[Legion] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Gorsameth]

The damage absorb portion of smite is deceptively powerful; it's not a whole lot from one cast (although it is about 25% of a PWS iirc) but over the course of a fight it will add up. In total it can be thought as healing for 225%SP + (atone% x 225% x #atones). It's especially good in smaller groups where atonement healing is relatively less powerful; it's better than SWP until atonement is on >6 (maybe more) targets (not to say that smite is always > SWP for that number of atonements). I wonder if recount is going to be tallying smite absorbs in healing numbers.

I've been playing the PTR recently and I'm trying to wrap my head around why healing numbers in general are so much lower than in WoD (I also tried paladin and they seem lower there too). Shadow Mend is now one of the beefiest heals in Legion but heals less than Flash Heal on live (which is obv not live disc's strong heal). I'm sure this was brought up in early beta but does anyone have any ideas? I know the jewelry/cape no longer have Int on them but this doesn't seem enough by itself. It seems that for the few weeks of pre-patch, getting thru WoD content might be difficult.

There will probably be a big general % nerf to raids when the pre-patch releases to enable content to be done and Blizzard doesn't want to spend the time to do proper damage. I think they nerfed SoO by 30% when WoD released.

[Maefor]

Alright, so I have a question that might have been asked already on this thread, hopefully someone can indulge me.

As a raid leader, typically the mentality I've always had is when planning raid comps is: make sure you cover encounter mechanics, then cut every corner you can to maximize DPS. If my healers are not super amazing, then I'll add another healer because we'll wipe to raid damage. If my healers are performing well enough, then I'll probably sit one or two, and 2 or 3 heal 20 man mythics.

I look at disc now, and it just seems like a situational specc I guess? I just can't think of an encounter I've lead in the past 5 years where I wanted half a healer and half a DPS because it would be better. If I have to make a desicion like that today: bring a disc or another healer, or a dps, im almost always gonna bring the DPS as long as my healers can keep up with the damage.

So bottom line is: I'm looking for reasons to be convinced that discipline will have a room on mythic raids. I don't have all the info, and from my probably biased perspective it seems like whenever you want to min max you will almost always choose to go with the pure DPS, or the pure healer, almost never (but sometimes) with the hybrid. Am I right or wrong?

[Zomgasmz]

Alright, so I have a question that might have been asked already on this thread, hopefully someone can indulge me.

As a raid leader, typically the mentality I've always had is when planning raid comps is: make sure you cover encounter mechanics, then cut every corner you can to maximize DPS. If my healers are not super amazing, then I'll add another healer because we'll wipe to raid damage. If my healers are performing well enough, then I'll probably sit one or two, and 2 or 3 heal 20 man mythics.

I look at disc now, and it just seems like a situational specc I guess? I just can't think of an encounter I've lead in the past 5 years where I wanted half a healer and half a DPS because it would be better. If I have to make a desicion like that today: bring a disc or another healer, or a dps, im almost always gonna bring the DPS as long as my healers can keep up with the damage.

So bottom line is: I'm looking for reasons to be convinced that discipline will have a room on mythic raids. I don't have all the info, and from my probably biased perspective it seems like whenever you want to min max you will almost always choose to go with the pure DPS, or the pure healer, almost never (but sometimes) with the hybrid. Am I right or wrong?

i think from what I've seen on beta raid tests they can do quite well however in my opinion they do have a lot of requirements to make sure they tick over playing holy/bring another class.
Does the fight prefer stacking or spreading out for benefit on barrier, what healers are they running with, is it a lot of spiky damage, constant tick damage or a mixture of both. Disc still has a lot of strong pieces in its kit which might be getting overshadowed by the whole mixture of dps and healing.
Does it make it a vs all spec? maybe not but i think its definitely a great flex pick if you have the right priest to keep both disc/holy at high level.

[deviantcultist]

For those in the beta, I'd like to ask a question. Does Legion endgame consider Disc using dps trinkets that favor atonement? Or is it still designed around healing trinkets?

[Melchey]

For those in the beta, I'd like to ask a question. Does Legion endgame consider Disc using dps trinkets that favor atonement? Or is it still designed around healing trinkets?

Probably almost always healing, unless you want to get more damage (at the cost of healing).

[TirielWoW]

For those in the beta, I'd like to ask a question. Does Legion endgame consider Disc using dps trinkets that favor atonement? Or is it still designed around healing trinkets?

I have several trinkets that have DPS procs, and they all seem to proc Atonement. They're even marked in the system as "Disc."

[Iromaw]

Hello,

first of all, I want to appologice if this is a double post, but I already look for it and didn't found any relevant answer, I also opened a new thread but noone answered so better to try luck on this thread. I checked also through the whole thread and didn't found a final good answer, so here it goes:

I don't have PTR access, and I'm planning to main a disc priest in Legion, however, I mainly want to play with friends mythic dungeons and fastrun them. That's something that right now concerns me. Is disc priest capable to heal in mythic dungeons enough to be as viable as any other healing spec? I'm an experienced player that wants challenge, but a fair challenge, I mean, if at some point I'm in a terrible disadventage, then I rather prefeer not to play disc then.

I hope we can build a nice discussion about this.

Thanks,
Iro

[Deleted]

Hello,

first of all, I want to appologice if this is a double post, but I already look for it and didn't found any relevant answer, I also opened a new thread but noone answered so better to try luck on this thread. I checked also through the whole thread and didn't found a final good answer, so here it goes:

I don't have PTR access, and I'm planning to main a disc priest in Legion, however, I mainly want to play with friends mythic dungeons and fastrun them. That's something that right now concerns me. Is disc priest capable to heal in mythic dungeons enough to be as viable as any other healing spec? I'm an experienced player that wants challenge, but a fair challenge, I mean, if at some point I'm in a terrible disadventage, then I rather prefeer not to play disc then.

I hope we can build a nice discussion about this.

Thanks,
Iro

Everyone has acces to ptr, unless you mean something like that you dont have a computer rigt now to acces it.

But from what i can see on the beta disc can do pretty nice dps in dungeons, espcially with the mindcontrol giving them a pet. I think therefore they might be pretty great in Mythic+ and CM´s. Their healing just has to be enough, but that might aswell mean that you need to learn disc very well. Tho once people get abit of gear, healing isnt such a big requirement anymore as you just cc and dps down, wich can also make them perfect for the job by doing high dps and decent healing if needed.

[Iromaw]

First, thanks for the answer.

Everyone has acces to ptr, unless you mean something like that you dont have a computer rigt now to acces it.

Exactly, right now, I don't have a computer in order to test by myself unfortunatelly.

But from what i can see on the beta disc can do pretty nice dps in dungeons, espcially with the mindcontrol giving them a pet. I think therefore they might be pretty great in Mythic+ and CM´s. Their healing just has to be enough, but that might aswell mean that you need to learn disc very well. Tho once people get abit of gear, healing isnt such a big requirement anymore as you just cc and dps down, wich can also make them perfect for the job by doing high dps and decent healing if needed.

But my main concern is as a lone healer it can still heal as any other healer. The dps i think is a minor issue as we're going 1tank 3dps 1 heal composition. And as we're focusing on mythic dungeons, I'm pretty sure we will need to heal a lot, as every level adds damage to all the mobs.

Thanks

[Totaltotemic]

But my main concern is as a lone healer it can still heal as any other healer. The dps i think is a minor issue as we're going 1tank 3dps 1 heal composition. And as we're focusing on mythic dungeons, I'm pretty sure we will need to heal a lot, as every level adds damage to all the mobs.

Thanks

If your focus is solely on Mythic+ dungeons, you are going to want to also have a Holy spec. I guarantee there will be some dungeons/affixes that you can handle better as Holy, and some you can handle better as Disc. For example, some dungeons have mobs you can MC right at the very beginning and you can do as much or more damage than a DPS, which will allow you to end trash pulls and boss fights before you run out of mana from Shadow Mend spamming. Other dungeons either don't have any mobs you can MC at all, or just very few that you can only get towards the end, which means your damage contribution as Disc is only ~60-70% of what it would be in the other dungeons.

If you get affixes that do heavy tank damage, you may just need to be Holy so you can get the extra single target healing boost from Holy Word: Serenity and from Guardian Angel.

[Iromaw]

If your focus is solely on Mythic+ dungeons, you are going to want to also have a Holy spec. I guarantee there will be some dungeons/affixes that you can handle better as Holy, and some you can handle better as Disc. For example, some dungeons have mobs you can MC right at the very beginning and you can do as much or more damage than a DPS, which will allow you to end trash pulls and boss fights before you run out of mana from Shadow Mend spamming. Other dungeons either don't have any mobs you can MC at all, or just very few that you can only get towards the end, which means your damage contribution as Disc is only ~60-70% of what it would be in the other dungeons.

If you get affixes that do heavy tank damage, you may just need to be Holy so you can get the extra single target healing boost from Holy Word: Serenity and from Guardian Angel.

Hi, thanks for the reply. But I have another concern now here. Because you said that I prefeer be holy for some situations means that I will not be able to do it in discipline? Or means that I will be able but for a holy will be easier? I don't mind if is more challenging, but not being able to do it at all is another thing.

Thanks

[Symmone]

Is it going to be necessary as a priest healer to be maintaining both a holy and disc artifact weapon? With the interest of being able to have a viable option in all situations at least. Im not sure how often youll need to be swapping in raids in comparison to the situational aspects of Mythic+ but its something Ive been thinking about.

In my raid group at least, our comp in legion is likely going to be Hpally, Resto Sham, Resto Druid, and Disc priest with the ability to go Holy if needed. Still now sure what disc will be like live with tuning changes and artifact weps etc so Im at least planning to be able to swap to holy if necessary.

[mkultra55]

Is it going to be necessary as a priest healer to be maintaining both a holy and disc artifact weapon? With the interest of being able to have a viable option in all situations at least. Im not sure how often youll need to be swapping in raids in comparison to the situational aspects of Mythic+ but its something Ive been thinking about.

In my raid group at least, our comp in legion is likely going to be Hpally, Resto Sham, Resto Druid, and Disc priest with the ability to go Holy if needed. Still now sure what disc will be like live with tuning changes and artifact weps etc so Im at least planning to be able to swap to holy if necessary.

I think it's better to go Disc with a Shadow Off Spec.

[Totaltotemic]

Overall I'm having a hard time finding an example of an effective disc priest in raid performance on warcraftlogs. Does anyone have a pointer for me?

It's almost impossible to even find someone playing halfway decently just looking through random logs. Almost every player I've seen is missing entire high-throughput spells from their cast list, be it Power Word: Radiance (or Shadow Covenant... which you should almost always take if you are never casting PWR), Rapture, Barrier (is a high throughput CD with Barrier for the Devoted, which everyone had in today's tests), or is just not using PW:S or Penance anywhere near on-cooldown.

And that's when you can find a log with pulls that go over 2 minutes. The vast majority of logs that have a Disc at all are of the variety that wipes the first time any major mechanics happen. I experienced this on Friday trying to test in a pug where half of the raid would be dead within 5 seconds of the first boss's first raid-wide hit, so whoever did healing was either people that could heal while running (as this mechanic requires running like 80 yards straight and of course pugs didn't have coordinated roars or Gateways) or whoever had strong cooldowns they could use the instant the hit landed.

The only people that have the skill to play their respective spec's effectively and also are in a raid where all of the other healers are also playing effectively are unfortunately the same people who want to hide their logs because they are in competition for some of the first Mythic kills. I don't think that anything can be really learned from the past couple of day's logs except that Disc is terrible when everything is unorganized and/or the player isn't very good. However, we also kind of knew this already.

[Jimjam38]

So bottom line is: I'm looking for reasons to be convinced that discipline will have a room on mythic raids. I don't have all the info, and from my probably biased perspective it seems like whenever you want to min max you will almost always choose to go with the pure DPS, or the pure healer, almost never (but sometimes) with the hybrid. Am I right or wrong?

Keep in mind disc is more like an 80% healer, 20% dps. At any rate, the disc won't be doing half the healing of a holy priest, more like 70-80% (I think?).

But I don't think anyone can really give you a yes/no right/wrong answer right now, there's too much that can still potentially change the outcome. All I can really say is you're best option is to just keep an open mind about it and see how it's actually performing in Legion, and when you do try to base your decision on credible sources (like these forums, or Warcraft Logs) rather than the in-game perception, which isn't always correct (e.g. in SoO where "Unholy is trash, DW Frost 4 lyf" was the in game attitude, but any theorycrafter would tell you that Unholy pulled ahead considerably above a certain ilevel). I'll also warn you that, as it is now, Disc is much weaker in 5mans than in raids, so in the weeks leading up to raids opening there'll no doubt be a 'disc is bad' perception, which you shouldn't put too much faith in until you can see how the spec is actually performing in raids.

What we can say now is that Disc seems to have very strong utility. Barrier is very strong relative to other healer's cooldowns in Legion, and becomes even stronger with certain artifact traits and legendary items. Pain Sup is also the strongest of all the Healing specs tank cds in Legion although its cooldown is longer.
I can also say, with reasonable confidence, is that Disc will be terrible in the hands of a sub par player. It's got an innate complexity with very high skill cap and will take a very good player to bring out its full potential.

- - - Updated - - -

It's almost impossible to even find someone playing halfway decently just looking through random logs. Almost every player I've seen is missing entire high-throughput spells from their cast list, be it Power Word: Radiance (or Shadow Covenant... which you should almost always take if you are never casting PWR), Rapture, Barrier (is a high throughput CD with Barrier for the Devoted, which everyone had in today's tests), or is just not using PW:S or Penance anywhere near on-cooldown.

And that's when you can find a log with pulls that go over 2 minutes. The vast majority of logs that have a Disc at all are of the variety that wipes the first time any major mechanics happen. I experienced this on Friday trying to test in a pug where half of the raid would be dead within 5 seconds of the first boss's first raid-wide hit, so whoever did healing was either people that could heal while running (as this mechanic requires running like 80 yards straight and of course pugs didn't have coordinated roars or Gateways) or whoever had strong cooldowns they could use the instant the hit landed.

The only people that have the skill to play their respective spec's effectively and also are in a raid where all of the other healers are also playing effectively are unfortunately the same people who want to hide their logs because they are in competition for some of the first Mythic kills. I don't think that anything can be really learned from the past couple of day's logs except that Disc is terrible when everything is unorganized and/or the player isn't very good. However, we also kind of knew this already.

Yeah. This. I've had more success looking for videos of Disc raid gameplay than looking at the logs. In the ones I've found the disc priest seems to be competitive at any rate. The more bursty the raid damage, the better they're doing. I've seen them pulling 200-300k hps and up to 100k dps, but it's all kinda meaningless when it's just wipes.

- - - Updated - - -

Is it going to be necessary as a priest healer to be maintaining both a holy and disc artifact weapon? With the interest of being able to have a viable option in all situations at least. Im not sure how often youll need to be swapping in raids in comparison to the situational aspects of Mythic+ but its something Ive been thinking about.

In my raid group at least, our comp in legion is likely going to be Hpally, Resto Sham, Resto Druid, and Disc priest with the ability to go Holy if needed. Still now sure what disc will be like live with tuning changes and artifact weps etc so Im at least planning to be able to swap to holy if necessary.

I think it's certainly going to be expected for anything outside of your own guild raids/dungeons, and if for nothing else it'll be worth it for your own sanity. There'll be times when you just won't get a chance in pugs for raids or mythic+ without both specs, and possibly even times where it'll be downright unpleasant to try to do something as disc, particularly in higher end Mythic+.

My approach will probably be to get the 3 'major' traits as disc first, then put some into the holy and/or shadow artifacts, get those up to an acceptable level, then continue filling out disc. Once I reach paragon traits on disc I'll probably fill out the rest of the holy and/or shadow ones depending on what I get good use out of, and then probably put all extra artifact power into the disc paragon traits, and if that ever gets finished then I'd start putting them into holy/shadow paragon traits, whichever I find I used more.

[jayeffkay]

Not sure if asked but if multiple disc priests cast smite on the same target does each individual damage reduction debuff accumulate? I understand that each individual disc priest has a damage reduction cap.

[Symmone]

Keep in mind disc is more like an 80% healer, 20% dps. At any rate, the disc won't be doing half the healing of a holy priest, more like 70-80% (I think?).

But I don't think anyone can really give you a yes/no right/wrong answer right now, there's too much that can still potentially change the outcome. All I can really say is you're best option is to just keep an open mind about it and see how it's actually performing in Legion, and when you do try to base your decision on credible sources (like these forums, or Warcraft Logs) rather than the in-game perception, which isn't always correct (e.g. in SoO where "Unholy is trash, DW Frost 4 lyf" was the in game attitude, but any theorycrafter would tell you that Unholy pulled ahead considerably above a certain ilevel). I'll also warn you that, as it is now, Disc is much weaker in 5mans than in raids, so in the weeks leading up to raids opening there'll no doubt be a 'disc is bad' perception, which you shouldn't put too much faith in until you can see how the spec is actually performing in raids.

What we can say now is that Disc seems to have very strong utility. Barrier is very strong relative to other healer's cooldowns in Legion, and becomes even stronger with certain artifact traits and legendary items. Pain Sup is also the strongest of all the Healing specs tank cds in Legion although its cooldown is longer.
I can also say, with reasonable confidence, is that Disc will be terrible in the hands of a sub par player. It's got an innate complexity with very high skill cap and will take a very good player to bring out its full potential.



I think it's certainly going to be expected for anything outside of your own guild raids/dungeons, and if for nothing else it'll be worth it for your own sanity. There'll be times when you just won't get a chance in pugs for raids or mythic+ without both specs, and possibly even times where it'll be downright unpleasant to try to do something as disc, particularly in higher end Mythic+.

My approach will probably be to get the 3 'major' traits as disc first, then put some into the holy and/or shadow artifacts, get those up to an acceptable level, then continue filling out disc. Once I reach paragon traits on disc I'll probably fill out the rest of the holy and/or shadow ones depending on what I get good use out of, and then probably put all extra artifact power into the disc paragon traits, and if that ever gets finished then I'd start putting them into holy/shadow paragon traits, whichever I find I used more

Going off another post you wrote a page ago about the trade offs of such a high skill cap spec and reward in throughput as compared to the other healers, I wonder if disc would be more considered the jack of all trades if you will. If it is indeed designed not to match other healers in raids even when played flawlessly under perfect RNG, either aspect of disc (whether the healing or the dps) ends up being less than the sum of its parts. However if they make up for that with their utility in general maybe that makes up for it. And like you said, its hard to say. Optimal disc likely requires a lot of its artifact traits which also stated, a lot of us will be maintaining two artifact weapons so it may take longer to benefit from those fully.

And the interplay between damage and healing is still something I have never been fond of. So do people use their high damage spells on CD regardless of whether or not people are actually low health? Is that more or less the way we need to play disc so that our dps (which counts as a portion of our throughput whether it actually heals people or not) has significant meaning during an encounter? Or would you say we hold our dps (similarly to classic healing) when people dont need heals? Its not like in MoP when our smites were more or less filler since they cost so little mana during down time which made it easy to dps. Now our dps spells are our bread and butter that you couldnt really consider in the same light since they are no longer filler spells.

[Floopa]

its hard to judge disc because no-one seems to be playing it well/right and a lot of raid logs will be skewed via huge healing cds. in heroic logs discs did very well, but it's likely they don't work in mythic because their passive hps isn't enough to deal with the burst you're likely to face on progress. personally i wouldn't mind if it was unviable in mythic raids on progress, i think it would be fucking welcome after 4-5 years of disc dominance.

[Symmone]

its hard to judge disc because no-one seems to be playing it well/right and a lot of raid logs will be skewed via huge healing cds. in heroic logs discs did very well, but it's likely they don't work in mythic because their passive hps isn't enough to deal with the burst you're likely to face on progress. personally i wouldn't mind if it was unviable in mythic raids on progress, i think it would be fucking welcome after 4-5 years of disc dominance.

I have never been one to revel in the destruction of a class and I dont think any proper disc priest would argue that the past few xpacks of spammy spam were good ideas. We played the hand we were dealt. Ive loved disc since I started in BC and stayed with it ever since so it sucks that a spec youre so close (any spec really) would get batted with irrelevance...not of course saying disc has reached that point at all; just speaking hypothetically.

[PosPosPos]

Going off another post you wrote a page ago about the trade offs of such a high skill cap spec and reward in throughput as compared to the other healers, I wonder if disc would be more considered the jack of all trades if you will. If it is indeed designed not to match other healers in raids even when played flawlessly under perfect RNG, either aspect of disc (whether the healing or the dps) ends up being less than the sum of its parts. However if they make up for that with their utility in general maybe that makes up for it. And like you said, its hard to say. Optimal disc likely requires a lot of its artifact traits which also stated, a lot of us will be maintaining two artifact weapons so it may take longer to benefit from those fully.

And the interplay between damage and healing is still something I have never been fond of. So do people use their high damage spells on CD regardless of whether or not people are actually low health? Is that more or less the way we need to play disc so that our dps (which counts as a portion of our throughput whether it actually heals people or not) has significant meaning during an encounter? Or would you say we hold our dps (similarly to classic healing) when people dont need heals? Its not like in MoP when our smites were more or less filler since they cost so little mana during down time which made it easy to dps. Now our dps spells are our bread and butter that you couldnt really consider in the same light since they are no longer filler spells.

Smite is still a filler spell.

You only use it when everything else is on cd and you don't need to/shouldn't apply more atonements. That's the very definition of filler.