12.1 Discipline Void Shield Priest Feedback
With the release of the 12.1 PTR and the announcement of many class changes coming with it, I wanted to take an opportunity to talk about the proposed Discipline Priest changes and provide some feedback on the overall design direction and gameplay implications as a result. In the bluepost containing the 12.1 class changes, we were provided the following Developer note about the design goals:
Developers’ notes: For Discipline in Curse of Ula’tek, our changes are aimed at reducing the spec’s reliance on procs for effective healing, improving sources of consistent damage, and improving Hero talent balance. We felt the spec was too reliant on Shadow Mend and Void Shield procs for effective healing, so we’re updating Shadow Mend to be a passive upgrade to Flash Heal and adding a deterministic way to gain access to Void Shield. Additionally, Smite contributes a low amount of damage despite being frequently cast, so we’re increasing its damage and updating the talent tree for easier access to Greater Smite.
While these design goals are great on paper, I want to break down why the proposed changes fail to accomplish some of them and simply introduce others in the process.
The Elephant in the Room
Including gameplay adjustments following the proposed class changes, Void Shield will be making up approximately (using an Oracle Raid Encounter Example):
- ~25% of our DPS
- ~45% of our Direct Healing
- ~28% of our Atonement healing
- ~40% or more of our total Atonement’s applied
To say that this spec functions entirely through Void Shield would be an understatement. While the proposed changes clearly stated one of the goals being our overreliance on Void Shield procs for effective healing, simply adding a way to force the proc and therefore increasing the expected Void Shield CPM does little to reduce how much of the spec is reliant on Void Shield to function.
While my ideal solution would likely be just simply going back to the drawing board for a new Apex talent, I understand that is simply not an option at this moment. Additionally, with the adjustment removing Atonement application from Penance, I don’t think the spec functions all that well in Raid without the Atonement application portion of this higher CPM of Void Shield post changes. As a result, I think the best temporary solution to the problem is simply reducing the effectiveness of the spell numerically and adding power back into the rest of the kit. The frustrating RNG aspect, the desire to track the deck via third party tools, etc. all go away as well when the spell only makes up a small portion of our output. These frustrations only exist because the spell currently makes up almost 40% of our total output. Additionally, while I understand that Inescapable Torment was disproportionally strong compared to other talents, it’s a bit unfortunate to see one of the only other major sources of Atonement healing take a huge nerf while the higher CPM of Void Shield largely counteracts the nerfed reflect rate leaving the total contribution of Void Shield mostly the same.
As a side note, one of the stated goals was to reduce the frustration of the RNG nature of Void Shield by adding a forced proc on Mind Blast. This doesn’t really solve that issue. You’ll still want to manipulate/track the deck to get a proc ready in advance of major damage events followed by then also force proccing one via Mind Blast and therefore stacking back to back Void Shields to make up for the nerf to the transfer rate. The forced proc doesn’t necessarily mean you just stop caring about the naturally proccing ones via Penance casts. I do not necessarily think anything needs to be done here, but I just wanted to make it known that as long as Void Shield is still this important to the spec, the addition of a forced proc via Mind Blast does not actually reduce the impact the RNG nature of the procs from Penance have on our output.
The Shadow Mend Treadmill
Focusing on reducing our reliance on RNG further, Shadow Mend has been adjusted to no longer be proc based. With the spell previously proccing off of Shadow Word: Pain ticks, whether you had access to the spell or not was a major determining factor in regards to your ability to handle single target healing requirements. While the removal of the RNG is a good thing, moving Shadow Mend back to just a spammable single target heal leaves us with a variety of unsolved problems.
Just looking at the proposed adjustments to Shadow Mend first, why does a single spell need 3 different downsides tied to it? Not only does it have the long standing DoT portion of the spell as a drawback, albeit a minor one, but now it also costs 38.9% more mana, has a 33% longer cast time, and costs 2 talent points in the capstone area of the tree for 45% more healing than simply casting a Flash Heal. Additionally, in any situation where you need to fall back on spamming Shadow Mend to handle a heavy DoT effect on an ally, 3 Shadow Mend casts with Grim Deliverance talented take the exact same amount of time to cast as 4 Shadow Mends without Grim Deliverance but do less healing overall. Grim Deliverance simply becomes a Mana save but an HPS loss unless you’re strictly utilizing Shadow Mend with only Surge of Light procs, which is unlikely due to the nature of how single target healing requirements occur. With single target healing having been a pain point for Discipline for so long, I’m not really sure why we need to layer so many negatives onto a spell that already has a talent point opportunity cost.
Moving past just looking at the current design of Shadow Mend, we’ve unfortunately been here before. Discipline Priest has long had issues with weak single target healing that only really is ever “solved” by continuously buffing one of a few spells (Flash Heal/Shadow Mend/Power Word: Shield). With these spells having no interaction with Atonement and Atonement having no method for more granular control over output on individual targets, we often end up in these awkward situations. Atonement becomes a very binary solution; either it’s enough to handle the incoming damage on a single target or it isn’t and there is nothing you can really do to influence that. Whenever it’s not enough, your answer is to fall back on Shadow Mend. We’ve had seasons in the past where our single target healing was weak so Shadow Mend got buffed. Suddenly Shadow Mend is better than your non-cooldown Atonement healing so you start just solely casting Shadow Mend whenever people need help. The spec quickly devolves into a non-Atonement focused Shadow Mend bot simply because it was buffed to help fix our single target issue.
We need to take a step back from just looking at Shadow Mend as the sole solution and instead looking at the design issue as a whole. Atonement is the core identity of the specialization. We need something that ties into Atonement that gives us the ability to force more healing into a single person on a cooldown to add layers to our healing. Something to add additional tooling that doesn’t just result in us jumping ship straight to Shadow Mend when Atonement isn’t enough to brute force everything. Looking at Druid for inspiration with their ability to have precise control over the output provided to each ally via number and type of HoTs is something that I would consider a well designed system. I’m not saying we need to copy their talents or spells as is, just simply looking at the overall system design as an example of something well done. Alternatively, simply adding a mid range cooldown (30-45 seconds) that can assist with single target healing that also ties into Atonement would be nice to give us an additional layer between Atonement and Shadow Mend spam. I’ve used something like Vitality Conduit as an example of something that could work well funneling HP from other targets with Atonement into a single target for a period of time effectively converting your AoE Atonement output into a single target heal. Overall, I simply feel that the single target healing problem needs to be looked at with a wider lens than just trying to make Shadow Mend both an interesting and one size fits all solution or else we’ll fall right back into the same trap we’ve been in before.
Greater Smite Gameplay Friction
With Greater Smite being mentioned in the design goals explicitly as a way to push more power into Smite, the talent has some lingering gameplay frustrations that I would love to be addressed. The spec already asks you to press a lot of buttons on cooldown: Penance (for damage and as a Void Shield trigger), Void Shield, Power Word: Shield, Mind Blast (to open Entropic Rift when Voidweaver and to force a proc of Void Shield), and Shadow Word: Death in execute or whenever pets are active under Inescapable Torment. With that much competing for your GCDs, you’re rarely casting more than 2-3 Smites in a row before something else takes priority. With the current design of Greater Smite, without stacking a significant amount of Haste, you simply cannot cast anything in between 2 Smites without losing your stacks. Even with stacking a significant amount of haste you’re still looking at tight windows with limited room for human error to not lose your stacks. As a result, your average Greater Smite stacks per Smite cast over the course of a fight ends up being incredibly low during relevant damage windows.
The easiest solution would be a simple small increase to the duration of the buff on Greater Smite. I’m specifically saying small because I don’t believe it should be some longer buff that turns into a maintenance requirement where we have to cast a Smite every X seconds to keep the buff up the whole fight. A small increase from 2 seconds to 3, or at most 4, seconds leaves the spirit of the talent alive being a temporary boost to smite during periods of focused usage without it actively punishing you or getting in the way of you interacting with fight mechanics or keeping up with the rest of the specs gameplay requirements. Being able to dispel between two smites and not lose the stacks or simply using Penance on cooldown or using a Void Shield proc and then going back to smiting without losing the stacks would make the talent feel significantly more impactful and remove some of the potential frustration of targeting haste breakpoints to get casts off between smites.
The Current State of Uppies
Unlike previous sections, I don’t have a hard suggestion here for a very specific reason. There are a very large number of different design and tuning directions this spell could be taken but I simply do not want to make any suggestions or recommendations without knowing what you intend for this spell design and power budget wise. After repeated nerfs to our damage or Atonement and its general tuning, this spell feels incredibly…meh to use. It’s a fantastic concept and visually amazing, but pressing it just doesn’t feel good. For a four minute cooldown, it barely keeps pace with, or loses to, cooldowns with half its CD or less. It’s lost all of its supporting talents from previous expansions, and I get near constant questions from community members about how its targeting priorities even work. In practice it gets relegated to a gap-fill cooldown or a personal defensive in keys, and it only saw meaningful raid use this tier because most encounters had split or spread mechanics during the high-damage windows that prevented the usage of Power Word: Barrier.
So rather than guess at a solution, I simply want to propose a question: what do you want this spell to be doing? Is the intended power budget meant to justify a four minute cooldown, or should the cooldown come down to match where the power currently sits? Are you happy with its current usage in regards to the general confusion around its targeting and the consistent misunderstandings in regards to what it actually allows you to go over vs what you’re still going to get hit by while in the air? Or is this spell a candidate for a full design pass? I’m happy to give detailed feedback on any direction once I have a better understanding on what the goal with this spell is, but as of right now all I can really say is that it doesn’t feel great or impactful to use.
TLDR:
- Void Shield: The forced proc raises our CPM but doesn’t reduce how reliant the spec is on the spell. I’d like to see its numerical effectiveness reduced and that power redistributed into the rest of the kit
- Shadow Mend: We’re shoving three separate downsides into a single spell at once. Buffing it has historically led to the spec becoming a Shadow Mend bot. The real fix is addressing the single target healing issue as a systematic design flaw rather than overloading one spell as the solution.
- Greater Smite: The 2-second buff window is too short to facilitate normal gameplay or encounter interaction without friction/frustration or chasing degenerate haste breakpoints. A small increase to 3-4 seconds keeps the talent’s intent without making it a maintenance buff.
- Uppies: I’m not proposing a specific fix here on purpose but instead am simply raising concerns about the impact and effectiveness of this spell. Understanding the intended power budget and direction of this spell’s design would allow us to provide significantly better feedback in the future, but currently this spell feels disappointing.
Conclusion
Overall I’m very appreciative that some of the common community concerns were heard and looked at, but I hope we can get a bit more attention prior to 12.1 releases to address some of the more immediate concerns and design frictions with the proposed changes and current state of the spec. Thank you so much for taking your time to read all of my rambling and I look forward to seeing what comes next!