You’re getting incredibly worked up over mechanics of class design vs balance and are very quickly calling anything you don’t agree with nonsense.
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It isn’t getting worked up to call a spade a spade.
Holy can only outdps Disc in circumstances where you have enough time to free cast dps. Disc will always beat Holy in Mythic raiding for example.
Also, Holy needs to be actually tuned to beat Disc in overall dps because at the start of 10.2 Holy wasn’t touching Disc in overall dps.
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Or we could tune holy to have proper utility to make it worth bringing without homogenizing it. Imagine if for example holy was the only spec that could give PI to someone else and for both Shadow/Disc it was just a personal CD.
Additionally disc is known to being the spec that needs to plant its feet to heal while we let holy be the spec that can heal more effectively on the move allowing it to make up for lost time between packs that disc would make up for via its DPS.
We could also allow holy to have specific spells apply damage buffs, perhaps old inspiration except where as in the past it buffed armor perhaps now it could buff the damage of targets with it.
Just a couple of ideas of how you could adjust holy to be the healing/utility spec without stomping on discs toes as the DPS healer spec.
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I play both specs and yes: Holy is lacking in utility for M+.
Just my comparisons:
Disc
- Literal infinite mana in M+ because of 40%+ Mind Bender uptime due to tier set bonus. I can go into bosses with 30% mana and never even worry about going oom.
- Power Word Barrier (group DR).
- Rapture (group DR).
- Lenience (-3% damage taken).
- Ultimate Penitence (way stronger than Divine Hymn).
- Far better passive group healing with Atonement healing. You just keep atonement up, cast dps spells, and throw spot heals when needed.
Holy
- Rough mana management and can go oom on 4+ min Tyrannical fights.
- Far better single target heals. Holy is better in dungeons where you need to funnel single target heals. You have Divine Word and Apotheosis to cycle through now.
- 1 minute Guardian Spirit.
- Symbol of Hope (got giga nerfed to being almost a joke).
- Divine Hymn (really bad for M+ - doesn’t do enough healing compared to Ultimate Penitence and you don’t get a 50% absorb shield).
- Very little passive group healing so has to rely on spamming Flash Heal + Holy Word Serenity to top people off that Disc otherwise just passively heals. This results in needing to hard cast 50%+ more healing spells than Disc.
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I don’t think we disagree about Disc being better than holy, or that holy fundamentally needs better tools. I just don’t like that the supposed answer to buff holy in M+ is to give it more damage instead of actually address it’s flaws.
I also don’t like that disc who should be adding a lot more damage than it does has so much utility when it’s damage should be the bulk of it’s utility.
No, you’re completely wrong.
With the rework to Discipline since Legion, it should always do less damage than Holy. The reason Disc works is because it uses damage to heal, so you never lose uptime. Holy on the other hand can deal high damage, but it has to basically stop healing to do so. Disc can’t do more damage than Holy because then it would do everything better and make Holy totally useless.
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This is a recording and something I have addressed many times, in addition to this thread.
This stance doesn’t make any sense at all. Disc is the DPS spec and it absolutely should be the highest DPS among the healers if for no other reason than that it is able to DPS far more often then any other healer. Think of it this way. Casters are able to have 100% uptime on boss X while melee have to chase them around the arena. It would make sense then that casters would do more damage to that boss due to this uptime. Likewise melee get constant uptime on boss Y because casters have to deal with insert whatever mechanic. It would make sense that melee do more damage than caster on that fight.
Disc gets to DPS more than any other healer and as such should do more damage bar none. If it doesn’t do more damage than them then it’s damage become irrelevant and there is no reason to take them.
The give and take is that Disc should do more damage but have less utility while specs like holy provides less damage but far more utility in order to make up for it.
This isn’t a hard concept as long as you stop thinking all classes have to be functionally identical and the only difference is how you flavor the same boring mechanics.
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But, I don’t know where you think Holy’s going to be able to scale that gap in utility, when it’s already heavily in Disc’s favor and efforts to change that, like with Symbol of Hope, have been largely walked back.
Either way, I think a lot of the worries about Holy’s damage are not taking into account where we are in the patch cycle. Holy’s able to find the time to damage now because we’re at the end of a patch. Once everyone’s no longer at max gear level, I won’t be surprised to see Holy’s damage balanced by the struggle of keeping people alive again.
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You want Disc utility removed? That’d brick the spec, and Disc isn’t functionally identical to other specs, it just has to be brought in line like anything else to keep it from completely being broken or sucking. You keep mentioning concepts not being hard to understand while failing to understand them. Bruv…
I specifically didn’t ask for mythic where disc scales better. Its why i mentioned normal and heroic in the original and subsequent post. Holy is doing better then disc in hps in both heroic and normal and Indeed are top in normal. All of which means nothing but i wanted to get it right
ok but in what environment? Totally pugging because everything ive neem told holy is better for pure pugging and can carry some errors from dps, or are your talking about a group of +23 competent people?
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It’s more the person behind the wheel than the class when it comes to pugging. You can get away with really anything all the way up to +20s because the keys are so easy once everyone is close to Mythic iLvl.
The quality of your average pug doing +20s isn’t great either. There’s a lot of green/blue parsers and you won’t find most of the “good” players until you’re starting to hit the top 5% of IO. Once you’re at the top 0.01% they’re on a whole other level than your usual pug players.
I grinded up to +27s on my Priest and stopped pushing because I wasn’t going for the title. It’s extremely difficult to find a push team that doesn’t fall apart like 1-2 weeks later.
The keys in S3 weren’t that hard to heal compared to previous seasons because most of the bosses do zero damage and periodically hit the group for 800k+ unmitigated damage.
I’m not playing S4 (taking a break like last expansion) so I’m not going to comment that much on stuff I’m not first hand experiencing.
I have to play oceanic times and i find some god awful pugs where im topping the cc’d done, people pulling for tanks, bad dps and having to pull miracles out to keep people alive who try their hardest to die. ie Bm Hunter in +22 WCM witches fight where he refused to move when the move around ability came out, cant remember the name
This has largely been because blizzard is still trying to homogenize every spec to make sure everyone has everything, for the most part, with literally the only exception being disc and holy who are the only specs lacking things like mobility, interrupts, etc.
Its that exact nonsense I am speaking to that needs to change and why I call it out. Disc does need some of its utility removed, not all, in order to justify its damage being where it should be.
I never said it needed all its utility removed, my entire point has been that discs damage should take up much of its utility budget and that holy should have more utility than the spec.
Disc should have less utility, there is no reason for its to have x2 pain suppress for example, or twin of the sun priestess which should be holy exclusive, or access to voidshift which should be shadow exclusive etc.
It should be doing around 75% the damage of an actual DPS with no other healer getting above 50% the damage of DPS giving it a significant lead over other specs in that area.
That is how the spec should be but unfortunately we can’t have disc stand out the way it should so its damage is weaker than it should be, holy lacks the utility it should have, and shadow is a clustered mess of a spec that doesn’t know what it wants to be.
But do go ahead and keep fighting for things to stay the way they are. The class is in such a good place with such ideas being the accepted orthodoxy.
I understand, but also realize that Holy’s job is not focused on dealing damage as much as disc priest.
Back in Legion, disc was doing a high amount of dps and healing and was OP, especially in PVP.
Disc can either be good at dealing damage, good at healing, or slightly relatively worse in both but still be good. U cannot have both of the former at the same time.
Holy needs to be brought up more than Disc needs to be brought down.
The most jarring difference in M+ when I swap specs is that on Disc you don’t need to think about topping people off <90% hp to 100% because it’s passively done for free with atonement. With Holy every person <100% hp you 9 out of 10 times need to manually cast a heal on them to bring them to full hp.
Holy also lacks in group healing in M+ with countering pulsing rot auras. You literally have zero group healing outside of Holy Word Sanctify, PoM, and Circle of Healing which all have cooldowns. You have to manually spam single target heals on each person in the group one at a time whereas on Disc you just keep atonement up. It’s significantly easier to do these pulsing aura fights on Disc than Holy.
You can literally fix all these issues by giving Holy better passive healing. This will cut down on the over reliance on Flash Heal as a hammer for all the worlds problems which cuts down on your mana usage.
For utility: Holy just needs a group DR and/or a battle res imho. They can refix Symbol of Hope.
So that’s kinda my expansion dream… better passive healing and better utility.
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Because it had all of that and, compared to other specs, a lot of its utility still intact.
To explain it a other way, all specs in the game have a balance of utility, which can be CC/mobility/dispels/CDs/buffs/etc, damage and healing. Disc is OP when it gets to much of all three. Historically as a healer disc was utility+healing with so so damage. In legion it was redesigned and given more damage without taking anything from its utility. Earlier in DF it was given proper damage AND more utility which was absurd. The damage was what it should be, but its utility needed to be nerfed. Instead blizzard picked the wrong thing to nerf.
Not every class should be balanced around doing the same damage/utility/healing trifecta and some should habe more damage than others with less utility. Disc is a perfect example.of this.
I’m not saying you bring disc down, I’m saying you reallocate its power budget so more of it is in damage and less of it is in utility.
Beyond that I am saying holy should have less of its power budget in damage and more of it in utility.
Doing this would result in both specs still being competitive and balanced to each other but in actual honest to God unique ways instead of the current nonsense where everyone has to do the same amount of over all damage and healing homogenized nonsense.
I don’t see it.
Disc and Holy already are very unique. I don’t see what makes their damage numbers being slanted towards disc being way more unique than the current.
Removing Disc’s utility is removing things core to their spec identity. Disc specific utility is what, Barrier/Pain supp? PW:S? Are you suggesting Barrier be removed or significantly weakened so that damage can go up? I think that’d be a very unpopular stance.
Personally I don’t think “utility” is a good balancing scale, pretty much ever, because it so heavily depends on the current season’s dungeon/raid design. Nobody at all thought priest class utility was powerful until DF Season 2 happened and suddenly it was part of the god comp in part BECAUSE of its class utility. Shaman’s had the same thing happen.
You can’t just design a class to be “more powerful utility” unless the CURRENT content interacts with that utility specifically. There hasn’t been a single piece of utility that has been perfectly applicable to the same amount in every type of content, unless you count mitigation, and even that hasn’t maintained 100% true.
Disc’s damage in DF was godawful until its rework in S3, and it’s still doing fairly high damage for a healer. The only place it’s equivalent to other healers is in an M+ environment (an infinitely scaling environment where you only have one healer, so they have to be balanced to be more equivalent to each other).
It sounds more like your problem is with M+ existing and the balance Blizzard has to do to keep players happy with M+. I don’t think anyone would be on board with one healer who can totally heal M+ hps-wise, but also just does significant damage.
Holy can’t do that now, either, even though in low damage scenarios they can easily hit 200k.
The thing is with Holy’s damage output is its inconsistent. It’s either amazing or terrible. At the expansion start it was terrible because there was no Burning Vehemence AOE cleave and Empyreal Blaze was nerfed from a 30s cd to 60s in the beta.
By S2 I was doing more overall dps on Holy than on Disc, but then Disc got overhauled in S3, and did a lot more damage than Holy. Disc was nerfed twice and Holy had 2-3 single target damage hotfixes and another Empyreal Blaze overhaul in 10.2.6 to push their damage up ahead. The process will start over again next expansion: Holy will probably have bad dps and need a lot of buffs again.
In regards to homogenized healing output: it’s good for the game if all the healers are fairly competitive to each other. You still need a healer comp, but you’re not going to be gimped for bringing non-meta classes. The gap between Holy Priests and Mistweavers was pretty wide. Holy was last place this whole season and that mainly had to do with the -10% hps nerfs coming in 10.2 to Holy.
Holy Priests are just physically capped on your maximum hps because of 10-12s cooldowns and needing to wait on Holy Word resets. Your filler spells don’t move health bars that much.
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