I think the damage changes are fine. You’re never healing through atonement anyway as it’s output just isn’t strong enough. It’s going to suck as we wont have the same pressure anymore though.
Weakened Soul change is an interesting one. I am 100% okay with this IF they buff the shield to be 3-to-4 times as large as it is now. Shields are purgable and, just using theming as an atonement applicator every 7 seconds isn’t going to be fun. Disc needs its shields. (Personally, I’d love a talent or PvP talent which changes atonement into ‘your critical strikes put a shield % onto a friendly target’ - bring back divine aegis!)
PW:S mana increase; to justify this and the weakened soul addition it really needs to absorb a lot more now.
Focussed Will nerf is silly. Just straight up. I guess they ran out of things to nerf and saw FW?
I think disc will be fine - however, it really does need to have its spirit increased in PvP as we can’t always fit solace into our rotation and we just oom so quickly due to our output coming from very costly spells.
2300 experienced discipline priest myself. Though I don’t have the same experience as you, I agree with everything said here and find these nerfs to be absolutely insane all coupled together. There’s no doubt in my mind that the spec is being deleted for the pure existence of RMP, and because they’re aiming to make holy priest, a spec flawed from a design perspective (when discussing pvp), more relevant.
This is, as you put here, insult to injury. We won’t even be viable anymore, and it’ll take weeks for them to realize how far they screwed us.
Realistically, any discussion of Discipline nerfs needs to start with a recognition that Discipline is currently overpowered in PVP. They may be close to balance in arenas, but in epic battlegrounds and especially world PVP, the discussion is around whether you need a 2v1 or a 3v1 to beat them, not whether they’re anywhere close to balanced. Even in rated, Discipline is overrepresented.
Because of the severe imbalance toward Discipline in the more popular forms of PVP, if you’re going to argue to soften the nerfs in arenas, you should come up with ways to keep the total nerf package severe in larger scale PVP.
In addition, the mobility argument applies to all Priest specs, so it’s difficult to use that argument for special treatment only of Discipline.
I think I already responded to this in the thread itself: Discipline can heal itself by dealing damage, but also has no escape and is forced to engage in any form of PvP combat that is thrown at it, this includes World PvP.
In World PvP you’re likely to always find unskilled people in the world - hybrids that don’t self heal, melee that don’t interrupt etc. It is very common, more than anyone really wish to agree, to see a Ret paladin jumping on a disc and dying in 2-3 minutes without casting a single flash heal until the moment that Paladin is at 5 or 10% HP, in which any other case would lead to the priest being beaten until OOM.
Disc Priest is as OP in world PvP as the people who force-engage it in combat are bad, and that will always be the case. No discipline Priest can opt to kite or run away from PvP combat, thus the “feeling” that it is OP is simply brought up.
In BGs it is strong simply because of Radiance healing, and applying attonement, to 5 people. This won’t change and wasn’t adressed at all in the recent nerfs, which is just proof of how out of touch and completely clueless the design and balance team is.
The nerfs were wrong, not well targetered and aimed at randomly stopping the entire spec from being viable in every single form of non-raid combat.
Edit: Just to back this argument a little because I feel like it needs a little context: Take resto Druids for instance, they were so broken in the begining of the expansion every Professional player claimed it was way too overpowered, which was shown and prooved during the first 2 AWC tournaments where roughly 8/10s of the healers were Druids and the rest were resto shamans. To a point all healing done by resto druid was nerfed by 35% and it still is a viable healer right now.
Now, did you see a single thread about Resto druids being OP in GD? in non-arena PvP forums? Of course you didn’t. What were GD and other casual-PvP discussions about? They were about how Discipline - the healing spec that had 0% representation in tournaments at that time, was completely broken.
I am not argumenting that they were wrong, because Discipline was indeed quite strong, but hell: it was miles behind Resto Shamans and Resto Druids, not even close to touching those specs, but because Druids could easily Roots+Run in world PvP they weren’t being labeled as a problem by the casual community.
What stops Blizzard from reverting focused will nerf and weakened soul (but keeping the mana nerf of 2.7% to 3%), reducing the mana cost of shadow mend from 3% to 2.7%, and adding a line in Ultimate Radiance PvP talent that says (“In addition, reduce mana cost by 25% but now only heals 3 targets instead of 5”)???
Well, one thing stops them from doing it: they are lazy and don’t ever respond to feedback unless they’re already planning to do so months in advance.
The problem is the over representation in arena especially in 2s. Why is it over represented. 2 reasons.
Disc is just very fun to play since it’s a healer with some teeth to it and has value in M+ since the additional DPS definitely helps with the timer when you have skilled dps that avoid and/or mitigate incoming damage. Holy Paladin, Rsham, and dudus (cyclone and roots) are superior in most comps in 3s.
Holy has almost no representation in arena, is one of the worst choices for M+, and in raids one Holy might be optimal but hardly required . Holy needs to be propped up/retooled a bit so priests have a viable alternative for arena, M+, and raids instead of being a situational one holy priest per raid (but not needed at all). Priest is supposed to be THE healing spec in the game and should be a skeleton key in PvE and PvP but in reality holy is outclassed significantly in most situations by the other healing specs.
If Holy was all around improved and made attractive in arena, M+, and raid environments disc representation would trend downward. Not to mention if priests are considered inferior and justifiably so in most situations where holy is concerned what is the point in playing a class that MAINS 2 healing specs when one spec is going to be over-nerfed because it’s fun to play and the other spec is one of the least desired healing specs in the game?
The solution is very easy. The more priests that find Holy attractive and desireable the less will spec as disc.
You didn’t explain why this didn’t apply to Holy as well, which was my point. Asking for Discipline specific escapes is asking for the stronger spec to be made even stronger, which is the wrong direction to go in.
At the beginning of the expansion, world and battleground PVP discussion lumped in resto druids with discipline priests, and there was about the same amount of complaining about both. This was on General Discussion until the world PVP discussion was split off into its own forum. Possibly you didn’t notice the druid complaints because they didn’t affect you directly.
They nerfed druids into balance, but failed to do so for discipline priests, which is why the complaints are about discipline priests now.
While there are unskilled people in world PVP, the most skilled people at world PVP are also found in world PVP, for example the guy who took out a rated rank 1 despite being 4 levels lower. The unskilled people aren’t going to complain about a particular spec, because they get ganked by everyone. The people who are singling out discipline priests are the people who know how to play their characters, and in some cases are better at world PVP than any rated players. And that’s not mentioning the complaints from the battleground aficionados.
If Holy was the easiest healer to play AND the most powerful at the same time, then all the healers would simply just flock to Holy and we’d have an even worse problem. Holy is pretty easy to play and is more forgiving in lower end content. Given that it is designed to be the “easy” healer this makes sense. Giving Holy more output in this case seems unnecessary, but what if instead they were given more utility? Maybe give holy priests the ability to give a damage buff to other players or alter their Purify to dispel curse and poison (in addition to magic and disease). Maybe it would be worthwhile to make some of their spells interact with each other more, say each time they cast smite it raises the power of their next heal. Any number of things are available to make the holy priest more useful without directly increasing their output. Personally I’d like to sea Holy priests (and most other healers) get a significant damage boost. Give them all teeth.
holy already has greater fade, which is one of the strongest escapes in the game, the problem with holy isn’t escape but the fact it needs 5 to 6 PvP talents to only function, and how much its healing is underwhelming when compared to even the lowest throughput in arena right now.
In legion holy PvP had only one build, it all had on-use PvP talents. Now that you can only choose 3 talents you can’t PvP with it at all, and even if you could, the throughput of holy makes it unplayable. it needs a 30% healing increase and some of its PvP talents to be made baseline.
You 100% needed Holy Ward, Greater Fade, Ray of Hope, Inner Focus and Rapid Mending(or Miracle Worker depending on matchup) to play holy in PvP in Legion, where its throughput was big.
Edit: But hey, this thread isn’t about Holy at all. its about how Discipline is getting completely unplayable in 8.1
I’m only a lowly 2k disc but there seems to be a disconnect to me between the community perception of disc to the reality of the spec. Yes, there are a lot of high rated comps with disc in them, but for most or all of them, I feel like they aren’t strong because of the disc. All of their good comps are paired with hunters, mages, and rogues who are all very strong right now.
In 3s, you have to forego a lot of offensive damage except for dotting people, pw solace, and pressing DA for your team. The rest of the time you are having to use penance defensively and spam mends and radiance to recover. Nerfing their damage and mana at the same time seems like a death sentence without some counter-balance in pvp.
Speccing into schism in 3s feels like an all-in and your only option is to kill in the first 2 mins. After that, you will be oom from spamming mend and radiance in your off-time or someone’s already dead. But going into this spec should allow for higher damage, that’s the whole point of giving up your best healing talents (only real healing talent)
I am really hoping that they can find a way to compensate in pvp somehow after all these pve nerfs. Maybe they can get some traction with replacing a bunch of pvp talents. Right now I only use some combination of prem, AA, DA, dome, and trinity. Searing in 2s. There are like 3 or 4 other talents that just never get slotted because they are so far behind the others or just so situational, you never take them. I mean the dispel talents are so bad now considering what you have e to give up. Double dispel is really only good against mages. The pws talent is just bad now.
I support what you’ve said in the posts. Without something to counter the nerfs, disc seems dead.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you’re saying here. With all the accelerated mobility tools melee has now, greater fade does not allow holy actually to escape anything in the sense of fixing our mobility, certainly not in world PVP. All it does is permit 4 seconds of mostly free casting. Maybe that’s what you’re using “escape” to mean?
I think I get you now; you just have a looser definition of “unplayable” than I do. I don’t think you can expect the same spec to be flavor of the month for more than one patch in a row.
He means an escape by the fact that most cc, interrupts and damage attacks miss you for 4 seconds, allowing you to thwart some or all of a cc chain or a go.
And by unplayable he is talking in a competitive sense, seeing how he is a r1 priest. Nothing is prohibiting players from turning on the holy spec and Qing arena, but by doing so, you will put yourself at a clear disadvantage compared to any other healing spec.
Even though I do think Discs needed to be nerfed, I think Resto Shamans should have been the ones receiving nerfs that severe, not Discs.
Resto Shamans will continue to be the undisputed kings of Arena with their insane toolkit.
I watched Samiyam streaming his Resto Sham in 2600s for fun and he was literally beating teams while playing with one hand. He’d lift his keyboard hand up so the viewers can see him just pillar humping forever with his mouse hand and never dying.
I meant escape because it is, its not because the entire spec is on a horrible state (holy) that greater fade isn’t an amazing tool - it is. Gives you immunity to everything except kicks, a big movement boost that stacks with feather and allows you to get away when timing correctly with slow duration.
Also our concept of unviable is exactly the same - if you queue disc on the PTR right now in arena, you’ll notice how the spec is beyond unplayable, being bad at literally everything it does.
it took some time for me to realize you were just someone who didnt have anything constructive to add to the discussion besides your pointless holy QQ that didnt fit into this thread at all.
Please just don’t respond to it if you don’t have anything constructive to add, all my points to back my argument up were presented in the OP, including my suggestion on changes (and nerfs!) to disc in 8.1.
Also @Arcosis, I’m not an R1 priest, I wish I was though ):
My point is that holy does have an impact on disc in pvp. Disc has about 9.8% rep over 2200 in 3s. Holy has a handful of of players over 2200 dead last with protection warrior. So those in that 9.8% who would rather be playing holy in arena because it isn’t viable to ratings chase are specing as disc in arena and rated bgs thus contributing to the inflated 9.8% stastic. Rshaman has 7.8% and undoubtedly will be more represented then Holy+Disc in arena after these nerfs.
I recognize that now. I was thinking of escape in terms of, say, escaping a gank in world PVP, which it doesn’t generally permit.
I also realize that now. However, at that competitive level, only a few specs in each role are going to be competitive at any one time, because exact balancing isn’t possible and the players will identify and seize the smallest advantage. “Playable” then means “above average” and contains only a minority of the specs, so again it may not be realistic to expect a spec to stay there for multiple patches in a row.