[Legion] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Atharaxie]

In dungeons... well.. it doesn't work so well. [...] free time (which despite some claims there actually is not that much of after DoTs, PW:S, and Penance upkeep) to be largely spent either spamming Smite or spamming Shadow Mend instead of thinking about your Atonement usage.

If you want to actually see some dungeon gameplay, I have 2 Normal mode runs and 1 Mythic run recorded

Thanks a lot, your first video (EoA normal) was very self explenatory of Disc theorical gameplay. That seemed really fun. The last one (EoA mythic) was, as you said, mostly Shadow Mend spam with a mix of other spells. Is attonment that ineffective in difficult 5 content ? Do you think that's something that could be changed in the beta or is it inherent to Disc and will stay in Legion ?

[Yunzi]

Ah the old Yunzi Shuffle, intentionally neglecting information that disagrees with your pre-supposed conclusion so that you can feel that you were right no matter what reality is.

Let's see, what is it this time?

-PoH is affected by Echo of Light, Shadow Covenant is not affected by Disc's mastery
-PoH triggers Serendipity, Shadow Covenant procs nothing
-PoH is not a talent, Shadow Covenant is
-PoH does not replace another spell to have, Shadow Covenant does
-When using PoH frequently, it will have an 18% bonus to its healing via the trait "Power of the Naaru", Shadow Covenant gains no such bonus (aside from the 10% increase traits both spells have)

If PoH was only a 1000% SP heal for 4.5% base mana for a 2 second cast that did not scale with mastery, it would be absolute garbage and no Holy Priest would ever use it. Let's not be dishonest when making comparisons now.



I don't need your help because your information is wrong. It is not arrogance to repeatedly stamp out blatant misinformation that is only geared towards appearing correct and not representing reality. Arrogance would be continually asserting that your ill-thought conclusions that are missing most of the relevant information are correct and that people with actual experience playing what you are talking about cannot possibly have a better viewpoint than you, someone with absolutely zero experience with what we are discussing.

For reference, Shadow Covenant is fine as a talented emergency heal when the player feels that it would be needed more frequently than planned setup for raid-wide healing or passive healing increases. That is its purpose, but it in no way "threatens" the way that Disc is designed to be played.

On what basis do you say that's it's purpose? *According to you* that's it's purpose. Here's a blue post from March 30th:

Discipline Priest Feedback -- Build 21384 -- 30-Mar
...

Nothing is inherently wrong with taking every available non-Atonement-improving talent and varying the playstyle away from the default, modulo correct tuning on the talents. Shadow Covenant is a new mechanic that thus far hadn't gotten much attention in testing, and if the most recent buff turns out to be too strong, that will greatly help narrow down the correct tuning.

Perhaps minor, but when looking at Shadow Covenant note that there's a tooltip bug--the absorb was increased in this build along with the heal (the absorb is still 50% of the heal). We're considering making the absorb based on the effective healing done, to be consistent with Shadow Mend.

The goal is not to have rotations where you don't use Atonement at all (and this seems unlikely since Penance, Smite, and low-count Plea are still very efficient). If Shadow Covenant feels like it can be spammed heavily in place of a normal rotation, then its cost is too low--but in any case it's good if that spell starts getting explored more on alpha.

---

Your vision of Shadow Covenant is not in line either with Blizzard's design goal for Shadow Covenant or with Shadow Covenant's current power. Blizzard itself is concerned that Shadow Covenant could be too powerful.

I can't get through to you. Your look down on me as a lesser being. So now you have a choice to treat Blizzard the same way or at least give *them* some respect.

[Spryte]

From what my raid leader is telling from beta, its not that Discipline is inherently bad, but that Holy is the superior healing spec in terms of output. Also being that Discipline no longer really has the advantage of absorbs, there would be no real reason to have a Disc over a Holy in most raid environments.

[Totaltotemic]

Your vision of Shadow Covenant is not in line either with Blizzard's design goal for Shadow Covenant or with Shadow Covenant's current power. Blizzard itself is concerned that Shadow Covenant could be too powerful.

Now you're just pulling things from 2 and a half months ago, which was a very different spell. Its healing absorb was not based on effective healing done, which allowed it to scale insanely with Crit and Versatility. It was also not a 1.5 second cast, which made it a very poor emergency healing tool.

I've lost track at this point whether you're being intentionally dishonest or actually just have no clue what you're talking about. I take pride in the fact that pure ignorance doesn't get through to me and change my mind about things; I see that as a very good thing.

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From what my raid leader is telling from beta, its not that Discipline is inherently bad, but that Holy is the superior healing spec in terms of output. Also being that Discipline no longer really has the advantage of absorbs, there would be no real reason to have a Disc over a Holy in most raid environments.

I'd love to know what that is based on, since there hasn't been raid testing in a few months and every healer has had numerous tuning changes. Nobody actually knows right now what the differences are, and if your raid leader is claiming to know right now then he's making things up.

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Thanks a lot, your first video (EoA normal) was very self explenatory of Disc theorical gameplay. That seemed really fun. The last one (EoA mythic) was, as you said, mostly Shadow Mend spam with a mix of other spells. Is attonment that ineffective in difficult 5 content ? Do you think that's something that could be changed in the beta or is it inherent to Disc and will stay in Legion ?

It's not that Atonement is ineffective, but that Atonement is not a single target healing tool. The power of Atonement is the ability to place it on as many targets as you like, and if it did very meaningful healing on a single target then it would be blatantly overpowered on 10 targets. It helps with the upkeep, but nothing really compares to a Grace-boosted Shadow Mend when it comes to single target healing.

There's a spot in the Clarity of Will talent to have a talent that meaningfully impacts Atonement and single target healing, but I think it's too late at this point to replace entire talents.

[Deleted]

Total is right, Atonement is multi target. If you want the absolute best single target, you should be casting PW:S on CD. Obviously that's ignoring Shadowmend spam.

[Deleted]

I think disc is gonna have a quite special and interesting role in the healing setups. Legendary Item: N'ero, Band of Promises: "Equip: When your Penance damages an enemy, it now also heals allies affected by your Power Word: Barrier." with Barrier of the Devouted trait. Makes the Barrier cooldown a really strong healing cooldown.

[Totaltotemic]

Right so there's this FinalBoss video on the front page right now. Before people jump in here after watching it, let's clear up a few inaccuracies:

-Versatility is not better than Crit. The "reliability" argument about Crit is largely irrelevant in WoW PvE due to the sheer number of damage events. This has been an accepted standard since the introduction of Versatility.

-External damage modifiers (fight mechanics that increase damage done or enemy damage taken) do NOT affect Atonement healing. This also means damage reductions do not affect Atonement healing. Only full immune/miss mechanics affect how much Atonement will heal for. This is very different from previous damage-to-heal mechanics, it is always normalized.

-Forbidden Flame (the end 0/20 trait that unlocks when you fill the other traits) will increase Atonement healing (the bonus per trait big number in the upper left still does not, and that's intended).

-PLEASE DO NOT GO FOR BARRIER FOR THE DEVOTED AS YOUR FIRST TRAIT! Doing this will royally screw up your character unless you spend an entire trait's worth of artifact power to respec the weapon. While the trait itself is pretty good, the traits needed along the way are among the worst in the entire tree, and Power of the Dark Side is a far better trait than Bay thinks it is (its proc is 1 RPPM and scales with haste). You really don't want to do dungeons without 15% extra PW:S and 10% extra Shadow Mend healing.

-Grace actually is much more useful for single target healing and less useful for AoE healing. For AoE healing, you want to be actually using Atonement, not casting heals on people that already have Atonement.

-Purge the Wicked has a 15 yard spread range, not 8. It will always spread to the nearest non-PtW target that is in combat with you, or if none are found it will spread to the target that has the shortest PtW duration remaining.

[PosPosPos]

On what basis do you say that's it's purpose? *According to you* that's it's purpose. Here's a blue post from March 30th:

Discipline Priest Feedback -- Build 21384 -- 30-Mar
...

Nothing is inherently wrong with taking every available non-Atonement-improving talent and varying the playstyle away from the default, modulo correct tuning on the talents. Shadow Covenant is a new mechanic that thus far hadn't gotten much attention in testing, and if the most recent buff turns out to be too strong, that will greatly help narrow down the correct tuning.

Perhaps minor, but when looking at Shadow Covenant note that there's a tooltip bug--the absorb was increased in this build along with the heal (the absorb is still 50% of the heal). We're considering making the absorb based on the effective healing done, to be consistent with Shadow Mend.

The goal is not to have rotations where you don't use Atonement at all (and this seems unlikely since Penance, Smite, and low-count Plea are still very efficient). If Shadow Covenant feels like it can be spammed heavily in place of a normal rotation, then its cost is too low--but in any case it's good if that spell starts getting explored more on alpha.

---

Your vision of Shadow Covenant is not in line either with Blizzard's design goal for Shadow Covenant or with Shadow Covenant's current power. Blizzard itself is concerned that Shadow Covenant could be too powerful.

I can't get through to you. Your look down on me as a lesser being. So now you have a choice to treat Blizzard the same way or at least give *them* some respect.

You demand respect when you haven't earned it so far. I mean, you can't tell you woefully wrong when nobody else has ever agreed with you for your entire post history.

If you wish to be treated as an equal, you should really behave appropriately.

In any case, I don't see why you started mouthing off about "Blizzard's intended design/vision" for Shadow Covenant, because no matter what they intended the spell to be and the semantics you wish to harp on, it's currently a 1250% sp emergency aoe heal at 1.5 seconds cast time during times you can't dps(lol).

It's as though you just started playing the game and have absolutely no clue that it isn't the first time Blizzard flip-flopped on their design and vision for the game. I mean, you don't even have to look past "Absorbs are too powerful in ToT" *uncaps T90* - Blizzard in MoP.

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I think disc is gonna have a quite special and interesting role in the healing setups. Legendary Item: N'ero, Band of Promises: "Equip: When your Penance damages an enemy, it now also heals allies affected by your Power Word: Barrier." with Barrier of the Devouted trait. Makes the Barrier cooldown a really strong healing cooldown.

The problem is what you sacrifice for getting there to begin with.

[Maues]

It's not that Atonement is ineffective, but that Atonement is not a single target healing tool. The power of Atonement is the ability to place it on as many targets as you like, and if it did very meaningful healing on a single target then it would be blatantly overpowered on 10 targets. It helps with the upkeep, but nothing really compares to a Grace-boosted Shadow Mend when it comes to single target healing.

Would making Atonement heal scale with the number of targets it is applied to be a bad thing?

Say for example you have it on just one target and it heals for a greater percent of the damage dealt (not enough to replace actual healing spells but enough to make it so you don't have to use them when the target takes a bit more damage than usual), and the more targets you apply Atonement to the less it heals(you won't apply Atonement to everyone in a raid anyways I think, so it would force you to choose your targets wisely).

[davesignal]

That would be really punishing when trying to move from spread healing to single target healing.

Maybe a talent that applies a double-sized Atonement to a target, but removes all your other Atonements, and is reduced back to normal size if you apply Atonement to any other targets.

[Ulmir]

That would be really punishing when trying to move from spread healing to single target healing.

Maybe a talent that applies a double-sized Atonement to a target, but removes all your other Atonements, and is reduced back to normal size if you apply Atonement to any other targets.

This is what CoW should be redesigned to. Instant cast, 2 charges, 45s-1m CD, slightly bigger shield than PW:S, 100% atonement.

CoW -> Penance would in that case be preferred tank healing before SM spam.

[Deleted]

You demand respect when you haven't earned it so far. I mean, you can't tell you woefully wrong when nobody else has ever agreed with you for your entire post history.

If you wish to be treated as an equal, you should really behave appropriately.

In any case, I don't see why you started mouthing off about "Blizzard's intended design/vision" for Shadow Covenant, because no matter what they intended the spell to be and the semantics you wish to harp on, it's currently a 1250% sp emergency aoe heal at 1.5 seconds cast time during times you can't dps(lol).

It's as though you just started playing the game and have absolutely no clue that it isn't the first time Blizzard flip-flopped on their design and vision for the game. I mean, you don't even have to look past "Absorbs are too powerful in ToT" *uncaps T90* - Blizzard in MoP.

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The problem is what you sacrifice for getting there to begin with.

Wont really be much a of a problem when you got a legendary you probly have filled most of the traits by then.


Its not really hard to see why single target healing is a problem for the specc. Atonements is still based on that low 40% of your damage. For it to be really good at single target healing without making it to good for aoe healing atonement kind need to start stacking on same target up to a balaned amount of stacks, lets say 2.

[tachycardias]

I don't know why people are trying to force the atonement mechanic to fit all possible healing niches. Atonement is for multitarget sustained damage. It should not be used for heavy single target dmg.

For single target healing shadow mend is one of the strongest heals in the game. It is not so good against large infrequent damage events, but is fantastic vs sustained dmg. If there are infrequent damage events,atonement is enough to fill it in over a period of time with possibly PWS as a buffer if needed.
Sustained single target = shadow mend
Sustained multitarrget "raid" damage = atonement
Infrequent spike damage = atonement

[davesignal]

People are trying to force the Atonement mechanic to fit all niches because it's cool. They want to use it more.

[tachycardias]

Variety is cool. Smite spam and lack of decisions is not.

[davesignal]

That's kind of the point, though. Having to maintain a DPS rotation to heal a tank would be more variety than mashing your Shadow Mend key.

[Totaltotemic]

The problem with trying to make single target healing more interesting by interacting with Atonement somehow is that Smite is so far behind Shadow Mend in terms of single target healing that you would literally need that Atonement to heal for 200% of damage done to make it worth Smiting instead of repeatedly spamming Shadow Mend with Grace, and even then it would only be worth it because you would save a bit of mana (it would still do less healing).

Clarity of Will actually has the right idea in that it's an alternative single target healing spell to Shadow Mend. If Atonement can't really be buffed in such a way to make it better than spamming Shadow Mend for heavy single target healing, then the next best option is some other spell that at least interrupts the 3-4 casts in a row of Shadow Mend with something else. CoW's problem though is that it is an absorb and also a cast time no-cooldown spell, which means it does not work with Shadow Mend but is mutually exclusive with it. What it would take is something that heavily synergizes with PW:S or a separate cooldown healing spell. Think a single target Circle of Healing.

[xdmemes]

Is there math posted anywhere on Castigation v. Schism?

[Totaltotemic]

Is there math posted anywhere on Castigation v. Schism?

A holistic comparison between the two in just terms of numbers is almost impossible to arrive at without assuming a number of things that won't actually hold true in realistic gameplay, largely due to how difficult it is to pin a value on Schism. It's an ability that buffs damage for a short time (so its HPCT, HPM, and HPS are all variable depending on how much damage is following the Schism cast), it has a cast time of its own (making assumptions about when you would cast it very difficult), and has a bit of a pricey mana cost of its own, meaning you can't assume that you would cast it on cooldown either (you go OOM if you do that).

Trying to compare all of that with a passive that essentially reads "Your Penance does 33% more damage" is a bit of a fool's errand. Instead we can just look at them for what they are, a passive increase to damage (and therefore healing) somewhere in the neighborhood of a 8-10% total damage increase (Penance being 24-30% of damage before Castigation) or a high cost, high reward active ability that increases damage by 30% (closer to 35% or 40% if you account for Schism's own damage) for 6 seconds at a time.

That's about as close to a pure numerical comparison as I think is possible without diving into some highly questionable assumptions, but it tells us what we need to know about them which is that Schism is strict but a higher damage increase if you can use it well, while Castigation is flexible and may result in higher damage or healing if Schism can't be used well in a given situation.

[tachycardias]

If it weren't for the mana consideration schism would always be better. I think that how relevant mana costs are at this stage for a spell with a medium cost like schism is very difficult to assess. The cost itself isn't that high, but maintaining high uptime would be somewhat costly. And unlike previous expansions, mana cost will likely remain a consideration throughout legion.