Dude, Resherin, no need for the salt. I’m not justifying or brushing these nerfs away. Linking one statistic is not saying I agree wholeheartedly with everything they did. I have been saying from the beginning I’m upset that lowering the skill ceiling also meant raising the skill floor; that 90% of raiding Discs that were not OP are getting nerfed just as hard as the top 10% that was. I don’t think that’s fair. However, there is no “fair” in this situation. Leaving mythic raiding ridiculously lopsided wasn’t fair either. This is a complex situation with no perfect solution; at this point, maybe not even a good solution.
This is absolutely a nerf on the lower 90% of raiding Discs that wasn’t needed. However, it’s also not the end of the world. It’s not trash, it’s not broken, we’re not guaranteed falling to the bottom. Have you raided with it on live yet? Pretty sure that if people hadn’t read the notes and freaked out, they’d hardly even notice the changes in PvE. I’ve been around this game too long to be certain of anything based on notes. I take my reservations (in this case, highly skeptical) and withhold certain judgement until it’s been out a while.
Frankly, I’m just saddened by the lack of empathy: everyone just exclusively concerned about their own niche. PVPers blaming PvEers, PvEers dismissing PvPers, casual raiders blaming mythic raiders, mythic raiders brushing off the concerns of casual raiders, NO ONE CARING ABOUT THE POOR PET BATTLERS. That’s a joke, BTW. A nerf doesn’t feel good, for sure, and I don’t expect anyone to be happy about it, but all the blaming and belittling doesn’t change a thing, and simplifies a complex situation.
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I have to agree with Aeterna as a long time veteran priest player. While it doe hurt a vast majority of the disc community, leaving it the way it was previously was not an option either.
I did get to try this out on live last night in mythic Uldir with my group and it was a bit of a shock. My numbers were definitely lower and I could feel it as well as the mana cost increase on certain abilities was noticeable as well. But all that made me do was alter the way I played. I used different talents/abilities and I tried new things. Once I did that, I noticed I was on par with the other healers which is fine. It is not trash or broken.
I do think the nerfs were a little bit on the heavy side yes, the percentages could have been lowered a bit and I think put things aligned just as well. Just need to give it time to see how things play out over the next few weeks and how it will adjust as new gear and higher stats become available.
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Yeah I tried running disc today on heroic and early mythic bosses but it was just terrible. I mean I was pretty mediocre before but now it’s just dumpster healing. I swapped back to holy and its just ridiculously better in raids. Literally going from bottom healer to top healer. I still use disc for dailies though. It is the more fun spec IMO.
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I think the problem on the lower end comes from both Disc being more difficult/punishing to play and a tendency for lower difficulty content to get overhealed, which just shrinks the window Disc has to make good on its strengths.
At least in my guild, there’s not a lot of interest in optimizing the kill time on farm heroics. Why drop a healer or two (or three - we 6 healed H Taloc last night in an 18 person raid and man was that overkill) to make a kill a couple seconds faster and stress out the remaining healers a bit when we could do what we’ve always done and practically sleep through the fights. There’s also not a lot of organization (read: zero) when it comes to raid CDs once something’s firmly on farm. I don’t imagine that’s an uncommon strategy, especially late in the tier.
Unfortunately, with how Disc works, it performs poorly in those scenarios and even worse when you’re not as quick/reliable at setting up for predictable burst damage. The more healers you have, the smaller your window for getting in effective Atonement healing before the damage is healed back up. The less organized your group is, the higher the odds one or more raid CDs are being popped on something you could have handled alone.
There’s not really a good fix for that. You can try harder and you will see pretty good results (I’m only really bottom of the meters on Zul as the OoM dispel-bot and Zek’voz where there’s not a lot of burst healing to do, most of the time I hover around top 3), but that’s not a satisfying solution.
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All I’m saying is you threw out a single statistic saying, “This is why”. I don’t know if you believe that is the reason why or if you meant blizzard believes that this is why. I’m just letting you know why that is WRONG because you’re right the “solution” they came up with was a very simple one and it was a complex situation. This change in the long run will only hurt the disc priest community or anybody else that will want to try to get into disc priest. If they didn’t want disc priest to be this way then they should have reworked the spec before hand or been working on a spec rework. I can play disc priest really good but I’m only mad because blizzard gave into a community that well…DOESN’T PLAY DISC PRIEST! They created this high skill spec and you were rewarded for using it at the highest level and nobody would understand that unless they played it. Of course youtubers and streamers are brushing this off because more than likely they are in the top 30% mythic raiders as well. The only fair thing blizzard could have done here is did their research and come up with a real solution. To me this nerf was just pure laziness and every disc priest that isn’t top 30% mythic raider has to pay the price for it.
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Sorry for using sarcasm. Though to be fair, one of the developers SAID one of the reasons they were reworking Disc was because they were so strong in mythic raid. Obviously they were also very strong in a couple other areas, but as that is the only one they mentioned, it’s the one I passed on. You can argue I was guilty of simplifying the complex situation, but as I said, SARCASM.
Really, if you think Blizzard was just lazy, what’s your perfect solution? How can they reduce Disc’s strengths at the top end without punishing the bottom end? I have spent a long time chewing on that problem, as have many other very knowledgeable people, and no one has come up with a solution that doesn’t involve basically getting rid of atonement. So if you think the solution is so obvious, please, enlighten us.
Discs were needing nerfs cuz not enough preists were playing Holy preists.
Overall its a good thing now preists will play Holy which has better heals more now.
I support the nerfs it just makes questing a bit harder.
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Um, no? Warcraftlogs shows 175,987 Holy raid parses versus 136,062 Disc parses pre-nerf. Raider io has 114,561 Holy runs and 125,679 Disc. It was actually remarkably even (in PvE).
I’m not saying the nerfs weren’t warranted for other reasons, but “not enough Holy priests” wasn’t one.
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Any healer is OP in 1v1 and WPvP. You’ve not seen what a Holy Paladin can do in a burst or a Mistweaver Monk running Way of the Crane in 1v1s or WPvP.
Healers aren’t really designed to lose in a 1v1 since they have near endless sustainability. Any class with mobility can just run away from a Discipline Priest no problem. People don’t understand that the reason we take less damage than other healers is because we have no mobility.
The majority of these changes ultimately won’t affect me, but I do think the Focused Will nerf was unnecessary. If they would’ve gave us a baseline mobility spell in exchange, I’d be happy with that.
I do think they should rework an Honor Talent or two to better reflect with these nerfs though. Strength of Soul has to be the worst Honor Talent because of the PWS change. Remove that and give us Inner Fire or Soul Warding in it’s place:
Inner Fire: A burst of Holy energy fills the caster, increasing armor by 10% and spell power by 10%. Lasts 30 minutes.
Soul Warding: Reduces the duration of Weakened Soul by 3 seconds and reduces the mana cost of Power Word: Shield by 15%.
…On a side note, they recently changed our Trinity Honor Talent. It’s supposed to increase our atonement by 15 seconds and transfer by 12%, but can only be applied through PWS. It’s also supposed to give us 25% crit to Smite, Penance, and Shadowfiend if we have 3 or more Atonements active. The way this is worded makes it sound as if it no longer has a 3 atonement cap, but it still does.
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Oh man this thread is big pile of yikes.
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PVP and whiny scrub PVPers ruining PVE games since forever
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This should have been a nerf to PvP only, but it wasn’t and after yesterday when I finished testing on live with 8.1 it made it official and I am done healing! there was absolutely no reason to nerf damage in PvE
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Thing about that is we get full seasons of FOTM rerolls. It doesn’t address their lack of consistent changes to classes throughout the season.
The PVP nerf is 10 times worse than the PVE nerf. Essentially disc priest can’t survive in PVP because of a 7 second debuff to shield. Even with a recastable shield having poor mobility meant that mages could free fire on me. Now its -10K off the 30K wammo on first volley… Now its 7 seconds of NO shield. to remove 70K life. Not hard at all.
Oh and BTW you have a + on you…meaning everyone attack that guy…so its insta death.
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Well Blizzard has never been known for being good at balancing anything. The weakened soul nerf was un called for but because noobs that didn’t know how to cc couldn’t kill us we got this tumor added back to our spec. Thank god I can still perform in raids and dungs or else I wouldn’t be on this toon at all.
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I’d have just swapped to Shadow and not said a word. You had to be bored out of your mind.
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I just went in a tested it live for a Heroic Raid as Disc and yes, I was at the bottom of the healing meter “most” of the time - with tanks doing more healing then me in one fight by almost double - so the nerf is formidable for sure! We’ll have to look at talents to see what makes more sense now, but Holy has an insane toolkit compared to Disc and tonight the part time Holy priest was killing it on heals.
It’s going to be about re-strategizing and figuring out what makes more sense for the rotation now. Until then, it’s going to be a time for re-adjustment for sure.
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And above average geared. Because I can attest that being a fairly poorly geared ultra casual player, im now a free kill when pressured.
Whether it was directed at pvp I dont know, but chucking a 7.5s per target cd on pws has been a death sentence for me. I couldve experimented with different builds etc, but it was such a rude shock i just quit playing. The buff to trinity is kinda nice when things are easy, but it does nothing to offset the loss of on-the-run survivability.
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Tank doing double your healing on MOTHER burn strat is not a nerf, it’s the point.
I don’t so much mind Disc was nerfed as much as Holy and MW weren’t, and still dominate all tiers of difficulty. I’ve always been a proponent of aiming to get healers within 10% of each other, and right now that’s only true in mythic (better than last tier, where it wasn’t true anywhere).