Is disc good now with all these new talents? And (drumroll please)… Is it now better than holy for M+?
Currently in prepatch? Holy will do more damage likely with empyreal blaze.
Disc isn’t bad and its healing potential is great, even. But with mind sear gone, it struggles for damage - especially since we’re missing 5 more talent points in our spec tree, which almost no matter where you put them would get you a nice bonus.
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Mind Sear gone? Sadge shame that is!
I have done a few runs as Holy and did 6.9k dps on a 17 or so one run, and with only healing trinkets. That is a sizable gain: roughly 2k dps more vs before these new talents.
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In the 18 I did today I was doing ~7k as well with no damage trinkets on running necrolord disc, and TBH I probably could have done more with divine star. But I was also trying to get as much dps as possible through twilight empowerment on dots lol.
But I still imagine holy has the higher damage possibility.
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What did your stats look like? Mostly haste/vers? Or crit/haste?
I run mostly haste/crit (but mostly am trying to get verse - I just happen to have crit gear) and will run crit for shrouded buff.
Basic playstyle was to try and make sure that I twilight empower halo, and also try to twilight empower Purge the Wicked (and spread that empowered purge with penance). Gets a bit tough to always empower purge in large mob packs. If I was running Dstar, I’d always make sure to empower dstar, and ignore empowering PTW in favor of it (though still trying to empower as many as possible). It’s a bit of a chore to play around initially - so you might not want to try and empower dots as much.
I also did get a fair bit of holy nova out in big mob packs.
Dominate mind can also give a lot of damage - but it’s a bit hard to use unless you know your tank - so I mostly run it when I’m playing with a tank friend and can tell them when dominate’s about to fall so I can fade and he’ll taunt.
Personally if I was going for max damage I’d probably run Kyrian too - Boon windows in mob packs are huge, and it’s easier to stay in range now with the protective light talent (this procs off binding heals, so you can flash heal the tank then boon and you’ll be invincible to almost everything except oneshot cleaves).
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I see a lot playing disc now. Is it better than holy?
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I’m pretty new to healing, and even newer to priest, but I am enjoying disc a LOT better now than before prepatch. I tried disc several times before prepatch in group-finder dungeons and at least 1 person died every time, but just now I ran a group and everyone stayed topped off the entire time and I actually felt like I was NEEDING to do damage since my heals were all topped off.
I definitely find it more fun. I dunno about better. That much is hard to say. But it also depends on what you mean by “a lot playing disc.”
If you’re talking about content creators I do know that Growl (yumy) has always loved disc priest - thought it was better in Slands than people thought and had wanted to play it for the off meta stuff but beta got in the way.
It’s also moad’s favorite spec, so it makes sense he’d play it now that it’s better.
They’re probably the biggest two priest creators next to jak so results might be skewed?
I am currently able to do more damage as holy than disc. As pointed out by someone else, Empyreal Blaze allows you to spam Holy Fire, which hits very hard. Between that and Shadow Word Pain, you can put a lot of dots up. Then Holy Nova spam with Divine Star. Easy to do a lot of damage that way. Whether it’s aoe or single target, I can only manage about half as much in disc spec.
Ultimately, I feel like the biggest difference is that disc allows you to dps more safely. People get healed WHILE you dps, whereas with holy, you hope to have enough windows of opportunity to do what I need to do before having to swap to healing someone. It’s a lot of back and forth with holy - heal, dps, heal, dps, whereas disc is one single playstyle.
Other than that, Divine Aegis (crit heals = 10% shield) and Lenience (3% mitigation on Atonement targets) will buffer the incoming damage more. That might be more visible in higher keys where the damage is large enough to where that 3% is doing a lot of work for you.
Yeah. That will probably the clincher going forward and in DF. I personally dont care either way as I love both, and only hope one of the priest specs is a meta healer. I like priest heals best because priests have two healer specs, like to specialize vs being a Jack of all trades healer, and no other classes have the two healer specs.
Meta healers will be the ones that do the most damage–unless it is close across healers and then utility and healing will matter. Let’s cross our fingers for priest heals.
And, yeah, yada yada yada, people hate that–or some do, I know. They have all kinds of arguments why that should not be, why it is just plain wrong, and so on. And they have all kinds of arguments as to why other specs are going to be just as good, etc etc. And maybe they are right.
Let’s just hope that those of us who enjoy priest heals most are not shoved aside (again–holy right now the exception).
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The addition of Empyreal Blaze has made Holy very competitive with raid damage if you use it on cooldown. I’m seeing consistent logs of Holy Priests doing 4-5k overall dps in non-meme parse settings whilst playing Night Fae. Damage output looks like 75% Holy Fire, 15% SWP, and the rest is Smite/Halo.
That puts Holy right up there with Disc and Holy Paladins slotted in a firm #2-3 slot. I’m expecting Empyreal Blaze is probably going to get nerfed because Holy is competing with battle healers for raid dps whilst being a throughput. I.E. don’t call me shocked if Holy Priests are being stacked again for world first race.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but what’s the point of the discipline playstyle if the Holy can match it in damage? What’s more, right now Holy has more raw/bust damage than Dicipline because they have to keep Dici’s damage down because of the way it heals.
I never agreed that Dici was able to heal/mitigate as much as Holy either. I guess the game doesn’t have room for hybrids 
Like I stated above: I won’t be surprised if Holy receives a nerf to Holy Fire or Empyreal Blaze before the expansion launches.
I find disc playstyle so much more fun than Holy. If it is decently strong, I’m tempted for the first time in years to main disc in DF.
Disc doesn’t really bring any unique utility. Pain suppression is on a long CD and is about the only cool unique thing disc gets.
This is not to knock your opinion, but just because disc can heal via damage does not imply its damage necessarily ought to be higher than other healers. I personally like holy playstyle and know a few little tricks to maximize its damage and like to use them whenever possible. That it does good damage makes it very attractive to some of us who like to focus more on mechanics and less on the rotations etc.
The benefit of having a disc priest is that they pretty much have to do damage. Otherwise they are not really using their toolkit correctly. And if you are in a learning group and you want guaranteed damage from your healers then you ought to invite disc priests and holy paladins–whose playstyle necessitates damage. But again, that does not mean they should do superior damage to other healers when those other healers are trying to do as much damage as possible–as when the healing is not that demanding and they have downtime.
If you think a healer that heals via damage ought to do superior damage that is your opinion. I too have said on these forums that a “damage healer” like disc ought to do good damage, but think of it this way just the same: A hockey player ought to be able to skate fast, but it is not necessary in the game of hockey to skate as fast as a speed skater to do well at the game. It is an advantage, but in the game of hockey, the goal is to score, and there are more important skills than speed at skating in the game–such as puck handling skills. For a healer, their main goal is to heal, and not do damage.
That said, I personally love being able to pump damage on a priest healer, no matter which healer spec it is–holy or disc. In the end, if you are going to down the boss or time the key, among other necessities are getting enemy health down asap.
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I agree, I’m just saying that, being Discipline a healer whose fantasy revolves around doing damage, that his damage or burst capacity is lower than that of other healers who are focused on the more traditional way of healing leaves a bad taste in the mouth. At least to me 
too much “substance over style” and too little “style over substance”
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I understand where you are coming from totally.
It ought to, IF holys hps is higher then discs. If disc does less dps and less hps then there is no reason to have a disc. So if the balance is out of wack which after the evang nerf it will be then disc needs a bump in dps. See how the dps buffs play out
Season 3 and 4 are what happens when disc does less dps and hps AND is harder to play. It doesnt get much action at all. I can see it being worse in the future