So I have always ran holy and want to give a try on Disc but reading the rotations, process, etc has left me literally confused. Can someone please give me guidance on the rotation and how?
From what I understand, Disc is more mitigation rather than healing and covers people with shields and making sure atonement is always up via shield and renew…
Am I totally off track?
Thank you for the help
For M+, PvP, or raid? I only play Disc for M+ so this advice is only for that.
Disc is not primarily mitigation anymore. The majority of your healing (80%+) is going to come from Atonement and Flash Heal. The other 20% is from you just continuously casting PWS on the tank and using it on a pinch on other players.
Your Atonement healing is going to be your bulk and that comes from DPSing. So the priority is to keep the Atonement buff up (comes from casting PW:S, Renew, Flash Heal, or using Power Word Radiance).
The easiest way to keep atonement up is with Power Word Radiance, which is a pretty powerful group heal at the same time. Other than that you can chain cast PWS on the tank or other players or use Flash Heal. The good thing with Flash Heal is if you take the Binding Heals talent it also gives you Atonement at the same time as you heal other players.
Disc has an offensive spell priority of:
Majority of the time you spend doing 3-5. 1-2 are on 20s+ long cds.
Flash Heal is your bread-and-butter filler heal outside of PWS. It heals for more than on Holy Priest. Also, you can use Penance to heal other players in emergencies, and it’s pretty strong when you’re under Shadow Covenant (from #1 above), Harsh Discipline, and Power of the Darkside (comes from using Mindblast).
So yeah the priority is to just keep atonement up all of the time on people <90% hp (or the tank), cast dps spells, and use Flash Heal as a spot heal. Mitigation abilities are more like emergency buttons most of the time.
An addendum
While your Mindbender/Fiend are out, your spell priorities change to:
Cast Mindblast
Cast Penance
Cast Shadow Word: Death (even if they’re not in execute)
Cast Smite to reduce penance cooldown.
You shouldn’t even worry about Purge the Wicked falling off in the Fiend/bender shadow covenant window. ESPECIALLY after 4 piece. Smite for penance and pet CDR is simply better for your damage and healing.
As far as raid, if that’s what you’re referencing, Disc healing is basically acting like a walking healer raid CD.
You wait for a big damage event to be coming up. About 12-15 seconds before the damage happens, you start spreading your atonements. Basically without rapture that’s:
Refresh Purge the Wicked → PW:S → Renew x3 → PW:S → Renew x2 → Flash Heal → PW:S → Radiance x2 → Evangelism.
Or with Rapture
Refresh Purge the Wicked → Rapture → PW:S x7 → Flash Heal → Radiance x2.
Then you move into damage rotation right as the damage is going off, which is the same priority I put above. Bender into blast, penance, SW:D then Smite to refresh.
Disc basically does little to no healing for big chunks of fights. We have a bit more mana to play with now, so you can flash heal or PW:S some extra people between, but you absolutely want both radiance charges and mindbender for most your ramps. You can go without mindbender if you took Ultimate Penitence, but you still want to pair your 2 charges of radiance in raid.
Anyone taking UP? I messed around with it a bit, and found it a bit lackluster for such a long cd. May give it another shot, but I just don’t like how it fits in the kit. Just playing around mind bender now and kind of like the way it plays.
Yes, it’s really strong as a group heal. You can line up abilities for different boss mechanics like Mindbender, barrier, Exalation, and UP.
Thank you all for the guidance! Seems like a much different process from when I last disc healed in MoP.
if you are running bender in raid you dont take uppies i belive. I use it in keys for funsies but its not that exciting and can get you killed. you also dont use it while bender or fiend are up
It’s pretty optional either way, but without our 4p, uppies is still fine with bender. Once we have 4p all our ramps are going to very comfortably have bender anyway. But without 4p it basically functions as a way to cover you for not getting enough CD.
Also I mean in a 30 man raid or something uppies can work taking the whole tree.
I’m looking at the Disc 4-piece and it says that your extra Smite does Shadow Damage while in Shadow Covenant. Does that work with TE?
No. Smite still only counts as holy. Followup isn’t empowered and doesn’t use the buff. Shadow Smite DOES get the scov, blaze and words of the pious damage bonus though.