I am a main shadow priest but I woul like to heal from time to time so my question is which spec is easier?
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Holy is easier, I don’t really think its much of a contest in that department.
Holy is reactive, if you are not used to healing, it will be easier to just focus on healing in the moment. No keeping up atonements, just push the HP bar up. There is little to no set up as Holy. There is no proactive healing, you do not have to ramp. I play both disc and holy, and holy is simpler and easier to play.
Your big CDs are easier to use as holy than disc. You don’t have to ramp into them, you don’t have to worry if anyone stands in them for their duration. You just hit it and continue healing.
Archon is the simpler of the two Hero talents. It does a good amount of damage and gives you a nice one minute CD. If you play Archon as Shadow, you’ll have an easy time transitioning to Archon Holy.
Your Holy Words (your big heals like Serenity and Sanctify) have their cooldown reduced by your smaller heals like Flash Heal, Renew, and Heal. It really is a more straightforward healer.
A large portion of your healing will by completely passive, you don’t have to put in any thought in it. That is your Mastery, Echo of Light.
Holy is simpler, easier to understand, and easier to execute. If you want an easy healer that doesn’t require as much planning, it is Holy.
If you wanna play the more meta healer, its Disc.
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No, holy is not easier, that is very outdated thinking. In fact, if you’re used to dpsing, the transition to disc is pretty easy.
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Holy is easier in a sense. If you’re looking for more of a 1:1 ratio in terms of transitioning from Spriest to healer, then disc makes more sense.
holy requires less set up and is more reactionary than proactive.
I love holy priest, but due to disc’s popularity and strength over holy, i normally play Disc.
Holy priest for lower keys usually…
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holy is the more traditional reactive healer spec: people take damage; you fill up the health bar.
discipline needs a lot more proactive work in terms of shields, HoTs and maintaining the atonement buff on party members.
disc is the most preferred healer at the top end of keys.
i healed a fair amount in DF keys, and not so much in TWW, but personally, i prefer the resto shaman playstyle, the second most prevalent healer. it has the shortest interupt (healing priests have have none) and brings a good combination of HoTs, shields, AOE heals, and direct heals.
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Holy is better if you don’t know the fight cadence as it is reactive and has a wide variety of tools for different situations.
Disc is better when teamed with good players and you know the fights back to front so you can set up all your attonements and can time key cooldowns with damage spikes.
A lot of which to choose depends on what content you will be doing. Healing a steady crew who are good disc is probably your choice.
If you are mainly pugging then Holy has better tools to cope with the erratic play and dps rates you will encounter.
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Depends on what you like.
Disc’s gonna do less damage unless you go voidweaver (which isn’t the meta choice right now), in which case their damage is relatively even to Holy’s.
Holy is a (mostly) reactive healer. It’s very easy to get started on, but later in keys (talking 12+) it’s generally harder to play with most groups - since Disc can basically be putting decent shields out off CD, and a lot of damage in this dungeon set is targeted to one or two players.
Holy is SIGNIFICANTLY BETTER than most people would have you believe. I’d put it a tier or two above Preservation who are the worst healer. The issue is that since you’re a priest, as you push higher content, people will just expect you to play Disc which is the better spec right now. So getting invites as holy will get harder if you plan to push past +11 or so (my experience is gatekeeping really starts at 12s, which is funny because that’s where resilients start).
That said, I’m having more fun on holy right now. But I did play a whole season of oracle disc last season and loved it then - and it’s only better now.
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Holy is easier to understand, but if you really want an easy time as a healer then you go Disc because once you get the concept of how to heal with Disc, you will find it is far more effective and more easier to to heal with Disc than it is with Holy.
You will find that the Atonement + Penance 2 button combo is far more effective in any situation than any Halo + Lightweaver combo Holy can come up with. It is by far the guaranteed buttons you can count on to keep yourself from being grilled out by your pug group and you don’t even have to have anyone selected to make this effective. This is auto-aim healing imo.
The only time I go Holy now is to remove the glowing eyes from the Oracle tree, but once I go into any dungeon I will spec back to Oracle Disc.
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i guess I am playing holy then
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I played holy last season and off and on other seasons. Compared to last season, I would say vw disc is hands down waaaay easier than holy—at least compared to what holy was last season. Maybe they made it easier but the tracking CDs and spell spam to get enough charges for incoming damage was brutal. That and hoping you could moosh buttons fast enough for big aoe wss panic inducing.
Vw disc is so simple and I really welcomed the change from last season. I will get 3k on it (almost there) and avoid oracle for as long as I can though.
However, if we are talking raid, I am pretty much holy for life. Every now and then I would try disc but I just don’t think it will ever be my style.
Anyone here saying holy is easier is ignoring the fact that they have completely simplified disc, while stacking holy with a ridiculous amount of required toolkit interactions to perform as well as disc in raid, but not nearly as well in mythic+. The former situation is acceptable, the latter situation is why Holy doesn’t have a place in competitive M+.
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Agree. Holy is not easy. The amount of CDs you have to track and the play style with Apoth is definitely not beginner friendly. Disc in keys is way more beginner friendly. Disc in raid is still a challenge and not beginner friendly.
So imo, to answer OPs question, definitely Disc in keys is easier, but I would also lean towards disc for raid too.
Holy is genuinely an easier spec to get into and wrap your head around as someone new to the game or new to healing.
If you’re a long-time player who’s been playing MMOs for a while, or playing WoW for a long while, and you’re clearing raid and already have KSH, then yeah, Disc is not going to be hard to get into. But we have to reckon with the fact that there are a TON of healers out there that quite literally do not hit damage buttons still even going up to +10s. They play with as little mental load as possible, and Disc’s healing is at least one level of abstraction further than every other healer.
That, and Holy’s just… not hard if you’re not trying to push high key with it.
There’s this weird notion in the playerbase that if a spec is difficult to do very high keys with, that translates down to low keys. It doesn’t. You can pretty much heal off lasting words and Echo of Light alone as Hpriest in 1-10 because the raw HPS is that high, and damage isn’t dangerous enough to require burst healing.
You do not need to be planning like you do in keys above +12. When you get to the point that there’s a ton of 1shots or extremely high damage, yeah, Disc is easier because they can plop out a pain supp or some big shields. But new healers rarely touch externals. It’s like the #1 thing people have to learn to start playing OK on healers. They also don’t have the knowledge of what targeted spells are dangerous - many don’t have a UI that tells them when someone’s hit by a dangerous spell/has a dangerous debuff. The amount of times on my pally tank that I do the entire Priory first boss with 0 dispels is REALLY high in sub 10s. The amount of tanks I saw oneshot on the first boss of stonevault last season was also extremely high.
When people are saying it’s easy to play Holy, it’s because it IS easy to play Holy so long as we’re not talking about pushing for very high keys.
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Disc seems easier right now, but I argue that’s not due to its design but due to its very good tuning currently. When Atonement on autopilot can’t carry your healing load and you have to rely on the rest of the kit, it quickly spirals out of control for the rookie healer. Oracle has a lot of damage mitigation tools but they have to be used correctly, with foreknowledge of the encounter’s damage patterns. Voidweaver needs to nail the rhythm of incoming damage to align its burst Atonement cooldowns. Neither are “easy” under poor tuning- but right now the numbers are very good and give a lot of margin for error.
Some others are right that, on top of needing to understand damage patterns in advance, Disc had a much rougher time maintaining Atonement uptime on everyone in M+, but Blizz has added enough tools to assuage that juggling act. Disc went from “hardest healer, unquestionably” to “hardest healer, debatedly”.
Lots of good points here from various people. With the caveat that I’ve more experience with holy than disc, my tldr would be that, on average:
Holy:
- In general, holy isn’t top tier but it does fine, and there’s actually a fair amount of flexibility in how you want to play (talents and such) that will let you try out very different playstyles (hot, single-target, AoE) while still doing decent-to-good healing.
- In mythic+, holy is easy to play well, and very difficult to play amazingly (e.g. title pushing).
- In raid , holy is decently easy to play well, and average difficulty to play very well.
Discipline:
- less intuitively obvious given the focus on either shielding or indirect healing-via-dps by atonement.
- In mythic+, comparatively easy once you get the concepts down, and top tier mode at high levels.
- In raid, galaxy brain required. Hope you like spreadsheets and timing diagrams.
Since it sounds like you’re just looking for part-time fun rather than full time mastery, I’d start as holy&archon. You can always swap to discipline or oracle once you’ve got a handle on things.
I feel like you’re coming up with this for the very same reason as…
This.
Neither Disc or Holy are straight forward.
We can use me as the case study here. I’ve been playing this game for a long time but just started playing Holy tww S2, so we can consider me new. However, having played other healers and strong knowledge of the game that would give me major leg up over someone truly new.
I can tell you firsthand it was not straightforward and it took me a while to understand all the intricacies to play it at a reasonably high level - currently 3/8 M progging 4th.
It requires more primary keybinds than other healers. By primary I mean heals you want in comfortable keybinds because you use them regularly. Comfortable vs uncomfortable keybinds do affect difficulty imo, and of course more keys to press usually increases difficulty.
Having to track sooo many CDs is definitely not going to be beginner friendly. It wasn’t friendly for me and I’m very good creating and modifying WAs. Having to watch for when Words/PoM/Renew are off CD and then use is much more difficult than healers that can just spam chain heal for example. And this is me talking from Archon. You add in premonition and it’s another CD to track with additional learning curve.
And lastly people grasp different play styles differently - maybe Holy just doesn’t naturally resonate with me the way it does for others. I think I’ve got a reasonable handle on it now, but some may just see all right away.
TLDR - I think you’re just a seasoned Holy player so not picking up on these difficulties.
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I’ll agree with this. I remember a time when atonement didn’t do much in keys and flash heal was weak. It was a struggle outside of CDs like rapture.
To add to this discussion.
I regularly play Disc and Holy in ~12 keys. Holy is and has been easier to pull off.
Its “maintenence” spells are not as punishing as atonement. Letting PoM or Renew fall of the CD for awhile is not devastating. Missing atonements/shields can be devastating.
The panic buttons on holy are easier to use. If the party gets low unexpectedly holy has a quicker and easier time tackling that.
I’m quite stunned people here are saying disc is easier than holy. Maybe they are focusing on how powerful disc is currently and I can understand that. Disc is bound to be brought down to reality with the rest of the healers. Holy is and always will be an easier healer to execute than disc in these current iterations.
Doing a bit of research to see if I am crazy or not on this has helped. The vast majority of players agree that holy is easier, maybe the people saying disc is easier here they just vibe better with it. Or more specifically, reactive healers are easier to execute than proactive healers.
Reactive healers are easier to pick up. Proactive healers are more for once you get the handle of damage patterns, if thats what you perfer.
I don’t really place holy in a reactive healer column and disc in a proactive healer column. Never really understood why people do that. Every healer has to anticipate damage at some level and then react. Some have to do more work on the front end but don’t all have to do some work? Don’t all react after damage happens? lol.
When I play vw disc the only real proactive thing I have to do is have atonement up before damage goes out. I have to plan ahead for heal checks and make sure I have xyz available to cover. Don’t all healers do that? I did the same preparation when I played pres evoker, resto Druid, holy priest. I would put pres evoker and resto Druid way more in the proactive healer column and disc, not so much. I keep atonement’s up, I push cds to damage when big heals are needed, I push evangelism/uppies/dome(often, not always) reactively.
I agree with above that disc was harder in keys when it was undertuned. You had to really squeeze out so much and the panic was real. I felt that was as holy in keys last season honestly.
Holy in raid has always felt much nicer, I can’t remember the last time I truly panic healed there. (But I only raid aotc and baby mythic)
I feel like the crowd that says disc is harder and that it is proactive and etc are really looking at it in the raid setting? Which is fine. I never cared for that so I play holy. But when it comes to keys, man it is super simple compared to holy imo.
I think the proactive/reactive distinction is mostly to do with how quickly you can heal someone up that took damage unexpectedly. You can “prepare” for unexpected damage as disc with having atonements out meaning you proactively prepared to heal. While holy doesn’t have to do that.
Holy pretty much just presses Serenity and the person is nearly topped off but Disc either has to have a buffed Shield ready or an atonement to then heal then up. Either way their effective HP is low for disc and needs more investment to get back up.
There is plenty all healers can do to prepare for planned incoming damage.