i play a slightly different style of atonement priest.

Similar to arcane mages, i use holy fire and smite spam when massive healing is not yet necessary, to conserve mana, how? I macro archangel to the big heals in order to return mana and increase their effectiveness. Using archangel this way, makes your smite healing almost costless. (you can also opt to use archangel asap at 5 stacks just to get the mana back asap).

An idea about atonement, is really to ignore it if u can help it, and macro to other spells, because you will still be healing as per normal, but the proc helps. (Macro it to big spells for buff to healing, or macro it to holy fire to use it on cooldown during atonement spam for mana returns)

Atonement actually does very little HPS, so its not viable to use atonement when heavier healing is required. Hence for normal healing mode, as our good article writer has mentioned before, macroed "Inner Focus" to each Greater Heal, Binding Heal, Prayer of Healing, or Flash Heal. By talenting "Train of Thought", Greater Heal is my prefered heal when penance is on cooldown, due to the talent actually indirectly reducing the cost of greater heal by 11% by making "Inner Focus" come off cooldown sooner.

As for AOE healing, I would spam heavily Prayer of Healing alternating on groups, this makes good use of Divine Aegis proc and also "Prayer of Healing Glyph". Its good to remember to use PW:S to proc rapture when spamming PoH.

I do not take Strength of Soul, due to the fact that:
1) If the raid is taking damage, i will be raid healing
2) If noone is dying, i may as well use atonement healing (helps dps and saves mana by pumping Archangel at 5 stacks asap)
3) I do not spam PW:S, as I use it to save others when they are low and in need of healing immediately, and only to proc rapture.


As for stats, it seems that crit will outweigh mastery (at least for me), as most of our healing % with this strategy are affected by crit, and less % of stats are effected by mastery (this is based on my recount breakdown on most fights with manual crafting, and also rawr model).

A non related to this post but I think worth mentioning, i guess is the use of "Focused Will" for disc priests, as there is a lot of damage being taken by a player in Firelands, by reducing the amount of damage taken on successive attacks, it will really save your life, allowing you to focus on others that need healing immediately too (I find it more effective to reduce damage then a 2 minute cooldown medium heal, which is only slightly more then PW:S yourself).

My toon is Shadowyvaine-Blackrock (US) in case anyone wants to check my spec. It is a little strange that I skip some talents that others will find atrocious but really..

1) I do not have mana issues due to maximizing rapture procs so no need for faster shadowfiends, Instead I use it very early in the fight (80% mana, rapture on CD) to get it a 2nd time.
2) I do not take "Borrowed Time" because I find that other talents are more required over an occasional quicker heal, which may help, but again, other talents matter more.

Happy healing.

Reply