Different covenants are supposed to have different pros and “cons”.
Where mind games is a direct benefit to disc for their healing and damage that you can see the benefit from NF is not directly reflected the same way.
You are gaining power from your covenant ability in other ways, like mana and buffing your party.
If mind games is nerfed it affects content outside of raids. Spirit shell is the best ability to nerf what disc was doing in raids. Also the transfer rate from mindgames was nerfed with the spirit shell nerf (all transfer was).
Again without SS disc is in a pretty bad space for raid healing.
Its wasnt OP in the first place at all, its the way absorbs work which made disc top mythic raids, the healing potential of disc was in no way higher than other healers.
Disc is pretty much ONE AOE absorb every minute while other healers are constantly healing.
Evangelism is utter crap since you need pretty much the same set up time as for ss for a lackluster aoe heal compared to other healers, not even taking in consideration disc mana is so bad you cant do much out of that one min window or you run oom way faster than any other healer.
If they keep the ss nerf they need to tone up atonement healing by a good notch.
Maybe buff damg all over by 10 or 15%.
And even that wont bring disc near holy pala damg output while healing or hps and still they have seen no nerf at all so far.
Because holy palas dont post all over their forums they want a nerf as disc and holy priests do for some strange masochistic reason.
And if blizzard wants to get rid of absorbs they should not have given palas a pretty insane absorb mechanic with shock barrier.
Disc evan build worked in the past, but our damg was nerfed to hell and back with sl and its not a viable option, even moreso because raid mechanics are pretty bad for an evan build in the first place.
I mean this is just plain false, if you looked at the analytics before 9.0.5 (especially later into the tier) was handily beating other healers especially at the upper percentiles. Even in my personal experience, the shamans in my raid would be doing 80-90th percentile parses while I outhealed them at 50-70th percentile.
It’s not masochism. Spirit shell sucks to play with while also making healing less fun for the other healers. The way to fix that is to either remove it or nerf it.
And again the potential wasnt higher than other healers.
If others pulled way less hps then you run with too many healers and disc gets higher numbers because their “heals” are first to hit.
Look at the logs …
Other healers often have 30% mana left at the end of the fight when disc is oom way before them so they could have healed quite a bit more if it would have been necessary.
So if its no fun for the other healers, the nerf was done because som,e egos got offended because the raids ran too many healers and couldnt htop meters because of the mechanic of ss and NOT the healing potential of disc?
What about the fun of disc being rock bottom in normals forever and now in heroic and mythic too ?
If absorbs are the problem remove them completely and buff the other options to comepensate.
And remove absorbs from holy palas too then. They are top in every single aspect of the game , PVE, PVP, Raids, M+, Damg by such a insane amount SS wasnt even tickling the OPness of Holy Palas and they just sail by with no consequences at all.
Calss balnce is pretty biased this expansion.
You havent even tested the nerfs yet and looking at the logs of your 9.0 raids the other healers of your setup werent far behind you at all.
It pretty much comes down to you play the most diffcult spec way better than your fellow healers and therefore pull higher hps then them, cant see something wrong with that.
Test it out now and then form your opinion.
The problem these days in all aspects of life is that people seem to put opinions BEFORE facts.
If statistics proof something , opinions are totally irrelevant.
People , well at least most sane people, wouldnt argue about the earth not being flat, because there is proof, well some still think its flat but thats an OPINION and absolutely irrelevant.
Actually flat earthers believe they have substantial “proof”, for them its not opinion its “fact” based on their “proof” whether there is actual proof that the earth is not flat is not their concern.
What we are discussing isn’t even if there was a nerf or that the nerf was too big.
What we have been pointing out is that SS is OP for what you gain from it vs what you gain from traditional healing.
What we have said is that disc won’t be benched because of the nerf.
You are interpreting what we say in your own way assuming far too much in the process.
Am I happy I got nerfed, not really but I understand it
Was a nerf needed? Yes.
Was it too big of a nerf? I couldn’t say right now.
Is it something that can be tuned in our favour? It can be.
Should disc receive tuning elsewhere to make up for it? Too early to tell, but I wouldn’t be against it if its needed.
Do I think disc damage output is off? Yes, but I dont like seeing the tool tip difference between sw:pain and smite for holy and disc, but thats personal feels.
I have tested the nerfs. I raided Wednesday night (we started extending and didn’t kill anything), I already said the nerf was huge there is absolutely no disputing that. But the doom and gloom is wholly unnecessary, disc isn’t going anywhere.
I dont think disc is going anywhere but i just dont understand the logic.
Looking at the top logs (i know this isnt the average user but it is what is achievable) on huntsman lets say, the best parse for disc was 11.1k HPS in 9.0.
Now lets look at 9.0.5 and Druid is pulling 12.4k HPS.
I dont get the logic in nerfing something only for it to be replaced by something more powerful.
If blizzard don’t like absorbs remove SS from the game and move evangelism to a 1 min cd.
But good luck timing that evang ramp with spell queuing, this is one of the advantages to SS that everyone seems to be missing.
The nerf is good in a vacuum, I also think it’s pretty bad that they decided to do this nerf mid-tier.
I don’t really think it’s the same thing. Firstly it’s not 70% absorbs, but also correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t really see resto druid (over say boomkin) bringing anything special utility-wise. Either way, if disc did exactly the same HPS through evangelism now, than it did through spirit shell in 9.0, I think that would actually be fine.
As much as I’d want to revert the BFA evangelism nerf, does the CD fix much though? If you run evangelism using CoM you can ramp more often than you can with spirit shell since you just alternate rapture and evangelism. I think the bigger problem is you need to cast schism>mindgames>mindblast>penance to actually do the healing. They’ve been nerfing the dmg more and more and putting more spells behind the atonement healing rotation. In legion you just casted penance or light’s wrath > smite spam to top the raid but now you have to cast 5 different spells for the same effect.
I am aware of this tbh, the spirit shell is way more lenient, also shifting the ramp window back 10 seconds is in itself a huge advantage.
I still want to wait and see, atm this just looks like a straight up nerf 'cause I don’t see a good reason to stop using SS until next tier (and this is a maybe, depending on how they design the encounters).
You are correct it is absorbs, but I have nothing else to compare it to. Unfortunately that is the manner in which we need to compare it as absorbs is all we can do
You are also right, changing the CD wouldn’t work and I sort of said it on purpose. To try and get another one of my points across. I think they should rework Spirit Shell to act like Cloudburst Totem
Keep the time the same, 10 Second Ramp, 10 seconds SS afterwards. Instead of absorbs do the below.
For 10 sec, Penance, Power Word: Radiance, and Atonement are stored for 80% of their value.
When atonement expires or the stored power is released, all targets with Spirit Shell shall be healed for the value stored.
Casting Spirit Shell a second time releases the healing.
This would remove the absorbs completely but keep the gameplay mechanically the same.
I do think this would render Evang useless, however they could remove that and provide us with a different talent since we aren’t sure if spell queuing will go away.
As for a legendary to go with it, as a different approach it might be nice to have one like the below.
Instead of your Spirit Shell healing being released instantly, it is now released over 10 seconds.
