Disc Priest or Resto Shaman easier for a new player?

Gameplay Dungeons, Raids and Scenarios
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I have some experience healing, just to understand the overall game and dynamics between roles on a deeper level, but healing is my least-used role, so I’d like some main healers, ideally who are kinda passionate about healing, to give me their perspective on which healing spec would be easier to use for a new player, eventually in Mythic raiding and M+ dungeons around M15: a Discipline Priest or a Restoration Shaman?

Some reasoning behind your vote will be very appreciated.

I picked those 2 specs because I don’t think that they’ll enjoy the melee combat style of a Holy Paladin, and after a Holy Paladin, it is those 2 other specs that are performing the best now in endgame content, and would also be most in-demand within guilds that do Mythic-level content. With that said, what I said about melee combat would apply to a Mistweaver anyway, and I’m open to hear something that could change my mind about not suggesting a Restoration Druid in the spec’s current state, although I doubt it.

I also hasten to clarify that “whatever they like/enjoy the most” is not going to be a helpful answer here, because the factor of fun will naturally be considered, of course, and if a certain spec is just not fun at all for whatever reason, then they’ll eventually drop it and try another, but part of the fun in this case will inevitably come from feeling effective and capable to perform well in various situations at the Mythic level eventually. So, yeah, the ease of using the spec fairly effectively, eventually at the Mythic level as I mentioned, is a big factor here. And “fairly effectively” here does not mean “become the best super easily;” it just means the easier path to perform acceptably. :slight_smile:

And if someone can suggest a good YouTube channel or two to learn those specs from, I would be very grateful. And if the content creator is female, like Naguura when it comes to Balance Druids, that would be an added bonus, but the accuracy, clarity, and quality of the content does have a higher priority than the content creator’s gender, of course.

Thank you.

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Resto Shaman is considerably easier for a new player, for someone reasonably new to healing. To make disc priest work, you need to anticipate damage quite far in advance, and if your party/raid makes mistakes, you’ll have a hard time patching them up.

As a resto shaman, you have a much easier time patching up mistakes.

If you’re going to pug +15s, go shaman. Disc is a pain in pugs, even if you’ve mastered the spec, simply because the amount of mistakes made are considerably higher, and that’s not something disc is good at dealing with. It can, for sure, but that doesn’t make the run very fun :slight_smile:

Shaman on the other hand, is quite easy to get started with. You’ll still need to master it, and the difference between a newbie shammy and a veteran is substantial, even a new shaman can learn how to heal +15s very fast.

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Thank you very much for sharing all those thoughts and details. I really appreciate it.

I kind of had a feeling that this would be the case, but as I said, I’m not experienced enough to have been certain of the accuracy of that feeling I got when I tried both specs, especially because if you’re not serious about learning a role but just trying it, there’s a good chance you could be making wrong conclusions here and there due to ignorance or so. :slight_smile:

I’m glad to hear that the vibe I got wasn’t so off the mark, though. Thanks again.

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Shaman. Not very complicated and very good at dealing with unexpected damage which i’m sure will happen a bit in pugs.

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I am not a healer. But I can say this.

Preventing dmg is always better than healing dmg. That is why disc priest is nearly always so good in higher content.

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Indeed, but for that to work, your team needs to avoid avoidables, otherwise you will have to heal, and that’s where disc falls short.

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Oh 100% which is why, in my experience, disc is lack luster in pugs, very good in organized groups.

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Yeah, I’m not a main healer, but when I did try healing to understand the game and its dynamics more, I felt that I was much, much more capable of dealing with DPS that take too much avoidable damage and tanks that bite way more than they can chew as a Holy Priest than I was as a Discipline Priest.

I also felt more capable of saving my tank from death as a Resto Shaman than I felt as a Discipline Priest.

And I felt very, very gimped and kinda awkward dealing with long-term heavy damage on the tank as a Restoration Druid, because my mind refused and still refuses to think of Regrowth as a spammable heal, since the HoT part of it does not stack cumulatively or additively, or all subsequent Regrowths entail a significant lack of mana efficiency, since you’re paying mana for an HoT part that gets wasted as you spam the spell. And this Resto Druid experience isn’t even in endgame content; it’s from leveling dungeons with tanks that just keep pulling nonstop, and they pull just slightly more than average. I felt able to deal with such situations as almost any healer, except a Resto Druid, and that’s when I just gave up on that specific spec in its current state, because endgame content can always have similar situations with the tank being almost constantly on the move (so they and the melee DPS keep getting out of Efflorescence), and also constantly around 50% health and in need of spammable heals, so the plethora of HoTs just aren’t ticking hard enough, your Swiftmend(s) is on cooldown, and they just don’t have time to wait for all those heals-over-time. :joy: In my opinion, Resto Druids desperately need to either get back their spammable slow-cast Heal or have Regrowth reworked to be efficiently spammable, by either making Regrowth do its HoT part instantly when there’s already a Regrowth-HoT on the target, or making Regrowth’s HoT part stack cumulatively (add seconds to the existing HoT) or additively (increase the intensity or HP part gained per second from the HoT part).

On the plus side of Discipline Priests, I think they might have the highest potential of pulling even more DPS than Holy Paladins in an organized team that avoids enough avoidable damage, especially in fights that favor ranged DPS over melee. So, the spec sounds like it’s more for pushing higher scores, breaking records, and that sort of thing, like a fairly high level of organized gameplay.

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Deffo resto

Disc can be awful & weak even in the right hands, let alone pugging with little knowledge of the game

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I’m inclined to agree with you that Disc can be awful and weak even in the right hands mainly because of the awful way it scales with gear (not fast enough). In other words, I think Discipline is kinda like Fire, in 9.0.5, you basically shouldn’t have bothered with either specs with iLvl lower than 220, because they were so bad without endgame gear, and paradoxically enough, they were the best in the highest levels of gear.

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Nope. Nothing comes even close to Venthyr Holy Paladin when it comes to potential damage, especially in keys.

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Wow, and it looks like nothing much has changed in 9.1 regarding this. That doesn’t sound very balanced, especially because Holy Paladin’s obvious superiority has been ongoing for pretty much the whole of SL season 1. And don’t get me wrong, I really hate it when Blizzard nerfs classes that are fun and effective to run for their targeted roles. What needs to be done is to buff other classes and specs to be on par with what’s working well enough for the community now. For example, Holy Priests desperately need a buff to their damage, or at least to their DoTs, since otherwise if they’re healing, they aren’t damaging, unlike Disc Priests and Holy Paladins, for example, whose damage contributes to healing either directly or indirectly (Holy Paladins get strong instant heals from doing damage). Mistweavers have needed a boost to their damage right from the start and again nothing significant has changed for them in 9.1. It’s really sad to see, forces a portion of the player base to give up their favorite classes/specs to boost their chances of getting into groups/guilds, reduces diversity, and further inflates the meta-way-or-the-highway culture. And the root of the problem isn’t the players’ behavior but those imbalances; I mean, can you blame me as a tank for favoring a Holy Paladin over a Holy Priest for a high M+ key that we need to finish on time!

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To be frank, for all but the highest keys (a tiny, tiny fraction of the m+ teams), it doesn’t matter. For a PuG, I’ll never pick a holy paladin, unless I know 4 out of the 5 people at a minimum, nor should anyone else. Holy paladin shines in coordinated groups. For a considerably less coordinated pug, literally anything else will work much better, because you’re not gonna play around CDs at the level that’s required for the pally.

That people pick the meta even for keys where it doesn’t matter, even in cases where it is actively detrimental, that’s a people problem, and nothing to do with balance. There will always be a meta for the highest keys, even with near perfect balance. As long as that trickles down to 15s and below, that’s a people problem, not a balance one.

Yes, it would be great if other healers did more damage, but venthyr hpal is quite an outlier, as while they do very high damage, their healing outside of CDs is so very bad, they might as well not be there. That’s not very fun to play.

https://clips.twitch.tv/MoldyCrepuscularHawkKAPOW-stffd2IO2CqIHAG1

That’s a very nice summary of how “fun” venthyr hpal is.

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I’m crying. Poor man honestly lmao :rofl:. He’s not wrong tho.

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From my experiences in PuGs, especially when uncoordinated or soaking up too much unnecessary damage, I can still see that a Holy Paladin would work significantly better than, say, a Mistweaver or a Resto Druid, especially if the tank is actively kiting himself and other melee out of Efflorescence too often, whether out of necessity or not. Yes, a Holy Priest would probably have the easiest time topping up such an uncoordinated group, but like in the Mistweaver’s case, with Mistweaver being considerably gimped in AoE healing relative to the Holy Priest, that will inevitably be at the cost of making all the fights that much longer due to very negligible DPS from the Holy Priest or Mistweaver when almost exclusively trying to keep their party members topped up the vast majority of the time.

Compared to those cases with 3 other healers, the Holy Paladin can switch to the so-called Glimmer of Light build (which also uses Glimmer of Light) or sacrifice some raw HPS for an easier path to healing an uncoordinated group while still finding time to pull off decent DPS with the Beacon of Virtue build.

Yeah, I don’t really see any healer working better than a Holy Paladin in an uncoordinated group, even in +15 if most party members aren’t overgeared, other than a Resto Shaman, especially because the only other “meta” healer is the Discipline Priest, who is much worse than a Holy Paladin in a bad group, especially after I’ve seen this confirmed multiple times on this thread. At least a Holy Paladin can literally just stand there and spam Holy Shock, Holy Light and Flash of Light while waiting for the shortest moments of breathing room to cast any of their instant attacks (minus HS, of course), and they will find such moments, even in bad groups, because all their attacks are instant, unlike all other classes that need a casting time for lots of their spammable attacks, except the Mistweaver Monk, who is so un-meta in 5-person scenarios that there’s no comparison here anyway.

At least that’s how I thought about it when I considered other healers in an uncoordinated group. And I was considering +15 runs, as long as 3 of the 5 party members aren’t overgeared, because with a fully overgeared party, yes, literally anyone will work just fine, even while everyone is eating up a lot of unnecessary damage, even a Resto Druid or a Mistweaver. Heck, even a Holy Priest who does nothing but heal will also work just fine; in fact, they’ll probably be the best here if everyone’s overgeared. :joy:

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You may see holy paladin performing better in pugs than the others, my experience playing one shows otherwise. :slight_smile:

I’ve healed up to 16-17s on venthyr holy pally in pugs. It’s a colossal pain in the backside, and my damage output is pretty much on par with that of my resto druid in the same level of keys, because I have to patch up people so much, and don’t get the chance to do damage. Yes, when Ashen is up, I can pump. That’s about it. Damage outside of it in pugs isn’t particularly better than other healers, and while it certainly feels great to ashen, overall, it’s a fraction of a paladin’s damage.

On a druid? SoF->WG->Flourish, and DPS for 10 seconds. Shaman? Cloudburst down, fill it up, and do damage 'till I need to re-cast cloudburst. If I need to patch someone up, there’s riptide, healing surge, early cloudburst, ascendance, healing stream totem - just to name a few things. On a holy pally? You can holy shock which does nothing outside of wings, and you can WoG if you have holy power. Managing holy power in a pug is clunky at best.

You don’t run Beacon of Virtue, like, ever. And definitely not when you want to do damage. With BoV, you don’t have Beacon of Light anymore, and that’s a ton of tank healing lost. As a holy paladin, you heal the tank via Beacon, quite a lot: you patch up everyone else, and that cleaves onto the tank via Glimmer and BoL.

With that tank healing lost, you’ll have to spend more time healing than DPSing. For DPS, you go Glimmer. For healing, you may go Beacon of Faith, but that’s for 24+ prides. For any other case, Glimmer is substantially better. Harder to play, yes, but if you’re aiming at doing damage, you’ll have to play good anyway.

Yeah, and they do no damage while doing so, while a shaman can have flame shock up, weave in some chain lightnings or chain harvests (which also heal, yay). A druid can sunfire. A paladin stands there and heals doing no damage - perhaps they have consecration down, and that’s about it, until they get into melee to crusader strike. Not being able to crusader strike also gimps their healing, because they won’t have the holy shock cooldown reduction, so will end up hard casting flash of light or holy light - which eat mana, don’t generate holy power (unless healing the beacon target, which you’d like to avoid)…

No thanks, I’ll take anything else for a pug.

I mean, as a paladin, if you’re ever in a situation where you don’t have ashen, nor wings, nor holy avenger, and you just spent your last holy power, and people are standing in bad - that’s gonna be a wipe. Those situations happen rather often in pugs, because you end up rotating your CDs to patch up mistakes, rather than rotating them according to the route.

Moonfire is instant. Sunfire is instant and AoE, and you only need to refresh them, rather than spam. Flame shock is instant. Earth Elemental is instant, and does nice damage with the Deep Tremor legendary. Lava Burst can proc instant. Chain Harvest isn’t instant, but it doubles as a heal. Druid has HoTs, so they can weave in damage easier in a pug. Shaman has Cloudburst and Riptide for instant heals, so they can weave in damage easier in a pug. Both of them are ranged too, while the paladin is melee. Neither Shaman nor Druid rely on damage (melee damage of all things) to have their healing CDs reduced.

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Disco priest is not a new player friendly or pug friendly
as Discipline priest you need to know when the dmg is coming so you can prepare your atonements and other stuff it’s quite hard to pull it off if you are playin that spec first time

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