The spec is half as effective as holy. I was so hoping for the ability to keep up with other healers but it’s not even close. Holy healing continues to completely dominate disc in PvP. How disappointing.
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They’re both still really bad. Disc feels awful except into certain matchups where you’re allowed to nuke indefinitely, which doesn’t happen often.
Just gonna quote myself from another thread…
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Thanks for sharing that. Here’s what I am experiencing:
Holy has higher healing throughput, straight up. I can weather the storm of peoples cooldowns while keeping my team alive. The cooldowns I have available to me are just stronger (40% damage reduction isn’t enough).
Here’s something I am struggling with: how do you find the balance between healing/survivability talents and damage talents? With atonement your healing should come from damage correct? Maybe this is a playstyle thing?
I’ll say I’ve been healing since vanilla (first char was a priest) and I’ve never played any healer this complicated. Resto druid had more buttons but was less complicated. There was more to do, but fewer dependencies to consider.
This is borderline calculus figuring out the right order of execution to fit the scenario.
Lastly, this meta is just brutal to heal.
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The issue may be in what you are playing to. Disc isn’t a spec that can play into deep dampening very well, it’s honestly never been. Disc is a highly aggressive spec that in a lot of ways you almost want to play it like you are a ranged DPS who just happens to heal some as well. It’s also very positioning heavy/dependent in that step out into the wrong place 1 time and if the enemy team is good you pretty much lost the game.
The hardest thing is you might not even realize it in that moment. For the most part as disc you can’t lose momentum, and you can’t let yourself get put on the back foot. If you do your recovery options are simply not as good as other healers, which is why you have to be the aggressor and look to close out games fast. Dispels are actually more key to it than you might think, not just defensive but purging as well. You can make a druid or Evokers life miserably by just spamming it at the right time causing them to get behind and reducing their windows to CC or help set up kills. While a lot of them have been made undispelable there are still a small handful of abilities you should be looking to dispel, Icy Veins, other Power Infusions, etc to outright shutdown enemy goes and keep your momentum as well.
It is a very different healing style and if you find yourself spamming Flash Heal than chances are you’ve probably already lost the game.
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Doesn’t seem to be the case for low and high rating games. They’re still struggling with handling heavy cleave and burst. Their throughout didn’t increase all that much. The damage did if you spec into the shadow side but you’re not keeping anyone up through atonement at the games current pacing.
There’s just not enough globals available to spam out a smite/2 mind blasts/solace to get your big dark penance with Shadow Covenant all while healing. Often times I’m finding myself just using ShCov to change my penance to shadow, hoping I get kicked so I can spam holy heals. Damage is still pretty obscene all around
Are we playing the same game? Exactly what mode of pvp are you playing where holy dominates disc? Because right now holy is the lowest rated healer in solo shuffle.
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Let me ask you, do you find yourself dying as quickly or struggling tk heal nearly as much in battlegrounds as you do in arena?
If not than damage isn’t the issue, dampening is, and if we are ever going to get blizzard to stop arbitrarily gutting healers in one specific part of the game that is a very important distinction to make.
I don’t play BGs - and no, I see very little difference between now and previous patches how quickly things die
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This patch was highly focused on slowing things down but it didn’t really hit the mark. The damage is still extremely high a bursty. You can’t really compare arena w/ BGs where often you have an extra healer or two and many others targets to peel, soak up kicks, cc, etc. You have the globals to go offensive and pressure on cool down, that’s just not the case in arena dampening or not.
My entire point was that dampening in arena is the issue not damage. I can sit in a BG and heal through 2-3 people no issue, if they are not properly interrupting/stunning/etc on me. No healer really does that for a long in arena because of dampening.
The issue isn’t damage, the issue is dampening.
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again you can’t compare bgs to arena it just doesn’t translate well in any way. Most BGs are full of people grinding honor with green pvp gear on. That can’t be compared to arena where people are geared and many have 2pc minimum, if not 4pc.
This is spot on - I don’t have survival or healing output issues in BGs.
Is there anything about disc that makes it more susceptible to dampening than other specs? (I can’t think what that would be, just throwing this out there).
I just know that my holy spec priest healing output is far and away better than my disc post patch. It’s not even comparable (BG’s and arenas).
Disc damage is fine, so is this just an issue of keeping atonement up? I will admit I do find it a struggle to keep atonement on my team.
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Well a lot of our healing is atonement which is 40% of our damage which is then cut by dampening. We do have some benefit that our major CDs, Pain Suppress/Barrier, are flat damage reduction and are not effected by dampening like say Lay on Hands from a paladin.
That said while people will make excuses to justify dampening, like the guy above, and try to pen it issue all on high damage I would just challenge them to go find the most geared player you can, duel them with the condition of no CC and see how well the kill you, they won’t.
Repeat the same test in arena and the healer dies extremely quickly. Dampening is a tool blizzard gave to bad players that don’t know how to use CC and it changes the game to make it impossible for healers to out heal DPS after so long. It makes the game more about stopping/preventing/mitigating damage than actually healing it.
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I agree entirely about dampening (I don’t know who would argue against that, it’s a flat healing reduction debuff - how would that NOT affect healing?).
My concern is that my holy spec does not suffer as badly as my disc spec.
Perhaps I can get some veteran eyes on my builds? Here’s my holy spec that is working very well not just for 3’s, RSS and BGs but also for 2’s:
And here’s my disc spec that is not working well:
Is there anything inherently flawed about my builds?
Holy won’t suffer as bad as disc because Holy has decent burst healing with serenity where for Disc its radience, which doesn’t heal as much.
This means Holy can maintain a bit longer, it also has a stun in its CC line up which as I pointed out earlier help stop damage and set up kills.
That said I would count any build without Mind Games to be rather troll. Its simply to good, and angelic bulwark really isn’t good either imo. Its effected by dampening and seems to proc weirdly, I’ve had it proc while I was at like 80% hp when i briefly ran it for mythics. The fade talents would be far better imo as % damage reduction is not impacted by dampening.
I’m posting this from my phone so I can’t switch back and forth to give specific advise atm, but those are just the things I noticed that I would change.
Thank you for the feedback!
Yet you are forgetting one very important thing…
All of Holy’s important spells are in the same school of magic so it is generally easy to shut down in solo shuffle because of uncoordinated teamwork.
Yeah but the number of instant cast heals that Holy has is incredible.
- Renew
- shield
- “Surge of Light” empowered flash heals
- Power Word: Life
- Guardian Spirit (increases healing received and heals to 40% when fatal)
- Holy Word: Sanctify
- Holy Nova
- Holy Word: Serenity
- Prayer of Mending
That’s all instant. Then when you do have to finally actually cast something, just stand in (talented) Holy Word: Sanctify to be immune to interrupts.
This is why I think Holy is so much better suited to healing PvP right now (disclaimer: I am a total scrub and don’t know what I am talking about).