It’s simple math. The shields are barely stronger than Voidweaver. Literally only 10% stronger which is negligible.
If you compare Atonement output between Voidweaver and Oracle - Oracle can only do like 40% of the healing output. And that is accounting for the fact your atonements last longer. You still only do like 40% of the total healing despite having massively longer atonements.
Now, I wouldn’t expect it to do the same healing and damage as Voidweaver because that’s Voidweavers thing. But I would expect it to be closer to like 75 or 80% of Voidweaver’s damage and healing and the remaining 20% is the utility tax of having interesting things you can do with Premonition. And Voidweaver’s utility is just big dmg and healing.
I would either put a flat atonement buff on one of our healing nodes, or honestly the spec needs the damage to be at all competitive towards Voidweaver which cranks – the Preventative Measures node probably needs to be turned up from 40% damage to like literally 100% which would be like a 40%~ buff over where it is. Which would take us to like 60% of Voidweaver’s damage and healing. Still probably too low but it’s a start.
Another way to look at it is that Oracle should be doing more Healing than Voidweaver because it doesn’t have the utility of the damage output and then you could leave Oracles damage where it is. But it doesn’t really matter how you look at it I guess, it literally just doesn’t have either at the moment is the issue. There’s no tradeoff or interesting choice. You just pick Voidweaver, every time.
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Agreed. Still too many “dead” nodes on the Oracle tree that don’t benefit our throughput and are clearly leftover from when the spec was designed purely for Holy.
Assured Safety needs to apply Renew instead of Prayer of Mending (a spell which has zero interactions with Disc) so our passive healing is supplemented. Our atonement throughput is still atrociously bad and every other damn spec in the game has at least some passive healing where we have none. Discipline just has to work overtime for no reason.
Also 40% is still not enough of a damage increase on our main abilities. Oracle still doesn’t hold a candle to Voidweaver in pure damage, but neither spec is remotely close to Holy’s damage capabilities or any other spec in the game rn for that matter. Flawlessy executed damage ramps still only get our damage to what other healers can do passively. And don’t even get me started on 90% of our throughput being attached solely to the stupid squid.
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Unfortunately I doubt it will get looked at from a conceptual perspective until at earliest 11.1
So I just wanted to draw attention to the numbers differential which leave Disc priests with no choice. They could choose to bring the damage and healing close to voidweaver and the differential is “What can you do with Premonition?” Or put its healing above Voidweavers and leave it at lower damage. Making you decide between healing or damage.
Anything really, like I said, just wanted to point out that it is currently not useful in any capacity.
Well it is absolutely useful in pvp. I’m sure this is about pve, but it is our best hero talent in pvp and is also very fun, so just want to make sure that is clear. I love the concept and gameplay of oracle, I enjoy the added complexity and min maxing. It feels like a good addition to disc.
I think you can very easily fix the issues of oracle because it only comes down to tuning, not design. It is designed well. They could definitely add some more damage to Preventative Measures, the healing is already comparable to voidweaver it is just more on demand healing rather than burst reliant on voidwraith. The damage difference is mostly the issue which is solvable in pve.
Also in terms of raid, I think piety is very undervalued right now by people. I won’t be raiding much outside of heroic this time around, retired from hof 4 day a week raiding lol, but piety is something you can minmax for pretty insane healing.
Wait, they were going to saddle us with having to take Oracle?
Yes, I am speaking about PvE.
I wouldn’t say it’s designed fine… There’s a decent amount of things going on with it that don’t make sense and could be fine-tuned to flow better.
But I think it’s fun, which, is why I want to see it buffed. But yes, numerically it simply cannot compete in PvE. There is no place for it. Which is why I made this post, because I would like to play it and not feel like I’m trolling.
Have you tested it or are you hyperboling? ( take that back i can see you said you played with it ) Ive played with both and my tank agrees i can push out more healing with oracle but more dps with VW
In a Key setting that may change but so far in heroics thats what im finding
Oracle can support a very different playstyle than shadow cov, mindbender atonement healing.
I personally like taking my pvp build oracle build focused on aegis of wrath, weal, ulti p with cdr reset and ignoring mindbender shadow cov into pve. Heavy investment into mastery makes your raw heals and shields very strong.
Prerapture or premonition huge shields across your entire party in the beginning of a pull.
Combo piety with radiance and ulti p to completely heal through heavy aoe. If ulti p is on cd combo with double radiance and a defensive penance on high hp target.
During clairvoyance you can do everything and it feels like a godly button to press.
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You guys aren’t factoring in the Disc tier set bonus as well. 3 smites and your PWS absorbs +45% more.
The problem is, youll end up having the Legion Disc Priest all over again. It was incredibly overtuned and destroyed in PvP. Disc is one of those specs that cant do too much damage as it heals through that damage. They just need to change the mastery of disc and it would be better.
Disc still does 2x the dps of all the healers in raid from all the logs I’ve seen. I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
Wrong that is exactly what they should do. The reality is whenever disc has appropriate damage is when the spec actually works, and it has yet to actually dominate in pvp it has literally never won a tournament even when it is supposedly “OP.”
That damage us the specs utility. It doesn’t have interrupts, it has bad CC, terrible mobility, can only dispel magic and disease, and its DR options exiat only to keep the spec aggressive giving it little to no ability to play on the back foot.
The spec absolutely MUST have the strongest damage that makes it a threat to DPS classes because without that it simply does not function. I shouted this from tbe mountain tops during the brief period in DF when disc was good. I got told I didn’t know what I was talking about and that disc “just needed more healing from atonement to compensate” and it would be fine.
They made those changes…and the spec died and was never relevant during the rest of the expansion with freaking holy doing better damage than it. Bottomline if they are not going to give disc the respectable damage the spec REQUIRES to function than they need to redesign it, period.
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Oracle had the coolest fantasy appeal for me but it sucks to play.
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The reward for playing disc with its clunky healing mechanics is supposed to be high damage. If they remove the damage from the spec, why would anyone bother with juggling atonements? In its current state it’s just an off spec for Shadow priests who gets pressured into healing for a guild but hate playing healers.
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In Mythic+ at the moment Disc is neither the highest HPS healer nor the Highest DPS healer, along with providing no utility.
In Raid there are some healers pretty close to Disc in damage, but it is probably the highest dps healer yes. However, that doesn’t really mean it has utility. If you factor in the damage it does compared to any other healer it’s less than 1% increase in total raid damage. You could literally triple Disc DPS and it’d still be worse than any of the general raid buff things like DH or Mage provide.
I’m not really asking for these changes though. I’m just asking the Devs/Balance Team to realize something is not quite right here. In M+ we’re not the highest HPS healer. And not the highest DPS Healer despite it being our original purpose. We were the first DPS healer but that has been long gone as our niche. Blizzard balanced that out of the equation ages ago. Every healer can do good damage now and Blizzard tunes it to be roughly similar. We also provide next to 0 utility. I’ve even tested most mobs and Mind Control and most of the stuff you’d want to Mind Control is immune to it despite not even being CC immune. They are just randomly immune to Mind Control specifically. Same with Mind Soothe. Like you can’t even soothe the mini boss before the 3rd boss in CoT despite it being the correct type. You have to kill it for the door to open and that mob is a death sentence to Disc because it’s all poison and, you guessed it, we can’t dispel poison. We also can’t move and heal.
In Raids Disc will be brought because historically it has been the highest DPS healer and brings Barrier. People just sort of accept that. However I think if raiders actually looked at their total damage contribution to the raid instead of just to other healers. They’d realize Spirit Link Totem is basically better than Barrier. Plus Ancestral Protection Totem. And the damage is less than a 1% increase. You should just take a second Shaman or Paladin probably because they have better healing, situationally similar damage, and way better utility. Unless you are literally Echo or Liquid in which case you obviously know what to do and youre not on these forums.
This post however was not about Raid or M+ in which we’re passable in raid but actually terrible in M+. I simply wanted to address it because people are focusing on that and it wasn’t the point of this post. This was meant to draw attention strictly from Disc priest to Disc priest. There is no reason in PvE content to pick Oracle over Voidweaver. It has a few janky things you can do that don’t actually provide much benefit in M+. So in 99% of cases you’re just playing a spec that does worse Healing and worse DPS. If the differential were closer, that 1% of janky things you could do is maybe worth it but probably not. Or if the spec did more or less healing or damage than Voidweaver that would be acceptable because at least it had one thing it was good at versus Voidweaver, be that healing or damage (thematically healing would make more sense). But as of right now, as I already stated. There is just no reason to ever play Oracle in PvE Content. You are better off just focusing on becoming better at playing Voidweaver as it simply does more damage and more healing and the “utility” of Oracle does not help it versus that major downside. I could go into more detail about what shenanigans Oracle can do that are neat but not functionally or practically useful in real gameplay scenarios. But that’d be too long so instead I am going to leave it as just “utility.”