U.Pen is actually a very strong button in M+ for healing up AoE damage. It’s a REALLY strong raid CD, but I wouldn’t write it out for M+.
It won’t save very high focused damage (like the big bleeds in high M+), but in fights where the damage is group-wide and isn’t like a double-burst of damage (I can think of few fights that fit that, and none in this dungeon set), it’s great.
Where we got compensation though was increased atonement as well as a ton of power poured into Bender/Shadow Covenant as a CD, which our tier set reduces a lot. Also worth keeping in mind penance/smite buffs, do generally make up for the lack of Mind Blast casts overall.
The changes shifted the playstyle a lot, but the spec feels pretty strong. I’ve been doing random keys in the PTR weekend and most people are trying around the 18 range that I’ve seen, and they’ve mostly felt like a breeze.
Honestly I think my biggest problems with the spec right now mostly just lie in our actual final end-talents still being very unattractive - and now what WAS good (TE, Harsh Disc, Expiation) also became pretty terrible with the MB change. Besides void summoner (which is mostly because of the Scov/tier change) the rest of them all feel very lame or unimpactful still.
And Harsh Discipline needs to be reworked. It doesn’t need to be smite casts if they’re afraid of that, but guaranteeing procs is important if that’s gonna be a 2 point talent.
Wait hold up, does this mean Shadow Covenant is on a 3min CD with Sfiend, 1 min with Mbender, instead of 30s? That’s awful. We almost have to go down in to Void Summoner to get SC back faster, and then we can’t get the bigger shields talents
Yes I’d imagine holy priest HPS in raid is near the bottom in raid because mastery doesn’t get to do it’s course since everyone’s overpowered and topped
Once the new raid comes out and damage isn’t healed immediatley, hpriest hps will creep up. I suspect they will be strong in raid.
I watched a couple twitch videos of some boss fights and holy priests were PUMPING . There’s a lot of factors that go into that
I crunched the numbers a bit to try and figure out where Holy stands post-10.2 in terms of HPS.
So I did 72.29mil healing (155k overall) in my first M Sark kill parse. I’m not going to break down everything individually… just only focus on the stuff that was nerfed/buffed.
Looking at a net nerf of about 1-2% overall just from that. What matters the most is Holy Word Salvation because if we can only use it once per fight that’s a net loss of 5-10% overall hps.
For M+ if I factor in just the Flash Heal + Serenity increase (I’m not running Lightweaver): you’re looking at an overall hps increase of about 10%.
I’m betting a lot will change in the coming weeks because Disc has currently one of the strongest tier set bonuses and Holy, one of the weakest by my estimation. I thought I’d throw my thoughts in here too and hope Blizzard sees it.
Disc:
The 4pce bonus Smite is a shadow version of Smite which gets buffed by Shadow Cov.
Both the Smite you cast and the one procced from the 4pce during Shadow Cov reduce the CD on Mindbender by 2 seconds with Void Summoner talented.
It’s possible to have Schism, Shadow Cov and Mindbender up permanently due to the 4pce.
There is no way this goes live. Having infinite mana and permanent CD’s rolling isn’t intended.
Sustaining 90k DPS single target damage on dummies at 475 on PTR. I’d guestimate this to be double the damage of the second highest damage dealing healer.
Holy:
Currently bugged on the PTR such that the Renews applied by your Holy Words do get increased by 35% by Rapid Recovery but don’t have their duration decreased.
Renews applied by Holy Words are not affected by Empowered Renew.
The 4pce almost never procs. I’ve healed 2m boss fights in keys multiple times without proccing a single time. Even when I’m keeping 1 or 2 Renews rolling permanently on top of the Renews applied by my Holy Words.
The 4pce proc makes your next Holy Word not incur a CD but doesn’t reset the CD which makes playing Miracle Worker feel more mandatory.
Overall fairly disappointed with the bonuses in keys. They don’t feel powerful or impactful or change my playstyle or decision making process like other set bonuses do for other specs.
The nicest part about them is that the Renews applied by Holy Words do count for Healing Chorus which increases CoH healing for each Renew tick up to 50 stacks.
Overall the Renews I got accounted for ~5% of my overall throughput in most keys which I guess isn’t terrible but also isn’t great.
I think the 4-piece needs to be overhauled imho. Maybe just a flat % chance when casting PoM to make your next Holy Word free and not consume a charge would be a lot more consistent. Also, I did see Rapid Recovery did work with the set bonus Renew, but overall Empowered Renew does more healing.
The 2-piece seems fine how it is, but I think it’d end up overhealing more in M+ because my Echo of Light is already a 50%+ overheal and an extra ticking Renew when people are topped to 100% pretty quickly isn’t an extra benefit.
I missed out on the dungeon testing because I was on vacation unfortunately.
Possible, but it doesn’t heal on its own - So not really probable. But it does come off CD all the time anyway.
The double smite kinda sucks without it applying to the regular smite resets, too. Honestly I just want a full rework of 4p instead. Especially because it shoehorns Scov and therefore bender/VS.
PWL is slightly weaker: it’s a 115k heal (PTR) vs 130k (live). The rework fixes the issue of wasted casts, but it literally can’t be used unless target is <35% hp. That makes me wonder if people can macro it…
Disc
Shadow Covenant got nerfed down quite a bit which is fine. You can reset down Mind Bender to like a 30s cd, but there was a million people lagging the PTR so couldn’t really test it.
Other end tree talents still seem underwhelming: Weal and Aoe and TE in particular.
Still nothing about instant cast free Radiances.
Holy
Lost about 5% Mastery, but it ticks every 2s instead of 3s. This is both a nerf & buff at the same time. Echo of Light overhealed a lot (50%+) because its tick rate was too slow.
Typical Blizzard: instead of buffing all the other end tree talents they nerf Divine Image. -_-
PoM nerfed: great that’s a -5% hps nerf.
Pontifex is still weak as a talent choice
Holy is just getting absolutely crapped on now. Overall it’s like an -8% hps nerf just with the DI + PoM changes.
Is there anything we got that we are looking forward to? I mean whatever if they want to make changes that’s up to the game devs but there is a big difference to me between “your character will be the same next patch and except only worse in many ways” vs “your character will be the same except worse in almost every way but you got this one new cool thing”. I need something to look forward to minus the set…
I’m really sick of Disc’s design around being big burst windows. Years ago, I loved Disc-it was fun, it was easy, and maybe it was a bit Alt Holy, but Holy’s deal worked. Since Legion, Disc and Shadow have been screwed up. Shadow was finally feeling like it was figured out again, but this Insanity change is ridiculous.
Disc… I want it to live up to the 2/3rds caster dps 2/3rds healer that was proposed in Legion instead of the 4/10ths dps and healer we got. It sickens me when playing Disc, it sickens me when I have a Disc healer and I’m tanking. It was sort of ok when PW:S had no CD, but we don’t even have THAT anymore.
I out DPS Disc as Holy 100% of the time. That is not the Discipline experience I ever wanted.
I have no idea who said this needed a 25% buff but I mean, okay.
I am very surprised this didn’t happen earlier, tbh. I’ve seen people pointing out that it’s weird void summoner references Sfiend at all considering bender was required to take it since the start of the xpac.
Everything else about the disc change is alright, I guess. But the tier set still sucks, and reducing the duration of Scov even by a couple seconds just made it significantly worse.
No idea why Holy’s getting slammed by nerfs, but it’s definitely looking like it’s sliding towards a ‘spam heal’ tier again.
I mean in Legion’s early tiers, Disc was better than advertised. It was doing more damage than tanks but also doing as much hps as the healers and it was incredibly overpowered for a couple raid tiers. Even post nerfs and focusing its damage downward it remained meta for a long time. It took MAJOR hits in Slands to get it to the point that it was doing fairly mediocre, and in DF it’s been pretty fine.
If you’ve been outdpsing disc as holy any patch besides post .1.5, you’ve probably been playing Disc weirdly or are just more comfortable on Holy so able to get more damage out, or both.
In 10.2 PTR, Disc right now is more damage than holy no contest because of Inescapable Torment.
10.2 changes makes me look at my disc priest for the first time since I tested disc on df ptr.
While I didn’t think we had too many spells, I felt like there was a lot of redundancy between spells.
Solace was just another smite, just instant (with smite being 1.5sec cast, it’s basically just a cast before the gdc or after…)
Mindblast was a shadow smite. It became so boring since df launched… Combining it to schism is a great idea.
Shadow cov while it did a good chunk of base healing was close to VE as a spell, in the sense that you use it to make more healing with following shadow spells… It’s sad to see the base healing go, but I feel this is a good change in that it can be used more often + no mana spent.
While Mindgames isn’t what it used to be in shadowlands, I feel it played the same role than light’s wrath, in different contexts, but still in a ramp. While I loved light’s wrath in itself, it doesn’t bring any gameplay element that disc doesn’t have already.
Some seems sad to see Twilight equilibrium become “useless”. I personally didn’t like it and wouldn’t say it was “fun”. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just waiting for this to be removed from the tree
Edit. Oh, and welcome back TPO. I prefer this iteration of harsh discipline way better!
I loved playing mainly boon in shadowlands and I felt there was a missing piece for disc after df launched. Maybe Ult penitance will fill that void
(mindgames was decent back then too, or even necro… but there was a piece missing still for me after Shadowlands)
Holy Priest nerfed again. Resto Shaman nerfed again. If I was a Rsham or Hpriest main I’d be pretty upset with the proposed patch. Neither spec got anything really new or interesting gameplay wise. They are just weaker versions of their 10.1.7 specs with their talent options being even more imbalanced.
Disc is getting a lot of numerical power from talent adjustments and by simplifying how the spec plays but I dislike how mindless it is becoming. Spamming Smite 450 times in a key isn’t my idea of fun.
Then you have Rdruid, Pres, MW and probably Hpal that are gaining a lot of power going into 10.2. In the patch that Blizzard are ostensibly reining in healing throughput to make raid healing less spikey, 4/7 healers (5 if you include Disc) are getting significantly stronger. If you’re one of those 4 (or 5) I guess you’re having a good time but if you’re one of the others (or Blizzard isn’t done nerfing) then you’re probably not feeling great.
I don’t know why Blizzard have chosen to nerf the throughput of the two weakest throughput healers, either. Doesn’t make much sense to me.
If that tier set doesn’t get nerfed I honestly am just confused. That’s such a massive climb in HPS for a spec that’s already getting a decent chunk of buffs and wasn’t really anywhere near THAT far behind.
It just got buffed too. To be fair though, the 2pce and 4pce don’t work with AoE healing and don’t work with half their toolkit.
But Vivify, Soothing (just got buffed also from Statue), Unison, Enveloping and ReM got pretty big buffs in 10.2.
It’s one thing for Blizzard to say they want to make changes to healing in 10.2 and make mana more meaningful and so on. But what we are getting is balance changes to each healing spec in different ways and Priests in particular are looking very imbalanced.
I can’t imagine any environment in 10.2 where Holy is comparable to Disc. Disc is just so much stronger on the PTR than it is on live but Holy is significantly weaker?! On live an argument could be made that at least Holy is “easier” or “simpler” to play than Disc but on PTR that isn’t the case anymore and I’d even say that Holy is now more complicated and demanding to play and get good value out of its toolkit than Disc is which can almost just spam 3 or 4 buttons for optimal play.
This is disappointing. I was actually wondering where the PWL buff to go along with all the other single target buffs. The tiny mana cost was a pretty big benefit in pvp. Using it properly did feel rewarding but plenty of times it gets ruined by heals from other players. The 10 second CD was really nice for keeping myself or a team mate alive while they are under heavy pressure. That extra 5 second wait is going to translate to a lot more deaths.
So heals less, costs more mana, and has a longer CD. The only compensation being that you can no longer risk messing it up. That flat 3% healing increase is looking better by the moment.
Damn and they are nerfing Holys mastery and aoe heals more.
