Disc oracle damage and atonement healing

Classes Priest
1

Ill start off by saying that as a long time disc player, I dont like the voidweaver hero talents. It seems like blizzard went all in on atonement. When I play this spec I feel like a subpar dps class who heals passively. It feels too simple and boring. Voidweaver disc doesnt feel like disc.

So that brought me to disc oracle, specially a sheild build. Its really fun to play. You need to be proactive with rapture, you need to rotate cooldowns to get through difficult pulls, and I love getting to spam ultimate penance a bunch of times each run. Disc oracle feels like a throw back to shadowlands disc where its difficult, you need to know the routes and damage patterns, and most importantly, you need to be proactive. Disc oracle just feels more like disc to me, so ive been loving it.

The problem I have with oracle is that there is a lot of healing absorbs this season. In places like necrotic wake, grim, and even the arak dungeons, many mobs put curses and other forms of healing absorbs on the tank and group members. Sometimes in places like GB several people can get cursed at the same time. It makes it really difficult to put out the raw hps when your primary source of healing is preventing the damage from happening.

Ive only done up to 6s (priest is an alt, started late and have been having terrible luck with drops), but im rarely above 100k dps overall at the end. The primary source of my damage is reflective sheild.

I really feel like oracal disc needs some help. My damage is very low compared to the voidweaver hero spec, which causes my atonement to be very low hps overall.

I would love for reflective sheild to get a buff to do more damage, or maybe interact with atonement. Another option could be to increase our penance damage by adding a buff into the oracle hero talents.

In short I feel like im being forced to go into voidweave for higher content due to the lack of damage and raw hps with oracle, but I find the playstyle boring and simplistic. Id like some oracale damage buffs to both help the group on dps checks and increase my raw hps for healing absorbs and high damage pulls.

How have you guys been enjoying oracle and what suggestions do you have to make it more competitive with voidweaver?

4 Likes
2

I Enjoy Oracle, Im a Biiiig fan of the Shielding/Light aspect myself. I think the reason why Oracle lacks in the DMG Dapartment is just due to the limited amount of Active spells Oracle has compared to Voidweaver. I think some QOL changes, The can revert DIvine Aegis back to being 10% 5% sucks… I think Divine star/ Halo should Benefit from preventive measures as well.

Stats do play a biiiig role I tend to target Haste, Mastery then crit the more haste the more your Dots Tick. Smiting and Penance on CD is Key as well We are still required to take SHadowfiend and Inescapable Torment as that also has a huuuuuuge impact on our DMG/Healing

3

Oracle was not designed with how discipline works in mind, which is apparent when you look at how Premonition works. It basically does nothing to empower the discipline talents that work, while voidweaver doubles down on them. Blizzard spent all of their dev time for priest on making oracle’s design palatable, but didn’t consider if it even made sense for discipline in the first place.

We just really need to hold out hope that the reason priest is getting no changes in 11.0.5 is because they’re completely overhauling every talent tree and every hero spec in 11.1 and have been working on it since alpha or beta but knew it wouldn’t be ready because of the scale of the undertaking, so they just got the priest talents up to the minimum possible standard before setting them aside to start rebuilding the foundations.

4

I truly think if they just cranked up Oracle Disc’s damage to be closer to Voidweaver, Oracle would feel so much better.

Definitely need to buff damage on Penance and Smite, even Mind Blast should be cranked up because for Oracle Disc— it doesn’t really have a shadow damage modifier for the shield build. That or give Mind Blast 2 charges again or a lower CD— something.

Oracle Disc just has fewer ways to actually do DPS compared to the many Shadow spells Voidweaver can use.

Additionally, more focused buffs for the shield build, like Divine Aegis buffs and more of a PW: Shield buff. I’m a huge fan of the way Disc used to play before we turned into a mini-burst Shadowfiend pet class. Oracle seems to want to be a way to give us back “old Disc”.

While Oracle probably shouldn’t do as much DPS as Voidweaver since Shadow spells should thematically be more offensive, Oracle should at least be near Voidweaver’s damage. Right now, the delta between the 2 hero talents’ DPS is too wide.

Regardless of which hero talents we take as Disc, Disc is still a DPS to heal spec in general. Each hero talent tree should feel good doing that job. Right now, Oracle does not.

5

So I’ve been playing super casually on a couple healers this expansion.

Oracle disc has by far felt the most fun to me to play, so I’ve been starting to play it more. ATM I know it’s capable of +10s because I went into Necrotic Wake 10 with it and ran out of time just before hitting last boss with ~8 deaths (5 of which were a wipe to trying to skip the miniboss and failing). And Stitchflesh was heal-able and that’s been one of the harder challenges this xpac while climbing.

Will likely get some more 10s done this week and MAYBE go for a push on it if I’m feeling it with some friends and see where we end up.

As far as DPS - realistically in 9s and the 10 I tried I was at around 220k overall. If I was playing Voidweaver I know I’d be near 350k. So it’s a fairly big loss of about 33% - and it’s not like it’s way easier in exchange or something. At most it helps a tank feel safer because PW:S with tier set is often shielding in the 3-4 mil range - and it’s better for incidental pug damage because VW doesn’t deal with someone screwing up very well.

6

It seems like it would make sense for voidweaver to be the damage focused hero spec while oracle should focus on higher raw healing and absorption instead.

It’s hard to see where exactly you’d fit changes into Oracle though since a lot of the talents just go into premonition or some personal defense and utility. You’d have to mix in some base changes to disc as well I think.

IE: buff contrition by a lot and have it diminish past 5 targets so it’s not OP in raids if that’s the reason they’ve left it so low.

Maybe throw into assured safety that PoM automatically triggers on any target missing 10%+ of their health. That would make PoM work better in an absorb focused spec.

They could add to Waste no Time that it makes radiance always trigger divine aegis and increases the value of aegis.

7

Yeah, I made a post about this before. I totally agree Oracle is fun. It just needs numbers tuning. It has a few “problems” mainly in

  • It consumes a lot of mana because you may or may not be running mindbender (I think a lot of people would prefer not to run it since that’s Voidweavers thing)
  • Very low damage compared to Voidweaver. I had also asked for a Reflective Shields buff on the beta. Obviously never happened.
  • It’s actual healing part with all the healing absorb shields in the dungeons.

The first two are easy. Buff Shield Discipline, or add mana reduction nodes to Oracle. Increase its damage output also buffs its atonement and helps the spec to just do damage.

For the last bullet it’d be interesting if unused shields healed the target they’re on when they expire. So if I put a 4 mil absorb on someone with a healing absorb, it heals them for the remainder of the shield at the end. Feel like that’d be super cool and sincerely I dont think it’d really cause any balance concerns. It either blocked damage and you got the value out of it, or it just healed a target that didn’t need healing because the shield never broke… Unless that target had a healing absorb on ofc.

1 Like
8

I do as oracle. I have gone a different way. I like having that front load dps with the 4 empowered insights for damage (providing im not using it for a healing cd) I dont go into AoW side. Down to heavens wrath and weal and woe. I make heavy use of clairvoyance and piety when i need a healing cd which combined mind bender and instant PWR when needed. Heavy use of pws obviously and rapture. I did try AoW but i just felt odd not having mindbender.

9

This is the premium priest copium that keeps getting snorted since DF released lol

10

It absolutely is. To think otherwise would mean that Blizzard actually does simply ignore one of their classes entirely.

Which, of course, they do. There’s no other reason several classes should be on their third complete talent overhaul for every talent tree after 10.0 while priest is still operating primarily with Dragonflight alpha talents that Blizzard admitted were rushed out the door for the 10.0 release.

Are there any other classes that haven’t received complete revisions of their talent trees since September 2022, or is it just priest? Maybe druid, too? Regardless, basically every class except priest and druid got more iteration and refinement in the 10.0 dev cycle alone than priest has received in two full expansions at this point.

11

Druid did get their class tree reworked

12

Really I don’t mind Oracle having lower damage, I actually think that is a good distiction between Oracle and Voidweaver.

What I hate though is the lack of interaction with our preventative tools outside of PW:S, IE renew and PoM. Oracle makes you think of someone who can see into the future and predict something so it would make sense that the spec would be targetting the heals/shields we can get out before damage comes.

I would love to see Oracle adjusted to give it a more sustained instead of bursting healing portfolio, allowing each Penance to tick to spread purge the wicked, while each smite hit didn’t just proc atonement but also forced each Renew to tick immediately, getting extra value out of it, and while renew doesn’t need to be as strong as druid/evoker HoTs it could stand to heal a bit more baseline and get a decent through-put buff for oracle imo.

Also I would like to see a change where if a target has PW:S active with PoM and takes damage, that doesn’t break the shield, then PoM will still bounce but its healing will instead increase the shield by that amount so it still bounces like it should. Sometimes with a solid Rapture+crit a shield can last a full duration and then PoM never bounces which makes it a waste.

13

This is why I wish Luminous Barrier wasn’t tied into a talent choice node with Power Word: Barrier. I’m sorry, but no Priest is picking Luminous Barrier over PW: Barrier. I’ve heard people make arguments that Luminous Barrier “could still be useful in some fights where people are spread out” la la la. It doesn’t matter. Disc Priests will just Atonement heal through the damage and spot absorb with PW: Shields. Dropping PW: Barrier never feels worth it in 99% of situations.

But hey, Mages got Mass Barrier and can do some piece of our job better than we can, so why am I complaining right. /s

14

I see what youre saying with the different class fantasy’s, the problem is at its core the spec (regardless of talents) uses damage as the primary source of healing.

Sheilds are great, but theres a small cooldown and it doesnt actually replenish health. Renew also is laughable, its essentially an attonement applicator when you dont want to radiance.

I dont think oracle needs to be on par with voidweaver, since one is a double hybrid healer and the other is a healer/dps. I do thing there are ways to compensate for the lack of atonement healing. Like making reflective sheild interact with atonement. This would allow tanks to receive some healing as their sheild is consumed. Or if they want to be lazy they can just straight up buff atonement for oracle. Our damage wont go up, but the conversion to healing can compensate for the last of hps (outside of absorbs).

15

Nothing I recommended changes that. All it did was buff other elements of its damage to healing so that instead of it being based around ramp ups it can have decent constant through-put via better spreading of purge the wicked and smite procing renew healing.

So lets put it this way. Right now renew is ticking for around 30k around 5 times at my curret gear, making it 150k total HoT. With my recommendation everytime you smite renew heals an additional 30k, which would mean if say you smited 3 times over the course of the HoT now healed 240k and will do more the more you smite.

It buffed the healing of the HoT without using a boring +healing that is so common. It also means there is more power behind casting smite for healing so 90% of your healing isn’t mind blast+penance burst windows(exaggeration but you get my point.)

Add in that Purge the Wicked would spread per penance bolt, meaning potentially up to 8 target get effected with Harsh Discipline, and suddenly you have a spec that has some respectable constant healing outside of just the burst windows and we haven’t taken anything away from the damage to healing playstyle. And if Penance spread is to much then let smite also spread it to a new target whenever you hit an affected target.

The only thing you might want to consider adding would be some method of AoE renew application perhaps tied to Rapture, or Barrier/luminious or maybe a node that allows PoM to also apply renew when it bounces.

I want to stress you still keep the damage to healing style, you are just shifting where the healing is coming from, IE less radiance/penance burst, and more renew/smite/purge.

16

I’m all for Oracle being the light version of Holy and Disc, focusing on Light healing rather than the default Shadow Covenant. I’d love to see spells and talents added or reworked to give that option to Disc and Holy, allowing focus on Light spells for both healing and dealing damage. Oracle should have Premonition not cycle through charges, but instead apply the intended effect when casting a spell that activates the said Premonition, rather than waiting for the right one to pop up. That would create better gameplay, giving the specs cooldowns to navigate burst healing checks. I’m longing for a Holy Light-themed heal spec talent choice for Disc—I’m so tired of the Shadow Covenant build. It’s not fun after all these years focused on a Walmart version of a Shadow Priest.