I’ve been playing my disc priest in M+ and having a blast, however I’ve been trying to get into raiding and it’s not so fun.
My problem is I seem to do a lot of overhealing and I struggle with aoe group healing.
One thing in particular is when I know the boss is going to send out damage to random players, idk how to set up for healing that properly. I can try to blanket atonement a lot of people, but sometimes I miss multiple people, or all of the random targets that get chosen for the mechanic.
Then I feel like I’m playing catchup trying to heal the people hit because I wasn’t able to set up atonement on them first. Even if I do try to catch up and heal the people I missed, other healers are able to get to them far more quickly, so I end up contributing little
So how do I best go about dealing with randomly targeted damage mechanics in raids? How do I set up when I don’t know who is going to be targeted?
disc specializes in covering up large burst windows, so your primary goal isn’t really doing big healing outside of ramps every 1.5 minutes. the best you can do is to cast PWS -Renew-Renew followed by 1 charge of PWR when you know that damage is incoming (or just PWR). try to position yourself next to where most of the people are located, this way when the damage happens, your PWR will likely reach the most damaged people with ease. i suggest you to read about mini-ramps outside of large ramps and check lorrgs io for ramp timings.
also, don’t forget that there are usually at least 3 other healers who generally do way better job and reactive healing than disc, so conserve your mana for ramps and don’t stress too much.
as of overhealing, it’s pretty normal even if you follow boss burst timings perfectly. you simply do too much healing within those 7-8 seconds of your ramp and a large part of it contributes to overhealing.
P.S. I forgot to add that you should use mindbender freely during mini-ramps, as while the tooltip says its cooldown is 1 minute, thanks to the set and talents its real cooldown is around 20-30 seconds
Discipline priest is all about timing in raids because you won’t have time to react to damage.
Using PW:S on CD on the current tank and always using your free flash heals will help keep free atonements on party members during damage down-time and give you extra healing.
For large group damage windows, you should try to prepare 20 seconds before the damage comes out. Cast rapture and then go down your unit frames using PWS on each person as quickly as you can until you count to 8. Skip yourself if you are in the lineup. If you have an instant flash heal proc, use it on someone other than yourself without atonement to get atonement on them and yourself for free instantly. Cast 2 power word: radiance on people without atonement to get 10 extra people and double buff dark reprimand. Cast Evangelism to increase all atonements by 6 seconds. Use Power Infusion and Mind Bender Then Mind Blast, Smite, Dark Reprimand, smite, SW:D, smite, smite, power word: radiance, Dark Reprimand, smite spam until you get mind bender back. I weave light and dark spells because I take the weaving talent. It you don’t, just use Mind Blast, Dark Reprimand, SW:D, smite x3, radiance when available, Dark Reprimand to finish, then smite for mind bender cd.
Your main goal in the burst window is to get as many atonements out as possible before the damage happens and be prepared to immediately be hitting the dps portion of the ramp when the damage comes out to maximize healing, then get mind bender back ASAP. Preparing at the right time so atonement from rapture and double radiance is maximized is the primary skill gap for discipline priests in raid. If a burst window happens when rapture is on CD, you can double radiance straight into your mind bender burst. This is a mini-ramp that will heal 10 targets well. Usually the bosses are set up so you can alternate mini and main ramps for full raid aoes. In between, I use radiance on CD and perform the same burst combination as the ramp during the rest of the fight. Just make sure you have enough time before the big damage hit to have double radiance.
It should be noted that 3/4 normal and half of heroic has little damage output and though it sounds like you can improve on atonement timing a bit, you can expect quite a bit of overhealing so don’t let that discourage you.
You can’t play disc in raid without a plan on how you are going to ramp for every boss. You need to generally start ramping 12ish seconds before you know the big damage is going to come out for a full 20 atonement ramp.
Evang ramp is 8 atonements via renew & shields, followed by a flash heal on anyone else to apply atonement to yourself and the 10th person. Follow with 2 rads, evang, pet. Blast.
Rapture ramp is 8 shields, one flash heal, 2 rads, pet, blast.
Mini ramp is 1 shield, 2 renews, 1 flash heal, 1 Rad, blast.
Get yourself copies of Viserios spreadsheets for each raid via the discord, set it up, export notes to use in MRT, get your kaze MRT timers weak aura and have it announce 15 seconds out so you get a bit of wiggle room to start your ramps on time.
Disc is a lot of homework though, you really can’t skip studying damage timings or you end up just trolling the raid