Atonement is a lot of fun, but either the devs don’t care enough to balance it, or they can’t. Either way, the outcome is the same, it should be removed. Disc does a lot of damage, yeah, but every other healer can do as much if not more, and while those healers aren’t doing damage to heal, they have the throughput/cd’s to make up for it. Also, atonement simply isn’t strong enough to heal through crazy damage, so priest resort to mend spamming, which is incredibly weak, and we lose our only niche, healing through damage. So, if high damage situations, disc is just terrible comparatively. Why take a priest when you can have a monk/rdruid/hpal, who are all going to pump crazy damage on a boss and be able to deal with more damage as well.
Blizz, stop nerfing atonement. We have ONE spammable heal, and it is terribly inefficient. All the penance healing/mastery buffs in the world won’t make up for our weak direct healing toolkit. We need MORE heals that actually heal.
I mean I understand what you say about Devs not balancing it, but that’s more about the class design/balance team being either incompetent or simply not caring, this a common thing across all classes and specs through BFA.
It should not be an excuse to give up on it and fundamentally rework one of the most fun specs they have ever designed. It’s not even that hard to balance, they could literally just make it scale better for small groups (5 or less), similar to how Tranq and Hymn have it… There, problem solved.
Or if they don’t like the idea of having different scaling by the number of players they could make it so pw:radiance is able to apply a second charge of atonement when it lands on someone that already has it, it would still prefer targets without atonement so this doesn’t affect large groups of 20+ players but it could help getting more burst healing on smaller groups.
It can probably be addressed through talents as well, there are many ways to go about it, but it’s definitely not impossible and not even that hard to do imo, they just need to want to do it.
I feel 50/50 on this. Because we all remember when Disc Priests where literally unkillable due to atonement on self. And Disc still does very well in Solo play and Dungeons. That’s due to the ability to easily manage atonement on 1-5 players. Getting the buff on the whole raid is a different story, considering its a preventative healer. You do end up throwing shadow mend out there, hopefully only one each target because that spell gives them atonement. I always thought giving us a few more base healing spells would help, and some talent/ability that procs atonement on the whole raid with a decent CD timer would be AMAZING.
I agree with Holymonky- there are solutions to the problems of atonement, so ditching the whole thing instead of implementing those solutions is overkill. None of the solutions are simple and elegant, so I think Blizzard has kept putting off changes hoping an elegant solution will come to mind. At this point, I don’t care if it’s inelegant - we’ve spent 3 years pondering this problem and there is no elegant solution. Paladin and Monk now have better iterations of the dps healer style because they learned from the mistakes of Disc.
High damage burst? That’s what Disc does well! At least in raids, with a well-timed ramp-up, I can outheal the Holy priest on my team and keep the entire team alive through crazy burst.
I feel like you’re probably referring to this week’s Bursting affix, which is always a rough time for Disc. Mostly because it happens after all the mobs are dead and combat has ended, and Disc needs to dps to heal. Solutions for that are either chainpulling, or… cheating and going Holy for the week
Yeah, I’m with Holy on this one. I’m not convinced that Disc is beyond saving and that removing Atonement is the best route to redemption.
Mostly I just feel that Disc needs ways to use Atonement for things beyond burst healing. Burst healing is basically the only thing we do, we don’t have the tools to effectively do much else. The key word there is ‘effectively,’ we can spot heal and tank heal and sustain AoE healing, we just don’t do it well and 90% of that is spamming Shadowmend.
PoM gets brought up a lot in respect to tools we wish Disc had. I don’t necessarily disagree, but I wouldn’t go with PoM as is. A PoM that bounces with non-DoT Atonement heals instead of damage taken would be my preference. It’d help fill the spot healing void and plays with our current playstyle.
Yeah I agree with your evaluation of how Disc needs effective ways to do other things that are not necessarily burst healing, specifically sustained AOE and single target or spot healing.
Now the thing with that idea is that I don’t believe it would be fair that we do the burst healing AND all those other things at the same time, but perhaps having some talents or options to alter the playstile a little bit to be more focused towards those other styles can be a good solution.
My idea mostly comes down to reworking the final talent row, Evangelism is the key talent that defines Disc as a burst helaer in Raids, so that’s where I believe new options should be introduced to compete with it and that can make a similar impact but for other playstiles.
I’ve talked about this before but I really believe something like a PoM that also leaves an atonement behind (probably for reduced duration) could be the way to go for the consistent AOE healing option, this also makes Disc more approachoable for less dedicated players that won’t necessarily be able to time burst windows correctly, in this case just use PoM on cooldown and you’ll get more consistent atonements through the fight but will no longer have the same burst healing option. (I think this would be an amazing talent for people doing LFR/Normal and even Heroic)
As for the third talent I believe it should be something more catered towards smaller groups and that can provide stronger spot healing or some triage, I don’t have anything specific in mind but I believe there are multiple ways to go about it.
My priest only does sub+10, but bursting damage is bursting damage. I’ve found ToF and SC makes it very easy. Lots of 60khps healing on trash on +9’s. So there is a way of doing very good bust healing without having to damage to do it. But, like I said, I only do +9’s on him. I feel there are very good ways to deal with heavy spike group damage on disc
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by get rid of Atonement?
While I would agree that in M+, Disc struggles to have strong enough healing to counter some affixes (in comparison to Holy Shock or Serenity, for example). However, I honestly play a very different spec in M+ than I do for raids. Disc is very much so a proactive healer, and the raiding environment is more predictable than the M+ environment. In M+, I run Shadow Cov, Lenience, and Solace (over Mind Bender because of the more frequent healing bump with Solace’s lower cooldown). Keep Atonement on everyone either through Shadow Word, Shadow Mend, or PW:R, and you’re good on Bursting weeks in M+.
I honestly love Disc healing, and I have done high-tier healing with HPally and Resto druid in the past, and I am never going back. I wish there was better AoE healing for Disc that didn’t require a 10+ seconds of prep work. Also better single-target healing because Shadow Mend and Penance single-target are not good.
In general, you guys seem to be missing my point. Maybe my post wasn’t as concise as I wanted it to be haha. I agree with you, I like atonement and disc priest is a very solid healer capable of pushing keys. This priest has been my main since wrather, it’s the only class and spec I want to play. However, several of you are making suggestions for changes and what not, and that is the point. The devs are either incapable of balancing it, or are too lazy, which is why they should just scrap it.
Give disc renew, PoM, prayer of healing, etc back. Make pw:shield great again. Disc has always been about absorbs and preventing damage, and they destroyed that. I mostly pvp, so I completely understand raiders not wanting shield priest back, but it’s absolutely pathetic currently. 471 ilvl and my shield absorbs like 30k.
I wish blizz would put more effort into disc balancing, and so far the idea I like the most is scaling based on the amount of atonements you have out. It almost seems too obvious and simple of a thing for blizz to have not done yet. Instead, we will get nerfed again and again while hpal does more damage and healing than us because of a trait.
Atonement is such an interesting play style. Its arguably one of the strongest healing tool kits in the game. But its so very flawed in the same time.
I think if the game was balanced more in a rock/paper/scissors format, then most would have less of a problem with the current disc setup (ie each spec in a role has a big strength and glaring weakness that is complimented by other classes within its role). Sadly, this is not how the game is currently and there are specs that simply perform better multiple forms of content (like holy paladin to disc, dh to feral, fire mage to demo lock etc).
I’ve thought about how to balance disc, and I think it will be challenging due to how mechanically different it is from other healing specs. Is it buffing its single target healing spells (that may make it do to much damage if penance is buffed), is it updating its scaling (this might make it far to strong in raiding), maybe changing things like content (this might make other specs stronger). Every scenario I go through seems to have an issue.
I see your frustration with the state of things, and I agree it’s not in a good place for the majority of content. And yes, we’re all incredibly frustrated that the devs haven’t made changes. I don’t think we missed your point - it is possible to see and understand a point and disagree with it. We all agree they should make changes, we just have some differences in opinion on what the changes should be. The devs were equally unable to balance shields and absorbs, so making absorbs stronger sounds like “ditch this mechanic that they can’t balance and go back to the other mechanic they couldn’t balance.” It’s just that mechanic was unbalanced in our favor.
I think they should do with atonement what they did with shields and absorbs: keep it in the playstyle, but reduce how much of our healing it is. I agree on bringing back some normal direct healing, which is much easier to balance. Make Disc one third shields and absorbs, one third atonement, and one third direct healing. That’s actually more in line with what Disc used to be, and is very close to what paladin currently is.
Can we have shields scale of number of targets with atonement? And take a middle ground on this. Bursting weeks suck. But if you could radiance shield then pencance+mend(flash heal?) It would make that affix so much more enjoyable in a pug environment. I miss having renew and insta pom. I just feel like I don’t. Want to log on my priest anymore shadow isn’t wanted in m+ with pugs even if it’s capable to run 10s on it just fine. And disc feels clunky in dungeons. It’s like shadow in legion where it only felt good in raid environment.
Split everything up into individual abilities and then I wonder why atonement even has to be as high as 30%, assuming it were changed.
Id be perfectly happy to see it removed, and go back to having a more normal healing repertoire. I only use disc for questing these days as it is, at least in that i find it more useful than holy.
What you say here is, at least to me, a really good argument for why atonement shouldnt be the core mechanic of the spec. Atonements existence as the core mechanic means damage has been nerfed, survivability in pvp is compromised, questing is longer, single target healing is lackluster, aoe healing is lackluster (except for being thrown the radiance honor talent), etc etc.
Having atonement as a significant mechanic, but not everything enslaved to it, means that the rest of the talents and abilities can actually be non-gimped again.
