Blizzard had already made the massive change to Disc Priest making them a reactive healer instead of a preemptive healer. It’s so disappointing to see that even more changes have been made to further this change.
I was expecting to see large buffs to Divine Aegis to allow us a version of Spirit Shell or preemptive shield that we’ve lost. I expected to see Divine Aegis overheal increased and proc to be off ANY overhealing done. Instead it’s nerfed and made almost pointless to use. Divine Aegis could have been a massive raid CD.
I expected to see the Radiance buffs so that dungeon healing was a little easier so that was nice. I do wish we could choose between PWS and Renew as our baseline Atonement application.
Disc isn’t really fun anymore not that we’ve just been made more and more reactive in healing. Sure, it’s “easier”, but that literally defeats the fun and challenge it presented before.
ALL DISC EVER NEEDED WAS CD TIMER FIXES AS WELL AS THROUGHPUT BUFFS TO RADIANCE, PWS, AND ATONEMENT!
You’re still reactive, but the Discipline style didn’t match the damage from dungeons in most cases, only a few, counted by hand, managed to bring Discipline to +20. While I think the changes went too far in terms of radiance, leave a learning space for everyone to enjoy the class, you still can and should prepare your strongest mitigations, just like your burst.
The main change was the synergy of holy and shadow spells and the new routes, although I think some talents still feel capped at 2 points (pain and suffering/contrition). For now, leave room for those who want to push up with Discipline and improve their combos without switching to holy in the process.
The damage absorption mechanics are harmful for the game, maybe in m+ you won’t notice the difference but in raid environments you completely ruin the gameplay of other healers. Perhaps with time divine aegis can be transformed into a button that allows 5/10% of all your healing to be transformed into a shield for 10 seconds, every 1:30 min (without global CD) or completely change its design, for example , be an active every 2 min that applies 50/100% pw:shield to party members for 50% of their mana cost and increases their crit chance by 20/40%…if that you want something more reactive.
Maybe the solution to the “harmful” aspect of absorption mechanics was never to remove disc as the only absorption healer and instead add in more absorption healing specs. Sure the problem with them back when they were designed primarily as absorption was that you essentially HAD to have at least one in every raid, plus whatever other healers, but if there were more instead of less then the choice wouldn’t be “a disc priest and a regular healer,” but rather “an absorption healer and a regular healer.”
To me that would be way more interesting of a general design than the simple “healers make green bars go up.” Instead blizz just hardcore back pedals on any good idea they have, as usual, the moment any sign of struggle in design pops up.
I’m sure the only reason they didn’t back pedal on atonement is because they were simply out of ideas at that point, and despite the initial fiasco of how it also turned out, they pressed on because it was still the simple healing and damage dichotomy, and all they had to do was make other healers do damage too.
Disc will always be a mess as long as they’re priest’s other healing spec.
They became necessary to survive mechanics while groups were undergeared, yes. But when fully geared, they also just hurt the fun of other healers because they left very little to heal. It’s that feeling of “Oh we just overlapped CDs now neither of us is gonna do good healing” that casual groups have, except it’s happening all the time because the absorb healer is just stopping every major damage event.
Healing is fun in Dragonflight raids largely BECAUSE there’s always damage to heal in a lot of these fights.
M+ is a whole other beast. The healing changes going into Dragonflight I’d say were a detriment there, because they caused a problem where every spec needs a ton of on-demand healing and that wasn’t working great for like 4 different specs.
I don’t know if fun is the word I would use to describe it… but maybe I’m always just a little undergeared for the content I’m pushing or something. It’s hectic and frustrating. This game has always suffered from an absurd lack of max health; just the stamina stat in general. Sometimes there’s nothing to do, until suddenly someone actually IS missing life, but then dies half a second later because whatever hit him killed him from full to dead in like 2 seconds, and then heaven forbid that happens in the middle of actually healing other people or that it happens multiple times.
All this on top of the fact that generally you’re just healing your dps and not even the tank nowadays, since tanks are so ridiculously overtuned that they don’t even need healers anymore. The entire relationship between healers, tanks, and health bars is completely out of whack in this game.
And if the problem was that absorption created too much overhealing, then it sounds like the solution is simple: reintroduce them in this expansion where healing is crazier than ever.
We all agreed that the discipline needed changes, the burst damage on m+ was too constant and hard to beat if you didn’t have complete mastery of the class. In raid he would become abusive if he was a pure absorb healer, but he needs a niche that makes him stand out beyond barrier. Maybe it’s time to explore damage reduction mechanics for raids, not so high that they don’t need other healers but so that they have a space in progression.
If you’re talking about top level M+ - this has been a thing there since its inception. M+ is infinitely scaling difficulty. It follows that you’ll get to a point where standing in an unavoidable (and normally just punishing) mechanic is instant death, instead.
If you’re talking about raid, usually this starts in Mythic, really and you really have to mess up a mechanic or just not use a personal on something that is targeting you (like a dot) for it to legitimately kill you that fast.
Raid healing in Shadowlands was very much mostly just healing people at like 70% health that were never really in danger, and a huge amount of the time not really having much to heal because everyone was so healthy. Then the boss did its big raid-wide and dropped everyone’s health and that’s where you stacked raid CDs. DF definitely feels like all your heals are way more useful. Raid-wides still happen and CDs still cover them, but outside those windows, there’s just consistent damage to heal and I’m enjoying raid healing a lot more because of it.
Blizzard has shifted the raid damage style away from just having big bursty damage every 20-30s to constant RoT auras from start to finish on fights. The bursty damage style favored healers that could mitigate damage.
This was done to counter the damage mitigation meta that was prevalent in Shadowlands because 3 out of 6 healers weren’t even brought in for high end raiding. So I’m pretty confident we won’t see Spirit Shell or anything like it coming back anytime soon.
This really made me chuckle. I agree with caith, SS is never coming back. They tried it again, it failed so o would imagine they learnt their lessons with DA. Tbh I don’t think DA deserved the nerf. It was doing meh healing but I’m not upset either.
Am enjoying mana being less on an issue in raids and not existent in keys. The choices I get to make in keys talent wise make it interesting. An aoe fear stun. More dps, more burst. Disc going to A tier straight off the bat tho it’s moved down but still ranked 3rd best healing spec in keys. Things looking up
I’m bothered by the DA nerf. It was already pathetic, now it’s worse. Moving further and further away from discs identity, feels bad. There’s no point in even speccing into it now lol.
Okay I guess I’m obligated to come in these threads now and say how disc is fine.
The changes were great tbh. I’m still experimenting with builds for m+ but I’m taking mostly damage setups in 20+ keys now and hitting 29k overall in keys. My buddies are slack jawed at the numbers. I can end a boss fight at 40k.
If anything I’m a little disappointed in petrifying fear, it’s hard to route to without losing a lot and if I take it for pure utility it isn’t actually as useful in as many scenarios that I had pictured in my head as I read the ptr notes a few weeks ago.
Outside of that though, the damage is the niche that disc fits. I’m very pleased with that end.
I helped a buddy push his 19 academy with some pugs and we finished with less than 20 seconds on the timer. He said, “we literally don’t time that with any other healer.” That is the identity that I play disc for.
And yes, I dropped DA after a few weeks ago telling everyone to stack crit and use it for throughput, but it isn’t that missed with the flash heal and radiance buffs. I take expiation in its place and the hps seems largely unaffected, while the DPS went wayyy up.
I’m fairly happy with the changes. Disc now does well (and better than Holy) in terms of blasting 5-man groups with group-wide heals, but Holy is still stronger when it comes to constant “whack-a-mole” single-target healing.
I’ve long said that Disc is a “house divided” in terms of its design, splitting its distinctive offerings between absorbs and damage-to-heal, and Blizz should just pick one and go all-in. They haven’t done that, but in this patch they are clearly edging toward the latter.
Disc does feel better to play after the changes and while my concerns about the actual design of the spec and the uncapped nature of atonement are still valid, it at least feels like the spec is playing with a full hand compared to other healers now, and in some cases might be hiding a pair of aces under the table.
The problem is that not all tanks are created equal. Blood DKs & Prot Warriors are much more self sufficient than a DH or Bear Tank because they require half as much external healing.
Tanks were like this in BFA though where they were self-sufficient islands in keys. It was only in Shadowlands that they made everything hit so hard and the healer had to basically carry the tank.
Yeah the tank shortage has existed ever since raids became the main focus for the game… so like… almost forever. Because raids only need up to two tanks for any 10-40 player group. Just a fundamental problem with their approach to the holy trinity is why there’s constantly a tank shortage.
Oh, please, Mr. Drama! Did you not get the memo about Shadow Covenant?! If you do not time it correctly, pre-emptively, then good luck to you. But the hairs you pull out of your head are going to be everywhere.
The current iteration of disc is great! It is a nice change and feels refreshing and actually quite good. It is still pre-emptive if you know what you are doing. If you are playing it reactively, good luck, but you are not playing it right.