Developers’ notes: Discipline Priest is not performing as well as we’d like, so for this week we’re increasing their Atonement healing. In a future patch, we are working on redesigning some of their talent options and making tuning adjustments there as well.
Atonement heals for 40% of damage done (was 36%). This change will also affect PvP combat.
Holy
Rhapsody now stacks every 1 second (was 2 seconds) and causes Holy Nova to deal 20% increased damage per stack (was 10%). This change will also affect PvP combat.
Rhapsody now highlights Holy Nova while at 20 stacks. This change will also affect PvP combat.
Hah, I posted at the same time as you about the Rhapsody buff. Mostly to say I don’t understand the Rhapsody buffs. I almost never have it talented. Guess I’ll take it out to play next week.
I use it for damage in packs when divine star and blaze are on CD which isn’t often. Or when we are moving and I need to heal and renew is already on them.
I hope Disc becomes completely overpowered for a few weeks. Of course Blizz will nerf them down, but the case has been that the settling point is usually pretty good.
For talents, they need to take a look at ability bloat, especially the numerous rotational damage-oriented abilities- Schism, Shadow Cov, Mind Games, Light’s Wrath, Smite, Mind Blast, SW: Death, Holy Nova, Divine Star/Halo, SW: Pain/Purge-Wicked. It’s far too much for a healer, even considering Atonement (which already has its own set of applicators to add to the hotbar bloat).
Schism being the worst offender of that bunch.
*edit: and they need to look at PW: Radiance and Atonement applications in general. Without the current 4-set bonus keeping Atonement up is going to get annoying again.
I honestly hate schism, mind games, and shadow cov being in the rotation on top of the maintenance needed by atonement. Take those away and I’m a happy camper.
I also feel Renew is just plea again with a minor heal tacked on.
I don’t think this is going to break them or anything. But it’s not bad.
Rhapsody is the bigger change by far. That’s going to give a lot of extra damage/dungeon. It’s listed under holy, like it’s a holy only change - but most things like this are usually class-wide.
Welcomed buff for Disc but more than that I’m glad to see they are working on redesigning out talents, hopefully they follow the Holy paladin rework’s model where almost everything is a 1 pointer, specially for the bottom section with some very impactful and strong choices.
Now one thing to watch out is that at the same time Holy Paladin and Shadow Priests both are getting substantial nerfs while Disc and Ret pallys are getting buffs… So maybe now Disc + Ret could be a competitive alternative to Shadow + Holy Pala.
I’m very interested in seeing what comes of their talent redesign for Disc. They won’t be on a live server any sooner than 9/26 (next mini-patch will hit in the fall, and that’s the earliest Tuesday in the fall), but hopefully we see some good changes.
Disc primarily needs help in PVP and raids. Disc feels very good in M+ right now, almost too easy if I dare to say it, but that’s mainly because with the tier set Radiance does giga healing and is often instant.
I’d like to see the following for Disc, from a PVE perspective:
Just make Evangelism apply to all allies within 40 yards, or make Radiance instant cast baseline. The time has come to make Disc more accessible to the playerbase as a raiding spec. Especially since encounter design has veered sharply into “dodge an endless chain of swirlies so you never have time to reliably cast Radiance.”
Substantial (re)buff to Mindgames damage. It needs to do more damage than Mind Blast baseline.
Schism reworked or just removed and baked in to Disc. It competes too much with Shadow Covenant (especially in M+ where I take both), and SCov is actually interesting and fun to use right now.
The Light’s Wrath-buffing talents need to be replaced or reworked. Especially Wrath Unleashed. My recommendation: make it so that Wrath Unleashed gives the damage buff to all spells following the cast of Light’s Wrath (so Penance/MindGames can be buffed, not just smite), and remove the 15% crit chance buff to Light’s Wrath.
Edit: also a “flavor” wishlist item: change the animation so that the cast of Light’s Wrath actually resembles a “torrent of holy fire” as the original weapon tooltip said back in Legion. Right now, it looks like Light’s Holy Basketball. For inspiration, please see Vegeta’s Final Flash.
If Disc became meta it would replace Shadow as the mandatory Mind Soothe and MD provider but Paladin isn’t mandatory and Ret isn’t good enough to warrant a spot, especially as melee.
Groups would transition from Holy Paladin, Aug, Fire, Shadow and Guardian to Disc, Aug, Guardian and whatever three DPS top the charts while hopefully also bringing defensives for their group which could unironically be some combination of Fire/Dev/Warrior/Shaman and even something like double Fire.
The only locked in spots is a Priest and Aug. At the moment the best healer by a country mile is Holy Paladin that mandates a Shadow Priest. If that changed and Disc became King, it would actually open up the DPS diversity but would also make 4/6 Healer classes quit, so not ideal.
Imagine Disc gets buffed and Shadow takes a tumble from the meta. How would a Mistweaver even play a Halls or Uldaman key? How would a Resto Shaman even play Fortified keys if Shadow wasn’t a good option and they had to go into every Fortified Uldaman with a route that included Crocs or a Bracken route that included Hunters or a Nelths key that included double Pelter packs.
This is the wildest season not only because Exodia is so good, but because any comp lacking an Aug and Priest is so bad. Right now all we can see is Exodia being so strong but what happens when Blizzard finally ruins Shadow and any non-Priest healer is left trying to push through routes all the other groups won’t even consider? Feels like Blizzard are about to F around and find out.
I like Schism to be honest. It’s the abilities that do essentially the same thing that I dont like. Like, to me, abiliities like Mind Games, I dunno. I’d sooner we had an option for Boon vs Mind Games. An AOE healing and damage ability vs just another single target damage button ability would totally rock. But to me, Schism is kind of cool in that it amplifies the damage of other spells–so you want to time it correctly. Outside of that it is just another single target fairly one dimensional button like Mind Games, Smite, and Mind Blast, so in that sense it is similar.
Discipline
Developers’ notes: Discipline Priest is not performing as well as we’d like, so for this week we’re increasing their Atonement healing. In a future patch, we are working on redesigning some of their talent options and making tuning adjustments there as well.
Atonement heals for 40% of damage done (was 36%). This change will also affect PvP combat.
I really like the playstyle of disc now. It seems to me to play very smoothly and nicely. That said, I think buffs to its damage and healing would make it a desirable healer to invite up there with Holy Paladin. In my view the fact that it is a fairly difficult healer to pick up and even moreso to master ought to have some compensatory rewards for those that are up to the challenge and commitment required to play it well.
Why I dislike Schism:
Timing it is impossible. It’s in a very awkward space where the CD is too long to be used as part of the rotation. Too short to be considered a CD that you save for emergencies.
It needs 3 more points to be worth anything (Intent+Reverie), but then becomes so vital that your non-Schism-uptime atonement healing isn’t viable.
The 24 second cooldown means I’m not pressing it enough to justify using those extremely valuable keybind slots, but because its a target-based casted ability, it really desperately needs to be keybound to be used effectively.
It’s awkward to use against trash, as your Schism target can die quickly, or not exist- where’s the atonement healing coming from when Bursting is going out? Etc.
And it relies so much on having uninterrupted dps time on the one particular mob, which never comes at a convenient time. When I have to swap to Incorp or Afflicted, or shield or defensive penance a dumb dps getting nuked, or run around because the major damage nuke is coming at the same as heavy movement a la Altarius, or the boss goes immune or out of range, and so on. I can think of a handful of times where the boss does “I’ma nuke your party at regular intervals, get ready” where Schism is perfectly suited for the task- but insta Radiance+Harsh Discipline does the job equally well, with less talent investment and overall easier accommodation in every other situation.
Stacks with Shadow Covenant, making them both kind of mandatory (I mean, I avoid both and still got KSH, but it wasn’t easy). Yet, S.Cov is the more usable talent and yet it’s harder to reach in the tree.
If the Shadow-side Atonement talents weren’t so overtuned I couldn’t see anyone volunteering into them. Too many buttons, too fickle targeting. Cast “X” to increase damage for “Y” seconds on target is a fine dps ability, but does not mesh with the reality healers face.
Yeah I really was just evaluating what the immediate effect of the changes could be, not really going into what the consequence of that… You make very good points there.
Going more in depth honestly I think the nerfs to Shadow are just bad and don’t make much sense to begin with… Shadow damage is fine but it’s not game-breaking nor the reason they have become “mandatory” even PI is very strong but still not the reason I think.
I do agree it’s less about Shadow and more about bringing Mass Dispel and Mind Soothe… Idk I feel it’s pretty problematic in the sense that are kind of binary for example Mind Soothe it’s either “yes” or “no” in terms of if it enables a skip and better routing or not once case makes it incredibly valuable, the other case makes it useless… Mass Dispel is often in the same boat, often it’s either very strong and near mandatory or just not useful.
Dungeon/ encounter design is also influencing this ofc but I think the very nature of those spells causes them to almost always land on this spot of being either mandatory or useless.
Isn’t this buff to Disc just fixing the nerf they got recently? Disc needs more spot healing capabilities imho than just atonement buffs.
The buff to Rhapsody is what I was asking back on the 10.1 PTR. Either way it’s a nice change for both M+ and raid.
I think what matters more is they smashed Holy Paladins with a nerf hammer to Blessing of Summer, damage reduction, and passive healing. This is going to help break up the singular Holy Paladin meta on high keys.
It wasn’t really a nerf since they buffed all of our damage, but yeah they are undoing it so the damage buff that we got that time is now also a healing buff.
AoW gives you a 30% stronger shield, but has the drawback that the shield reduces in value every second.
It’s still very good in any scenario that the damage will come decently quick (like within the next 5s). But it does make the talent pretty meh for raids because you lose so much value on many of the shields you’re better off grabbing something else - so I imagine that’s what they mean by negative effect.
I dunno. It is currently part of “the god comp.” And if it is nerfed there are more reasons to bring other priests, namely Disc or Holy for Fortitude–which provides a substantial buff to all groups.
That said, I feel bad for those that play Shadow a lot and really like it as it has not been very good for now what seems forever.
Totally. What happened was disc got a 10% damage buff, and so that healing remained the same the healing atonement did was reduced by 10%. That is it went from 40% (of lower damage) to 36% (of higher damage).
Really? I dunno about that–and think it wont be so major, but Tettles and/or Jak talked about it in very recent videos about the upcoming changes next reset. I personally hope it is not nerfed that much but can understand that some dps who find it hard to get invites feel like if it is that good that it displaces all dps to some degree who want to join groups for keys.