Recount and Discipline Priesting

Last night I stepped into a pug TotCr-10 with a warrior tank I know, who might become a friend and might become a raiding teammate. I didn't know anybody except him, so my expectations of "AWESOMENESS" were pretty low. The raid leader assigns the resto shammy to raid heals, and me (disc priest) and a resto druid (srs?) as tank heals then off he goes for the pull.

I will admit my druid isn't at level cap yet, so maybe there's a bunch of resto stuff I'll get between 75 and 80, but I would have sworn that druids are really good at rolling HoTs on a bunch of people and not so much at throwing huge heals on one guy. So yes, I think the healer assignments are off but I didn't say anything.

After the inevitable wipe, the druid posts the healing recount meters and says "the priest sux", because, I assume, it's my fault that the OT kited Acidmaw right through the DPS who were consequently too stupid to go get the fire debuff.

I replied that recount was a DPS tool that was spectacularly unsuited to dealing with healers, and that if you're a druid rolling HoTs on a whole raid and you're not at the top of the healing meter then you're doing it wrong (we'll come back to this shortly). He says, and I'm not entirely sure I'm spelling this verbatim, "nuh uh".

I followed up with telling him that recount fails at dealing with disc priest. He asks how that could possibly be, since Recount is made of WIN! Four other people in the raid answer him with variations on "damage mitigation" and "bubbles"; +50DKP to each of those people for cross-class awareness. He posted the overall healing done counts again, then left the group.

Which reminds me how much I really don't like people.

My lessons from this:

1. Pugs are really random
2. I should have spoken up about healing assignments. Just because I'm the last guy in doesn't mean I don't have valuable information to contribute.
3. There are still some people who don't know how discipline priests work

I can really only address #3 here.

When a priest casts "Power Word: Shield", he puts a damage-absorbing bubble around the target. If the bubble is 10K, then the next 10K worth of incoming damage eats away the bubble instead of the target's health. But the combat log just shows "damage absorbed", it doesn't show "damage absorbed by Obamessiah's PW:S", so Recount has no way to credit the priest with the damage mitigated by the bubble.

Normally a discipline priest will have the glyph of Power Word: Shield, which heals the target for 20% of the shield amount. So you can look in recount at healing done, then drill down to get the details for healing done by PW:S and multiply by 5 to get the potential amount of mitigation done by PW:S. Note that you can't tell how much of the mitigation was actually used since, once again, the combat log doesn't assign absorption to the spell.

The second kind of bubbles that disc priests put on people are from Divine Aegis. This happens when your heal crits, and adds a bubble that absorbs 30% of the crit heal. Further crits will stack their DA bubbles up to a maximum of 125*[target level], or 10K on a level 80. And Prayer of Mending crits count as well.

You can kinda-sorta estimate the amount of PW:S mitigation your disc priest is providing from looking at the healing done by the glyph, and you can kinda-sorta estimate the amount of DA mitigation your disc priest is providing from looking at the crit heals from Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Penance, and Prayer of Mending. Add all that together and that's quite a lot of not-dying your disc priest is causing that recount just can't show your loudmouth know-nothing buddy.

Seems like a lot of work, doesn't it? And that, my friends, is why we say recount is for DPS.