I find disc impossible for it. Holy is doable but still some hot moments to be careful for. Deaths are inevitable
It’s a though affix for any healer but I actually don’t find it to be worse for Disc than for others, or maybe just a little bit.
One important thing to note with this affix is that everybody in the group should have food and use it to help clear stacks when out of combat, if they just sit there and expect the healer to top them off that’s gonna slow you down a lot. Make sure to tell that to the rest of the group before the run, you can also add a mage friend (or someone’s alt) to drop table so everybody can grab food then remove him.
I’m finding it insanely difficult, might just be me being bad ![:stuck_out_tongue:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/stuck_out_tongue.png?v=6" ":stuck_out_tongue:")
Hmm not sure if the current build you show is the one you are using but for this week I’d take Twist of Fate and Shadow Covenant.
ToF gives you strong spot healing and Shadow Covenant is great to push that final bit of healing needed to remove grievous stacks, the healing absorption is a minor concern if it actually helped you to remove grievous.
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Maybe I just don’t understand but Shadow Covenant seems terrible? The effective healing once the absorb is taken into account is only about 6k, and I can’t think of too many instances where it would have topped off enough to be worth the loss in dmg?
The same with Schism, I dont think I want to bet on people getting below 35% on a grievous week, the 40% damage buff seems like the better option.
Not saying your wrong, just genuinely curious what would make them better choices.
Popping in here to be notified of replies. This week is the only time ive considered skipping Mythic chests. I tried a freehold 11 as disc, and at the first boss i was basically stalling for time. If you dont clear the grievous stacks by 3 stacks, all you can do is go ham and pray the fight ends before your mana does.
I then tried a waycrest 8. It was difficult, but we made it work up until the coven fight. I probably didnt play 100% perfect, but it didnt help that they didnt interuppt their spells and took avoidable damage ![:confused:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/confused.png?v=6" ":confused:")
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its going to get worse on 8.1
this week i run as holy… its impossible to do disc at higher m+
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Grievous is on Everybody. It snowballs really fast if dps and tanks aren’t interrupting/dodging mechanics, sometimes to an unrecoverable amount.
Best thing to do is ask people to bring their own food or grab a mage and tell people that you won’t be healing between pulls if you have to drink.
Another thing that can help is to have your tank chain pull (within reason) so that you can keep up your atonement healing.
I also don’t see how Holy is Magically better at Grievous than Disc. Is it serenity? Disc single target healing is superior outside of that.
We just don’t have a big ST heal to get us over the hump. They need to make Penance HPS similar to serenity.
But isn’t shadowmend one of, if not the, strongest spammable single target heal in the game?
Agree that Defensive Penance needs more power though.
It is but it is only moderately better than other healers spammables. Every other healer has a bar filler on a short CD. Penance is suppose to be ours but it is so undertuned that even if you took castigation and contrition, which is a bad idea, it would still be considerably weaker than any other.
The short answer is atonement is too slow for Grievous. Your aim is not to shield and atonement heal up slowly, it’s to get above 90% health as fast as possible. Atonement is strong but slow, so direct heals are your go-to for filling up health bars quickly.
Shadow Covenant is usually better for Grievous because it is an instant, large, fast heal, which is exactly what you need. Let’s say someone is at 50% health with 2 stacks of Grievous. If you atonement heal them up, it will take some time for the bar to slowly rise, and you’ll probably gain another 2 stacks. If you Shadow Mend and Shadow Covenant, you can get them above 90% before another stack is applied. They’ll have a healing absorb on them, yes, but they won’t have Grievous any more. You’re not looking at total healing after the absorb is discounted, you’re looking at how much it heals upfront, NOW, and that’s quite a lot.
Same with ToF - You’ll be using a lot of direct heals to get Grievous stacks off quickly, and that means Shadow Mend. ToF is the only talent on the row that affects Shadow Mend. It isn’t so much that Schism and Sins are BAD, it’s that they don’t do anything for direct healing, and direct healing is superior to atonement for getting a health bar up quickly.
First, let me give some context… There are two “meta” builds for Disc Priest, the “offensive” one with Schism and Sins and the “defensive” one with ToF and Shadow Covenant. In general you should try to use the offensive one because it deals more DPS but if you need some of the benefits that the defensive build provides then you should go that route, and this week you probably do (with experience you can mix them up and take for example ToF and Sins for certain situation but for now let’s keep it simple).
Using the offensive build you have more DPS and in general is good but it leaves you weaker in two areas: Spot Healing and Ability to Recover from mistakes. Taking the defensive build you have less damage but you have a more complete healing kit that gives you very strong spot healing and very good recovery tools.
Now, why Shadow Covenant?, well it’s a massive heal to start with (even bigger when buffed with ToF), it’s in general a good tool to have but this week is specially good, once you use it to remove grievous stacks then you don’t really care too much about the healing absorption it leaves.
As for ToF it’s really not hard to proc in a dungeon tbh, in general you take it any time you expect the healing will get rough, I’d say this affixes fall into that category. Also remember ToF affects ALL your spells, while Schism only affects your atonement healing so it’s specially good for spot healing too.
Shaman would like to have a word. And the point during Grievous isn’t to have one bar-filler you can use every 30 seconds or so, it’s to have strong spammable heals throughout. Shadow Mend is pretty much superior to every other spammable for Grievous - it’s more that atonement and absorbs are crap for it.
I was thinking more along the lines of when grievous gets hard where your spammable is enough to hold ground but not enough to get it off. That bar filler gets you there. Disc just doesn’t have that.
Serenity is absolutely a great tool for Grievous, but it’s a sporadic tool, and isn’t the biggest factor in what makes Holy better for Grievous. Comparing one sporadic tool to a superior spammable comes out about even. I would argue it’s the rest of the toolkit that makes Disc worse for Grievous - absorbs and damage reductions do nothing for Grievous, and HoTs are too slow. We can all agree direct heals are best for Grievous, and Holy has many more of them.
Being able to cast it every 8 casts is pretty juicy.
Holy isn’t better because of Serenity, it is better because of Apotheosis allowing you to get out of overwhelming situations and hit the reset button. Also people aren’t factoring the impact of PoM and Echo on allowing someone to stay on top of Grevious. Serenity and Sanc are just icing on the cake.
As Disc your option is to be hyper aggressive in clearing stacks so you can keep pulling and stay in combat. Atonement AoE healing is stronger than anything else Disc has for topping up multiple people. If you get out of combat and have multiple stacks of grevious on multiple people you’re gonna have a bad time. That’s why many are recommending SC because it helps you to never get to that point and covers up that weakness a little bit. That’s what you need to do to stay successful as Disc this week.
I like Disc a lot. Depending on the instance and group it can definitely handle higher keys and contribute a lot of damage too. Holy is just easier to manage those mistakes. Both are find this week but it is a hard week to be a healer in general.
Or you can just drop a fish feast.
Healing as Disc on grievous week is really not as bad as people think and you can absolutely do higher keys. In fact just did my first +16.
A few weeks ago when we had grievous for the first time in BFA I remember I was a bit scared from the comments I read about how bad it was for Disc, so I went Holy for a few dungeons, eventually decided to try as Disc and to my surprise it wasn’t nearly as bad as some people were saying, in fact I had an easier time as Disc. So don’t be scared to try it.
This is just my opinion ofc, but even with grievous I still think Disc is the stronger option over Holy for M+. I agree that Holy has nice tools like Apotheosis on a 2m CD to deal with difficult situations, but for that matter Disc has Rapture on a 1.5m CD, which if used properly is even stronger since it can prevent grievous from even being applied in the first place it’s a very short CD so you should use it aggressively, specially this week it will do wonders to prevent a lot of grievous applications.