New ability Light’s Caress = Capped @ Power Word: Barrier (3 min cooldown)
Shadow Covenant = Now only locks out holy spells for a short duration
Discipline now have Mind Blast = More Atonement healing + shield all with Atonement = new spell spam (will be nerfed)
Absolutely insane…ly bad.
Light’s caress was labeled as a talent, I assume after they remove luminous barrier, meaning we aren’t taking it over Evangelism. Its not even good or fun so I’m not sad that its a dead talent they wasted any amount of time on.
Shadow Covenant… finally it was good enough to beat out the extra damage on its row and is actually pretty good! And then they…nerf it to oblivion??? Lock out all holy spells which btw include: Smite, Penance, Power Word: Solace, Power Word: Radiance, Power Word: Barrier. Basically, our entire kit except for Schism and now Mind Blast. So unless Covenant’s lockout lasts just as long as it takes to cast two spells, you’re destroying your gameplay, and even if it becomes superior, that will lead to the clunkiest, unappealing healing style I can imagine, since you’ll literally just have to sit there waiting for the moment you can play the game again…
I guess I should count my blessings, Holy and Shadow got even worse changes and Disc can just ignore all these cool hip changes and just take the same talents to have exactly same playstyle. I think its time for a main switch in SL, but I’ll know for sure during the prepatch and having to lock myself out of 90% of my kit in raids.
And disc will still be hit with the nerf bat every patch because of how impossible it is to balance atonement.
All of disc’s issues in BfA (scaling, throughput) were because they had to tip toe around the concept of atonement. It’s why holy pallies could do 50k DPS and not get nerfed while priests get their DPS hit with the nerf bat. It’s why Disc only shines in 20 man raids and flops in high keys and isn’t S tier in PvP like druids or pallies. To find out they’re doubling down on it for Shadowlands and adding gimmicks like the redesigned Shadow Covenant is laughable at best. Unless they change the way scaling works with atonement depending on the party size, we will just see a repeat of BfA.
And yet with all of this, Disc still is in a better place than Holy and Shadow. Holy, despite being the worst healer the entire expansion (other than in heroic raids) is getting… circle of healing back. For shadow, they’re doubling down on void form and trying to be inherently unbalanced talents like S2M work, like they haven’t tried to do it a million times before.
A disappointing day for all specs all around in my opinion.
Shadow Covenant will help with overall DPS - mainly targeted at Mythic dungeons
Light’s caress is targeted at PVP - how to exploit it in PVE is the question
I too am very disappointed with the holy changes, after reading the list of changes most classes got. I’ve never felt like our priest class devs just don’t have any inspiration or care for the class than I have after seeing what we got. I second your “holy got…circle of healing”.
Read again. Its in place of leniency and i think they need to scrap it and use something else. Nominally LB is for people wanting to play disc in normal/ LFR (my opinion) . Maybe they think it will help in mythic plus with grevious. Stack i na barrier and get 2 heals but i think its cumbersome and they need to scrap.
What i do think is power infusion with only a haste element without the mana part is crap. I dont remember a PI iteration with only haste
You may be right, it seems logical.
Its such a waste though isnt it, because LB had obvious discipline flavor, but then because its ‘all targets’ it ends up being a waste. Such a shame.
Then of course Lenience is one of those unimaginative placeholder passives.
The disc final tier has been really disappointing to me.
It does but its too easy to press one button and have the raid covered. ITs why im happy for it to stay for those who cant use Evang effectively