Maybe I’m alone, but I’m concerned about the Discipline priest rework.
Reverting Purge the Wicked to Shadow Word: Pain just seems kinda lame. Purge the Wicked was a cool spell for discipline to have for itself. I’ve always felt that Twilight Equilibrium was frustrating to try to play optimally; with all of the mental cycles we have to spend on movement and precise ramping, Twilight Equilibrium just strikes me as a great way to shove a stick into my own spokes.
I’m certain I’m in the minority on this one, but I actually really like Ultimate Penitence. It’s got its issues which all of the hardcore players have made clear, but as a spell I just think it’s really cool. I like that it can serve as an “oh crap” button if you invest in it; if you bungle a ramp a bit you can still slap that bad boy and lay down some healing.
I’m not sure if I really agree with the premise that Discipline has too many cooldowns, and the loss of rapture really stings. Heck, even the nerf coming from Dragonflight felt bad, but now it’s leaving completely? Lame. At the end of Dragonflight, Discipline had this nice cadence where you could have a big Evangelism ramp followed by a big Rapture ramp followed by a meh ramp and repeat. Rapture and Evangelism are the only things that make ramping for Discipline even remotely practical for players below the top tier of skill (like me).
The best that discipline has ever felt (to me) was during Aberrus, with the set bonus that gave us instant Power Word: Radiance procs and extended our Atonement window by 2 seconds. Just those 2 seconds were a huge difference maker in terms of making the spec much more forgiving; if you ramped a couple of globals early you could still pump some heals and not feel like complete crap.
Discipline is so fun and addicting to play because when you pull off a big ramp you feel like a god. You spend all of your play time chasing that high, and when you get it it’s good…but man, it’s really easy to screw up and feel bad.
Anyway, those are my thoughts. I know not everybody feels that way and a lot of people seem fairly excited for at least some of the changes, but to me 11.1 just looks super sad. Like my favorite spec is going to get a lot less fun to play.