right now I'm 852 disc (no leg) pulling 220k hps / 110k dps to 270k hps / 130k dps in actual fights. I'm finding so far that some of the advice you'll find on icy veins guides etc aren't very good.

Namely trinkets are a huge part and all the guides list the wrong BiS trinkets because they're based off of sims and trying to do more healing. Disc in a raid situation isn't about doing more healing, it's about doing the most combined damage and healing possible. For that, you don't want mana regen trinkets like all the guides suggest, you want flat damage trinkets like Corrupted Starlight.

Flat damage trinkets are extremely good on disc for a few reasons:

• The damage from Corrupted Starlight, etc, transfers over atonement (190k over 6 seconds from gnarled root turns into ~522k healing per proc plus the damage (5 atonements out is average in a raid)
• On a low dps class like disc, the best way to improve your dps is flat damage which is attuned for full-on-dps classes
• Disc priest has some really good % boosts to all damage which affect flat damage trinkets. 30% from schism and ~5% from the atonement buff golden artifact trait.
• Higher atonement transfer means higher healing while doing what disc wants to do: dps (if you can't keep people up while dpsing, then you're forced to stop dps and cast nuke heals which cause a drop in your damage+healing combined)

Lastly, if you roll disc it's a really good idea to have shadow offspec since they share the same stat priority (haste>crit>mastery>vers) and damage trinkets are good on both and make itemization a bit easier.

Just wanted to chime in because it's a wicked fun class and I'm seeing both some misinformation in popular guides for it, and because I don't see nearly as many disc priests as there should be.

Edit: sounds like flat damage trinkets receive a disc-specific nerf that I was not aware of. I'll have to test more things out and see what's up. If the damage decrease really is significant, then they may not be the way to go. Given their uptime and the way atonement converts the damage into even more healing, it may still be worth going them, but I'll have to see.

Edit 2: dps'd a minion till I ran oom. Here's my findings: Gnarled root makes up 2%-4% of my dps when purely doing my dps rotation (popping mindbender on cd). That % number will go up when you throw in heals that you will be casting. Atonement makes up 70-80% of healing during raids, so it's that much of an increase to healing as well.

On the flip side, Corrupted Starlight was only doing ~0.7% to ~1.3% single target. It's only worth having if 5+ mobs can actually be tanked in the AoE for its full duration. Basically it's bad and I'll be trying to replace it for sure.

Some damage trinkets are still good despite the ~50% damage nerf.