Old school disc priest

[Valìnka-argent-dawn]

Since classic have reached cata and me and my GF is no longer interested in what classic have to offer i was wondering if you could spec the disc priest in War Within more akin to what disc priest used to be, since GF aren’t very keen on the whole “Do damage to heal” thing nor the doing damage as a healer, so more like what healers used to be where healers heal and damage only if there is enough mana + nothing else to do.

The spec i’ve been looking at looks like this, though she can’t escape the purge the wicked dotting.

Discipline Priest The War Within Talent Calculator - 11.0.0 Beta

In some way i would to see healers get abit of a reverse thing where instead of “Healers do damage to heal and boost overall damage to complete stuff in time” to a talent or buff or something where they would be unable to do any damage, but instead buff other players when they heal them to do the damage they don’t do. Much like the Augmentation evoker but purely focus on healing

Something like shield would reflect more or like what is in MoP remix: Righteous Frenzy and Searing Light

[Triip-argent-dawn]

You’ve probably heard it many times before, but here it goes:

You dont NEED to dps as a healer. No one is forcing you. Most people wont expect you to dps AS LONG AS you dont do medium/high level m+ or raiding, where killing stuff fast enough is important. For the content I assume you’ll be doing, there is no need nor expectations for healers to dps.

If you’re thinking about the actual design of the spec, then yes, disc priest isnt moving away from atonement anytime soon. You can tweak the talents a bit, and go oracle, to make it more “healing-friendly”. But at the end of the day its never gonna be the optimal way to play the spec, unless you mean pure single target healing and nothing else.

I know many people feel this way, and I dont know if its due to some philosophical conviction, or if it simply comes down to difficulty and stress factor. If it happens to be the latter, here are some useful macros in case your gf targets the traditional way (either by clicking on the frame or using keybinds). These will allow you to do dmg while having your teammates targeted, and will be casted on the target of your friendly target - can also be used just the same way your normal dmg spells works, on an enemy target:

Mind Blast
#showtooltip Mind Blast
/cast [harm,nochanneling:Penance] Mind Blast
/cast [@targettarget,nochanneling:penance] Mind Blast

Smite
#showtooltip Smite
/cast [nochanneling:Penance,harm] Smite
/cast [nochanneling:Penance,harm,@targettarget] Smite

Shadow word: Pain / Purge the wicked
#showtooltip Shadow Word: Pain
/cast [nochanneling:Penance,harm] Shadow Word: Pain
/cast [nochanneling:Penance,harm,@targettarget] Shadow Word: Pain

Penance [keep in mind you’ll need a separate bind to use it defensively]
#showtooltip Penance
/cast [nochanneling:Penance,harm] Penance
/cast [nochanneling:Penance,harm,@targettarget] Penance

So if she wants to do some dmg without having to swap targets to enemies all the time, this makes it a lot easier. You see the pattern, just change the spell name and add whichever spell you desire.

[Donq-argent-dawn]

1. Modern Discipline priest is designed to do damage to heal effectively, Atonement (i.e. healing the group via doing damage) is the single biggest source of their healing (last time I did a 10 level m+ key with a disc priest, 40% or 50% of their overall healing was atonement).
   You can probably do heroic dungeons and LFR / normal raids without atonement, but you would probably soon start feeling like you’re underperfoming anyway.
   On top of that discipline priest is arguably the most difficult healing spec to master, it’s very newbie unfriendly and one will need to spend quite a bit of time practicing with their rotation & setting correct macroes and weakauras before feeling like being efficient.

So your GF can commit to mastering Disc if she rly wants, or she can change a spec to holy for example (no even need to change class).
2. Currently in Retail Holy Priest is your most classical healing spec in terms of “heal by doing healing spells”, one of the easiest healing specs to start playing with and yet it has a lot room for improving. If you need to bring a wounded groupmate from 10% health to 100% within 2 seconds or less, holy can do it no problem (while many specs cannot).
When you have nothing to heal as holy, you can also pump some impressive damage (higher than any other healing spec at the moment).
On top of that holy priest is also atm exceptionally good in pvp (should your GF ever want to go there), excellent at healing heavy spiky damage and quite hard to kill or even CC with 9 seconds immunity every 2 minutes (immunity is only available in PvP).