Priest healing, especially disc looks dead and buried. No wonder I regret my having paid for game time and a new expansion. 
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Dead and buried seems kind of harsh. Disc is always a bit of a balancing âwork in progressâ, especially early on in an expansion, I wouldnât write anything off yet. And holy is fine - in desperate need of some of the utility the modern game demands, but fine.
You know, while I was waiting for early access to launch on my monk I was asking trade chat on my server what healer they felt best about in their groups: and it wasnât even close, like almost half said priest, and the most often cited reason was PI.
Even if mathematically itâs kind of a poor manâs blood lust in most cases, the people in early access (and they were probably among the sweatiest try-hards) donât write off priest heals. And hey, in an MMO popularity is most of the battle. They canât give up on us when weâre basically synonymous with healing to a lot of people.
Based upon what evidence? There are aplenty of people on this forum having no healing issues
Evidence? Tier lists. All of em rank it crappola! And no problem except for all of the people who look at them and trust them. Sigh. Iâm doing my own thing, farming mats and selling emâlimited to an hour a day game time, if that. When my month is up, heading for higher ground. Good luck to you Daketh. I know you are a die hard disc priest entusiast, and good on you. My disc priests are an army of Dumbledroid, Fourleaf, etc and I have been a Wow fan for years. But itâs just not doing it for me anymore. And priest being trash is not helping.
Dont pay attention to tier lists. If you can play the class well, youll do fine. Most of the people making tier lists are making them with the highest of high end in mind and even then you can get season title and rank on any class or spec.
There are arguments to be made that one spec might be easier to hit that point with than others due to numbers tuning, but player skill will always beat out FoTM chasing.
edit just to be clear. I watch the tier lists too, just try to take what they say with a grain of salt. Itâs much more important you enjoy the class you play.
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I watch the tier lists too and everyone has said you want to get your 10âs out, then every healing spec can, its up to the skill of the healers. Anything more can be done with the right network. I point to the monk healer thats been going around, poddy C etc who was getting title when monk was bad.
Having said that, they dont pug. So really for me its about skill now if your pugging
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If I play any more than a month I guess I will have to play shammy heals. Sad though cuz I have an army of priests, lol!
And as for networking. I dont find people who play Wow to be nice at allâexcept for a few long time friends I join for stuff sometimes. But they dont play much and it is usually just a f* around fest.
As for raid and guild leadsâlots are very rude. I know you just need to hunt around, but I canât be bothered. Last guild I was in removed me because I was not in Discord and they sent me a Discord message I did not see. I had not even done a single thing with any of them, and I had a high IO score. And I was online at the time and got no in game message even.
I dunno. Better to just work out and read in my free time, lol.
Iâve done some dungeons as Disc and it doesnât feel as good as it did during S2 and S3. The loss of the S3 tier set bonus really stings the most. Voidweaver can rip out some beasty damage, but then for 10s after you feel weak as heck.
Holy feels strong because youâre stacked with 3-5 healing cooldowns. I can rotate through Archon Halo, Divine Word, Divine Hymn, Apotheosis, Essence Devourer, and get Answered Prayers procs through PoM. Every time I look at my bars I always have a solution to a problem and thereâs usually some kind of button up for almost every trash pull as well.
Also, all 8 of the dungeons seem ideal for Mind Soothe skips as well so that leans towards a Priest meta as well.
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Yeah, I think if I stick around I will indeed play Holy. It is always a very very playable healer. And despite people seeming to denigrate you for playing an easy healer, mastering it is a whole other story. I mean I like to pump damage, and Holy can pump good damage usually if you get it down. That is, if you use your healing kit well and then have more time to dps.
If that is the case, is shadow not going to be meta?
Shadow is looking to be quite good in m+. As with most dot classes, we wonât see their potency kick in until mobs are lasting longer, but I suspect theyâll be great.
Holy is being ranked lower in tier lists but I think itâll be good. Not the best, but good. AutomaticJak says the lack of poison cleanse and interrupt hurts but they can PUMP so that makes up for a lot.
Keep in mind it was beta and we wonât truly know for a few more weeks. Right now we just focus on feels over reals.
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Yeah, poison cleanse. That and no kick for Disc sucks (for Disc). If I do play priest main I will play my Iron Dwarf priest. At least Dwarves and Iron Dwarves can self cleanse poison!
Oh, and Daketh. You being the gold man, when is a good time to swap gold out for tokens?
The sad truth is Blizzard has proven time and again that they have no clue what to do with the priest class as a whole. Whenever they for a fleeting moment hit the mark they always knee jerk and nerf/remove mechanics and the cycle repeats.
Just looking at Shadow it has gone from a Vamperic mana battery, to a face melting DoT machine, to literally killing itself to do damage, to a weird psychic/void/vamperic hodgepodge of leftovers from previous expansions in which blizzard removes the cool elements while leaving the scraps.
Vampiric Touch used to be the mana battery, then a strong DoT now itâs just kinda there because itâs always been but blizzard doesnât know what it should be.
The entire Void thing was introduced with Surrender to Madness and the class getting Xalâatath in Legion but StM is gone, Xalâatath is an antagonist, but we kept the scraps like Voidform and itâs mechanics minus the actual gameplay that made you actually feel the ramping and impending insanity of the spec.
Itâs just the nature of playing a priest in WoW. Blizzard doesnât know what to do with it, and when they do try something unique and cool it doesnât last more than an expansion, at best, and then we carry the scraps of that cool idea forward in the junkyard of abandoned ideas that is our kit.
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Yeah, ha ha! Spirit Shell a case in point!
Honestly Iâve never had trouble playing an off spec up to decently high level keys as youâve very often complained about - I just generally make my own and it goes fine.
It gets gatekept if youâre pushing for title, but quite literally everyone gets gatekept heavily at that level.
There is a reason that every off meta player that ever makes content will tell you to make your own groups, to network and form your own parties. Even the highest level players will tell you that - Ellesmere has had whole giant talks about how if you want to actually get to the highest keys you need to start collecting a party and finding people who are like minded because you simply wonât do it in pugs even playing the most meta specs.
It seems like quite often I see you post on the forums about wanting to push super high keys, but youâre completely unwilling to do it out of pugs, and specifically signing up for other peopleâs keys.
To me, it does actually sound like M+ does not suit you as a player. So it probably would be better to uninstall. Pugging to title without making friends and forming groups along the way is just not the game Blizz has been making for ~10 years now.
If you want to push to 10s (the new 20s where rewards stop) you can EASILY do it off meta. If you want to push to 13-15 or so, itâs going to be up to your skill as a player, and itâs gonna be your own keys. If you want to go higher than that, then yes, youâll have to find a team, or at least stop fully pugging and fill up your friends list to pull from when you want to do keys. But even meta specs are gonna struggle in that range.
If that doesnât appeal to you, itâs likely that the M+ system is just not ever gonna feel good to you.
I read that and im like damn i need to check the prices. ATM im paid up for 2027 on 2 Accounts and bought this xpac with EA on both those 2 accounts with gold
Iâm sitting on millions of gold, lol. And waiting to unload it all and buy tokens and Blizzard dollars, lol.
Yeah, make your own groups. I know. But when priest heals has been meta, man, what a difference. Like when Holy was meta a couple xpacs ago, I pushed to 25s with groups that autoinvited me the second I logged in! It was a real blast!
I do have a long friends list, but most people rarely play as much as I used to. Now, I dunno. I had quit Wow a while ago now, and just came back. I have no desire to run five or more dungeons a day. Let alone in pugs. That kind of thing kind of killed my back and I gained weight â like maybe 10 kilograms. And lost muscle too, and quite a bit. Iâm back in shape and think, naw. Wow will be nothing more than a minor thing now. At best!
You forum dwellers are just as dramatic and over reacting as redditors. What an extreme thought to have. Priest is viable. Perhaps healing or this game in general isnât for you if youâre this bent out of shape
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Also imagine putting complete faith in tier lists 
Tier lists donât matter unless youâre trying to push the top 0.1% of content. Like if youâre trying to get a title, just go pick a top tier. Do it. If youâre playing for fun, have fun and play what you enjoy. For me fun is playing what I like and if I want to tryhard something I will with what I like.
Itâs a lot more fun being a casual tryhard then an actual tryhard cause in the end my goals are personal and not influenced by what other people are telling me I have to do.
Iâll be flying under the radar with broken bubble Oracle disc priest while everyone is grieving the loss of the shadow atonement disc.