Take Two, the “even as disc” Post

The problem with not blogging in a while is there’s so much to say that it just wants to all come bubbling forth at once. I’m not sure how many are willing to sit through multiple thousand-word posts, so I’m trying to limit my exuberance to more manageable sizes.

Last time I talked about how disc healing, and healing in general, was in Wrath.

By the end of the expansion, it wasn’t too difficult at all.

And then Deathwing fucked up the world.

Priests got some new goodies in Cata:

• Mind Spike – Trained at level 81. Some DPS thing that removes all your shadow-based DoTs on the target. I never use it.
• Inner Will – Trained at level 83. Reduces the cost of your instant cast spells by 15% and increases move speed by 10%. I lurvs it.
• Leap of Faith – Trained at level 85. Affectionately or not so affectionately known as Life Grip. Bane of all that think they can sprint ahead of me. Well bane of one person every minute and a half. If you’ve never been gripped, the priest basically snatches you from your current position and drops you nose to nose with the priest. Be warned it has a nasty tendency to turn people around. Very amusing when people are on autorun.

OK, now that I look at it, we got crap, not goodies.

Inner Will is important, and is swapped with Inner Fire as needed. Generally, I run IW. I’ve tried the same fights with both and with trying to swap between them (no mana cost, just GCD), but I have fewer mana issues with IW up and it’s hard to beat a movement speed increase when so many fights are mobile.

Mind Spike is a DPS ability, no application for this healing priest.

Leap of Faith is amusing and has, on very rare occasions, proven to be useful in encounters. But not so much to make it deserving of being the ultimate skill learned.

…

Somewhere along the line, Blizzard decided that dispelling things needed to be a real choice. Or they just hate healers.

Previously, if you attempted to dispel something and either it wasn’t there or you couldn’t dispel that thing, you would get a little error message informing you of your stupidity, but all you really lost was the GCD to cast it.

Now, dispels cost even if there is nothing to dispel and they cost a lot.

(Note that all the new crap below is taken from WOWPEDIA, the replacement for WoWiki and the old stuff is pulled from WoWiki.)

Cure Disease is 16% of base mana.

Dispel Magic is is 14% of base mana.

(At 80, before Cata, they were 14% and 12%, respectively and were learned before level 20, now they are learned after level 20.)

At 85, my base mana is 20590.

(At 80, it was 3863.)

Quick math, carry the two, divide by 6.25, multiply by pie (pumpkin, of course), and we get the following:

Cure Disease costs 3294 mana and Dispel Magic is 2883.

(At 80 they were 464 and 541, respectively.)

I’m currently at around 90k mana.

(I think I was pushing 38k at 80, in raid gear.)

If I did nothing but dispel and and had no mana regen, I could attempt to clear off approximately 30 debuffs before going OOM.

(At 80 I could successfully clear 76 debuffs.)

Mass Dispel is no better.

Not only does it not affect diseases, although it will remove stuff you normally can’t directly dispel, we can no longer reduce the cast time to ridiculously fast in the disc spec. We’re stuck with the 1.5 second cast (outside of haste gear, talents, and buffs) and 33% base mana cost. Where it used to be uber fast to cast and only 1275 mana (3% of my mana pool) it is now 6795 mana or almost 8% of my mana.

Ouch.

…

Buffing!

Subject of a previous rant and will probably fuel many more.

We lost the spirit buff. With mana costs, this is a blessing as it would probably be the buff to push us over into complete OOM before the pull.

Shadow Protection. Yes, it lasts longer, but if you keep dying it lasts even less than the older incarnation.

WoWpedia may be a little out of date on this one, but it states that the single version is 31% of base and the group is 62%. I don’t have a single versus group version so I’m not sure if it was replaced or if WoWpedia has some old data. Assuming that it’s reasonably correct, we’re looking at 6383 or 12766 mana, roughly 14% of my mana.

(At 80 it was also 31% of base mana for 10 minutes for single target and 62% of base mana for the whole party/raid for 20 minutes. So we’re looking at just shy of 1200 mana and 2400 mana for these spells. But ultimately only about 6.5% of my total mana for the group buff.)

Power Word: Fortitude has always been a bit of a mana hog.

New and old seem to have been 69% of base mana. So back in the day it was 2665 and today it’s 14207 or almost 16%. Glyphed it’s only a whopping 8%.

With Mental Agility, the glyph for Fort, and running Inner Will, it’s still at least a quarter of my mana to buff. If I didn’t have any level 85 food, I would be sipping that Spring Water for a very long time.

…

That’s just the support spells!

Heals, particularly AoE heals are also atrociously expensive.

I’m sure I’ve made at least one person’s head explode with the math so I should probably end the post here while he goes and gets a squeegee. I won’t run (much) math in the next post. I (maybe) promise.

/tease