I’m thinking of changing classes now that holy pally is dead and was thinking on hopping on disc priest, but I’ve heard that it’s quite hard to play, especially for a casual player like me.
I just wanted some opinions on whether disc is hard to get into? Or is the transition, especially as a holy pally main (dps+heal), not too bad.
Also, what are some weaknesses for disc?
I would say it has a higher skillcap, but not an insurmountably high one. It just takes some retraining of your fingers and for your brain. Especially if you play at a more casual and chill level, it’s going to be perfectly fine for whatever you want to do once you get used to it mechanically.
It may feel hard to get into, but play it for a few days and just get used to the atonement style and you will know whether or not you love it or hate it. It will feel difficult at first, and probably stressful, but it’s not so bad.
My advice would be to either use Mouseover macros like I do, so you can keep your target and keep DPS going on that target, while also maintaining atonement on people in your party, or to use a healing Add-On like Vuh-Do.
Weaknesses are that it is incredibly punishing on mistakes, and also that your fast reactive healing is kinda limited, especially for large groups.
I wouldn’t say an incredibly high skill cap, but you need to know and learn how to balance damaging and healing at the same time. You can only really pull it off using mouseover macros so you can hover over cast heals/PWS on your group without detargeting your current target so you can go back to DPSing.
The main weakness to Disc is mainly that they’re tunneled into only one way to heal your group which is dealing damage through attonement via radiance. If you’re unable to deal damage, you’re out of combat, and/or radiance is off CD then you’re going to have a hard-time dealing with M+ affixes or group damage that Holy has no problem handling because literally all you have is Shadow Mend & Power Word Shield.
garbage throughput outside of 20 atonment ramp-up, very bad self only defensives, not the best mobility, low damage vs other healers if they just focus on dps, very cooldown reliant, outside of long cooldowns all you have is shadowmend spam to recover, if you don’t know the fights you are never gonna pump even half decent heals.
Disc priest gets better the more you play from ahead. Knowing what mobs do damage and why benefits a disc priest more than it does any other healer, because disc doesn’t have great buttons to reactively heal with. If atonement is already applied to the group, your DPS burst rotation will heal everyone for quite a bit. If everyone drops a lot of health and your atonements aren’t applied, you’ll have to spend globals applying atonement, and people can die easily in that window. Their weakness is trying to come back from unexpected bursts. If you’re trying to heal in a heavily reactive way you’re going to do a lot worse than on another healer.
Granted, Penance’s heal got buffed enough that when you do get a power of the dark side proc, it heals for a very high amount, and can definitely cover some mistakes. You’ll still want to use it for damage the vast majority of the time, but it makes a good emergency heal on the move now right alongside shadowmend. So you do have some single target to work with.
It took me about a month of video watching to understand the mechanics. And I leveled my disc only through instances to learn it. It took me awhile longer to get super comfortable. Now that was the beginning of bfa. Now at the end of I feel like there is a better understanding and I have an easier time
3.2k arena, 4.5k m+, trash raid disc here.
It’s not that the skill cap is high, it’s that the skill floor is high. It takes a lot more effort to heal a +15 key as a disc than any other healer. It’s not that much harder to heal a +25 as a disc than another healer.
Because you heal through damage, but you heal more by just healing, you need to get good enough that your damage through healing is bigger than the damage your group takes, and then you just have a ton of fun. If you don’t meet that threshold, you get stuck shadow mend spamming one target at a time. Meeting that threshold is why there’s a skill ‘floor’.
I very much recommend it, by far the most fun spec in the game, especially going into SL the new kit is just bonkers.
If you’re doing 3 or 5 man content, get a mouse and just keybind target party 1-5 to 5 side mouse buttons.
The one unfun part about disc is how much target switching you need to do, but the actual playstyle of being both reactive (by nature of healing role) and always having proactive damage to do is like nothing else.
UPDATE: there is no such thing as “skillcap”. There is only experience and inexperience.
That being said: there are specs that are so well designed, they poop on all the others in similar roles.
Example: resto druid. It’s easy to play in the role, and the healing scalars are so overtuned that you can be in catform most of the time DPS’ing instead of healing.
If you’re not a fan of hover healing here is a macro that makes your damaging spells cast on your target’s target if your current target is an ally. That way you can throw out DPS without taking your target off the tank. Just replace “Mind Blast” with whatever spell.
#showtooltip Mind Blast
/cast [harm,nodead][target=targettarget,harm,nodead][] Mind Blast
For Penance you often want to use it for it’s heal so you may not like the target of target macro for it. This macro will cast Penance on your target unless you’re holding SHIFT, in which case it will cast on Target of target. If you want it to work the opposite way (always cast on target of target ifyou’re targetting an ally unless you hold shift) just switch the nomodifier and modifier=shift portions. (There is probably a better way to write this).
#showtooltip Penance
/cast [nomodifier] Penance
/cast [modifier=shift,harm,nodead][modifier=shift,target=targettarget,harm,nodead][] Penance
I dispute the chat about needing keybinds etc and macros to play disc. I do 20 keys and a decent level of raiding and i use few of either.
Disc takes more effort to do the same job as other healers.
It takes more skill to do WELL, and thats the proviso i put on it. Not just playing disc but playing it at a lvl that your doing well.
My healing team had 3 hpallies in it. The issue with hpallies this last raid teir is the class was so op you could not help but do well. You were propped up by the class. That wont fly with disc.
That being said, its very fun and rewarding when you can pull it off.
Just so you are aware, it is currently much harder to level as disc in dungeons or pvp, as atonement seems to be completely broken at low levels.
Wouldn’t say high skill cap, would say high skill floor. IE its more difficult to pick up a pure-proactive healing playstyle, but honestly once you know the fight and the class I’d argue that it is sooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo much easier than say RDruid, I can just afk rotation, apply atonements and I’m doing as much dps as the tanks and the group is nice and healthy. Don’t have to think about flawless gcd usage and weaving dps like RDruid or other healers.
I beg to differ… disc actually has one of the easiest kits in the game. A near 2-3 button dps rotation and a handful of heals.
The challenge with disc lies in the ramp up or anticipation of incoming damage and there is a lot nuance there. They can’t just press one button (like tranq, hymn, totem, revive,aura) and heal the whole raid up.
The other healers are more reactive.
Disc definitely has a larger skill cap than Pally by far but even then I would only put Disc as “moderately” difficult.
With that said, Disc has a higher skill ceiling than most other healers due to some clutch plays that it can make and knowing when to do so .
My justification for making this comparison is that I play all available healing specs to at least 450 ilvl w Disc and MW being my current main and Holy Pally being my main for most of BFA.
Thanks so much for the bunch of responses, disc is much clearer to me now. What I’ve gather is that disc is:
Basically it’s a proactive healer that will have trouble dealing with party/raid wide damage if I do not already have atonement placed on everyone, but once I understand the fights it becomes much easier. If not, it’ll be a whole lot of GCDs used and shadow mend spamming?
However, they are cooldown reliant so if I am using these GCDs to react, when I could’ve already anticipated the damage and placed atonement on everyone, this could be detrimental?
They also rely heavily on target switching, but mouseover macros can fix most of this issue?
This seems quite complex, especially for a casual player like me and the start of an expansion when I am clueless about fights, but on the bright side, they are the most fun and rewarding healer
You could get a point and click healing addon like Vuhdo or Healbot so that you do not need mouse over macros (actually, the addon does the mouse over macros for you, but this is 100% transparent for the player).
With this setup, your game play becomes:
Simple as that.
The True difficulty of disc, as was already said on this post, is knowing the fight and appling atonements before the damage comes up.
How do you approach targeting in arena? Mouse over macros seems bad because you can’t turn character, but the amount of switching makes target binds difficult (for me anyway.)
@Skribleh
get a mouse with keybinds on the side. keybind party 1-2-3 to buttons 3-2-1, and target arena 1-2-3 to buttons 6-5-4. So your left hand casts abilities and right hand does targeting so it can happen at same time.
Get clique and a mouse with at least 5 or more buttons. You will bind 10 targetable beneficial spells to that mouse (5 spells through shift), and you will learn to be quick and efficient with that mouse and your rotations. Remember, the mouse is an extension of your faith in whatever deity, be it light or dark, that you deem favorable to allign with in the moment. You have to learn every encounter as if you’re the tank. Know when to use mitigation and raid wide healing, which will be on a lengthy cool down and cost loads of mana, so no room for error.
They’re also super gear dependant. There is a huge difference when a disc priest is only slightly undergeared and when they’re slightly over geared.
Be warned, you will likely develope some kind of arthritus in your hand way faster than most players would due to the sheer amount of buttons you will be pressing, but dont worry. The pain brings you closer to the light, and then the void, and then the light, and then the void. The duality will ultimately drive you to become a godly force of divine reckoning, as you weave life and death through the heat battle, ultimately bringing you victory, wealth, and an endless supply of women.
Yup, you’ve got a good idea of it here.
I wouldn’t want to scare you away from it though. Disc is very fun to play, and really rewarding once you learn fights. As long as you go into it with the right outlook, you will do OK. Early on you’ll probably run into a lot of situations where it feels like you have to shadowmend spam to keep people alive. What’s important is to notice when that happens, and the next time you run that dungeon, before that damage goes off shield everyone and do a damage rotation instead. Or if you notice that a certain mob tends to wreck a melee, or the boss has a mechanic that targets a DPS, use mind blast before it goes off, etc.
As far as macros, I just use simple mouseovers. It’s what I’ve come to enjoy using largely because I can swap whatever unit frame addon I’m using and not have to go through all the setup again.
#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover,nodead,help][] Power Word: Shield
I do this for Rapture (now that it casts a shield), PW:S, Shadowmend, dispel, and Radiance. Everything else I just have on a normal keybind.