I don’t wanna make another thread abt how the blue post from last night sucks, bc we all agree it does and we all know why. I want shadowmend to stay for disc etc etc, but I feel like with all these changes disc will feel extraordinarily bad in m+, and wanted to make a couple quick and dirty suggestions. I think any one of these could work decently, and wanted to see what other people thought.
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Make atonement transfer scale differently in 5 man. Spells like tranq and healing tide totem already do this, so I don’t see why they couldn’t for atonement. They can clearly recognize that some abilities need to scale differently in five man content already, and I feel like atonement definitely does. I don’t wanna play disc to be a flash heal spam bot, I wanna heal with atonement.
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or they could give us a modified version of the pvp talent trinity. change it to read:
Atonement’s duration is increased by 15 sec, but can only be applied through Renew
Smite, Penance, and Shadowfiend critical strike chance increased by 30% when you have Atonement on 3 or more allies.
Atonement can not be applied to more than 5 targets.
This would keep it from being at all useable in raid because its capped at 5 targets. It’d also change our gameplay significantly, which some might see as a positive. I’m not gonna lie, this isn’t my favorite idea because it’d make radiance basically useless, but I guess it’d fill the disc class fantasy more because you would have to actually ramp in a 5 man and it would make us spend more time doing healing with atonement.
- Probably the easiest fix here: drastically increase the Sins of the Many modifier when at or below 5 targets. Right now at one target, you get 12% more damage, scaling down to 6% at 5 targets. I’m not smart enough to have give exact numbers, but I feel like they could literally just make this number significantly higher up to 5 targets, and then at 6+ it could drastically drop off to where it is now.
I don’t know, disc priest is conceptually my favorite healer, but they seem to be incredibly unwilling to make it a fun spec to play in m+. They have tuned other healer’s abilities separately in 5 man and raid, so I don’t know why they haven’t for disc.
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IMO with all the changes in mind except for the shadowmend change Disc is looking pretty decent for dungeons. We have tools that cover almost all damage scenarios. So at the very least our HEALING is looking great.
If we have a problem it’s damage - not so much the way we deal it, but that it’s too nerfed to keep up with most other healers, and the only advantages we had to Holy’s damage (Mind Sear and Wickedness) are gone. Especially so since our better tools don’t allow us to take Sins of the Many.
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u are such a little goober <3
I mean, I can explain:
- We get Twist of Fate + Castigation + Schism, which were all nice increases to dungeon healing in their own ways.
- We get Twins, which helps with our PTW spread.
- PTW now cleaves a second target, and the cleaves gain any bonus that the first had (Twilight Equilibrium matters here).
- We have enough in our tree to make our DoT slightly better than Holy’s SW:P before equilibrium buff.
- Shadow Covenant no longer reduces your holy spell damage, and Shadowmend comes off CD, meaning we have a way to gain strong ST healing for boss damage patterns that extend beyond our atonement burst.
- Stolen Psyche makes Mind Blast a very high atone transfer (and MB’s cooldown got cut considerably).
- Harsh Discipline makes your penance empowered almost 100% of the time in dungeon, which if you’ve played TPO + Tier this season you know how powerful it is when it’s actually up.
- Aegis of Wrath currently makes PW:S pretty incredible, and DA crits with it give you shields for unironically 50% of a tank’s health bar. This actually makes Reflective shield worth it, and if reflective shield does get atone transfer (it should) it’s gonna be nuts with this + rapture in dungeon.
- Expiation makes our SW:D hit for around the same damage Mindgames deals in execute, and we can do it twice now.
I don’t think we’re going to suffer from healing problems.
Where we become less desirable is when Holy Priest (who also brings PI/Twins) comes into a fight with 5 casts of Holy Fire + Chastise that deal increased damage and just completely trounces us because they don’t have several aura nerfs reducing their damage that have been there since Shadowlands beta for some reason.
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I’m probably gonna be extra contrarian here and say both that disc healing looks good for DF (unless they actually remove Shadow Covenant), and that damage as a healer is overrated.
Disc in Shadowlands really only suffered from spot healing and sustained tank healing, which no-CD Shadowmends and Divine Aegis take care of.
Of course healers who do substantially more damage than other healers will be preferred, all other things equal. But that’s not going to stop you from regularly getting a group, or getting into one more easily than most DPS specs, up to and including +20 level keys. Damage is really more of a personal preference. And maximizing damage talents will require a tradeoff of certain healing profiles, like absorbs that empower you to more easily in certain scenarios save people (DPS included) who have the ability to do more damage than any healer.
I don’t disagree that in reality damage is fairly optional. Lots of low damage specs complete high keys.
The problem is damage often informs the M+ meta which ripples through pugs quickly, and makes getting a pug hard. Usually not a problem for me because I’ll make my own keys.
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I’ve been playing Disc in Heroics in beta for a few hours and here are my preliminary thoughts:
Talents:
- The Aegis of Wrath change from 30% to 50% is noticeably better. Indemnity needs to be buffed however because 3s tacked onto PW:S Atonement is extremely underwhelming for a capstone choice.
- Twilight Equilibrium is one of the best additions to Disc in DF. Being able to min-max my throughput feels great but only because I have choices in what I cast which means removing spells due to ability bloat is a dangerous game. Please be careful Blizz.
- I would much rather lose Flash Heal or Renew and allow Prayer of Mending to apply Atonement rather than lose Shadowmend. This is mainly becuase Flash Heal is so numerically weak it doesn’t feel any diferent to press Renew or Flash Heal when I’m looking at health bars.
- Harsh Discipline is amazing. Do not nerf this talent. This is carrying my enjoyment of Disc at the moment but it comes with the cost of using PW:R to build it in any reasonable time which helps balance it. I think this is strong but appropriately limited and the true all star feel good talent for the whole Disc tree.
- I think Light’s Wrath and Mind Games are competing for the same spot in Discs toolkit. I would prefer to keep Mind Games because I believe it a better button in PvP and PvE. Removing Lights Wrath and replacing it with more passives or ability buffs would help alleviate the button bloat Disc has. To this end I’d also like to see Mind Games proc Twilight Equilibrium.
- I think the PW:R talent choice needs a little work. Enduring Luminescence is meant to be powerful because it allows two Penance casts inside a single PW:R window but with Schism, Mind Games, Light’s Wrath and possibly SWD competing for cast time inside the PW:R window, double Penance gets pushed out and the talent loses its power.
Gameplay:
- DF Disc feels like SL Disc but with all of the toys in the box at the same time and it feels very, very good. Being able to PtW > PW:S > Schism > Penance feels great knowing I can keep adding spells to the list depending on incoming damage patterns with lots of tools in my pocket like PoM > Mind Games > Smite > Penance again.
- Atonement finally feels like a solid HPS foundation outside of raid. This is largely due to Harsh Discipline but also Schism and MG. Being able to back to back 7 bolt Penance if needed is a huge help to party-wide throughput on some of the higher incoming damage bosses so far.
- Damage isn’t amazing but is still quite good compared to the other healers I have played in my limited testing. I think is mostly down to other specs losing their borrowed power more than anything else.
- Disc is the only healer so far out of Rsham, Hpal and Prevoker that I have managed to top 25k+ HPS in Heroics. The number isn’t important here though. The point I’m making is that throughput is currently not a weakness Disc has in DF like it has in SL. I’m sure Prevoker could pull similar or higher numbers in stacked fights and probably Rsham with all CD’s used but Hpal would struggle to reach even half that at the moment (I could just be bad Hpal also).
- TL:DR Disc is feeling good. Even without an interrupt or a stun or a knock or good mobility or good defensives I could see them being taken to keys purely based on their numerical power at the moment. Please don’t dumpster them Blizzard. If you absolutely must take something away take duplicated PI or make PI a self buff only and leave Disc numerically strong.
3 Likes
OK I did a lot more testing since the new build. Thoughts:
Talents
General Tree:
- Halo is actually unironically my choice now. We have so many buttons to hit now (Schism, PW:S, Dominate, Mindgames, Bender) that getting a twilight empowered halo every time is much easier than twilight empowered Dstar. Also Halo heals a lot, so it helps out. Finding it regularly doing ~20% of my damage. Taking it every time now, honestly.
- Death and Madness + Tithe Evasion are must takes. My execute phase is doing like 140k damage and healing everyone a stupidly large amount.
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- I’m pretty certain this is going to get nerfed for raiding purposes. It seriously hits way too hard, lol.
- Twist of Fate is considerably higher uptime now that it procs off damage. Seeing ~60% uptime in these heroics.
- Reflective Shield has really good synergy with Aegis of Wrath. This can do like 7% my damage even when I’m not using it super well.
- Dominate Mind - Honestly better than I thought it would be even. There’s still mobs with interrupts, so you can carry one through a dungeon with you if wanted an interrupt. But there’s also a lot of mobs that just do some sick damage that you can MC.
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- This still generates crazy threat and is super spooky to keep doing. Your tank will need to taunt if you MC a mob 2-3 times. They also might not know you want to get rid of your pet if you’ve been re-dominating. In M+, this might just kill you sometimes, but will have to see.
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- Some mobs are inexplicably not MCable. This creates a learning curve.
- Shadowmend loss sucks.
Disc tree talents:
- Twilight Equilibrium - annoying to actively think about all the time. I’ve found it’s much better to pick a couple abilities you want it to always be up for (IE: Halo and PTW or Halo/Penance) and make sure you empower those with Mindblast/Schism rather than try and play with SW:D to empower anything unless you’re fighting a boss. Then you can use SW:D to empower PTW/Penance.
- Expiation - became its own separate damage instance, and that lowered the appeal of the talent a lot. This is mostly just to have sick SW:D executes now.
- Aegis of Wrath - very good.
- Harsh Discipline - Needs its duration removed, but is otherwise really nice.
- Weal and Woe - This talent feels terrible post Aegis of Wrath buffs.
- Inescapable torment - Honestly not feeling the damage out of this one much. It’s better than it was in Slands I suppose, but it’s not good enough that I’d want to keep taking it.
- Light’s Wrath - At current tuning this is worthless in dungeons even with the talents below it. It hits less than mindgames fully talented, and doesn’t have the healing component. But in raid this thing is going to do upward of 50k damage (100k on crit). Kinda nuts, there. Wrath unleashed is still worthless though.
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