‘‘Good’’? It’s an S tier healer currently, outclassing any other healing spec.
I am not really sure about S tier, last time I saw ranking it was A tier, mostly because lack of utility in form of Lust, Battle ress and proper group disruption.
It is certainly in best shape it has ever been for m+.
Also there are some dungeons in season 2 we really fit in to. Take underrot for example. There is a lot of stuff we can trivialize with our utility. Purging the immunity buff at the trash groups in the beginning, dispelling the 30 sec incapacitate at second boss trash, dispelling the disease at third boss allowing people to soak single shrooms without having to commit immunities, mass dispel at last boss for less group dmg overall. We also have a way to deal really easily with the new affix where you have to CC constantly due to spammable shackle undead.^^
All of the above is true, I am not disregarding any of this. I even said we are in the best shape for M+ we have ever been…
But we are still not S tier healer. Lack of battle ress, heroism/bloodlust and proper mass disruption or utility prevents us from being S tier. S tier healers will be great no matter your group composition. Priests heavily rely on their group to cover their weak points, plus they also require good PI target. Also our mobility is terrible. Also if shadow priests will be sought after DPS, we will be less likely to get invited, as they can easily supply both PI and Mass Dispel.
I think Discipline spec in WoW should totally be a support-style class, like Augmentation, but as a healer/support instead of just DPS. It would spice things up and make gameplay way more interesting. How about making Mind Blast not only deal damage but also buff the stats of allies with atonement? That would be awesome!
Honestly, we’ve got too many spells that do the same thing, and the whole atonement timing is crazy fast. It’s hard to keep up with it, especially with all the movement required in fights. It would be a game-changer if we had a spell that applies a permanent atonement, just like Shaman’s Earth Shield. Pick one person, probably a tank in raids, and they’ll always benefit from our DPS/Healing. No more rushing around trying to keep atonement on everyone at all times.
And can we talk about the shadow/light weaving theme? It’s a mess right now, way too overwhelming and stressful. They should definitely work on improving that. We want a smoother, less cluttered experience that’s more enjoyable and less of a headache.
That’s my take on it, just some casual thoughts and frustrations. Let’s hope Blizzard listens
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This so much. I recently tried disc for the first time and it’s just too convoluted and hectic for me to enjoy it. I get the spec needed to move away from just spamming PW:S in wrath but this is the other end of the spectrum. Hard pass on disc.
Healer/support would need to work differently to how they are trying to approach Augmentation. Currently, Auvokers deal approx 40% of the dmg Devokers do, but they are meant to offset this in boosting their allies. It works for DPS, as there will always be other dps to boost in most content.
As for healers, you can easily work like that in raids, but you can’t apply that playstyle to M+ and Arenas, where you are the only healer. If you would have just 40% healing of other healers, you would be dead spec for that content. You would need to approach a support role differently for healer.
I can see disc being reworked more into support spec. Disc already has strong external defensives in Barrier and PS. We could also have some skills that boost max HP of your team, so they can survive hard hitting mechanics. I can imagine Symbol of Hope being moved from Holy to Class tree, which would give us quite nice class utility. I can also see return of Fae Guardians covenant power, in some form. Back in WotLK, we also had talents which allowed shields to replenish resources (mana, rage, energy, runic power) to your targets… And there is also PI.
There are cool things to do, which we can have reintroduced from past… But we would really need to have our own throughput remain same as it is now.
So many people with no competent information about disc saying “it’s fine etc.” do not speak anything you heard from some youtuber or whatsoever, or not if you do not play this class.
check the numbers so they show you the facts:
Mythic Kazzara World Logs:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/rankings/33#boss=2688&metric=hps
just 2 disc on the 1st 100
Still Just 2 disc on the 1st 200
still just 2 disc on the 1st 300
still just 2 disc on the 1st 400
you finally see a 3rd disc at the 405th line…
Average number of parses per healer spec on the top 95th percentile is 5293
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/33#metric=hps&aggregate=amount&dataset=95
And the number of disc parses in that percentile is by far less 1170, and by far worst.
Why ? Ask yourself why !
do you even think about what could it mean ? it is either 1 of these:
1- top players do not play this class
2- top players cannot play this class
3- top raid leaders do not want them
And any combination of the above three means :
Discipline Priest Sucks.
Do you really do not care anything about numbers ? Or you do not know what competition is ?
There are only 2 disc priest in the WORLD at 1st 400 top healing players ! C’mon !
Discipline priest needs serious rework. There lot’s of good ideas above. I have my own comments too, like “instant radiance being baseline and not a proc, atonement application is damn bad cumbersome and need rework”
but hey ! something’s clearly gotta change.
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Yeah even in M+ holy seems to match disc, not even talking about raiding.
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More general Atonement coverage would definitely help for raiding, so maybe a Disc version of Benediction with 15-25% chance for Atonement applications to spread to a nearby player. Or maybe even just make Radiance hit up to 6 people.
I would not mind Benediction, it would at least give us some reason to spec into PoM, but I guess it would be quite unreliable for ramping.
One of the best suggestions is to rework Evangelism to apply 6 sec atonement on every person in raid.
I am kind of sad and… hopeless… but i will still try to put out the facts to the community.
Mythic Aberrus, 1st Boss, Kazzara, World HPS rankings:
Only 3 disc priest on top 300.
Which means again as i earlier said;
- Either even top players are not able to perform equally with the rest of the healers as discs
- Either top raids do no prefer to get discs to their teams
Which means,
- Disc is on a really bad level now.
The game tempo has increased insane drastically since the earlier patches. It is now no where near on a design of “bursts of damage + bursts of movement” instead… Constant damage+ burst of damage + constant movement + burst of movement.
At this scenario, Disc is like an old model of a Giant German Cannon which requires 100 days to setup to tear down 1 target and yet this is now obsolete cause enemy is INSANE dynamic now.
All the healers have “agile” solutions where Disc has nothing.
-yes procs of instant radiance is something but it is no where near enough of making the spec viable, it barely makes it “meh”.
Blizz, either
- re-design fights, make some reduction to this insane amount of movement requirement (which you won’t).
- remove atonement application requirement completely make it a passive effect
- or bring back spirit shell
- or give us some ULTRA Practical atonement application CDs
- if you select the last, it still is not enough, make our damage rotation “ok”. our damage rotation is even complexer than a given dpsers dps rotation. this is funny
- or increase the mastery coefficient drastically so even if we miss out 2-3 atonements or make 1 damage rotation mistake during a ramp, our existing atonements and damage would dish out some “ok” heals
Else, this spec will slowly pale out and die off raid environment.
First of all, Contrition is still useless after 7 years in the game so we all know the disc dev is incompetent.
maybe replace that guy with someone who actually played disc or can read the 0% talent pick-rate for 7 years?
alright…
I’ve been playing disc since cata, since i was a kid, and I have never changed spec, and always played high level content (+20s, mythic raid, etc)
so I’ve had many ideas over the years on how to fix the spec. I will list them here, change them as you like:
1- Evangelism:
the disc ramp is the number 1 thing keeping new players away forever.
A cooldown should be the thing that gives you a good feel not cancer. so this is the cancer-less evang:
for 10 seconds you have atonement on everybody and healing transfer through atonement is 100%. (you can change the transfer, duration, cd, anything, but a healthy evangelism should free us from applying atonement)
2- Casted heals:
keep flash heal the complete useless thing it is, but make shadow covenant convert it to shadowmend and pump. don’t hate the idea, it’s an option and you can still SC + Schism and go for burst aoe heal, but our options for spamming spot heals are laughable.
3- Atonement:
SERIOUSLY we need a passive proc that will spread atonement randomly sometimes. i’m 100% sure every disc priest in the world will die for something like PoM jumping around applying atonements. the way flash, shield and renew work now is eh-ok but needs the random proc so bad.
4- Damage rotation:
do you realize every throughput increase options that is meta in our talent tree right now will make our rotation more difficult? TE, Expiation, HD… inescapable torment is actually a very well-designed name for the talent, it really is a torment. we don’t even have an API that tracks mindbender duration correctly.
Take all of these stuff down and make them effortless, our rotation will still remain among the hardest if not THE hardest.
Make amends & Painful punishment should have been baseline into penance, they are never worth spending a talent point but they have a beautiful design that fits very well into our always-one-step-behind spec.
5- Barrier is boring, it just looks good and is powerful yes, but pls add some talent points to alter/empower it. it is extremely boring for a 3m cd.
6- Talent points: in the class tree, I find many priest can’t even take Leap of faith(grip) because how bloated the throughput nodes are… it’s like we need to have 100% of these power nodes so we can function.
When we need to take utility ,for instance disease poison, we need to sacrifice big throughput which is not the case at all for other healers who also get interrupts and immunities they can use on themselves or others…
You’ve been smashing our heads against the ground just because of PI but is it really that good? good enough so we don’t get any interrupt? who’s been this stubborn guy who doesn’t want to listen to the community that’s been asking for interrupt since Beta. does this guy know how to play priest better than everyone?
In the end, I am very ashamed of blizzard devs for this awful design. I hope for a new team for priest devs that can actually understand our problems and address them.
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there’s obviously a lot more to this. I came back today to add some more if any of it helps:
7- permanent atonement: we need atleast one and should be able to talent into 2 of them. so we could have perma atonement on both tanks in raids. if it costs talent points it’s balanced.
8- Radiance talents: we need ones that will make it hit more targets, and it should have been instant cast from the beginning of it… split Bright pupil (5s cd) and Enduring lum
it’s not a choice node, it’s an “obvious-choice node”. having both can help the lackluster radiance we have now.
Radiance’s problem was anything but the amount it healed, and you changed nothing just added a big load of heal. nice bandaite for M+, 0 difference for raiding.
9- Mana: after all the billion problems disc had, it was and probably still is the most mana hungry spec. completely unfair. I would see mana management in a spec like holy to be part of the game but for disc if mana was infinite it still be hard to play.
10- Malfunctioning cooldowns:
schism on 24s with SC 30s and mind game’s 45 that can be lowered plus mindbender’s VS and there’s radiance charges and Halo/divine star. solace on hasted 12…
we don’t need ten thousand cooldowns to function, can we have CDs that actually do something by their own?
we’re keeping track of a lot of buffs and cooldowns, it feels awful really, we can never plan a good rotation unless we just sit on some cooldowns to get them lined up and I’ve been playing other healers a lot, their cooldowns line up automatically like butter…
You’ve been trying to make disc complex but you just made it hard so nobody would play it. I wish priest devs didn’t need to hear this but hello “you can’t make something fun just by making it hard to play”
Every time there’s a new talent that buffs an aspect of disc it’s like:
“You get 10% buff to this one spell, but first you need to bend-over-backwards to get the buff”
pff
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Disc is just currently not worth it in any PvE content sadly. Holy paladin and resto shamans completely outclass it in m+ currently and in raid it’s probably dead last. And even worse with the 10.1.5 nerf to atonement healing once again.
Can’t complain tbh. Haven’t played higher keys yet but so far I’m having fun with disc in M+. I often outheal my resto shaman in some situations, especially ones with high sustain dmg. Haven’t looked into ptr yet but they also buff our overall dmg by 10% so maybe it evens out the atonement nerf. Will test it later…
blizzard just loves those apply to heal buffs…
atonement
fistweaving ancient teachings
melee wings
etc.
the maintenance of this trash makes those classes less fun.
Am i the only one who feels that Rapture is completely useless ? It could have been of value if like, i cast it in 2 seconds and it shielded like 8 players in an area at once. But now, GCD-GCD-GCD-GCD… while people are dieing…
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I think rapture is great. Maybe they could tune the numbers a bit, giving bigger shields, but I really like the design of the ability. Disc is supposed to be about preemptive play and being rewarded for thinking many moves ahead. The problem is more so that the reward doesnt feel big enough imo 
I think disc main issue atm is twofold:
-
Throughput being too low. Even with a perfect combo of scov+schism+TE with penance and other dmg it just feels low
- Healing profile, mainly applies to m+. You can do mediocre overall healing, and you can do decent spothealing, but you cant do both at the same time due to how penance works.
I havent played other healing specs in DF so Im not sure exactly how it is for them. But I suspect some of them dont have to choose one or the other, to the same extent. Possible fixes for this could be penance incurring a shorter cd when used on friendly targets during scov, and maybe retaining harsh discipline for both one offensive and one defensive use.
Another solution that would also address button bloat is to remove schism and give a flat buff to all dmg or atonement healing. I personally like having many buttons, but I agree its an issue that disc requires so much effort for mediocre performance.
after testing Luminous Barrier, and reading the latest changes I have to say:
the best decision blizzard can ever make is to fire the disc priest team entirely and hire a new team.
This is my best constructive feedback. those guys are way past the point of getting benefit of the doubt or any kind of forgiveness. it is very obvious they have no idea what they’re doing and they are way too lazy to work on the main problems.
I have to clarify, this is a real constructive feedback blizzard, please change the dev for priest. Honestly consider it please please please.