Discipline Priest Complete 8.1 Thoughts, Feedback and Suggestions

Classes Priest
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Hey guys, I am Nuba, X Priest Gladiator and Casual AOTC raider, wanted to share my thoughts about everything post-8.1 Discipline Priest, give not only feedback but suggestions moving forward to make the spec more fun and engaging!
I am the guy who made the slightly-popular Disc PvP Feedback thread prior to 8.1, but since a lot of things have changed since I made that thread I decided I wanted to make another one with more insights and base myself on the experiences that I have had with the spec both raiding casually as well as playing PvP in very high levels (2800+ MMR) and some insights on how the spec feels right now.
Alright, so let’s begin!

Table of Content:

  • Thoughts
  • Feedback
  • Suggestion
  • Closing

My thoughts and rumblings about current Discipline Priest

There is a line between effort and reward that exist in this game, sometimes playing very good rewards you with higher numbers on the DPS meters or higher rating in Arena, this is how its always been, right?
Play your class well, get rewarded, but the thing is that with Discipline Priest things are a little blurry on that line - You play your class well and you’ll be on the same level as everyone else, but if you play it wrong you get punished. This happens mostly because Balance if made based off the top of the charts, which should be an OK thing, right?
I mean, Discipline Priests were, no offense to the other healers, the higher Risk-Reward healing spec in the game prior to 8.1, to a point that it was much harder to play than the other specs but had upsides to it.
While most specs see issues and react to it - “Raid wide damage? Sure, press AOE Heal burst thing”, with Discipline this often happen the other way around - A discipline Priest has to previously study the raid timer for abilities and pre-attonement(usually with radiance) and evangelism so you can be able to have significant healing done. No other healing spec requires you to have complete knowledge of Raid-wide damage and calculate ideal times for you to press your buttons in order to -meet the low requirements- for healing done in the game, as mentioned before - everything in regards to the other healing specs is intuitive, as with Discipline you really need to study not only your class/spec, but also the encounter.
Didn’t time your Radiances+Evangelism properly? Well, you just lost 30-50% of your HPS right there. This creates a gigantic gap between Low-level heroic raiders (me!) and below, but also creates a perception to the general community that Discipline Priests are only good in Mythic raiding - Which could not be the case at all, its just a lot more difficult to play in comparison to other healers, and if you don’t follow the exact patterns you’re supposed to, you’re instantly useless to the raid.

Well, I like being rewarded for playing well, right? Who doesn’t, people like playing Discipline and have liked it for years already, and the attonement style of gameplay really helps a lot here. Thing is, after 8.1, Discipline Play style became some sort of “High risk, low reward”, in a sense that its a class that requires a very high level of investment into the game for you to be on-par with other healers, and this comes from the need of Balance rather than the need of fun.

I think this is ok actually, but I have a suggestion to make here, which might initially upset a few players but in general is the correct thing to do: If High-reward can not exist in a MMORPG like WoW, then the High-Risk should be diminished properly to match the lack of reward for playing flawlessly.

Initially, this might sound wrong, which is: if you want to Balance Discipline around the very top, you should make Discipline’s skill-disparity similar to that of the other healers, which currently it isn’t even close. Discipline’s abilities aren’t intuitive, and even when they are understood, it still requires certain types of encounter studies that doesn’t exist on other specs and classes - its not enough to do all the mechanics right, you need to do everything else that was mentioned before in this text and more, just to be “normal”.

Do I think this is the ideal path moving forward? Not really, but I do think its the best possible solution for the problem created by Blizzard that “High reward shouldn’t exist”.

Moving on to PvP I have seen a pattern in regards to Discipline in 8.1, which is its only playable now in comps where you don’t really have to heal.
In PvP, much like in PvE, there is a huge gap between the top end of the ladder and the bottom - Discipline Priests are currently only viable in high-CC high-Burst comps, which are limited to RMP and possibly Jungle and Cupid (the latter 2 being quite weak right now). These comps are very skill dependant and high-reward kind of comps, but in case of PvP currently still has some sort of “high reward” involved.
Currently Discipline Priests are somewhere around the “Tier-C” healers together with Holy Priests, in a sense that our healing is the worst of all the healers, our survivability is the worst of all the healers, but different than Holy Priests Discipline brings a toolkit that is unique and fits well into the RMP playstyle.

But outside of playing with really good Mages and Rogues, playing Discipline Priest right now is a complete nightmare. I have 4 Priests, 2 of them I use to play with good players I met in LFG and get Gladiator/rating with, while the other 2 I use to play with RL friends who aren’t top tier level players.
The thing that I noticed is how much Discipline Priests can not heal or survive -anything- without massive peels. The entire class’ playstyle currently play around not only you playing flawlessly, but also your teammates, just in order to survive long enough for your team to score, and this creates a huge disparity between the top and the bottom, and is why Discipline Priests can not currently PvP if they aren’t already Gladiators with contacts.
This creates a huge barrier to entry, and diminishes the number of people wanting to play Discipline Priests in both PvP and PvE.

8.1 Discipline Priest Feedback

Since I am more focused on PvP, I’ll start with my PvP feedback:

  • The Focused Will nerf created a huge gap between playing right and wrong, if two melee caught up to you and you’re not instantly peeled, you die - Discipline can no longer survive melee damage, and this creates a feeling of hopelessness in the “low end”-anyone below Gladiator- of the Discipline Players, while not affecting, but also being relevant to, high end players as much.
  • The Weakened Soul nerf furthers the “high-risk” factor of playing Discipline Priest, but I think it is correct for this to exist, and this is how it should have been from the start. I think that as long as Discipline Priests are Balanced having Weakend Soul can add more depth to playing Discipline. I think this change moves the class in the correct direction, but I also see the loss that it implies: spamming shield has always been the wrong play in BFA, regardless of level, weakened soul prevents players from “playing wrong”, which is somehow a form of “cattering”, but I am ok with it as it not existing felt like a design flaw after seeing it in action.
  • Massive nerfs to healing, traits, shields, attonement and everything else throughput-wise was a… “ok” thing, up until the moment that all the must-have traits were also all nerfed by 50%. Prior to Season 2 launching having Radiance Traits and Shadowmend traits were the one thing allowing Discipline Priests to keep up with “unbursted” damage, and while this is a design flaw in the end - since every healer in the game is supposed to heal through “unbursted damage” when standing still and “just healing”, Discipline Priest cant. There is a general feeling that Discipline Priest’ throughput in Arenas is below that of other healers, and probably less than half of that of Restoration Druids and Mistweaver Monks.
  • In PvE I won’t go into much details, but I’ll say that unless you’re one of the many “die-hard” Discipline fans like me (there are quite a lot of those, I think) you’re much better off playing Holy as its a lot more straight-forward, there is less Risk in playing the spec, and the Rewards are superior to that of Discipline Priests

Suggestions

Considering that “High-reward” can not exist, as seen and proven by the actions of Blizzard’s balancing team, here follows a few suggestions:

  • Revert focused will to 2 stacks - I’ll start with this. This is a no-brainer, as it has no impact on PvE and could help begining Discipline Priests whille not having much impact on the high end of the 3v3 competitive ladder.
  • Make Power Word: Radiance Baseline Instant Cast - Spamming radiance is wrong, and different than Power Word: Shield its mana cost is massive, which leads to even beginers instantly noticing “wow, I just spent too much mana here”. This wouldn’t affect high-end raiding numbers at all, but would give normal/heroic/M+ players a huge boon - “oh raid is taking damage, better use radiance here to mitigate it” instead of “raid will take damage in 12 seconds, so I should apply attonement to X players with 2x radiance and refresh it with evangelism so during the next damage phase that happens in 1min 20 seconds I’ll have evangelism back up again and thus I’ll be able to heal through the raid-wide damage better.”
  • Ultimate Radiance - Increase Power Word: Radiance healing by 250% but it no longer applies attonement - This buffs radiance healing slightly when compared to current Radiance, but removes the “AOE apply attonement” factor of it. If Radiance were to be made baseline instant cast players could opt to have either a big AOE heal in RBGs or a 5-plalyer attonement-application, giving players a choice in playstyle.
  • Trinity - Attonement Duration increased by 15 seconds and healing transfered increased by 20%, but can only be applied through Power Word: Shield. - Seriously, the extra line added in 8.1 is just too random, unintuitive and comes from bad design - the team just wanted to make it stronger but didn’t want to revert a nerf they did previously, so they seem to just randomly come up with the 25% critical chance thing, which makes no sense and doesn’t fit with the ability at all.
  • Strength of Soul - This thing was never changed during Alpha, or Beta, or anything else. its just useless, its a waste that needs to be made into a real talent. Why is this pre-alpha thing even here? My suggestion here would be to completely rework it into something different - Make it so power word shield heals for the same amount as it absorbs as well? This is a blank PvP talent currently and can be made into anything.
  • Shield Discipline - I had to open the talent calculator to remember the name of this talent - Not a single soul has picked this in BFA, this is useless for every piece of Content. To a point that even if this was made 1% it would still probably not be picked, but at least people would consider it. I don’t think Blizzard should be afraid of making the least-throughput talent to be desirable, as it helps in Balancing numbers further without major issues.
  • Premonition - This PvP talent should be removed and the ability made Baseline. Nerf the attonement extention from 5 to 2 seconds (maybe 1 second, even zero seconds would be fine for a baseline ability). This ability adds a lot of depth and fun to Discipline Priests in PvP and I see no reason why it isn’t baseline - its such a no-brainer against certain comps while being useless against others, but having the ability to “Death” a Incap would be cool, and fun and interactive without me having to gimp myself over by picking the talent against something that I shouldn’t. Premonition for Discipline Priests feel like a “interrupt” ability, in a sense that I shouldn’t need to spec into it.
  • Balance the Numbers - This is obvious here, but kinda hard too. Discipline’s throughput numbers are currently inferior to that of other healers despite its high representation in the high ranks due to RMP’s playstyle (and honestly being the only comp in the game that doesn’t care much about the Discipline healing or being focused), but obviously something has to be done. After the “Depth of Shadows” and “Ultimate Radiance” trait nerfs the spec is very very weak. This is quite random, but I think currently Discipline’s numbers at the very top relies too much on mage being viable and not on the spec itself being viable, to a point that I could bet that if Mages were as bad as Disciplines are, you wouldn’t see a single Priest at the top.

Final Thoughts

Agree with my suggestions or not, we all know Discipline Priests need a whole lot of love in 8.1, and we haven’t received any at all.
My feeling, especially seeing things so unfinished like Strength of Soul and Shield Discipline, is that Blizzard has a total of Zero players in their group of Designers that play or care about Discipline Priests other than what they see in the “Numbers websites” such as Raider io, but let’s be honest here even Raider io shows Discipline Priest as the very worst of the healers, so I can’t even be sure about that.

The reason why I can talk so much about my spec is because I play it a lot, so this is why I think Blizzard should have their designers play the classes they’re balancing. The entire thing about the spec being unfinished as it is can not happen in a game with a monthly fee such as World of Warcraft, and the lack of love for the Spec’s design is apparent.

Hopefully something can be done, and this text helps guide Blizzard in the correct direction.

As I mentioned before, I know a lot of you here probably think that “High-Risk High-Reward” should exist in World of Warcraft, but I do not think that pressing the key constantly is going to bring us anywhere as Blizzard is obviously set on their idea.

Hope you guys enjoyed this very long read!

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Ok you all know I have to put my 2 cents in so here it goes…

Disc priest right now is underappreciated as in we don’t really get invited to group content as much as the other healers. After the 8.1 nerfs disc priests were looked at the wrong way because of lower numbers. Our numbers were one thing that made us good but the other thing we had was damage mitigation which was amazing for group content. But yes it is like you say for raiding we do more for the same numbers and if we mess up we are punished for it. Like our guild attempted mythic Grong which is a healing intensive fight and I swear I was using everything correctly and all of us healers were pulling 40k hps pretty much equal on the charts. Disc priests don’t pull ahead in raids anymore and that’s not a bad thing either as long as we can keep up. Now as for mythic + we are amazing this patch. Disc priests are way better for reaping than any other healers atm because of our damage mitigations and mass dispel. For example I just recently hit 396 ilvl with really good stats and I can pull 35k hps off of atonement healing alone in a mythic + dungeon while maintaining 11k Single target dps. On top of that I got damage mitigations and shadow covenant for reactive healing. I almost feel bad for the groups that declined me because i was a “DISC PRIEST”. Disc priest feels so good right now in mythic + and with our damage mitigations and dps I feel overpowered tbh. If they were to buff disc priests in any way then it has potential to just make us overpowered again. I can’t really speak for pvp but even after the nerfs I have never lost a 1v1 duel or open world pvp fight. Disc priests can still put the smack down on people in 1v1 and hell sometimes even 2v1. It usually ends with them running away so I use tailoring nets to prevent that because it was getting annoying that they challenge me and run. Whenever I get the bounty buff it pretty much just makes me unkillable which is kinda broken tbh. My final conclusion of disc priest is don’t judge disc priests at the start of a new raid tier. Obviously you’re going to feel underpowered due to lack of gear and not timing the atonements properly. Learn the fights, get the BiS gear and I promise you disc will start to feel overpowered again.

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So you give your opinion about a text that you didn’t read?
What is the point of it then?
You’re talking PvP and then you mention “open world 1v1” as your only experience in PvP, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.

Your entire reply was you trying to tell us you’re a good priest and adding nothing constructive pass the raid grong talk.

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Oh I read all you’re text but it all goes out the window because of one simple fact…Disc priests are still overpowered when played correctly. The playstyle feels really good with better gear and I was simply giving you examples of that. Sorry disc priest doesn’t have a playstyle that you enjoy if you don’t like it then don’t play it.

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That means you didn’t read my text, because that wasn’t the subject of my post, and you missing the entire point but still trying to tell everyone how great you are is sad, not self-promoting.
I suggest re-reading the OP and trying to make sense out of it.

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If that’s the context you get out of my post then that’s on you. I never once said I was “GREAT” or that I was “GOOD” or even attempted to self promote. The entire point of you’re post is obviously “PLAY STYLE” then you start complaining about the risk vs reward system and how it’s flawed. NO we are not flawed nor is our play style. We are still overpowered because of the risk vs reward system such as the examples I gave above. If you didn’t already realize this is that people play disc because it’s “HARDER” and not face roll. We want the challenge of the spec because it makes the game more interesting. People that want the play style to change obviously aren’t good at it and should go play something else if they don’t like it. Also yes there is a bigger reward for playing disc properly. You’re post goes over many different points and to say that I self promoted and didn’t even hit one of those points is just straight ignorance on your part. Anyway I’m done with you and I’ll try ignore you’re posts and replys in the future because of how toxic you become when you misread something.

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I think I mostly agree and further add that I even think Disc is niche at best in PvE. Performing competitively with other healers currently requires a strong match between our cooldown timing/use and the boss mechanics. If a boss isn’t doing massive predictable raid-wide damage on Radiance/Evangelism timings, then we have a square peg-round hole problems.
The 8.0 design that you describe as high-risk, high reward was allowing over performance when there was a strong match between the boss mechanics and the toolkit and comparable performance even when the two were mismatched.

I also feel that, even in 8.0… and going back years, disc has suffered from not having many strong arena partners. We require high cc, both because of our own squishiness/lack of kiting ability but also because our low throughput. But we share DR tables with both warlocks and boomkins. So every caster-cleave comp for disc has DR table problems. The 8.1 changes just exacerbated this situation.

So, I’m with you, if they can’t allow disc to overperform when there is a strong mechanic/toolkit agreement, then I think they need to generalize the toolkit more, which will make it lower risk and generally more beginner friendly.

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The mind boggles tbh.

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Almost ilevel 400 gear…yeah, youd want it to feel good. And your advice is ‘dont feel bad if youre low geared, nub geared, or a noob, because if you can accumulate BiS gear its all good’, etc.
Its relatively useless advice for most pvpers.

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Disc is still being called the hard healing spec?

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Well have you played all the others?

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Priest lover through and through!

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My thoughts on Disc.
The nerfs were for the .1% playstyle and really hurt us in pvp and dungeons.
We’re still fine in raids but you literally have to ignore spot healing and play the optimal rotation having perfect timing for raid damage to be competitive.
If you can do that we can be competitve on healing and better than average on heal dps.
It’s high risk low reward and not worth it most of the time.

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Nuba, You really hit the nail on the head with all of these changes! If only we could get someone to Listen!

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If they got rid of the high risk playstyle, I’d probably end up unsubbing. That’s not a threat, or to say they must cater to my idea of fun. But I find all the other healers too boring at this point. I certainly think we could use some small buffs / tweaks, but making the spec fail-proof would remove the thrill, for me. I’m also not convinced Blizzard would never allow a high risk - high reward spec.

Personally, I’m really tired of the “devs don’t play our spec” fallback argument. All through MoP, Holy Priests screamed about how obviously the devs didn’t play Holy and didn’t care about it, and then it was revealed it was Ghostcrawler’s main. I don’t feel a lack of love in Discipline’s design, I think it’s very difficult to tune because of its skill curve. And it’s an honest debate about whether such a skill curve should exist in this particular game, and where it should be balanced around, but to me “lack of anyone who knows or understands the problems” is not the issue, it’s a way of simplifying the problem into something that’s easily fixable.

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you don’t feel a lack of love, yet there are so many unfinished talents and unplanned playstyles such as the ones listed and the reasons why 8.0 disc was so strong in raids.
They have no idea what will happen, even if members from the community scream about whats going to happen (see: Maledict trinket, Rdruid/MW massive buffs, etc), this is generally what happens, but in the case of disc its just unfinished.
You can point talents and things that haven’t been changed since Legion even though they make no sense at all anymore. Damn, we still get the Artifact buff although the ability no longer exists >.>

My suggestion isn’t to change the playstyle of the high-end, nothing would change on my arena playstyle with the listed suggestions, nothing at all!!

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I have seen no spec anywhere that doesn’t have dead, non-synergistic, undertuned talents. It’s a long jump from that to “no devs play it or love it.”
I AGREE there are dead talents that could use a rework, I just disagree with your assessment that the reason is apathy.

I think a lot of your points are reasonable and smart. I probably should have started with that. I do disagree with some of your points, though, like that high reward can’t exist and that the fault is that devs don’t play it.

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My argument was based on Balancing. The hard vs easy spec balance isnt made around difficulty, its made around numbers. Don’t you agree?

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I’m having a little trouble parsing your question, but if you’re saying Blizzard doesn’t account for difficulty in tuning, I would say it’s not clear. BM Hunter is generally seen as the easiest spec in the whole game currently, and I think that’s part of why it’s tuned so low right now. Maybe I’m wrong, but I wouldn’t say there’s ironclad evidence that it’s NOT a consideration. Obviously the 8.1 nerfs were largely about numbers in mythic raid, but to me that’s not evidence that a difficult spec will never again be allowed to be powerful at the top end.

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Minor segway. BM hunter is also tuned lower because it can do absolutely all of its damage from range, whilst moving, so whilst other casters / specs start to lose damage when movement mechanics are introduced, BM does not.