BUBBLES!

With the release of 4.0.3a I have found myself facing the biggest change to my healing rotation as I have ever faced as a Discipline Priest. Okay, lets face it, discipline was a pretty simple spec to play decently, it was pretty much Power Word: Shield spam. In order to be good at it, you had to get better at using your cooldowns (Power Infusion, Pain Suppression, and more recently Power Word: Barrier) and to be great at it, you had to be able to use your class extremely well, all the CDs and abilities you have to their fullest, know your spec'ing, etc. (just like every class), but things have changed.

Disclaimer: (ok anyone who reads this blog is getting used to these by now :P) I am not a theory crafter, I don't spend hours on dummies or digging through logs, or anything else that those crazy people do!
I raided my last raid through ICC with my guild until Cata (I am taking this last week off), and looking at the change logs I had a hunch. I had really been thinking that with my crit where it was (around 45% in a 25man raid) that Prayer of Healing  would probably be viable, and had randomly spurted this out several times in our healer chat channel in our raids. Well I got the confirmation from Blizz that they wanted it to be. Included in the patch notes were little gems about the spell, such as mana cost reduction, and the way that Divine Aegis procs for it. Now we get guaranteed bubbles on ever single heal caused by Prayer of Healing. This means that with a decent amount of master, a bit of haste, and a ton of spellpower, I am now getting (math ahead!)
10 000 Heals x 5 = 50 000 raid heals to target party
+
6 000 bubbles x 5 = 30 000 potential raid absorbs to target party
+
2 000 x 5 = 10 000 raid HOTS (6 seconds) to target party
=
18 000 x 5 = 90 000 raid heals/absorbs to target party from a 2 second cast.

Okay so a lot of that was rounding/estimates (as I said I am not Zusterke and can just pull random math numbers out of the air that are 100% correct), but you get the idea.

If metres matter to you, I was pulling pretty much top numbers the whole raid in terms of healing. In fact on Marrowgar I was actually told by a shaman healer that they hated me (I was about 150% their total heals, and he was #2 on the metres).

Needless to say, I am awaiting the all feared "Ghostcrawler's Nerf Bat". However, until then I will enjoy this crazy through-put, and hope they don't nerf my regen anytime soon.

Now I know that this has come off as a bit of a brag, and to be completely honest, it is. I have loved my class from the moment I rolled it (hey, I didn't realize I was leveling that slow, until I leveled my first alt), and I am really excited for the few modest changes that it has received. I really do feel bad for those that got extreme changes for them, but hey, you have to love your class, otherwise it's really no fun, and I am loving mine to its fullest.