Discipline Arena Priests: What the Pros Are Doing

Post by Paolo

Edit: See the date? This was written at the beginning of May, at the end of Season 5, and has not been updated since. The info is still very fascinating, but out of date, seeing as how everything in it is pre-3.1, pre-Ulduar. Enjoy, but caveat emptor!

So with all the renewed interest in pvp, and not enough experts to go around, I decided to do a meta-analysis. This is not information borne of my own experience, but a simple analysis of what the best people in the business are doing.

I've taken 10 of the top ranked priests in the 2s bracket as a representative sample (or "panel of experts"), and looked at their choices of gear, talents, and professions. Choices might of course be different in 3s or 5s, but this is not intended to be the all-encompassing guide to all things pvp, but simply a place to start, to see what works for the best of the best. Also, the choices one makes when just starting out (both gear-wise and skill-wise) might also be very different. But we're looking at the top of the mountain here, at least for this exercise.

Note that all the data is aggregated. I haven't correlated anything; that's an exercise for the reader. For example, did priests who gemmed defensively allocate more talent points toward regen or mana-saving talents like Absolution?

The main problem with doing a guide like this is that there's no one to answer the question WHY?. Sorry about that! I wish there were...

The Priests

These fine folks are all in the nosebleed seats, somewhere around 2700 ratings.

Bilian
Shatoria
Arterian
Tkizze
Felyn
Ychytakaseto
Sketched
Butteslol
Evleh
Quuz

The Comps

Seven partner with rogues. Two with ret pallies. One with a feral druid.

The Gear

Ok, here's where things get interesting! I haven't tallied every single piece of gear. But I was particularly interested in several gear choices:

Main hand weapon
Trinkets
Gems (especially meta gems)
Set pieces

Main hand weapon

Eight are using Torch of Holy Fire, one is using Deadly Gladiator's Gavel, one is using the Soulblade.

Trinkets

9 Medallions (one human, of course)

For the second trinket, interesting choices were made between defense, offense, or regen.

Defense: 4 Battlemaster's Bravery
Offense: 1 Platinum Disks of Sorcery, 1 Forethought Talisman
Pure Regen: 1 Spark of Hope, 1 Spirit World Glass
Hybrid Regen: 2 Living Ice Crystals, 1 Je'tze's Bell

Gems

Meta gems leaned heavily towards regen.

6 Insightful Earthsiege
2 Tireless Skyflare
2 Powerful Earthsiege

Other gems were chosen as follows: 59 defensive (stam, resil), 21 offensive (SP, hit rating, etc), and 20 hybrid (SP/stam).

6 Mystic dragon's eye
15 Mystic autumn's glow
8 Kharmaa's grace
3 Solid dragon's eye
9 Solid sky sapphire
18 Steady forest emerald

16 Durable monarch topaz
4 Glowing twilight opal

6 Rigid autumn's glow
2 Runed scarlet ruby
3 Veiled monarch topaz
2 Shattered forest emerald
2 Mysterious twilight opal
6 Royal twilight opal

Edit: Here is a presentation that I think might be more useful. I've summed up the total number of points allocated for each stat across all of these (non-meta) gems.

+834 Resilience
+603 Stamina
+317 Spell power
+120 Hit rating
+40 Spell penetration
+18 MP5
+16 Haste

Set Pieces

Every priest had 5 set pieces, mostly Deadly of course. I did not consider offset pieces (cloak, rings, etc) for this analysis.

Of the 50 total pieces, 48 were Mooncloth (spirit), 2 were Satin (crit). The satin pieces were on two different priests, so all 10 of them had the 4-piece set bonus.

Post by Paolo

Enchants

For now, I just looked at the enchant choices on chest and bracers:

Chest
7 Resilience
2 Health
1 Stats

Bracers
7 Spellpower
3 Stamina

Professions

Of the relevant professions, 6 were engineers (for nitro boosts and hyperspeed accelerators), 4 were enchanters (for rings), and 3 were jewelcrafters (for uber-gems).

Talents

All 10 priests were disc/holy, anything from 57/14 to 60/11. Rather than list every single talent, what I've decided to do was present only those talents which are confusing or debatable, and see what our experts chose. You won't see Penance listed below; that's a given. But Absolution? Here you'll see that 16 points out of a total of 30 were chosen. Since it's a 3-point talent, if every priest took it in full you'd see 30/30. The 16 points means that it was not universally considered required. Some took 2 points, some 3 points, and some zero. Again, I haven't correlated anything here, so this just gives you a sense of how essential each talent is considered, nothing more.

If you wanted to look at a "template" build, look at Shator. It's a good place to start.

Discipline

Silent Resolve - 30/30
Improved Fort - 11/20
Martyrdom - 6/20

Meditation - 30/30
Inner Focus - 10/10

Absolution - 16/30
Mental Agility - 30/30
Improved Mana Burn - 20/20

Reflective Shield - 18/20
Focused Power - 20/20
Enlightenment - 20/30

Focused Will - 30/30
Power Infusion - 10/10
Improved Flash Heal - 3/30

Renewed Hope - 16/20
Divine Aegis - 15/30
Grace - 19/20

Holy

Healing Focus - 19/20
Improved Renew - 21/30
Holy Specialization - 20/50

Spell Warding - 8/40
Divine Fury - 40/40

Desperate Prayer - 10/10
Blessed Recovery - 2/30

Profit!

Also left as an exercise for the reader.

Post by Paolo

Specs

Here are direct links to the pros' talent specs.

Bilian
Shatoria
Arterian
Tkizze
Felyn
Ychytakaseto
Skatched
Butteslol
Evleh
Quuz

Glyphs

10 Penance
6 Inner Fire
5 Pain Suppression
3 Shield
3 Renew
2 Dispel Magic
1 Smite

Base Stats

Stam
Median: 1362
Range: 1312 - 1493 (wide)
Notes: Median health was 20480, which includes (for some folks) a +hp chest enchant that doesn't show in the stamina value.

Int
Median: 737
Range: 729 - 762 (narrow)
Notes: Median mana pool was 14638. Other than one person who stacked int, all priests had int values within about 15 of each other.

Spirit
Median: 624
Range: 561 - 742 (wide)
Notes: Median regen (out of 5sr) was 315.

Bonus Heals
Median: 1891
Range: 1799 - 2069 (moderate)
Notes: The priest who stacked int also stacked heals; she is the high value in both stats, and the lowest value in regen and stam.

Hit Rating
Median: 118
Range: 90 - 122 (narrow)

Haste
Median: 48
Range: 0 - 110 (moderate)
Notes: Turns out the Torch of Holy Fire, the best weapon in the game (pre-Ulduar), has exactly 48 haste. Hmm. Only two priests had other haste pieces or gems above the amount on the Torch, so this stat was definitely not a priority for our panel.

Crit
Median: 58
Range: 0 - 109 (moderate)
Notes: If you consider how much crit a PvE disc priest will stack (in the neighborhood of 700 crit rating), the numbers here are so close to zero we might as well just call them a wash. Another non-priority stat.

Resilience (did you think I forgot?)
Median: 919
Range: 802 - 1115 (wide)
Notes: The lowest and highest values are both extreme outliers. If we remove those two from consideration, the range is actually very narrow: 905 - 928 for all the remaining priests.

Post by notquiteartdeco

Fantastic Post!

I love that it doesn't start with some silly opinion on why you are uber-awesome in the arena. Instead you give data from the best and what they are using to be the best.

Being a non arena guy myself, it's very helpful. I might give this a try some day.