Yes, at a high level, this is the case. We are not talking about high level healers.
No. I am saying that playing disc at an effective level requires more mechanics than playing any other healer at an effective level. This is specifically talking about low to mid level play.
So here’s where you’re not really getting what I’m saying. The forward pass ISN’T banned for Tom Brady. I’m rejecting this idea you have that Disc somehow just doesn’t have fundamental tools. It has all the fundamental tools it needs currently. You can build Disc in a way where you literally never cast any damage spells beyond SW:P if you want to, and you can clear +16s with it just fine.
Why we’re saying that healing on Discipline is hard is because you have more to think about than another healer far earlier than any other healer needs to even consider it. If you take a player who has little to no experience healing in WoW and put them on a Disc priest for one run, and a Holy for the next, I guarantee that they will have more success on the Holy priest run. This is not because one is worse than the other at the same content. It’s because Disc has more nuance to their spells than Holy does. Even just the decision of how to cast penance is several steps more than you’d ever need to take on Holy.
This is not true. Skill expression exists at all levels of play.
Again, this is wrong. Your toolbox is far bigger than ‘you will play like this or fail’ until you are at high levels. And at a high level of play, every single healer is in the exact same ‘you will play like this or fail’ boat. You can even look this data up. High level keys on every single healer in the game are all using very specific builds by the vast majority. Generally any deviations are a good 2-3 key levels down.
Alright, let’s actually talk about burst heals.
Mind games isn’t your only one. It’s also not the most powerful covenant for burst heals, because Kyrian takes that piece of the pie. But if we want to go even further:
Shining Radiance PW:R is a strong burst heal. It is flat out better than most AoE heals in the game.
Penance with PotDS is the best single target heal in the game outside serenity. With castigation, it beats serenity. With The Penitent One, it crushes serenity - but that kind of burst healing is rarely needed.
Shadow Covenant buffs Shadowmend to be an incredible burst heal for triage healing.
ToF procs will buff literally any spell.
Mindblast is actually fairly high healing with absorb included.
Rapture PW:S is very good.
This, again, isn’t true. Every healing spec is pigeonholed into singular builds when the key gets high enough. Generally, again, for most healers the variation in talents revolves around their utility rows. At least for Discipline, Mindbender is still completing above +20 keys versus Solace in the same row, and Shadow Covenant has seen some use against affixes - which is a fairly large playstyle change.
This idea that Discipline can only play one way literally can only come from just being inexperienced on the spec, or inexperienced as a healer overall. There’s literally nothing unique about Disc’s playstyle over another healer in the highest keys.
Yeah no, this is all wrong, so I wasn’t far off, it seems. This is you coming in with “You use a hammer to hammer nails, that’s it” and me saying “OK, well the back side of the hammer can pull a nail out, too.” and you replying “Lol no you just hammer that’s it that’s how a hammer is designed obviously, it’s a hammer.”
Anyone can just as easily be reductive about any given spec. “As a holy priest you’ll spot heal with… heal. You’ll attack AoE situations by hitting Hymn for a buff and follow up with CoH/Sanc. You’ll pretty much just spam heal in any other scenario and weave holy words to proc resonant words to brute force your way through the highest instances of damage.” Sounds boring, but it’s pretty much true.
As discipline I approach fights in completely different ways. Even things as simple as what mob your Mindgames and Mindblast targets are will completely change a fight versus just using them in a pre-determined rotation.
This topic LITERALLY STARTED with new players picking up a spec. Just look at the title. If anyone redirected a conversation here, it was you.
That is exactly what you are talking about when you are discussing mastery, your attempts to dance around this doesn’t change it.
You may not realize it, but all you are saying here is “disc punishes you for being bad” you are not speaking about how much skill the spec does or does not require. I hate to break it to you but, pretty much all specs in the game punish you for being bad in some way, healing/tanking/DPSing doesn’t matter, if you are bad you will get punished. Disc isn’t unique in this way.
You still don’t seem to get it. I have not now, nor have I ever made an argument that disc isn’t viable, and that it can’t clear high level content. This is a strawman you like to keep stacking up because it’s easy to knock down. I have said time and time again DISC LIMITS SKILL EXPRESSION OF THE PLAYER. To drive the point home…
DISC LIMITS SKILL EXPRESSION OF THE PLAYER =/= Disc isn’t viable
These are two completely different arguments and you are only showing your ignorance by attempting to make arguments centered on discs viability. There is no argument there. I am trying to remain polite here but good greif you go back to this argument so much I’m starting to wonder if your a preprogramed bot who is incapable of grasping higher concepts like class, design expression, playstyle loops, etc.
Put someone who has no experience healing in WoW on any healer and throw them into end game content it won’t go well, this type of discussion is a non-starter and irrelevent. If you set someone up to fail they will fail spec is irrelevent to that.
I would love to hear your arguments for this, you have so far failed to provide them.
You don’t get it. High levels specs tend to be based around flexiblity of the toolbox allowing the healers to adapt to the situation. At low levels you don’t need a big toolbox and can streamline, or play what is fun. At high levels you need your best tools available so you can make the best decisions when something goes wrong. The existence of a cookie-cutter spec for healing doesn’t disprove skill expression. You sound like a MTG playing saying “you played a netdeck because you can’t make your own” when 9/10 times that netdeck took more skill to pilot than the idiots homebrewed garbage.
False, a 4k heal isn’t burst, if you a lucky enough to get the crit for around 8k I can grant it but that is inconsistent, IE non-reliable, and healing is about reliability.
1–You are talking about procs, again inconsistent, but you also don’t seem to understand what burst healing is. You think you burst healed someone over 2 seconds? Fun fact with heal+Serenity I will heal more than your fully procced penance in a shorter time frame. Why? Because both Heal and Serenity will hit at the exact same second, as soon as Heal casts finishes Serenity lands as well and, in doing this I’ve healed around +35k in my 207 ilvl gear. Penance with your full procs, and castigation, doesn’t get close and instead of doing all of that instantly it does it over 2 seconds, modified by haste. That isn’t burst healing, although it’s the closest thing Disc has to it in a PVE scenario so I can see why you would think it is.
So what you are saying is you use your Shadowmend for spot healing. Buffing it doesn’t change it from being your spot healing tool and doesn’t defeat any argument I have made, it also doesn’t complare to actual burst healing combos/tools other specs have.
Irrelevent to the discussion of disc and it’s ability to burst heal. Burst healing isn’t what a single spell does, at least not often, it’s generally generated from the combination of a cast time spell followed by an insta-cast spell so both heals land at the same time resulting in a sudden burst of healing. Sure some classes can achieve this with a single spell, Serenity/Lay on Hands/Druids Soul of the Forest/etc. Disc doesn’t burst heal anyone outside of pvp with the closest it has being a large Shadowmend crit since it literally has no insta-cast heal to combo with and every other tool it has either heals over time or is just it’s version of a Flash Heal or AoE heal.
And doesn’t come close to being a burst healing tool, even with Shadow Covenent.
Doesn’t heal, let alone burst heal.
None of what you argued actually provides any form of burst healing. Honestly even Mindgames doesn’t provide a ton in terms of burst healing but it tends to be far better than what you stated, especially if empowered by Shadow Covenent.
I addressed this above but to recap, cookie-cutter specs do not disprove skill expression. They exist to provide a spec the tools that when used correctly will enable you to perform the best. They exist to allow you to express your skill in the class, BECAUSE they tend to give you the tools needed for any situation provided you know how to use them.
Disc by contrast, in its cookie cutter spec or no, doesn’t provide that. Changing your playstyle to a shadowmend shadow cov spam to ignore atonement doesn’t makes you suddenly skilled, if anything you further streamlined your kit by locking yourself out of half of it further limiting your skill expression. I guess if anything I might be able to give you being able to known when you lock yourself out of shadow vs when to keep your holy school open is something. It’s just a very stupid something.
I’m trying to point out to you that what you are holding isn’t a hammer, it’s a mallet, mallets don’t have a reverse end designed to pull nails out.
No the thread itself was a guy asking is disc was hard to pick up, that’s fair. It then evolved as I argued it isn’t as hard as pretty much everyone else in the thread was making it out to be. From there the conversation naturally evolved at first between me and Binklewink, which you ignored in your first post by only responding to literally the first line of my first post.
Now you want to say I’m redirecting the conversation that you literally jump in the middle of and ignored a great deal of. Sorry that doesn’t fly.
Precisely! New players are generally not good at the game. Disc is not good in the hands of a healer that isn’t very good. As such, it’s harder to learn, and generally not recommended for new healers. This thread was from a dude that was asking about getting into priest. It was recommended that he don’t go into disc right away because it’s the more difficult of the two to play. Your response, quote:
It IS for someone who hasn’t healed and is looking at getting into healing with priests. I’d absolutely recommend to anyone that they should try out other healers first, get a foundation then look at Discipline if it interests them. That is what I responded to. You then went into a talk about skill level, but took this position that skill only exists at high level - and discussions about skill can only be had about high level (it doesn’t, but that’s a different conversation and one I’m not about to entertain).
Most heals in the game have a similar time to penance, especially considering most healing specs in M+ are around 20% haste. Even Holy priests are running heavy haste builds in high end M+ right now. To pretend that something is only burst healing when it’s absolutely instant cast is a bit pedantic, IMO. A castigation Penance followed by a rapture shield accomplishes the same thing you’re talking about. Far more with a proc of PoTDS or TPO.
Great. You’re underestimating TPO though, with its proc alone (which you can hold and stack, by the way). The thing is, you would never need that burst on Disc - There’s really no point to it when you already have the best flash heal in the game and excel at triage healing anyway. I was using that section as an example of a bunch of things that COULD burst.
If you only accept a scenario of 800+ SP within one GCD, then penance is the one spell that meets it. But most healers just don’t have that at all. Hpriest would be the only one. And they’re certainly not the singular healer capable of burst healing in the game.
Absorbs are still healing so long as they get absorbed. Rapture shields almost always do in any situation you’d employ them.
This is again, just incorrect in terms of Discipline’s play. Mindgames will not outburst any of the options I laid out. It doesn’t even outburst a ST penance. The only time it might even come close to a burst heal is used before a tankbuster. You’re still only doing ~600% sp. Which isn’t far from a regular penance with castigation.
This isn’t what I was referring to. You can take castigation/contrition and penance defensively if you wanted to. You can even take Divine Star and play around the Caut Shadows legendary (which Scov buffs, as well). These are viable playstyles up to 18 keys right now. They’re not particularly GOOD, just as it’s not good to play other healing specs inefficiently either.
Your argument very much boils down to “I don’t like discipline’s tools, therefore I have classed them as non-tools!” We’re disagreeing here, because for some reason you seem to think other healer tools are far more flexible. But they really aren’t. When, exactly, are you using Holy Word: Serenity for anything but a burst heal for a single target? And why is it an efficient choice to use it that way? What myriad of scenarios are there to hit your heal button besides being mana-efficient sustained spot healing? Why is that different than Shadowmend? Why does a Druid put out ironbark, and why is that usage significantly different than pain supp? Do you think a Shaman is making a huge meaningful decision on what they should do with their Earth Shield beyond ‘Hm I might need more healing on this guy soon.’? And if so, why is it significantly different from pre-shielding? What meaningful decision is a Holy Paladin making when they cast Holy Shock on a teammate or an enemy? How significantly different is that from Penance?
Speaking of penance it can be used two ways - as a strong single target heal, or a smaller AoE heal. But it can also spread PTW, or proc Contrition depending on talents. Even Mind blast has nuance in that the target it is best used on isn’t necessarily the target you want to prioritize. So the idea that you would just hammer a damage rotation mindlessly is incorrect, too.
In reality, healer skill expression is based more around using their toolkit to meet the demands of an ever-changing situation. It’s not about using your tools in surprising and new ways. Every healer’s tools when put in a vacuum are pretty rigid in what they can do. What shows skill as a healer is reacting properly to what is happening to the party with the tools you have, whilst contributing as much as possible to the group. Discipline can do this just as any other healer can. This idea that they can’t is just wrong, and if it were true, Discipline wouldn’t be consistently performing well in dungeons through 3 expansions.
I’d agree with you far more if we were talking about their raid playstyle. Discipline has one singular job there and they are pretty bad at doing anything else. It’s just not true of small group content.
First my opinions are mine, and you can contest and argue against them all you like. Feel free to have your own opinions that are at odds with mine. It makes no difference to me.
I have played all of the healers since vanilla, and feel strongly that disc (especially in its current state) is unlike all other healers. It is worlds apart and unique vs all of the others in a very basic way–in how atonement works and in how you should be doing most of your healing via damage. Being at the top of your game requires you to learn be pre-emptive and know the damage patterns of nearly every part of every dungeon and raid boss and trash pack to be most effective. You have to know when to shadow mend vs heal via atonement. You have to know when to rapture, etc. beforehand. You have to know when to hold back on healing and by how much to conserve mana. Most critically, you have to get out your atonements at the right time and realize that if your timing is off, then you are doing less damage and/or healing than optimal, likely making it so that you have to waste mana because you misjudged and hence have to use shadowmend more, etc etc.–all resulting in lost time and/or failure.
In my experience, all other healers have pre-emptive aspects to their play, most notably druids, but none have to be nearly as pre-emptive and spot on with the timing so often and nearly as correct in decisions of when to do what. And in raids this is even more so the case.
In fact, I feel so certain about the above that I would also say you can easily fail as a discipline priest and not be up to it. It is far from easy to master. Yeah, anyone can have a go at it and do it on a very basic level. But the skill ceiling for disc is probably the highest in the game of not only healers. I would wager this is true across all classes and specs.
Getting back to comparing disc to other healers, this is not to say you can’t benefit from knowledge of when to do what across all healers. Knowledge of damage patterns helps all healers, but to be effective as disc, you can’t get away with knowing very little unless you stick to beginner only level content. With healers that are more reactive, it is less about preparing your group for healing and more about healing up after damage is taken. Hence the requirement of knowing the damage patterns is not as important to most other healers–albeit druids do benefit more than all but disc by knowing the damage patterns. Resto druids are probably the second most pre-emptive healer of the lot. But I feel that a resto druid can get away with knowing less than a disc priest has to know and that the toolkit for druid healers is more of a mix between reactive and pre-emptive than disc. But back to my main point: To play a disc priest well at more advanced levels, you need to know what to do when a lot more than with all other healers across the board–resto druids in some ways, the exception.
Feel free to argue against the above all you like. But read any guide about disc vs other healers, and this point is central. Disc is largely pre-emptive, and the most pre-emptive of all healers. Period.
In summary I don’t agree with what your general opinion seems to be: that disc priest is an easy healer to play. It may be easy to pick up and play in beginner only content, but as you progress into harder content your skill and knowledge of fights, your planning of your cds, your ability to know when to heal via atonement vs other options all become extremely crucial to your success. And in my experience, this is a lot more so than with other healers–all of them.
I get the sense that you misunderstood, don’t know what you are talking about or lack experience dungeon healing as a discipline priest. In my case, in the last year alone, I have probably healed more than 500 dungeons as a disc priest and maybe as many as 1000+ --and countless dungeons across all healers since vanilla. Positioning as a disc priest is extremely important. In a boss fight, for example, if you cast radiance on yourself and you are in the middle of the group but there is a heavy damage doing mage in your group that is about to take big damage but who likes to run all over the place and is not in range of your radiance cast, then you can have a situation on your hands very quickly. The fact that the mage is out of range means you have some hard and critical decisions to make very quickly.
