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Discipline
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Flash Heal healing increased by 25% (Discipline only).
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Renew healing increased by 25% (Discipline only).
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Power Word: Radiance healing increased by 100%.
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Ultimate Radiance increases the healing done by Power Word: Radiance by 10% (was 100%).
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Sins of the Many increases damage dealt by 40% at its highest effectiveness (was 30%).
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Divine Aegis create a protective shield for 3%/6% of critical healing done (was 5%/10%).
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Developers’ notes: Our changes to Discipline are aimed at improving the spec’s ability to react to burst damage, especially in dungeons. At the same time, we’re tuning down a talent that’s contributing more than intended to Discipline’s overall healing. Between these tuning changes and talent changes in 10.0.5, we expect Discipline to be slightly more effective in raids and significantly more effective in dungeons.
I think the PW:Radiance and Sins of the Many ones will be the most noticeable but it’s nice to see the Devs targeting M+ performance specifically.
that sins buff is gonna be pretty big from the go
That plus all the dark disc changes. We wont be meta because disc is trickier to do well on for some people, but it will close the gap to holy and those players who jumped to holy may jump back
I look at these changes, and the Dark disc changes, and I feel like disc is gonna be S tier in arena. It will be easier to set up its burst, its burst will be shadow and not Holy allowing them to force interrupts on it, and the damage in that burst window is comparable, and in some cases even tops some DPS burst windows.
So as someone who’s been through a lot of wow buffs/debuffs, important to keep in mind that these are likely aura changes, so that means:
Flash heal change:
Flash Heal was already at a +30% in our aura. If this is an aura change we’ll be at +55%.
That’s still a ~19% increase to flash heal numbers. That makes it heal more than PW:S does (outside PW:S talents/4piece).
Renew and Radiance were at 0%, so those increases will be as stated. That puts renew pretty close to flash heal’s CURRENT power. Note, Renew always gains the benefit of our mastery, where flash heal doesn’t on targets without atonement.
That said, our damage is still lagging behind holy priest after their holy fire changes, and these changes very much kill Aegis of Wrath. There’s absolutely no reason to ever take it in any content now considering how weak DA is in dungeon and how weak AoW is in raid.
But we’re going to be really solid in dungeon. PW:R change and the Scov changes make us like unironically one of the best AoE healers in the game. Radiance heals ~40% more than Holy Word: Sanctify and is on a 15 second cooldown with 2 charges. Lol. Lmao.
Quite honestly, that radiance change would make me reconsider playing the raid blanket playstyle. I would need to math it, but it’s so significant that it might just be better to play a playstyle closer to the dungeon one (taking bright pupil) with how good radiance is about to be in PvE.
Looks like Wednesday I go back to Disc.
V happy as it was my original spec on my oldest (real) toon.
I’m a bit sad that they didn’t just instead give Radiance an instant cast. But the 100% healing increase will definitely help alleviate the toxic ramp playstyle. I’m excited!!
These buffs are jumbo.
Now I’m officially excited.
I ran a couple of Mythic+s as Disc today, +14 Temple… that last boss has so much damage outgoing that I burned through my entire mana bar before the boss dropped below 40%. Took me deliberately not healing myself so they could Brez me with like 20% mana 3 times to get him down. And that’s even after the Druid tank innervated me.
Such an awful spec right now.
I think the massive changes we’re getting should help.
The reason Disc was having issues was because Blizzard took a “sit and wait” approach after the Shadowmend removal to see if they needed to buff Discs single target healing.
Disc and Holy both got nerfed in the beta in terms of damage + healing and they’re basically backtracking on them now.
The best thing Blizzard could do for disc as a spec is move us away from atonement being our AoE burst heal and instead being our consistent, and constant, healing mechanic. Let spells like Radiance, and Scov be our burst AoE healing tools and let atonement provide baseline healing more on par with multi-HoTing. The atonement as raid CD design is poison for the spec.
I don’t think it’s necessarily poison, but I think it’s needlessly difficult for the vast majority of players and could be made way more consistent and overall useful by reworking evangelism to just… apply atonement to the whole raid for 6s.
Ramp players who specifically enjoy the payoff vs skill might not like it, but I don’t necessarily think that it’s smart to have a spec that needs to plan for damage that far in advance. Plan for damage, sure. But planning 15s in advance to move into a damage rotation seems excessive and pretty much impossible without addon support - especially for your first few times on a boss.
Disc needs a way to do some raid-wide throughput, rather than just plopping barrier down, for sure. Players have been playing the ‘raid blanket’ playstyle because it’s traditionally the best way to get HPS out of Disc’s kit - but it’s not like that’s super unique to them. The best thing for your HPS on ANY class is to use your CD in the big moments. Disc players are molding their entire playstyle around that. More than it being a class thing, IMO it’s a fight design thing. As long as fights are designed where the majority of the damage to heal is going out all at once in specific intervals, Disc will attempt to play in that way. Mostly I think why not just support them in doing that easily?
Disc players also molded their playstyle around bubble spam, but we both understand why Blizzard doesn’t support them in that.
The issue is unlike other specs Disc doesn’t “use it’s big raid healing CD” because disc IS the big raid healing CD. This is why it’s healing tends to not be very consistent because of how bursty atonement becomes. If they designed atonement around instead of being bursty by default and instead made it constant like HoTs and then made it’s ability to be bursty attached to a long CD, like Salvation/Divine/Hymn/Tranq/etc it would bring the spec more in line with other healers, allow it to keep it’s own identity, and make it significantly easier to balance and adjust in M+ without breaking raiding, or visa-versa.
I am excited with both specs, but i Believe disc will surpass holy now because of GCDs available and talent choices. It is a long way to get those DPS buffs.
Hmm I did that fight on a +15 tyrannical like two weeks ago (I was around 395 item level at the time) but I don’t remember that boss being particularly difficult as Disc… You use rapture or barrier during the add phase and other than that is just managing the DOT that he applies but as a Priest you can use mass dispel every other time to clear both players immediately and don’t even have to deal with it…
And the time that Mass Dispel is on CD then just single target dispel one and heal trough the other one until your dispel is off-cd but it’s easy to manage in a way that it’s always on someone who has a defensive available, don’t really need group coordination for that just if the first time you left it up on Player A then next time make sure you don’t leave it up on Player A again.
Now if you don’t dispel the DOT then yeah that DOT trucks, please tell me you were dispelling it…
I just don’t think I’ll ever agree with this idea that atonement is unable to be balanced at 20 targets vs 5 when dungeon disc is doing 40% more healing on full duration atonements, versus a CD where they’re doing 40% less healing but on 20 targets for at maximum 4 globals. Meanwhile, Salv is over here existing and not blowing up Hpriest despite casting renew on every target in the raid at full duration alongside 2 stack poms which are considerably buffed and can refresh that renew, lol. You’re only going to get the equivalent out of a CD like that to any other raid CD - and likely less.
There’s a lot in place already to limit Disc’s ability to just heal the whole raid unmitigated in raid-CD fashion. If there weren’t you’d be seeing impressive raid numbers from them right now. And TBH, if I were to pick an innervate target right now it wouldn’t even be disc, it’d be mistweaver ironically enough.
A redesigned evang is really all they’d need to make the spec much more popular, and it wouldn’t completely break the game either, honestly.
The holy changes reduce the GCDs to get damage out by like more than half, and the talent’s not too painful to pick up either.
A 10% buff to disc’s damage alongside the scov changes is good (and tbh I might be underestimating Disc, because inescapable torment is probably going to be a big dungeon contributor if it’s viable after these healing changes - you can proc it 4x now rather than 3, and it’ll be resetting constantly).
Yes!!!
as a pvp only disc main now I can heal 3s and not just 2s like normal.
Can’t wait
Lets talk about Salvation vs Atonement for a moment, since you seem to think Salvation justifies atonement.
Is renew a strong heal? Is PoM a strong heal? The answer to both is no. Yes they both have their purposes and can be good in specific places but neither are really going to move health bars and save lives. That is exactly why you can have 1 button put both of them on every raid member and it not be a big deal.
Now instead of renew and PoM being on every target lets instead say its Holy Word Serenity on every member of the raid. How stronger is Salavation now? I mean I know my Serenity right now easily hits for over 100k when it crits, so how about that on everyone at once?
Atonements power level during that brief window is far closer to a Serenity than it is a Renew+PoM. That is to say nothing of the actual design.
What does Holy do after it cast Salvation? Does it sit around waiting for the next time it comes off CD? Does it waste mana in order to set up for its next salvation cast? Is its entire kit designed around being able to press Salvation? While I exaggerate to make a point there is the diffence.
Discs entire kit is about that moment where it gets to be the raid CD, not use a raid CD, but actually be the CD. It has a 15 second set up to just that moment, and its kept to a punishly short window because of how strong it is. Much of its kit really isn’t that good outside of that window, so much so that even with it being as strong as it is during that window it doesn’t catch up.
How about instead of it playing to that one moment we instead let it being as strong as other healers through-out the entire boss encounter with a CD or two that makes it really crank and show off…you know similar to other healthy healing specs.
This is not what I said. I said salvation is more or less equivalent to giving a 6s atonement blanket, and it’s one of two raid CDs that spec has.
Renew is a strong heal under Divine Word (which can easily always be up - and you still have multiple divine word uses the rest of the fight). A 2 charges of PoM on every target is not weak, no. And it only costs one global. A salv actually comes pretty close to a holy word serenity on the whole raid (closer than you’d think, at least - as you can get ~500%SP? on everyone.)
We’re talking about a version of evangelism that takes one global, and at max you’d get 4 to fit in its window. Absolutely maximizing it, you’d get something near equivalent in those 5 globals.
It’s pretty close, actually. And if it was, in fact, too strong, there’s nothing stopping a redesigned evang from reducing your healing by a small percentage during those 6 seconds. It’s a much easier spell to tune when it’s made that way.
Granted, I think you severely overestimate how much healing Disc is doing outside these windows versus every other spec. It’s OK to have specs bring something unique to the table, and low overall throughput that’s balanced out by extremely high burst throughput isn’t out of this world crazy anyway.
Well you’re going to use as many holy words as possible to get that salv back so you can have 4 raid CDs during the fight (double salv double hymn). But that isn’t really an argument in your favor. The idea holy could be doing more healing while the salv is out, while Disc needs to spend that time catching up to the salv over 4 globals is a point in the favor of this really NOT being the balance problem you think it is.
Or, hear me out, here: We don’t just homogenize every healer in the game, and instead recognize when there’s a unique draw to the spec and design the spec in such a way that it can support it.
Neither approach is necessarily correct or incorrect, but I know which one I like better.