I can’t help but notice with the 90s Spirit Shell that most people on the PTR just aren’t bringing disc priests, and most of them are just rerolling holy. Is this the end of disc for raiding in 9.1? I tried out two bosses on the PTR, i cannot say for sure that spirit shell sucks because things change, but sitting there, holding cool downs when folks are dying, just to use a spirit shell finally, and not having the 1m CDs up for it to make it really powerful feels horrible. I personally have been setting up holy and making sure my RSham is ready to go, because disc looks like its met its end, what about you guys?
tl;dr Disc priest looks like it wont be played in 9.1 raiding, so what will you play?
I much prefer the healing through damage aspect of disc, and it had me interested way back when they revamped disc to heal through atonements. This was my first experience w/ spirit shell, and i enjoyed it too. But i would be totally down if they buff the damage, create a different talent there, because lets be real, no one is going to use spirit shell any more in 9.1, not with resto shamans and hpals walking around…
there’s a good chance that Disc plays Evange for 8-9/10 fights. also most the ptr tests were so far have been in heroic because our healing caps out around 18-20 ppl most groups doing raid testing were using 25. on top of all that we lacked timers to what mechanics youd ramp for to play against. basically ptr doesn’t prove or disprove the viability of Disc. Doom saying Rn is kinda pointless.
Not necesarrily doom saying, but the overall grasp and feel of a 90s spirit shell and having 90+ seconds of small ramps just feels rubbish mate, y’know? I did not make a post say, “Disc is dead in 9.1, do not even play it.”
For perspective, people thought paladins would be dead and would be at best a one of for beacon tank healing before 9.0. Then they made sweeping changes and buffs to make it the monstrosity it is right now. You never know what last minute buffs they might implement to make disc this. If they just buffed damage alone disc would be a much more palatable choice in 9.1 given even a bad disc priest would at least be bringing significant dps in addition to their cds and a good disc priest would be doing what a druid does but better cause there’s damage attached as well as aforementioned barrier and (if taken) SS
I will say, Disc’s HPS is not comparable to other healers at all really when it comes to Evang right now.
This is mostly as a result of them getting nerfed so many times in the 9.0 Raid testing. Evang was pretty decent until our throughput was nerfed ~18-20% after SS came in.
With SS now gone, those nerfs could be reverted and the spec would probably be OK and worth taking for Barrier. But as it stands now, I could see kicking them out of the meta in favor of a higher throughput healer (or, if you need the Leap of Faith/fort/PI, a hPriest) and taking extra DKs for more AMZ.
If you want that, you need to be prepared to either outright lose atonement, or have it completely redesigned. As it is now it’s glaringly obvious that Disc wasn’t designed from the ground up to be a DPS healer instead it’s a square peg attempting to fit a round hole.
why would they need to redesign/remove atonement? we had it last expansion and it was significantly stronger. If they retune our atone healing disc will be fine. If not; we may be in for a bit of a rough patch
My response quoted “develop the class w more playstyle options” and you don’t get that from a DPS to healing playstyle if you don’t design the class with that in mind from the start. Disc was not designed with that in mind. Instead they first tacted on the style in Cata, tried to force it to fit during MOP, decided it wouldn’t work and brought back the bubbling style for WOD, etc etc.
It’s never really been a fully fleshed out healing style for the spec because blizz is trying to get a square peg to fit a round hole. If you want disc to really fit the style and have more options like the post I responded to mentioned then you will need to either remove atonement and let the spec be focused on healing, or redesign it from the ground up with atonement in mind so it can really lean into the style. As it stands now the spec is a weird half and half style that doesn’t lead to it having a great deal of flexibility, and results in a rather linear playstyle.
You are right up to that point (WOD) then for Legion they made a conscious decision to move away from the absorb playstile and completely re-designed the spec from the ground up with Atonement as the core mechanic to work as a DPS healer. So yes the current Atonement iteration and the “new” Disc is indeed designed from the ground up as a healer who heals trough damage.
(“DPS” healer is a bit confusing, Disc is intended to be more of a healer in terms of mindset and how to approach fights it just does the healing trough doing damage).
Not saying the spec is perfect but tbh I think at its core is a really good and well designed spec with clear gameplay loops and decision making to be had… It’s indeed pretty linear in what it does, imho that’s mostly because of decisions made after that, for example coming into SL the spec was in a pretty good spot just needed perhaps a few talents to make it more flexible (something to tailor atonement for different group sizes perhaps) .
Instead for some reason they added Spirit Shell, an extremely oppresive talent for M Raiding (the area where Disc was already excelling at) this obviously caused a lot of imbalances with the spec, but it doesn’t need a full re-work just really removing SS so they can un-nerf other areas would be a great start, then they can work on adding more flexibility trough talents that allow the spec to branch out to other playstiles a bit.
It was designed as a healer, first and foremost, and Atonement was intended as its main method of healing.
It still does fit that playstyle, for the most part. The problem is that at this point our damage has been toned down so far and with no compensation to atonement transfer that it makes up less of our healing.
Despite that, it’s still making up the majority of our healing. So the spec still works. But even in legion it wasn’t possible to get by on atonement alone, and considering the spec had talents like old ‘the penitent’ and grace, it’s pretty obvious they didn’t intend for it to.
