Discipline Priests & Atonement

[Sabra]

I am having real difficulty finding information on how Atonement actually works for healing groups. I don't know if I have to hit each party member with certain spells in order for them to benefit from Atonement or it my own individual damage is enough to activate Atonement on all party members.

I am also seeking macros that will help me with healing groups in this spec.

Clueless as usual and I certainly don't want my groups to have to put up with my on-the-job learning curve.

Kan, any insights?

[Tal]

I am having real difficulty finding information on how Atonement actually works for healing groups. I don't know if I have to hit each party member with certain spells in order for them to benefit from Atonement or it my own individual damage is enough to activate Atonement on all party members.

I am also seeking macros that will help me with healing groups in this spec.

Clueless as usual and I certainly don't want my groups to have to put up with my on-the-job learning curve.

Kan, any insights?

Hey Sabra - fair warning I ditched trying to heal as Discipline in favor of Holy on Bronwynn because I found it too challenging to keep everyone up if they insisted on either standing in Bad™ or ignoring mechanics.

That being said - I found the advice at Focusedwill.com to be good. In particular this information on dungeon healing:

Thankfully dungeons are much more straight-forward. In a nutshell, Atonement is for multi-target healing and Shadow Mend/PWS are for single target healing. The talents change the bulk of the gameplay, but in short I will simply copy the “Core” part of Disc raid healing because it is mostly the same.

TL;DR Use Power Word: Shield on cooldown for cheap Atonements and big shields, keep Shadow Word: Pain (or Purge the Wicked with talent) up on whatever targets it makes sense to, and Penance on cooldown for efficient damage. Between these abilities, use Plea and Smite to put out and heal your Atonements, or use Shadow Mend to burn extra mana on some more healing. Use Power Word: Radiance to heal a lot of people, followed by Penance and Smite to heal them for even more for a while. If the tank is dying, spam Shadow Mend until they are no longer dying.

They also have macro's here.