Invincible PVE Group (A New Twist on a Classic)

[Littleburst]

I love the idea, and always want to encourage new groups and thinking out of the box, but my ego is telling me I have to say this: a team with 4 disc priests is more "invincible" than what you have Their survivability is insane.... INSANE I tell ya!

4x Atonement http://www.wowhead.com/spell=81749
When you deal damage with Smite, you instantly heal a nearby low health friendly party or raid target within 15 yards from the enemy target equal to 100% of the damage dealt.

Will be quite sick

I just spam smite with my disc priest and that covers like 40% of the healing done. That's in normals though, not geared for HC's yet. (like below 180, so can't queue)

[HPAVC]

4x Atonement http://www.wowhead.com/spell=81749
When you deal damage with Smite, you instantly heal a nearby low health friendly party or raid target within 15 yards from the enemy target equal to 100% of the damage dealt.

It has a strong appeal, but a lot of talents add nothing to synergy for the team with four discipline. So many buffs don't stack or just overwrite so prematurely.

[Mercurio]

Nice thoughts here, Gunsun.

In Wrath I ensured that I have an ele shammy in every leveling team in addition to my specced healer (sometimes a resto shammy, sometimes a priest). It really helps to have more healing when needed - either ele healing or respeccing to resto when needed. This is certainly a philosophy I'm going to maintain in Cata. You have taken this a bit farther.

My caution is that WotLK heroics really are a complete joke right now. I don't believe they give much of an indication of what the Cata dungeons will be like. With my traditional 3 DPS teams my dedicated healers are pretty useless - they cast an acutal heal about 4-5 times a heroic run these days - Riptide or Renew takes care of the rest for me. I certainly don't expect that to be the case in Cata.

For you, I would guess that the kind of incoming tank damage in Cata dungeons will cause you to have to spend much of your resto time healing. Also, since Blizz seems to be wanting to put more stress on DPS lately I would guess that many of the fights will be based on having very solid DPS to survive. Stacking boss damage buffs or additional adds running in over time that will overwhelm low DPS groups will probably see quite a bit of use in Cata. I think back to running WotLK heroics in quest greens and how many special abilities I had to plan for when battling each of the bosses. Now I completely ignore everything because my DPS is so overpowered that I kill things before special abilities are an issue. In Cata a low DPS group may have a much harder time dealing with all the special tricks bosses throw at us.

Again, I love the thought, and running heroics now can definitely help you tweak your macros to optimize, but I think your group's performance will change significantly come Cata (as all groups will). I'm excited to see how you fare!

[lightstriker]

4x Atonement http://www.wowhead.com/spell=81749
When you deal damage with Smite, you instantly heal a nearby low health friendly party or raid target within 15 yards from the enemy target equal to 100% of the damage dealt.

Will be quite sick

I just spam smite with my disc priest and that covers like 40% of the healing done. That's in normals though, not geared for HC's yet. (like below 180, so can't queue)

Dont forget Divine Ageis, it procs from Atonement. I want to level 3 more Disc, but Disc dont have AoE. This is the only thing lacking. Do you and Owltoid throw out Mind Sear for AoE? Is it weak on Disc?

Disc Priest
#showtooltips
/castsequence [nochanneling] reset=target/combat Penance, Shadow Word: Pain, Smite, Holy Fire, Devouring Plague, Smite, Penance, Smite, Smite, Holy Fire, Smite, Smite,
/cast Archangel

My Disc and Boom never runs out of mana anymore. On Hall of Reflection run my 2 EleShammy run out faster now. Probably because of Chain Lightning and Earth Shock and heals.

My team is similar to GunSun's but i don't have one dedicated healer. I won't know what to do with 2.

[gunsun]

Thanks for the feedback, Mercurio. I've been thinking similar things and trying to stress test with pulls of 12-15 mobs in heroics.

I went into ICC10 and trash there is just like heroics. The passive heals are all you need and the restos still pull 8-12% dps each. Some fights the two of them out dps my Boomkin. Fights are long but danger free. No mana issues, no heal issues.

I've wiped on Marrowgar so many times that I swear he's laughing at me.

My best attempt I had him near 70%, which was a fluke because I'm lucky to get him to 85% most attempts. There's just no margin for error. A great 4 min attempt is ruined with a bad dance. Most wipes were from stupid things, like botching group placement on the pull. It's an unforgiving fight and most of the team is low 5k gs.

You can chain heal through bone storm, with almost no frost resist, so the survival build works. The shaman still pull 7-8% on a raid boss, which is nice. But killing bone spikes while healing the tank is a mess.

I think it's doable with 3-4 situational macros, depending on who is spiked (if I brought back the elem shaman I'd have four options for backup heals, nukes, etc depending on the spike).

But I'm tired of repair bills and respawns and typos in my macros.

[gunsun]

Does anyone have a link for Healing Stream Totem scaling? I've been searching and don't understand some of the stuff I'm reading. Is there a good site explaining the mechanics?

I just noticed that with the mage in the group their is a proc adding about 70hp per tick per totem. Not sure what is doing that, but with the mage they're comparable to 2 resto + 1 elem.

I've never spent much time trying to max healing totems

[Mercurio]

Thanks for the feedback, Mercurio. I've been thinking similar things and trying to stress test with pulls of 12-15 mobs in heroics.

I went into ICC10 and trash there is just like heroics. The passive heals are all you need and the restos still pull 8-12% dps each. Some fights the two of them out dps my Boomkin. Fights are long but danger free. No mana issues, no heal issues.

I've wiped on Marrowgar so many times that I swear he's laughing at me.

My best attempt I had him near 70%, which was a fluke because I'm lucky to get him to 85% most attempts. There's just no margin for error. A great 4 min attempt is ruined with a bad dance. Most wipes were from stupid things, like botching group placement on the pull. It's an unforgiving fight and most of the team is low 5k gs.

You can chain heal through bone storm, with almost no frost resist, so the survival build works. The shaman still pull 7-8% on a raid boss, which is nice. But killing bone spikes while healing the tank is a mess.

I think it's doable with 3-4 situational macros, depending on who is spiked (if I brought back the elem shaman I'd have four options for backup heals, nukes, etc depending on the spike).

But I'm tired of repair bills and respawns and typos in my macros.

Are you trying to 5-box him? I've soloed him about 40 times, but always with 10 toons.

I certainly remember all the difficulties of getting each boss down the first time. Lots of repair bills and macro tweakage. It is painful, but I'm kinda looking forward to more challenges in Cata.

[gunsun]

Are you trying to 5-box him? I've soloed him about 40 times, but always with 10 toons.

I certainly remember all the difficulties of getting each boss down the first time. Lots of repair bills and macro tweakage. It is painful, but I'm kinda looking forward to more challenges in Cata.

Yeah. I have a 10 box setup but I never tried ICC with them. A few have gear issues. But this was a 5 box attempt. I could last 4-5 min and get him down a bit, but it's a mess.

Dividing things into heals for the tank and dps for the bonespike, at the same time, is the issue for 5 boxing it. If there weren't bone spikes it would be a very long but simple fight since the shaman can heal through the bonestorm.

Happy to hear it's going well! Good luck with your Swiss-army-knife group.

Thanks :-)