Every time I do a raid with another priest, I come to the same conclusion.
A raid leader would either need to be nuts, or really clever, to take a disc priest over a holy priest.
Here's the first thing anyone will see when they look at our performance in Recount. Here "S" is a CoH holy priest with about the same gear level as me (with a totally different stat profile of course). "B" is another CoH priest, not only lower gear quality, but out to lunch, so pay no attention. All charts are from a partial run of TK with a decent quality pug. And while it's instructive, I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from this data set!
(Oh and if you're not familiar with Recount, it's basically the add-on to track battle stats. Bars are color-coded by class, so the white bars are the priests, green are the hunters, etc. And of course the window title indicates what graph you're looking at. So in the graph at left, it's showing that "S" did 2.09m in total healing, and I did 862k.)
Thanks for coming Paolo, you've been...a really nice guy. Keep practicing!
Mitigation you say? Yeah, ok, whatever, would be great to see you do more healing though. Meanwhile, as long as we're waiting for loot to be distributed, might as well have a look at some other pages in recount, just for kicks.
Oh interesting! He sure kept himself busy doing...whatever it is disc priests do. Since it wasn't healing, maybe he was...buffing everybody? Hmm. But he cast about 25% more spells than CoH man, for what that's worth, even though CoH is instant-cast, and "S" is probably spamming it most of the time. Anyway, at least it seems he wasn't afk, so I can't boot him for that.
Wait a second, I thought we had three priests. Why weren't the others doing any dispelling? We have all sorts of magic debuffs to get rid of...damage increasers, sleepers. Not sure exactly how to measure the value of this, but damn, he seems to be pretty attentive to the raid.
So how do I score this guy? Seems seriously engaged, using all his tools, attentive to the raid. Supposedly he has some awesome buffs, but who knows, can't see those in recount either. And he says he does a ton of mitigation...yeah, ok, probably. His 13% haste (with talents, plus haste procs) doesn't show up anywhere on the charts.
But one thing that does show up is that his heals hit for less, at least 15% less. And his overall healing done is less than half of what our CoH healer does, no arguing with that.
So? Do we bring a disc healer or not?
Here's the first thing anyone will see when they look at our performance in Recount. Here "S" is a CoH holy priest with about the same gear level as me (with a totally different stat profile of course). "B" is another CoH priest, not only lower gear quality, but out to lunch, so pay no attention. All charts are from a partial run of TK with a decent quality pug. And while it's instructive, I wouldn't draw too many conclusions from this data set!
(Oh and if you're not familiar with Recount, it's basically the add-on to track battle stats. Bars are color-coded by class, so the white bars are the priests, green are the hunters, etc. And of course the window title indicates what graph you're looking at. So in the graph at left, it's showing that "S" did 2.09m in total healing, and I did 862k.)
Thanks for coming Paolo, you've been...a really nice guy. Keep practicing!
Mitigation you say? Yeah, ok, whatever, would be great to see you do more healing though. Meanwhile, as long as we're waiting for loot to be distributed, might as well have a look at some other pages in recount, just for kicks.
Oh interesting! He sure kept himself busy doing...whatever it is disc priests do. Since it wasn't healing, maybe he was...buffing everybody? Hmm. But he cast about 25% more spells than CoH man, for what that's worth, even though CoH is instant-cast, and "S" is probably spamming it most of the time. Anyway, at least it seems he wasn't afk, so I can't boot him for that.
Wait a second, I thought we had three priests. Why weren't the others doing any dispelling? We have all sorts of magic debuffs to get rid of...damage increasers, sleepers. Not sure exactly how to measure the value of this, but damn, he seems to be pretty attentive to the raid.
So how do I score this guy? Seems seriously engaged, using all his tools, attentive to the raid. Supposedly he has some awesome buffs, but who knows, can't see those in recount either. And he says he does a ton of mitigation...yeah, ok, probably. His 13% haste (with talents, plus haste procs) doesn't show up anywhere on the charts.
But one thing that does show up is that his heals hit for less, at least 15% less. And his overall healing done is less than half of what our CoH healer does, no arguing with that.
So? Do we bring a disc healer or not?
It is nice to see someone else mentioning the utility of disc priests. When I was holy, I could always top the charts, but I decided to give disc a try and won't go back! I am always low on the healing meters but, fortunately, my guild appreciates the benefits I bring. I joined the guild and was brought into raids immediately over people who were in the guild longer than me. We did a TOC for the weekly raid a little while ago and after the druid posted the healing meter for the faction champions fight (which he topped) someone else decided to display the dispel meter. I had 199 to the next closest of 33. Let's see...dispels remove CC (so others can tank, dps, and heal) and dots...any benefit from that? I was the first to get the mark on the last boss in ICC and was able to heal through it and still pop a few shields while a druid kept hots up on everyone. Plus, with about 33K mana buffed I haven't had to use a mana potion in a long time! Raids still need a combination of healers, but a good raid leader would make sure he has a disc priest in that mix.
Get Skada, absorbs and healing, you will see yoruself top of the metres soon enough. The amount of raid dmg we reduce is uncanny.