Did I read that right? Rapture is gone?
Was seriously my favorite ability to press on my Disc Priest.
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Go Oracle, you can still Rapture
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Kind of a bummer, I agree, but at the same time, I feel like it’s going to be a good change in the long run 
I often find myslef not pressing it because I lack the time to properly set it up when it matters. Otherwise, I like using it to soak debuffs that do periodic damage, but this can easily be done by our other spells if they’re tuned up to compensate.
Rapture is one of the things that makes pw:shield tuning complicated, so it being gone should help on that front.
I’m not sure it’s the case, but I could see luminous barrier taking rapture’s spot in the tree, allowing us to have the a single cast shield on the group while having pw:barrier still (they seem to want te reduce the amount of cds so I’m really not sure about this one but I’m still hoping…)
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Rapture, Ancestral Vigor, and Ebon Might weren’t healthy for the game in M+ because it created a situation where you only have 2 healers that can give the group an hp buffer to survive big hits on high keys. That ends up driving the meta on high keys more then anything.
They also went and hit Voidweaver with a hefty -20% nerf to Entropic rift while also buffing Disc’s baseline Smite and SWP. This will probably make Oracle the play for Disc next season because you can use Insight to reset 3 PWS back-to-back.
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This. Now remove Mass Barrier, too.
I really hope not given they’re very clearly trying to make oracle a traditional healer for discipline with direct healing your primary method of pushing up health bars while atonement is supplemental. Though, given the overall changes discipline got, they’re probably just going to try and kill off atonement healing as a primary playstyle anyway.
I play both Holy and Disc in M+ so I can compare both.
Atonement by itself is pretty overpowered. You just tap the Radiance button or drop a few hard casts and you can keep a >90% uptime on it and cruise control through the majority of healing checks. You literally have to cast 40-50% less healing casts then Holy to do the same overall hp.
Since you focus 90% of your time on dealing dps you’re able to easily clap the majority of the other healer specs in overall dps.
Been saying it damn near since the rework in Legion that atonement is badly designed, and braindead easy, especially in a world in which most AoE healing have soft target caps. Being able to blanket an uncapped number of players and heal them all for the same when no one else can isn’t good. Coupling this with some of the best effective health tools in the game and it has never been healthy.
Either its numbers make it too strong or too weak and there has never since Legion been a time when disc was in a healthy state. It was either manditory or useless and at times it was manditory in one form of content and useless in another.
Disc needs a rework as much as Holy does and atonement needs to die.
no thank you
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Agreed, that is true after 11.0. Historically? That’s never how it worked and discipline was garbage in keys as a result. They’ve spent the last three years buffing atonement in small groups to make disc function without being a Shadowmend/Flash Heal spam bot, and simply buffing disc’s existing tools will not make up for atonement being weakened.
If an encounter has a healing check every 25-30 seconds, atonement can’t heal those checks, and disc’s AoE healing options are Evangelism and uppies (lol), then disc is going to fail those healing checks without being given new tools. Flash Heal and PWS have proven grossly insufficient in the past, and atonement’s current strength is the result of that weakness. What’s more is that making oracle the required hero talents defeats the purpose of having a choice - atonement needs to be strong enough to be playable for voidweaver justify existing.
Priest is a very binary class that is far more numbers based than skill based. If the numbers are good, so are you, if they are not you don’t get to play because you bring nothing else but those numbers. Its why the class is either top dog, or scraping the bottom of the barrel with very little in between.
Atonement is the most fun I’ve had in this game since MoP. I honestly cannot fathom the idea of anyone wanting it to die. It’s fun, it’s unique and it feels great. If they take that away from me, I would just stop healing altogether.
Disc is in a good place right now, and that’s thanks to Atonement. If anything, the healing we’re doing right now should be the baseline at the start of every season. Other healers should be buffed if they can’t keep up with disc, I don’t care.
Healers should feel powerful, because feeling powerful is fun. I’m so sick of Blizzard constantly taking power away from us at the start of the expansion. I want to see my spells make a big impact on people’s health bars. That’s what feels good and that’s how it should be.
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Thats subjective. Im presuming you played VW which is laughably easy compared to old discs rotation and very powerful for that ease.
Ive played a lot of oracle because i like it to be challenging, i dont want to be op. I want skill to rule the day, not the spec being overpowered. I like oracle being more complicated and hard to pull off and its more satisfying to see big numbers of healing then VW’s smite smite smite rift goes bang style healing.
Much like a number of people said if they took bubble disc away they would stop healing. The truth is some would leave, most wouldn’t as they would want to at least try the new thing, like they did with Legion when disc got atonement and lost bubble spam.
The thing is me saying atonement “needs to die” isn’t even about personal preference, it needs to die the same way bubble spam needed to die. It isn’t healthy, it cripples the spec design, forces us into a very binary design of being little more than a ball of numbers, and until recently when evokers got their Flameshaper tree it was literally the only spec capable of doing what it did making it mandatory in raids no matter how broken and non-functioning it may have been in other elements of the game.
Objectively speaking none of that is good design but that is what atonement has left us with. It needs to go.
It’s in a powerful place, but being powerful and being healthy are two entirely different things. Right now it’s numbers are tuned high enough that it’s powerful, but to compare when Rshammy was the big dog what did they really hit? They didn’t really wreck it’s through-put but their utility because that was what made them strong, and yet they can still adapt and do ok, because they are a better design that depends on more than raw numbers to do content.
What will disc do when it’s numbers get hit? It doesn’t have utility to fall back on. You can’t hit it’s utility like they did Shaman, you can’t nuance buff/nerf the class it’s always you hit the numbers because those numbers are all it has. That isn’t good, that is bad.
Correct they should feel powerful but they should feel powerful in ways that are healthy for the game. Beast Master Hunters in TBC was literally a 1 button spec, could macro their entire DPS rotation into one button, and be one of the best DPS in the game. This made them extremely powerful, but that wasn’t healthy. I want disc, and priest as a whole for that matter, to be both powerful AND healthy.
Oracle’s Premonition of Insight and Premonition of Clairvoyance both allow multiple PW:Shields, similar to Rapture but not as many shields.
I feel like getting an aoe heal on Evangelism is a decent trade off for losing Rapture. A lot of the changes make me excited to play Oracle in s2 tbh.
Another PVE change that ruins PVP. I honestly wish someone would DOX the priest devs at this point.
- We still have no stun.
- No mobility.
- Mind Games is unplayable bad DPS.
- 2 PVP talents are close to mandatory 90% of games (Ultimate radiance & Greater Fade) - the other is either a passive or archangel (A mechanic every single healer in the games has except disc but we have to pvp talent it). 0 Gameplay buttons ever.
Ontop of this they buffed Zerker rage, removed rogue duel so if we play actual 3s instead of shuffle we wont kill anyone ever. I mean how do any of these untalented morons have a job? I could write better pvp changes than this sitting on the crapper writing on toilet paper.
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Whats bad now is that we lose a great cooldown, and are even more suseptible to bad tuning…
Disc does not have issues with too many buttons. This is sad.
They should have tuned disc down if it is the strongest healer. Not delete core cooldowns…
No amount of dissatisfaction over balance in a video game deserves a real life threat my dude. Chill.
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Every single boss has AOE damage patterns every 20-30s or longer and it lines up perfectly with Mindbender/Mind Blast resets. Sometimes you have to sit on them for a bit, but you have both up for every single healing check. If you build up two stacks of Harsh Discipline you can just giga ramp the group as soon as the damage comes out.
Holy has multiple 1-2 minute cds and you have to rotate through them 1 at a time for every 20-30s mechanic and there’s often gaps where you don’t have anything.
That’s why I was saying that Disc can cruise control everything because its like Blizzard deliberately designed everything for Disc’s 20s cooldown resets.
For now but with smite being removed from Void summoner this won’t be a thing. Chances are Mind Bender will more than likely have around a 40-45 second CD instead of the near 30 it’s been currently having if you go that route.
I was trying to get at disc not having the tools to heal those checks if atonement can’t do it. It can right now, but the changes Blizzard has started indicate that it will not be able to come 11.1, and having only two cooldowns for group healing, one of which being on a 4 minute cooldown, will render disc completely incapable of healing encounters without new tools.
Unless, of course, they’re trying to force oracle to be played and make every Penance cast target at an ally, but forcing that gameplay means voidweaver has no reason to exist just as oracle has no reason to exist now.