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This is a repost of an article from wow.com.  I find it intresting because I am raising up my shammy currently and I can use all the advise I can get.

by Joe Perez Mar 30th 2010 at 6:00PM

The facts

• Spell Haste reduces the global cooldown to as little as 1 second. No amount of haste including Bloodlust/Heroism will lower the global cooldown below 1 second
• The soft haste cap for resto shamans is 1269 haste rating (38.7%).
• 1% haste means you will cast 1 additional spell in the time it would normally take to cast 100 spells. You do NOT cast 1% faster.
• 1% Spell Haste = 32.78 Haste Rating at Level 80

Haste has the ability to reduce the global cool-down from 1.5 seconds to 1.0 seconds. As a healer this can be very important as it directly affects the time between spell casts. In most raids (10 and 25), you will have a total of 8.15% this is before gearing and item procs. 5% from Wrath of Air Totem and 3% from either Improved Moonkin Form or Swift Retribution. Now you might be asking how 5%+3% = 8.15%. Haste is a multiplicative effect, which means each factor that does stack compounds the total rather than simply add to it. An increase in an ability by X% is equal to multiplying the current modifier (which begins at 1.0) by (1 + X%/100); for example, a haste increase of 30% would be a multiplier of 1.30.

The soft cap refers to the amount of haste requires to lower the global cooldown to 1second. What this ultimately means is that in most raids you will begin to approach the soft cap for haste at around 30% on your character sheet. No amount of haste, even with Heroism / Bloodlust, will reduce the GCD below 1.0 seconds. It is also called a soft cap because additional haste rating will continue to reduce the cast time of longer spells, such as Chain Heal and Healing Wave. Here is a rough example of how stacking haste will affect your cast time on the longer spells.

Haste is calculated after talents and does have an equation that you can use to estimate the effectiveness of your haste rating.

I’m going to borrow an image from over at elitist jerks here to show you since I think they best illustrate the math.

Meta Gem: Insightful Earthsiege Diamond
Blue Socket: Quick King’s Amber. To meet the meta requirement Energized Eye of Zul or Royal Dreadstone can be used.
Yellow Socket: Quick King’s Amber
Red Socket: Reckless Ametrine

When haste is not best choice

While haste is a fantastic stat for a raid healing shaman, there are some circumstances that haste is not as useful.

In smaller environments such as Heroics, the usefulness of haste diminishes some. While it is still useful, you can not count on the presence of raid haste buffs (such as Improved Moonkin Form or Swift Retribution), which would mean that you would need to stack more haste. and it does have the potential to increase downtime.

In tank healing situations where you are relying on bigger heals haste can be useful, but spell power and crit can be as useful or more so than haste. This is especially true when dealing with tanks with higher effective health such as bear druids and death knights who tend to take large chunks of damage all at once. While it can be argued that haste will still improve the casting potential of chain heal and healing wave, spell power and crit directly affect spells like Earth shield and Healing Stream Totem, while haste does not.

Also anytime a spell dips lower than the global cooldown (less than 1.0 seconds) the effectiveness of that spell drops very sharply as it can then clip your casting time and cause disruptions in the flow of healing. Be mindful of this as you stack haste.

In the end haste is a very good raiding shaman stat and in most cases will be the stat of choice. Next week we will talk about about useful restoration macros and some game addons you may find useful in your healing travels.

The following is a repost of an article from The Warlocks Den

Published by Akasha
November 22, 2008

What is Spell Hit?
Spell hit is a combat attribute that increases a caster’s chance to hit with spells. Spell hit is primarily obtained from talents or gear that has hit rating. The more gear with hit rating a caster has the lower the chance the caster’s spells will miss (i.e. an enemy resist the spells). With patch 3.0.2, spell hit is capped at 100%; with enough spell hit, it is possible to reach a state where it is impossible for your spells to miss. A spell that fails to hit is shown as a miss, while misses caused by a target’s resistance is shows as a resist. Spell hit has no effect on healing spells, as they will always hit.

Spell hit rating is part of the combat rating system that was introduced with Patch 2.0 and the Burning Crusade expansion. Each point of hit rating increases chance to hit with spells by a percentage. The exact percentage per point is based only on the players level. When the player’s level increases, the points of +hit rating needed to achieve +1% chance to hit with spells increases as well. Viz, the percentage contribution by each +hit rating point is reduced when the player’s level is increased.

Other than hit rating, Warlocks can increase chance to hit with talents:

• Suppression, a talent at the top of the affliction talent tree reduces your chance to miss with Affliction spells by 1% per talent point (up to 3/3 for 3%). Note, this only effects Affliction spells. Your Destruction and Demonology spells will be unaffected.

• Cataclysm, a talent at second tier of the destruction talent tree reduces your chance to miss with Destruction spells by 1% per talent point (up to 3/3 for 3%). Note, this only effects Destruction spells. Your Affliction and Demonology spells will be unaffected

Note: Neither of these talents effect demonology.

For every point you have into these talents you reduce the hit cap by 1% (for the schools they affect) and you can subtract 26.26 point from the cap.

How spell hit chance is calculated
The spell hit mechanic has been confirmed by Blizzard CM Eyonix. Base chance to hit is based on level difference between caster and target, starting at 96% for even levels, and going up or down from there, capping at a maximum 100%. Furthermore, the chance to hit is different for mobs (PvE) and player (PvP) targets.

For example, a level 70 caster attacking a level 73 mob will have a 83% chance to hit with spells in PvE. Furthermore, a level 70 caster attacking a level 74 or higher mob decreases by an additional 11% per level in PvE, and by 7% in PvP. Players many levels below their target will always have at least a 1% chance of landing a spell. This means you will have the minimum chance of hit against PvE targets at least 11 levels higher than you, and PvP targets at least 16 levels higher.

For casters, 1% of additional hit amounts to 1% additional damage statistically, up to the cap based on level of the mob being attacked.

• In heroic 5 man dungeons bosses, the highest level mobs in the instance, are level 82 elites. Against level 82 mobs you have a 94% chance to hit with spells. To make it 100%, at level 80, you need 158 hit.

• In raid instances, bosses are level ?? elites. The ?? denotes a mob who is 3 levels higher than you, i.e. level 83. Bosses in raids are always 3 levels above you. Always. Against a level 83 mob you have measly 83% chance to hit with spells. This is almost a fifth of your casts being resisted and lowering your DPS. To make it 100%, you need 17% or 446 hit.

What’s the hit cap at level 80?
The question that everyone wants the answer to! At level 80, the highest level mob currently present is level 83 (e.g. all Wrath of the Lich King raid bosses), a level 80 caster has an effective spell hit rating cap of 446. That assumes no other spell hit sources.

• In PvP, the cap would be 1% – 27 hit
• In Herioc 5 mans, the cap would be 3% – 79 hit
• In Raid instances, the cap would be 14% – 368 hit

crit rate over all spells = crit * hit

crit rate over all spells = 30% * 83% = 24.9%

• In some situations should Hit rating be sacrificed?

• Improved Faerie Fire – Druid talent in the Balance tree – Your Faerie Fire spell also increases the chance the target will be hit by spell attacks by 3%, and increases the critical strike chance of your damage spells by 3% on targets afflicted by Faerie Fire.

• Misery – Priest talent in the Shadow tree – Your Shadow Word: Pain, Mind Flay and Vampiric Touch spells also increase the chance for harmful spells to hit by 3% lasting 24 sec, and increases the damage of your Mind Blast, Mind Flay and Mind Sear spells by an amount equal to 15% of your spell power.

• Heroic Presence – Racial ability of Draeneis (passive aura buff) – Increases chance to hit with all spells and attacks by 1% for you and all party members within 30 yards.

This is a repost from Wow.com, Its a discipline healing guide.

by Dawn Moore Mar 21st 2010 at 8:00PM

Every Sunday Spiritual Guidance is liberated from the shadows by Dawn Moore, while Fox Van Allen is busy massaging the many tired tendrils of Alfonz, Dawn’s loyal Shadowfiend. Dawn will reflect on the intricacies of priest healing for discipline and holy priests, while forwarding Fox’s address to her gnomish allies.

It was sometime in early 2009 that I was sitting in Dalaran, reading trade chat when someone asked “can disco priests heal?” Someone replied “lol, disc priests?” to which the original poster said, “yeah, disc. Can they?” I smiled when I saw the mistake. Then a few months later when I applied to a guild, I filled in my spec and class as Disc(o) Priest. In response this, one of my future guildmates told me he expected the 70s to be in full revival during my trial: I provided. I might have gone overboard since, but I was born for this.

So here it is, Discipline 101. Just as was the case with the holy 101, this is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to every nuance of the discipline tree. Instead it will cover the basics of how to get started with gearing and playing a discipline priest in a PvE environment, and hopefully get you asking more questions that I’ll be able to answer in future articles. If you are a veteran discipline priest please provide the newbies with any tips or tricks of your own in the comments.

1. What is Discipline?

Discipline, or disc as it is often shortened to, is one of a priest’s two healing specs. It was once thought of as a PvP spec, due to its talents focusing on utility, damage reduction, and offense. However, on the eve of Wrath of the Lich King, patch 3.0.2 was released and discipline received major changes: offensive talents were removed or reduced, and several improvements were made to the tree’s healing and damage mitigation options. As a result, discipline has become a viable healing spec for all PvE content, with a strength for single-target healing.

2. Discipline benefits

• Versatile: disc can perform many different roles for a party or raid with the same gear and spec.
• Control damage: because mitigation acts preemptively, you can often manage healing multiple players at once by strategically placing shields and heals. This means even without a strong AoE healing ability, a skilled disc priest can keep a group alive just by stopping damage on certain targets until he has time to individually heal them.
• Utility: discipline priests have many useful cooldowns, buffs, and improved spells to assist the raid.

3. Discipline drawbacks

• Weaker heals: since damage mitigation is your specialty, your actual healing spells are a little weaker than other healers with comparable gear.
• Misunderstood: some players will not understand how discipline works, or worse, think they understand how discipline works when they don’t. You’ll occasionally have to deal with discipline related ignorance in this spec, in more ways than one.
• Gear competition: because disc priests don’t currently utilize spirit in combat very well, best in slot items are often the same pieces being sought by caster DPS.

4. Stats to look for

Discipline priests, like holy priests, benefit from most caster stats available. Despite this, the two trees differ in how much they benefit from each stat. The value of spirit is the biggest difference between disc and holy priests. Spirit is not useless, since talents like Meditation will allow you to gain mana from it in combat, but there are so many sources to return mana for disc priests (trinkets, mana return cooldowns, and the talent Rapture) that you don’t need to worry too much about mana. This will all change in Cataclysm, but it stands for now. These are the stats you’ll want to look for on your gear at this time:

• Spellpower: Spellpower will increase the size of your heals and the amount your shields absorb for. (Directly for Power Word: Shield and indirectly for Divine Aegis.)
• Intellect: Just like with holy, this stat will increase your mana pool and grant a small amount of critical strike rating. In addition to buffing your mana, it will affect your mana regeneration from spirit and increase the amount of mana returned by abilities like Shadowfiend, Hymn of Hope, and Replenishment. If you are having mana problems as a disc priest, this is the first stat to go to if you can’t get enough mana by simple adjustments to play style.
• Haste: Haste does two things: decreases the casting and channel time on non-instant cast spells, and lowers the 1.5 second global cooldown (GCD). As a discipline priest, how much haste you need is incredibly variable due to talents. Depending on your role and what your regular raid comp is, you can hit the haste cap for GCD with as little as 5% haste. This is barebones though, and dependent on raid buffs, so shoot for something around 13% if you’re a bubble spammer and maybe a little bit more if you are more of a tank healer. The reason for this is Borrowed Time will effect your GCD, so if you cast nothing but Power Word: Shield (as shield spammers do) you’ll always have that haste buff present. A tank healer on the other hand, might want a bit more haste incase he is unable to cast a shield between each cast. Stacking haste significantly past this amount is only a benefit to long cast time spells like Prayer of Healing or Greater Heal, both of which are used sparingly by disc priests.
• Critical strike: This stat will increase the critical strike chance on your spells. Each time your spells crit the amount of bonus healing you get as a disc priest is almost double a normal heal (50% from the crit bonus itself, plus the 30% absorption your Divine Aegis takes from the total of the crit heal.) It will also buff your target with Inspiration. For this reason, crit is a very substantial stat for disc priests who tank heal. Shield spammers, on the other hand, will receive negligible amounts of benefits from crit, since Power Word: Shield cannot crit (though the heal from Glyph of Power Word: Shield can.) Choose an amount of crit that suits your raid role.
• MP5: MP5 is how much mana you regenerate in combat. You will occasionally find it on gear upgrades, and if you do, feel free to tap in. (The majority of mana restore trinkets you’ll find, for example, either state a bonus amount of MP5 on their tooltip or are valued on how much MP5 a proc effect grants over time.) How much MP5 you need will depend on how long fights last, as well as how well you manage your cooldowns. Just keep in mind that MP5 does not benefit anything other than mana regeneration, so you don’t want to purposefully stack it. MP5 will disappear in Cataclysm, so don’t get too attached.
• Spirit: Spirit converts to mana regeneration in and out of combat. The conversion is based on your intellect, so as you gain more intellect, it will take less spirit to raise your in and out of combat mana regeneration. As I said earlier, spirit is not a heavily valued stat for discipline since we have other ways to get mana back. You don’t need to entirely shun it though.

5. Stats to avoid

Just like with holy, the following stats are not needed for healing:

• Spell hit.
• Spell penetration.
• Melee stats such as strength, agility, armor penetration, and expertise.

This is the best video explanation of Professor Putricide I have come across, filmed by the team at WoW.com they have full explanations running as subtitles throughout the whole video.  Since so many people seem to be getting stuck on this fight in ICC I think this video really is worth a watch.  Yes you can find alot of videos on youtube about the Professor, but non of them are this quality or have the running subtitles to explain whats going on in such detail.  So, for your learn experience, Professor Putricide, enjoy.

The Devil is in the details when it comes to end game content, more so now than ever with ICC fully open.  I get asked alot, what Gear Score do I need to raid ICC?  Sadly the question does not have a simple answer at all, its all about the details that gear score doesn’t cover or take into account.  You see,  to start off, I recommend a GS of 5000, but I can stand two DPS next to each other, same class, race  and watch one pump out 5k dps while the other does 3.5k.  I have seen it many times before and the lower dps is like…WTF what am I doing wrong?

• Know your Class and Spec – When I started raiding with my death knight I was always impressed by a fellow guildie who was hitting 1k dps higher than me at all times. I would check his gear and stats and we both ran the same build and never really got it untill I started really searching on my hit rotations.  BAM!  It hit me hard when I found out half the spells and junk I used was actually dragging down my DPS.  I realized that my total hit rotation only needed to be about 3 keys. Blood Strike, Plague Strike, Death Strike…spam repeat.  Wait, it can’t be that simple can it?  Yes, it really is. Don’t over complicate your DPS, know what your heaviest hitting spells and attacks are, stick to them like they are written in stone.  You may have lots of fancy spells, attacks and abilites you can use, but how much to they contribute to your total DPS?  I advised a warrior to stop using his thunderclap and demorializing shouts on boss fights because in the time it takes him to throw those shouts, he could have popped off another mortal strike for bigger dps.
• Hit Cap -  This is something I notice a lot on DPS all the time.  They come into ICC talking about how they pull 6k DPS on mobs easy, raid starts, clear trash, get to the boss and their dps shows at 3k… So were they full of it?  NO, mobs are 80, raid bosses though are not, they are a 83 Elite.  You may have enough hit ratting to never miss a trash mob but when it comes to that boss, your coming up to bat with a big swing and a miss.   Research your class and know what the hit cap is for your character, I don’t care if you have to switch out Crit or Haste gem with a hit ratting, because your haste and crit do you no good if you can’t hit your target.
• Armor Penetration- If you have hit cap on your character and you know how to DPS, its time to stack your Armor Penetration.  Its a new stat added in Lich King that alot of people still don’t fully understand it, but the basic rundown is how much of a targets armor you ignore.  The more armor pen = how much armor you ignore on hit = more damage delt to target.
• Gem for Success – Once again, know your class and what stat you need to succeed, and not just in terms of DPS. For my disc priest, its not just about stacking intelligence and crit.  Yes big heals are great, but for me personaly, I stack haste.  I prefer to cast my heals fast and often compared to big slow heals.  When you heal raids, being able to heal multiple targets very quickly can prevent a wipe.  When it comes to DPS, do you know which gems help your class and spec the most?  My death knight stacks strength and armor pen, once I met my hit cap and got my expertise to a place I like.  Also..I don’t know if I even need to bring this up, but if your not fully socket with northrend epic gems, you just flat out fail.  What are you waiting for?  ICC is it!   Stop waiting for your next piece upgrade for that epic gem, spend the gold you cheap bastard.
• Enchant Everything – Do I really need to say more about this?  Stop being cheap and waiting.  If you plan to raid ICC you better have everything enchanted head to foot.  Buying the best enchants for each piece makes a huge difference.  From the added spell power or attack power on your weapon to the strength, agility, stamina, what every is best for your character, stack it.  Every piece on my DK is for added strength, my priest, spell power, if your a hunter, go pure agility.  Let your gems and gear stats take care of your hit and armor pen, but try to keep your enchants based off of your main stat.
• Bonus Enchants – Bonus enchants you say?  This is the big one people.  Do you have exalted with Sons of Hodir?  You should, you need that exalted shoulder enchant for bonus spell power or attack power.  You need to get the head enchant from Ebon Blade for attack power or Kirin Tor for spell power.  Have you added on epic leg armor?  You need it, spend the gold and do it.

• Flasks – Once again, its not the time to be cheap, hopefully you have a good raid that keeps a bank tab full of flasks for raiding parties, but if not, then you need to get a few flasks and keep them up during the entire raid.

Last but not least, don’t think for a second that ICC is the only raid that you can run anymore.  There is a lot of value to running Naxx, Ulduar, TOC, even the dragons of Northrend.  Get that time in, gain the raid experience and use it as a way to build your skills.  ICC is not the time to be trying out a new spec, or a new rotation, its game day so show up with your A game ready and remember gear score is only a starting point, without everything else I covered above, your not ready.

The following is a repost of an article from Dominate Your Server.com I thought I would share this because hit rating can be a bit confusing sometimes.

Hit Rating For Spells And Mages Explained

Posted on February 9th, 2010 by Lawbringer
There really isn’t an easy way to completely understand hit rating.  There are so many variables involved when it comes to talents, abilities, resistances, and the fact that Blizz has a tendency to change their mind from time to time (such as making all hit rating just plain hit rating instead of both mele and spell hit rating, whew!)

But since you are probably looking for spell hit rating we’ll just leave it at that and separate out the different classes so that you can find what you need without having to root through some huge table (if you can even find one that makes sense).

So here we go with Mage Hit rating and caps.  To keep thing simple we’ll just go straight for the kill shot and not go into some tedious explanation of combat ratings and all that other what-not.  So here goes.

In order to maximize your DPS you need to get hit capped before you worry about anything else.  For every 26.232 hit rating you will gain 1% DPS.  There is simply no other stat that matters more until you hit the cap.  Once you ARE hit capped, more is worthless and then spell power (up to about 4k spell power for mages) haste and crit become more valuable.  Be sure to see our post on Making Gear Decisions For Your Toon.

So now that you know you must be hit capped to maximize your DPS,  we need to talk about what the heck the hit cap is.  You’ll hear two terms when people talk about the hit cap.  One is the hard cap, the other is a so-called soft cap.  The hard cap means that you have reached a point where more hit is worthless, the soft cap is a term used for abilities past which point have diminishing returns.  There is no such thing as a soft cap for hit rating.  You are either at the hard cap, or you are not capped and need to get there.

The absolute hard cap for hit is 446 Hit Rating = 17% in the tooltip

The hard cap represents the amount of hit necessary to ensure that you never miss.  That means the hard cap is a 100% chance to hit any and every mob in the game.  It may not seem like a big deal to have a 1% chance to miss, but if you miss on a big, fat Arcane Blast for 15K it will seriously erode your DPS in a big, fat hurry.  Now let’s talk how to hit the hard cap without having to get to 446 hit rating from gear and gems.

We’ll start at the top and work our way down.  For every one of these things you have available, your hard hit cap for spell hit drops to the next number down.  Just find yourself in the list and you’ll know how much hit you need to have to be hit capped and never miss.  Keep in mind that anything that adds +% chance to hit does not necessarily show up in the tooltip (like +17%), so the hit rating is a much better way of looking at things.

• Dranei or Dranei in Party – Hit Cap = 420

• Mage with Precision OR Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 368

• Dranei or Dranei in Party Mage with Precision OR Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 342

• Arcane Mage with Precision AND Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 289

• Dranei or Dranei in Party Arcane Mage with Precision AND Arcane Focus – Hit Cap = 263

There are a few levels past this if you do a lot of 25 man raids, or have just the right combination in your ten mans.  If you always run with a druid that uses improved faerie fire or a shadow priest using misery you can get by with just 210 hit rating.  And if you happen to be a Dranei or have both a Dranei AND SP/ImpFf in your raid you can do as little as 184 and be capped.

Keep in mind that heroic Presence is party only, so folks may be fighting to get the Dranei in their group, meaning you might not always be able to count on this buff – plus it’s a 30 yard range so on fights with a lot of movement you may be out of range for it from time to time.  Your best bet is to stick with the absolute cap of 289 unless you ARE a Dranei (in which case you will always be in your party and can’t get out of range without some wicked bipolar debuff) in which case you can always be safe with a hit rating of 263.

The bottom line is this.  If you are an arcane mage your basic hit cap is 289.  If you are a Dranei or always party with a Dranei your basic hit cap is 263.  Everything else is just gravy.  Now, the more gravy you get, the more hit rating you can drop in favor of other stats.  But the reality is that it’s much harder to balance staying just barely above the cap than it is to find a bunch of gear without hit on it.  It can be tough to get hit capped when you first hit 80, but later on you’ll be looking for nearly every chance you can find to dump hit for spell power or haste or just about anything else.

One more factor to consider, however is that many bosses will have a certain amount of resistance to one or multiple schools of magic.  In the end the balancing act can be almost impossible to hit precisely between just enough hit to overcome both the regular combat hit rating and any resistances a boss might have.  It’s not a bad idea to just go for 289 as a mage and anything above that is going to overcome a certain amount of resistances that might be present.  But it would probably not be a great idea to carry around a hit rating of 350 at the expense of spell power or something else.  You can get anal retentive about it if you wish and figure it out for every boss, but only if you have a lot of time to kill.

So there is hit rating for mages made simple.  If you are arcane, your goal is 289 add in Dranei and it’s 263.  Once you get hit capped it’s far better to try to stay as close to 289 or 263 as you can (and still be over) and then use the Simcraft Engine to figure out what else you should be stacking and how much.  The less hit you can get away with and still be over the cap, the more of those other DPS stats you can stack which will really bring your DPS up to Domination levels.

Thanks to Wow.com for this video of the new Toxic Wasteling Pet, not to be confused with the Disgusting Oozeling Pet.  The toxic wasteling pet is an all new vanity pet added this year for the Love is in the Air holiday in Warcraft and is a random drop from the new boss Apothecary Hummel who has taking up residence in Shadowfang Keep for the duration of the holiday.   For more info on the boss and how to beat him, along with all his loot drops check out our posting on him, Love is in the air again! Oh and be sure not to let your Wasteling feed, or you might just get the results you see in the video…