I would say it’s to much mana but the player is responsible for maintaining it through out the encounter. It just feels like maybe it’s a better system of mana management than what say a holy priest has.
I feel like Disc is 100% going to get a nerf on its mana returners.
With the 4-piece and Shadowfiend I don’t even need to think about mana at all in keys. I sit >75% mana on trash and on bosses I can walk in at 40% and not even be at risk of going oom.
It’s somewhere around 400-450k mana just from Shadowfiend alone. I don’t even put a point in Throes of Pain anymore because if I did I would be just be overflowing at 100% mana on every trash pull.
Agree, and that’s going to suck when we move on from this tier set and Shadowfiend ends up being a button you press because it’s free but gives you next to zero benefit unless the entire tier is built around it just like it has been for shadow since at least Cataclysm.
we wont be moving from this tier set till 11.0 fwiw so with the hero classes maybe we get something to compensate
I really hope so, but Blizzard’s record with making adjustments for borrowed power and then adjusting back when it was gone is terrible, and especially so with Shadowfiend/Mindbender.
If I were to hazard a guess as to why it would be because they use the same version of the spell for all three specs, which results in Shadowfiend having the most laughable damage for a 3 minute cooldown for shadow because it can’t be outlandish for healers. So their solution is to staple every bit of borrowed power shadow gets to Shadowfiend (except for 10.1 because of public backlash) so that it does more than 0.7% of the player’s damage.
Since so much of their focus on making Shadowfiend relevant is related to borrowed power, it just doesn’t seem likely that Blizzard will revert any nerfs to it for discipline in 11.0 - or Blizzard condemns discipline to shadow’s fate of every tier being focused on Shadowfiend.
Tier sets are borrowed power and they tune the classes around it.
It’s like robbing peter to pay paul. They’ll nerf your damage + healing in order to make it seem like you’re getting more powerful with your 4-piece bonus. That’s why Disc got two rounds of dps nerfs before the patch came out.
Holy is the same deal because they nerfed a whole list of stuff just to tune it around the 4-piece.
This is the first time mana hasn’t been a major constraint of Disc though and it feels really good. Rather than mana, we’re constrained by globals (for more smites), which is a VERY nice change of pace.
I also don’t know how they’d mess with mana in a way that wouldn’t hurt holy too. No disc priest is running Shield Discipline - everything that they’d nerf would nerf holy on the side. They’ve never done a change to specific spells that hasn’t affected the whole class even when they put them under a spec. The only way this happens is with class auras (IE: Discipline modifier to Mindgames damage specifically) - and we’ve NEVER seen an aura change that hit mana regen.
They have modifiers for each spec so they can tune everything accordingly without impacting the other spec. If anything Holy needs a stronger Shadowfiend to help with the mana problems in keys.
The only consequence is that Disc players without the 4-piece also get hit with the mana reduction.
Either way I’m expecting a 33-50% mana return nerf on Shadowfiend. You’ll actually need to think about managing your mana on Disc instead of it just being an afterthought.
Yeah… but they don’t.
They have class auras - whenever they do a change like this, it’s to the class aura. IE: Discipline’s class aura has Mindgames at a -43% damage done.
But the class auras have never affected mana regen to my knowledge. And whenever they change the baseline spell (which they’ve done from time to time - like Holy Nova) it affects all 3 specs. Even though in the notes they will list it under a specific spec.
It’s all code at the end of the day. C++ to be exact.
All they have to do is just modify the shadowfiend on attack script, add a condition if its disc spec, and change it there.
I’m just reluctant to believe they’d ever do that.
Right now, I don’t think Disc is in dire need of it - and going down to a code level change would be wild. If they do that, they need to ask programming to change it back whenever they want it changed back, because it’s hardcoded. It’s just taking more risk for no reason.
What they’re more likely to do is build some tech to add it to class auras - that way designers can turn the knob whenever they want to. But that just seems like a lot of effort in a live service. I could see them nerfing disc in a number of ways before they did that.
The only other option is they tweak the mana costs on the abilities. However, that still doesn’t solve the problem of getting flooded with 400k+ mana just from Shadowfiend.
Or just nerf the healing. Maybe cynical, but this is how Blizz has a track record of approaching it. If I need to flash heal more, I’m going to eat more mana.
That said, I really don’t think Disc is some crazy outlier right now. We’re a very good spec but it’s not like I’m thinking much about mana on my evoker or resto druid either in a dungeon. And in raid, Disc’s mana doesn’t feel infinite such that you could perma blanket or something either.
Rather, Holy and Shaman need to be brought up.
Just looking at the data.
Resto Druids are about 50% ahead of Disc Priests in overall dps. Disc Priests are about 25% ahead of the 3rd highest dps healer.
Resto Druids are basically double what a Holy Priest or Holy Paladin can do and I’m 100% expecting a nerf soon. They can do 120-140k overall with an aug which is almost the same as tanks.
Disc is also a bit too strong in raid healing relative to everyone else. Then you got the infinite mana shenanigans going on.
I’m expecting nerfs to hit a whole bunch of specs in the next couple of weeks: DHs in particular. DHs are 15-20% ahead of everyone else and they’re about as mandatory as the Fire Mage was last season to push keys.
Oh I’m expecting nerfs. I just don’t think we need to hit mana much.
I mean, even if mana gets hit, what are they going to do - force me into taking throes of pain to make up the difference?
They’d have to hit the mana returns so hard that they’d barely be noticeable. And at that point, the second we don’t have the tier set, we’re the worst class in the game.
They made a tier set and reworked the spec almost entirely based around a talent that provides mana regen. There’s no way they were just completely blind to what that would mean. And the balance implications that has should stick with us through the tier.
With the mana reductions you’ll actually need to think about managing your mana and putting points into Throes of Pain again on Fortified week.
Last season I wouldn’t dream of walking into a +24 Tyrannical boss with only 40% mana playing Holy or Disc and expecting to last 3-4 minutes. You’ll just need to stop and drink to 100% before going on.
Now it’s literally like lol what’s mana like we’re playing Shadowlands again with the infinite mana reset button every couple of minutes.
last season it was basically impossible for disc to go oom too.
This whole conversation feels like, giving ideas to blizz for nerfs.
Disc mana too good. Disc don’t need mana. Please nerf.
I don’t even have 4 piece yet lmao. I don’t want this nerf please TwT
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managing mana was fun when there were multiple spell ranks and you could actually choose to use cheaper spells. this actually demonstrated who had skill in the game, because it revealed the players who actually knew which spells to choose for what situation in order to conserve mana AND still get the job done.
but then they took that away from us. blizz has mostly just taken control away from players. and then demanded every step of the way we play the game their way. that’s not an enjoyable experience. its worse than boring. so i just dps now mostly. my guild lets me dps. i get to have the fun job again, cause they never really treat dps the way they treat tanks or healers.
you people who talk about “oh they need to THINK about managing THEIR MANA” can go back to the mythological past when it was actually interesting to do that, caues that is the pretend fantasy land you live in, thinking that its actually fun to do that now, its not, you just living in some pretend 2007 that doesn’t even exist.
the game has moved on, people playing healers as their mains now are just slaves to devs who don’t give a damn about people and their enjoyment
They absolutely do, but they don’t with Shadowfiend, or at least it doesn’t look like they do. If you go and look at logs for disc and shadow, their Mindbenders are doing the same with the differences coming from disc’s higher uptime and how much damage their IE does.
Blizzard spent a decade making Mindbender functionally baseline for shadow because Blizzard has always stapled every ounce of borrowed power onto Shadowfiend to make it do anything at all for shadow, never scaled it differently for Mindbender, and never buffed competing talents (in the old system) to be competitive with Mindbender amped up with borrowed power.
The only rationale I can conjure up for that pattern is that Blizzard wants Shadowfiend to be identical for disc and shadow for some reason, and that pattern of letting Shadowfiend be what it is and balance it by tying all external power to it means that a nerf to its mana regen is going to result in a permanent 33-50% (based on your prediction) reduction to the mana regen from the ability.