This might not seem like a major issue to the majority of the playerbase, but this issues actually eliminates an entire spec.
In era wow, Discipline priest barely skates by as viable in pvp due to the searing light talent in holy (10% smite and holy fire damage boost). When you add this along side of power infusion this buffs smite to a total of 30%. This makes smite viable in pvp to say the least.
In era when you compare discipline hybrid priest vs shadow spec healing equipped hybrid priest, you end up comparing 30% boost to holy dam and healing during infusion, vs 25% damage boost from shadow talents. Both specs heal equally well outside of power infusion. With this logic, discipline is the better true “hybrid” than shadow ONLY because of power infusions boost to healing as well as damage. Otherwise, you could spec shadow, and use healing gear, and deal the same healing yet better damage full time vs discs partial infusion windows.
Now, when you add sod logic, that has insanely strong shadow runes, along with 3 shadow dots available, it seems clear that if you wish to play “hybrid” priest in pvp, that you’d be far better off equipping shadow runes and talents, and just swap between healing and damage gear, thus, completely eliminating power infusion from being viable in solo play.
This forces disc into this weird “support only” function even if surge of light exists, we dont have much modifier to proc this in pvp, or time to hard casts smites when being focused. Sure you may get a proc off a flash heal that allows an instant smite, but even thats garbage because you can’t double smite the same global (hardcast into instant) so really the instant cast would be better used just healing anyways…
So all in all, disc has been pretty much shoved out of the door… So you have 2 choices here blizz. Give us some nice holy damage runes and allow disc to have some fun before the season ends, or give disc more “true support” runes since power infusion can be a buff for anyone, and all the support runes are class wide not spec wide currently. Disc is looking pretty garbage right now vs holy for all content.
How about a rune that gives an additional effect to mental strength or agility that gives 20% of your healing power as HOLY spell damage? That way we can actually enjoy being a true hybrid spec? Idk maybe a 3% damage boost for every weakened soul in 40 yards of you stacking 5 times? I mean there’s plenty of options to use here!
Also, why have we not received some kind of rune to change lightwell? Yall really going to stick priest players with that garbage 20 years later? That’s baffling…
This whole “discovery” season was really cool when you released things like heal mage, tank lock etc, but you guys are leaving an entire playstyle and spec behind. It would really be nice to see the unfinished parts of priest gameplay fleshed out with some fun ideas… Yes, you added penance, yes you added pain suppress, and barriers, but you guys forgot that these are no longer tied to a spec even if these are iconic disc abilities. holy, shadow, or disc can all use these abilities, and holy and shadows raw stats are just going to shove disc further out of viability.
RIP lightwell and true disc hybrids until further notice…
(cough cough also reduce power infusion to a 1min cd 
)
it’s a spec. and a meme one at that