I started playing in MoP, and I chose Disc because it seemed really fun and cool. I loved the idea of shielding my allies to prevent them from getting hurt. Numbers didn’t matter to me, and I had no idea how Disc performed anyway.
Ever since Legion, I have not enjoyed Discipline at all. I try it every once in a while, but it just doesn’t feel good. Having to apply a weak heal to people so that I can then do damage and actually heal them just doesn’t make any sense to me.
So I came up with a new style (borrowed from other games and tweaked). I don’t expect this to actually go anywhere or be noticed, but it was fun for me.
The playstyle revolves around a light/shadow bar. You default to neutral when out of combat. There are 5 ticks on either side (5 ticks of light, 5 ticks of shadow). Casting a shadow spell moves you one tick toward the shadow side, and casting a light spell moves you one tick to the light side.
While on the shadow side, atonement is automatically applied to you and 4 nearby allies. Each tick of shadow increases your shadow damage dealt by 2% and increase mana cost of shadow spells by 5%. So, at 5 ticks you’ll be doing 10% more damage and 25% increased mana costs. This should burn through your mana, so it can’t be sustained for long. You’ll have a big finisher that does lots of damage and resets you back to neutral.
On the light side, your healing is increased by 2% per tick. In addition, each tick causes your spells to restore 2% mana. At 5 ticks, you’ll be restoring 10% mana per spell. You’d have a healing nuke that puts you back to neutral.
Penance would change based on which side you’re on: in shadow it can only do damage, and in light it can only heal.
There would be an ability to instantly swap to the other side, so if you have 5 light ticks you can go over to 5 shadow ticks. This would have a 1 minute or so CD.
You’d want to stay in shadow for as long as you can to do high damage and atonement healing. But you swap to light side for spot healing and/or mana restoration.