In this guide I will cover everything that you need to know about how to gear your Discipline priest in season 11.

Hit and Spell penetration cap

Hit Cap

Casters cap hit at 4% or 410 rating. Finding the optimal way to hitcap means finding a way that allows you to lose out on the least amount of the stat you value the most, be it spirit, haste, crit or mastery. In some cases, depending on how you value the stats, it might be worth getting more hit than what is required if it keeps you from reforging away a stat you prefer.

By reforging ring, main hand and offhand, you will get exactly 410 hit rating. If you want to avoid reforging spirit, you could go with main hand, wand, helm and land on 412 rating. As you can imagine, there are many ways to reach the hit cap and what will be the best way for you depends on what secondary stat you plan to gear for. You can also use a 50 hit boot enchant to get you to the cap if preferred, which will save you from reforging away spirit.

The reasoning behind using a 50 hit (or a 50 stat enchant) rather than mastery+runspeed is that the runspeed increase will not stack with [Inner Will] nor the 4 piece mini-freedom provided by [Holy Walk]. Holy Walk caps you at 100% runspeed and you should be using Inner WIll for most of the time. An exception would be when you are getting trained, in which case you will most likely be snared, rendering your runspeed bonus useless.

Spell penetration cap

You need 197 spell penetration to be capped against everything bar mages with [Mage Armor], who require 240 spell penetration. The current season’s neck piece and cloak come with 287 spell pene which will put you well over the cap. While this is a waste of stats, it is the smallest stat loss you can get in order to reach the cap.

An alternative would be to enchant your cloak with 70 spell pene, gem the rest and aim for ~197, which would cause you an intellect loss and a minor secondary stat gain while not being capped against mages, and would be a subpar way of getting capped.

What you want to keep in mind when picking your spell penetration piece is what stats the other pieces offer. Necks come with either spirit or haste while cloaks come with spirit and mastery.

Primary Stats

Intellect > Resillience > Spirit > Haste = Mastery = Crit

Resillience

Cataclysmic gear comes with plenty of resillience and fully geared you should typically not have to gear or gem for it specifically. The only time your resillence levels might be a concern is if you’re either a human priest running double PvE trinkets or if you feel like your comp requires it.

For example, in a comp like RMP you can get away with wearing slightly less resillience since you have two of the best peelers in game backing you up, while in a melee cleave or another comp (generally one lacking a mage or lock) you might feel that you’re often the target of choice and want to pick up some more resillience.

Intellect

Intellect is by far your strongest stat. It increases your spellpower, mana pool and crit. You are going to want to prioritize intellect over all the other stats. Intellect will not only provide you with stronger shields and bigger heals, it will also increase your regen by bigger [Rapture] mana returns, [Hymn of Hope] and [Shadowfiend] ticks, as well as the extra mana you get from a bigger mana pool.

Spirit

Although spirit is a secondary stat, I have put it down as a primary because you sort of have to treat it like one. All priests, no matter the comp, need a healthy amount of spirit. As mentioned before, intellect will also provide you with some mana returns. However, spirit scales directly with your int, meaning it will only become better and better the higher your int is. Together, those two stats make up your regen.
A full spirit set will always be a solid choice in almost every comp.

Secondary Stats

Gearing a priest tends to be a little trickier than any other class because of how secondary stats affect our spells in very different ways. Regardless whether you are intending to go full spirit or not, you will have to make a choice between the 3 of them while picking up your 5th main piece and boot enchant. ([Cataclysmic Gladiator's Satin Hood] for haste, [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Satin Leggings] for mastery and full mooncloth for crit)

The different stats will outperform each other in different types of situations, so it is near impossible to tell which stat will be the most beneficial for you. Here is a closer look at all of them in order to help you figure out which stat will work the best for you and your comp.

Mastery

Mastery was the secondary stat of choice for many priests last season and it only stands to grow stronger in the upcoming one, with higher obtainable levels.

Mastery is extremely strong when it comes to shields and will benefit them even more so than intellect does (note however that you should still never choose mastery over int), but it is extremely weak when it comes to your other heals with the exception of DA which relies on you to crit. With mastery being so weak for anything but shields and DA, you have to take into consideration that outside of the duration of your shields and in the event of your shields getting dispelled it will largely be a wasted stat.

If your focus lies within rated bgs and you often find yourself with a lot of excess mana, mastery will be a good choice for you since you will have other healers to complement you and put out more raw healing. This will allow you to be more effective with the type of healing you do best (shielding) and will give you time to focus on other things, such as dispelling, fearing and mana burning.

For arena play, you need to account for what types of teams you most frequently meet and which of them give you trouble. For example, last season there were lots of MLS (mage shaman lock) teams around, which effectively have 3 offensive dispels. With a large number of your shields getting dispelled, all the itemization you chose to put into mastery could have been better spent elsewhere. On the other hand, if your BG is full of melee cleaves who don’t even have an offensive dispeller, mastery will shine, especially with the limited time where you won’t be able to cast anything but instants.

Haste

Haste has always been a favourable stat among priests in previous seasons, although so far in Cataclysm we haven’t been able to reach any significant numbers without sacrificing much needed regen which made it far less desirable in most comps.

Haste increases your casting speed, lowers global cooldown and decreases the time between ticks from channeled spells, hots and dots. It is the only stat that directly affects all your spells in form of faster heals or shorter gcd’s. Haste scales at a better rate than both mastery and crit, but like I previously mentioned it is weak for shields and doesn’t affect them in any way other than lowering the gcd in order to throw them out faster.

Outside of healing, a priest also has to play offensively and haste will help you do just that with faster dispels, mana burns and casts. As opposed to the other two stats, haste will not increase your mana efficiency. On the contrary, it will allow you to spend your mana faster, so before you start stacking haste you need to be sure that the lack of regen and mana won’t be holding you or your team back.

As an example, when I play in a melee cleave or an otherwise bursty comp that relies on fast kills, we will either have lost or won long before I oom. My team depends on me for fast dispels, both defensively to keep them mobile and offensively to make them put out more pressure, so for these kinds of comps I often choose a heavy haste setup in order to throw out fast dispels and heals all while my mana won’t be a concern.

Crit

Last season crit got a buff which made it heal for twice the amount of a normal heal instead of the previous 1.5, with Divine Aegis adding an additional 10% to the amount healed. While this indeed is a nice buff, it is not as powerful for us as it is for a shaman or a paladin.

At its best, crit gives you a nice boost in both efficiency and throughput, while at its worst it will leave you with a zero increase to both. Much like haste, crit is a really weak stat when it comes to shielding since the only portion of it that is affected by crit is the glyph. For every other heal type it will perform better than mastery and situationally better than haste. Overall, haste will perform better than crit because of its consistency and affecting all of your tools but crit does not only give a chance to improve your throughput, everytime it does it will also save you some mana as opposed to haste which will never increase your efficiency.

Crit is unarguably RNG but what you should keep in mind is that there are some talents, glyphs and buffs that will add to your crit. Reaching ~33% crit with [Renewed Hope] and a 5% crit buff from either elemental shaman, rogue or feral should not be a problem in Cataclysmic gear, making crit a little more dependable.

Mh/Oh Vs. Staff

The decision between using a 1h or a staff  comes down to a personal preference, throughput vs regen, it’s as simple as that. [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Energy Staff] comes with a little more stamina, resi and +162 more spirit while [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Gavel] / [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Spellblade] coupled with an enchanted OH gives you +32 intellect and +157 crit.

Gems

Epic quality gems have been introduced, but it will take time before they become easier to obtain for everyone and we can use them in our PvP gear.

As of now the only way to obtain them (outside of buying them for a ridicilous amount on the AH) is to raid at least normal modes where bosses will drop Mote of Darkness for which you can buy a [Crystalline Geode] that may contain an epic gem.  Essence of Corrupted Deathwing drops from Deathwing and gives you a [Elementium-Coated Geode], which has got 100% chance of containing an epic gem.

Again, these do not drop on the Looking for Raid difficulty, so until they implement other ways for us to get these or AH prices go down, raiding normal/heroic modes is the only way.  Until then just replace the following gems with their blue quality equivalents.

Red sockets: [Brilliant Queen's Garnet]
Blue sockets: [Purified Shadow Spinel] or [Veiled Shadow Spinel]
Yellow sockets: [Reckless Lava Coral] / [Artful Lava Coral] / [Potent Lava Coral] or [Willful Lava Coral]

All our socket bonuses are decent and you generally want to match them.

Meta gems:

Many of us resort to the intellect+mana meta by default, and even though it’s the logical choice, there are still other meta gems that can be very valuable depending on the situation.

[Ember Shadowspirit Diamond] 
This will be your most solid choice since it benefits you in every single game and situation, comes with your strongest stat plus a slightly bigger manapool to work with.

[Forlorn Shadowspirit Diamond]
[Powerful Shadowspirit Diamond]
[Impassive Shadowspirit Diamond]
All of the above metas are a little more situational but can be very useful, forlorn being slightly better than the other two when the situation calls for it due to having passive intellect instead of stamina/crit.

They work out to shorten the duration of respective stun/silence by 0.8sec for a 5second cc or 0.5 for a 4sec cc, which might be just what you need to get that one global to cast a shield or pw: death in between two cc’s.

[Burning Shadowspirit Diamond] 
This gem originally only worked for critical damaging spells and although it is not a recommended choice for a PvP gem I mainly just wanted to point out that as of patch 4.3 this gem also affects critical heals.

[Destructive Shadowspirit Diamond]
Nothing I recommend, but those game breaking perfect reflects you sometimes RNG can make you forget about all the games you never even noticed you were wearing this meta.

Enchants

Helm: [Arcanum of Vicious Intellect] or [Arcanum of Hyjal]

Shoulders: [Greater Inscription of Vicious Intellect] or [Greater Inscription of Charged Lodestone]

Back: [Enchant Cloak - Greater Intellect]

Chest: [Enchant Chest - Peerless Stats]

Bracers: [Enchant Bracer - Mighty Intellect]

Gloves: [Enchant Gloves - Greater Mastery] or [Enchant Gloves - Haste]

Legs: [Powerful Ghostly Spellthread]

Boots: [Enchant Boots - Lavawalker] or [Enchant Boots - Precision] / [Enchant Boots - Haste] / [Enchant Boots - Mastery]

MH: [Enchant Weapon - Power Torrent]

OH: [Enchant Off-Hand - Superior Intellect]

WIth the new Looking for Raid tool being introduced, people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to PvE gear can now easily get their hands on the following trinkets, although sadly the healing trinket itemization is rather bad with the current tier.

[Heart of Unliving]

A raid finder version of this trinket grants 770 spirit fully stacked which is pretty underwhelming if we compare it to Tsunami’s 321 Intellect and 400 spirit stacked.
The heroic version of this trinket would be comparable to Shard of Woe pre-nerf minus the haste on use.

If you can get a hold of the heroic version of this trinket it is a ton of regen, but personally for me the raid finder versions regen does not make up for the lack of throughput you would get from tsunami. The normal version is somewhere in between where you have to make a choice between a little more regen vs more throughput.

What you will also want to take note of is that you need to stack this trinket 10 times for its full effect and the duration is only 10 seconds, compared to tsunami’s 5 stacks with 20second duration. It is much more unlikely that your tsunami stacks will fall off and it is a lot faster to stack them up again in case they do.

The intellect version of this trinket, although a lot more appealing stat wise, will be very unrealistic for any healer to keep up in a PvP scenario.

[Seal of the Seven Signs]

The normal version offers 406 intellect and a 2573 haste proc for 20 seconds. Although it is quite a lot of haste and a nice bit of int, this proc is not only RNG but also comes with a 2 minute ICD which is relatively long. Having this proc just as you shield people out of the gates and not being able to profit from the proc part for the following 100 seconds makes it rather bad.

[Windward Heart]

Although this trinket is at a double disadvantage when it comes to RNG, relying on you to crit first and then having this proc off the crit, what you want to take note of is that its ICD is significantly lower than any of its predecessor, only 30 seconds! This gives it more chance to proc at times where you actually need the heal. Coupled with the int, I would use this over Seal of the Seven Signs if I was after the throughput in form of int and looking at the proc as just a bonus.

I would advise you to hold on to your [Darkmoon Card: Tsunami] if you can’t get a hold of the higher ilvl versions of these trinkets, in case you’re after regen or throughput. If the season turns out to be more about burst and less about mana, picking up a [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Badge of Dominance] or [Cataclysmic Gladiator's Emblem of Tenacity] won’t be a bad choice since they come with a massive amount of resillience.

In conclusion

As you can tell, gearing a priest often comes down to your own personal preferences and circumstances.  A new season is a perfect time for you to try out different gear setups with honor pieces before you have to decide on what to spend your conquest points on. Season 11 is going to be the first Cataclysm season where we will begin reaching more significant numbers of on secondary stats, dont be afraid to experiment and try out new things in order to find out what works the best for you!

Thank you for reading, I hope this guide proves to be helpful. As always I will be happy to answer any questions you might have.

Crazé