Priest Mana Economy in 2026: Why Modern Design Has Left Us Behind

In Development Midnight: Curse of Ula'tek Public Test Realm
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Making a third post was not something I was planning on, but after replying to Hawthorne’s Holy Priest Feedback post, it has gotten me thinking about the current state of the Healer Mana Economy. This post will mainly discuss ideas and provide criticism on how the Priest’s Mana Economy seems to be stuck in 2004.

Now, I will preface this with a simple statement: While I am pointing out the great things other healing specs have for their mana economy, it does not nullify or negate individual problems that each healer spec has.

The Competition’s Mana Economy

  • Restoration Druids: They deliver an expansive amount of throughput, with a good chunk of their healing being instant-cast (granted, heavily supplemented by Clearcasting). On top of that, their Return on Investment (RoI) regarding mana economy is ridiculous.

  • Restoration Shamans: They enjoy incredibly low baseline spell costs paired with high throughput, plus the automated capability to get mana straight back on critical heals through Resurgence.

  • Preservation Evokers: They set up their throughput using Echo, a system that relies entirely on a separate, self-regenerating Essence pool. Furthermore, their Empowered spells only cost a flat, base level of mana; the cost doesn’t scale up based on how long they hold down the button. (Which highlights how ridiculous it is that Blizzard added scaling mana costs to Discipline’s Plea).

  • Holy Paladins: They have robust mana returns through Shield of the Righteous, but their core design revolves around an entirely separate secondary resource: Holy Power. Their most impactful burst healing comes from building Holy Power and spending it for 0 mana.

  • Mistweaver Monks: They get Mana Tea to actively inject chunks of raw mana back into their bar, and their core offensive damage-to-healing rotation costs absolutely nothing baseline. They essentially heal for free during downtime by passively converting damage to smart-healing through Jade Fire Teachings.

I will also acknowledge that some of these things have been changed, with either nerfs or buffs, but the premise still stands.

The Priest Attrition Problem

Holy Priests, with the loss of Shadowfiend and Symbol of Hope, have no active way to recover mana in M+ or in a Raid. While Holy Priests were given a paltry 8% Mana Reduction on Flash Heal, Benediction, Prayer of Healing, and Prayer of Mending, it still is not enough. This fix is akin to putting a band-aid on a gaping wound.

Discipline Priests only have a small leg up on Holy Priests because we still have the “Pet Package.” While that mana return is not getting nerfed, it is receiving yet another nerf to its healing output. This means we will need to spend even more mana to compensate for the loss of raw healing, making the mana return on the pet package almost negligible.

With this in mind, I think it is time that both Holy and Discipline Priests get modernized. The paths for both are a bit different.

Holy Priest Modernization

The solutions I discussed in Hawthorne’s post involved either getting mana talents similar to Shamans and Monks, or getting a secondary system like Paladins and Evokers. A third option is going the route that Druids have—finding a way to give Holy Priests more free spells to cast.

I personally think the ideal path would be giving Priests a talent similar to Shaman’s Resurgence. It would at least stabilize the mana issue. This is supported by the current Stat Priority for Holy Priests, which puts heavy emphasis on Crit and Vers in both Raid and M+. This would lower the effective costs of Holy Priest spells while giving them a viable way to actively recover resources.

If we were able to do a complete rework on a X.1 patch, I would say it is time to not only address mana, but start addressing how outdated our utility is. Holy Priests offer the least amount of utility in both Raid and M+. Leap of Faith, in my honest opinion, is far too niche of an ability with very low usability. Removing player agency has never been well-received by the community; this ability could be pruned and very few Priests would be sad to see it go. At this point, Holy Priests deserve a Battle Rez.

Furthermore, we are only able to dispel Magic or Diseases, while all other healers are able to dispel three different debuffs. This begs the question of why Priests are limited to just two. It is time Priests got a third dispel, and with how often Blizzard uses Poison as a ticking damage mechanic, I would argue that is the best addition to our dispel pool.

Discipline Priest Modernization

This spec has a bit less work required compared to Holy, but the elephant in the room starts with the recent change announced: the removal of applying Atonement via Penance.

This one change has moved Discipline Priest from a mana-hungry spec to a mana-starved spec in one fell swoop. This change needs to be walked back immediately. Penance was our most mana-efficient tool to seed Atonement into a raid. The addition of Plea would have been a better button if they did not add a scaling mana tax on it for every Atonement already active.

Pressing Power Word: Radiance outside of the Evangelism window costs 20,000 mana (8% of our mana pool). If our Evangelism is on cooldown, it takes 16% of our mana just to get Atonement out via Radiance. Even with the ability to use both charges of Void Shield (which hits 6 people, a function currently restricted to the 12.1 PTR), we have zero control over where those secondary Atonements actually go, regardless of any smart-casting logic built into the spell.

Let’s look at the math for a full setup:

  • In the Evangelism window, pressing both charges of Power Word: Radiance costs us 9.6% of our mana. Adding two charges of Void Shield brings the total to 13.6% of our mana bar.

  • Outside of that window, that exact same baseline jumps up to 20% of our mana bar.

Because Power Word: Radiance only targets 5 people, 2 charges of Radiance + 2 charges of Void Shield caps out at 16 total targets. In a 20-person raid, you are short by 4 players. With the PTR version of Shadow Mend costing 5% of our mana, hard-casting to cover those last 4 people in our Evangelism window pushes the total cost to 33.6% of our mana bar. Outside of Evangelism, it skyrockets to 40%.

Penance was our cheaper outlet. If we use the current cost of Penance (1.6%) to replace those 4 casts of Shadow Mend, it takes the cost of the Evangelism ramp from 33.6% down to 20%. Outside the Evangelism window, it drops from 40% down to 26.4%.

The percentage increase between these two design models is staggering:

  • Inside the Evangelism Window: A 68% increase in mana cost to use Shadow Mend over Penance.

  • Outside the Evangelism Window: A 51.52% increase in mana cost.

This is ridiculous. If you are going to skyrocket our setup costs, we need active mana regeneration to compensate. The Pet Package simply isn’t enough—especially in encounters where there are no adds to use Shadow Word: Death, or where adds melt so quickly that we cannot effectively snipe them for the return.

The best solution is to follow the Druid design and give us more free spell procs. Make Surge of Light allow us a free cast when it procs, or give us a way to cast Plea cleanly without having to suffer the exponential Atonement tax.

Conclusion

While adding a secondary system to either spec sounds like an awesome long-term solution, I’m not sure what it would look like mechanically. But these current mana problems, layered on top of our lack of modern utility, severely lowers the value of Priests unless our raw healing numbers are explicitly overtuned to compensate.

What are y’all’s thoughts?

(sorry for the rushed ending, Had to dash off to work)
(Edit: I expanded on the ending for Discipline Priests to round off the post, and edited the wording/format)

3 Likes
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I hate modern dungeons
bring back drinking before pulls and smaller pulls

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That’s not a feasible solution. Especially with Mythic Plus being one of the cornerstone pillars of end game content.

And not to mention the loss of subs if they decided to try and take M+ out of the game.

While older dungeons were great for thier time, are no longer popular. No one wants to spend 45 minutes to an hour in a dungeon any more.

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It really shouldn’t be a hard problem to solve. Shaman were one of the worst mana wise just last expansion and now they’re better.

My philosophy for mana is that things that are balanced by a secondary resource or cooldown don’t need to be balanced by mana because their output is already limited by the secondary resource or the cooldown. The only reason mana needs to exist in modern WoW is to limit how much you can spam big abilities without a cooldown. This is essentially how holy paladins are balanced. You can sit at 100% mana just using instant casts and flash, but holy light is their expensive ability limited by mana.

I also think the concept of balancing mana regen and pool size by the usage over an entire encounter is outdated. Mana could be more like energy now where you limit how much you can spam in short windows, but the recovery is faster. Healer mana doesn’t need to be a secondary soft-enrage for an encounter. We could limit spammable abilities (healing ones, I think damage abilities should just be free even for VW) by an energy-like mana system and have little to no mana cost for any ability with a cooldown or secondary resource cost.

Mana tea can basically be like an active energy system and was originally when we had cheap sources to generate it in MoP. Melee MWs are like that now sort of since their melee abilities are cheap and slowly build up tea but it’s probably too slowly to really be like an energy bar.

I’m not really sure why druids have the active mana from DPS system. That used to be the shaman thing via a lightning bolt glyph. When a class has this kind of system though it can also be like an active energy bar if you have it fill the pool faster and have spammable abilities drain it faster.

They’re probably unlikely to do a mana to energy style thing in this patch though so I think aiming for at least the holy paladin design where cooldowns are cheap and mana is just a limiting factor for your spammed abilities could work for disc easily enough.

The 12.1 version of shadow mend can be the holy light for disc. You can even make it baseline instead of a talent. Reduce the mana cost of anything with a cooldown and make their mana pool primarily just a limiting factor for beefy shadow mends. Plea can be dirt cheap or free as well. Radiance could also be expensiveish if needed to limit how often you can do big atonement windows in a raid.

Alternatively if raid atonement is their biggest concern for mana they could start everything dirt cheap but have a scaling cost for damage abilities that ramps up the more atonements you have out. Penance cost would only scale up on damage penance not defensive.

Holy is awkward because their design is to spam things even when you don’t need the healing to reduce holy word cooldowns. I’d either use them as a guinea pig for energy bar style mana or maybe just buff enlightenment for now. You could make enlightenment scale with haste in some way since they’re trying to make haste a stat you want as holy anyway (which would also make PI/lust a mini-innervate for them). Another option would be to give them something like plea (or renew but make it more like riptide with a direct heal and a HoT) as a cheap filler spam that reduces holy words, but make PoH/flash beefy but expensive and their cooldowns cheap. Maybe renew/plea could become their super cheap flash heal filler and flash heal could be replaced with greater heal instead as their big spell that costs a lot? Then lightweaver could be proced by plea and reduce the cast time of greater heal or prayer of healing.

If you were just casting plea/renew, PoM and holy words mostly you’d sit around 100% mana like an instant cast holy paladin but start spending it with gheal/PoH.

Or if all of that is too much, just buff surge back to 100% reduction and increase the proc chance.

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It shouldn’t be, but that is problem that Blizzard has been consistently recreating since Legion, in the context of Discipline Priest. As for Holy Priests, this problem has been brewing since Cataclysm and they have refused to address it.

Discipline Priest:

When Atonement was first reworked into its modern form back in Legion, it came with a punishing structural design loop known as the “Atonement Tax.” This was perfectly showcased by the original implementation of Plea, which multiplied exponentially in mana cost for every active Atonement you had out. It effectively forced Discipline Priests to play alongside a Balance Druid for constant Innervate casts just to keep their mana bars afloat. Now, in Midnight, Blizzard has inexplicably brought Plea right back as a baseline ability—replacing Renew—complete with that same exact punitive scaling mana tax.

Battle for Azeroth introduced the 5-target version of Power Word: Radiance we use today, but it was saddled with an astronomical mana cost. During that era, a single ramp window could easily devour 50% to 60% of a Priest’s total mana pool. Players were forced to dump over half their bar to prime the raid, and then spend the next 60 seconds casting nothing but Smite—which was thankfully free at the time—just to passively recover enough resources for the next mechanic.

Then came Shadowlands and the introduction of Spirit Shell. The talent was so profoundly overpowered in early tiers that it triggered a wave of heavy, targeted nerfs to Discipline’s baseline spell costs and mana returns. To survive a mythic encounter, the spec became entirely dependent on specific raid compositions—requiring other players to run mana-generating abilities like Night Fae Fae Guardians—or forcing the Priest to lock themselves into specific mana-regenerating trinkets just to survive the length of a fight.

The only reason Discipline felt as fluid and rewarding as it did throughout The War Within was because our resource economy was finally subsidized by the Mindbender “mana battery” loop. The frequent, active return of mana offset our high setup costs. But now, that reliable pet loop has been stripped away, and we are being forced to rely on a high-cost Shadow Mend instead of Penance just to seed our basic Atonements.

Blizzard is heading down the exact same road, ignoring the exact same historical warning signs. If these changes go through, it is ultimately going to cripple Discipline’s viability, destroy the fluid pacing we just enjoyed in The War Within, and leave the Priest community entirely distrustful of the development team’s vision for the spec.

Holy Priest:

As I mentioned Cataclysm was the start point, or as I would all it, the flash point of where things started going off the rails. The following statement wouldn’t exactly be an exaggeration in my opinion:

If you look at the history of Holy, it is a spec that has spent over a decade unable to survive on its own baseline merits. Ever since Cataclysm stripped away our resource safety nets and forced us into an agonizingly slow triage model, Holy has only functioned when a temporary, external expansion feature stepped in to bail it out.

  • In Legion, the spec was trapped in a toxic design loop where you had to aggressively waste mana on expensive fillers just to reset your Holy Words—a mechanical defect that was only masked once players unlocked maximum Artifact weapon traits and overloaded their characters with secondary stats.

  • In Battle for Azeroth, our baseline Prayer of Healing economy was a trap, forcing us to lean entirely on external patch systems like the Lucid Dreams Essence and passive Mana-Regen Corruption traits just to cross the finish line of a mythic encounter.

  • In Shadowlands, the underlying spell book was so fundamentally inefficient that the community had to completely abandon AoE casting, relying entirely on a mandatory mechanical crutch—the Flash Concentration Legendary—to force efficiency into our kit.

  • In Dragonflight, we only found luxury at the tail end of the expansion because overpowered Tier Sets showered us in free Serendipity procs and duplicate automated healing.

  • And finally, in The War Within, when Blizzard systematically slashed baseline healer mana pools across the board, Holy was left gasping for air in the early seasons, completely dependent on the raw cooldown synchronization of Symbol of Hope and Shadowfiend just to maintain parity with modern healer designs.

Entering Midnight with every single one of those historic crutches stripped away, while simultaneously losing both Shadowfiend and Symbol of Hope, leaves Holy completely exposed. We are being asked to heal modern, high-damage, hyper-mobile encounters using a raw baseline resource model that is structurally unchanged from 2004. If history has proven anything, it’s that Holy’s mana economy cannot survive a modern expansion launch without a design safety net, and an 8% cost reduction on a few filler spells isn’t a safety net, it’s a refusal to modernize the spec.

I apologize for the overly wordy response to one part of your Response, but I think it is equally important to bring the history of what the Discipline Priest and Holy Priest Dev Teams did to each spec. There is a reason why Priest look at what should be easy fixes and make snarky comments about how either Dev Team is going to inevitably mess it up.

I do like your idea, and I am open to discussing different possible secondary systems that would allow a more modern approach to Holy Priests.

Maybe instead of a standard energy bar for Holy, we create a secondary system that operates similarly to a Holy Paladin’s Holy Power, but is powered entirely by our ranged healing engine. We could call it something like Divine Favor.

For example:

  • Flash Heal grants 1 Favor.

  • Prayer of Mending bounces generate 1 Favor.

  • Critical heals on either spell grant 2 Favors instead of one.

It would require a button or two to spend them. Holy Priests or Blizzard Devs could choose between a specific 3-point utility option and a 5-point throughput option to prevent button bloat:

  • Option 1: Miracle Worker’s Overflow (Costs 3 Favors) Consumes 3 Favors to instantly cast Ultimate Serenity without depleting either of your two baseline Miracle Worker charges. This gives you a “free” cleave cast on the move, allowing you to handle sudden back-to-back damage spikes without running completely out of gas.

  • Option 2: Epiphany of the Wind (Costs 3 Favors) Consumes 3 Favors to grant you a brief 6-second window where all Holy Priest spells with a cast time (like Flash Heal or Prayer of Healing) can be cast entirely while moving at full speed.

  • Option 3: Resplendent Apex Reset (Costs 5 Favors) Instantly refunds 1 full charge of Ultimate Serenity and immediately triggers your Apex Talent effect—automatically granting you a fully empowered, guaranteed Benediction proc for your next Flash Heal. This allows you to immediately follow up your big cleave word with a massive, amplified spot heal.

  • Option 4: Benediction Cascade (Costs 5 Favors)

    Consumes 5 Favors to empower your next Ultimate Serenity. It prevents the spell from consuming a Miracle Worker charge, forces the cleave heal to automatically trigger a Cosmic Ripple, and causes all active Renews on the targets to instantly detonate, dealing 100% of their remaining healing values immediately

While a system like this would obviously need numerical tuning, it would be extremely beneficial to Holy’s mobility and charge-management in high keys and raid. Though if we are left to choose them as a player that means more talent bloat, which I want to avoid as much as possible.

Now for Discipline, I think it would be a bit harder because the spec constantly plays between Light and Void, meaning the system would need to look entirely different from Holy. I’ve thought about something akin to the old Balance Druid Eclipse bar, but it would need heavy restrictions to avoid the mechanical clunkiness that made Blizzard remove it in the past.

I want to mull over a few different angles for a Disc “Equilibrium” or balance system a bit more, because I still feel like a standard sliding scale might not be quite what Discipline needs to solve its actual throughput issues. I’ll need to do some more research before sketching out a proper example.

(Sorry for all the edits, I work overnights and my brain forgets about certain talent interactions.)

2 Likes
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So first of all, I’m going to say that I hate Apotheosis. I hate turning into a generic angel when there’s no such thing in the entire lore of Warcraft.
But most importantly, I hate that it wants us to spam our spells while only giving a 50% reduction. This is just the cherry on top of terrible mana costs.

Mana return doesn’t have the be the most interesting thing in the world, but it should definitely impact our gameplay a bit.
Druids can choose what to use their free spell on.
Shamans build Crit intentionally for it.
Pres plays around their Echos.
Paladins can go on the offensive while restoring mana.
Monks can choose when, where, and how much mana they want to restore at any time.

You could always just reduce mana costs and call it a day, but that would end up balancing some other way where our spells would have to be nerfed accordingly and make us an even more spammy healer.

Sure, Enlightenment is a thing, but you don’t feel it. You don’t see it visually. Knowing this, it feels like a dead talent.

My suggestion for Holy would be to just implement a Resurgence-like effect on Prayer of Mending.

Each time Prayer of Mending jumps to an ally, there is a small chance to restore some of your missing mana.

Is it the most interesting thing in the world? No, not really.
Does it fit the class and ensures Prayer of Mending is worth casting, even during downtime when it’s not powerful? Certainly.

Give it a small audio/visual queue so you feel it each time it pops (A little Naaru chime and burst of light) and you’ve got something that’s noticeable.

Shield Discipline for Disc is fine, but again, it should have something else attached to it and be adjusted accordingly.
ie. “When Power Word: Shield is fully absorbed, you replenish a small amount of mana. In addition, it extends your current Atonement on the target by 1 (or 2) second(s).”

Again, is it the most interesting thing in the world? No, not really.
Does it fit the spec? Yes, absolutely.
Can it be felt and impact gameplay? It would give mana back and help with Atonements for newbies, so absolutely.

2 Likes
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i agree with your thoughts on restoring mana in some fashion and it should absolutely not be that only priest has to deal with mana issues while healing whereas every other healer gets a pass, the fact that they cannot give us an in combat mana regeneration ability and keep front loading us with haste in tier sets that just amplifies how quickly we go OOM is ridiculous. i am very hopeful they actually consider this before season 2 goes live

1 Like
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This was true a long time ago but for resto it only makes regrowth free.

Monks also benefit from crit since it gives a chance to generate a second stack of mana tea when your mana tea procs.

Haste could be a neat option for holy priests either via buffing mana regeneration or having mana cost reduction that scales with haste.

They do have to build up the stacks first but this works well for melee monks because they have low cost abilities that slowly build up stacks for when you need them later. If you have no stacks and are low on mana you can’t do anything about it quickly though.

Caster monks are a bit out of luck here since they spend more mana before having time to build up stacks and mana tea is then just a fancy cost reduction rather than a mana banking system like it is for melee. Crackling Jade Lightning also has no cost, so it doesn’t generate any mana tea the way SCK and RSK do for melee monks. If you were doing content that was easy enough to get to spam CJL a lot, you wouldn’t be saving up stacks for later the way SCK spamming monks do (which is useful for boss fights or places you end up having to cast shei’lun’s gift a lot since it’s expensive and drains your mana quickly).

I’m actually not sure how the new Soothing Mist talent that increases healing and mana cost might play into the mana tea system for a caster monk. If it’s still cheaper than your regen, the new SooM might let you build up mana tea stacks more effectively during lower healing periods (but if you’re a jade empowerment monk you’d rather cast CJL in those periods than SooM so until they add mana tea generation to CJL in some way I think they’re still not in a great place compared to melee monks). The S2 set bonus is entirely RSK/RWK focused anyway so I doubt many will try playing MW as a caster in S2 unless they implement some of the suggested changes.

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I have to go to work soon, but I am going to add a bit more on to the rough design of the secondary system for holy, I do think a system like Divine Favor could also be used to give Holy Priests to have a Proactive Healing Engine as well, I will try to edit this post with some ideas and see what y’all think.

As for Disc, I think I am going to draft a couple of ideas before I flesh them out. I don’t think the sliding scale for a secondary system would work. That said, I do appreciate y’all continuing the conversation. Mana right now seems to one of the strongest issues after gameplay mentioned in the forums.

(Edit: here are my thoughts for how to fix Disc Priests without a major rework for at least X.1 Patch. I will then add my current thoughts for a redesign, then I will put my thoughts out for a couple different idea for a secondary resource for Discipline Priest)

To start, our mana costs for setting up our Atonement Ramp. I am going to create a table of information that I have scoured to collect, if any of this is incorrect, please feel free to correct me.

Note: As a Disclaimer, this is with the current changes listed as of 06/25/2026. I know this a PTR testing period and more changes are to come. So please bear this in mind, that these numbers may be outdated depending on when you visit this thread.

Discipline Priest Ramp Profiles

Pre-12.1 Live Profile

  • Setup Strategy: Uses defensive Penance to passively seed cost-efficient Atonements, supplemented by Power Word: Radiance and automatic Void Shield procs.

  • Cost Outside Window: Functional (26.4% total mana). Two raw Radiances and passive Void Shields paired with 4 manual Penance applications (1.6% mana each) to hit the 20-man target cap.

  • The Evangelism Window: Evangelism makes the next two Radiances instant and cuts their cost by 40%. Seeding the remaining 4 targets via defensive Penance drops the total setup cost inside the window to exactly 20.0% total mana.

  • Escape Hatch: Highly reliant on passive Void Shield random procs to save mana.

Patch 12.1.0 PTR Profile

  • Setup Strategy: Penance application is completely removed. Forced into hard-casting multiple Power Word: Radiances (20k mana baseline each) and manual Shadow Mend modifiers to seed remaining targets.

  • Cost Outside Window: Extreme (40.0% total mana). Two raw Radiances cost 16% max mana baseline, paired with 2 charges of Void Shield (4% mana tax), and 4 manual Shadow Mends (20% mana) just to hit a 20-man target cap before our offensive rotation.

  • The Evangelism Window (12.1 Impact): Even with Evangelism’s active 40% discount reducing Radiance to 12,000 mana, the loss of Penance seeding leaves a 4-target deficit. Hard-casting 4 Shadow Mends at 5% each explodes our setup cost inside the window to exactly 33.6% total mana.

  • Escape Hatch: None. Forced into uncontrollable smart-cast Void Shields via the Master the Darkness talent loop.

Restoration Druid Ramp Profiles

Pre-12.1 Live Profile

  • Setup Strategy: Blankets 12–14 raid members in Rejuvenation, followed by a Swiftmend-empowered Wild Growth.

  • Mana Cost: High (approx. 25% to 30% mana setup).

  • Escape Hatch: Innervate window allows the entire 12-second setup phase to be cast for 0% mana.

Patch 12.1.0 PTR Profile

  • Setup Strategy: Spends raw mana to apply Rejuvenations, followed by a Swiftmend/Wild Growth combo.

  • Mana Cost: Medium-High (Setup is raw mana, but follow-ups are heavily discounted).

  • Escape Hatch: Innervate is a raw 25% max mana return over 8s. Redesigned Abundance grants a 50% mana discount on Regrowth once 5 HoTs are active. Baseline Regrowth (-10%) and Lifebloom (-20%) costs are permanently discounted.

Preservation Evoker Ramp Profiles

Pre-12.1 Live Profile

  • Setup Strategy: Deploys Temporal Anomaly to passively Echo 5 players, manually Echos 5–6 more targets using Essence, and finishes with a massive Stasis breath combo.

  • Mana Cost: Medium (approx. 15% raw mana); bulk is paid via Essence resource.

  • Escape Hatch: Essence Burst procs actively grant 100% free Echo applications.

Patch 12.1.0 PTR Profile

  • Setup Strategy: Same mechanical Temporal Anomaly and Echo sequencing.

  • Mana Cost: Stable. Dream Breath burst healing is shifted heavily into HoT healing (-50% instant, +118% periodic) to slow down throughput pacing.

  • Escape Hatch: Unchanged. The Essence Burst economy engine and secondary resource scaling remain completely intact, allowing resource-neutral recovery after the ramp phase.

(Edits: The damn table format I was trying kept failing. So apologies for all the edits)

This side-by-side comparison highlights a massive design double standard. While Evokers retain their Essence loops and Druids receive direct baseline cost reductions alongside a massive 50% discount via the redesigned Abundance, Discipline is left completely exposed to mana bankruptcy. The only way for a Discipline Priest to get any form of mana recovery is through a heavy, talent-point-heavy investment into the ‘Pet Package’ AND by hoping there is a low-health add they can successfully execute-snipe to trigger their resource loops. If both conditions aren’t met, the spec completely bleeds dry—even within our own Evangelism window.

Proposing the Solution: Concrete, Zero-UI Mana Fixes

We don’t need a brand-new secondary resource system or a massive UI overhaul to fix this crisis. The development team can easily solve Discipline’s mana starvation by building economic “escape hatches” directly into our existing Midnight talent tree architecture—mirroring the exact resource safety nets given to Druids and Evokers.

Here are three direct, actionable solutions, please note that all three can not be taken, If anything I think option 1 or 2, but I wanted to try my hand at making something for Voidweaver, seeing as Oracle has so much already in the Patch Notes for fixes:

1. The Core Tree Fix: Extending Evangelism to Benefit the Throughput Phase

While Evangelism successfully grants a 40% discount to our upfront Power Word: Radiance casts, we are still bleeding dry on the expensive follow-up damage spells needed to actually trigger the Atonement healing.

  • The Talent Update: Add a secondary clause to Evangelism: Additionally, activating Evangelism reduces the mana cost of your defensive spells by 50% and your offensive spells by 100% for the next 8 seconds.
  • The Goal: You pay the discounted upfront cost to apply your Atonements, but your offensive throughput loop becomes a temporary mana-generator. This ensures a successful ramp actively recovers your resource pool.

(Edit: Numbers tuning here as well. It was broken)

2. The Baseline Tree Fix: Passive Mana Generation via Encroaching Shadows

This option targets the baseline, rhythmic economy of the spec over the course of a long encounter, smoothing out the high setup costs of regular gameplay.

  • The Talent Update: Add a clause to Encroaching Shadows: “Whenever Shadow Word: Pain ticks on an enemy while you have at least 1 active Atonement, it has a 10% chance to restore 0.4% of maximum mana. This effect cannot occur more than once every 2 seconds. Casting an offensive Penance guarantees this resource restoration once per cast.”
  • The Goal: This transforms our mandatory DoT upkeep into an active mana-generating engine. It rewards offensive play with passive, rolling resource stability that matches the efficiency of modern HoT healers.

(Edit: I did some better tuning for the numbers. Those were game breaking. Sleepy brain also forgot both specs can take Encroaching Shadows. Title updated to reflect.

3. The Voidweaver Fix: Entropic Rift Pacing and Setup Relief

The Issue: Voidweaver is severely penalized by its own major cooldown loop. Because the spec has no built-in mana mitigation, players are forced to drain their entire mana pools hard-casting expensive Atonement appliers (Power Word: Radiance and Power Word: Shield) at full premium price to prepare for the Entropic Rift window.

Note on Evangelism: While the Midnight redesign of Evangelism reduces the cost of two Radiances by 40%, it sits on a 1.5-minute cooldown. Because Voidweaver operates on a strict 30-second Entropic Rift loop, Evangelism only covers one out of every three Rifts. On the other two windows, the player is forced to pay full price for setups while simultaneously maintaining the high-cost Pet Package (Inescapable Torment / Mindbender), leaving Voidweaver mathematically unsustainable across longer boss fights.

The Talent Update: Add a passive modifier to the Entropic Rift talent:
“Opening an Entropic Rift reduces the mana cost of your next two Power Word: Radiances or Power Word: Shields by 30%, and reduces the mana cost of Mind Blast and Shadow Word: Death by 100% while the Rift is active.”

The Goal: This keeps our baseline spells expensive outside of our main cooldowns, but treats our frequent 30-second setup and burst windows as resource-neutral. It allows Voidweaver to execute its fast-paced Shadow rotation without completely emptying its mana bar before the damage even starts.

(Edit: I was operating under the guise that there was a cost to Void Blast. So this needed a complete rewrite. I was mainly doing a ton more saving to try and salvage a Format. So please refer to the note below)

(Note: I am not a Voidweaver Discipline Healer. I have mainly played Oracle, so if this makes things worse, please let me know)

(I should only need one more edit to add on the Secondary Talent Ideas. Barring any thing I catch being messed up, I appreciate have a small bit of grace as I am still learning Voidweaver on the fly and trying to make sure that I put out decent ideas that are somewhat numerically sound)

Secondary Resource Ideas For Discipline Priests:

Concept 1: Atonement Resonance (The Momentum Drain Engine)

This system uses a visual momentum meter (0 to 100) below your mana bar. It does not alter your proactive playstyle; instead, it turns your offensive rotation into a battery that directly fuels the speed and cost of your next setup phase.

  • The Generation: Dealing damage via your core offensive loop (Penance, Mind Blast, Smite / Void Blast) builds Resonance from 0 to 100.

  • The Spender (Harmonic Release): Upon hitting 100 Resonance, the bar ignites into a 6-second utility window and begins steadily draining back to 0. Your proactive setup spells consume pieces of the draining bar instead of your raw mana pool:

    • Power Word: Radiance: Consumes 40 Resonance to become instant-cast and receive a flat 25% mana discount (stacking cleanly with Evangelism or acting as a vital buffer during non-Evangelism Entropic Rift windows).

    • Power Word: Shield / Shadow Mend: Consumes 15 Resonance to have its raw mana cost reduced by 50%.

Concept 2: Evangelical Zeal (The Low-Cost Gateway Spender)

This is a simple, non-intrusive 5-point tracking UI beneath your mana bar. It separates your resources: you use mana to cast your damage rotation, but you pool combo points from that damage to shield your mana bar during intense ramp windows.

  • The Generation: You generate 1 point of Zeal from a Mind Blast cast, a fully completed offensive Penance channel, or Smite / Void Blast casts. Caps at 5 points.

  • The Passive Threshold (No Consumption):

    • At 3+ Charges: The mana cost of Power Word: Shield is passively reduced by 20% to provide a minor economic cushion during quiet periods or mini-setups.

  • The Low-Cost Active Trigger:

    • The Spend: At 5 Charges, casting Power Word: Shield consumes the entire bar to trigger Zealotry.

    • The Payoff: That triggering Power Word: Shield costs 0 mana, and for the next 6 seconds, the mana cost of your next Power Word: Radiance is reduced by an additional 20% (stacking multiplicatively with Evangelism). Additionally, your Atonement healing output receives a minor 5% stability bonus only while this 6-second window is active.

(This is the last edit to this post. I will post my Holy Proactive System for Divine Favor at a later post)

10

bring back small pulls, drinking and first aid cowards

11

That’s not going to happen.

While I appreciate the commenting on thread. This isn’t a solution, or a response to the priest current issue.

Your solution is made invalid due to the existence of M+. Which I told you in my previous response, would be detrimental to the game if it was removed. It is a cornerstone pillar of end game content and that isn’t going to change.

If you have feed back relevant to priests, then feel free to respond. Otherwise, please go take your grievances about dungeon design to an appropriate thread or create your own.

12

They should increase the mana cost of the one button JFT spam rotation of MW and tweak things for other healers. Spamming one button for tons of cheap healing/dps with like no cognitive load is pretty degen.