Hi! So after having not played my Disc Priest for several years (at least 3-5 years, I can’t remember!) I have been playing it a little bit again. Level 106 at the moment, just going through the Legion stuff.
I just ran a dungeon for the first time because some Priest quest wanted me to go in there. Eye of Azshara. Oh boy.
After wiping at least 4-5 times on some snake boss called Serpentrix, everyone gave up and bailed. So I am of course wondering, am I just that terrible, or what?
Disc healing is quirky, and I have to admit to doing a terrible job, but I have trouble believing I could have kept the group up even on my Resto Druid (who I am much more competent with at the moment). There was just too much incoming damage.
Looking at the guides, it seems like part of the strategy is to interrupt the red snakes. I have trouble believing this, but I don’t even seem to have an interrupt spell? And certainly nobody else was doing it.
I can readily accept that I sucked and anyone else would have succeeded, but I do have to wonder at the very least, does Holy have an interrupt, or just Shadow? What’s up with that?
Well disc did receive some nerfs a while ago.
It was completely dominant over all content as THE healer spec.
And it is one of those “easy to learn. Difficult to master” specs.
I would say give it another shot.
One try with disc again.
And one with holy
holy is a much more forgiving spec.
See if anything happens
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That specific fight was always genuinely hard in my opinion especially if the DPS aren’t trying to kill/interrupt the red and purple snakes adds, best advice I can give you is practice keeping atonement up on everybody using shield and radiance, cast schism and spam smite to do aoe healing on everybody that has atonement active, I also take power word : Solace talent for a little extra burst healing and to keep my mana up after a Radiance -> schism -> solace -> smite spam (that’s also a good rotation to keep in mind to burst heal) you’re not bad! Keep practicing! And spam shadow mend when all else fails!
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It’s impossible for us to tell what happened, but it’s not always the healers fault. In fact the majority of the time a wipe is caused by the group not doing mechanics. That fight I remember clearly, and it is the tank’s duty to interrupt the red head. Disc doesn’t have an interrupt, but healers in general don’t (the only one that does is Resto Shaman). The game is designed that interrupts are mainly the job of the dps/tanks, the same way dispels are mainly the job of healers.
Disc is definitely quirky and hard to master, but that sounds like a clear example of the group not doing their job.
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A few things… First I’d say that if the incoming damage was just too much then very likely people were not following mechanics, pretty sure not interrupting the red snake and/or standing on poison puddles will cause a lot of damage on that specific encounter. As for interrupt, yeah nothing you could do there, the only healer that still has an interrupt is Resto Shaman, for Normal mobs you can fear them or knock them back but nothing you can do about a boss.
As far as Disc Priest itself goes, it is indeed imo the hardest healer to learn. I’ve healed for many yeas on multiple specs and it still took me many dungeon runs to feel I could be effective as Disc, and that was in 8.0 where Disc was at it’s strongest point. At the start I was actually swapping to Holy on the “tougher” dungeons since it felt significantly stronger (it wasn’t I was just not experienced enough at Disc).
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That fight is not your fault.
Tank needs to stay by boss and interrupt his casts, dps need to kill the other heads.
Disc is fine, and fun. Currently the best raid healer at the highest skill caps. Not great in mythic+ or pvp but viable for which you would prefer to be an rdruid.
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Great advice, thanks, I’ll definitely give Holy a shot if I feel like I’m not grasping the current Disc paradigm well.
Yeah, nobody was even DPS’ing the red snakes down. The tank told us to ignore the red ones and just kill the main boss. I guess none of us knew any better… hah.
I actually didn’t realize Radiance provided atonement (I thought it was just a group heal), thanks for the tip. Also I didn’t take Schism so I’ll swap to that and try out your rotation. Thanks!
Thank you everyone else for the advice. I wasn’t ready to give up or anything, but it’s nice to have the encouragement!
Thats not my experience of it. It was good in world pvp against random soloers, it was only ok in lower level dungeons though, and it was strong in random bgs. As to mythic keys, raiding, higher level pvp, i dunno for sure, but i gather it was a mixed bag.
Holy is better in 5 man content. disc has penance and mend, holy has heal, flash heal, Prayer of Healing (amazing spammable aoe heal), Prayer of Mending, Renew, and an instant heal (can’t remmber the name), probably missing some, but you see there are more healing spells and it is more reactionary - meaning you can make up for blockhead dps mistakes.
Well I mean whenever you’ll need to play very reactively then Holy should always be better than Disc since it’s a reactive spec… That’s normally the case when either the group or the Priest himself is inexperienced on the content or with poorly coordinated groups.
But whenever both the player and the group are experienced and well coordinated Disc is almost always going to be better since it can do a better job at dealing with particularly dangerous mechanics and also provide nice DPS while sustaining the group’s health in the meantime.
I agree most players will usually fall into the first scenario more than the second one, but both scenarios exist so which one is better is dependent on that.