2 competent disc priests can and do work well together – the key is ‘competent”. They have to understand how to set up their unit frames to see and read each others shields, and communication between them is important. Throwing 2 typical PuG disc priests together, however, probably won’t work well.

You are correct in disc as a raid healer – played well, they most certainly are not weaker in AoE fights.

@Madwand

I find I prefer a heavy hasted disc set for healing HICC10, and we always 2 healed it with me as that and a Pally (or a shaman). I fight the preventative with the quick heals most comfortable, and the PI is always a nice touch. Derevk, however, prefers to go as holy and pairs with a holy pally. I’m hesitant to say one is better than the other – it comes down to your style and raid make up.

@Juzaba

Crit starts to lose it’s direct effectivity once you pass 40% or so – I’m not a bubble monkey so I favor haste for the pure thruput. Some people stack the crap out of red gems, but with TOO much, you start to affect your rapture abilities.

Holy will only pull dramatically ahead when raid damage is strong enough to allow PoH to work its magic on 5/5 group members consistently. Speaking anecdotally, even if there’s strong raid damage if I’m going up against a holy I’m still going to be hitting the majority of it (putting up a 10K damage shield and a 2K+ spot heal on a raid member per GCD) and I’ll be doing it a tad haphazardly at times also screwing up PoH hits since you will rarely get a full hit on 5/5.

I think part of the problem with the perception of disc as raid healers is that not only are we terrible at topping up the raid, we honestly don’t care. Someone sees raid frames with 70% of the raid with a 5-8K health deficit on Val10 and thinks “wow the disc priest is struggling” while in reality the disc priest is cruising along penancing the tank with the larger health deficit spamming bubbles on the GCD on the entire raid, spot healing with Glyph of PW:S and just protecting them from damage while LoTP or JoL or VE or HS or more bubble spam glyphing heals them back up to full eventually.

The other part of the perception is that some disc priests are just downright terrible and give the rest of us a bad name. Disc priests require you to know your fights and the damage profiles of those fights extraordinarily well, know when you have to go nuts on your bubble spam for raids, know when it’s time to start helping on the tank, react quickly to spot shield dots, react quickly to spot shield potential agro pulls and randomly targeted spells (target of target how I love you especially on Lady Deathwhisper and her frostbolt). This is while all the time keeping a rough eye on the field on some fights so that you can mass dispel competently (glittering sparks I’m looking at you) if necessary.

One of the things that I personally love and have come to adore as a disc priest is that we have most of the power of a single role biased spec (i.e. holy pally tank healing, or a resto anything) while being able to change our role on a dime. Disc priests who know what they’re doing don’t need assignments. If the pallys are struggling with the third tank they’ll get penance up and keep hammering them with flash keeping up DA and grace, stop for a few seconds to bubble the bone spike targets then go right on back to healing that third tank. Bone whirl starts up and they go full raid bubble spamming stopping idiot DPS from being owned by coldflame. Fester? Bubble spam first two stages, full tank healing with CDs for the third. Bubble spam as much of the raid prior to pungent blight for rapture cheese if you’re a bit low on mana.

Holy priests are great. I love them. They’re great raid spot healers and make sure I can stay disc but I wouldn’t consider us weaker than holy by any means.

You are entirely correct in that 2 disc priests are worse than useless trying to work together though. I hate it.

Were I particularly worried about opitmal disc itemization I’d probably gem crit instead of haste for yellows and maybe even blow off blue socket bonuses entirely since spi is only really good for holy. Or maybe I’d just go 100% red gems in everything. I’d also adjust my BiS list a bit to swap some of those spi/haste pieces (such as the neck and weapon) for spi/crit or crit/haste.