Developers’ notes: Discipline Priests are performing beyond where we would like them to be, so we’re reducing the impact of their Power Word: Shield, Penance, and Atonement throughput.
Weal and Woe now increases the absorb of Power Word: Shield by 5% per stack (was 10%). Does not apply to PvP combat.
Penance damage and healing reduced by 15%. Not applied to PvP combat.
Allies with Atonement are now healed for 28% of damage done (was 32%).
Atonement is now 125% more effective outside of raids (was 100%).
Voidweaver: Void Blast damage increased by 10%.
I’m ok with everything except Penance. That nerf feels terrible. They hit the main issue with Oracle with Weal and Woe.
I’m really glad you’re not in charge of balancing disc priest.
People that keep talking about removing shields or significantly reducing them will just gut the spec to unplayable, not to mention remove the identity of the spec.
EDIT: And just for the unaware, cause sometimes it looks like people making recommendation, such as these, don’t even play the spec, so don’t understand, but the nerf to Weal and Woe is nerfing the amount of shielding done. It is a direct nerf to the shields everyone is complaining about in M+.
The things that need nerfed are the overwhelming survivability. So yeah nerf, Fort Buff, Barrier, Pain Supp, Shields and remove Lenience. Then move power back into direct healing like Penance, Flash Heal, Radiance, Atonement.
In addition to that the kit dedicated to extreme survivability makes sense until you get to Bosses and Mini-Bosses. If you can’t kick and you don’t have any stops. Your only way to help the group is shielding stuff that otherwise wouldn’t go through if you were playing Monk, Shaman, Pally, etc. Because they can just use a stop or kick. And Blizzard refuses to give us that. So the kit makes sense literally until extremely high keys where you can’t kick or stop a boss so your only option is a shield. They really just need to bring the class up to a design relevant for 2025.
Oracle’s damage is so garbage and their general utility is so bad, no one would even be playing it if it weren’t necessary to live one-shots in keys.
So how about Blizzard address the real problem, which is after a whole year now, player damage skill scales way too fast. Leading to people pushing into keys where any missed kick is a death, long before the key timer is any issue at all. This was brought up in the BETA Testing a year ago. Never addressed.
So then why should Paladin (a class that already has higher armor) have better survivability/cheese mechanics? Because that’s really all that’s being asked for with a shift like this.
Disc priest is not a super unique special little baby. It’s been around forever with these mechanics and it has not always been meta. It has been meta for EXACTLY 2 TIERS, which were last tier and this tier in the entirety of M+'s lifespan. And really what caused it was just atonement in dungeons getting boosted.
Druid, meanwhile has had streaks of 8 tiers in a row being the best M+ healer by far. Pally has also made its way in very often.
If mitigation tools on healers all go into the gutter we’re just going to see a resurgence of a meta where every other class that has strong mits gets taken instead. Oneshots exist by the pure nature of the content. It is infinitely scaling. Even if they delayed oneshot damage as long as they POSSIBLY could and you only got oneshot in a +20 key, you still get to a point where you’re getting oneshot and you need to figure out how to fix that with your comp, trinkets, etc.
There’s no true solution to this:
You could make damage so non-punishing that healers realistically shouldn’t even exist because the challenge is the timer and nobody is ever worried about staying alive. But if that’s the game we’re expecting them to make, we may as well just visit target dummies IMO.
You could make the game about solely rot damage, but that just severely limits healing kits in a totally different way. Now the best healers are strictly throughput healers and nothing else, and the one competing for top slot is whoever technically has the highest throughput. Etc.
Personally I just don’t think Blizzard ever intended for M+ to turn into what it did - and for everyone to be hyper focused on the top 20 spots on the leaderboard to strictly copy them. Because it’s truly a fools’ errand to try and balance that kind of content at the top end while still maintaining unique playstyles.
Honestly, there needs to be some forms of failure damage and significant single target pressure damage. And so long as those exist they will scale heavily as key level rises.
Good points.
It feels like the forum and streamers got hyper-fixated on how Disc matches against the highest key levels, ignoring the average play.
I feel good but not particularly overpowered. My Disc (Ilci Stormrage) is slowly gearing towards KSH/Portals, my usual goal. I ran a pair of +6 Meaderies tonight, one had an incompetent tank and no amount of OP healing could salvage the run. One had a good pusher tank and he was stacking things up to my limit, and I felt stressed as hell but managed through. In between, for all of Disc’s OP advantage, having enough gear and already timed the dungeon at +6- I was declined by 6 groups, only once for another Disc. So I don’t see how I’m overpowered nor benefiting from meta bias at the moment, at my level. Seems unfair if issues in the 15+ range are set to undercut my play so drastically.
Also, gonna repeat this pretty much everywhere- baseline Penance is weak. It has up to +~145% modifier procs stacked up in the talent tree- those need some pruning before nerfing the ability itself.
Brain dead response there. Lets try which content are your speaking about for 20 points. The majority of people are playing normal and heroic. at the 75% for heroic raiding disc is 3rd behind shammies and monks. Nerfs should be centered around majority of players, NOT the top players
PWS is disc identity, you cant just remove it.
So remove everything that resembles disc for 20 plus years and just everyone play some Bastardized version of holy?
This is what I was saying. Nerfing it doesn’t do anything unless you completely gut it. It’s kind of a fundamental ability for Disc, it would be like trying to somehow nerf Power Word: Serenity even though that heal is fundamental for Holy.
You either want to balance the spec or you want to kill it off completely.
You seem to be poor at reading and have somehow misread nerf as remove.
Every single time a shield/mitigation build has come up for Disc in those 20 years it has been promptly removed.
It’s still possible to make a light based healer with different mechanics than holy and voidweaver while not having the kit focus on doubling player effective hp.
Healing in heroic raiding is a joke and you should feel bad for even bringing it up.
It’s all about heal sniping at that level because people run way more healers than they need. And surprise, Shamans and Monks are the kings of heal sniping because 99% of their heals are smart heals that require very little targeting.
Crashing out just because your overtuned spec is just brought back down to parity with every other healer is just disgraceful, really.
TBH I kind of hate that this EHP argument got super popular to talk about.
It FEELS like people only ever really care about it when it shows up in a details window. Have Pally Devo Aura, BoPs, DS, AM show up there and they’d be looking like actual villains for talking so much about Disc EHP.
The classes that don’t have options like this? They’ve got HPS spilling out of their ears in 5 man (not you, though, Holy Priest).
Like I’m not going to say Disc isn’t overtuned right now - it is. However, it’s nowhere near as overtuned as people are trying to say.
I wouldn’t really defend it in raid. It kinda is the only healer capable of a couple of the damage patterns there because of how Oracle lets you ramp. It’s why they hit penance/atonement outside dungeon.
I just think this dungeon argument has been really silly. The spec is like barely too strong there. It’s not even maintaining a strong key level lead above other healers, it’s just very comfy to play with and people are hyping it up way more than it’s actually worth. I’m expecting the exact same thing to happen with Paladin or Shaman come 2 weeks from now. But probably not Paladin, somehow the Paladin community keeps gaslighting everyone into thinking Pally is trash every single tier even when it’s overrepresented.
the issue is EHP in 5 man content. Devo provides essentially the same benefit as lenience(which is active for every big damage event), and hpal has no method of providing overshielding. If a class (such as disc or aug) allows DPS to entirely neglect defensives or DR gcd’s then that class is obviously causing a balance problem. I think we could have overshielding be balanced, but it would probably require a massive increase in player health, an increase the spot healing capabilities of other healer specializations, and a increase in overall rot damage
I think this is simply due to the fact that Oracle disc started emerging and showing value just a few weeks ago-- People are finally approaching gear cap, and this is when/where 1 shots and overshielding provides the most value. Even with these nerfs, I’d wager disc will see the meta shift even further into their favor than it saw in Season 1, which was already extreme.
there is no data to support this claim, that was a weird shot in the dark lol.
Using actual data is a preferred approach to determining the state of things, over just experience. Maybe you’re new to the game or just don’t know what tools are out there, but wow logs is a very good tool.
i have been in the game since pre beta and as i said im basing it off experience in the raid at heroic and at mythic level and not everyone parses on warcraft logs
Weird day to come troll the priest forums, given the gutting nerfs to priests. There’s a lot of sad disc players out there trying to figure out why Penance got nerfed and not really in the mood for trolls.
Have some respect for those grieving their lost game time.