Disc Priest, or Priest as a Whole Feels lost

Classes Priest
1

Hey, a bit of an oddity here as I have never posted before today, and my first post was bugged out and on an older PvP Page, odd, but I’ma go with it.

The one I wanted to post on was a Beta chat about Priest and where they are at right now and thoughts about it. It was filled with complaints and people talking about the issues it’s having. I’d like to bring up some of those points, ad actually get some left feed back on this because honestly, I don’t feel like Disc Priest until we are stated out to the max, has a place in this game currently.

  1. Severe Lack of Mobility

    • Feathers Are Insufficient: The only real movement tool for Disc Priests is Angelic Feather, which grants a 30% movement speed increase. Unlike other healers, this requires precise placement and doesn’t allow casting while moving, making it far less effective in dynamic encounters. In comparison, other healers like Druids (Dash, Cat Form), Monks (Roll, Chi Torpedo), and Paladins (Divine Steed) have much more versatile and powerful movement abilities .

  2. Minimal Defensive Capabilities

    • Squishiest Spec: Disc Priests are known for being one of the squishiest healer specs in the game. While they do have some defensives like Pain Suppression and Power Word: Barrier, these are often not enough to keep the Priest themselves alive, especially in high-mobility fights where they’re expected to avoid damage while continuing to heal .

  3. No Interrupts or Silences

    • Lack of Utility: Disc Priests don’t have access to a Silence or Interrupt, which severely limits their utility in both PvE and PvP scenarios. Other healers often bring these tools to the table, allowing them to contribute more effectively to handling dangerous casts or interrupts .

  4. High Skill Requirement and Punishing Mistakes

    • Ramp-Dependent Healing: Disc Priests rely heavily on the concept of “ramping” to apply Atonement and then heal through damage. This requires precise timing and foresight. Any mistakes or poor timing can lead to massive healing failures, which is far more punishing than for other healers who can rely on more straightforward, reactive healing abilities .
    • Mana Issues: The spec is also very mana-intensive, particularly if you’re not managing your Atonement application properly. Overuse of single-target Atonement applicators like Renew can quickly drain your mana pool, leaving you struggling to keep up during longer encounters .

  5. Ineffective Healing Cooldowns

    • Cooldowns Don’t Mesh with the Kit: Many of the key cooldowns for Disc Priests, like Rapture and Evangelism, don’t synergize well with the class’s identity anymore. For example, Rapture was reworked to be more useful in Mythic+, but this change actually hurt its effectiveness in raids, reducing its impact where it was once strongest .

  6. Reactive Healing Weaknesses

    • Limited Reactive Healing: Disc Priests are particularly weak in situations that require quick, reactive healing. Their toolkit is built around preemptive healing and damage mitigation, which is fine when everything goes according to plan, but disastrous when unexpected damage occurs .

  7. Inconsistent Performance Across Expansions

    • The Cycle of Buffs: Disc Priests often start at the bottom of the healing rankings at the beginning of expansions or patches, only to become viable later when Blizzard buffs them or introduces tier sets that address their weaknesses. This cycle leaves many Disc Priests feeling like they have to struggle through the first two-thirds of an expansion before they can truly shine.

  8. Complex and Often Inefficient Atonement Healing

    • Atonement Doesn’t Always Cut It: In dungeon content, Atonement healing can feel underwhelming, especially if your cooldowns are on cooldown or if you’re trying to heal through small bursts of damage with abilities like Smite. This can make it feel like you’re doing a lot of work for very little payoff, particularly in fast-paced encounters .

Understand, I know Disc is powerful in PvP, but based on blizzards own words. All classes should be viable for every content, able to do “TOP” Tier content. That’s hard to do when you continue to hyper stack buffs on buffs to the same healers almost each release.

Priest has had just about the same kit the entire time this game has been out with barely any real adjustments. It’s a bland taste and no longer functions in a working way as the game has changed way to much senses the early “Move out of the one fire spell on the ground” MC Days. Now you have 10 Fire Spells, 3 Lines going through the raid / M+ and someone is probably already needing you to battle res or silence- wait… We don’t have, either…

Can someone, from the Dev team, actually look into listening to the people who posted1,000+ Comments about the issues priest is having, as they have been bringing up the SAME issues for months and NO ONE from the dev department took any of what they said Seriously.

5 Likes
2

re 1.
Macro this:

#showtooltip Angelic Feather
/cast [mod:shift, @cursor][@player] Angelic Feather

It’ll drop a feather directly at your feet with one button press. Much simpler way to use feathers.

5 Likes
3

I do mine as a rotation. I use the feather and then do the speed on shield
/castsequence Angelic feather, power word: shield
can zoom quite a while on that, you just have to watch the timer on the buffs though to not waste

1 Like
4

But as for this, sorry to say 30% isn’t enough, first off the average AOE in the game isn’t small, and as they are increasing the amount of mechanics that require movement, and we don’t have as much “Cast while moving, or abilities to allow us to cast while moving” 30% isn’t enough. If it was faster, like a Paly horse, or a blink, something that could allow us to actually escape quickly and return to the life of “Turret Base healing” That would be fine. I like our rotation, but we need something more tangible to assist us in these situations.

Current, we as a Healer haven’t been updated to keep up with Newer released, and better updated classes. Ult Penance is like, currently the only thing keeping our train moving. That’s on a 4 minute CD with a way to take a few seconds off to make it almost 3 if you do it right. All other healers have had some type of overhaul at this point, Druid, Monk, Shaman, Pally. Some have had multiple. Oddly enough, we have TWO SPECS that are healers, and currently neither of them function well enough to actually ENTER high end mechanics heavy fights or situations.

Why do we have renew? Honestly?
Why is Feather on the GCD? Remove it and give us 2 - 3 Seconds of Cast while moving.
Why do I HAVE To play a Shaman, Druid, Evo, or Paly to do higher end M+?
Why do I HAVE To play something else to be a Mobile healer.
And again, WHY do we have no SILENCE!

We have two specs, ONE should be able one should be able to function well enough. Not both be at the bottom. We feel gutted.

5

Some of these are some weird complaints I’m ngl.

I think priest mobility could be better for long term running but honestly feathers are fine.

I’ve had it macroed to /cast [@player] for years so targeting is a non issue.

Its 40% not 30% so it’s the same as travel form or ghost wolf (shamans rarely have points to upgrade its speed) unless I’m mistaken. So my gameplay between priest/shaman/druid has always been the same.

Need to move out of some aoe, press same keybind for each class to get a 40% boost to walk out, then go back to what I was doing. Priest actually has the advantage of not having to stay in a form to keep the movement speed lol.

Blaming mana on casting renew is an odd one to me. Mana has only been an issue when over relying on radiance for atonement uptime AND healing from my experience.

Mana and atonement throughput inconsistency I’ll give you because they wildly rebalance disc every couple seasons it feels like and it comes down to tier in some cases.

The past tier set hard carried discs issues from just being an insane mana and throughput boost. But then was really put in a box of only being strong inside bender windows.

One of the other unique things that bugs me about disc healing is the way the majority of your healing is always an equal flat amount across the whole group. So fragmented health bar healing becomes kind of awkward (which Oracle has a great tool to solve now occasionally)

My wish list would be, a way to have better atonement upkeep. Like healing with non dot atonement added 0.5-1 second to the duration. Atonement healing for more on the tank.

1 Like
6

Commenting to agree that Priest mobility is a real issue. I ran my first dungeon the other night and I was having trouble keeping up with the tank. I think most Priest players would agree that movement on a Priest is NOT fun.

I would honestly love to see them implement something akin to Mercy’s Guardian Angel in Overwatch for Priests with a CD close to Blinks so it’s not extremely OP. This would fit thematically and more importantly it is extremely fun to use. Another option would be to bring back Spectral Guise but give us a speed boost while using it, close to DH’s netherwalk.

7

Overall, this is a good thread. But bear in mind that every healer has their weaknesses. You’ve addressed pretty much all of Disc’s correctly, that’s true. But Disc requires some of these in order to offset its strengths, same with every other healer.

Generally speaking, I think Priest (both Holy and Disc) have one super glaring weakness and that’s Mythic+ toolkit. Priests absolutely need an interrupt, an AoE stun, an AoE knock-up or something that can contribute to controlling mob packs. At the highest ratings of Mythic+ this is the single most imperative thing. A Holy Priest brings literally none of it. Your damage is mediocre, you have no interrupt, no reliable “stops”, you ONLY bring healing really. And although Holy Priest HPS is strong, it’s not even close to the best. So why bring a Holy Priest, ever? Disc has the advantage of doing some reasonably good damage, having strong externals, and being able to ramp up to huge HPS/mitigation if the pulls are well coordinated. This does mean Disc struggles with PuGs more than greasy, optimized premades, though.

I think if Priests could be given more reliable crowd control / interrupts and a substantial damage buff, this would address their desirability in Mythic+ content and indirectly address Disc priest sustained healing. I’d love to see some Priest mobility too, but Blizzard seems intent on keeping Priest a wheelchair class, so I wouldn’t hold your breath, and it’s not really keeping you back anyway.

On Resto Shaman, I bring a 30sec AoE stun, a 12sec ranged interrupt, an AoE group sprint, Ancestral Guidance, a Mastery raid buff, Blood Lust, a Decurse/De-poison, and Healing Rain + Stormkeeper Chain lightning is surprisingly strong AoE damage.

A Holy Priest brings Power Infusion, Power Word: Fortitude, Mind Sooth and uhhh, hmm, they uhh… that’s it, actually. And, sadly for healing priests, Shadow Priest brings all three of those. It’s essentially the inverse problem Boomies have, when Resto Druid brings all of their utility and is better at the role.

As a last thought, I also agree that Disc Priest often feels like it has an identity crisis. Blizzard hasn’t really known what it wants to do with Disc for a long time. Is it an absorption healer (spirit shell, PW:S, barrier etc), is it an Atonement healer, is it a CD-based AoE healer? Disc has no clearly defined class fantasy and as such as a “junk drawer” of often competing styles and abilities. It’s immobile, fragile, cooldown dependent and requires more foresight, fight knowledge and group coordination than any other healer - and for all of those things to be true it ALSO doesn’t perform particularly well. I think Holy priest has much the same problem that Outlaw Rogue currently has - there’s only a single thing you do and if you’re not doing it better than anyone else there’s no reason to bring you. Outlaw ONLY does damage. It provides practically no meaningful group buffs or utility, it cannot tank or heal, it’s a fragile, melee-range, leather wearing DPS. If it’s not bringing face-melting damage, then what is it bringing? Holy Priest is purely a throughput healer with little other utility or synergy (that spriest can’t bring). If Holy Priest isn’t going to be the HPS godking of The War Within, then why ever bring one? Bring a different healer, that brings substantially more to the content and does even BETTER healing.

But, outside of spot-fix tuning, I don’t see any of this stuff really being addressed. Most of these issues are long-standing even. They’re not TWW issues, they’ve been priest problems for 10 years.

1 Like
8

I don’t agree with it not having an identity.

It has a clear split down the talent tree of holy and shadow.

Shadow typically being more atonement focused with burst windows. And the holy side having more consistent atonement healing and bubble/preventative measures.

The hero talents reflect this too. Oracle makes bubbles and penance way way stronger.

Personally I’d rather keep priest unique in not having an interrupt and amazing mobility but making up for it in other ways (bring back shining force though). Like PI is obviously part of the reason priests are the way they are, but I like that unique and powerful utility. I’d rather just get more strong unique niches

1 Like
9

Has been since legion hence its earned title of hardest healer to start with.Its a spec for some skill

You referring to raid? Because in keys mana is a non issue. At all. Raids not out yet so we will see how it goes in raid

Our class identity is as a burst healer now, not a bubble bot. They changed rapture to be stronger and also something you can hold on to for 30 seconds

You are referring to heroic and normal i presume due to scaling? I personally have had no issues in heroic healing. Ive never been last but thats merely a scanning of warcraft logs for every fight for timers. Disc will still do well in good hands, even at rthe bototm of the rankings.

Nor should you, we are still a healer and have those abilities ie Dpen. Im having a blast atm weaving in healing abilities with my oracle atonement healing.

I understand your gripes but i have a different view with most of them except for utility. I think we could def get some work in that dept. Decent post though

1 Like
10

A lot of these just seem like frustrations with the base function and design of healing. Perhaps you prefer reactive healers?

I agree with the lack of mobility and utility, stops and such. But for the rest of your points, it just sounds like you don’t like Disc priest much.

11

You just need a macro.

Talent with Fade for DR. Pain Supp yourself. Drop your PW: Barrier on yourself and as many in your group as possible. Heck, even MC anything on you.

LIke with anything it just takes practice. That said, there ought to be a reward for mastering Disc, but at least currently, it looks like your reward is: Sorry, but even though you mastered Disc, your class is wanting (versus other classes). That’s my take anyhow.

Takes practice that your raid group probably does not allow for. You also need timers. And once you get it down it can make for dull and boring game play. I would just create drama in the group for fun at that point (just kidding, of course).

Track your CD timers. You can modify or create your own Weakauras.

Hopefully your group realizes that for the big DR the tradeoff is the occasional need for offhealing and your group being on top of using their own defensives. Most don’t bother, and so you may be in trouble in high content, potentially. They may even just keep standing in fire and probably will, and then they will die and you can rejoice.

12

I did a dungeon with my disc last night and, man it was rough.

13

Try oracle disc ignoring shadow cov and mindbenber.

As a pvp player its nice to be able to take big shield oracle disc mastery stacking playstyle into pve and feel strong. Wasn’t a fan of the pet reset playstyle.

1 Like
14

You can even do both in pvp with oracle too. There is a build that opts out of Harsh Discipline and Lenience to go both shield build side and shadow cov side down to mindbender. Its really good, I still prefer regular shield build though. The shadow cov+shield build is little better with voidweaver due to voidwraith, but still good with oracle due to insight.

15

Tell us why. Im really loving oracle healing dungeons atm. During key season i do my +20’s but only do 4-8 keys a week. currently im doing heroic dungeons just for the joy of healing. capped out my crests. Im having a blast. Miore so then i can remember

16

I have been running archon holy priest and have been having a blast. I was in beta the last couple weeks before launch and was doing +20. Granted I’m not aiming to be at the .01 percent so priest is good enough for the content that I am doing. But to each their own. A silince or kick of some sort would be awesome. Maybe down the line. But for what it’s worth right now I’m having fun. Can’t speak for disc.

17

Disc just got some beefy buffs.

  • Oracle Discipline priests’ Preventive Measures now increases Power Word: Shield absorption by 40% (was 25%). Does not apply to PvP.
  • Atonement healing increased by 100% outside raid (was 70%). Does not apply to PvP.
  • Fixed an issue where Atonement critical healing was not increased by the correct amount outside of raid.
  • Shadow Word: Pain and Purge the Wicked damage increased by 20%.

+30% more healing just in M+ alone.

2 Likes
18

This is basically exactly what we asked for and exactly what was needed, its what i’ve said all disc really needs. I think it will feel so much better now. Gave us more ST healing for oracle, and a lot more atonement healing in m+. Plus more damage from purge the wicked is great.

19

Yeah, I still wish Oracle’s damage got a slight tune up. Maybe add Holy Nova damage to the preventative measures passive, or something so it could compete with Voidweaver, but eh I’m probably asking for too much.

20

Disc has literally gotten a +60% atonement boost in M+ over the last 3-4 weeks.