Currently leveling Discipline priest. The way it works in BFA is kinda old Shadow armed with Vampiric Embrace: PWS everyone who might be taking damage & DPS enemies. Atonement fading > recast PWS or just Radiance > spam some more Smite. Uh, this a healing spec, or a DPS spec with inbuilt party support?Flash baseline would be good, Shadow Mend feels bad in combat when you just delay damage on tank instead of really healing.In general PWS seems to suck and it's only use is putting Atonement on 1 target. Needs beefing up.Penance is good for DPS. No joke, it's castable while moving, and really weak as heal, but slightly better than Smite in DPS. So why does this spell has healing function again if it doesn't heal people, just keeps them walking a while longer?Power Word Barrier is a cheap copypasta of Anti-Magic Zone, like the small indie company couldn't squeeze out some $ for graphics team to make a new "holy yellow-white bubble" effect (instead of palette swap) and new sound effect (pure old Wrath AMZ). Too strong to ignore, too long CD to actually use as something else than cheesing a big raid-wide hit.Mind Blast & Sear baseline = meh/good. Good because Discipline gets ranged AoE. Meh because Blast is YET ANOTHER DPS ability to bind & use on cd when you are, y'know, the healer.The whole thing with Discipline being labeled "HEALER" gets old when you play it a bit and realize it heals more by damage dealing abilities than actual healing abilities. Really, VE Shadow + some yellow-tinted spells. Who the heck put that label? It's obviously DPS... :DPower Infusion, Evangelism, Rapture, Shadowfiend/Mindbender should be off GCD, feels incredibly bad to waste 1,5s doing nothing but casting INSTANT buff on SOMEONE ELSE, or yourself and not benefit from it for that 1 gcd. Bad enough Discipline doesn't really have tools to sustain healing party/raid, it doesn't need more GCDs.
A lot of this thread is just selfish wish lists and it shows that a lot of the comment section doesn't really play discipline priest at the highest of levels. Discipline is a specialization made for mythic raiding, by using Power Word: Radiance and/or Rapture before huge burst windows they become a perfect raid healer. The issues are not that there are lackluster GCDs... if you are actually complaining about rapture and evangelism being boring; it shows that either you aren't grasping what the abilities are meant to do or you aren't using them right. The Devs gave discipline priests the perfect cooldowns for high intensive healing. Both Evangelism and Rapture are at the same cooldown time of 1.5 mins, while other classes such as holy paladins need essences to fix their base kit to even use glimmer correctly. It also gives the user an opportunity to use them in succession or use them at two different times which Holy paladins don't get the option to do that.Furthermore, shadowfiend/mindbender isn't meant for you to see results right away! They are abilities used prior to large damage mechanics or when the raid has rot damage. For the thread to say that it doesn't feel good I'm not sure what you want out of this ability? When used in tandem with 15+ atonements on the raid, shadowfiend almost doubles the healing throughput. Discipline priests aren't BM hunters or Frost Mages so I guess I'm not completely understanding why you think we need an action bar for a pet that is solely there to help you heal and in other variations of the game also a mana battery.Lastly, I want to address two big things regarding the thread. First, Power Infusion is not always meant to be used on yourself. In higher raiding content when the spell was in the game before removal; Power Infusion was always used on the caster that utilized the haste the most and this will still be the case in Shadowlands. Yes, healers want to see everything used on them such as Innervate/Power Infusion/Wisdom/Etc. However, just like what they did for Innervate, where it now has the secondary effect for putting there cast on another player these abilities aren't meant to be used selfishly. Power Infusion will be primarily put on strong casters during their burst windows and not used on yourself. Unless Discipline priests get nerfed so hard that they start to have mana issues this spell should almost never be cast on the user. Leading me into my last point.Reading the Night Fae covenant portion of this article, it is obvious that you are saying the ability is not worth using. But every high end raider I have spoken to about this covenant ability has said this ability is busted. Multiple clips have shown things such as spamming a Frost DK with Power Word: Shield during their Breath and it extended their Breath for more than double its normal uptime, and for Warriors in execute they will literally be able to constantly be casting execute if the ability is used in that regard. And when you don't need to buff up a dps you can then spam shadow mends on the whole raid to give everyone a 10% dr on top of the already amazing Power Word: Barrier. Which is the issue with this covenant ability... The Night Fae ability is not an issue for it not being good, the issue is that the ability is TO GOOD. The issue is that instead of using Rapture as a way to do throughput it will now be used to buff up their fellow party members and this makes for very unhealthy gameplay. Most world first guilds will have to create comps around this ability to utilize the ability and completely amplify a single player every 1.5 mins. As I mentioned prior Rapture is also a 1.5 min cd which now you can see where the underlining problems lie. I think they will need to completely scrap the Night Fae ability or discipline priests will have no choice to choose it and basically become an equivalent to a Bard or a raid utility healer.I would love to hear anyone else's opinions on what I had to say! Furthermore I want to address that I do not hate the author nor the article written, I am just not fully onboard with specific comments made that would influence the reader into thinking a specific way. I also love almost all the changes with what they did to the discipline priest in Shadowlands and by complaining about minor things such Mind Sear not doing enough damage or Mind Blast having to long of a cooldown that it feels bad to press it will cause the Devs to inevitably remove the abilities instead of fix them.
I doubt Disc will ever return to "bubble lord". Blizz has stated that absorbs are too powerful and detract from other healers. More direct throughput would be a nice medium. During high damage use a direct healing/absorb cycle, and during low damage/constant AoE a primarily DPS cycle. The 30% damage "target" (as mentioned in some presentations and interviews) is where a lot of the complaints seem to lie. The option to switch to 10% damage with more upfront healing/absorbs would be nice.
Imho it would be best to simply add atonement as a talent to Holy and come up with something completely new for Disc.I know a lot of players will hate on this proposal, but as long as NEITHER priest healing spec can have something cool "because the other spec has something like it!" priest will always have the worst complete package out of all healers.If i play Disc, i cannot access the throughput talents/spells of Holy. If i play Holy, i have no access to the absorbs/damage<>healing conversion of Disc. Other healers always have access to all their healing-talents.Priest having 2 healing specs is NOT a bonus - its a liability. Especially if the expansion forces you to specialise into ONE spec (Azerite Armor in BFA, Covenant in SL).
Evangelism should be a base line ability and they need to add better talents.
sadly shadowlands seems intent on keeping priests on the weaker side of things overall.2 healing specs, neither of which is particularly good. 1 dps spec that is slow AF.I just wish we had a good damage spec to go with the lackluster healing specs priest has. Soloing content is just decidedly slower on a priest than any other class, even in shadow.
I mentioned in my first comment that disc is not good in mythic+ and there is an underlining issue with that but the solution is not to gut the spec it is to just add more talents that can fix this. Shadow Covenant is a good step in the right direction but instead of it just increasing shadow damage by X% it should just make it so it increases the potency of shadow spells by X% this makes it so shadow mend will also be affected by this ability. Its little things like that, that can help discipline. Besides this in all content other than M+ disc is probably one of the most well-rounded healers. However, as I mentioned previously disc excels at raid healing it feels like it was created for this specific purpose. The problem is that almost all the healers aren't in a good place for M+ besides druids and monks, holy pallies just recently came into the meta for M+ but that is because Holy paladins have spiraled out of control for scaling in the current expansion. The whole argument started because someone mentioned that disc should just be scrapped and turned into a holy talent. The solution is not to just get rid of something because of inconvenience. I think the Shadowlands Devs need to look into all healing specs and see why some specs are performing well in M+ while others are flopping.
Its =/= it's.Every. Single. Article.
These comments make me feel sorry for the priest discord.
Disc would be miles more optional to bring to m+ (and more consistent raid throughput) if we had a few things: - A slow Heal spell baseline to counteract many of the “rot” damaged or bursting effects we see in mythic plus in a way that won’t make us OOM in 5 spells like shadowmend feels. The ability to have any sort of efficient out of combat heal would be great as well in comparison to shadowmending our hearts out.- Reduced recovery rate for Radiance to improve AOE healing capability OR alter our mastery back to how it used to be. Having atonement be a proximity based heal off the target you’re damaging and increase that healing by x% and absorption by x% based off mastery is leaps and bounds more appealing than “if you’re healing someone that already has atonement on them, here’s a little more to add on”- A SILENCE/INTERRUPT. Even on a 45 second Cooldown, we’ve experienced things like the horrific visions where solo encounters are just less favourable for you to be doing while in Disc because we lack an ability like this. These are some of the only things that I actually find bothersome with it. As my main character, I manage to get the job done but you can also visibly see how much harder disc is working to output as much as it is in comparison to other healing specializations.
I really would not mind Disc struggling in Mythic +, if Holy was good... but every season both Priests specs are the least desirable healer any group wants. Mass Dispell cannot keep up with the utility of the other healers, the so-called damage healer cannot compete with a paladin (or Resto, Monk?) for damage.
disc in raid is god tier since many years.disc in PvP is really gooddisc in mm+ is ok, not best tier but not worst tier. Ppl like Moadmoad do 26-27 timed, but ppl just prefer to play with Pal or DroodDisc player want to be god in all format...
For my personal wishlist I would add Shadow Covenant to not only increase damage done by shadow spells, but also healing. This would be really helpful talent in m+ scenarios with Bursting / Grievous affixes. Running completely oom after second mob pack because of shadow mend spam is just not fun