So I messed around in PTR quite a bit. This thread is mostly to collect notes on discipline’s changes and testing out anything people are curious about.
Ultimate Penitence
This has a cast time equivalent to Mind Blast before the channel starts.
Basically this just shoots 24 bolts of penance at random targets.
I haven’t found a way to actually hit allies with this - even if I’m targeting an ally when cast. It seems to always hit enemies? Possibly bugged.
This also means that you don’t get stuff like Inescapable torment on fire - as it’s only shooting bolts, it’s not actually casting penance at all.
This is affected by Blaze of Light
Harsh discipline does not give it extra bolts.
This does NOT get power of the dark side.
This does NOT work with Twilight empowerment, so TE is pretty much officially dead in the water.
It does not reduce the cooldown of itself. Every time you cast penance, each bolt will contribute, but the 24 bolts from ultimate penitence seem to do nothing to the CD.
This doesn’t seem to fire bolts at anything you’re not in combat with in dungeons/open world. So it’s safe to take/fire in dungeons.
You can’t move while channeling this, and you’re not invulnerable. But you do become immune to CC, so anything a Pally could freedom themselves for, we can avoid now, too. (IE: You COULD dodge the hex totem with it)
Sanctuary
This is in the spot of Make Amends, and it’s 80% Spellpower, but is affected by verse. It’s basically old BfA Smite absorb. Not great, but it’s actually kinda nice considering how much smiting we’re doing now.
Shadow Covenant
This works pretty much how it reads - the somewhat good thing about this change though is that TE is kind of bad now and all our shadow spells have fairly long CD, so we have way less to weave in the window. Therefore, Twilight corruption is a real option rather than the Scov duration increase and can make your mindbender’s IE actually kinda smack. With 4 piece though this could change. Smite is actually kind of worth casting now, so getting double smites for that window could actually be nice.
Harsh Discipline
No real notes here except that this is very awkward to try and guarantee Schism/POTDS with because it’s RNG, but you also want to spam penance whenever available right now for Ultimate Penitence cooldown.
Expiation
With Mind Blast being on CD for 24 seconds now and not having multiple charges, I’ll be honest, this feels really bad to take, let alone put 2 points into. Personally I wouldn’t bother with it.
Discipline Tier Set
2 Piece is a decent buff - it also affects Ultimate Penitence.
Our 4 piece is trash of the lowest tier I’ve ever seen included in WoW, to be honest. It quite literally amounts to basically 3 extra casts of Smite in each Scov window. That is bad enough that you might consider just not equipping it for more optimal stats.
The only way to make this 4 piece any good is to take the Scov line with increased duration down to Void Summoner (for smite resets), then also grab train of thought on the left side to allow Smite to reset penance.
This makes your Scov window a bit longer and lets you basically Smite x2 > Penance, which now activates IE. That can give you some really good AoE, but it still feels really weird as a 4p and sucks that we’re very locked into several talents, almost all of them in the final tier of talents to make it any good.
Currently for M+ talent build I’m thinking:
With the points in Blaze of light to flex into whatever you want. It can be Blaze, it can be Lenience/Harsh Discipline, or you can even grab Divine Shield and AoW now with 2 points (which is probably the highest HPS option). Currently not liking the randomness of Harsh discipline, or it being tied to PW:R, so I’m gonna end up excluding it. Surge of Light seems like a more consistent bonus, especially after 4piece, but we’ll see I suppose.
On target dummies I can stick around 70k DPS with this build while casting radiance every so often. It FEELS pretty good, but we’ll see.
Didn’t swap my trinkets out - just equipped the sample tier set. So I was using Rashoks and black dragonscale.
The big contributor is the 60% boost to IE.
It does mean you have to play pretty well in the Bender window, but it’s not hard to do since our rotation is very simplified. It’s basically Mind Blast > SW:D > Penance > Smite 2x > Penance > Dstar > Smite to fish for penance resets hopefully before Scov ends.
Keep in mind that penance activates IE now, and you can get penances a lot faster than Mind Blast - so we actually probably gained IE activations.
My thoughts on the tier set get a BIT better with Train of Thought resetting penance in 2 casts. But what still kinda sucks about the tier set there is it requires like a 5 talent point investment that can’t be changed in order to be a little bit decent in AoE scenarios. That’s still a really bad 4p.
That build you posted was the exact same one I ended up tinkering around with on the PTR. Ultimate Pentience + Void Summoner seems to be the wombo combo and you can get it down to a 2.5-3 minute reset.
I can’t imagine current TE goes live with these changes. No one will take it
As for your PTR M+ build, im far from an expert but the idea of playing around ultimate penitence doesn’t excite me. I think squid is the move for sure but I would probably take the points towards penitence and put them back in abyssal reverie → lenience → harsh discipline. I just like rattling off 7 bolt penance too much
EDIT: having second thoughts about abyssal reverie with long CD mind blast. Those point(s) might be better served in exaltation and/or divine aegis
My reasoning is primarily that Ultimate Penitence is a REALLY strong tool. It’s a Radiance + 3 harsh discipline penances at once when fully talented, and you can reduce that to like a 2-2.5m CD.
You have like an 85% chance of getting harsh discipline after burning both charges of radiance now.
It feels REALLY bad when you don’t, and with radiance not being instant procs anymore it’s kinda yikes.
You can flex the blaze of light points into lenience/Harsh discipline if wanted, like I said though!
That’s kinda my thoughts yeah. I haven’t done any math to prove that, but I mean, it does feel way less worth it since you’re getting it significantly less often. The M+ build I posted I just skip that whole triangle of talents.
Can’t test this right now because Ultimate Penitence never fires an allied bolt (Even targeting allies, it only fires at enemies right now - which is probably a bug). But chances are it does work - because whenever something has fired penance bolts in the past (like the old tier set that was reworked last tier) it’s worked with contrition.
Messing around with the talent builder and I see its possible to get 2/2 blaze, aegis of wrath, void summoner, and exaltation if you drop harsh discipline and abyssal reverie which sounds pretty good
Now im wondering if we can’t squeeze words of the pious in on the priest tree somewhere with how much smiting we’re going to do?
Yeah, I’ve thought about trying to grab words of the pious as well. I forget if there’s any bad disease dungeons in the current S3 lineup - but we can sac the point there + dispel magic to path over to it instead.
I think you’d be gimping yourself not taking Ultimate Pentience because it’s the only major spot healing group cd that Disc has for dungeons. It also functions as a dps cooldown and I don’t see why Disc won’t clap Holy for dps going forward.
Yeah, now that I’ve messed with it, the big buff to atonement and ultimate penitence I think bring Disc’s damage more in line.
Holy still does a TON of damage when they can use Emp. Blaze well. But the IE + Void Summ changes and Ultimate Penitence I think bring Disc’s damage up around where Holy is currently. The cherry on top being that we can lean more on Atonement now because our atonement healing in groups got buffed (even with the baseline nerf). So we did get a bit more uptime damage-wise as well.
On target dummies, it kinda sends bolts everywhere (which scared me) but when I went into Ruby Life Pools - it would only target things I was in combat with. (I pulled the 2 groups in the first hallway into the room JUST outside aggro range of the elemental/caster group and fired it there) So it functions like Halo from what I can tell.
unfortunately my only gripe is that i cant seem to wrap my head around the New Harsh Discipline Change…Its just kind of out there?? I wouldn’t mind having the 4 Smite come back
Surge of Light seems like a more consistent bonus, especially after 4piece, but we’ll see I suppose.
