I agree, Disc is fun!!
Disc only became popular after the Prot Paladin rework because those two specs pair together well.
1 Like
Disc rose in the meta when teams moved into higher keys. It was already happening when the prot pally changes went in and was bound to happen with the nature of infinitely scaling content and discās toolkit.
Pretty sure heās talking about M+ and you are talking about raid.
I would say it has to do with how they are strong. Rshammy was strong vexausw itbhad perfect counters that completely trivialized and negated entire mechanics without any thought or group communication required, see PCT.
Additionally it brought the best ranged interrupt in the game, the best dispel portfolio for the dungeons, AoE stops in both Thunderstorm and Cap totem. In short it was strong because it pretty much negated the encounter.
Disc is strong while playing into the encounter. Good healing and damage combined with strong damage reduction allows it to both play strong in uncoordinated and coordinated groups. However it isnāt full on negating encounter mechanics, like shammy did.
Priest had their brief moment of doing that back in Dragonflight, its the reason people said PCT got the Mass Dispel treatment. Now instead of negating mechanics blizzard put no thought into we are just powering through them āas intended.ā Combine this with blizzards absolute desire to forget this class actually exists and well thats why.
Oh no, your spec is slightly worse than another spec. I feel for you. No, I really do. Youāre definitely not overreacting and crying about it like a little baby.
It was 85% Resto Shamans, 10% Disc, and 5% everything else before the Prot Paladin update. I couldnāt get invited to keys above a +11 even as Disc or Holy.
With Disc you donāt bring an interrupt or any other CC other than Psychic Scream so the Prot Paladin can make up for it. The Disc Priest can also Pain Sup and use Barrier to keep the Prot Paladin alive so it creates the perfect combo. You still bring an Enh Shaman for the Poison Cleansing Totem.
The prot paladin update coincided with high key pushers naturally moving into the 15/16+ key ranges and the normal meta shift that was already occurring but not popularized/settled. PI also happens to be incredibly powerful for enhancement shamans since it lines up with ascendence and they benefit so much from haste. Shamans dominating the dps meta also means that youāre not stuck without curse/poison dispel with a priest healer. Barrier is great, but itās not like other healers donāt have group-wide DRs. Yes, pain sup is great, but I think youāre overselling itās synergy with prot paladins since it gets used often enough on DPS and itās fairly rare you need back-to-back pain sups on the tank to necessitate a 2-charge external DR as opposed to a 1-min sac or a cocoon or something. All of this aside, resto shaman is STILL a dominant healer outside of the very highest keys and because of its lower skill cap than disc, has more representation at low-mid levels.
The meta is largely driven by the players pushing the highest keys, and the wider perception that those classes are optimal in all settings, which simply isnāt true. Aug, for instance kinda sucks in low-mid keys, but they get invites because people worship the 15+ key pusher tier lists and what the raiderio/wcl top scores show. Youāre kinda up sh*t creek with holy priest, sorry, itās just not in a good spot right now, but I do think itās important to remember that the meta being what it is does drive players into the optimal classes and specs, so representation doesnāt quite reflect actual viability. IE: when Beast Mastery is dominant, the better players are not going to be running as marks or surv and you wind up with far fewer and worse parses/scores in those specs. Could those same players who play the optimal build achieve similar results on another spec? Likely.
Iām only in the 2800s on my disc priest, but I havenāt felt yet like any other healer couldnāt do just as well, and in some cases Iāve really felt like the squishiest member of the team where other healers might have to spend fewer resources to keep themselves alive.
Prot Paly before the update was terrible. Low damage, low survivability, low self healing, etc. 11.0.5 took it from C tier to a solid S tier.
The primary cause of the Resto Shaman meta has to do with 7 out of 8 dungeons having poisons and curses. Iām honestly surprised they havenāt been nerfed at all beyond just a reduction in AOE damage and PCT getting the MD treatment.
11.0.7 has very little class changes so Iām expecting thereās more meat coming out in 11.1 after.
Because we donāt have the utility of other healers for starters. Mana management would be one step closer to making them unusable. Not being able to cleanse poisons and curses and being forced to heal through them is already annoying enough in lower keys. High keys the spec would be entirely gone.
1 Like
Does disc not have mass dispell?
Itās a 2 min CD and thereās really nothing for mass dispel to do this season other than occasionally deal with an affix once a month.
The reason poison cleansing totem got nerfed like mass dispel did is because it trivialized dungeon mechanics this season.
If thereās little to no poisons to remove in the coming seasons, itāll be frustrating for you just as the mass nerf was.
So holy should deal with mana management and not disc? It has even less utility.
2 Likes
These people are just grasping at straws. I donāt get how any one is happy with class tuning at this point.
1 Like
No it definitely hasnāt been as good as DF. Lots of specs need a lot of work and receiving nothing is not ok.
1 Like
It needs a lot of help.
1 Like
On an extensively lengthy CD especially when compared to other cleansing abilities for other healing specs. It also has a cast time and an AOE. Not the same.
So hereās a question.
What, for you, is the major sticking point other than discipline is meta in high keys and shaman has lost favor? Resto shaman still has 30% more representation (and 50% of total healer representation) than discipline in +13 and higher and still represents ~30% of healers in +15 and higher. Mistweaver is starting to make gains in +15 and higher, too. M+ healers are almost always dictated by the rest of the comp and the healer class itself is pretty much only locked in if the spec is an outlier. Right now there are two established healers, an up and comer, and resto druid is timing the highest keys in some teams as well.
What makes resto so unplayable when itās the 2nd most popular healer, by a long shot, in the highest keys and still makes up more than double of its share of representation if all healers were equally balanced and equally popular?
Would you be happy with resto shaman if you lost every utility button you have except for Bloodlust, basic Thunderstorm, and Spirit Wolf if it meant you did 5% more healing in M+/PvP and did 5% less healing in raid if it made shaman 65% of healer representation in +15 and higher keys?
But if disc needed to sit and drink 3-5 times a dungeon, it wouldnāt change its strength without the current meta at all.
It would actually change a lot based on how disc is actually designed to work. Namely it heals through damage. The issue is if you gate their damage via mana so they canāt spam damage then they canāt heal.
This is honestly a massive conflict with the damage to heal design philosophy as a whole. Gating damage with a finite resource, such as mana, is generally seen as unhealthy game design, literally every DPS who has used it has been move from mana as a resource for damage, because āyou canāt over DPSā like you can over heal. This is a conflict of the nature of DPS and the nature of healing and why the design is inherently flawed.
However, if you where to gate a healer who is required to DPS by limiting how many damage spells they can cast you effectively make the entire premise of the class fail. TLDR if you are going to gate itās damage behind mana than it wonāt be able to actually DPS, if it canāt DPS it canāt heal, and you have broken the class as a whole.
Yes itās dumb, but so is the design, and no I donāt like it anymore than you will, but the idea that nerfing discās mana wonāt effect it is fundamentally flawed because of itās unique, and flawed, damage to heal design. It would in fact break the spec and itās why, as far as I know, there has never been a situation in which a disc priest would oom if they are able to primarily heal through damage.
1 Like