Disc is seeing very little play in raid this tier. It seems to be really lacking in raid-wide throughput compared to other healers, including holy. It’s very rare that a real single-target healer is needed (Broodkeeper’s mortal strike is this tier’s big exception).
Disc is also the least able to respond to a raid damage event without very significant pre-planning and ramp. While planning is obviously a big part of the spec, being utterly unable to respond to a mistake makes it weaker than other options.
I am theorizing that a raid-wide throughput CD would help both issues and help Disc see more high-end play.
I’m thinking something, perhaps, like this:
1.5 min Cooldown
Instant (off GCD)
No Mana Cost
Applies Atonement to all party or raid members within 40 yards and increases Atonement healing by 30% for 15 seconds.
Like Rapture or PW: Barrier, I see this as a first or middle tier talent, not a capstone.
This would give Disc some raid-wide throughput that would help Disc compete against Holy with Divine Hymn and Blessing of Salvation (and other healers with similarly strong AOE CDs like Rewind, Tranquility, and Revival). The spell doesn’t do any healing itself, so I feel that a shorter CD is warranted.
I think this would help keep Disc feeling unique, but would improve it’s toolkit in the area where it is the weakest. It would also soften the need to perfectly ramp every major damage event, which would improve performance of Disc players on the lower end of the skill spectrum.
The strength of disc is that they are flat out better at burst healing an entire raid during a short duration than any other spec in the game. Atonement is that powerful, because it doesn’t scale down as target count goes up. Disc has had moments post-legion rework where atonement duration was longer - and it always led to Disc being ludicrously OP. A singular button that gave everyone atonement for 15s would be just that. Especially on a 1.5 min CD. That is just saying ‘disc has the most powerful raid CD by far, and is now mana efficient while doing it.’
This doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have some kind of raid-wide. I think evangelism extending atonement by 6s, but ALSO applying atonement to the whole raid for 6s would improve usability of the spec a lot, especially in huge raid groups (since we can’t easily blanket more than 20). If not a change like that, then we could use something like luminous barrier back (but hopefully without losing actual barrier). Just something to easily hit all raid targets, as opposed to the current scheme, which is limited by haste caps.
Not all healers need raid throughput buttons. Holy Paladins and Disc Priests function without them because they rely on burst healing the group and have damage mitigation buttons.
While I don’t entirely disagree - they both DO have raid throughput buttons that function a bit differently than the others.
Wings is still very potent, especially with how much LoD (and the free LoDs from WoG) are healing for. And LoD’s cone is so enormous now you can hit people like halfway across a room from you.
Evangelism is essentially just a raid CD. The problem is that it isn’t in actuality a raid CD - which is what’s making Disc complete garbage in many raid evironments except for Mythic raid. TBH, Disc as a raid spec feels like it only functions due to players forcing it to in spite of the dev’s efforts to make it not work over the years by further and further limiting raid atonement specifically - and I don’t think that’s a healthy space for a spec to be in design-wise.
An ‘apply evangelism to everyone for 15s’ button is obviously overpowered. But I don’t think having Evangelism apply atonement to everyone on top of extending atonement would be a horribly bad thing. The worst thing that could happen from it is stopping Disc from casting radiance in its Evang ramp - and using the radiance for a bump of healing outside that window. It’d definitely impact HPS by saving mana, but not nearly as much as adding a whole new CD.
And, you know, I guarantee you it would make the spec way more popular in norm/heroic raiding even if the HPS didn’t change at all. Likely in mythic too.
This. When i read people asking for a raid wide cd i ask do they play disc because evang is our raid wide cd and is the burstiest one. Being its the burstiest one it should also in my book be a bit harder to implement.
I think thats a little nit picky I know what your saying but for all purpose’s it finishes off your ramp to allow a raid like cd affect. Saying its not, might confuse new people a little.
Very, and takes away the skill from playing the spec. We would become the new BM hunters. Exageration maybe but people asking for overkill tools that would break the spec
It would most certainly be a capstone and mandatory in any raid setting and totally overpowered. No mana cost?
It’s not a CD that can cover the whole raid. It’s a button that can cover 20 people, which is the whole raid in Mythic or sub 20 heroic/normal, but it isn’t a true raid CD in that it can’t provide full raid coverage in a ton of scenarios. Disc could use a button that allows that.
20 people can be a whole raid since heroic and normal can be flex. What your saying is disc cant cover a 30 man raid. I personally think disc works just fine in heroic but if your going to stack a 30 man raid you can go,holy or stay disc. Even in 30 mans i can find disc quite competitive, fight dependent.
I think disc is fine as it is. Im a Soley disc player. I dont cry when the raid team im in is 30 man. I understand its a choice i make to stay disc.
It can’t fully cover anything above 20. And there’s a lot of groups for which that is the case.
Disc is absolutely not competitive there - Even parsing well I’m so less useful than a real raid CD is in that content. I’d rather run my shaman who’s 15 ilvls behind. I’d like to play disc in a 30 man raid with friends, but fact is if I can’t blanket the raid properly, even if my HPS is doing OK, people I wasn’t able to cover have a much higher chance of dying to the mechanic I was ramping to heal.
I feel like if this were true, Disc would see more play than it does now. Maybe it’s a skill cap issue, but Disc is just not seeing much play right now compared to holy.
I’m theorizing that this is because of a lack of responsive CDs that don’t require a meticulous ramp to be of value. I think that’s a suboptimal spec design if it’s an absolute requirement for the spec to have any value.
I’m certainly open to tuning–either in duration or in the strength of the buff, but I don’t think it’s as cray strong as you’re saying.
Separate from that, mana longevity is a real pain point of this spec and is something that should be improved. That’s one of the reasons why I wouldn’t add mana cost to this. 1.5 min CD “free” ramp would be a big help in making Disc playable.
I’d like to get to actually main disc (as opposed to holy) for raid next tier, and I don’t see that as possible as things stand. It’s a fun spec, particularly in keys, but just doesn’t have the sauce for mythic end-game raiding right now.
Very open to alternatives though also. This is just one suggestion.
It’s undoubtedly true. There isn’t a healer in the game that can match Disc in short duration burst healing besides caster monk with a Power Infusion during Yulon, but they’ll instantly oom themselves trying, so they can’t. This doesn’t mean they’re the top HPS healers. It means that if you take a slice of the fight where they’ve got a full ramp and execute properly (and enough damage was taken in that window) they’re going to beat everyone else in HPS during that slice.
One problem is that healing profile isn’t necessary for most fights. How many fights in this raid have frequent windows where a huge burst heal on the whole raid is incredibly valuable, rather than just having strong overall throughput and a healer CD? Terros is one, for sure, but when you look at fights like Council, Eranog, Sennarth, Dathea, Grimtotem… Generally pure overall throughput healing is going to do more HPS.
And, you know, to be fair Disc probably can’t have HPS that competes with other healers when it’s got barrier and is bringing far more ST damage to a raid fight.
Keep in mind, Disc has been meta during the raid RWF in every tier for the past… IDK 3 expansions outside of specifically sepulcher. It absolutely keeps up enough in Mythic to be brought. It’s VERY unlikely that it won’t be viable for your mythic raid - as much as your skill at the spec might prevent you from being able to do so.
I promise I’m not trying to take a jab at you with that. Playing Disc is hard because ramping leaves you vulnerable, and you basically need a UI to inform you of ramp timers to have a lot of success with it. And I think the entire vault raid tier was pretty bad for Disc, actually - because we WERE undertuned until the .5 patch and still being taken as meta. I don’t disagree that an atonement applicator CD would make the spec more popular - I said as much. But a 15s blanket atonement button would have the top level disc players absolutely slamming HPS. It’s a good way to break the spec (again).
Assuming this is accurate as stated (and I’m not entirely convinced that it is), I’m not sold on there being a lot of value in this compared to much more straightforward and consistent raid healing that doesn’t require the level of preplanning needed to be useful as Disc. Disc’s rigidity is a real problem. And the further down the rankings you go, the bigger the problem it is.
It isn’t always a problem, though. It’s just a different healing profile, and that’s going to be heavily encounter dependent. In a raid tier like Nathria, Disc is incredibly valuable. In a raid tier like Sepulcher, they are incredible in a couple fights, and very, very bad in others.
Regardless, they still bring barrier and ST damage which are valuable in Mythic groups.
I agree bad players are very bad at disc. The core problem here is that when balancing mythic raids, disc SEVERAL TIMES in the past has been incredibly far past the balance line for top players but still sucked for players below them.
This is true, and is why softening the need to ramp perfectly–which is the hard part of playing disc–is a good thing. I’m all in favor of the best players being able to squeeze more value out of the spec than others, but the spread needs to be reasonable, since most people aren’t playing perfectly.
I agree that encounter design is important when looking at niches for healers. But I don’t agree that we would see Disc taking the cake right now, with it’s current toolkit, if Nathria was current. Spirit Shell was insanely overpowered when used correctly. THat was why Disc was so incredible in CN. I’m glad it’s gone, even though it was the niche Disc filled before.
I think it would be beneficial to pump disc’s non-shield throughput to bring it more in line with the others. The imbalance problem with Disc has always been that damage not taken (i.e., absorbed) is always better than damage healed after the fact. By making some of the non-shield throughput stronger through a CD, it’s easier to bring it up to par without making it completely OP, which I agree would be suboptimal.
Don’t get me wrong - I agree with you. Spirit shell should never have come back. But it wasn’t the reason Disc was the best healer in nathria. It was the reason Disc was horribly overpowered, sure, but the fight design played heavily into it. Almost every fight in that tier had damage patterns that matched Disc’s CDs. Spirit shell got nerfed (to the state it remained all the way through sepulcher) halfway through the tier, and Disc was still the most looked for healer for raid group recruitment at the time.
Disc fell off in Sanctum because Sanctum’s fights seemed almost intentionally designed to not work to disc’s strengths, and that pattern has pretty much continued. Blizz keeps making a mix of fights that have predictable raid-wide burst damage, and then the next fight will be a heavy rot damage pattern.
But again, Disc’s throughput can’t match other healers. At most it should match Paladin which brings similar DR/Damage and that’s more or less where it is right now.
I’d love ease of use and a raid CD to make the spec more approachable. Just atonement blankets for free mana on the entire raid is a bit extreme.
Power Word: Barrier, Rapture, and Light’s Wrath all want a word with you.
No, it makes it more skillful than the others. Resto Druid and Disco Priest have always been preplanners, that’s how they heal. You set ramps up, then heal or deal damage to heal, then you rest in the meantime and do a few things here and there while the other healers take care of most things needed.
Wut, you’re literally the only healer 100% designed around dealing damage to heal. If that’s not unique enough for you then Idk man, sounding quite spoiled here.
That doesn’t matter, if you choose to play Disc you should be looking up everything and understanding the timers, understanding every little thing about the fight in order to play Disco. That’s why there’s Holy, first. That’s a much more reactive healer and use that to figure out timings, then come in as Disc and play around those timings.
Agreed.
I do think Atonement healing should be a good bit stronger, though. Like I think Mastery should scale a slight bit better or you should start off with a bit higher Mastery base level, either of those would help a good bit more.
Nathria Disc was really good on almost every single fight. Damage was happening at almost perfect intervals.
Sanctum you had a couple fights, but a ton where it just wasn’t as good at covering as it had been. And Sepulcher went back on that even more.
Granted, if we’re talking about RWF comps, I don’t think any guild leader cares about how good disc is on any particular fight besides the hardest ones. If Disc is great in the wall fights, it’s going to be taken to splits, etc.
I know what your saying but for all purpose’s it finishes off your ramp to allow a raid like cd affect. Saying its not, might confuse new people a little.