Not sure about other healer video rankings, but Madskillz has Disc as B tier, and Holy as C tier. This is pretty sad really. Two healer specs and both are fine but I dunno. I thought Disc’s higher damage was going to make it better.
I came back after quitting in 10.0 and so have been playing catch up and have done a fair number of 19s now, but cannot seem to buy my way into a 20. This has been my experience in previous expansions, both BFA and SL. It just seems like the keyholders just seem to put up walls once you start queuing up for above 19s.
In late SL, when Holy was meta–pumping great heals and damage, in contrast, there were no shortages of insta invites to any keys i queued for and got all the way to 25s.
Sad, very sad. I dunno if I want to play Holy Paladin, but they seem to be the meta now. Disc is just such a blast to play I have no interest in playing other healers. Oh well.
Any thoughts?
Edit: Just look at the first page of the top 20 healers on raider io currently. Eighteen of the top twenty are holy paladins. Even Moad is playing H paladin and has not touched his disc priest in over a month. Sad state of healer balance if you ask me.
Edit 2: As of 7/24, 19 of the top 20 healers are H paladins, 38 of the top 40 are H paladins. And get this: In the top 100 healers there is only one priest. And in the top 200 there are only five priest healers, and that includes BOTH Holy and Disc.
Disc priest is great. Holy pala is just over tuned right now with a plethora of short but impactful CD’s right now, which are being tuned on reset today anyhow to address this. So this “tier list” may change by the end of the week. But do note, that Holy paladins during mid to late expansions have always been doing well. With more gear coming in, BiS trinkets during rotations for M+ and such, they tend to get better and better as time goes on.
Disc and holy priests tend to stay more consistent. Disc priest this season has been incredibly strong with its insta cast radiances, both in raiding AND M+. While holy is just in general, a very powerful healer, they just happen to run OOM too quickly right now.
EDIT: too many people look at these tier lists and take it to heart, and it makes them think “well this will be easy” but just because someone is playing the “meta” class, doesn’t mean an easy 20. Play what you love and push with it. I myself have Keystone: hero on my disc priest and at the least as of now, 1 20 dungeon.
I try not to take tier lists as the gospel and I advise you not to either. Listen to the reasons and judge for yourself.
Also chasing meta is never good. The meta is always changing because classes and specs are being buffed and nerfed every other week.
Not to mention the moment you play something that is meta but is not fun to you, that’s when WoW will start feeling like a 2nd job. So just play what you want.
I play both Disc and Holy and I don’t find Disc to be better than Holy. They both have strengths and weaknesses and I can do more overall dps on Holy than Disc. Disc struggles due to a lack of spot heals and Holy isn’t as good as Disc on rot fights.
Also, there’s 5-6 Holy Priests in the top 20 Priest healers for IO in NA as well. Avaye from Liquid is a 3300+ IO Holy Priest.
So really these guides can go shove it.
Holy Paladins blew up to FOTM status just like Aug Evokers and Mages last week because they were incredibly overtuned. Even despite this I managed to move my IO up 100 points in a week and timed all +24s and 4 +25s which was more progress in 1 week than I had in 1 month.
They just need to nerf Holy Paladins more and bring them down to the level of everyone else and they’ll be less FOTM. It’s not just Priests that struggled to get into keys: it was basically every other healer.
To be fair it’s incredibly hard to know how a class is going to perform after such extensive overhauls until you get real time data.
This expansion has been mostly chill about comps as there was a lot of diverse class comps everywhere, but last week was just a crap show, and its back to Shadowlands where 80% of your keys are just going to be FOTM comps.
I agree both Disc and Holy are Different the Sheer amount of Powerful healing Holy has over Disc when it comes to healing is enormous.
My concern with Disc is that Even tho we are a Mitigation like Spec, The shields just don’t seem to Almost like be enough?? or like there isnt enough ways to shield If thats supposed to be the Big thing about Disc’s Gameplay. It isn’t as satisfying as seeing someone’s health go from 30 to a 100 in a single heal And that’s where the Difference comes into play
I never played Holy before in my entire wow Lifespan, i recently given it a try and im just in sheer Awe with the amount of Wonderful things Holy has in its kit and it made me a little jealous as to why doesn’t Disc have something Cool like that in its Arsenal.
I will forever and always will be a Disc main, It just fits my playstyle of a healer, Dealing damage to heal is the best feeling cause i love to contribute in the best way possible
Coming in this late in the season you might just have to build your IO score to be invited. I don’t usually have problems getting into 20s anymore but I am pretty sure that that is because of my score. My first 20 I did have to build up my score a lot to be invited and I tried either a FH or a UR as those are freer keys.
I do remember that jump from 19 to 20 was harder than any other jump though. Don’t give up!
Compared to the sheer throughput of other healers. But their tier set bonus is making the spread of atonements not only more efficient, but faster and more common. i was able to out perform normal and heroic healers as disc in my raid as well as Pug raids. consistently doing over 70k in normal healing, and sometimes even reaching 170k+ HPS during burst times.
In general yes they aren’t doing as strongly as lets say holy paladin or evoker. But they are still being used in raids and most of the time still heavily sought after.
Disc is fine on normal and heroic difficulty since bosses die too fast this late into the tier and not a lot of damage going out, but its definitely struggling in mythic difficulty. Compare the healing of all other healer specs to disc on warcraft logs.
Yea i never said that they are TOP TIER, META BREAKING spec, im just saying they are still strong contenders for raiding and M+ because of their new tier set. They can still pump out the numbers. A lot of raid teams still want Disc priests for the damage reduction abilities as well.
Oh, man. It was a dream late in Shadowlands with the Flash Concentration legendary and Kyrian boon–at least for me. i can’t say I’ve ever really enjoyed the game as much. Then again, late in BFA when you could juice your secondary stats to insane levels, disc with high vers and good haste was also a blast.
Holy has a Swiss army knife of healing tools, it’s true. The problem is usually like half of them are rusty and made of tin and simply not fit for (most) purposes in any given patch. And it’s like playing whack a mole against the GCD and CDs to make them work.
Disc by contrast has way fewer tools but is expected to use them with more precision. The two specs couldn’t be more alien from each other but both are classed as priests, which is weird. Hpriest has vastly more in common with rshamans at this point and yet we’re all termed priests for some reason despite the core toolkits not carrying over beyond a few superficial flavor spells.
I keep hoping disc will one day return to pre-Legion or ideally MoP-style design but they seem hell-bent on keeping it… what it is to please relatively few players.
It’s not relatively few players. It’s a huge amount of the mythic raid healers that get upset at the shield blanketing styles. Yes, there’s not a ton of diehard Discipline players. There’s definitely quite a few that enjoy it when it’s powerful enough to play, sure. But the bigger win they got from leaving the pre-legion style was other healers in top level content having things to heal. The return of Spirit Shell in Shadowlands was called out as a mistake by almost every high level healer at the time, and it turned out it was indeed a mistake and made everyone mad at disc the whole first tier again. I don’t think they’re gonna be keen to return to that for another couple xpacs when they forget about why shielding hasn’t ever worked for them again.
Or they’re just gonna blow disc up and make it a support spec eventually. There’s still a chance of that.
At this point though, Atonement works. It barely requires super precise play anymore with how strong Disc’s non-atonement heals are now, and it’s not even bad in raid, tbh.
But most the raid damage patterns aren’t good for burst healing and that’s unironically its biggest problem now. Fight design has moved out of suiting Disc 100% of the time, and now suits it like 20% of the time. But I think we do have to consider that the very first tier set they proposed on Disc this tier would probably have made it #1 in HPS. So it’s not like the spec is really hopeless or anything.
Perhaps I’m not understanding what you meant but surely you’d agree that all healers at every level of content get upset at the shield blanketing style… unless they’re the ones blanketing the shields
You’re 100% on that, more rot style fights and less crazy burst AoE.
Yeah, no, it’s not hopeless. It just hasn’t really been popular except when it’s been broken in fights in some way. I would just say there were probably a lot more people that loved disc before the Legion redesign came in, and since then it’s been fairly niche. (By contrast the Legion redesign of holy I’d say was hugely successful, at least judged by popularity).
Sure, yeah. Mythic raiders are the ones getting the most mad about it though most the time.
But I think the ‘popularity hit’ of Disc moving into the legion redesign is probably fine in comparison to the amount of problems shielding was causing for other players and fight design itself in that same old playstyle. If their team truly thinks ‘hey, we’re having to design these fights around everyone having huge absorbs all the time for high level players because it’s a given they’ll have them,’ then it’s clearly less healthy to keep that spec around, regardless of if it was popular.
Oh yeah, WoD disc was next-level dumb, I don’t think anyone disputes that. Haha, I don’t even think about WoD too much as an actual expansion, when I say pre-Legion it’s really just because that’s when the current design came in. MoP was the last version of disc that would be recognizable - WoD 1 button shield spam was just a sign they gave up on that expac early.
Im on the fence when it comes to current disc shielding cause like it’s not bad, but when I look at divine aegis I get sad cause it’s based off crit instead of just the healing itself?
Would it break the game if it was 10 % of the flat healing done regardless of it crits to create a absorb shield up to like the capacity of 20% or even 10% of their max health? Or even get rid of the button PW:S and bake it into atonements damage done/Transfered through atonement heals and builds up a shield capacity or something like that
This is what I mean when I say it has an identity crisis, they want us to mitigate DMG by shielding alongside DPS to heal but we got 1 shield button and hellla DPS buttons
Ha ha, so true. I know that the guild I was in at the time had a lot of healers with super low healing parses while disc was pumping amazing healing. I had never really healed disc in a raid before but had a good share of amazing parses putting to shame the HPS king healers like Resto Druid and Holy Priest. That said, high end guilds and people like Max and others who know how to organize healing CDs for mechanics and understand disc healers need safe places to do their rotation know that if properly used such abilities allow undergeared groups to down hard bosses with relative ease. In fact most of the other healers in that guild I was in were so shut down with their 5% parses and such (mostly because there were two of us disc priests) I’m sure they were mad as heck.
That said, healing parses are of limited value–even though a lot put stock in them–and that is because without proper organization a lot of overhealing can occur. Parses also fail to give credit to healers who actually know how to heal–and save people on the brink because parses do not show that. Adding to the problem is how numbers are viewed by the persons with the low parses when the ego driven maniac people (including some incredibly rude raid leaders) who like to taunt others have a go at them (or remove them). But disc does not often have good parses currently or most xpacs because their HPS pound for pound (that is, for the same effort and at the same ilevel of other healers) are a fair bit lower than other healers. That is because disc brings one of the single best spells in the game to raids that people quite often dont take advantage of enough and/or simply fail to understand the value of–that is Power Word: Barrier.
That spell is amazing. And I use it all the time in M+ only to see people actually moving out of it like they dont even know what it is.
In the end, I like Disc more than any other healer by a mile. I think the problems with it scale with how so few people understand the finer intracacies of the spec like damage reduction and how hard it is to get right and how disc healers can be incredibly vulnerable and die so easily (moreso on certain raid bosses) because of the nature of their healing style and requirements.
That said, I think the rankings often get things wrong because a lot dont know how to play disc well, a lot of tanks and DPS dont know the strengths and weaknesses from one healer to another, and so give it a bad name. Furthermore, lots of people (like Madskillz) do not factor in the skill level of the individual players themselves when they make those videos, and often paint all healers of one class with one brush.
