I leveled my Disc Priest to 120 a few nights ago, and ran into some problem with dungeons. He was my Horde main in Legion so it’s not the first time I do Disc style healing, but this was the first time I heal max level in BfA.
Running regular BfA dungeons was not an issue, but when I did Timewalk, I’m not sure if it was because the old contents weren’t designed for Disc, the group suffered a lot of damage and wipes. Granted, several people were unfamiliar with old dungeons and/or were distracted, but it dawned on me an issue I didn’t have before: Playing as Disc relies on me knowing the fight, but what should I do when my teammates aren’t as familiar with them (In this case the older contents)?
I have no control over who might stand in the fire or when, so I wouldn’t know who to protect ahead of time. I’m also not keen on using CD every time someone risk an avoidable boss AoE. And, I’m uncertain if the tank being Blood had anything to do with it, since their mechanic focuses on self-heal. I didn’t have trouble with the DH earlier.
So LSS, I’m beseeching for advice here. Is there any tip on how to handle emergency situation, such as a few people drop below 50% under one attack?
1 Like
You’re running into the major weakness of Disc: Taking avoidable damage.
Disc is strongest when you can get Power Word: Barrier, Raptured Power Word: Shield, Pain Suppression, and Atonement out before damage goes out.
Disc is not designed around triage, or reacting to damage. They can react to damage via Shadowmend or defensive Penance, but those options are not nearly as strong as a spec with a dedicated triage kit like Holy. (You could use Power Word: Radiance as well, but that’s a really inefficient option).
If the group takes avoidable damage, or you don’t know damage patterns to the boss, then Disc is absolutely going to be a nightmare because you’re always going to be in catch-up mode, where Disc is weakest. In a perfect world, you’d never put yourself in a position where you’d need to catch-up to begin with.
You’ll hear people say “Disc is great, when the group is good”, and that’s absolutely true. Other healers are elevated by a good group. Disc is reliant on it. Unfortunately, this means that, more than any other healing spec, how much mileage you can get out of Disc is going to depend on factors outside your control.
In the end, emergency group-wide damage has to be treated with Power Word: Radiance and your DPS rotation
2 Likes
Reacting to avoidable damage is Disc’s weakness. On top of that, timewalking tuning is horrendous when people don’t know the mechanics, and I refuse to heal them on any healer. But if you’re dedicated to doing them as Disc, you’re frankly going to be doing a lot of Shadow Mend spamming. I’d recommend taking the safe build of Twist of Fate - Shadow Covenant. For AoE healing, you can try Radiance into Shadow Covenant for a burst heal before filling in the remainder with either atonement or Shadow Mend.
Do keep in mind Rapture is on a pretty low cooldown, so you should be able to use it on every major boss at least.
Two problems here: Gear (both ilvl and things like heart level and essences) hurt disc more than any other healer. Your heals are awful and your damage is awful, so your atonement healing is awful, until you have amazing gear. I truly recommend holy until then. You don’t even need to take holy azerite traits, just change over once you get better gear score (450 at least). Disc priest is borderline unplayable until this point due to having low secondaries and damage output.
Timewalking SUCKS: Not only is the tuning on monsters awful, damage is akin to lower level dungeons: massive, spiky - because healing then was Take 60%+ of your hp in hit, but heals heal for 60% of your hp. Again, not disc’s way to play. More than that though, your stats are lowered massively while in TW. The biggest culprit is your haste, when that gets lowered drastically in the dungeon your output is trashcanned. The only option you have is to alter all of your talents and heal more, using penance defensively and taking shadow covenant for AoE. You won’t feel like a disc priest and rightfully so, you’ll feel like a “normal” healer and realize you can just go holy to do that so…
TLDR; Go holy till higher gear score, or at the very least go Holy in TW dungeons because blizz ain’t fixing it. No need to change anything as Holy does well without min/maxxing or even azerite traits at all.
1 Like
Update - So some of the runs were good, and unfortunately related to what I mentioned: People not knowing mechanics really hurt, and those who don’t play carefully also sucks. I had a tank whose using heirloom gears with the exact same hp as I do (and I’m a healer), he ran and pulled a few groups of mob at once. When asked, he said he likes to “test his limits”.
Yeah I think I will stick with Holy in TW from now on. Thanks all for your advice.
1 Like