[Legion] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Floopa]

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 to get batted with irrelevance...not of course saying disc has reached that point at all; just speaking hypothetically.

thats fair but what i think people need to remember is that disc is likely impossible to balance. in 5 mans it's pretty fucking strong simply because dominate mind exists (and makes disc priests able to reach 300-400k dps easily). obviously you don't have access to dominate mind in raids, so you're losing about 50-66% of that 300-400k dps immediately. now you're sitting on 100-150k dps max, but you can never achieve it because it requires hitting penance on cd... something you likely aren't going to do because you need to save penance for big bursts of damage. so you save penance, making your damage bad. now your atonements are much worse off, so it makes PWR (which is pretty op) seem a lot less powerful because for it's cost it cannot be justified. idk i just don't think the spec works.

it honestly feels like you'll be forced into SM/SC spam ... in which case just play holy priest/resto shaman cus those specs bring much more to a raid. right now i think the strongest specs are shaman hpriest monk (in that order). they're all hps spammers and do something for the raid. i would hope im not wrong because i would absolutely love to see holy priests be the dominant spec again, but at least this expac it seems like disc players will need more than mashing their face into the keyboard to do well

[Symmone]

Well as of now Im planning to maintain a holy artifact in case things go awry. I am more willing to believe all the prexpack qq (including my own) is just due to uncertainty and a lot of factors that will iron out once we hit 110 with the artifact weapons.

[Totaltotemic]

thats fair but what i think people need to remember is that disc is likely impossible to balance. in 5 mans it's pretty fucking strong simply because dominate mind exists (and makes disc priests able to reach 300-400k dps easily). obviously you don't have access to dominate mind in raids, so you're losing about 50-66% of that 300-400k dps immediately. now you're sitting on 100-150k dps max, but you can never achieve it because it requires hitting penance on cd... something you likely aren't going to do because you need to save penance for big bursts of damage. so you save penance, making your damage bad. now your atonements are much worse off, so it makes PWR (which is pretty op) seem a lot less powerful because for it's cost it cannot be justified. idk i just don't think the spec works.

it honestly feels like you'll be forced into SM/SC spam ... in which case just play holy priest/resto shaman cus those specs bring much more to a raid. right now i think the strongest specs are shaman hpriest monk (in that order). they're all hps spammers and do something for the raid. i would hope im not wrong because i would absolutely love to see holy priests be the dominant spec again, but at least this expac it seems like disc players will need more than mashing their face into the keyboard to do well

Almost everything in this post is wrong.

MCs are usually 30% of damage unless it's specifically one with an AoE ability in which case you're talking about AoE DPS and not single target DPS. Nobody is ever hitting 300k in a 5 man with a single target MC.

You also never save Penance for anything. It has a 9 second cooldown, that's like saying you save Holy Shock or Renewing Mist, it doesn't make sense.

Your atonements would be much worse because you'd be playing horribly by not using Penance on CD. Atonement (and subsequently PWR) is still by far the most HPM and HPS provided you don't do stupid things that make that not work properly.

Finally, you will literally never see Disc devolve into Shadow Mend and Shadow Covenant spam in raids because you would be OOM within 2 minutes. It might pad HPS meters on testing pulls that are a minute or two long, but in a real raid nobody would ever do that and conclude it was better than just healing normally.

Now Disc's healing might be tuned to be too weak right now, but that doesn't mean any of the nonsense that you've said is true at all regarding the best way to play Disc.

[davesignal]

Anyone else anticipating an uproar over mana costs when real raiding begins after release, and all the disc priests stacking haste to the ceiling have to deal with fights that last more than two minutes?

[Totaltotemic]

Anyone else anticipating an uproar over mana costs when real raiding begins after release, and all the disc priests stacking haste to the ceiling have to deal with fights that last more than two minutes?

There will definitely be an uproar about mana once people start dealing with full length pulls, but it will have nothing to do with Disc and Haste being the best stat (it is actually the best in terms of HPM, not just HPS).

[Zomgasmz]

i do feel like its very much pre-patch worries (especially when u think of how WoD damage is like)... disc priests still have some pretty good cool downs and setup for raid conditions, they may not have the healing to deal with burst damage that well but i feel like their niche is to healing certain situations and dealing with the cool down phases very well.

I've been watching some of the raid testing and trying out on my Paladin with disc priests in the raid, one of the disc priests i noticed on Krosus sort of had the understand that his main job was to keep people from 75% to 100% hp with the druids hots, holy priest/shaman was using their spells mainly to burst heal throw slams then when it came for main raid burst damage from the adds spawning u saw disc priest pre-rapture as many people he could get his atonement up, put barrier to effect them before the damage then nuke heal while everyone was get the extra 100% from artifact perk.

Are disc priests more challenging? most definitely. Do i think they ain't viable for a raid? hell no, as long as they are bring the cool downs and their sustain healing i think they have a good spot in a raid and ill definitely be bring one as long as i can fill the other healing slots as well. As for the mythic+ etc. i cant give much insight on it as i normally play a healer in it and haven't tried disc priesting it.

[davesignal]

There will definitely be an uproar about mana once people start dealing with full length pulls, but it will have nothing to do with Disc and Haste being the best stat (it is actually the best in terms of HPM, not just HPS).

Haste is almost always the best stat for throughput for healers, that's never been seriously in contention except during WoD with stat attunements and such. The issue is that haste makes you spend mana faster, and the DPS-y nature of Discipline is going to lead people to think that (like DPS) they should always be chain-casting.

[Saiyoran]

Haste is almost always the best stat for throughput for healers, that's never been seriously in contention except during WoD with stat attunements and such. The issue is that haste makes you spend mana faster, and the DPS-y nature of Discipline is going to lead people to think that (like DPS) they should always be chain-casting.

The playstyle when you get more haste is to convert it into more Smites as opposed to more Pleas/Radiances in an ideal world. That's the only way it can remain competitive in HPM that I can think of. We have a handful of very efficient spells that we can cast more often with more haste.

Unfortunately, when you need HPS and you're stacking haste, chances are you're going to be applying extra atonements at points with those globals. I'll wait til actual raid content to see how haste's HPM works. Also Mindbender scales with haste I think.

[Totaltotemic]

Also Mindbender scales with haste I think.

And SW:P as well as Penance (via Power of the Dark Side's RPPM scaling with haste), and PW:S being able to be cast more often which is one of the most efficient spells in the kit. Solace also scales with haste if you use that. It's actually the spells that make up the bulk of Disc's healing that get better with haste in terms of HPM, which is why it's so good.

[Yunzi]

The optimal way to play Disc is conditional upon many factors - mana regen, ilev relative to the encounter, group composition, etc. Let's not draw too many early conclusions.

In challenging raid situations we're going to want all the mana regen we can get - along with farming for the two key legendary items that's the gear I'm looking to get ASAP.

Haste is almost always the best stat for throughput for healers, that's never been seriously in contention except during WoD with stat attunements and such. The issue is that haste makes you spend mana faster, and the DPS-y nature of Discipline is going to lead people to think that (like DPS) they should always be chain-casting.

Not just DPS - everyone should be chain-casting whenever they have the mana to afford it. For healers this means either doing damage or applying "slow heals" like HoTs that have a decent chance to be effective even when the target is at 100% health.

Per the "conditional upon many factors", we don't know exactly how tight the mana situation in raids will be yet, but it's certainly possible that it's going to be bad. A low-mana raid rotation is maintaining several atonements while doing minimal or no damage, and not casting any spells when we would otherwise be in a damage phase. So a sequence of...

PWS > PtW > SM > SM > SM > PWS > X > X > X > X > PWS > X

Where Xs are empty GCDs replacing damage spells in a "normal" Disc rotation.

This type of rotation leaves us in a state of readiness - whenever unexpected damage comes in we already have several players atoned and can immediately go into Schism > Penance > Smite

[Jimjam38]

Almost everything in this post is wrong.

MCs are usually 30% of damage unless it's specifically one with an AoE ability in which case you're talking about AoE DPS and not single target DPS. Nobody is ever hitting 300k in a 5 man with a single target MC.

You also never save Penance for anything. It has a 9 second cooldown, that's like saying you save Holy Shock or Renewing Mist, it doesn't make sense.

Your atonements would be much worse because you'd be playing horribly by not using Penance on CD. Atonement (and subsequently PWR) is still by far the most HPM and HPS provided you don't do stupid things that make that not work properly.

Finally, you will literally never see Disc devolve into Shadow Mend and Shadow Covenant spam in raids because you would be OOM within 2 minutes. It might pad HPS meters on testing pulls that are a minute or two long, but in a real raid nobody would ever do that and conclude it was better than just healing normally.

Now Disc's healing might be tuned to be too weak right now, but that doesn't mean any of the nonsense that you've said is true at all regarding the best way to play Disc.

Yeah I was thinking basically all this when reading his post, though not in quite as aggressive terms.

- - - Updated - - -

Haste is almost always the best stat for throughput for healers, that's never been seriously in contention except during WoD with stat attunements and such. The issue is that haste makes you spend mana faster, and the DPS-y nature of Discipline is going to lead people to think that (like DPS) they should always be chain-casting.

*cough* mop disc crit mastery *cough*

- - - Updated - - -

On another note on the PTR I've noticed something strange. The tooltips for SWP and Purge seem to read almost the same damage (~3k initial + ~32k dot for SWP over 18 sec, ~ 7k + ~37k dot over 20 sec for Purge. I did a quick test on some target dummies, SWP average tick was 3.3k, Purge was 3.5k

Can anyone else confirm? Is this a bug? According to the database SWP should be 280% spellpower over 14 seconds, and PTW should be 420% over 20 seconds.
Dunno what's going on here.

[Deleted]

Yeah I can't think of any situation where you would want to save Shield or Penance, those are best used off cooldown, since shield can virtually never be wasted (unless you targetted someone who never takes damage... in which case that's on you :P) and Penance synergizes with PtW, helping making an already powerful dot (although based on what @Atonement said, it's a little worrying how powerful that is) become double effective.

I honestly find that the best filler would be Purge, not Shadowmend. I noticed shadowmend being a little heavy on mana (or this was the case for me when I tested in ptr) so it's a nice thing to weave in and out of but not something that should be spammed unless tank death is imminent and no cooldowns are available, along with the main burst also being down.
@Totaltotemic , @Atonement and any other active Disc priest testers out there, do you have any links to interesting disc vids to check out? I mostly checked as many as I could find on Youtube but most testers made me rest my head in my hands and some even caused me heartburn :P Would really appreciate seeing someone besides FinalBoss, Preach and AutomaticJak play a disc.

[drtrann]

...and any other active Disc priest testers out there, do you have any links to interesting disc vids to check out?

I am in the process of cutting together a video (short and too the point). I'm waiting however till I finish a program I've been working on to simulate raid healing so I can test a bunch of different styles and figure out which is more "ideal". unfortunately with the limited testing windows and them not matching up with my schedule I haven't been able to clearly determine the "right" way to heal 20 man mythic.

also yes, a lot of the instruction videos are straight wrong, but totaltotemic's video is very good in demonstrating the 5 man style.

[Deleted]

Hi, just tried the first time disc on legion, and I am a litte bit disappointed. Always loved Clarity of Will, but that is the point of this spell, if even a single crit is already over the target cap, which is ridicously low at 28.4% of my HP with Grace (without 21.9%). And why is Grace increasing the HP cap? It should be better explained in the Talent discription of Grace.

This low Cap makes Crit terrible for CoW builds, Mastery is also terrible, Haste is ok except you will run into mana problems. So only Versatility is good for this build, which is of course terrible per default...

[Yunzi]

Hi, just tried the first time disc on legion, and I am a litte bit disappointed. Always loved Clarity of Will, but that is the point of this spell, if even a single crit is already over the target cap, which is ridicously low at 28.4% of my HP with Grace (without 21.9%). And why is Grace increasing the HP cap? It should be better explained in the Talent discription of Grace.

This low Cap makes Crit terrible for CoW builds, Mastery is also terrible, Haste is ok except you will run into mana problems. So only Versatility is good for this build, which is of course terrible per default...

Unfortunately what's happened is that the Disc community in general (you notwithstanding) don't enjoy Clarity of Will, so there isn't much outcry over it's underpowered status in Legion. We're like "well, we'll just take DS or Halo anyway, no biggie".

That's terrible news about the lowering of the cap on CoW - why in the world would Bliz do that? Are people really complaining that CoW's WoD cap is too high?

[Deleted]

but totaltotemic's video is very good in demonstrating the 5 man style.

Don't think I happened upon this video as of yet, mind linking it please?

[drtrann]

Unfortunately what's happened is that the Disc community in general (you notwithstanding) don't enjoy Clarity of Will, so there isn't much outcry over it's underpowered status in Legion. We're like "well, we'll just take DS or Halo anyway, no biggie".

That's terrible news about the lowering of the cap on CoW - why in the world would Bliz do that? Are people really complaining that CoW's WoD cap is too high?

because in the first raid tests on alpha, disc priests went CoW and Grace and literally just sat there spamming it on tanks, doing 3-4x the healing of any other healer (need to dig up the logs, but pretty sure I was well over 800k hps). it was absolutely terrible and they had to kill it to actually get people to play disc the way they intended. (really not sad to see it go, just wish they replaced CoW with something not terrible).

Don't think I happened upon this video as of yet, mind linking it please?

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7K...3O8cN2mOXvTdzA

[Deleted]

Hi, just tried the first time disc on legion, and I am a litte bit disappointed. Always loved Clarity of Will, but that is the point of this spell, if even a single crit is already over the target cap, which is ridicously low at 28.4% of my HP with Grace (without 21.9%). And why is Grace increasing the HP cap? It should be better explained in the Talent discription of Grace.

This low Cap makes Crit terrible for CoW builds, Mastery is also terrible, Haste is ok except you will run into mana problems. So only Versatility is good for this build, which is of course terrible per default...

Hmm, tested CoW again...
Made a Character copy of my Lvl 100 Priest... there the Cap with Grace was 46% (195k/424k HP). Is it not longer dependent on the caster HP and some kind of spellpower scaling, or is it just broken at 110?

Edit: ah ok, seems to be based on spell power/int and not Caster HP (tested with and without weapon). That's why Grace is also increasing the Cap.

Further testing (I don't know whether this is already known...) Cap is 18 Hp per 1 Spellpower =1800% Spellpower (without Grace, Grace= x1.3)

So in general you can cast 2 CoW or 1 crit for the Cap, the problem ist versatility, which is not increasing the Cap (that's why you are over the Cap with 1 Crit).
Imo the Cap is too low (should be 2700% Spellpower), because you cannot cast on the same target twice Clarity of Will, because you will already start the second cast, before you realize the first cast was a crit.

[xdmemes]

We don't need any CoW buffs - it's already a pretty poor talent that doesn't fit well into our toolkit. Not sure why it even still exists - allowing it to stack multiple times will just encourage mechanic cheesing.

[Morrighan]

SOoooooooooo, Is CoW good now? Seeing as healing 5 mans sometimes devolves into spamming Shadow Mend, I dont think I'd mind spamming CoW instead. 900% sp vs 770% sp(with artifact). I mean we'd be putting PW:S on the tank on CD anyway so the lack of atonement application wouldn't be a huge problem, and if we actually get a bit ahead in healing could give us time to spread atonement to the other group members. Shadowmend would still act is the "flash heal"....
I mean, so long as it doesn't become a thing in raids........maybe it isn't the literal devil... Maybe? I mean.... I wanted to use CoW in WoD. Guys...