First off, I’m not here to knock holy priest.
Seems like the way these two specs are built, Disc should always do more dps than holy. Holy is going off with damage right now. I play disc because I love dpsing to heal. But I feel odd comparing myself to holy who is capable of more damage. I’m not even advocating for nerfs or buffs for either spec, I guess I’m just here to say it feels weird.
Anyone else feel this way?
That’s fine…. But holy always gets to heal more then, right? Or you want heals to be the same but Disc healing thru damage to be heal as much as holy and also do more damage than holy spamming dps?
The issue here is that Disc is designed to do damage in order to heal, whereas whenever Holy is contributing damage, it is not adding more healing. Disc doesn’t make that trade off, so it seems reasonable that Holy would have a higher throughput ceiling for damage because in order to achieve that throughput, Holy has to give up potential healing.
I play both specs.
Holy was not outperforming Disc at the start of the season. It was only after receiving multiple dps buffs and the 10.2.5 patch did Holy start to pop off again. Holy always lags behind the other healers every patch and then they get buffed up.
Blizzard has shifted away from the battle healers outdpsing every other healer since really mid to late Shadowlands because there was a point where if you stacked multiple battle healers it was like adding an extra dps to the raid.
The damage difference between Holy and Disc isn’t really that much (maybe 15-20k overall for Holy) that it’s going to matter for keys. Disc overall has more utility - barrier, lenience (-3% damage taken), far better passive group healing, and has to press their heal buttons 50% less than Holy does to do the same hps.
So yeah: Holy will probably do good dps in S4 and then Blizzard will nerf it hardcore next expansion just like they did with Shadowlands into Dragonflight.
Disc historically has always been harder to play the wack a mole Holy priest, so yes i think that disc should dps more then holy. In heroic normal raiding disc can never compete with holy priests in hps. There are pros and cons to both specs.
Disc isn’t harder to play than holy anymore and does as good, if not better hps in raids this past season. Disc is also far easier to play in m+.
I was honestly thinking that myself. Holy has a far higher skill cap to perform well in M+ compared to Disc.
Disc is just keep atonement up and do dps and you can 90% of the time just heal through everything. You only need to bust out single target heals if people are getting focused by beams or something nasty.
With Holy you have to raw heal through every pulsing AOE aura by manually casting one heal at a time. It’s literally one tool for everything - Flash Heal. The most jarring difference is that you have to manually top people from say 80% to 100% hp with a Flash Heal vs Disc who just does it passively for free with atonement. I know from comparing logs Holy has to cast 50% more spells than Disc to do the same hps.
This is why I was pointing out in my DF review in that Holy could use some better passive AOE healing. You could have light-atonement healing through dps abilities or just a pulsing AOE aura ability like Tyrs Deliverance. The whole point is to cut down on the unnecessary flash heal casts to top people who aren’t in danger to full hp.
That’s mana saved and more gcds for dps.
Free instant renew tick to those affected whenever holy fire is casted. 
In normal and heroic raiding?
Heroic and mythic, discipline has been s-class for raiding in season 3.
This is likely why discipline is getting a small nerf for next season.
Interesting changes with the healer nerfs come next week.
Discs atonement healing in M+ is going to go while up while Holy Priests are going to move up to 3rd-4th place in overall raid hps.
Every healers going to do roughly the same amount of hps like in S1.
This discussion comes up all the time. The reality is disc is designed to heal via damage and holy can’t deal damage if they’re healing. If holy can’t deal strong damage while committing to it, then spec balance suffers.
Holy is obviously doing more damage than intended right now, but on big HPS check fights, disc will do way more damage than holy because holy will not have the time to commit to dealing damage, while disc passively does it to heal.
i have a lot of healer alts, and experience from many years, and do a lot of m+, though not at the absolute high range, but i do plenty of 18 keys and that’s high enough to get a good grasp of specs played at an above average level across timespans of months and considerations for gearing up and all.
where m+ is concerned, most healing specs when played well seem to relatively easily do more damage than discipline. holy priest especially seems to be doing crazy damage lately. monk has received so many buffs and QoL improvements, it is the defacto damage-to-healing healer now, much more capable than disc (imo). while people may quibble about just how much more damage than disc a spec can do and if that matters or not, i think the fact is after hundreds of keys, my main conclusion is this.
clearly all those healers are finding the time to throw in dps. lots of it. they aren’t missing out, even druids, holy paladins, shaman, they all manage to contribute tons and tons of dps, despite not being designed like disc is to “do damage while healing.” and yet they still do that in a way.
now perhaps one can say raids are a different story. but considering raid cooldowns are often very organized and planned in raid settings, i would think there’s still that opportunity for other healing specs to find time to dps there too. if the players are so inclined. i do see less dps’ing from healers in raids, but most healers in m+ seem to lean toward preferring to add as much dps as they can. i’d say 70% to 80% of them.
basically, imo, disc is gettin the short end of the stick, has no particular place where it excels over other healing specs, doesn’t have something it can say its the best in, and its just not “bad enough” to have room to complain except from a conceptual level where everyone else has been given the same toys, or we might say potential, and everyone pretends not to notice.
This is exactly what I was thinking. If other healers are out dpsing disc, then they obv have enough time to dps and aren’t “forgoing” healing at the cost of damage.
So if Holy does more dps and more healing during a fight, what is the trade off? You get to do less dps and less healing as disc. So the trade off to do less damage is less healing or is the trade off you get to do less healing to do less damage?
Currently disc is doing more damage and healing on most fights. Holy is basically just winning in m+ on damage for the most part. As stated before, any major healing check, disc is winning on damage every time and depending on the healing profile, will be winning there too.
This would be like saying a tank who is designed around doing DPS to mitigate damage should do less damage and mitigation than a tank designed to simply mitigate damage.
Its nonsense, it has never made sense, and there is no legitimate excuse for why disc isn’t the highest DPS healer in the game bar none.
If Holy does more damage while doing more healing, that’s a balance problem. My post is about the design aspect, and assumes the intention is that the healing- i.e. the role they are in- is intended to be balanced.
Let me put it this way: If Holy and Disc both had roughly equal healing output, and Disc- which always is adding damage to do their healing- always did more damage than a Holy Priest that was sacrificing healing to do damage, then why on Azeroth would you ever bring a Holy Priest?
If you’re balancing classes with this logic then disc should also be the lowest HPS.
Because numbers isn’t the only reason you bring a class. I know it’s alien for people in the modern era where everyone has to have X ability and everyone has to have Y talent and everyone has to have Z passives, but once upon a time classes got to be effective while also being different.
If disc is going to bring damage and healing, that leaves Holy open to bring healing and utility. What will matter is how strong that utility ends up being to justify it’s existence and that is where balance comes into play.
Additionally the nature of HOW classes heal can also make a big difference. If Disc is healing a lot through constant DPS resulting in constant healing making it strong against rot type damage than you could easily see a situation where it would struggle with burst damage and holy could easily fill that void. This is just an example of many ways you could make that happen.
This is just flat out false logic. If one class that is designed to do damage to heal ends up doing more damage than classes that are not designed to do damage, while also putting out enough healing to be effective at it’s job then it’s supposedly a problem.
I don’t have to say much else the nonsense speaks for itself.