Healing Sunday, Learning to Heal as a Discipline Priest

Recently I have started trying to heal as Discipline on my priest. For a long time I would exclusively heal as Holy, but since I haven't been doing so hot with Shadow as my off spec, I decided to give Discipline a shot. I've always been intrigued by Discipline and how the spec utilizes absorption heals more than any other healer. The idea of using a bubble to heal by preventing damage is an interesting one.

So I tried it out. I changed my spec. I picked up Evangelism, Archangel, and Atonement, and into my first heroic I went. One thing that stayed the same as Holy is using Prayer of Mending on cooldown. This spell is a great go to, especially with the glyph for it. Another similarity that I noticed is the pace of healing is about the same. I didn't feel as though I was using more or fewer spells to keep up, and overall the effectiveness for both is about the same.

One big difference between the two is the ability to heal with Smite and Holy Fire. I think that the synergy between Evangelism, Archangel, and Atonement is very cohesive, and, while Chakra has improved greatly over the course of this expansion, I wish that Holy had something as fluid.

The absorption from Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis is another big difference between the two specs. If someone is on the verge of death and I'm unable to cast a heal in time, I can use PW:S to save them. It essentially gives them an additional 30,000 health. Divine Aegis felt very similar to Holy's mastery heal, Echo of Light. If I heal and generate the heal over time from Echo of Light, then I can wait until the HoT has ticked before I heal again. Similarly, when the shield procs from one of my critical heals, I can wait until it is absorbed before I heal again. In both cases I can let the spells do the healing for me.

All in all, I'm happy with my decision to try Discipline healing, and finding that I enjoy it as much as I do gives another reason to love my priest even more. So what do you think? Have you tried out a spec that you ended up loving?