I don’t really believe that disc is much harder of a spec to learn tbh. I love disc and did keys (only up to like 17s) last expac as disc and it felt way better than it does now. Disc in mythic + is a lot of shadowmend spam and using rapture on CD for bad pulls. I truly think this idea that you need to be some sort of galaxy brain healer to use disc in keys is just a way to make up for how poorly tuned the mana is and how small the kit is. How is spamming shadow mend any different than spamming heal? At least with FC you have to watch your stacks.
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It is flat out a harder spec to learn. Is it a harder spec to master? No. But very few people hit a point of mastery on their class. Most people don’t even make it to 15 keys through a whole season, which only requires you to be somewhat decent. So let’s not pretend people are all hitting a point of mastery.
Disc’s difficulty comes down to a few things:
- They’re more effective used pro-actively even in lower keys, where other healers only need to think reactively for quite a while.
- Managing Atonement, and learning when it’s sufficient vs standard healing is something no class has to deal with at all. Most healers do some DPS in their offtime, but can pretty much commit to just healing in the meantime. Disc’s mana efficient tools are all wrapped up in Atonement - so you want it to cover as much as it possibly can - but Atonement isn’t enough throughput to brute force most situations, especially at low gear. Most other healers can fall back on hard throughput spells.
- Penance/Mindblast aren’t easy spells to maximize. When to use Penance defensively vs offensively is more of a choice than many make it out to be, especially in pug keys. But Mindblast (and mindgames) can make a world of difference in a key just by putting the debuff on correct targets.
- They’re a healer that’s heavily reliant on cooldowns. That seems like it’s a small barrier to overcome at first glance, but MOST players will hold cooldowns way longer than they should. I’d just point to all the pallies that quit that class when they could no longer play it like a holy priest, and their CDs became core to their playstyle. Remember at the start of this xpac when most pallies were saying Pally was trash? Meanwhile they’re by far the most dominant healing spec in the game in high level content. And Holy Priest, Druid and Shaman barely need to even consider touching their externals and they can hit +16-17s doing so.
Again, once you’re doing 20+ keys, the difference between the healers when it comes to pure input of skill is really miniscule. But when you’re talking about actually learning the class from the ground up, Discipline’s generally jumping hurdles while something like Holy can ease into its optimizations, and can honestly hit fairly high keys without optimizing much.
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disc is best with groups that know what they are doing - if you watched the mythic championships all the disc priests were healing but all the other characters self healed as well. disc is very viable if you have a group that donest go HEAL MEEEEE REEEE.
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I enjoy Holy and Disc, Disc was my new fav spec 8.3. It has interesting CDs, but I think Holy does as well. I think CD management is important for reactive healing as well, especially things like apotheosis and when your group is all taking crazy dmg. Choosing which aoe heal to use or staying single target-y.
I think that disc’s tuning has suffered this expac bc of the whole SS debacle and atm I just don’t find it that fun to heal as disc in mythics. As you’re saying, you have to watch CDs so closely that when you’re out of them you’re just kinda spamming smends. It feels kinda crummy.
I don’t know about what you mean by “kinda spamming smends” to be honest. I think, much as with all classes that rely on their CDs, the CDs optimize the class. That doesn’t mean when you have used this CD or that CD that you suddenly lack other options. I mean, on Prideful, for example, in my case on 14s and 15s, I cast Radiance, then dps, then repeat. Then I can no longer cast Radiance, but I have lot of options. I can spam smends, but can also PI, then cast PW:shield on everyone and then dps. Both do the job. You can also put up a barrier. There are loads of options.
The thing about CDs is they allow you optimize your spec/class, and you have to figure which is best for this or that. Or you have to figure out a combination of this one or that one. But with disc, this is crucial I think, and in many cases this use of your CDs and the right combinations and planning them out ahead is a lot more required more often than with other healers.
The what?
For me it is not as impactful as you make it seem. The choice between barrier-ing and rapture-ing a prideful is not as nuanced as you make it seem but I can appreciate that it feels that way for you. You switch off both? When you’re without either your hps is low because smend spam feels both inefficient and has no talent or legendary to back up it up. You’re watching radiance charges and if a dps isn’t smart about not using a defensive you’re going to have to shadowmend.
Re. SS if you don’t raid it might not be something you noticed but Disc was repeatedly nerfed throughout SL Beta. It was hard to balance the strength of Spirit Shell with atonement healing converting to absorbs. Bc of that atonement healing was heavily nerfed at the end of BFA and its why when you have no CDs all you can do is shadow mend in mythic +. Atonement used to have this really unique power where holy did poor dps and we got a great reward (healing) out of it. It isn’t the truth now. I’m not really sure that a lot of priests that solely play disc know that holy actually has a really similar lvl of DPS.
Yeah, the dps is there, but with holy it requires you to have windows. Disc does not–or not nearly as much, because you should be healing via damage via atonement as much as you can not only for good dps numbers, but to use your mana most efficiently. As with all healers except for disc, you can really only do one or the other–generally. That is, they are exclusive. With holy, if you are going to do any significant dps, you need windows when the healing is light. Of course there are minor exceptions to this–with your dots or even with Holy Nova spamming. But generally speaking. The size of those windows is going to directly translate into how much dps you can do. If you’re in a low skill group, you aren’t going to have the windows for dps that you would in a high skill group. In a low skilled group interrupts are going to be missed. Mechanics are going to be done poorly. A lot of fire is going to be stood in. A lot of damage is going to be poorly mitigated, etc etc. Naturally, as a result, your dps is going to depend on a lot of factors. A lack of windows is going to mean your dps will be garbage.
The general rule of thumb is the higher the key the less time you’re going to have to dps. A good portion of my damage on higher keys (and on fortified week especially) is from just SWP because if you can’t contribute to full smite casts you can still tab target DoT everything.
Healer DPS is just something that’s hard to balance overall. Holy Paladins do the most because they have to be in melee range and they’re literally designed around just being a healer-dps class. Disc is a healer-dps class, but their baseline damage is literally 50% less than Holy so it’s like throwing pebbles.
In BFA healers had way more time to dps overall. Usually spent 60-80% of my time dpsing even in 20+ keys.
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Interesting point. This the case, are paladins still doing double the damage of disc priests in higher keys–like in 20s and higher, for example. This may seem like a silly question, but with disc, the damage is required for a good part of your healing. Whereas, with a paladin healer, at least to some degree, they are mutually exclusive–that is, you have to do either one or the other–you are not healing by doing damage. Mind you I know there are other dynamics at play with paladins–like shortening your healing CDs or something with more Crusader Strike casts (my current paladin healer is a work in progress).
Disc really does feel like it’s missing a few buttons, IMNSHO. That’s why I can never bring myself to play it full-time even when it has some new gimmick to pad the meters… which seems to happen like every tier with some talent or borrowed power.
I think your argument is well formed, but incorrect in the fundamental play style of players.
All of the things you mentioned - having to do DPS, having to switch to enemies too, having to make sure you don’t outrange teammates, this is actually true for holy but in many cases UNTRUE for discipline. When you set an atonement out, there is no (known) range where your damage then doesn’t still heal that target. If there is correct me, but I know it’s FURTHER than 80 yards, which is at bare minimal more than double a holy’s range. For this reason, range is LESS of a concern for disc in moments where non burst happens. Holy must be positioned at the center of action to ensure range no matter what, and doesn’t have that leisure, and often putting them at more of a central danger point during fights, since people typically like to spread out in boss fights. Disc can disperse after setting out atonements and only step in when necessary.
Pre-emptive shielding is always the hardest for blizzard to balance because even blizzard stated it is the most broken form of healing. It’s a heal, before the heal is even needed. If you have the most broken abilities, you have no leg to stand on in an argument that the class is harder to use. If you scaled shields, healing and damage all up at the same rate, eventually the shield would be the only winner. A heal cannot reverse a 1 shot. A shield can. This is why shield class heroes will forever be more powerful and inherently easier to play and be successful with. It has nothing to do with the skill ceiling. It has to do with the abilities being more broken.
Also, DPS’ing on a discipline priest is incredibly brain dead since you can move while doing a ton of the damage you do, WHILE regaining that new position you need. We also have Penance, Mind Blast, SWP, and Smite. If you can’t manage a 4 button dps rotation while tossing shields, you just shouldn’t play.
You’re right. When we want to DPS, we have to target mobs, and when we have to heal, we can’t just keep DPS’ing. We have to switch back to the person who needs to heal. It’s MORE STEPS, more cursor usage, more things to do. When someone for you gets hit, you just keep dps’ing and it fixes the problem. You still have to watch health bars and dps as holy, you just can’t do as much DPS, which means in turn stuff also dies faster, which means there’s even MORE strain on your mana as holy than discipline, since fights last LONGER, which means you need to be even BETTER with your mana management. This is also demonstrated by holy priests being able to empty their mana pools almost 3x faster than a discipline priest even can when both stand next to each other spamming. Yes, flash heal will drain you faster than shadowmend.
People tend to think that because disc has more people towards the top end of key levels, that it means they have a higher skill cap when in fact it’s quite the opposite. There’s still holy priests hitting 22 and beyond, and far fewer of them for a reason. Simply put, it’s because it’s harder to be great at that spec than it is discipline, hence higher skill ceiling.
Both arguments have merit, but the fact that there are fewer hpriests in higher keys tells the entire story about which class it is harder to be great with.
Um, that is not the range issue being referred to. If you track atonement carefully when you cast Radiance, you will sometimes see that this person did not get it or that person did not get it. I don’t find this often when healing Horde NA, tbh, but get it a lot when healing alliance. This is not to dump on Alliance, but this has been my experience. Hence, I am often thinking about who is the best to target the cast on–and often simply try to position myself in the middle of the group and then cast it on myself. I find that mages seem to be the main offenders–the last fight at Mists has been a notable and repeated problem when healing that on Alliance, and I have seen in streams by this or that Disc priest that I am not alone in having this problem at times. Some streamers healing disc have accused others of ignorance about Disc priest healing, and one I know of has even accused said mage or boomy of trolling by always running or blinking out of range.
If this is the case for you, great. Maybe you are limiting your damage casts to mainly penance and purge the wicked. And if that works for you, fantastic. In my case, I cast a number of damage spells that require planting. My only damage spells that allow movement are Penance, which I almost always move on when casting, and Purge the Wicked–which I have spammed on the move–mind you the mana cost of doing that can add up. All other spells, and the main one I cast, Smite–because of its extreme mana efficiency in terms of both damage and healing, have a cast time that requires you to plant. I don’t limit myself to casting Penance and Purge the Wicked the most. That would explain what you are seeing vs what I am seeing.
In regards to mana issues of holy vs disc, I personally find Disc to have more mana issues. I am not alone in this view either. Jak will tell you the exact same thing–that disc has a lot of mana issues that holy does not. If you don’t believe me you ought to simply ask Jak directly when he streams–which is really often. There are instances where this may not be the general case though–which is obviously what you are seeing. In trash pug groups where you get a lot of standing in fire, missed interrupts, poor skill at mitigating, etc disc priest has a ton of mana issues because of overreliance on shadow mends. I’ve also noticed a lot less mana issues when healing grievous as holy vs disc–such as last week. I would add though that in a great group–that is, one that dodges attacks well, does interrupts routinely, where the deeps use defensives and the tank mitigates well–it is a whole other story. In this case, disc mana use is optimized.
As for your argument, I understand where you are coming from–it takes longer to down bosses when you heal holy because the fights are longer. The dps is typically lower in this case. Hence you have to heal longer so your mana management is that much more critical.
Yes, you make a good point here. In regards to this argument though, yeah, it is harder to achieve more as holy, hence, it is that much more critical you be better at your class. But, just the same, if you poured the same effort into mastering a disc priest you would go further. Also, disc is generally a more complicated healer to master. Hence, the skill ceiling is higher–in regards to those things. The consensus and community view is that holy is the easiest of healers to play, and disc is the hardest. A lot of experienced healers will tell you that. If you hold a different view, all the more power to you. I typically admire those who take a contrarian view and can respect that wholeheartedly. I also feel that if you disagree and love playing this or that healer then that is great!
I think if you invest yourself into being a great holy priest healer that is admirable. But if you want to be the best healer, lol, right now? I think you go holy pally. And in regards to holy priest vs disc priest–at least in M+, I agree with Madskillzz. He considers Disc priest to be an A class healer. He considers Holy Priest to be a B class healer.
In summary, yeah, being at the top of your game requires more skill if you go the route of holy priest–and because you need to be that much better to compensate for how Blizzard seems to forever have class balancing difficulties. But, just the same, disc is more complicated and hence, harder to master–which is the consensus view.
Jak also didn’t play holy as NF at the start of the expansion, so even jak didn’t understand hpriests as well as I from the getgo. Just because someone is at the top of io doesn’t make them the most knowledgeable. It definitely means he has a better team than most everyone. Jak also created his guide loosely based on what I was saying 6 weeks before he said it. I preached FC for M+ from day 1 and the ENTIRE community laughed at me. Now the community sees it as the CRUTCH the entire class stands on in M+. Funny story.
He also makes suggestions as if you have a pro team, for example censure. Not the greatest talent unless your team knows how to work around it for pugs. Average forum dwellers like you and i that pug 24/7 cannot utilize his strategies like you think. His advice isn’t wrong to take censure (in cases other than necrotic), if you have a pro assed team. Otherwise, the general playstyle when u pug dictates shining force as the greater talent for everything except plaguefall to have an additional interrupt for when ur dps are straight up failures.
When discipline runs into mana problems, it’s not the problem of the priest, it’s the problem of the group progressing to the next pack too fast. Forcing a priest (ESPECIALLY DISC) to run and catch up to an already damaged group, and try to reverse said damage is what OOM’s the disc priest. If the group waited 2 extra seconds for the priest to get there and set out shields and atonements pre engagement, the disc priest wouldn’t be stuck shadow mending everything, dumping their mana at exponential rates.
Shadowmend costs less mana than flash heal, so there’s that, but more importantly, if you’re having to use shadowmend for anything other than big spot heals mid fight, your team is screwing you, not your mana pool. If he’s having mana issues, it’s not a class design issue, it’s a team failure issue. I have 4 priests, and have been playing hpriest since BETA vanilla.
The damage he has to reverse running into a fight with a half dead tank is only fixable through the burst that shadowmend offers, and then he’s not dps’ing or setting atonements, which means he’s also forced into the same predicament as soon as one of his DPS takes some damage as well…more shadowmending. If you don’t have to do that as a disc priest, you NEVER oom. NEVER. Not as NF. One NF pop and mana pots reverses ur mana issue almost 100% of the way if ur using them appropriately.
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Guess you were preaching it in the wrong places, because pretty much every Holy Priest out there, and even this forum had been saying FC was really good and propping up the spec. Even in raid, where FC has been the meta since week 2.
The argument was whether or not Holy was good even with FC. And on these forums there were a few that thought it had potential to do fairly high keys. So this isn’t some kind of revolutionary thing.
Jak himself swapped to holy before the 9.0.5 patch and was using FC then. He just played discipline because it was his raid spec, and it was undisputedly better than Holy there.
I don’t understand this whole section.
You get the mana regen regardless, because it comes off a debuff, not from any buff to yourself. Why wouldn’t you use the DR on the tank?
FC is faaaaantastic. Sadly, though, I am tired of banging my head against a wall because of priest weaknesses. I love disc and how it’s super fun but disc got shafted with all the nerfs. I know you mention that a top healer like Jak has a team, and we–the guys like you and I don’t but if it’s worth anything, note that Moadmoad is raving about H Pally damage. And right he is to. I have been running dungeons as H Pally and sometimes topping the damage meters. To me, holy priest is dull because I have healed so much for so many years and H Priest is so basic I find it boring, but then H Pally as well–but then with CD management it is different now. I love disc though, and despite a lot of criticism of how I mouseover heal and other criticisms, it is super easy to time 15s in good groups (I just healed a 15 we two chested), and I like doing damage but the nerfs have killed some part of my enthusiasm for priest healing. Why is the damage garbage vs Holy Paladin when Holy Paladin has plate armor, an immunity, etc.? Hence i am rethinking everything and probably going to main h pally (again) going forward.
Imagine being a Mistweaver main then lol.
I play all the beer at least a little bit but Disc Priest STILL has it great compared to MW.
Imagine being created and designed as a melee centric combat medic and over the course of a few xpacs getting… whatever it is Mistweaver is now?
A mana starved quasi cleave healer that can literally go Oom in 20 seconds. A Fistwraver that is forced to use their raid heal(EF) in order to melee heal ND Mana Conserve…
Analysis of wow makes me think that they just throw darts in development. Mistweaver ends up as the tail on the donkey a lot tho.
Disc and Holy are doing good tho. I’ve just started working on Disc in keys this week so I guess I’ll have to report back further on that at a later date. Not gonna miss an opportunity to cry about MW tho.
Yeah, I am with you. I have really enjoyed healing Mistweaver, tbh. Kickweaving is really fun. Do you follow Madskillzz and Jak? Both play Mistweaver, even now–despite it’s low, bottom of the bin state. I don’t what you can do though. Blizzard ought to make a better effort at balancing–mind you, maybe we oughta just hang in there. Look at the recent tank buffs and rebalancing news. Maybe healers are next? Probably not, but who knows?!
I dunno, dude. Much as I love disc healing, and have really upped my game since starting to main on one late in BFA, it is big disappointment once you start pushing higher content. When I want to up my raider io score, even just one notch–like to get my KSM done, dude, the invites are so few and far between. It was the same in 8.4–nobody would ever invite me for 20s–and when I did get the very occasional invites, the groups were bad–I was the highest ilevel by a mile, my gear was all socketed, and the total picture was gear as topped out as the top ten disc priests in the world, I had more than 130 keys timed 15 and higher vs 20 or so timed 15s and higher for the others–and most others were 5-10 ilevels lower. Now all the people posting saying “Resto Shammy preferred, R Shammy only,” etc. like in 8.4 for Resto druids? It is all really discouraging.
My point? I am now almost sure I am going to main holy paladin starting soon. I am making one now, and despite finding it a lot less fun than disc priest, I want to push the content and am sick of the balancing problems and the problems getting invites. Hence, maybe you ought to rethink priest healing if you want to push into high keys. If you are not so keen, you are fine.
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@Kaddie as a fellow long-term priest player, and the top ranked oceanic holy priest in M+ last season (done by pugging alone, I didn’t have a group) I feel like I have a lot of experience with the class and I just wanted to respond to some of your comments.
You believe holy priests have more mana issues than Disc. With the flash concentration legendary we should never run out of Mana. If you are running out of mana, then your playing the class wrong. I would argue that we are now on parr with Shaman (in terms of mana efficiency) when using this legendary in both M+ & Raiding. The only exception to this rule will be on Raid bosses where we rely heavily on PoH/Circle/Sanctify and do very little single target healing, but then it just comes down to smart spell usage and not spamming or over healing at the wrong times.
You believe Holy is the harder of the 2 specs to player and master. It is the popular opinion of those who have played holy & disc, that holy is by far the easier spec of the 2 to learn and master, and discipline requires significantly more attention and micromanagement. Now whilst your personal experience between the 2 specs might be different, you are the minority, player feedback is strongly against you on this.
I do agree with your comments that that playing disc effectively in M+ keys does heavily rely on your group executing mechanics correctly. Reactive healers have a significantly easier time adapting to mistakes and changes. Thus holy is definitely the preferred healer for pugs.
You know it’s interesting, I initially rolled with my Priest when Shadowlands launched after maining mage for 2 expansions. I wanted to heal, primarily Disc. The first few weeks of SL/M+ were rough with people learning mechanics (which Disc doesn’t really do well with), and it soured me towards the spec. The community’s utter disdain for Holy became ultra apparent, too, so I leveled and geared my Shaman, because that’s where the meta was. (I ended up falling in love with Resto/Elemental, much moreso than Holy/Shadow, so it ended up working out for me).
But that leads me to this:
Interestingly, I leveled up my Paladin and I saw the bonkers DPS they could provide as Holy, and like 2 months ago I was telling everyone in my guild “man, I really think Holy Pally is gonna be the way to go for their sheer DPS contribution helping to time keys.” Sure enough, this is the direction the meta is now going. The “LF R Shammy” requests, while still there, are slowly becoming “LF H Pal”.
Just yesterday I changed my Paladin to Venthyr and I’m starting to practice playing it. I played Holy Pally in 8.3, so the meleedin healer isn’t super foreign to me. It’s way less fun to me than my Resto Shammy, that’s for sure.
A final point, but Resto Shaman can actually contribute pretty decent DPS, too. More and more are utilizing the Earth Elemental+Earthquake legendary, which combined with the buffed Chain Lightning means they can actually pump some decent numbers in m+ dungeons. It’s not quite ashen hallow/holy paladin, but it’s actually still substantial.
What’s ultra discouraging is seeing Holy Paladin kind of step on the toes of the original class designs of Disc and Mistweaver, and perform their roles better.
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While completely abandoning the role of being single target heal bomber.
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