[7.0] Legion Discipline Priest Guide and Discussion

[Djriff]

Plus we can actually benefit from the healer ring and get pretty beefy shields on everyone, unlike 6.x disc.

Not to mention the stats on the healing ring are better than the DPS one.

[Levelfive]

Usually to either get a tank (if it is about to fade) or damage spikes on DPS.

Sometimes to get myself (since PW:R has a pretty long cast time, and my haste is not all that high), If I am taking damage, etc, I get myself and someone else, then start DPSing.

Right, but the mana cost of Plea increases 100% per Atonement out, so I would think you would want to Plea early in the cycle rather than late, and use the time after Radiance strictly for dps, no?

[Totaltotemic]

Yeah, I can try that, after you mentioned it, I realized the mana cost is higher after two PW:R. My only concern was that doing Plea x2, then casting PW:R x2, would mean that the first two Pleas/Atonements are close to fading.

That's why haste is so good. With 30% haste, if you Plea, Plea, PWR, PWR, the end is only 6.15 seconds after the beginning. You still have another ~9 seconds of Atonement before the first Plea would fall off. This is how you chain together PWRs for 10-15 Atonements out at a time. Haste is king.

[Totaltotemic]

Yeah for reference, once you have full heroic dungeon gear in Legion you'll be at least at 20% haste already. If you're under 25% right now, this is the lowest amount of haste you will basically ever have doing a raid, so it will feel slow and difficult to manage getting your atonements off.

[anon5123]

I suppose my only gripe with Disc is that Atonement doesn't last long enough, and we don't have enough ways of applying it.

In 5mans it's not an issue since there's only 5 people, but in a 25man raid, you can really only have Atonement on a few people at once, unless you want to burn your mana bar spamming PWR. PWR itself, I'm just left scratching my head. Compared to similar AoE heals, it has a much higher mana cost, much slower cast time, and lower healing. All that to balance it around Atonement. It pretty much exists for no reason other than to be an AoE atonement applicator. Why not remove its healing, lower the mana cost and cast time, and have it just be that: a way to quickly apply Atonement to multiple people?

Atonement only lasting 15 seconds is rather annoying as well, since by the time you get it out on a bunch of people, you only get maybe 5 or 6 seconds of DPS before you've got to re-apply more.

And on top of all this, the random nature of raid damage only further goes against this design. Other healers can just heal any raid damage on anyone as it comes out; Disc has to rely on a finnicky AoE heal with a slow cast time and then start DPSing to do some meager healing; in that time the other healers can very easily snipe the healing.

Compare Atonement to Vivify or Chain Heal:

Vivify / Chain Heal: Cast once or twice, damage healed up
Atonement: Cast PWR once or twice, hope that it applies Atonement to the right people, and then start smiting/Penance to slowly heal them up, and not really end up doing much healing because Vivify/Chain Heal got to those people before you even started DPSing

It's just...egh, so much slower and feels really clunky.

Ideally, I'd like a spell that applies Atonement to 5 people, maybe put it on a CD so that it can't be spammed, and make Atonement last 20 seconds baseline, and change Contrition to be +5 seconds instead of +2. As it is right now, Contrition is pretty shit since Power Infusion is just so much better, but I'd gladly take Contrition if it was +5 seconds on Atonement.

Or maybe change how Atonement works, so that if Atonement is applied when the target has full health, it will remain at full duration, and only start ticking down when the target takes damage for the first time. That would kinda bring back some of the "set up for big raid damage" that was previously done with PWS or Spirit Shell.

OR...make it work like REM does, and just have Atonements jump around to anyone who is missing health. With their duration intact, of course. That way you could just hit 2-3 PWR's and then go to town on the boss, healing up whoever takes damage, but...eh, I suppose that's too similar to the original smart-heal Atonement, and Blizz said they didn't like it because it was too mindless.

I've always loved the concept of dps-to-heal, but it's still not working particularly well. It's decent in 5mans, but struggles in raids larger than 10-15. I don't feel like I have control over who I'm healing, which is a pretty big annoyance.

[Yunzi]

I think I have gotten the Disc rotation down, more or less, but could use more tuning...

If any want to critique what I am doing, it would be of great help:

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/42nyw3adpRqA7rWk#

My Priest is "Empathy".

From my own POV, I need to remember to bubble more, I tend to skip that now, and just use Plea, also need to remember to use the Mindbender CD when it is up.

I really like the PW:R though... I tend to use that twice, and Plea the tanks... than DPS till Atonement is about to fade.

My gear is not the greatest, the app is recommending I go Holy instead... but I am going to be doing Shadow/Disc in the expansion... (Main is Shadow)

From my own logs I feel like a lot of Disc priests are doing things like you are - applying atonements and then DPSing until the atonements run out. That's pretty risky to do though - if unexpected damage comes in near the end of your DPS you're screwed, since everyone's atonements are running out.

My healing numbers have been good but my damage numbers not so much because I use a single Schism-enforced DPS-limited rotation. Meaning, I apply a bunch of atonements, Schism > Penance > Smitex3, and when Schism runs out I apply more atonements, while the first ones are still up.

This is more flexible but perhaps less effective under current HFC circumstances than simply DPSing until the atonements run out. But as we move into Legion and progression, I prefer the more flexible and moderate rotation.

As to your logs - Plea is great to use pre-pull - cast a bunch of them along with PWSes before the pull, and then go into your normal rotation. During fights you can use Plea if you want to continue your type of rotation. So lots of atonements followed by a long damage sequence then when the atonements run out do some Pleas and PWSes followed by ONE PWR then followed by the next damage sequence. In my type of rotation featuring a much shorter damage phase Plea is only useable pre-pull - during the pull it's all PWS, Shadow Mend, and PWR because several atoned targets are maintained throughout the fight.

PWR has a big problem when any atonement applicator (especially a 2nd PWR) is used immediately after it - you're casting it on a player who may receive atonement from the first PWR cast, unless you pause after the first to see who receives it, which is a throughput (CPM) issue in itself. That's another reason to use PWR at the *end* of an atonement phase, when this issue is avoided.

[Yunzi]

I suppose my only gripe with Disc is that Atonement doesn't last long enough, and we don't have enough ways of applying it.

In 5mans it's not an issue since there's only 5 people, but in a 25man raid, you can really only have Atonement on a few people at once, unless you want to burn your mana bar spamming PWR. PWR itself, I'm just left scratching my head. Compared to similar AoE heals, it has a much higher mana cost, much slower cast time, and lower healing. All that to balance it around Atonement. It pretty much exists for no reason other than to be an AoE atonement applicator. Why not remove its healing, lower the mana cost and cast time, and have it just be that: a way to quickly apply Atonement to multiple people?

Atonement only lasting 15 seconds is rather annoying as well, since by the time you get it out on a bunch of people, you only get maybe 5 or 6 seconds of DPS before you've got to re-apply more.

And on top of all this, the random nature of raid damage only further goes against this design. Other healers can just heal any raid damage on anyone as it comes out; Disc has to rely on a finnicky AoE heal with a slow cast time and then start DPSing to do some meager healing; in that time the other healers can very easily snipe the healing.

Compare Atonement to Vivify or Chain Heal:

Vivify / Chain Heal: Cast once or twice, damage healed up
Atonement: Cast PWR once or twice, hope that it applies Atonement to the right people, and then start smiting/Penance to slowly heal them up, and not really end up doing much healing because Vivify/Chain Heal got to those people before you even started DPSing

It's just...egh, so much slower and feels really clunky.

Ideally, I'd like a spell that applies Atonement to 5 people, maybe put it on a CD so that it can't be spammed, and make Atonement last 20 seconds baseline, and change Contrition to be +5 seconds instead of +2. As it is right now, Contrition is pretty shit since Power Infusion is just so much better, but I'd gladly take Contrition if it was +5 seconds on Atonement.

Or maybe change how Atonement works, so that if Atonement is applied when the target has full health, it will remain at full duration, and only start ticking down when the target takes damage for the first time. That would kinda bring back some of the "set up for big raid damage" that was previously done with PWS or Spirit Shell.

OR...make it work like REM does, and just have Atonements jump around to anyone who is missing health. With their duration intact, of course. That way you could just hit 2-3 PWR's and then go to town on the boss, healing up whoever takes damage, but...eh, I suppose that's too similar to the original smart-heal Atonement, and Blizz said they didn't like it because it was too mindless.

I've always loved the concept of dps-to-heal, but it's still not working particularly well. It's decent in 5mans, but struggles in raids larger than 10-15. I don't feel like I have control over who I'm healing, which is a pretty big annoyance.

I feel like Contrition is balanced right now with Power Infusion, and I've been using and plan to continue to use Contrition - it's a stable, always-good talent, whereas Power Infusion's use has to be planned out. I feel like the nerfs to Contrition from 5 seconds to 3 seconds to 2 seconds were all good, and 2 is it's point of balance.

It's interesting that you also mention Power Word: Radiance applying to 5 people, since in an earlier Alpha build this was precisely the case. But I think that right now the spell is pretty well balanced - it could be nerfed in power but increased back to 5 targets, although keeping it like it is makes it contrast more against the 5-target healing of Shadow Covenant.

I like the fact that atonement applicators have a healing component. Other than tanks the primary targets for applying atonement are players who have already taken damage, since that's usually easier to determine than figuring out who's going to take damage in the next 15 seconds.

I'm also bothered by the lack of control over healing targets in Legion Disc, especially since WoD Disc was so good at that. I don't think that's a problem that is easily fixable in the current frame of Disc healing.

[anon5123]

I feel like Contrition is balanced right now with Power Infusion, and I've been using and plan to continue to use Contrition - it's a stable, always-good talent, whereas Power Infusion's use has to be planned out. I feel like the nerfs to Contrition from 5 seconds to 3 seconds to 2 seconds were all good, and 2 is it's point of balance.

Eh, I've always liked PI because it's a really nice throughput CD that can make a big difference when you really need it. +2 seconds on Atonement isn't really going to save anyone, and it's barely noticeable in a raid.

It's interesting that you also mention Power Word: Radiance applying to 5 people, since in an earlier Alpha build this was precisely the case. But I think that right now the spell is pretty well balanced - it could be nerfed in power but increased back to 5 targets, although keeping it like it is makes it contrast more against the 5-target healing of Shadow Covenant.

If Shadow Covenant applied Atonement, it might be worth taking, but as it is right now it's just completely useless.

I feel like 3 targets on PWR is too little, considering the cast time, mana cost, and how little healing it does.

I like the fact that atonement applicators have a healing component. Other than tanks the primary targets for applying atonement are players who have already taken damage, since that's usually easier to determine than figuring out who's going to take damage in the next 15 seconds.

Yeah, the problem is that applying Atonement just feels slow and clunky compared to traditional AoE healing. Other healers just have to hit their AoE heal and bam, damage healed. Disc on the other hand has to use a slow-casting, high-mana spell to apply Atonement, and it has a really weird formula for how it chooses who to heal (it seems to prefer players who are missing Atonement, instead of players who are missing health) and then start DPSing to slowly heal those players up.

It's a good idea on paper, but in execution it's tedious and clunky.

[Yunzi]

Yeah, I am trying to figure out if I want to go with Atonement "main" healing... or the more traditional direct healing with some DPS in between. Basically meaning using Shadow Mend/Penance to heal + Atonement.

From the guides on here, Icy Veins and the Wow Forums, it seems to be, as you said Atonement being the "main" way Disc is healing... But with "The Penitent" + "Grace" you could actually go the way you are doing it... I am thinking of trying that out as well.

You're mistaken - although in dungeons I'll consider using The Penitent, I can't imagine doing so in raids (which is all I've done so far in the pre-patch). I'm using Schism, Contrition, Halo, and Purge the Wicked, although I think that Castigation and Shadow Covenant are fine options for raiding.

I wonder if one way will be the "goto" spec, or if it is more about playstyle versus plain numbers.

Mythic+ versus progression raids will probably have different optimal talents and healing styles - Clarity of Will, Grace, and The Penitent are very much hard-core Mythic+ talents IMO. Selecting these basically destroys one's DPS but keeps as much consistent single-target healing going as possible. It just seems like going to this extent to keep the tank alive raises the question of why one doesn't just switch to Holy at that point.

[Totaltotemic]

The Penitent and CoW are only ever useful in place of Shadow Mend in the case that you need to move and single target heal (for the Penitent) or you are really concerned with shielding someone before damage happens and PW:S isn't good enough (for CoW). Like Yunzi said though, they utterly destroy your DPS to use them.

Right now the only way to translate your mana and time into HPS on the level of other healers is to throw out a bunch of Atonements and then do damage centered around some kind of high period of raid damage. If you deviate from that for any reason, whether it's to focus more on single target healing, to maintain some kind of constant high number of Atonements, or to focus on "unexpected" emergency healing, your HPS drops like a rock to the point where you might as well just spec Holy and DPS in your downtime.

There's really two kinds of choices in Disc talents: the kind that you need extremely specific reasons to take and reasonable differences that you may succeed better with depending on the circumstances.

Castigation/Schism
DS/Halo
Contrition/PI/ToF
PtW/Grace

The above fit the acceptable difference category. You'll never do drastically less healing by deviating from what is optimal in the above choices, but only slightly less under normal circumstances and possibly slightly better in others.

The Penitent
Solace/Shield Discipline
Clarity of Will
Shadow Covenant

These talents you need some very specific reason to take them, and none of them will result in better overall HPS in really any kind of circumstance (except lovely addons/WCL that count both Shadow Covenant's healing and its healing absorb as effective healing ) You basically have to sacrifice a lot to pick up any of these talents, and it really better be worth it over just speccing Holy instead.

[Deleted]

It will be interesting to see if Disc will be viable when you are leveling and healing dungeons. And if not, if Blizzard will basically say go Holy till you get better gear, etc, or if they actually change the class to be more "healer" than DPS...

Disc can easily heal dungeons while leveling. Unless you boosted to 100(640 gear) and went straight into a dungeon where you ended up healing a nearly max level tank there are no issues.

[Yunzi]

Yeah, the problem is that applying Atonement just feels slow and clunky compared to traditional AoE healing. Other healers just have to hit their AoE heal and bam, damage healed. Disc on the other hand has to use a slow-casting, high-mana spell to apply Atonement, and it has a really weird formula for how it chooses who to heal (it seems to prefer players who are missing Atonement, instead of players who are missing health) and then start DPSing to slowly heal those players up.

It's a good idea on paper, but in execution it's tedious and clunky.

Yeah, we've been talking about how slow Legion Disc is for the entirety of it's development. It's slowness, long set-up time, and general complexity are probably a big reason why Shadow Covenant exists in the first place, to offer an easier, more traditional way to group-heal similar to Holy Priests' Prayer of Healing. A player selecting Shadow Covenant and The Penitent can blast Penance on players who've taken large damage, use Shadow Covenant for raid healing, and otherwise use Plea, PWS, and Shadow Mend here and there and if none of that is needed, do atonement DPS. This type of healing is much more similar to that done by all of the other healing specs.

[anon5123]

Yeah, we've been talking about how slow Legion Disc is for the entirety of it's development. It's slowness, long set-up time, and general complexity are probably a big reason why Shadow Covenant exists in the first place, to offer an easier, more traditional way to group-heal similar to Holy Priests' Prayer of Healing. A player selecting Shadow Covenant and The Penitent can blast Penance on players who've taken large damage, use Shadow Covenant for raid healing, and otherwise use Plea or Shadow Mend here and there and if none of that is needed, do atonement DPS. This type of healing is much more similar to that done by all of the other healing specs.

Yeah, the problem with that though, is that it sucks. It can't even come close to the HPS of other healers, or even Atonement Disc. It's not very viable at all.

I love the idea of Atonement on paper, but in execution it's just not working out very well.

Rift pulled off the "dps to heal" archetype very well back in vanilla, with one of the Cleric specs just having a passive aura that heals 5 people for 50% of damage you deal, and you cast a few heals and dispels and buffs in between. Was very viable in 5mans and extremely viable in raids, being arguably the best raid healer. Though that was mostly because they had a semi-spammable heal that smart-healed 10 people. And it was instant cast.

But alas, Blizz said they don't want smart-healing Atonement because they feel that there's no thought involved, and they don't want people mindlessly spamming Smite to heal.

[Totaltotemic]

Might as well go into this now because I have a very good illustrative log on hand for it.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...6&type=healing

This is the current #2 rank HPS Disc parse for Mythic Xhul'horac. Notice how 64% of his healing is Shadow Covenant.

This is going to be very, very long because I'm going to manually verify whether any of the Shadow Covenant debuffs from each cast (all 27 of them) lasted for 6 seconds, or if they were fully consumed. I can do this by going to the debuff events for Shadow Covenant and noting when it is applied and when it is removed to figure out how long they lasted. I'll be using the last debuff from each cast.

Cast 1 (0:41) - All debuffs gone 1.8 seconds later

Cast 2 (0:51) - Debuffs gone 1.1 seconds later

Cast 3 (0:53) - 2.1 seconds

Cast 4 (0:57) - 1.3 seconds

Cast 5 (0:59) - 2.0 seconds

Cast 6 (1:00) - 1.8 seconds

Cast 7 (1:01) - 0.8 seconds

Cast 8 (1:02) - 1 of 4 debuffs (this one only hit 4 people) lasted the full 6 seconds! (the one on Gabani)

___ Beyond here it gets to be a bit of a mess because he starts going to town and spamming SC for the rest of the fight so I'm going to switch to the debuff graph to help

Cast 9 (1:22) - 3.8 seconds (Ikhor's lasts a while beyond the others)

Cast 10 (1:24) - 2.3 seconds

Cast 11 (1:25) - 1.7 seconds

Cast 12 (1:28) - 3.0 seconds

Cast 13 (1:29) - 2.5 seconds

Cast 14 (1:31) - 2.6 seconds

Cast 15 (1:32) - 0.4 seconds

Cast 16 (1:33) - 2.3 seconds

Cast 17 (1:36) - 5.2 seconds (Nouway almost made it)

Cast 18 (1:39) - 2 of 5 debuffs lasted the full 6 seconds! (Pãodeoculos and Senx. Special mention to Madnees who somehow got his buff refreshed through a smaller healing amount before this one was fully eaten)

Cast 19 (1:41) - 1 of 5 debuffs lasted the full 6 seconds! (Gforced)

Cast 20 (1:42) - 2.8 seconds

Cast 21 (1:44) - 2.5 seconds

Cast 22 (1:46) - 2.5 seconds

Cast 23 (1:49) - 1.9 seconds

Cast 24 (1:50) - 1.2 seconds

Cast 25 (1:51) - 1.2 seconds

Cast 26 (1:53) - To fight end

Cast 27 (1:54) - To fight end

There were 4 total debuffs that expired. They totaled (5827 + 12945 + 47591 + 31071) = 97434 healing.

Shadow Covenant "did" 7.1 million healing, of which 3.55 million should have been an absorb shield. We'll take away 100k or 0.1 million for the debuffs that faded, so in reality only 3.45 million was an absorb and the spell actually did 3.65 million.

So we subtract 3.45 million from his 11.03 million total for a final 7.58 million healing, or 65.9k HPS, around 30% less than what he is shown as doing.

Remember this if you ever see someone using Shadow Covenant. Take half of whatever it did, and throw that away because it wasn't actual healing (until Kihra and people that make the various addons fix this).

[spungebobby]

Interesting read!

Maybe I missed something but, shouldn't you divide that absorbed healing by ca 3? Since there were 3 others healers there who probably absorbed about 33% of his covenant "shield" each? So his hps (rough headcount estimate) would be closer to 76kish?

[Totaltotemic]

Interesting read!

Maybe I missed something but, shouldn't you divide that absorbed healing by ca 3? Since there were 3 others healers there who probably absorbed about 33% of his covenant "shield" each? So his hps (rough headcount estimate) would be closer to 76kish?

No, because I'm only counting the total absorption created, not how much of his healing was absorbed. I actually have no idea who was having how much of their healing absorbed, just that ~3.45 million healing across the raid was absorbed by SC's debuff.

Think of it like this: WCL says he did 11.03 million healing, but he also created 3.45 million more "damage" to be healed.

[VigilantRose]

Remember this if you ever see someone using Shadow Covenant. Take half of whatever it did, and throw that away because it wasn't actual healing (until Kihra and people that make the various addons fix this).

Bear in mind that there is really no practical distinction between overhealing and healing absorption. So it's a bit more complex than 'half'. In all likelihood, there were plenty of situations where Shadow Covenant's upfront 500% spellpower/target heal topped someone off and they received subsequent healing that ate away the shield. In such a situation, the existence of the healing shield wasn't meaningful.

[Totaltotemic]

Bear in mind that there is really no practical distinction between overhealing and healing absorption. So it's a bit more complex than 'half'. In all likelihood, there were plenty of situations where Shadow Covenant's upfront 500% spellpower/target heal topped someone off and they received subsequent healing that ate away the shield. In such a situation, the existence of the healing shield wasn't meaningful.

Yes it was, because that healing would have topped them off anyway. That is to say, for all intents and purposes it only did half of its healing and the other heals did the rest. Shadow Covenant didn't somehow not take away future healing just because the end result was that the player ended up at full health.

Let me put it another way. The assumption is that Shadow Covenant is only really a 250% SP heal and not actually a 500% SP heal. The only way it does more than 250% SP effective healing is if the absorb times out, because otherwise that other 250% would have been done by someone (even the Disc), except it wasn't due to the absorb. It's effectively a 250% SP heal with 250% SP future-stealing of anybody's healing.

[VigilantRose]

Yes it was, because that healing would have topped them off anyway. That is to say, for all intents and purposes it only did half of its healing and the other heals did the rest. Shadow Covenant didn't somehow not take away future healing just because the end result was that the player ended up at full health.

Except you apply this definition to no other heal. If Flash Heal tops someone off and forces a Rejuvenation to overheal, you don't claim the Flash Heal is 'worth less'. But that's exactly what you're claiming with your analysis: that somehow a healing shield matters on a full health player.

If you're looking at it from a strictly theorycrafting sense, it's reasonable to argue that Shadow Covenant provides 250%/target healing due to the healing shield. However, once you're looking at logs, you need a method far more rigorous than simply halving effective healing to make any sort of rational comparison to other heals.

[PosPosPos]

Except you apply this definition to no other heal. If Flash Heal tops someone off and forces a Rejuvenation to overheal, you don't claim the Flash Heal is 'worth less'. But that's exactly what you're claiming with your analysis: that somehow a healing shield matters on a full health player.

If you're looking at it from a strictly theorycrafting sense, it's reasonable to argue that Shadow Covenant provides 250%/target healing due to the healing shield. However, once you're looking at logs, you need a method far more rigorous than simply halving effective healing to make any sort of rational comparison to other heals.

Even if you didn't halve it, and picked a moderate value to peg the healing absorb to, it's still going to be inferior to PWR.