Checks out I guess. That said if the classes are literally designed in such a way that they have no reason to utilize their full kit that would be a pretty big indicator of bad design.
Let me illustrate why I agree with Madskillzz that disc is complicated by talking to this point you make.
If you are a holy paladin, you cast a spell, there is no hot, so you do the heal to heal up to full or whatever you deem as adequate.
In the case of a holy priest, you can cast a flash heal or heal, or renew, or what have you, and you can then wait until the hot from Echo of Light or renew times out and then you can look at the health bar again and do as you deem fit. Basically, here, you are being reactive.
In the case of disc, it is different than these two cases yet again. With disc, you can cast a shadow mend to heal, but remember, that also applies atonement. Hence, you have to take the atonement into account. The atonement can act to heal after the heal part of shadowmend is done. Hence, one shadowmend plus the atonement can suffice. But this is where the complication comes in. Most disc priest have mana issues when the incoming damage is heavy. Hence, you not only want to do enough healing, but you also want to be efficient at healing. A PW:shield may be effective if you expect more damage to come in, because it will shield it–and PW:shield is also less mana intensive than shadowmend. But PW:shield also applies atonement. So following your cast, you can then dps, and expect that your dps may or may not do the job. Now if you are experienced at healing disc, you learn to know what is enough and is not enough. And with disc, it is complicated because of the mana issue. Sure, you can spam shadowmend, and quickly get everyone to full in a snap, but if pride is up, and you already used a mana pot, and you are low on mana, what then? And if you are used to getting an innervate and dont get one, what then? And if you are on a boss fight, and your dpsers are not pumping, you can go oom partway through a boss fight. What then?
In my case, I have to plan out all of my CDs ahead of fights. I have to get a quick handle on the skill level of the group, how fast the mobs and bosses are going to go down. I have to take sips whenever I can, knowing that the tank may not (more than likely that is an understatement) be aware of my mana issues, and so may go rushing off out of range (DH tanks are the worst for this). Then when I catch up, I find that the sip I took means my group now needs shadowmend spamming–putting me even more in the hole with mana.
Also, just the atonement concept is hard for new healers to get their head around. Oh, you just do dps when atonement is up. Easy enough. But sometimes one person takes a lot more damage than the others, and so, what radiance would have managed is all mucked up. You now have your atonement on everyone, but that one rogue standing in fire will die if you dont save him. Now your atonement on everyone has dropped, and you have no charges of radiance left. But you are at 20% mana, so if you spam shadowmend, you are oom, and the tank loves charging out of range…
Do you follow?
I fully agree with Capslock here. On my holy pally (in five mans) I dps a ton–and have even topped the damage meters on some pulls, and heal mostly, and almost exclusively with WOG and holy shock. My paladin main is not yet 60, but intend on continuing with this style of play when doing keys down the road.
As for standing around–maybe I would stand around if I had no idea that my Crusader Strike reduced the CD of holy shock. Maybe you don’t run Crusader Might talent but I do. Regardless of what you do, I dps like a madman, and can usually do enough with WOG and holy shock.
This doesn’t mean you ignore Infusion of Light procs, but I see paladins in five mans as being capable of doing a ton of damage. And if mine is not, then I wouldn’t play pallies. The healing is mediocre, really.
You would do this if you are bad. As a healer you don’t stand around and wait, really ever. Even in BC and vanilla when we had to use the 5sr you at the last where pre-casting in case your heal was needed. You don’t sit around and wait for a hot to tick, especially since damage most often doesn’t just stop, even if healing isn’t needed you can improve your position, if you know you need to drink use the time to get a head start so you can catch up easier after your drink, prep some hots if needed(assuming holy), etc etc. What you described isn’t being “reactive” it’s wasting time and being bad.
No they really aren’t. You assumed the holy priest is bad and wastes time while disc is tunnel vision micro-managing every little thing possible. It’s a silly comparision.
So does every other healer. If you are running dungeons/mythics/raid/etc you will know what abilities are coming out, what CDs you need for what abilties, and how to cycle them with your group no matter what spec you play. This isn’t unique or special to disc, never has been, never will be.
Then perhaps work on improving your positioning while healing so you can get a bit ahead and have to run less making it easier to catch up. Would also recommend taking Feather if you don’t have it, as it’s a mana free way to speed boost when needed.
I’ve always followed everything you said every time we have had this conversation. You just tend to think things every single healer and spec should do are unique to disc when they are not.
Not sure if you noticed but this whole part of the discussion was settled pretty quickly. I conceeded I hadn’t played those specs since WoD so I likely don’t know exactly how they heal. The one thing I left the topic with was pointing out that if there is no purpose in using the variety of tools available to a class, than there is a serious design flaw with the class.
No. If the person needs healing, you do what you need to do. Overhealing is not a big deal for a holy priest, but you can still go oom. Also, I’d sooner cast a damage spell than another heal if your echo of light hot is enough.
Been there done that. I am not running ahead at all. If the tank sees me running ahead he has to be thinking I might get aggro–which can happen. I have found that tanks can read that as you implying the group needs to go faster. Also, I have a macro keybound and just hit to say I am drinking and to please wait or be careful. I also have engineering boost and have feather macroed and use it a ton.
Note that Moadmoad quit healing disc recently. In his stream mana was a huge problem for him too. You seem to be singing to the choir and like to go off on tangents and change the subject a lot.
I dont really plan out anything when playing holy. I react. When I see things unfolding I react. That is enough in the same level of content that disc requires very careful cd planning.
Maybe you do it differently, but I dont really plan at all with holy. Or only very rarely. Also, Holy is not nearly so cd dependent. With the flash concentration lego, a ton of my healing comes from heal. I cast my other spells as needed. That said, when i expect hard fights are incoming, I am careful to hold divine hymn, but use my other cds in a reactive fashion.
I see I need to spell things out so here we go…
This is the line I was refering to when I said “you would do this if you are bad.” There is never a time as a healer when you should be just sitting back and waiting, you should always be taking a proactive step, be it via damage, better positioning, whatever. If you are just sitting back and waiting for your HoTs do tick to make a decision and do something, you are bad.
Yes this is a prime reason you would do this, you do it to create the distance ahead of your tank so you can get the drinks you need without slowing down the group and enabling tanks to chain pull. You literally do this BECAUSE you want the tank, and the run, to go faster that is literally the point.
Also you have Mind Soothe, there is zero reason you should be pulling anything ahead of you.
Than you are doing it wrong. Healing has always, in every expansion with every spec, been a proactive role. You don’t sit back and wait for damage, you don’t chase the tank, you don’t hold the group back for drinks. You find the spots you can get ahead and make use of them for drinks, you know what debuffs/buffs are coming and ensure people are topped off so you have time to dispel, you prep for big damage with Pain Suppression/Barrier or if holy Guardian Spirit healing buff, or Divine Hymn if it’s AoE. You should always be thinking about what is the next pull, the next debuff, the next threat, when will I need to drink, etc etc.
If you are not doing these things, as any spec, you are gimping yourself and your group. This has been true since vanilla, it is just as true now.
I never sit back. Lol. I have five bars to watch. If one of those bars drops, and since I run FC as holy, I usually just keep the buff up and cast a heal or flash heal and monitor. But that does not mean I ever stand around. My bars are near the focus of the action, so I am doing dps when i can and otherwise healing as needed. Holy is built to be reactive. To spam heals when you could be dpsing is, to use your word, silly.
That is laughable. I wouldn’t do that and if I was in a run and saw a priest do that, I would cringe.
Time is of the essence. In the time you took to target, get in position correctly and cast mind soothe, you could have gotten ten percent of your mana back. Sit and drink and then sprint to catch up has less steps. Less steps means time saving.
I’d also add that a good tank has an eye on his minimap or is aware of your range to him and/or knows when you are low on mana in the first place. The whole positioning ahead idea is good in principle, but in reality there are other problems with doing that. You can try to position what you think is ahead, and the tank may turn left instead of right. Then the time you took to position is lost, and you actually have lost time in addition to that lost time because you then have to backtrack somewhat.
Honest question, are you even reading the things I type to you?
I literally stated doing damage is one of the things you can be doing.
1–Do you not know what a Mouse over Macro is? There is literally zero reason to change target.
2–You can reposition while channeling Penance casts, while casting PTW, Solace, Shadowfiend, you have plenty of insta-casts, or channels, you can use while moving. Stop standing still in the back when there is zero reason to.
3–Do it correctly you can planning ahead, IE being proactice, so that you will be able to use insta-casts to get into position quickly, perhaps even use one of your feathers, you land with literally 1-2 GCDs for the Mind Soothes, if they are even needed, and you drink as soon as you drop combat.
This isn’t some grand complicated thing, Literally a small amount of planning and being proactice, and you make the run much smoother and quicker on everyone.
This is why you know your tanks, and you know your instances, more of that planning ahead. The “tank goes the other direction” should never happen as optimal pathways are a thing and people are going to take them in order to finish quickly.
Optimal pathways? I have run HOA maybe 80 times. I have seen tanks go a variety of routes. You also have mob count to factor in, and the timing of pride.
This is not to knock your ideas, but I pug a lot of my runs. This way I see different approaches and learn the mistakes commonly made. Also, I dont know what you mean by “know your tanks.” All I know is some have no clue how to mitigate properly no matter if they are a prot pally, DH or monk tank. A lot in the pugs I join are lucky to have been invited.
“Know your tanks” is a short hand for learning how your tank handles the run. You can generally get a feel for it within the first 2-5 pulls of the instance and be planning ahead. What paths are they clearing, is he chain pulling, does he use defensives, does he kite, etc etc. Learn how the tank is playing, and compare that to tanks you have played with in the past, you will actually find some pretty consistent simliarities between tanks who know how to use CDs/CC/interrupts/kite/etc and how efficiently they pull through an instance vs ones that don’t and how much time they waste pulling extra trash that could be skipped.
I can smell tank skill in the first pull. I was just wondering if you were referring to pugs or runs with the same group–like guild tanks or to the differences between tank classes…
EvErYthInG iS bAd DesIgN
Positioning is very important in pug groups. This is because half the time the average pugger has little if any knowledge of how disc healing works. You get one ranged here, one across the way, then you get melee here and there. On some packs at some dungeons, and on some boss fights people dont realize a. that they can be out of range of healing. b. They can be out of range of your radiance casts (this is not in reference to after you have cast radiance either–we all know that once atonement is on someone they can run halfway to Alaska and still be healed). This is less of an issue when I run on my horde disc priests, but it is still an issue. I regularly have to position right in the middle of the group for radiance and cast it on myself or someone will not get atonement on them. That creates a problem.
Also remember that positioning is really important in countless cases to dodge avoidable damage.
Another factor important to positioning is your distance from the tank. A lot of tanks use mobility and kiting to save themselves when the hits are hard. If I am not positioned to take this into account, then a tank can leap out of range of heals and die.
Those things in mind, I already have a lot to think about in terms of positioning. While it is possible to learn to position for yet something else, it is a bit much. Tanks can simply pause sometimes. The best tanks I have grouped with, some on keys into the 20s are aware of your mana situation and can judge when to pull, how big to pull, and what it means to your mana use.
Deeps in a lot of groups I have run with have gotten really mad at tanks when we wipe because I have been at less than 5% mana for an extended time, have repeatedly messaged in chat that there is a healer mana problem. Under such circumstances, dodging and avoiding any and all damage is what I am positioning for first. Getting ahead of the group is the last thing on my mind then and I am usually tilted at that point. Ten seconds here and there to prevent wiping is a small price to pay for a healer to have mana and to be able to pump damage as well.
It’s ironic you should post this reaction–namely that I did not read your post, when in the post just previous to this one, I mentioned this exactly:
It is ironic because it shows I read your post and reacted to it. You, on the other hand show proof there that you did not read my reaction to your post.
Regardless, the idea of running ahead of the group is something I have tried. But it adds risks and wastes time when you could and should be positioning with other priorities in mind–like avoiding damage and ensuring deeps stay in range of your radiance casts. The bottom line is that in the majority of cases having the healer be out in front and ahead of the tank is just plain silly.
Lastly, I would like to add that I run an addon called Healer Protection. It regularly posts in chat when you are getting low on mana. I also run my own macros to say I am stopping to drink and that I am out of mana, and to be careful. If tanks (and druids that have innervate up) choose to ignore that info (or ask me to turn that addon off), which is critical to group success, then it is on them.
I like how you try to turn this around and remove it from context in an attempt to make yourself not look silly, but let’s just recap it shall we…
You made this statement about sitting around waiting for HoTs to tick before you make a decision to do something. I responded to this statement with…
Calling out the variety of things you should be doing instead of “wait until the hot from echo of light or renew times out” nonsense. Instead of actually reading that and allowing the conversation to move on we get this…
Emphasis added. This response doesn’t do anything to address what I said, it instead reads more like someone playing defensive and trying to act like they are mentioning the idea of doing damage. Instead we are now at…
Where you try to bring it full circle and act like you didn’t completely ignore the laundry list of things I said and act like you where the one arguing for proactive play when you literally started off the discussion talking about sitting around waiting for HoTs to expire as if that is how you play holy.
I put up with a lot, but this type of bad faith attempt at revisionism of the discussion isn’t something I’m going to deal with. Good day.
A. It works for me.
B. There is no mention of “waiting around” or saying what you do in the meantime. If you need someone to hold your hand because you are “standing around” as you put it that is on you. Every healer should know the the basic ABC rule. That is, always be casting. Even a disc priest with its mana issues can usually be casting Smite vs standing around staring at the wallpaper. When other people, probably people like you “wait” for a bus, you stand there and gawk at the color of the sky, while people like me have a book in hand and read it while we “wait” for the bus. That only implies what you take as “wait” means you twiddle your thumbs, while to people like me, “wait” means you monitor the situation and do something else worthwhile in the meantime. You too can stand around and watch paint dry all you like. Me, in the time needed to “wait” for paint to dry I will have worked out, gone for a bike ride, installed a new GPU, and used an air blower to blow all the dust out of my computer parts. The next day after we both “waited” for the paint to dry you will be wondering why your CPU is overheating because you took “wait” to literally mean “waste time.” The next month, because of your habit of doing squat while you “wait” for your ship to come in vs using your time productively, you will have gained a few pounds and will be wondering why. Meanwhile in the time you watched the paint dry people like me cycled 150 miles. This is because you thought “wait” literally meant “twiddle your thumbs” because you are so busy doing nothing all the time, wondering about all of your bad luck in life, and feeling sorry for yourself. Meanwhile people like me have read entire books about multitasking while we “waited” for a bus every day for a week, got the job done, and used our time effectively.
On an aside, I once had a job where a manager said “do not assume anything.” That is good advice to someone like you. Just because you assume “wait” means “do nothing” does not mean that is what I meant. If you typically “assume” things that are not implied, you might benefit from a deeper understanding of the concept of “thinking outside the box.”
Your pathetic attempts to change the meaning of what you said isn’t funny, and is just a further indication of your inability to debate on good faith. I’m done with you.
bruh i may have disagreed with you in this thread but dont feed this guy. he’s a troll and doesn’t even know it.
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They are pathetic to you because you are offended. I did not mean to offend you, but simply tried to illustrate a point–albeit I did overdo it, but you don’t seem to grasp the meaning of the word wait because you seem to think the word “wait” means do nothing while waiting (vs nothing simply in regards the action referred to–but not in reference to other actions). On a linguistic level you have read things into the word “wait” that I did not imply, nor are implied by the word itself. If the word “wait” meant “do nothing” then why aren’t “waiting” rooms called “Do nothing rooms?” And why are there magazines for you to read in “waiting rooms?” To further illustrate the point, if you still don’t get it, simply replace the word “wait” with “delay your next heal until you know it is needed.” In the context of “delay” and in the context of the word “wait” neither imply you are required to or have to twiddle your thumbs in the meantime.
Also, you ought to look at a log once in a while and you would see that Echo of Light does a lot of healing. I don’t know about your frames, but when I heal holy, that is a hot that I track closely. A fair number of people who heal holy are probably not even aware of it. To quote Madskillzz, the dude who plays all of the healers like I do, and who makes videos for people who like to improve or are learning to heal, a holy priest is really a resto druid in disguise. That is (translating on a general level), Echo of Light is a very potent hot that at least some people do not realize is ticking. As someone who has played all of the healers, but started off healing as a holy paladin and healed on one mainly for years–a healer with no hots, this point is an important one–as are the finer points of all healing spells–assuming you are into min/maxing.
Lastly, you do not have to always feel obliged to keep everyone at 100%. If you are on the move to the next trash pack, you can cast renew on people who are not at full then, and it will heal them simultaneously as you are moving. If you keep this in mind, you can be doing damage while mobs are still up, late in a pull, vs topping people up then–assuming you are sure nobody is going to die.
I speak from experience, and have gotten my fair share of 99% damage parses healing holy. Maybe this is irrelevant, because the concept of doing three things simultaneously should not be beyond your grasp. That is, it is possible to wait (for one thing–in this case, on your next heal) while doing another (casting damage spells). The word itself does not mean you are to stop every single action possible while you do so.
Also, feel free to continue to argue and put words in my mouth to the effect that it is your opinion that I mean you are to twiddle your thumbs between healing casts. That is your right. But know that by doing that you are arguing the word “wait” flatly means that you are required to twiddle your thumbs and do nothing at all unrelated in the meantime.
You’ll learn quickly to ignore him.
Your post is excellent. Thank you. I even shared it on social media!
Would you consider WoW Disc Priest to be equivalent of the Scholar in FFXIV? In FFXIV, Scholar has remained overpowered across all expansions and their version of the Holy Priest (White Mage) has remained the lesser choice for endgame content.
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Disc is an odd spec because IMO it’s high complexity isn’t rewarded. It’s akin to Cata warlocks. Lots of buttons to press but you’re probably fine just running with a simpler class.
It relies on gimmicks to shine. It’s great in Rated BGs due to the pvp radiance talent, great on predictable bosses because of SS, and kind of clunky in mythic+. Or… it’s not exactly GREAT in mythic+ if you don’t have a fixed and predictable group is a better way to describe it.
I love playing it - it’s been my go to spec for about a year but wish they could move away from just building it around a few cheese mechanics. (Also - I wish those mechanics didn’t effectively remove ALL choice when it comes to covenants. You’re venthyr or bust. Meaningful choice my sweet panda butt)
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