Will discipline fly for groups?

Penance seems to be the talk of the day amongst priests. On paper, it's a 2 second cast, healing 2K x 3, and can crit on any or all of the heals. The two big drawbacks being that a) it's channeled, meaning the mana cost is front-loaded and it's also subject to interrupt, and b) it's at the very bottom of the Discipline tree.

To be honest, the channeled/front-loaded mana bit isn't too big a deal for me, since I hate cast-canceling anyway and it's no easier to interrupt than a GHeal. Plus the new push-back rules mean you'll always get something out of it. The problem I see is that you're choosing the Path of the Shielder instead of the Path of the Healer.

Discipline pretty much forces you into a style that leans heavily on PW:S, since your heals just won't have the "oomph" that a holy priest does. So, your fallback becomes "shield to prevent, then heal the rest." Many people claim that this requires a more anticipatory style, but I disagree. I think you can react to someone get aggro fairly quickly. Even as holy, I'm as likely as not to toss a PW:S on a DPS taking damage. The problem comes when you toss it on a feral or warrior tank -- they don't like taking less damage due to how it effects their rage. If I'm forced to keep an eye on rage bars before deciding what spell to cast, then I don't think it's worth the effort.

And the healing meters won't take mitigation into account at all, so if you're Pugging or running with a guild that puts a heavy emphasis on recount numbers, you're going to have a lot of explaining to do.

But all that notwithstanding, I'm eager to try something a little different. In a 5-man, no one cares what your healing numbers look like -- you either live or you die -- so I think the instances on the way to 80 might be a good place to do some experimenting in the discipline tree.