I feel that Discipline has several problems going into 9.0 that need addressed. These won’t be in any particular order.
Rapture is too clunky. Even when Rapture was off the GCD, I feel that Rapture simply requires far too much setup to appropriately prepare for damage. The spell itself doesn’t feel good to use.
1a. Solution: Make Luminous Barrier baseline to replace Rapture (Not replace Power Word: Barrier as it does now) and have it apply atonement to all those affected, cutting down the maximum number of targets that can be affected by Luminous Barrier.
Tier 1 talents are imbalanced.
2a. Castigation currently will never, ever be chosen for any content, as it is completely outclassed by Schism. Schism got buffed going into BFA, but Castigation was never compensated. Castigation is supposed to provide more sustain healing at the cost of burst healing, but Schism is outright better in both sustain and burst healing. Mathematically, there’s absolutely no reason to pick Castigation. This is important because Disc has to focus on DPS due to their design.
2.a.b Solution: I don’t feel Schism needs to be nerfed, but rather Castigation needs to be buffed. I think a flat increase to Penance on top of its current effect, or give each bolt a chance to produce an additional bolt, might be enough to put it in line with Schism.
2b. Twist of Fate doesn’t provide enough of a reward for the proc condition necessary. Disc is all about mitigation and prevention. While you can see some good use out of Twist of Fate if you can get a lot of uptime on it, you’re already in a tough spot if you let a player get down to 35% in the first place as you’re essentially now behind, where Disc is the absolute weakest. There’s no double dipping of the talent either. You get far more mileage out of Schism instead of having an overall weakened toolkit with just regular Penance, Smite, and Shadow Word: Pain/Purge the Wicked up until a player hits 35%.
2.b.a Solution: Outside of a redesign, I think this talent can go in two different directions. One is to keep the health threshold as-is and buff the damage/healing percent increase. Another is to substantially raise the health threshold (75%, 80%?) and reduce the dealing/healing percent increase.
Shield Discipline talent is not worth taking. Again, this talent was great in Legion due to the way Power Word: Shield worked at the time, but like Castigation, this talent was never properly adjusted for BFA, and in-fact only got nerfed. There’s currently no point in taking this talent whatsoever, as Mindbender and Solace provide damage and mana return. Damage alone will trump Shield Discipline, but the talent doesn’t even have a higher mana return in comparison to the other options to begin with.
3.a. Solution: I feel what might help this talent is the addition of the text "When Power Word: Shield is completely absorbed, X% of the damage absorbed is dealt to the attacker". This thorns-like feature should give atonement healing in order to keep pace with the other options. This also might incentivize using Power Word: Shield during combat and not just during pull or during Rapture applications.
Lenience is extremely boring. Lenience is, to me, the most boring talent in the entire game. A 3% decrease to damage for those with Atonement is helpful, but it absolutely doesn’t feel like a level 100 talent. It changes nothing about the spec, there’s nothing to think about, it’s just a boring 3% decrease that certainly isn’t felt during regular play.
4.a Solution: I would rather have this talent be replaced entirely with something more meaningful going into 9.0.
Disc is too punished by Bursting and Grievous. Due to the way both affixes are designed, these two affixes uniquely punish Disc.
5a. Bursting because Disc has no good healing AoE outside of a kiss-curse talent on a slight cooldown. Disc either has to blow cooldowns, which is not optimal at all, or Disc has to rely on the group to heal themselves. No other healer in the game suffers from Bursting in the way Disc does.
5.a.b Solution: To me, there’s no way to solve this unless either Bursting is redesigned, or Disc gets more reliable AoE healing that doesn’t rely on damaging enemies.
5.b. Grievous harms Disc uniquely due to the fact that Disc is the hardest healer to use when trying to play catch-up. As stated, one of Disc’s design philosophy is to prevent damage, with a limited ability to react to unpredictable damage. As Grievous stacks increase, Disc has to pull more and more of their focus away from damage and more on triage, where Disc is weakest. Shadow Mend is strong, but it’s not Holy Word: Serenity strong. Power Word: Radiance is nothing compared to Holy Word: Sancutary, and Power Word: Barrier does nothing to stop Grievous, just reduce its damage, in comparison to Divine Hymn which can actually remove Grievous. You have to just hope that your group doesn’t take unavoidable damage.
5.b.a Solution: Again, I see no way to solve this issue unless Grievous is redesigned, or Disc gets more reactive abilities to handle it.
Disc relies too strongly on other players rather than itself. What I mean by this is that you’ll very often hear the phrase “Disc is great, when the group is good.” This is because Disc is harshly punished by other players taking avoidable damage. More-so than any other healer in the game. Worst of all, this is completely outside of Disc’s control. While Disc has some ability to triage and react to damage, Disc suffers the most when having to play catch-up. In an ideal world, Disc shouldn’t have to catch up because they’re constantly preventing the next big batch of damage. Not only that, but all of Disc’s major cooldowns (Rapture, Pain Suppression, Power Word: Barrier), rely on knowing incoming damage patterns beforehand. None of these cooldowns offer value to players that already took damage, they have to be cast before the damage goes out.
6.a Solution: The only solution to this issue is to give more reactive healing to Disc’s toolkit, but at that point, you’re infringing on Holy’s playstyle. I’m not entirely sure how you would go about actually tackling this issue, as it’s a higher level issue.
What I mean by this is that you’ll very often hear the phrase “Disc is great, when the group is good.”
Most players also have no clue how to play disc. Of course, you’ll hear this because to some people doing anything more than smite is incomprehensible;. You can play with bad players as disc, and be relatively fine.
Most of disc priest’s issues can be solved by the group carrying food or fish feasts. (Particularly grievous and bursting.)
I disagree. Pushing your relevant content with a bad group as Disc is far more punishing than with other healers. Disc’s toolkit is not built around triage, it’s about prevention. Shadow Mend, especially on a tank, isn’t strong enough to counteract sudden spikes of damage without putting yourself at a deficit.
With regards to the group carrying food, that just ties back into my point of Disc needing to rely on other players. Not only can you not rely on your group carrying those items in the first place, but it takes far longer for the entire group to sit for 10 seconds and heal up when every other healer can triage and keep the group moving.
If the response to that is “Play with your guild/people you know”, that once again just completely loops back into “Disc is good when the group is good” argument. Other healers are elevated by a good group. Disc is reliant on it.
They may replace the dot of shadow mend whit a shield afther the heal, there’s no sence on a healing skill whit damage as part of it.
The damage of smite shuld recharge a shield on every character whit atonement and no reduce the damage on smite target there’s no use for this mechanic on many targets situation.
You can’t make a statement and then not explain yourself. Saying “This is just ignorant” and nothing else does nothing to refute me.
If a tank suddenly takes 40% damage (Say from Spirit Breaker), are you saying spamming Shadowmend on the tank is going to heal the tank such that you won’t experience a dip in healing the rest of the group? Because last I checked, even with the first Shadowmend bolstered by Depths, you’re not going to be healing the tank for more than around 10% of their overall health. Under this hypothetical scenario, it would take at least 4 Shadowmend casts to put yourself back on track, assuming no other significant damage was taken by the rest of the group or the tank since then.
Edit: I can’t consecutively reply, so in regards to the post before this one:
Because they are? I’m not sure what your issue with the statement is. You do realize that I’ve never stated that Disc doesn’t heal through DPS/Atonement, correct? Or are you just assuming that because I haven’t explicitly said it?
If a tank suddenly takes 40% damage (Say from Spirit Breaker), are you saying spamming Shadowmend on the tank is going to heal the tank such that you won’t experience a dip in healing the rest of the group?
You framed it as if using shadow mend was bad play, which it is not. Even in situations where people DON’T screw up, shadow mend is used on a regular basis.
Not all amounts of fail can be healed through, not on even a holy paladin.
Completely agree about the Grevious and Bursting points though. Disc is uniquely gimped in this aspect, particularly when combat is dropped or there’s no target to hit.
Damage prevention/mitigation are buzzwords that have been used for years, and though they don’t apply exactly to Disc anymore, they are still used to describe it’s unique healing style. Disc is Proactive healing, meaning you need to know when spikes of damage are coming out and prepare for them. You shield/atonement early to prevent the damage getting out of control and mitigate the amount of non-atonement healing you need.
When you say the OP lacks understanding, but his critique of the talents is spot on, those are contradictory statements. Though I don’t agree with his suggested changes, I understand why they would be desirable.
Also, coming in to the Priest forums posting on your Paladin about how “We don’t understand our class” is a kinda silly thing to do. I wouldn’t expect a Paladin to inherently understand Priest playstyle so your comments are mostly irrelevant. Come post on your Priest or keep your comments constructive.
It’s not accurate to say Discipline’s design is to prevent and mitigate damage. The majority of healing is atonement based.
It doesn’t take a complete understanding of the spec to see that those talents are useless. You don’t agree with his changes because he lacks understanding of what can be done with the spec and what is actually needed (which is not much tbh).
I’ll post on whatever character I want to post on and post whatever thoughts I want to post that isn’t against ToS. TBH your whole reply just seems like you’re just miffed that a paladin is posting on these forums.
I think he is commenting more on a lofty op pally dictating to disc, but as i see your priest was your main when the allure of easy top of the chart healing was too much for you. and you jumped ship … a little tongue in cheek there
I wouldn’t describe Shadowmend as bad. I don’t technically have a problem with it, I just have a problem with the fact that it’s basically our only solution to a lot of really common problems.
I don’t want to be that guy and plug my own Shadowlands thread, but I do go into it in a fair amount of detail there. If you don’t want to read my exceedingly long post, here’s the short version:
Disc is basically set up to burst AoE heal and only to burst AoE heal. We just don’t have the tools to do anything else effectively. We’re really good in that niche and it’s a super valuable one for high end raiding. If you’re in a high end Mythic raiding guild, you’ll do well, because your group will play around you and make sure you don’t have to worry about the things you can’t do. If you’re not, you’ll start to suffer. It’s a bit like trying to patch holes in a road, but we only have one of those street-wide brick-laying machines to do it with.
My argument, at least, is that I would like to have options to deal with situations outside of that specific niche, even if it came at the expense of my burst healing capabilities.
I think it does need some changes because mythics can be difficult on disc. We all see how well druids can be but no nerds. I genuinely don’t understand why disc has gotten another nerf ever single patch to limit us even more on our ability to heal. It’s been frustrating to say the least
Also keep in mind Glimmer scales waaaay too strongly off of gear. Not only does the higher iLvl Azerite give more stats, but it also increases Glimmer’s base heal, so it double dips with iLvl.
Fundamentally there should be a trade off as a healer; do I stop healing to contribute more dps to the group? Or do I forgo dps completely to get out as much healing as possible?
There is no trade off for Pally, they just passively dps and the Glimmer buffed Holy Shocks make up for the lost healing and then some.
Disc doesn’t have to worry about this in Raid since the only time you aren’t dpsing is if you are applying atonements, but in M+ it exists for them since atonement is much less impactful when a tank is taking heavy damage
And Resto Druid doesn’t have this trade off in M+ because they just cast their hots and then have 10 seconds where they can just dps and lose almost no healing throughput.
Mistweaver has Way of the Crane in M+ that also ignores this trade-off, though on a cooldown.
But Resto Shaman and Holy Priest have no way to effectively heal and DPS at the same time, which makes them fundamentally worse healers.
Blizzard hasn’t been able to juggle Healer Balance between Raid and M+ at all since M+ was introduced. And unless there are some pretty sweeping changes in Shadowlands, then it’s gonna be another entire Xpack of crappy Healing Meta in Raid & M+ again.
The thing is, right now disc is pretty strong at everything, and it’s only real weakness is that it’s bad at triage, which holy is good at. I think holy needs much more work before we starting talking about disc needing changes. And I think the spec itself is fun and had good tradeoffs.
The thing that would fix disc would be nerfing hpal/rdruid, which are overtuned. I actually think disc is where most healers should be at balance wise.
I disagree a little. Disc feels awful in m+ with a group that takes avoidable damage. The lack of Triage is a real issue for M+. And for Raiding, they just bring too much to the table compared to everyone else *(Besides Pally). Damage Reduction CDs, Passive DPS, Massive Burst Healing Potential.
When you are doing 12k dps and doing the same healing as other classes something is wrong.
I would make 2 changes to Disc to really make them a lot better.
They need to increase Penance Single Target healing by a LOT, like double or triple it.
You do reduced dps per atonement you have out, without affecting how much healing it does. like each atonement you have out reduces damage done by 5-10%, up to a cap, but transfers healing as if it did full damage. No other healer *(Besides Pally) can dps and Heal at the same time in raids, it’s one or the other. This would just bring them a bit more in line with other healers.
*Pally is just stupidly broken this patch and justgoes to show Blizz complete neglect of their game this Xpack
When comparing other healing classes… factor in 2 things
!) if there is nothing to dps then you cant heal… Wrathion springs to mind plus a few bosses in the past
2) Other healers are just plain easier to play. I play hpriest and resto shammie monk and they dont rate against disc in terms of ease of play and attn needed.
