Obviously its impossible to balance a damage based healer, they’ll either always over perform or feel weak at both roles, and even those staunch discipline priest supporters have been saying the spec is in the trash for a while now.
So why not ditch the idea of it being a healer, and just make it a damage spec? Make it burst instead of dot/ channel/ramp up like shadow. Many players absolutely hate that shadow is the only priest dps spec right now because it has a playstyle only a mother could love, and even if it weren’t so bad it doesn’t thematically fit the holy caster/cleric image that many people have based their priests on. maybe
We have no actual holy damage caster in the game right now - discipline could be just that, and if you go and add more offensive holy options to it like, say, exorcism, or holy bolt (sorry paladins…) it could turn into a really fun dps spec.
Keep a portion of the group healing, just like shadow can do with vampiric embrace and such, as a form of group utility - but move it over to a primary damage role
Alright, so the idea is unpopular, but how would you all change discipline to make it better in a healing role? It seems like blizzard cant wrap their head around balancing a damage-dealing healer properly, so it ends up being terrible at both. In my experience it becomes far too difficult to heal mythics on discipline, being unable to keep up with randomized burst damage, especially affixes like bursting which hit when you have nothing to DPS on, leaving you spamming shadowmend as your only way to heal.
I suggested in another thread that maybe changing atonement to work sort of like ignite for fire mages, but as a healing over time effect, might be a possible solution. Instead of having to apply atonement to players before you can begin healing them, it applies automatically as you deal damage to enemies, healing nearby (30m?) allies for a percentage of all damage you deal over 6-8 seconds, and stacking/increasing as you deal more damage.
At least on bursting you’d have a 6-8 second HoT rolling on everyone at the end of each pack, and you can still spot heal with shadowmend or power word shield as needed.
They just need to add some talents to help a little bit in some areas other than Mythic Raiding, the spec doesn’t need a full rework.
Atonement used to be something like that, well not a HOT but direct passive healing from the damage you do and in my opinion it was terrible design, super boring with basically no thought process other than semi-afk DPSing for some passive healing, very little though process or decision making, no control on who gets healed by it.
I think it’s going to take more than “some talents to help a little bit”.
To me it just feels like discipline lacks the tools to handle a lot of situations as well as other healers can. There’s no reliable burst healing outside of cooldowns, there’s no way to reliably heal up group members without targets to deal damage to, and the one spot heal we actually have is a double edged sword that deals half as much damage as it heals in the first place. Aside from that we’re totally reliant on a damage shield that doesnt feel like it scales well at all.
Beyond those issues, this is the single most punishing healing spec in the game when things dont go according to plan or you happen to make a simple mistake, yet it does not seem to offer much benefit in exchange for that punishment. It’s always seemed to me that discipline’s current design is pointed at helping the group get things killed faster by providing more DPS than a healer typically does, but in the end it’s not really enough to make that much of a difference, especially when compared to a resto druid catweaving or even a resto shaman throwing flame shocks and lava bursts between heals. The difference isnt great enough to really justify the downsides to discipline.
If we are talking about the highest levels of keys then sure, Disc doesn’t have as much utility as some of the meta healers but that’s more of a general Priest problem.
Disc was in a pretty good spot for M+ at the start of BFA, it felt great to play and was actually No2 just behind Druid. It still had weaknesses, as all specs should, but it was in a pretty good spot even with slightly less throughput than the rest. Multiple nerfs aimed towards Raiding ended up hurting a lot.
Yes Disc is a proactive spec so while it has some of the strongest tools to prevent damage like Rapture and PW:Barrier, it does have a bit of a harder time recovering (Not impossible just not as good). This does make the spec harder to play because you need to know the encounters very well to be effective, but that’s the nature of the spec.
I agree Disc’s damage in M+ is a bit underwhelming, that’s mainly due to AOE, just adding a GCD efficient way to deal AOE damage would solve the issue, this is what Sunfire and Consecration do for Druids and Paladin respectively. Right now in Alpha it looks like unlike Holy Nova which only heals from 1 target’s damage taken, Mind sear is fully working with atonement, if this is intended then this might also fix the issue.
We have Holy Priest as the passive HOTs ticking spec, Disc is a proactive prepare for damage spec, we don’t want that changed.
Give Priests better M+ utility. We got Mind Soothe already so maybe one more (strong) tool could be enough.
Give some talent to make atonement scale better for smaller groups, or a passive that increases it by X% while not in a Raid (kind of what Tranq has but perhaps more like a 20% rather than 100% increase).
Give Disc a way to deal more AOE damage in M+ (which we might have in Mind Sear if it remains like it is in Alpha).
That’s it, solved!, Disc is in a great spot for M+ now. It still has some weaknesses, it’s still probably weaker overall than Resto Druid, but that’s fine.
Either add a new spell or do something that allows power word: shield to be cast on multiple targets at once. Rapture is great but you’re still spending 6+ seconds just casting shield on 4-5 people due to globals, and if heavy damage is coming in that’s way too long just to be shielding everyone, plus the shields only last 15 seconds as it is. Maybe if rapture also made your next power word shield apply to all group/party members or up to 5-6 raid members? I just feel like I’m spending way too much time casting shields in order to do any actual damage (and thus healing). If we’re meant to heal via damage, we should be doing damage, not spending all of our time and globals casting non-damaging abilities.
Alternatively, a much lower cooldown on luminous barrier and causing it to apply atonement would be a good way to handle this as an aoe version of power word: shield.
Change purge the wicked so that it spreads to all (limit 5-8) additional nearby enemies when you cast penance on the target, instead of only spreading once. I love purge the wicked, but compared to divine star or halo in the same tier it seems really lacking for aoe power being in an aoe damage/healing row of talent choices. That might also help with the aoe damage deficiency in m+, serving a similar role to sunfire/consecration as you said
As far as utility, I think that dominant mind should be baseline for discipline, so that mind control becomes more usable as both a crowd control and damage ability.
Those changes sound a lot better overall, I think Rapture is fine as it is the one change I would love to see explored is going from having a set duration to instead give you (let’s say) 8 charges that last longer, and you consume 1 charge to empower your PW:Shield, this allows you to make more efficient use of your spells by not having to necessarily spam PW:Shield for the full duration.
I do like the idea of reworking Lum Barrier though (I actually propose d that in a recent post I made about the lvl 50 row). It could have a shorter CD, apply both the shield and the DR but only for 5 targets (maybe that’s too broken idk, just some ideas).
An efficient way to spread Purge the Wicked would be nice too but it’s a bit similar to sunfire then, the idea I had about it was to combine the effect of PtW with Castigation, so say they made Castigation fire 4 bolts AND spread SW:Pain to a nearby enemy per bolt. Then on the PtW spot a new talent could come in.
Change the scaling of atonement (so it’s stronger on fewer targets, weaker on more) or cap how many atonements you can have and add back in some direct heals to compensate. I don’t want to get rid of the atonement mechanic entirely or make it passive, but the scaling really needs to be fixed.
