Discipline Priest Feedback - Midnight Alpha
First of all, thank you so much for the opportunity to test these changes as early as we are. I’ve been testing Discipline Priest on the Midnight Alpha and discussing with the Priest community about the coming changes and wanted to share some of our initial thoughts and concerns. To preface my design concerns, I would like to state that I fully agree with the direction the dev team has decided to go with regards to Healing as a whole, so these concerns strictly address making Discipline as enjoyable as possible within the new ecosystem.
Major Issues
Evangelism
While the new design still fills the same general role (a method of achieving high atonement count), there are some design concerns in regards to this new approach:
- Chain casting Power Word: Radiance introduces some targeting concerns. When casting Power Word: Radiance, players who do not know the semi-complicated rules for Atonement spread from this spell will often be stuck waiting to see where the Atonements land before continuing to apply Atonements. As a result, many players tend to cast something (Shadowfiend for example) in between the two Radiance casts during a ramp to give themselves time to process the information. The new version of Evangelism promotes spamming back to back to back Radiance casts, exacerbating this problem. Players who chain cast them are likely to lose a non-insignificant amount of Atonements as a result of poor manual Radiance targeting, forcing them to cast an additional Radiance to cover the gaps.
- While I understand not wanting the various “Launch Code” sequences Disc has employed over its lifetime, everyone that I have spoken to in the community (myself included) feel this version of Evangelism is an oversimplification and brings a core identity of the spec down to something that simply isn’t enjoyable. I agree that 15+ second ramp up windows drastically raise the barrier of entry to the specialization, but is it possible to find some sort of middle ground? Still cut down on the number of buttons needed and the amount of time it takes while leaving some semblance of our original ramps.
- Discipline Priest already struggles heavily in Raid due to our lack of mobility options, among them the “turreting” required during Power Word: Radiance casts. Changing Evangelism to involve spamming Power Word: Radiance exacerbates this. Consider the many recent raid encounters requiring heavy mobility during or slightly before major damage events.
- The expected healer ecosystem changes aim to flatten both damage and healing curves resulting in longer, more drawn out windows of prolonged damage rather than single or short moments of high burst. However, this change to Evangelism simply shortens our effective healing window compared to the version of Evangelism that included an extension to active Atonements.
Overall, I’m not 100% sure the best way to fix this spell as is. While I can come up with some ideas on how to fix some of the above concerns within the bounds of the current Evangelism design, everyone that I have spoken to within the priest community so far, myself included, are simply not a fan of this iteration. It feels clunky to use, it oversimplifies the most enjoyable part of the spec into just spamming a single button, it makes our mobility issues worse, and the payoff window is too short and feels unrewarding to be our primary cooldown.
Ultimate Penitence
The issues with Ultimate Penitence fall under two primary concerns:
- Four minute cooldowns are difficult to use efficiently in modern fights. Players often get only a single use in shorter fights outside of rare circumstances. On many longer fights the long CD drastically limits those uses potential placements, often leading to 1 good use and 1 “just to get it on cooldown” use. Making this cooldown 3 minutes drastically increases its potential flexibility.
- Ultimate Penitence is heavily reliant on Overloaded With Light (OwL) to be a standalone cooldown… With OwL leaving the talent pool in Midnight, I fear players will be forced to combine Ultimate Penitence with Evangelism to achieve full Atonement coverage for a long enough window to effectively utilize it. Simply baking in Overloaded with Light’s 10 Atonements will allow a “Radiance x 2 → Ultimate Penitence” sequence, allowing it to be an independent cooldown.
Inner Light and Shadow
While this talent is numerically very strong, I do not think there is a version of this spell that is enjoyable or engaging to play around. Currently on Alpha, swapping between “stances” is on the GCD. As a result, if mana is an important resource to manage, you’re forced to spend a significant number of otherwise empty GCDs managing this effect. In a scenario where mana is not a concern, this becomes a purely passive talent. If the spell is removed from the GCD, players will macro the spell to a handful of other spells, effectively making the talent passive… While there may be ways to streamline this functionality, most people I’ve spoken to would rather see this talent replaced with something that has more of a positive impact on our rotation, especially considering its placement on the tree as a capstone talent.
Greater Smite
While this talent is well designed and provides some fun thematic gameplay, I feel the 2 second window is simply too short to still meaningfully engage in encounter design. For example, dispelling an ally or using a feather to move out of a swirly, or any other various micro-interrupt becomes immensely punishing due to how quickly the buff falls off. What we want to avoid in increasing the window, however, is making sure it does not become a “maintenance” buff. If the window is too large, then you suddenly find yourself weaving smites simply to keep up your stacks for when you need them rather than the intended design. An increase from 2 to 4 seconds gives players a small amount of time to interact with the encounter without allowing players to simply maintain the buff for extended periods of time.
Atonement Scaling combined with Piety
This one is a very specific potential interaction that I want to highlight early. The addition of “Full health allies are discounted when calculating Atonement’s healing” makes perfect sense in a vacuum as it forestalls the punishment for lingering Atonements. With piety talented, those “lingering” Atonements are not purely overhealing as their healing is redistributed into injured allies. For example, a player has 20 Atonements active, five of which are on full health allies - Atonement suddenly becomes stronger on not only the remaining 15 players but also on the 5 at full health. This leads to recursive increase of Piety healing as it assists in topping up additional players This feedback loop could quickly become oppressive to other healers in any healing-rich environment, especially later on in tiers when content has been nerfed, characters are very high item level, and raid buffs have reached very high values.
Overall I’m really not sure how to avoid this issue outside of environments where healers are generally weak relative to health bars, but I thought it was important enough to include in this feedback early.
The Passenger Princess Problem
This one isn’t new nor was it something caused by the most recent changes on Alpha, but it’s an issue that is not addressed by the changes. Generally this issue is two fold; Mobility and Defensives, but I don’t want to focus too heavily on our Defensive package until I have a better understanding of what the incoming damage profile is going to look like on difficult encounters first. Mobility, however, is still going to be a significant issue.
Discipline priests as a general rule are heavily punished by significant movement. See my comment above on how this could be exacerbated by the proposed design of Evangelism. Giving priest access to some sort of snap/teleport mobility option would drastically reduce our reliance on external abilities like rescue and spatial paradox to meet encounter requirements. It is not enjoyable to be carried around and babied by other players to meet movement requirements of these encounters due to the drastic lack of mobility options we have compared to everyone else. It’s really disheartening to be forced to consult a fight’s design before stepping into Raid to determine “Can priest even do this? Do we have enough Evokers to carry them through these mechanics?”
In a post made prior to Dragonflight release there was a comment about how it didn’t make sense to give priest access to reverse grip as a choice node with regular life grip because we want to retain highlight reel moments with life-saving grips… and I agree. But why does it have to be on a choice node? If anything, if we want regular life grip to always be present so we can, as a class, pull off those amazing moments, why not just make the spell baseline, put it on its own further down the tree, or add a void-themed version of Door of Shadows. Overall, I don’t think a 1:30 cooldown or 2:00 cooldown displacement movement CD would suddenly turn us into a hyper mobile class, but it would go a long way in making the class less frustrating to play on many of these encounters.
Minor Concerns
Overall anything I mention here is far from what I would consider important, but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to bring attention to them early on in the Alpha cycle.
Plea
I understand Plea was added to replace Renew’s functionality, but is there any reason this functionality must no longer be baseline, requiring a talent point to activate? We’re often going to find reasons to eschew this talent in favor of more significant throughput nodes, which will nonetheless lead to a loss of quality of life.
Bright Pupil
If Evangelism stays as a “Spam Power Word: Radiance” cooldown, Bright Pupil will likely need some help to be not a dead node. Enduring Luminescence is preferred in most content as is and the new version of Evangelism will push that needle even further. A small amount of power pushed into Bright Pupil would help shrink that gap.
Shadow Mend and Harsh Discipline
This one is very minor, but the placement of Shadow Mend as the gate for Harsh Discipline is a bit awkward from a theme perspective. Not 100% sure where you’d move it to and it may just not matter, but it’s been something a non-insignificant number of community members have mentioned.
Void Shield
I’m starting off this section stating that I have not been able to fully test this, so it’s possible this has already been fixed. If that is the case, thank you and please ignore this comment, but with the new apex talents I feel this is important to bring up early.
Crystalline Reflection existed for a very long time on our class tree prior to Midnight and for a very significant portion of its existence, it did not fully work as expected to varying degrees based on the patch. Frequently, damage was not properly reflected when the damage source was environmental instead of sourced from an actual enemy, but there have also been other issues as well.
Overall, people are excited about this talent - they love the flavor of reflected damage applying to Atonement healing. That said, if we’re going to be tuned around the power level of this node, it needs to work 100% of the time. It is a huge accessibility issue if the use of this node on a fight by fight basis is determined by if the reflect works properly or not with that encounter’s damage events.
Conclusion
I think that overall these changes are mostly positive and I’m excited with the general direction of healing changes. I hope the provided feedback will aid the development process in the coming months of Alpha and thank you for taking the time to read over my and a portion of the priest community’s thoughts!
