Been leveling another priest as disc through dungeons and it feels so bad to heal people who are around 85-90%.
In combat approximately 2 gcds are needed, SW: Pain into a PW: Shield or vice versa, but this is not nearly enough to top someone so something like a PW: Radiance into an offensive Penance/PW: Solance, or a PW: Shield into an offensive Penance/PW: Solance has to be used. Of course there is Holy Nova but let’s stop trolling.
In combat this is worse. You have no one to hit so you are left using either Penance and/or spamming Shadow Mend.
This feels terrible for two reasons:
- Overhealing with Penance/Shadow Mend.
- Stationary healing with Shadow Mend.
Disc already has mana problems, and as a long time healer it hurts my soul immensely to see overheals. At least back in the day our overheals put a bubble on someone, not that I’m saying it should do that again.
Also, with all the movement needed for modern WoW, stopping to heal with Shadow Mend just feels bad, especially when I know I’m going to be overhealing.
My suggestion:
Make PW: Shield strong again. Disc has always been the bubble spec but in BFA bubble feels like it can only block a wet noodle.
At the same time, make Renew baseline and allow Renew to apply atonement. This would make healing on the move a little more better and would allow for less overhealing. Might as well throw in insta PoM while you’re at it.
If all fails just give Holy Penance, and swap PS & GA in Shadowlands and we’ll call it day.
Let’s make disc great again and not just primarily a raid healing spec again.
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You should have a least one SW: Pain rolling at all time, ideally more, as the total healing per mana it does when there are atonements applied is astronomically higher than any other spell we have.
Not just anything can be an atonement applier, atonement is far too strong for that. PW:Shield is as weak as it is because of how strong atonement is. The shear healing one atonement does for is mana cost is crazy.
|Though, I do agree with you on the general points
- Disc out of combat Healing is a complete joke, and any talents we have to make Penance better when cast on a friendly are pathetic and weak.
- I agree, the current iteration of Holy Nova baffles me. Who thought this was even remotely acceptable? It’s completely unusable.
- Atonement overhealing does feels bad, but with how much raw healing Atonement does this doesn’t bother me.
- Healing Chip damage is very mana costly since it requires a PW:S or Shadowmend no matter how much damage is taken, there are no low mana alternatives.
Sadly it’s not just Disc every Priest spec is performing poor outside of Raid. Holy is in a sorry state at the moment, it’s been the weakest Dungeon healer for 4 years and remains so in the Shadowlands Alpha. And let’s not get started on Shadow…
But hey, we’ve been ignored for 2 full expansion, maybe we can be ignored for another…
2 Likes
With the new focus on DPS that Paladins (glimmer/crusader/AoE H shocks covenants), Monks (Chiji=crusader), and Druids (Heart of the wild insane feral burst) are getting, all three of those healers will be able to dish out more dps consistently than Disc can in SL. Normally, Disc edges out because their overall damage done ends up overtaking the small bursts the other three can do, but with all their new shiny dps tools, I find it hard to justify a disc priest (outside of raid) in Shadowlands.
-Also- Your comment about Holy Nova being terrible is so true. Even it did good healing, its basically a melee ability… as a priest… with cloth armor and no defensives… you’re just asking to be one-shot or aim ranged mechanics at your melee team.
Well we got good news everyone! Two of the four new covenant abilities are functionally just stronger holy novas with like 15 yard ranges… Please blizzard, let us stay at Range like a RANGED healer should.
With all that being said and really enjoying leveling my monk and pally so far, and I intend to main one of them for SL unless it gets better for Disc and at least one of its other specs
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Glimmer in SL is a talent and thus wont scale as much and with an increased mana cost to holy shock and finally a mana cost to crusaders strike, they will have to be more careful and cant go as rampant.
Disc getting mind sear in SL will help keep up with pallies etc. Ive heard that disc healing in SL is a little weak but tuning should fix that.
Currently level 90 disc that has leveled via dungeons only.
Couple of things iv noticed
- it’s not worth putting shadow word pain on targets during a heavy aoe pull
The globals applying swp is to costly and puts you behind the curve. You are better off applying bubble and spamming shadow mend.
-Holy nova
This actually did decent damage but healing wise this spell is hot garbage.
Iv played wow since classic and iv played every single class except priest. This is the first time iv ever made a priest. And disc to me feels super bad. I don’t do enough damage to heal people. And basically feel like I’m shadow mend spamming.
Level 90 Disc priest isn’t indicative of a level 120 Disc priest, just as a warning.
At 120, in challenging content, you should always SW:P/Purge the Wicked on the trash pack to get that healing rolling. Pre-pull Bubble the tank, then DoT the group.
Holy Nova is just flat-out bad and should almost never be used except for some real fringe AoE cases or world content.
This just doesn’t work while leveling. Not enough healing coming out. I feel like I’m constantly shadow mending. I’m just trying to show that leveling as disc stinks. Also not being able to move and heal stinks. I mean penance and that’s it? I’m going to ride this to 120 and update on my pug experience.
Also I think Im have an issue from going from Resto Druid to disc in dungeons. Hero to 0
I’m not surprised given that leveling dungeon trash dies a lot quicker than actual end-game content, so your ability to damage the trash to get the healing is cut off drastically. Once the health pools start getting to ‘acceptable’ levels is when you’ll notice getting more mileage out of your tools.
leveling as disc was quite good imo. i had no issues.
dungeons are easy as well. just 1 shield on the tank and just use a few damage spells and Smite away. It’s not bad. Since usually the tanks are quality as well… so its smooth sailing.
Think Disc is just an issue for you personally. Which is fine, plan ahead, pump damage, profit.
Make sure those talents are right for you and lining up properly.
I do agree 120 feels effing nice… but the core gameplay doesn’t change. You shouldn’t be struggling too bad.
The scaling while leveling is terrible in places (worst around Wrath), and all you can do is Shadow Mend spam. It’s not as bad at 120, though it’s still not great.
Disc might be good in raid but I can def see why it struggles in m+. There are 0 talents that help you in 5 man content.
Think there is Shadow Covenant and… that might be it.
My problems with atonement is that…
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It sacrifices the power of PW: Shield. I rather have a strong shield again; this has been our identity for a long time but is being gutted in favor of raiding. This is why I suggest Renew to apply atonement. In Legion people complained about applying atonement with Plea, but having Renew (and maybe hopefully insta PoM??) apply atonement would feel better than pressing Plea.
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Atonement is useless out of combat. Running from one pack to another in a dungeon and Penance is on cd? GL getting ANY heals out. Cept Holy Nova but nova is a meme at this point. Having some sort of healing on the move, other than Penance, would go a long way on making disc feel better in 5 man content.
I personally would like strong defensive penance back and PW:S to go back to having a cooldown but being a once again beefy shield.
Penance doing strong healing defensively would only be bad for pvp (which they have their own scaling right? Just turn nobs there if anything) It wouldn’t make us more broken in raids, and it would significantly boost our tank healing in dungeons which is where we struggle the most. I guess it could make using penance a little weird in raid as there probably would be scenarios where the most hps would actually be to not use it offensively, but I think that is okay.
PW:S being buffed on the other hand is kind of weird. On one hand I most definitely miss when someone was dying and I’m on the move and I know my PW:S will let them live at least another tick of damage. Now that old instinct I still have sometimes makes me chuckle a bit since the shield was off faster than I even saw myself put it on. I get the logic and the reasoning for its current state, but it feels very bad. Why even call it a shield if its just a secret rename of plea from legion.
Perhaps giving back the CD on shield and replacing our current shield(lol plea) version with renew could be an idea. That might be a little too much hot healing if you combine it with our SW:P/PTW hots though (which actually do lots of healing its just hard to tell)
I’m not sure we can ever go back to our shield being strong again w/o some hits in the atonement department, which could lead to some wonky stuff. With the new scov in shadowlands we might do better group healing. This spec is sadly heavily atonement focused now and I think the only way to apply stronger ST healing would be having specific talents that had to be competitive with raid talents that made our atonement stronger in smaller group content. What those changes would be I couldn’t say, but I can say its pretty unlikely we ever get a strong PW:S back. I’m sure it only has its name for the sake of nostalgia at this point.
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We were talking about this in another thread but I think a good change for penance would be to change power of the darkside to be for mind blast and/or offensive penance only and then significantly buff baseline defensive penance so we had a reliable strong cheap short cd single target heal. I think that would feel a lot better in 5 mans. I also think you could transform castigation into a 5 man/single target healing focused talent since it will never compete as an atonement related talent vs schism anyway. Maybe it would just happen automatically with a significant buff to baseline defensive penance.
In terms of bringing back a strong shield, a combination of some ideas I thought could be interesting is if they brought clarity of will back as a talent, but had a limited number of charges so you couldn’t use it to blanket a raid in shields. I had some other ideas for CoW as well posted elsewhere, but a good way to bring back a strong up-front shield that didn’t push you back into shield spamming primarily would be something like that with limited charges. IE: fast or instant cast, large shield maybe only 2-3 charges and a 15-30 second recharge timer depending on how many charges and how strong the shield was.
OP, your concern with overhealing is negated at 120 when you run the minor essence that gives the recipients of your heals a haste buff. Yes, overhealing from atonement procs a HUGE haste buff. My dps absolutely love me for it. Being applied through atonement gives it a nearly 100% uptime.
I’ll go along with this route. I like the current identity of Disc and am glad bubble disc is gone for many reasons. A bubble based spec just doesn’t work in the current way WoW is designed. I feel like Disc is mostly fine except for needing better talent choices for M+ and a spammable out of combat group heal (that would be worse than atonement in combat).
Blizz is doubling down on the “healers do damage” mindset in Shadowlands (as Kiwilemonade outlined) so I prefer for the majority of my healing to come from atonement. Ideally the only time I’d like to be casting direct heals is in emergencies or out of combat. If we got more heals to use in combat, that’s less time DPSing, which would make us even less desirable to the masses since we would be doing even less damage and lose a “utility” in their eyes. Regarding atonement applicators, Renew is already a near useless button for holy so I don’t see it feeling any better than PW:S or Plea.
Disc is such a fun and engaging spec to a fair amount of people who enjoy the DPS-to-heal play style. I don’t want to lose that identity and be homogenized when 5 other direct healing specs exist in the game. Holy has been in such a bad spot regarding utility (their HPS is fine) that I’d rather see them get some strong, but limited, shields built into the spec so that they have a stronger identity than just “basic vanilla healer”. That way people who were a fan of Pre-Legion disc can have both their shields and other priest healing abilities they keep asking for (Renew, PoM, CoH, etc) while people who like current Disc can keep moving forward with the DPS to heal model.
I agree that Holy Nova is garbage and absolutely needs fixed for both specs.
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With regards to your last sentence, it seems like, to me at least, that they could change Holy Nova to just do more healing and take out the damage component if all specs are getting Mind Sear back. There’s little point in having Holy Nova split between healing and damage when Mind Sear covers the damage portion.
Holy Nova was nerfed in the first place because it did way too much damage on AoE.
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This is so true! I have that same instinct and every time I’m like “why did I just waste that global?” Lol
Holy nova is a better flag defense ability in PvP and can be used to knock players out of stealth. This was also a large reason why people asked for it to be returned to both specs after they removed it from one of them. Of course it could still do this even if it dealt only 1 point of damage.
I think they can make it a better healing tool without removing all of the damage. Maybe if they added a target cap they’d be willing to increase the value, or add a talent that focuses on it.