Constant pressure to go disc - anyone else getting this?

Classes Priest
1

This is really ruining my enjoyment of the game and I wonder if other holy priests are experiencing this. I’m in a guild that has just started mythic, and was in a prior guild in the same situation - 2/10 and 3/10 mythic respectively just about. I’m the top healer almost always HPS/healing done wise, and I execute mechanics I can honestly say consistently better than the majority of the players in the guild. My parses are usually purple/orange, average about 6.5k HPS I would say. So there is nothing wrong with my performance respective to the guilds. Not trying to toot my own horn just putting into perspective it is in no way a performance issue.

But I feel like in both guilds I have been in, there is this constant underlying pressure for me to play discipline instead. I do not want to play discipline at all and even in this guild I upfront said I had no intention of playing discipline, but all I hear about is how complexity limit echo uses disc priests and how amazing it is… in both guilds we have pugged disc priests that are much higher Ilvl and more experienced than me for our heroic and mythic fights and they all underperform really consistently comparatively and yet every day I still have to hear about how it would be better if I was disc and how disc is so amazing.

Is this just how it is? Does every holy priest have to deal with this? I honestly don’t see the appeal of disc in a raid environment where mechanics failures and attendance are our biggest hurdles. I feel like we are neither consistent enough or cutting edge enough for disc to have the same value it has in higher end play. I know I’m pulling my weight and then some, so it’s just … feels frustrating. I wonder if I have just had bad luck with guilds or if it’s like that for everyone. It feels very monkey see monkey do, that people don’t know what to do besides try to copy high end comps regardless of player skill, which is how we’ve ended up with grey parsing WW monks and fire mages and hunters that eat every mechanic… sigh. Is this just the standard now or am I jaded having just had a bad experience? I feel like if we just filled raid with appropriate ‘ranged’ ‘tanks’ ‘melee’ ‘heals’ that were actually good players and had good uptime and did not eat mechanics, we would progress better, but I feel like I am alone in thinking that.

Help, it’s really driving me away from the game. Tell me I’ve just had a bad experience, lol.

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Disc is better in Hungering and Sire. The other bosses Disc is still better but not by much, like 5% better. Got nerfed from 15% better.

Anyway, if you raid pressure you to play Disc after nerf then…well they are not that good.

ttps://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/26#boss=2399&metric=hps&class=Priest&spec=Discipline
Here are Sludgefist Mythic logs. Disc have the same hps as Holy, but they need to be fed with 4 innervates.
Tho barrier gives Disc a little bit of edge.(5%)

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Well, that sucks. That was all of 9.0, getting flak for playing holy instead of disc.

I’d kind of hoped with the buffs people would stop and take another look at what hpriest can bring to the table (which is now a pretty compelling set of buffs and CDs), but guess it takes time to change community perception…

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your guild is behind the times. new updates make holy good and disc bad.

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5

be gone troll.

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6

Play whatever you want and ignore the meta kids.

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Your guild is kinda obsessed with meta. I play at about the same level and my guild has never pressured me to play Disc (nor told anyone in the guild to play a spec they didn’t want to). Conversely, a group I run with for fun that was progressing Normal had asked me to go Disc because they thought bad play could be overcome by meta classes.

There is something to be said for Disc, even when doing less HPS overall, being able to largely prevent certain mechanics. But from what you’re saying, your guild is not playing at the level where that’s going to be what makes or breaks progress.

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Not a troll in any way. I’m seriously having this issue in two guilds now and it’s driving me nuts. I just didn’t know if this was widespread or just me and wanted to know if this is now the standard, if I should look for another guild again or just leave wow because it wasn’t ever going to stop :cry:

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They were talking to the person above them.

And play what you want.

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Low level guilds follow meta a lot because they don’t know better. Explain to them that Holy is good. Show them logs and stuff.

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I did try and did show logs. Unfortunately wasn’t getting much except ‘this is how top guilds do it’

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I mean, regardless of HPS, disc priests make the fights and healing feel much more manageable thru mitigation. Idunno after nerf, but one is almost mandatory for a mythic raid team.

My take is that your guild sees a good priest, and wants to persuade into disc because it would help enable the other healers and you’d be capable of doing it. They probably know it would be a HPS loss. To them, it’s more of trying to build the right healer team and aren’t paying attention to how it effects you individually. The fact that top guilds use disc priests just adds to it. They see a capable priest and want to nudge into the easiest healer composition. It’s much harder for them to recruit a new priest maybe, or to min/max strats around a niche healer composition.

*For example, say they’re looking up boss strats for your mythic raid tonight. In the guide they’re looking at, it says “Have your disc priest start spirit shelling at the 30 second mark…” and they go, umm well crap. And cue confusion at what to do now.

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At what boss if I may ask?

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So when I say this, I mean not for a specific boss, all bosses, all the time pressure. I was facing this on mythic Shriekwing and Huntsman, and on Heroic Sludgefist and Generals and Sire.

We haven’t been lacking a disc in either guild, in both, we had access to one fairly consistently, but since the nerf the numbers have been persistently underwhelming from those folks and we’ve actually never had it really make a difference in our rate of progression, even on hungering destroyer mythic now. We ARE currently progressing on hungering destroyer, which normally might explain it if it were just this boss I was hearing this on, and we didn’t have access to one or if we were wiping to something that could be helped by Spirit Shell, but we are wiping pretty much solely to people taking numerous stacks of essence sap while the miasma folk are at 100% and not understanding the fight/moving fluidly/following the strategy at all. We have people dropping expunge balls in the consume path or on top of melee and blowing up Miasma’d folk. I’m still top healer on all of our attempts, and I do keep PWS on the miasma’d targets myself, even as holy because I can see the value in doing so. I can see spirit shell has some value as well but I’m not seeing it make up for sloppy mechanics and I can’t see where it is ‘needed’. I would never argue that disc is “bad”, so that isn’t the thing - I just don’t want to play it personally and I don’t think it’s a game-changer for the particular issues we face, and in practice, that’s been true as well. I am sure that at the top end of play where people are better at executing mechanics reliably and take less overall damage, disc value just goes straight up.

I’m sure they do see a skilled priest and think they can pressure me into going disc because they just think it’s ‘better’ and I might do better than the others, but I would say I’m especially aggravated because no one else is under any pressure to change specs and we have numerous specs considered ‘bad’, we run what would be considered ‘too much melee’ and all kinds of other stuff if we are just really committed to putting ‘meta blinders’ on. But, those meta blinders are only applied to me… Really I’ve shown over and over that on successful kills people are taking far less avoidable damage than us, and why. I’ve also shown them numerous kills in the last guild over a month ago with no disc priest at all. I actually really firmly believe if we stuck any competent healer in that spot and fixed our mechanics the boss would be dead, and by fixating so much on comp rather than correcting poor execution, we are causing our own stagnation.

Also sorry for the rant, I just hate the whole ‘try to copy meta’ thing, while not playing to meta standards. It is something I’ve only run into since returning to wow in BFA just prior to Shadowlands launch. Before that I hadn’t played since WOD. I was in a much higher end guild before but you know, I’m old now, so either I never understood that (I don’t want to say lower end, but lower progressed?) players so blindly tried to follow a composition meta in some cases, or this is just new behavior

I ought to add I don’t even try to do M+ I learned pretty quickly holy priests aren’t welcome and any deaths are going to be blamed on holy even if they stand in a green circle in M+ Tirna and get tossed off the cliff while your grip is down. You should have been disc to save them from that, or the run would have gone better if they had a shaman, despite that being the only deaths.

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That boss Disc has better HPS by around 2k(after nerf), and It can save people from mechanic mistake, because Disc can shield Miasma people.

I mean yeah If your team plays perfectly then Holy can get the job done fine.

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I’m not trying to deny disc is good on that specific fight at all, I’m just saying we haven’t seen the impact like that at all from people playing the spec, who have already killed the fight btw and are very, very geared - and I think that is pretty much because of mechanics fails that aren’t salvageable. I’m also not sure ‘perfect’ execution is at all needed to do the fight without a disc, I found lots of logs with no disc where execution was middling. This also doesn’t explain the pressure on things like Heroic Sludgefist, lol.

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Well, if you already killed it with Holy why did the guild tell you to go Disc then? That’s just weird. And What is your priest covenant btw?

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Honestly, hungering is when many guilds start feeling alot of pressure without a disc priest. Kinda sounds like you have one tho? And they want two? Maybe I misunderstood. But yeah, from a raid leader perspective it’s like “well, we could have everyone play perfectly OR we can just have a disc priest help us thru it.” Which yeah sucks for you lol.

WoW community has definitely went over more and more to meta comps every expansion. Probably from popularity of wclogs and rio, and even from the mythic invitationals and world first races.

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Yeah, I think she said her team has a Disc priest carry and she is playing Holy, and her raid wants 2 Discs.

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I think we might have a little bit of a misunderstanding here, I kind of feel like you’re trying to convince me to go disc and that is exactly what I am disliking, and I just want to make it clear I’m not asking if I should go disc or not, I’m asking if other people experience the same pressure on ALL bosses. There is a bit of weird focus that has cropped up on this thread on hungering too, while it’s interesting to discuss I suppose, that really is kind of not super relevant.

Let me clarify my stance/feelings here - I won’t play disc under any circumstances unless they change the core mechanics of the spec. If a fight ever comes out where I absolutely can’t produce any numbers or execute mechanics playing holy, I’d flex shadow before playing disc, or sit out. I did say this in advance, so they were notified, and still chose to bring me along. I do have a viable shadow offspec.

That being said, I’m venthyr and really want to go night fae since it’s just obviously much better for my chosen spec, and my chosen offspec now - but with my current unhappiness with the game and stuff I’m a little afraid to make the plunge because I don’t know if I will want to play enough to get all that renown back and it seems like it takes a lot of playtime. I hate M+ and raiding is giving me frustrations right now. I know that if I don’t have enough gas in the tank to relevel renown, it won’t actually be an upgrade compared to having my third tier and all my stamina, and I’ll end up raiding mythic with less HP and no soulbind, which sounds like a bad time. Thats actually how I knew this was starting to impact my enjoyment of the game, when I just didn’t want to log in.