Why is discipline so hard to learn and master only for it to be below average ?
Not great for keys , decent for raids but has the most complex healer rotation.
#buffdisc
For raids at the highest level disc is a must. That said, it is also hard for various reasons and of all the healers disc dies the most. That means if your raid lead is an ignoramous you have a problem on your hands.
Right now, quite honestly, it is a beesâ nest for keys and not fun. The healing is bad, the mana issues are still there, arguably the most potent burst spot heal in the game, Shadow Mend, is gone. The mobility is pretty bad. You have no kick. A very nice spell for CC, Shining Force is gone.
All you can say about it is it is a real challenge. But the reward for being up to the challenge is non-existent.
Discâs only saving grace right now, at least in my view, is that it does damage. But its damage is not standout vs other healers. Furthermore, the current dungeons require healing more than anything, so your damage, which even at best, is almost insignificant given how much damage you are doing vs dps classes.
Hence, yeah. The real question is, why is it so hard? And being hard, why are there virtually no rewards for any level of mastery?
The bottom line is there is no real reason to play disc right now at allâexcept maybe for pvp but youâd have to ask a pvper for the full story on that. The rewards generallyâand especially if M+ is your focusâand for hard work learning are not there. The only sane reason to pick it up now if you have never learned it before is for fun, but knowing it is not a very good healer. I would only advise anyone to play it if you are in a guild and you have to.
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Cause itâs fun
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I really think you are pessimistic when it comes to disc. I was able to walk through 15s this week with no mana issues. We had a bad set of afflixes last week (which honestly werent so bad since we had access to improved mass dispel and PoM), but all healers were struggling.
Rapture is probably one of the most powerful cooldowns in the game. You can fudge entire mechanics. I just healed through crystals bursting on the last boss in the vault on a 15 with rapture. Barrier is also really strong during big hits, like the evoker boss in vault, or the first boss of RLP. Things like mass dispel are also very strong for bosses like the first guy of CoS. Im not denying disc has some draw backs, but it also has an interesting and unique toolkit that allows you to get through certain mechanics with ease where other healers really struggle. Its give and take. I dont know if id want to trade rapture for a healing cooldown like healing tide totem, and i wouldnt give up mass dispell for an interupt.
I miss shining force and we lack an interupt, but we have life grip and fear. Both are awesome in dungeons like SBG where you can save people pelted by the worms, or interupt disease bats. The lashers in vault can be group interupted with fear as well. Theres no other healers with life grip (ive saved people on hyj and the fouth boss in HoV and other places) and theres not too many with an aoe group interupt.
I also dont necessarily agree with your lack of mobility comment. The following spells can be used while moving: renew, pws, pwl, PoM, penance, purge the wicked, and shadow word death. You can always be casting something while moving and all of them heal (if youre proactive and have atonement out).
Disc brings great cooldowns and buffs to a group. It has an interesting and unique toolkit. We have to work harder than other healers but ive pumped 60k + hps in m+ no problem. I think you might be a little disenchanted with the spec because its gear dependant, is not forgiving if you play with noobs, and requires you to know the encounters well so you can properly prepare to mitgate the damage. Right now youre undergeared, everyone is kinda a noob, and the encounters are fresh. It will get easier as time goes on.
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Look at you go with getting KSM already. Well done you! It is nice to see that some of these dungeons that I am having a hard time figuring out can be doable at a higher level as disc. I just need to puzzle it out more and figure out my dancing steps, especially in AV and NO.
Good luck this week everyone, hope that it is better than last week for you.
Bigger hope- that it is FUN. 
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Disc isnât hard. Donât let anyone in these forums try to act like super-geniuses and say stuff like âwell disc isnât for beginnersâ while they run dungeons with friends and guild groups.
Is it different? Yeah. But you learn how disc functions mechanically in one dungeon. And you arenât some big brain for doing so.
The reason disc is has been hard in the past (I actually think itâs better in DF) is because it isnât a triage healer, and pugs need a boat load of triage.
When compared to holy at least, it has less potential to carry bad players. Thatâs why itâs hard. If you donât play with bad players, then it isnât hard.
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You may well be right with all of your comments. Even your comments about mobility, but I dont know about that. For a lot of atonement healing you have to plant. You may have a number of things you can do on the move, but the list of spells you cannot cast on the move is a long one.
Let me additionally qualify my statement so you know where I am coming from. First where I am coming from. I played Holy in SL Seasons 3 and 4 and a lotâgetting 8 vault items a week on three priests, and healing friends runs in addition. What I mean by this is I played it a heck of a lot. And then later in Season 4 I made a disc priest. I played it a ton as well, getting up to the 20 range of keys playing it virtually all day every day for a few weeks.
Well, just the general feel between the two specs was stark in terms of mobility. Disc was not completely immobile, but Holy felt then, and feels now waaaaaay more mobile most of the time.
Yup. You are spot on about that. And I pug a lot. All of my friends have stopped inviting me on disc. I dont blame them when the contrast with other healers is obviously stark. Especially vs meta. Healer like resto druid that can heal groups that ignore mechanics, groups that never use their defensives, and ones that play poorly and make loads of mistakes, etc, are far superior in the vast majority of runs. And never mind, resto druid incoming buffs make them even better.
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Disc buffs on the PTR makes disc a hell of a lot better as well, actually makes Shadow Covenant an S+ ability through the 20% atonement on shadow spells, 2 charges of mind blasts, the fix on power of the dark side to work with Dark Reprimand, Dark Reprimand being usable on allies and power word Solace + mind blast stacking up the extra penance bolts.
It is not something to scoff at.
Weâre talking 40k+ crits with dark reprimand here.
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How dare you. This is WoW. ONLY META, NO FUN. OPTIMIZE OR GO HOME!
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This seems like a pretty big flaw.
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Yea especially if you think of healers as being in two categories;
Has the throughput to heal mechanics and mistakes:
- Resto Druid
- Preservation Evoker
- Holy Paladin
- Holy Priest
- Resto Shaman
Has the throughput to heal (some) mechanics:
- Disc Priest
- Mistweaver
That final category used to be just Discs but in DF MW is in the same boat and itâs sad to see. I watch the front page of raider IO Mistweavers struggle to break 50k HPS and wipe to bosses in 14âs and 15âs due to lack of throughput and then I watch Thaner play his Prevoker in TJS and do 160k HPS on Stonestep without even playing TA which is the higher throughput build.
10.0.5 canât come soon enough. The Disc changes are game-changers imo and I canât wait to take it into keys.
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So I finally went ahead and took this chick into dungeons/heroics and a mythic to have something to compare to my druid. It isnât even close. In Ruby Pools my group could just ignore the fire elementals and I could just heal them through it with no real issue. On my disc priest, who actually has better gear believe it or not, there was no way. Everyone but the tank died and the tank just soloed the boss, because tanks are totally not OP atm.
Pretty much I had to make very liberal use of Pain Suppress/Life Grip/Barrier/Rapture, predicting the stupidity/laziness of my group to prevent the damage because otherwise they where going to die. My druid just rolled hots and might occasionally have to use a swiftmend, or something without much issue.
Now Iâm aware Iâm prolly not using optimized specs, I more or less just kept playing and changing my talents until I got something I kinda enjoyed and felt decent to play, but I could say the same thing for my druid who can just run into the same dungeon in a freaking pvp spec and not flinch. I wouldnât even consider that as disc.
At least the spec now has more going on with it. In shadowlands it felt so incredibly brain dead linear and boring to play Iâm glad we have a few more tools and abilities to use so thatâs good, I just wish they packed far more of a punch.
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Thatâs the problem right there. Sadge really.
Time to roll a different healer or do other things in the game. There are professions, quests, rep, alts, pvp, raiding, and the list goes on. But if you like disc, strike M+ off your list or expect to struggle or only do low keys and really M+ only âfor fun.â
And yet disc is underperforming in mythic (actually all raid difficulties) right now. If you look at the statistics at Warcraft Logs, itâs actually sad.
Part of the problem is our ramps get decimated by having to move for mechanics. Atonement doesnât feel like it lasts long enough when I have to run around for mechanics and waste precious seconds of my ramp. Sometimes by the time I can safely plant, it feels like the raid has already been healed up by other healers, and my ramp gets wasted.
Mobility is an issue.
I get that disc is very gear dependent, but that gear is useless when your ramps get griefed by a random swirl under your feet.
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i just started healing and so far iâve tried disc and mw and disc feels super easy. I mostly pvp but even in dungeons the amount of instant âoh S%##â buttons makes it seem less stressful to me. I prob am not even healing in the best pve way but just having so many instant things feels nice. aradiance (not instant in pve but still), rapture, PS, PW: Life. Itâs prob harder in more difficult pve content. I hope it gets some buffs to bring it in line with the others
Isnt this all healing specs?
Wouldnt it be ideal to have all healing specs that can help poor DPS and tanks recover ?
That certainly would be ideal.
To an extent yes. If its entry level, heroics, low mythics, or raid finder than its fine to have the healer be able to carry them through it, however, at some point you have to expect them to properly perform the mechanics and the only thing the healer should be healing is the unavoidable damage.
While I agree that disc isnât like some giga-brained spec that people sometimes will say it is, itâs also definitely worthy of the âhardâ label for a beginner.
Disc is hard because its throughput and where it comes from isnât straightforward, and you have to pre-empt damage before any other healer even needs to think of doing so.
A druid can just wild growth on reaction to damage up to +15s. They SHOULD be thinking of pre-hotting, but they donât need to. Disc needs to think about pre-shielding the dangerous stuff, or hold onto a harsh discipline charge/schism else wipe the group at around a +10.
This is pretty evident in the dungeons novice disc priests complain about, like RLP. We have a great toolset for the fire elementals if we take good talents and manage our CDs, but people die on them a lot because novice healers donât even think of how theyâre going to use their CDs.
So yeah, we shouldnât exaggerate the difficulty, but we also shouldnât be saying itâs super easy either, lol.
Did a decent chunk of PTR testing and this is absolutely true. Our HPS is increasing a LOT with the changes to Scov, Stolen Psyche and Dark Indulgence.
My only concern is these are also pretty huge changes for raid, too, so I can see em being peeled back.
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I honestly donât think Disc is Hard But it Def has its moments. Most people run with Stacked Groups/Guildmates so they have a understanding of their team, there is a very small percentage of people who pugs their dungeons with random people Itâs just a little too group/Tank dependent and by that I mean there is always this fear of getting players that Do and Donât know what THEY are doing when it comes to Defensives (Help your Healer Help you Kinda things) Same thing goes for your tank do they know how to use their own abilities without have to be Spam healed to death. Thats the only downside i face playing disc is having to Spam heal the hell out of a tank because they canât use their defensives or properly manage their CDâs And sometimes that happens.