Discipline: Clarity of Will

Discipline has changed. Atonement is dead. A whole new style of gameplay has emerged from the ashes at level 100, and its name is Clarity of Will. Clarity of Will is a 2.5 second cast stackable absorb, like a GHeal whose full value is an absorb. This is incredible, but requires an additional resource to get the most out of it.

First, you need an addon that will show you its absorbs and duration as a graphical interface. The information is readily there by hovering over the buff icon, but that's extremely annoying to work with. I've taken the addon Shield Tracker and modified it to include Clarity of Will on its tracking list (this is a trivial change by simply adding the spell ID and name string to the file, but I'll include the whole package as a zip at the end of this post). This will allow you to better keep track of Will.


I have it set up like this. Top bar is Will, middle is Shield, and bottom is Aegis.

I'm going to gloss over the particulars of using Shield Tracker for a moment and move onto the mechanical portion of the healing first. As I mentioned, Atonement is dead. At level 100 with 4.1k spellpower and 2.2% versatility, Smite hits for and heals for 3.8k. Flash heals for about 27.5k in the same cast time, has a controlled target, and costs a little over 3 times as much for healing almost 7 times as much. Smiting will not be used primarily as a healing tool anymore. Smite and Holy Fire will instead be used to build Evangelism stacks to get a healing boost through Archangel. Absorb this knowledge into your brain.

Instead, your primary focus will be on maintaining your Will stack on your tank or primary target. Using Shield Tracker, you'll be taking advantage of Will's absorb cap to keep your tank's health bar from moving, playing an invisible healing game that only you can see. Watch in amazement as your tank wonders what the fuck their job even is anymore and confuse DKs by forcing their Bone Shield to expire from time. You will accomplish this by carefully rolling your various absorbs to get the maximum efficiency out of all of them. Here's some basic info that you'll need to understand in order to better grasp these mechanics.

Stacking:
All four priest absorbs (Will, Aegis, Shell, and Shield) stack with each other. Multiple priests may have their own version of Will, Aegis, and Shell on a single target. Shield however is limited both by Weakened Soul and a limit of one Shield per target, period. If the Shield currently on the target is greater in value than the non-crit value of the priest's trying to cast, the priest will get an, "A more powerful spell is already active" error, but if it's lesser, they'll just overwrite it.

Absorb Caps:
Will’s absorb cap is 50% of the target's max HP.
Aegis' absorb cap is 60% of the caster's max HP.
Shell's absorb cap is 60% of the caster's max HP.
Shield has no absorb cap and is capped only by the amount of +healing/absorb effects you have.

Priority:
The priority for which absorb will be consumed first is extremely simple - the lowest value absorb is consumed first. This is important when it comes to juggling Will and Shield, which will be your primary absorbs.

Additional Healing/Absorb:
All absorb values are increased by Spellpower, the +healing% of Archangel, the +absorb% of Mastery, and the +healing% of Versatility. Twist of Fate does not increase absorbs. Shell causes Flash, Heal, and PoH to all heal for slightly more, but it doesn’t correlate to mastery values and each one seems to get a different amount of bonus. I have no clue what’s up with that.

Crits and Multistrikes
Will, Shield, and Shell are all capable of crits. Shell’s crits are equal to the original spell + Shell’s value, since these are different. In the end, Shell’s crits are not 200%. More like 180% of two Shells. Will and Shield are capable of multistriking but it won’t display in the logs; the value is simply folded into the final number. I haven’t confirmed whether or not Shell can multistrike.

Healing with Will

In a nutshell, the primary skill is managing which absorbs you refresh such that no absorb is wasted by falling off early or by applying absorbs past the cap/refreshing shield before it's been fully consumed.

Your goal with Will healing is to keep the tank’s health bar from moving. You accomplish this by keeping Shield on cooldown and casting Will such that it doesn’t cap out or expire. If the tank’s health takes a solid hit while you’re responding to AoE healing or people standing in fire, you can use Archangel to provide a guaranteed Flash crit on the tank, providing both a small amount of healing and a base Aegis absorb to cover you while you regain your Will stack. During periods of extremely heavy tank damage, you will not be able to keep the tank’s health bar still. This is fine and expected, but you should always shoot for a static bar.

There will be times where you will want to delay casting Shield because Will is going to expire. If the tank is taking enough damage to expend absorbs, you should be cancel-casting to try to land a Will just before it expires to ensure you’re getting the most out of your cast. It is now safe to Shield again. If the tank isn’t taking damage, then it’s okay to waste absorbs to refresh the timer. You’re probably not suffering mana troubles at that point.

Here’s some stuff.

Pre-fight:
- Will up to cap. It's got a 20 second duration and you'll be taking full advantage of this.
- Shield. This will (almost) always be a lesser value than a full-capped Will stack. It also has a shorter duration, so you want it to get used first.

Rules of Engagement:
- Will the tank any time their stack drops below the cap minus Will’s absorb amount, unless you need to refresh it early. You can wait a bit further here to ensure crits are not wasted.
- Shield the tank if and only if Will has enough duration left that Shield will be absorbed fully, otherwise you’re forced to refresh the Will stack for time and not for value.
- Penance will primarily be used to heal yourself or your DPS. Your primary tank heal will be Will normally, but under heavy fire you’ll of course shift over to using Penance on the tank.
- Heal on yourself and DPS when you have the time.
- Flash when you don’t. You will be doing this in the harder instances on the tank. Once you have some absorb coverage, try to switch back to Will.
- Holy Fire on cooldown to build Evangelism stacks.
- Smite in short bursts to help build Evangelism stacks.
- PoM a melee or slow-witted ranged. If the damage is outrageous, PoM on the tank is acceptable, but otherwise they should be absorbing too much damage for PoM to pop. Try to keep this on cooldown and you’ll have multiple PoMs out unless AoE is crazy.
- PoH spam is a thing that you will be doing a lot when health bars get low all around. It chugs through your mana so watch out. Use Holy Fire to get 1 Evangelism stack and pop Archangel to get only 5% healing but the guaranteed crit from Empowered Archangel right away.
- Holy Nova is babby garbage and you should not use it.
- Cascade is a solid T6 heal because it doesn’t require you to care about range. There are remarkably few fights that involve stacking in this expansion, so Divine Star’s value is much less than in MoP.

Talents
T3 - SoL doesn’t proc from Will, which doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take it, it just won’t be as valuable as normal. I use Mindbender for the fire-and-forget nature of the mana regen.
T5 - ToF will proc a lot more often this expansion but doesn’t provide bonuses to absorbs. RIP in peace. I use PI because the haste is killer this early in the expansion and also because there aren’t often times where stacking up Shell on the tank is going to be that much more throughput than keeping up your standard Will rotation. I had a lot of wasted absorbs trying this because Shell ended up at the lowest priority due to capping out and then expiring before Will and Shield could be burned.
T6 - Cascade is sort of the de facto choice here because it requires less positional consideration.
T7 - Duh.

Glyphs
Penance and Weakened Soul are mandatory. For a third, you can always keep Holy Fire for the range increase, but the reduced significance of Atonement devalues this glyph. Leap of Faith for the root removal or Purification for the additional dispel charge are good choices.

Stat Priority
Haste, Crit, and Mastery are all roughly equal in capability. Haste will let you spam faster, Crit works on all of your relevant abilities, and Mastery lets Will and Shield scale very well. Unless you’re absolutely bleeding edge, don’t stress which stats you get. Multistrike does work as well and is probably roughly equal to or only slightly below Crit. Versatility at the very least is a raw power increase while helping keep you alive just a little longer. Long story short: don’t stress the stats.

Using Shield Tracker

I did not write this addon. I’ve only made a very small modification to it, though I plan on improving the functionality for the benefit of my fellow Disc priests.

Shield Tracker lets you create bars to track shields. Oh my! The attached zip should contain all of my current settings for it, which will place a set of bars next to the top party position (where the tank usually is). The order of the bars from top to bottom is: Will, Shield, Aegis, Shell. The bar number displays the current absorb value for that spell. The bar value ticks down the duration of the spell.

The options for this addon are kind of limited. In order to focus a tank with the bars, you have to go into each of the four bars (type /shieldtracker) and assign the target type to “Named” and then put the tank’s name in there. There’s no option to associate the bars with a party role (yet). You have to manually place and lock in each bar. It’s a huge hassle. Tool around with it for a bit and resize the bars if you want to. I tried to keep mine neat and integrated with the default party frames. If you use something different and weird, you’ll have to customize it for yourself. The important thing is the tracking of the absorb values and durations, since that’s the part that’s missing from the Will healing equation. Have fun.

Link to Shield Tracker download from my dropbox
https://www.dropbox.com/s/em21isk5vd3utgz/ShieldTracker.zip?dl=0