I’m going to go back and do some edits today. I forgot PI in the SL Shadow post I wrote yesterday, so I will go back and add that in. I’ll be covering Disc again today, but focusing on the SL changes so far.
I won’t cover the covenants again. I initially wrote it as a Shadow subsection, but figured the last paragraph helped it to cover my thoughts on them as a whole. I might go back and edit it to make it a little less Shadow specific regarding each of the abilities, but it’s mostly fine. From a raiding Disc standpoint, I think Unholy Nova is just barely in the lead (providing a decent chunk of healing outside of Atonement, which is always welcome), but BotA isn’t too far behind.
Discipline
We haven’t seen a lot of changes to Discipline yet, but we’ve seen a few talent changes.
New Talents
Shadow Covenant
Shadow Covenant got reworked, but I’m not sure how I feel about it. I’ve seen a lot of negativity surrounding it and I don’t think that’s unwarranted. It feels weird. I think the issue I have is the penalty doesn’t match the bonus. During SCov, no holy spells means you can only cast MB, SW:P, SW:D, Schism and Shadowmend. The damage bonus means you don’t want to be casting Shadowmend, leaving you with SW:P just to fill that void once you’ve used up all your CDs.
This could theoretically become a part of the meta burst build, but not in a very clean way. The strat as I envision it is Atonements - Schism - Penance - PW:Sol - SCov - MB. In other words, the standard burst set up, followed by SCov/MB to finish up with a giga-heal. I’m not sure that’s healthy to backload even more of our burst healing like that or to even encourage burst healing even more.
I do think the holy lockout is an interesting drawback, but I don’t think the damage bonus is the right way to offset it.
Light's Carress
When I saw this in the preview, I was dead certain this was going to be replacing Luminous Barrier. It’s actually replacing Lenience. I’m not against replacing Lenience, it was definitely at the top of my boring talents list, it just feels weird to have two talents modifying PW:B on that talent row.
I think I prefer LC over LB, even if Evangelism is still the winner in that tier. That might change in actual gameplay, but LC just tickles my brain in the right ways.
Other Changes
So we get Mind Blast, which, on its own, is a big buff to our burst healing. It’s basically adding a second Penance to our burst window.
I am probably very alone on this, but I do think it feels very similar to Schism. Obviously, lower CD, no damage bonus. But they’re both 1.5s cast shadow spells with no real visual component. As is, they even do very, very similar amounts of damage. This isn’t an argument for having Schism be a modified Mind Blast, but I would prefer something that made them more distinct.
Power Infusion is also back. Again, really solid burst potential when we use it on ourselves, but I think I would be more likely to toss this on a DPS during Bloodlust.
We also get SW:D but it’s purely a DPS tool. The tooltip explicitly mentions that the damage dealt does not trigger Atonement. Nothing to really get excited about. Nice for solo play, I won’t really touch it in groups.
Overall
I don’t think there’s a lot to get excited about yet, or at least nothing for me to be excited about. The issues I have with Disc still exist within this version, perhaps even exacerbated a bit if I’m right about SCov. I’m most excited by Covenants, but less from a mechanical standpoint and more for numbers.
I think Disc is liable to just remain in the same position it’s in now. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just kind of okay.