Losing PtW/Rapture will make me quit disc

Classes Priest
1

I’ve been struggling to compose my thoughts on these disc changes, as a long time disc player I’m struggling to conceive of Blizzard’s intended playstyle for disc, and how to reconcile it with my own view of what disc is after thousands of hours playing it in both PvE and PvP. The main thing I want to address is why I don’t believe that disc will feel satisfying to play after this changes. At the end of the day how one feels about what they are playing is the most important factor in determining enjoyment.

In my view, disc is split into two playstyles - both proactive - the satisfyingly complicated raid ramp play style, and the rotation of strong short CDs in PvP and PvE. Disc has felt, at least to me, to be a low mobility, low utility healer, with on the whole average damage. Like every spec, disc has had over and under corrections in tuning, but overall disc’s biggest strength is its powerful short CDs and passive healing through atonement management. Disc isn’t button heavy, and yet it can feel rotationally more complex and punishing without game knowledge and other healers. The reason I love disc, and I believe many fee the same way, is because this proactive playstyle makes each button feel impactful.

With that in mind, PtW has fit into disc as a proactive set up for atonement healing. This is especially true in m+ and PvP, where a spread of PtWs can lead to substantial passive healing through good atonement management. PtW also does something important for disc - it visually and audibly marks a disc’s dot as more potent than a normal SW:P. It has the visuals of holy fire coupled with a satisfying hiss. It feels impactful.

Rapture is, of course, a far greater issue than PtW, and the real nail in the coffin for me in putting disc back on the shelf. Anyone who has played disc in PvP knows that rapture is fundamental to play disc. Again, the proactive play style demands it. When you fall behind as a disc priest, you are at a major disadvantage to other healers. Rapture is like a speed break in managing momentum, and in late season, heavy damage environments, this is an absolute necessity. The same is true for m+. The speed break affect allows a disc priest to weave in other stabilizing globals and create a set up for continual healing after the ending of rapture.

Overall, disc doesn’t have a lot of buttons. To remove rapture without a serious plan for its replacement is egregious. I truly felt that when blizzard added a CD to shield, they were bringing shields into a direction where they could feel impactful to press. Now I feel that Blizzard is making a very large mistake in homogenizing disc with direct healing for the sake of balance.

I hope that Blizzard will revert these changes. I feel that right now disc is giving up major identity spells without receiving much in return, and I also don’t feel that disc is or has been an over performing or possessing of too many abilities to warrant this type of pruning. Most of all, PtW and Rapture, along with atonement healing, are why I feel in love with disc. PtW and Rapture feel meaningful and available. Spells like Ultimate pen can feel impactful, but they also feel thoughtless - once the cast is off, everything is loaded into smart healing. In some ways it feels like a dumbing down of disc to trade rapture for perhaps a more accessible ultimate pen.

I don’t expect that everyone will agree with these thoughts, but with my playtime in disc I felt that I had to leave some sort of feedback and if these changes do roll through I hope blizzard truly keeps the identity of this unique and fantastic spec. As it stands, I believe that these changes will fundamentally change the spec into something that I, and I believe many others, will no longer find enjoyable.

5 Likes
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Same boat, the solution is simple, vote with your wallet, if these horrid changes go live disc pvp is in the dumpster, so like, im done, should of been done after that shadowlands crapshow, its clear developers have no fn clue what they are doing with most of these class changes AT ALL, and if i had my guess, its probly some new woke dei hire after all the layoffs blizzard has had in the past few months

1 Like
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I’m with you.
I also feel these changes do not address Disc’s weakness, the lack of healing during the Atonement ramp. The Evangelism change doubles down on the already strong healing window achieved after the ramp, but doesn’t do anything for maintenance healing.

You could feel this disparity back in Dragonflight M:- 2 troublesome bosses, Talondras (3rd boss Uldaman) and Khajin (3rd boss Halls of Infusion). Talondras was easy for Disc, with our shields and damage reduction so suited for the bleed, and our burst windows timed so well to counter the stomp. Then Khajin, with her absolutely crazy amount of RoT damage, was our worst nightmare, and we struggled to keep up between our ramps.

Taking out Rapture, all but enforcing Evangelism, doesn’t prune or streamline our spec, it destroys choice, adaptability, and nuance. This has been a historical sore point in Disc, with so many possibilities for play-styles, but every time Blizzard needs to double down on a singular choice in the lazy belief they can only balance one cookie cutter build.

Disc could have been balanced far more easily with a tuning knob on Voidweaver’s numbers- but I suspect the wide-ranging mechanical nerfs were deliberate, not to bring VW Disc in line but to cater to an ideal, singular concept of what healers should be.

1 Like
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I think the changes are overall a net negative because of rapture’s removal, but that’s really the only issue.

Losing it is a fairly large hit in raid, and an enormous hit in PvP - but these are both areas where Disc wasn’t really dominating.

M+ rapture was OK, but realistically it was a tool that was assigned to very specific mechanics to get a higher EHP to survive the hit at high enough keys. It wasn’t really used as a stop gap much unless you were running Oracle (and nobody was). Voidweaver M+ just got nerfs, which is kinda expected in that content.

I can’t really say these changes are terrible in M+ and if the goal is to bring Oracle up (most these changes are geared towards oracle - TE change especially because it just becomes completely unusable in shadowform) they’ll do that well. But I do think rapture should come back. The Evang change is just kinda meh. Could even be put on a choice node with Evang or uppies. But I think they’re probably worried about the tier set - they created a problem that created more problems with how that tier set is implemented.

2 Likes
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I was originally in favor of removing Rapture a long time ago because I dislike the notion of spamming nearly a dozen shields in a row in a raid setting. Instead, they changed it to reduce the # of shields and buffing the absorb amount was a good tradeoff, I thought, and I embraced the new version. Now I am sad to see it go.

I do think that there is too much variation in the absorb amount in that the low seems too low and the ceiling too high. Depending on your talents, procs, buffs, and set bonuses, it shields for a negligible amount or a crazy good amount. Blizzard had to prune something that empowered PW:S, it seems.

I don’t think the new Evang really covers the loss of Rapture in an M+ environment. It’s 500k healing per person in current gear, after benefitting from Grace, making it a mid-level AOE heal instead of a serious cooldown. Extending the atonement duration by 6s every 1.5 minutes doesn’t do anything significant in M+. I would honestly rather see them remove the healing component from Evang and distribute that healing into Ultimate Penitence to make it stronger, and then reduce Uppies’ cooldown.

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I will say - I really don’t know how strong people expect uppies to be. This cooldown is completely nuts for throughput, especially with the +20% crit Disc is getting on penance.

Its problems are still just the CD and the root in place (which they seem totally unwilling to change).

Honestly think they shoulda removed the AoE heal + atonement application and kept the bolt CD reduction if the only other change is the shield getting a bit bigger, because we’re still going to die in any challenging content if a single thing hits us up there.

IMO twinsight is not enough of a concern to totally remove that CDR talent, lol.

3 Likes
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I wish they would have kept Heaven’s Wrath or reduced the CD of Uppies to 3 mins at least.

Uppies’ Icon/ability should change to a short ranged leap ability when we are up in the air channeling uppies. This way we can chose where we land if we need to cut it off early. Doesnt need to be huge distance 15y would do. Just something so we don’t need to land in the bad that almost always spawns under us.

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Uppies needs to have power that justifies its cooldown, and it should be a powerful cooldown regardless of whether one chooses Oracle as the hero talent.

Let’s assume I’m Voidweaver Disc with 30% crit for Uppies (taking into account Inner Focus) on the PTR. Uppies will do ~3.12 million damage. I can do nearly seven million damage - effectively twice that amount - in a standard SCov rotation every ~30s on live and every ~45s on PTR.

Of course, one could say, “well, choose Oracle if you want a serviceable Uppies.” I don’t think it makes sense for Disc players to feel obligated to choose Oracle just for Uppies to be do almost as much damage as cooldowns that are ~1/4 as long. This is especially the case given that Uppies is now a central part of the tree; it is much harder to skip taking.

1 Like
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I don’t think comparisons like this are fair, generally. And it’s for a few reasons:

  • Scov is quite literally the best cooldown for 5 mans they’ve ever made.
  • Scov is not just a singular button that you hit and get healing from.
  • Scov is barely even a cooldown, more of a rotational ability to ‘activate’ your cleave (quite like Pally BoV).
    • Scov is getting massively propped up by the Voidweaver Tree, entropic rift, void blast, collapse and another atonement boost. If you are not voidweaver, it does not do nearly as much for you. Hence, not really a ‘CD’ as much as the voidweaver tree is a CD.

Compare it to other one button healing throughput CDs in the game like Divine Hymn, Tranq, Revival, HTT. It completely dwarfs them.

And, you know, you can still play it alongside VW/Shadowform, and use it to fill gaps. Nothing exists in a vacuum like this.

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These comparisons do feel kind of weird, because it’s true that Scov is more of a tree than an ability. But it’s also true that you can break out various sections that empower SCov and make them useful on their own, outside minion/SCov windows. A simple Mind Blast/radiance/penance/Void Blast rotation does some decent mid-level healing on its own; it’s not, say, useless outside minion/SCov windows.

I get what you are saying with Uppies being a singular ability…but it is also empowered by its own tree (albeit with fewer branches) as well. And it has a 4-minute cooldown!

I think Tranq is among the weakest of these “raid CD” abilities and comes most closely to the sense of an isolated talent pick; it has minimal talents that boost its throughput, and its cooldown is short enough to justify how weak it is (2.5 mins w/talents).

Hymn seems more powerful than Uppies, honestly. It’s doing 6M healing on 5 targets on the PTR when you include crits and mastery (assuming mastery overheals by 50%). It needs fewer talents to further empower it than Uppies, and it’s on just a 2min CD (again, w/talents).

Edit: my formatting sucks