off by that squiggly red line!).

The power of mitigation healing is that it reduces the impact of a big burst of damage, smoothing the incoming damage out a bit, taking off the peaks of pain. HoTs have this same power, but in a different way. Mitigation smooths out the incoming damage. HoTs smooth out the health pool. They result in similar effects, but go about it in different ways. Both Disc Priests and Resto Druids are "smoothers" if you will – but they are inherently different in their processes, and misunderstanding the difference can be fatal.

The fundamental difference between the two is best described in an example.

Let us say, for the sake of argument, that you have a tank with 35k health. This tank takes a hit of 37k damage, and consequently dies. A Disc Priest can actively prevent this by using one of their many mitigative abilities – be it Power Word: Shield, Pain Suppression, or perhaps a well timed Divine Aegis proc. These "mitigation" abilities are, in effect, temporary hit points that will be absorbed before any of the actual damage. If I pop a 5k shield on the tank, I have effectively increased their health to 40k, albeit temporarily. This is enough to allow them to survive that hit.

A resto druid cannot give that tank temporary hitpoints. However, if my Penance is on cooldown, a Resto Druid can do something that I cannot. What if, right after that tank takes that 37k hit, and is down to 3k health, he continues to take melee damage? With his health so low, and all my cooldowns blown, he could die before I get my Flash Heal cast off. But if he has HoTs on him, he will have health trickling in that may be enough to keep him alive between the time that he took his giant hit and the time that my Flash Heal or Greater Heal lands. THIS is the power of a Resto Druid.

Of course, in the effort to find the right word for teh HOTNESS that is a resto druid, the Twitterati came out and threw me a variety of potential words to meet my demands. None of them were perfect enough for me, but some of them were pretty epic.

Cadistra and Angelya suggested "lifestream".

Angelya again: Trickling?

Me: Trickle top-offing?

Sheqeri: Increased effective health?

Dristanel: Flailing? Foundation HoTs?

Matticus: Health gappiness?

Nibuca: Hottification? Pre-cognitive burst smoothing? Bursty effective armor displacement stamina throughput druid mob tree? (I get this strange sensation as if she were almost teasing me...)

Wonderful suggestions, eh? But I do believe that Deyndor takes the prize for the best suggestion of all time: Colander Heals. (I made sure I spelled it right this time! Ever notice that my spelling errors are mostly limited to double consonant words?) Do you have a difficult time conceptualizing Colander Heals? Well, LET ME DRAW YOU A PICTURE

Look! I'm going to do this all scientific like! Maybe if my thesis advisor runs across this, she will be proud instead of holding her head in her hands.

INTRODUCTION

Awhile back, Matticus did a little test in an effort to determine which bubble absorbs damage first, Power Word: Shield, or Divine Aegis. If I understand his methodology correctly, he essentially cast Power Word: Shield on himself as well as Divine Aegis, committed suicide by way of Molten Colossus, and examined his Combat Log to see which faded first. He tried this in various combos, proccing Divine Aegis first, and also using Power Word: Shield first. His conclusion was a "first come, first served" method. In other words, the bubble first cast/procced will be the first absorption used.

There was a comment on his post that suggested this might be inaccurate due to the way the combat log functions. I'm not really an expert on computery things, but I tend to agree with the commenter - when multiple effects occur at the same time (such as all your buffs fading when you die), the combat log has to have some order in which to list them that do not necessarily make any contextual sense. I.E. I'm not sure if this really determined which absorption works first, because everything drops off at the same time when you die, and is listed in a somewhat non-sensical way on the Combat Log. You can see this yourself if you ever note that your Combat Log may say you gained Spirit Tap before listing that you have slain a mob.

So I tried to test it too. I'm not as cool as Matt though, I didn't use Molten Colossi... I used various mobs around Icecrown while I did some dailies.

METHODOLOGY

I tested this by running around screaming wildly at mobs, standing around stoicly as they beat on me, helping them along with Shadow Word: Death, and tracking the results. Anytime Divine Aegis dissipated by timing out instead of by being fully absorbed, I threw out that result.

As a side note, self buffed, Shadow Word: Death is usually enough to make a Penance-procced Divine Aegis dissolve.

RESULTS

Both test versions were performed multiple times.

Test 1:

• Power Word: Shield first
• Divine Aegis second
• beat myself up (a la house elf)
• Divine Aegis dissolves via absorption
  
• Much much later, Power Word: Shield disappears

Test 2:

• Divine Aegis first
• Power Word: Shield second
• beat myself up (a la house elf)
• Divine Aegis dissolves via absorption (not by timing out)
• Much much later, Power Word: Shield disappears

CONCLUSIONS

Based on my not-really-very-scientific-either tests, it appears that in every scenario, Divine Aegis is used first for absorption.

However, I don't have any super fancy awesome addons that tell me how much absorption is left on each shield, so the alternative conclusion is that whatever bubble you have with the least amount of absorption value left is the one used first.

Ideally, this would be the best way for the absorption priority to work - the bubble with the least amount of absorption left gets used up first, thereby preventing it from being wasted.

DISCUSSION

The main reason I suspect this is NOT the case is due to the inability to cast a new Power Word: Shield on someone that is "less powerful" than the one they are currently wearing, even if the current remaining absorption value is lower. This is in response to a question I posted yesterday - if you've ever received the "a stronger spell is currently in effect" error message when trying to bubble someone, you have run into this scenario. When you cast your first bubble on them, your spellpower was higher via a proc, or buff, or something like that, and therefore your bubble bigger. When you go to cast another bubble on them before the current one has expired, but after weakened soul has fallen off, you are unable to do so because now your spellpower (and therefore your bubble) is lower. It doesn't matter if there is only 10 hit points worth of absorption left on your target - it uses the original value of the bubble to determine priority.

The system is not currently "smart" enough to recognize this, most likely because it doesn't do a very good job of tracking the remaining absorption value on a shield. Therefore, "whatever bubble you have with the least amount of absorption value left" is most likely NOT the first one used, because I don't think the system recognizes that.

Feel free to leave me your thoughts, criticisms, suggestions, and results of any tests you perform yourself in the comments. I may try this again with some better addons to validate the potential alternative conclusion. It's a bit tricky, because you have to be very careful with the timing.

Firstly, a little note about the Battered Hilt drop rate change.

First, Battered Hilt drop rate was very high. Then they changes it so it was very low. It has been changed again to be a little bit of a higher drop, but accordingto Zarhym:

In light of this change, we are also removing the chance for the Battered Hilt or any other epic item to drop from the Skeletal Slaves in the Pit of Saron. The need to “farm” these creatures for the Battered Hilt should be reduced by our first in-game fix and will no longer result in a chance for epic loot or Battered Hilts.

Now, on to Disc Priest stuff.

Ghostcrawler says:

If a group is getting on to you for using PW:Shield as a Discipline priest (or jeez even a Holy priest), you have my permission to say "GC says you're doing it wrong."

*points indignantly* SO THERE

I am trying to better understand the mechanics of Power Word: Shield for Disc priests. I intend to make a post on the PlusHeal forums about it I suppose, but I decided that first I would ask my readers, because I am lucky to have obscenely (and almost offensively) smart readers who correct me every time I screw things up, so I have no shame in asking them for answers. Gimme.

• When a character is bubbled (be it through Power Word: Shield or Divine Aegis), what is the priority of damage mitigation? For example, say I bubble up my PallyTankMate Fuubaar. Will the bubble absorb damage BEFORE she blocks, dodges, resists, dances, etc, or will her mitigation go into effect first, and the bubble absorbs the remaining damage she would have taken? This may seem like a no brainer to most I guess, but I find myself wondering sometimes, and wanting confirmation.

• Is there any record (aside from Recount Guessed Absorbs, which is truly an educated guess) of exactly how "big" my shields are each time I cast them? It's frustrating to not know exactly how much more damage my shield will prevent before it dissolves.

• Assuming all my buffs are the same, will all my shields be the same size, unlike my heals?

• Can shields crit (yes, I know the glyphed heal can, but I mean the size of the shield)? Since bubbles are related to spellpower for Disc priests, I am curious about all these things that normally affect heal size.

• If a target has both Divine Aegis and Power Word:Shield on them, which will absorb the damage first? Does Divine Aegis absorb damage in exactly the same way as Power Word: Shield (see first question)?

• Bonus question (Becky asked this in a comment, and it's a question I have as well that I forgot to ask) - On occasion, even once Weakened Soul has dropped off a target, I am restricted from rebubbling the target, and get an error message that says the target has a stronger spell currently in effect - this is not from another priest, because I get it even when there are no other priests around. It is possible that this is caused by me bubbling someone when a trinket or something else procs that boosts my spellpower, and therefore when I go to bubble the target again, my spellpower is lower, and it will not allow me to do put a smaller bubble on the target? Also, when I get this error message, does this mean that the ORIGINAL bubble was stronger, and still has enough absorbtion left that it is bigger than if I were to cast a new, or is it simply that the original bubble was stronger, regardless of whether or not most of it has been used up?
  

These are the questions I ponder as I slowly move from novice Disc Priest to a more experienced one... and I'd like to know better what all I'm doing before I move into ICC10 this Thursday!

One of the most difficult things for me in regards to switching from Holy to Disc, is learning how to bubble properly. Since I rarely use Power Word: Shield when I run Holy, and since I'm a habit-based healer, I knew that training myself to bubble properly would be tricky.

I originally suspected that I would not bubble enough, so when I started as Disc, I forced myself to bubble all the time. As I mentioned before, this actually turned out to be a bad thing - I bubbled too often when people wouldn't take damage, and therefore spent far too much mana on bubbles without benefiting from Rapture. In effect, it's no different than overhealing. I was bubbling often enough to try and keep weakened soul up on every member of my five man at first, before I began to realize that was over-doing it.

I ran several heroics this past weekend, and my primary intent was to learn to bubble properly. Here are some of the tips I picked up for bubbling in a 5 man:

• Always bubble the tank. When Weakened Soul falls off, rebubble - you want weakened soul to remain on the tank at the very least.
  

• It's usually a good idea to keep a bubble up on yourself, whether or not you know you will be taking damage, but I don't think you need to worry about bubbling often enough to maintain Weakened Soul.

• If there is not a lot of group wide damage, and all the damage can effectively be picked up by the tank, then do not waste your mana bubbling the rest of the DPS.

• Squishy, high threat DPS (i.e. mages) who may have occasional trouble with aggro, particularly when there are multiple mobs and they are providing AoE damage, are good candidates for full time Bubblage. However, again, I do not find it necessary to bubble enough to maintain constant Weakened Soul.

• When there is group wide damage, it is then a good idea to bubble all members of your party. If everyone is likely to take a fairly large amount of unavoidable damage, this may warrant maintaining weakened soul on everyone, as best as you can.

• Regardless of the circumstances, be sure to bubble people often enough to keep up Renewed Hope buff for the whole party.

Bubbling properly is one of the trickiest arts to master as a new Disc Priest, so I will likely be posting more information about various Bubbling tips and suggestions as I gain more experience.

I know there are several Disc Priests who read this blog, so please provide more suggestions about proper bubbling procedures for the five man scenario in the comments - I'd love to hear them! I'll post about bubbling in raids at a later date.

Eventually I intend to put all of this information together into one long guide specifically on the art of bubbles for new Disc Priests. It's become something of an obsession with me, because as a healer, mana usage and mana regen is always on my mind - and for Disc Priests, bubble management is fundamental for mana management. I hear all the time about how Disc Priests should not have problems with mana, so I am trying to get to a point where I feel I can say that about myself as well.

Well last night I gave Disc spec a solid try. Not that I had never tried it before, obviously, but this time I had a new air of determination... this time it was NOT going to be "spec for a day", or, "if this goes badly, I'll just go back to Holy"... No. I had decided that no matter how miserably I flailed about waving hands full of bubbles, I was going to stick it out, and learn how to do this damn thing properly. I will no longer permit myself to despair, and run back to the safety and comfort of my Circle of Healing when things get tricky.

It went... alright.

True, this was not raiding. I felt it was best to start with some five mans. My guildmates and I spent an hour in heroic ToC, all of us learning a bit more each time. I've run it dozens of times on my priest, as holy... but my guildmates had only done it a handful of times, and I was certainly not as comfortable as a Disc Priest. I had, in fact, even tried it once as Disc... and the results provided the basis for my present day hesitance towards Disc Priesting.

Of course, that was before I had a lovely Meatloaf Macro.

There were a few things in particular with which I struggled, though I improved on the way.

• You actually CAN bubble too much - who knew? Or rather, bubble improperly. I began having mana problems due to bubbling other members of my party who never took any damage... therefore Rapture never kicked in. After I realized this, I started bubbling only myself and the tank until I saw others begin to take damage.
  

• I need an addon that lets me know, in a non-annoying way, that the cooldown for Penance has passed.
  

• Pain Suppression can be a tricky little bugger. After using it on the tank, I guess he must have lost aggro on the hunter, because the troll quickly shot me down immediately after I used the spell. As a matter of fact, Pain Suppression is one of those spells that has me convinced that Disc Priests can handle certain types of raid healing - just not in the way to which most of us are accustomed, a la via strong AoE heals. To me, PS just screams "use me on the mage! The MAAAAAAGE!" It's definitely no Guardian Spirit.
  

• Now that I've mastered the art of remembering to use Divine Hymn (well, most of the time... it saved our butt at the end of the Black Knight), I now have Inner Focus and Power Infusion to remember. I've heard that others use macros for these... such as a combination of Inner Focus and Penance. I'm not sure if I want to bind Power Infusion to a macro, however. Any suggestions?
  

• I still do not have a solid rotation down for healing the tank. I am not utilizing Borrowed Time to its fullest extent, for certain. However, I don't believe I will really get to learn this well until I am assigned to heal the tank, and only the tank - as opposed to in a five man where I persistently need to break my single target rotation in order to heal other members of the five man. I was certainly unable to maintain Grace on the tank for the entire duration of any fight.

So there you have it. My intial deep thoughts about converting from Holy to Disc and the 5 man experience. It helps that I know a lot of the theory behind Disc Priesting, though my hands on experience was insubstantial (Look at me, I'm Hermione Granger! Bushy hair and all...).

As a final thought on this topic for today, I would like to add that if you start getting bored with your toon, be it priest or otherwise, a solid respec will breathe new life into the journey. It feels almost as though I'm playing a completely different class, though many of the spells are the same. Though the spells are the same, their use is almost completely different... and in some ways, that's even trickier than playing an entirely new class.

You know, just a thought regarding my post yesterday on Divine Hymn, I also think that if you are Holy or Disc, your shadowfiend should be renamed Muse.

WELL IF WE CAN'T HAVE A BARD CLASS... Just sayin'.

So I have decided to try something dangerous and scary.... Jessabelle has respecced to Discipline. /cower

Despite the fact that I've written about healing as Disc, and that I understand it in "theory", I actually have had very few opportunities to raid as Disc. We've just always had far too many Pallies to justify it. Now I have an opportunity to take advantage of it, and I'm pumped... and nervous! Granted, my gear is directed more towards a Holy priest than a Disc priest (way more spirit and regen than a Disc priest should ever need), but I think it will be okay for the content I'm currently raiding. Besides, until I get into the swing of fanatic bubbling, I'll need some of that extra regen as a crutch, particularly in 10 mans.

Scariest thing of all... I skipped Divine Fury. My goal is to try and MT heal without using Greater Heal. We'll see how that goes... surely there are other Disc Priests who don't need to use Greater Heal? I'm now debating on whether or not this was a good move. I guess I’ll find out tonight when I get to see my Disc spec in action. Or rather, myself, in Disc spec, in action. I’m not raiding tonight, but I do have plans to hit up heroic 5 man ToC with some guildies – which is a pretty decent challenge for something easy to throw together to try out the spec.

Regardless, expect more posts in the coming days/weeks regarding an adjustment from Holy to Disc, and possibly back again.

The Habit-Healer’s Crutch

As someone who heals by habit and reflex more than anything else, the scariest part of changing specs for me is readjusting my habits. The biggest issue? My keybinds (I use Clique, for reference). When I (try to) heal on my Pally, I organize my keybinds so that they are as similar to my Priest binds as possible. Obviously, the spells are different – but some of the concepts are the same.


The above are how I currently have my keybinds set for each healer/spec/whatever. There are a couple of things you might notice.

• Left Click – My short heal.
  

• Right Click – My big heal.
  

• Middle Click – An instant cast heal. As holy priest, it has a little bit of burst healing with Empowered Renew, as holy pally, it is an instant burst heal. Thematically, it’s a bit different for Disc Priests, but my fingers know this is renew, so I don’t want to change it.
  

• Alt Right Click – My panic button combo. It’s a combo I never “accidentally” hit, so low risk of my blowing the cooldown on accident. However, no matter what healer I’m on, my fingers know that this is the combo to use when someone important is about to die.
  

• Shift Right Click – Shield of some sort. Damage Mitigation combo. Not as fitting for my Pally, but strangely enough, I think once I get myself into the habit of using this key combo more while running Disc, I’ll start remembering to use it more on my Pally as well, and work it into my rotation.
  

• Control Middle Click – Just ignore the Hands thrown in for the Pally right now, as I’m still sorting those out. But this is a problem for my Priest. I use this button all the time, obsessively, on my Holy Priest. Thus, I am a bit worried about putting Power Infusion here for my Disc Priest, because there is a very high risk I will accidentally cast it when I don’t want to. It’s likely I will move this into the combo used for Levitate or Fear Ward.

My point in showcasing my key combos like this is to give you an idea of how someone who is a habit-based healer tries to minimize potential mistakes when switching between healers. If I don’t know where a spell is in my key-combos, it can have disastrous effects as I scan my spell bars for the spell or try to open my spellbook to find it, etc. If my key-combos have vast differences in the kind of spells to which they are bound among my different healers, I will constantly be screwing up and getting confused. The key to my ability to heal well in a raid is my trigger finger response, which comes from training my fingers via pure habit.

My next step will be to organize my toolbars with my other abilities so that they are similar across healers, particularly with mana regen abilities.

So, for those of you who have multiple healers... how do you differentiate your spells in the heat of the action? Do you ever mix up spells from one healer to another?

Quickie post before I head out to my interview. There was a really great comment left on my Intro to Disc healing guide with some suggested improvements, so I have updated the guide.

If you have come here looking for some (hopefully!) helpful healing guides, they are listed to the right under Miss Medicina's Guides. I might start making it a weekly thing... until I run out of ways to boss you folks around. I have debated on and off about making a Holy Priest starter guide, because there haven't seemed to be a whole lot of requests for that, but I may do it anyway.

Oh bother, I have to go sell myself. Too bad I can't put "Writes many TLDR guides with lots of detailed information about healing in World of Warcraft" on my resume.

Better late than never, right?

Part of the delay on this is that after reading the Q&A I had no thoughts, because for healers it seemed to have very little relevant information, relatively speaking. We've sorta been put on the back burner while other classes are given more tweaks, and while I'm not opposed to that in principle or for any particular reason, it makes for a pretty boring Q&A. But regardless, let's get to it - I'll try to keep my comments limited mostly to the topics relevant to disc or holy.

For the full Q&A, instead of the tidbits I'll be quoting here, please visit the source.

"In World of Warcraft, the priest isn’t a stronger healer than the other classes, but does have unmatched versatility. At its core the priest has two unique talent trees for healing, while the others only have one. Furthermore, the priest has strong heal-over-time spells (HoTs), direct heals, and area-of-effect (AoE) heals."

Strong heal-over-time spells? Where? There is ONE official HoT, and that is Renew. Don't get me wrong, I love my renew spell, particularly coupled with the Empowered Renew talent for Holy. And yes, we have the option of more HoTs with the Glyph of Prayer of Healing, but I think GC is overestimating our HoT abilities here. In spite of that, I do agree with his underlying message - Priests really are incredibly versatile healers, with lots of tools in their toolbox. This also means that contrary to popular belief, they are not easy healers to play well. Sure, you can spam a couple of spells and probably do okay in most 5 mans and the like... but there are so many different healing spells to choose from that it can create quite the headache (not that I'm actually complaining!). That's one of the reasons I chose to level holy instead of shadow - by the time I hit level cap, I finally understood all my different healing spells. You can have a 25 man raid with only priests for your healers, and you will be okay, though it is certainly not ideal. This is generally not the case with Pally healers or Resto Druids, though it might apply for Resto Shammies. Our versatility is our strength.

"Overall, we feel the priest is one of the most versatile classes in the game, and can be the most enjoyable of the healer classes in the game because of its feature of having two different unique talent specs providing two different types of play styles."

The idea that priests are "one of the most versatile classes in the game" is so completely laughable that I can't even laugh. That's definitely a feel-good phrase if I ever heard one - did GC say that for every class Q&A? If you want true "versatility", roll a shammy, a druid, or a pally - not a priest. However, if you are into healing in a big way, a priest is the way to go, because with one class you can try two different types of healing due to the uniqueness of priests being the only class with two healing talent trees.

"When we go to improve Holy, things we want to improve are mana efficiency and burst healing."

I suppose with this statement I am left wondering how, exactly, the developers go about improving "burst healing" for any class. I say this because it seems that over the past year or so, they have done a couple of things that have already improved "burst" healing for Holy priests. The change in focus from haste/regen to crit in and of itself fosters and encourages priests to stack crit, which gives burst (if unpredictable) healing. Also, the changes to Serendipity give another source of burst healing, depending on how you look at it. A large amount of healing in a much shorter amount of time = burst healing in my book. Now, if you wanted to add a talent that granted more healing bonus on someone with some other type of healing buff on them, and define that as burst healing, I would like that too. Otherwise, I think we're okay without needing too much more burst healing, though I suppose this may not be the case in PvP. In response to mana efficiency - YES PLEASE. Holy priests are at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of mana efficiency.

"Flash Heal is big, so Greater Heal is just overkill. Combine this with the fact that there are other spells that are doing a lot of the healing that Greater Heal used to do -- Penance for example. I don’t think many players look at Greater Heal as being too expensive from a mana-per-healing standpoint. They often aren’t in danger of running out of mana. It’s also worth pointing out that max rank Greater Heal has always healed too much. The difference is that priests used to be able to cast down-ranked Greater Heals. We have considered offering say Lesser Heal as a literal 50% mana, 50% healing version of Greater Heal."

To be honest, I never used downranked heals. Part of that is that I started raiding only a short time before downranking was removed as a viable option, but the other part is that I just always found it stupid, and much more effort than it was worth. Priests have so many heals in our aresenal that quadrupling those split-second decisions with downranked additions was jsut too much for my tiny brain to handle. Greater Heal is a bit of an issue, because it does heal for too much, and too slow. Unless I have several stacks of Serendipity, I just don't use it, it's just not viable in Ulduar when we need to be on the ball and quick. GC does address this later, and I'll get to that in a second, but lastly I wanted to add that I've always thought it was a pity that after a certain level, Lesser Heal is completely abandoned. You get your highest rank of Lesser Heal at level 10, and if you compare it to Greater Heal, you'll see what I mean. What is the point of having a spell that is essentially abandoned 1/4 of the way through your leveling career? I encourage any efforts by developers to bring back this spell in a raiding environment.

"In a raid in which healers don’t coordinate well it’s easy for other healers to stomp on your big, slow heals. While you are casting, someone heals your target for you [...] Or else everyone has their targets and won’t heal someone else unless something unpredictable happens. Other raids just heal anyone who is injured and don’t have a lot of assigned targets, except for probably the tanks."

There is a lot of truth in this, and I do applaud GC for pointing that out. It can be very difficult to coordinate heals, and in fact, from my experience, even when you give healers specific healing assignments, a lot of them just can't resist healing others. Sometimes this is fine, and other times while they're healing someone else's target because they are bored and think they will "help out", and their targets are fine, some big whammy comes along and makes sausage out of one of their responsibilities. In a 25 man raid, chatting over vent and saying "I'm healing Jimmy!" "Big heal incoming on Pat!" just doesn't work very well. Too many healers, and too much healing going around. We've trained ourselves to heal essentially one of two ways - either via mitigation, in which we prep our targets for incoming damage and try to reduce what the consequences of the hits they take, or even more commonly, reflexively. It's reflex for us to respond to someone getting a big hit, and even if it's not one of our main targets, we can't seem to resist clicking on that shrinking green bar. It's hard to focus our attention on only a select few targets, even though in theory it should be easier. I can give all kinds of healing assignments, but it doesn't stop people from ignoring them.

"Q: Have you considered reducing the 10-minute cooldown on Divine Hymn?
Ghostcrawler: It was balanced like Tranquility. We basically want these to be once-an-encounter spells. "

Hey look! I spell I never remember to use, and have therefore never established a good justification for it. See, that's the problem with having such a large toolbox. >.>

"Pain Suppression is more or less targeted Shield Wall. It’s really good. "

I beg to differ. The problem with Pain Suppression is that it reduces the amount of threat on the target. This may seem like a good thing, but it is a deep Discipline talent, and the strength of Discipline healing is in single-target healing. Single-target healers usually focus on tanks. Therefore, reducing the threat of the tank is rarely, if ever, a good thing. I'm never quite sure just how much threat the tank can afford to use, so I avoid using Pain Suppression on the tank, and therefore rarely get any use out of this spell, sadly - which is too bad, because it is an awesome spell. I have no doubt that personally I'm far too conservative with it.

"Q: Do you have any plans to improve [Lightwell's] functionality?
Ghostcrawler: [...] The basic root of the problem is that most dps classes seem unwilling to have to take the time or spatial awareness to make use of the Lightwell, even if it provides great healing. [...] We don’t like that dps characters focus on dps at the exclusion of even their own survival and just assume that’s the healer’s job [...]. Lightwell heals for a lot. The problem is just getting players to use it. Encounters currently are very fast-paced, in terms of both dps and healing required so you have trouble finding room to use it. "

GC hit the nail on the head with this one. This has always always ALWAYS been the major problem with Lightwell. They keep improving it and making it even more awesome, but it does nothing to fix the problem with people not remembering, or taking the time, to use it. It is also a situational spell - some fights it's just pointless because everyone is moving around too much. But consider the benefits - you can precast it before a fight, players can use it whenever, it lasts for a long time, has plenty of hits available, and heals for a helluva lot. The tanks I run with are usually pretty good at hitting it here and there, but it seems to be more of a struggle for dps. I also understand that it's not always easy to target with so many visual effects going on in fights now. One way they could change it would be to make it a stationary AoE heal - standing near it will give a HoT to the lowest health players near it. This would make it way OP, and it would undoubtedly need to be nerfed, but it would get a lot more utility. However, it's not really the fault of the developers if people just can't be bothered to make use of something, no matter how awesome they make it. That's why you'll often hear holy priests calling out over vent "Lightwell up! Use it or die." I make frequent reminders to people to use it, and I hope that helps.

After the Lightwell discussion, there is a short discussion about the technical difficulties of showing absorption mechanics in combat logs, which is an important issue for Disc priests. They have made some changes to make it easier for 3rd party add-ons to pick up on it, and I hope it helps. A few uninteresting comments on dispel mechanics (yawn) and then we touch upon Inner Fire.

"Q: Would you consider increasing or removing altogether the charges of Inner Fire?
Ghostcrawler: At that point it just becomes a passive buff and we might as well just say that priests have the armor of a leather-wearer while wearing cloth. It works a little better for mages and warlocks who are at least making a decision about which armor spell to cast. If we go ahead and add alternatives to Inner Fire ("Outer Fire"! "Inner Shadow!") then we might take off the charges. Certainly the spell requires a lot less micromanagement now than it used to. "

I agree completely with GC here. If everyone is doing their part, we don't really need the extra armor provided by Inner Fire - the main benefit is the added spellpower buff that came a few patches ago. Inner Fire used to only have 10 charges, lasted 10 minutes, and it was a pain in the ass. Now it lasts a half hour and has a lot more charges along with the spellpower buff, and I'm quite pleased with it - most of the time the buff wears off long before the charges are all used up. However, it would be really awesome to have a few options for armor spells, like locks or mages. It would be much more useful to have spell resistance than an armor buff, or to reduce any damage taken, that sort of thing. I'd love to see a decision change like that made.

All in all, I was supremely disappointed in the Priest Q&A, unlike the pally one. Though I certainly found plenty to say about it, the Q&A itself just seemed rushed, and it didn't even look like GC put much thought into his responses. It seems like Blizz thinks that priests are fine just as they are, and while I can't say I necessarily disagree, it's kinda a bummer to see so little creativity going on with regards to priests from developers.

There are plenty of sources on teh interwebs for information regarding Discipline Priest healing, but I thought I would throw my own two cents in. If you’re looking for theory crafting, there’s no better place than ElititstJerks. If you’re looking for hilarity, try Bubbles. And if you want a perspective from a raid and guild leader who runs Discipline, check out Matticus.

And if you’re totally lost, and don’t even know where to start to try out this Disc thing you’ve been hearing so much about, well here I am. Rock you like a hurricane.

I’m not an expert, but I too went the way of the Disc. If you’re switching to Discipline from Shadow, you will have a completely different learning curve than if you are switching over from Holy. If you are especially n00by, bubble = Power Word: Shield :)

The first thing to remember as a Discipline priest, is that unlike other healers, your focus is on damage mitigation. You will not top healing charts. You are going to be bubbling and trying to prevent targets from taking any damage in the first place - therefore your priority is in damage prevention, not reactive healing.

Table of Contents

• Talent Points
• Stats
• Glyphs
• Spells
• Rotation

• Discussion on Enchants/Enhancements can be found in a separate post.
  

Talent Points

If you’re looking for a basic Talent Point distribution to give you an idea what you need at level 80, I threw one together that will suffice. You can move a few talents around here and there, but for PvE and raid healing, you will want all of the bottom half of the Disc tree.

Most Important Talents:

• Inner Focus – Personally, I’m pretty rotten at remembering to use this spell, but you really should take it and learn how to manage it properly. In addition to being providing you with a mana free heal, it also gives you a good shot at a nice crit boost.
• Improved Power Word: Shield – Discipline priests bubble. That’s what they do. You cannot call yourself a Disc priest without this basic, staple talent that ensures your bubbles are superior to Holy bubbles.
• Soul Warding – This effectively removes the cooldown from Power Word: Shield so you can bubble like crazy. Go nuts. You can spend all your time bubbling your companions – and that’s kinda like, what Disc priests do yo.
• Mental Agility – You will be using a lot of instant casts, so you might as well take this to move on to the next tier.
• Mental Strength – See below for reasons why Intellect is such a great stat for Disc Priests. This is a must-have talent mainly because in addition to a very nice increase in regen and mana pool, it is a prereq for Power Infusion, and gets you to the latter half of the tier.
• Reflective Shield – Why do I not include this in my PvE spec? With our personal delight in bubbles, why not have a reflective bubble? If you are speccing for PvE, skip this talent because it only applies to bubbles you cast on YOURSELF, and is therefore not worth the 2 talent points for a raid healing spec. Great PvP talent though.
• Power Infusion – This is a pretty snazzy spell that will give you (or someone else – it is castable on other members of your raid) a significant speed boost, as well as cutting down mana.
• Renewed Hope – This is a staple Disc spell. If you didn’t know, Weakened Soul is the debuff given when someone has Power Word: Shield on them to prevent you from spam casting your bubble on one individual taking damage. This talent explains why you should be casting Power Word: Shield on SOMEONE at LEAST every 20 seconds as a benefit to the whole raid. This is also why you usually want to bubble someone up before you start casting heals on them, because your heals will crit more when you do so.
• Rapture – This talent ensures that you do not run out of mana. Take this, bubble freely, and you will have few mana issues.
• Aspiration – the only part of this talent that is especially crucial is the reduced cooldown for Penance. But, that reduced cooldown is so crucial that this is a must-have talent.
• Divine Aegis – It’s your double-bubble! When one bubble just isn’t enough! You will likely be critting quite a bit.
• Pain Suppression – If you are joining us from the Holy side, this is the Disc version of Guardian Spirit. In other words, it is your oh shit button. Despite what I may have said elsewhere regarding the efficacy of an oh shit button that reduces threat, it still has a significant damage reduction associated with it. Don’t just use it on tanks! Everyone has that ridiculously aggro-happy mage in the group who needs the threat reduction…
• Grace – This talent is one more reason why Discipline priests are great single target healers. It’s a 9% healing boost, which is pretty significant.
• Borrowed Time – There are two parts to this talent. The speed boost is nice, no doubt about it, but that’s not what makes this talent required. The increase in how much your bubble absorbs explains why Disc priests keep yelling at Holy priests to stop making half-assed bubble attempts. Disc bubbles will always be far superior to Holy bubbles.
• Penance – The awesomest heal ever. You are not a disc priest until you have Penance. This will quickly become your favorite heal, and it should become your most used heal.

You’ll likely have a few talent points left over that you can spend over in the Holy tree. For the most part, you only want/need to spec into Holy deep enough to pick up Inspiration. Here are a few suggestions:

• Holy Specialization – Crit is pretty important to Disc priests, so you can go ahead and pick this up as your tier 1 holy talent for all your non-Penance heals. You know, those silly heals you’ll be using when you aren’t spamming Penance or your bubble. Pfft.
• Divine Fury – another anh talent picked up mainly to get to Inspiration. However, you probably will use Greater Heal in between Penance often enough to justify the half second reduction in cast time. This is all a matter of personal preference. If you find you are more of a Flash Heal spammer, pick up Spell Warding instead.
• Spell Warding – as an alternative to Divine Fury on your way to Inspiration, you can pick this up for a little extra survivability. Most AoE raid damage that can’t be avoided is spell damage, so it’s not a bad talent to have, just not a necessity.
• Inspiration – This is the most important talent for you to try to get to in the Holy tree. Because you will often be focusing as a single-target healer, which means you will often be the tank healer, this is an added damage reduction talent for you.
• Desperate Prayer – If you have an extra talent point left over, this isn’t a bad spell to pick up. It’s a personal oh shit button (I am not mourning the days when it was mana –free and Dwarf racial. No really, I’m not. ::weep::)

Stats

Alright, so you’ve got your talent points sorted out. Now it’s time to figure out your gear. You will probably already have picked up on some of the stats that are important to Disc priests by filling in your talent points, but here’s a more detailed look.

• Hit Rating – if you are new to healing, this applies to all healers – Healers do NOT need ANY hit rating. Heals always hit.
• Spirit – Holy and Shadow priests, take note. You do not get a spellpower bonus from Spirit when you are Disc. Spirit is very blah for Discipline priests. You can take it or leave it, but it's not really any better than Mp5, and should be well balanced with Intellect.
• Intellect – this is an important stat for all casters, of course, and certainly all healers, but if you are coming over from the Holy side please note this is an even more important stat to Disc priests. (This is another good reason why when deciding on your talents, Mental Strength is a must-have.) Intellect boosts the size of your mana pool, boosts your regen, and increase your crit rating. The size of your mana pool is actually in and of itself a regen mechanic – take a look at the tooltips for the following raid regen spells, and you will see why – Replenishment, Shadowfiend, Rapture.
• Crit Rating – Crit procs your “double bubble”, Divine Aegis, which is a large portion of the "healing" (mitigation) you will be doing, so it's pretty important.
  
• Spell Haste – it may seem that Spell Haste isn’t as important to Disc priests because we spend so much time using instants (a la Prayer of Mending and Power Word: Shield) but because Spell Haste also reduces your global cooldown, and therefore allows you to cast more bubbles in a smaller amount of time, it is still important. The Haste vs Crit debate still applies for Disc priests, but it is largely a matter of personal preference. If you want to read more about the theory-crafting behind it, check out ElitistJerks.
• Mp5 – The recent 3.2 boost to Mp5 makes it a better stat. If you are Shadow or Holy, and are used to avoiding Mp5 in favor of Spirit, remember that again, Disc priests don’t get any supplemental boosts from Spirit unlike the other talents. Therefore Mp5 is better for Disc priests in some ways. Mp5 will directly increase your mana regen while casting, with the tradeoff that it does not scale with Blessing of Kings, and similar buffs. You usually have a choice between Mp5 and Spirit, but it’s not a bad idea to have a decent mix of both. Intellect is still superior in some ways because of all the different ways it increases regen mechanics, and the fact that it scales with Kings, but it does have a smaller direct effect on your regen, so you don't want to solely rely on Intellect.
  
• Spellpower – In my original version of this guide, I neglected to notice the full tooltip of Borrowed Time - in addition to making your direct heals larger, your bubbles are also increased by 40% of your spellpower. That's some pretty powerful stuff.

As a side note, if you are switching to Disc from Holy, your gear will most likely be fairly sufficient to work for both specs, however, you will want to take a second look at your enchants and gems. Switch out your spirit enchants and gems for Intellect, crit, or possibly Mp5 to adjust better for Disc healing.

Glyphs

If you want to see a solid list of all the Priest Glyphs, Wowwiki has a nice one. For Disc specific glyphs, there are no minor glyphs that really matter too much. We don’t really have a whole lot of option, but most priests like to have the handy Glyph of Levitate. Everything other than that really is a matter of personal preference. I, personally, like to use Glyph of Shadow Protection, because it adds some time to my Shadow Protection buff, and I don’t really care about the other minor, heh. Now for some info about major glyphs for Disc priests:

• Glyph of Penance – This is a must have, hands down, no questions asked. Penance is your bread and butter healing spell, and you want to use it as often as possible, so you definitely want a reduction in its cooldown.
• Glyph of Power Word: Shield – You will be bubbling so much, that it’s very nice to get an extra little free heal from it.
• Glyph of Flash Heal – If you use Flash Heal a lot, this is a good option. Personally, I never have mana problems when I’m running Disc, but better safe than sorry, right?
• Glyph of Holy Nova – If you suspect it will be necessary for you to contribute to raid healing, this glyph is one of 2 that will help boost your raid healing abilities. If you like healing with the instant AoE non-smart Holy Nova, this is a good choice.
• Glyph of Prayer of Healing – If on the other hand you prefer raid healing with the long cast, but powerful AoE heal Prayer of Healing, this adds a nice little HoT buff to it.

The first two Major glyphs are pretty standard, but the third is more a matter of personal preference.

Spells

Healers don’t necessarily have a “rotation” per se, but due to cooldown management and the fact that Disc healers excel at single-target healing, they are more likely to have something close to a rotation than most other healers. We will start with just a basic list of the spells you will use while healing from each school.

Discipline:

• Pain Suppression – your oh shit button (or as Ghostcrawler likes to call it, the “oh snap!” button). Note the threat reduction – if you are going to use it on the tank, try to be sure he or she can handle the threat loss.
• Penance – One full cast of Penance will give three stacks of Grace to your target, increasing healing on the target. This is your bread, but it does have a cooldown. The Discipline tree is built around this spell and Power Word: Shield – basically, all the other spells are what you are casting while Penance is on cooldown.
• Power Infusion – Super boost. Use it on someone, or yourself, every cooldown, and people will learn to appreciate Disc priests more.
• Power Word: Shield – If Penance is your bread, your Bubble is your butter. Or maybe it’s the other way around? Not sure. Your bubble shield is what makes you Disc. Specced properly, it can mitigate massive amounts of damage, be cast every Global Cooldown (you know, when you aren’t casting Penance), and will keep up a nice raid buff after you cast it.

Holy:

• Binding Heal – There is little reason to ever just be healing yourself. You might as well cast this spell on someone else, and heal the both of you. I love this spell like whoa.
• Desperate Prayer – If you specced deep enough into Holy to pick up this spell, it’s a nice little personal oh shit button. It’s a matter of personal preference – I’m a creature of habit, and never remember to use it.
• Divine Hymn – This is essentially a once per encounter AoE heal. Remember to use it, it’s pretty handy. If you are assigned to tank heals, it may not be worth the risk of casting it for 8 secs, however – a tank can take a lot of damage in 8 secs, so be sure someone else is throwing heals on the tank in the mean time.
• Flash Heal – Staple small heal for all priests. You will probably still get a lot of use out of this spell as Disc, particularly if you pick of the Glyph of Flash Heal, and/or the talent Improved Flash Heal.
• Greater Heal – Staple large heal for all priests. If you aren’t as big a fan of Flash Heal, and prefer larger slower heals, this is your main choice, but be sure that you spec deep enough into holy to pick up Divine Fury if that is the case. Note that the talent spec I linked does not fill out Divine Fury completely, so you'll have to rob the talents from elsewhere, such as Improved Renew.
  
• Holy Nova – Baseline instant AoE heal for all Priests. It’s instant, AoE, no cooldown, but it ain’t cheap, and it ain’t smart. It is going to only heal the people in your party.
• Hymn of Hope – Regen spell. Note that this returns a percentage of mana – therefore, for a real boost, couple this with Shadowfiend and/or Replenishment.
• Prayer of Healing – Slow cast, very large, non-smart AoE heal. This is pretty powerful stuff, but keep in mind that it is not a smart heal. Unlike Holy Nova, however, it is not limited to your own party – you cast it on someone, and then it heals THEIR party.
• Prayer of Mending – Instant bouncy reactive heal. Keep it bouncing around at all times, and it does the work for you.
• Renew – Our nice little HoT. Unless you find yourself using Greater Heal a lot, spec into Improved Renew from the holy tree. In addition, if you pick up Mental Agility in the Disc tree, the mana cost is reduced. If you are solo healing a target (particularly the main tank), it's a good idea to keep a Renew rolling at all times.
  
• Redemption – Your basic healer rezzing spell.

Shadow:

• Fade – This is the panic button for when a mob is running at you. It is not a permanent threat dump, but it is usually enough to get the mob to forget about you so that the tank can pick them up. Better than running around like a mage, yes?
• Shadowfiend – Another regen mechanic priests have. Love it or hate it, shadowfiends are handy for mana intensive fights! Couple it with Hymn of Hope or Innervate, and you can easily go from an empty mana pool to a full bar. If you can’t couple it with other regen spells, use it early in a fight so that you get a chance to use it more than once.

Rotation:

Your “rotation” will depend largely on how you are assigned as a healer. In a raiding environment, you should be assigned to one target to make full use of your awesomeness as a Discipline Priest.

Single-Target Healing:

• Power Word: Shield - Always always always start with Power Word: Shield. Keep an eye on that Weakened Soul debuff – your target should have this debuff at all times. If there are other priests in the raid, kindly ask them to refrain from bubbling your target – your bubbles are better. In addition to keeping up the Weakened Soul debuff so as to get full benefit from Renewed Hope on your target, you need to be bubbling at least often enough to keep up Renewed Hope buff on the raid as a whole. Specced properly, there is no cooldown except global cooldown for your bubble, so you have no excuse not to bubble! And after all, why wouldn’t you?
• Prayer of Mending - Keep a Prayer of Mending bouncing around the raid. Start it up on the tank since they will likely be taking the first hit. This is another spell you need to monitor to make sure it is bouncing around at all times.
• Penance – Follow up your bubble or PoM with Penance. You want to keep three stacks of Grace up on your target at all times to maximize healing.
• Greater Heal/ Flash Heal / Renew– When Penance is on cooldown, and you have ensured that your target has the Weakened Soul debuff, fill in your cooldown times with Flash Heal and Greater Heal as needed. It’s a very good idea to keep a Renew rolling on your target as well.

With one target, your rotation is pretty simple. Prayer of Mending -> Power Word: Shield –> Penance –> Renew –> Flash Heal/Greater Heal. You should be able to get in 3 flash heals or 1 greater heal and 1 flash heal between Penance cooldowns if the weakened soul debuff is up.

Group Healing (Primarily for 5 man instances)

• Bubble Bubble Bubble!!! One of the biggest advantages for raid healing as a Disc priest is no cooldown on your Power Word: Shield. When in doubt, bubble. When happy, bubble. When dancing, bubble. Always be a-bubblin.
• Disc priests do not have any smart AoE heals, but all of our AoE heals affect the entire group, so in 5 man instances, it doesn’t really matter. If you have predictable large amounts of incoming damage for the whole party, use Prayer of Healing. For sporadic AoE damage, use Holy Nova. Otherwise, bubble penance and Flash Heal. With only 5 people to watch, it should not be too difficult to keep a bubble on everyone at all times, though it may be trickier to keep up the Weakened Soul debuff. Therefore, try to bubble the tank often enough to maintain a steady Weakened Soul debuff on the tank, and just try to keep a bubble on everyone else.

Raid Healing

• If you are contributing to healing the raid in general, it is not too different from healing for a five man. Bubble! If you are in a raid with other priests, ask them to avoid bubbling in general so that you don’t get frustrated. If there is another Disc priest in the raid, divide up your groups so that you will not overlap in your healing assignments due to the weakened soul debuff. It is exceedingly frustrating to be going around bubbling and to get error messages because the target cannot be bubbled again.
• Because neither Prayer of Healing nor Holy Nova are smart ("smart heals" automatically heal the people within range who are lowest in health), they really aren’t the best for raid healing, unless it is AoE damage that everyone takes. Even in this scenario, if there is a Holy Priest in the raid, their Prayer of Healing is likely to be more powerful, and a faster cast. So if you know some damage is incoming, go on a bubble craze first.

And there it is! Everything you ever needed to know about starting out as a Discipline Priest Healer for PvE. Unfortunately you will need to look elsewhere if you are looking for tips for PvP, as I am utter fail for PvP. I realize this guide provides no theorycrafting for you, and that is because MATH IS HARD zomg. If you are looking for more specifics about the maths behind my suggestions, mosey on over to ElitistJerks and calculate to your heart’s content. I spent a lot of time reading the stuff over there to get an idea for how to heal as Disc, so it’s definitely a spot you should check out.

If you feel you have graduated past the level of starter Disc guides, and are looking for more tips on min/maxing your priest, I highly suggest checking out PenancePriest (especially this post). PP is MUCH better than I am at theorycrafting and min-maxing.

Updated October 6th, 2009 (added link to PenancePriest post and Enchants)