[7.0] Legion Discipline Priest Guide and Discussion

[Hamunra]

Shadow is one of thoes speccs that scale immensly with their artifact. The artifact spell is quite a big deal cos it stopps the insanity lose.

Thank you all for the replies. So the general agreement would be that disc "could" function as a dps/back up healing in casual raiding, but would hinder serious progression even with the added utility? I have to imagine that some mythic groups must have tested its viability and determined its not worth it, but I wanted to check.

[Jimjam38]

Please stop feeding the nonsensical notion spewed out by some people that Disc is "not viable." It's pretty clearly an ignorant and horribly misinformed statement and anyone that far down the rabbit hole away from reality isn't going to listen to any kind of reason. It's basically just hate speech at this point, and the best way to deal with that is to ignore such cries for attention.

I feel like the only way this misconception by the general wow public will go away is if there are discs utilised in the world first guilds. If there are people will suddenly be like "disc mandatory" and if not people will decide "disc nonviable"

[Djriff]

I feel like the only way this misconception by the general wow public will go away is if there are discs utilised in the world first guilds. If there are people will suddenly be like "disc mandatory" and if not people will decide "disc nonviable"

I said it before and I'll say it again, i'll let raids and logs do the talking for how viable disc will be. The main problem that I see and has been mentioned is that people will stick disc with the stigma of being bad because people don't know how to play it. So if you're pugging as a disc you'll have to hope that the RL believes you're decent at it, logs would probably help, but perception is reality. If people see a lot of bad discs they will think the spec sucks.

[Ahovv]

At a mythic level, maybe. I don't remember having any trouble with Holy throughout Normal+Heroic. I was always at least on par with other healers, barring Disc.

Game balance literally only matters at the highest level. Questing/LFR/Normal/Heroic content is not tuned with optimizations in mind. It's simply not challenging enough to force everyone to play what is best.

If you aren't doing mythic, then you shouldn't care about game balance. It's actually a bit surprising you're even commenting here.

[Hamunra]

Do you happen to have logs for your pull as shadow? Can't really tell you if you're playing right without them.

To answer your original question, it's probably better to main shadow and just swap to disc to heal on those fights you need to. You're really gimping yourself and the raid if you just use disc as a DPS spec.

Djriff,

No, I wasn't logging at the time because I thought the result was going to be overwhelmingly shadow but was surprised disc did so well, it was only then that I came here seeking more informed opinions.

[Tzlha]

Am I correct in saying that in the higher end mythic+ dungeons, disc devolves into Shadowmend spamming? Has there been any word on whether this is the intentional play style? I was thinking of maining disc for legion, but I will probably primarily be doing mythic+ dungeons and don't want to be stuck only pressing one or two buttons.

[Djriff]

Djriff,

No, I wasn't logging at the time because I thought the result was going to be overwhelmingly shadow but was surprised disc did so well, it was only then that I came here seeking more informed opinions.

If you can, run another pug as shadow and pm me the log and i'll give you some advice. Your DPS as shadow should be much greater than Disc, regardless of gear.

[lcs]

Am I correct in saying that in the higher end mythic+ dungeons, disc devolves into Shadowmend spamming? Has there been any word on whether this is the intentional play style? I was thinking of maining disc for legion, but I will probably primarily be doing mythic+ dungeons and don't want to be stuck only pressing one or two buttons.

For higher level Mythic+ yes, you will be spamming a lot of Shadowmend and using less Atonement.

It is important to keep in mind that in those same dungeons, each of the other healers are also reduced to spamming their high HPS heals. Not many classes have multiple different ways to deal with fuck you levels of sustained damage on a single target. This is not a problem specific to discipline priests.

[Krazzorx]

Important thing to remember about dungeons is mana doesn't matter basically at all. Which basically breaks all healing specs' "rotational" complexity.

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The biggest difficulty in comparing healers in anything outside of mythic (and now high end mythic+) is the experience is so dependent on outside factors like amount of healers, players knowing mechanics to a reasonable level, and out gearing the content. (And as a general rule of thumb, most outside of mythic run far too many healers).

This is different than dps which you generally can get a feel of in any raid difficulty. Very little changes.

The chance you can replicate a challenging healing situation outside of a mythic and possibly heroic raid is very minimal.

[Zuzie]

Does anyone know if the alchemy trinket will be worth it? I'm guessing since mana is going to be rough the added bonus to the mana pot during the fight might prove quite useful in mythic+ / raids etc. Not sure if the versatility and other effects on it will be good enough though compared to other trinkets.

Cheers.

[fallenangel-succ]

A druid in dungeons uses rejuv, regrowth, lifebloom, swiftmend, efflorescence, cenarion ward (if specced), with ironbark on a 1 minute CD.
Shamans have riptide, healing surge, healing wave, chain heal, healing stream totem, cloudburst totem, their artifact ability has a 45s CD and they can spec into earthern shield totem, a shortish CD.
Holy have their holy words, flash heal, renew on the move, prayer of healing, prayer of mending, perhaps circle of healing.
That said, if you pick the up the penitent, you have a pretty solid rotation of PW:S, penance and shadowmend in between, with the occasional SW:P and plea. So it won't be a single button spam.

[Hamunra]

If you can, run another pug as shadow and pm me the log and i'll give you some advice. Your DPS as shadow should be much greater than Disc, regardless of gear.

I should be able to run HFC normal this Sat. i'll log it and send you the link to analyze. Thank you.

[Jimjam38]

A druid in dungeons uses rejuv, regrowth, lifebloom, swiftmend, efflorescence, cenarion ward (if specced), with ironbark on a 1 minute CD.
Shamans have riptide, healing surge, healing wave, chain heal, healing stream totem, cloudburst totem, their artifact ability has a 45s CD and they can spec into earthern shield totem, a shortish CD.
Holy have their holy words, flash heal, renew on the move, prayer of healing, prayer of mending, perhaps circle of healing.
That said, if you pick the up the penitent, you have a pretty solid rotation of PW:S, penance and shadowmend in between, with the occasional SW:P and plea. So it won't be a single button spam.

Okay, so in the situation where the tank is copping fuck off levels of damage, as disc, as you said theres shadowmend, pws and the occasional swp. Theres also pain suppression, better than any other tank cd. 4 min cooldown? Okay theres also barrier, which in dungeons can be as much a tank cd as a group cd. Then theres also mindbender/shadowfiend, on a 1/3 min cd, a solid hps cooldown that will also dps, thus reducing the length of time you need to spam all fuck heals for. Oh and lets not forget Light's Wrath, 1.5 min cd I think. Power Infusion. 2min cd. Divine Star/Halo, 15/45 sec cd, decent aoe damage and healing. TRINKETS. How many resto druids can turn aoe damage proc trinkets into hps on the tank, or an on use damage trinket into a mini cd? RAPTURE. 2 min cd, pws spam the tank, slightly lower hps than shadowmend, but your hots, mindbender, tank self heals and so on can slowly top him up while your pws eats the damage
Lets not forget, if you have time to set up before all fuck damage begins, more swp on the enemies becomes more hots on the tank. You can easily throw out 3 swp to become 3 hots on the tank, like a weaker version of a resto druids double rejuv talent. But theres no cap. On the number of swp except the number of globals you can afford to spend on it.
And you mentioned hpriest having renew on the move? Thats cute, how about penance, swp, pws, plea and mindbender on the move.
Disc toolkit is absolutely not lacking, even in the most spammy desperate tank healing situations.

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Now, and this really goes out to everyone, I started reading through the bulk of this thread in the hopes of finding some little golden pieces of useful information, the little tips, tricks, ideas and suggestions that I've come to expect from the MMOC spec discussion threads. Now, I still have half the pages here to work through, but I ended up skipping to the end to make this post because I had become so frustrated with the absolute crap this thread has been dominated by in at least 50% of all posts I've seen so far. And i get here to see that, for the most part, this same crap is still being argued about. I'm talking about the ABSOLUTELY SHIT AND UNPRODUCTIVE DEBATE about whether disc is viable for this, that or whatever. Its not interesting, its not helpful, its not informative, after 29 god damn pages its just childish bickering. Whether it is or isnt viable doesnt stop us from discussing genuinely useful things. Or apparently it does actually, but it damn well shouldnt.
Make a god damn FAQ to redirect all the shit one-off questions from first time posters asking whether they should let discs in their guild raids or if their RL is being fair saying they have to play holy not disc. For the multi-post culprits who seem to want nothing but to argue with those defending discs viability make a thread specifically for their tiresome fight, and infract either side if they bring it up here again.
FFS, is it too much to ask for a discussion thread where you might learn something new 29 pages after the original post? The best damn thing I've seen so far was my own bloody post about felmouth frenzy/fishbrul special food. The second best was whether Light's Wrath added 10% damage multiplicatively or additively, and im not actually sure that got a clear answer.
/RANT

[fallenangel-succ]

Rapture is a pretty bad tank CD, if the tank is taking constant damage SM just heals for more. You wrote it yourself but then ignore it for reasons. A 30% premium on HPS is not "slightly". And you also run the risk of overriding PW:S if he gets in a few avoidance rolls. It is much better as a tool for applying atonement on party members while doing meaningful healing on them.
Light's wrath is ... OK in dungeons? It really lacks the punch that it has in raids though, due to the quadratic scaling it has with the number of atonements. It heals for less than Halo even if you have 5 atonements up (assuming Grace, which you should have), but that of itself requires prepping and the cast is very slow.

[Jimjam38]

Rapture is a pretty bad tank CD, if the tank is taking constant damage SM just heals for more. You wrote it yourself but then ignore it for reasons. A 30% premium on HPS is not "slightly". And you also run the risk of overriding PW:S if he gets in a few avoidance rolls. It is much better as a tool for applying atonement on party members while doing meaningful healing on them.
Light's wrath is ... OK in dungeons? It really lacks the punch that it has in raids though, due to the quadratic scaling it has with the number of atonements. It heals for less than Halo even if you have 5 atonements up (assuming Grace, which you should have), but that of itself requires prepping and the cast is very slow.

If by a 30% premium you're refering to Grace, PWS still benefits from grace. If you're talking about the raw spellpower difference, then with 3/3 in both Shield of Faith and Darkest Shadows, then the difference is 1 - (550*1.15)/(750*1.1) = 0.233 = 23.3%. Still significant, but not quite 30%. And rapture has the situational benefit of smoothing the tanks hp, while SM's higher throughput is going to be much more spiky. Whether or not Rapture is worth using as a tank CD will be entirely dependent on the situation, there'll be some where its more valuable to use on the party, and other situations where party damage is insignificant or smoothing the tanks hp is more valuable than raw hps.

Anyway, I know my last post was talking about tank healing specifically, but my intention was more just to outline that there's more to disc's 5man toolkit than just PWS, Penance and SM.

[Deja Thoris]

Now, and this really goes out to everyone, I started reading through the bulk of this thread in the hopes of finding some little golden pieces of useful information, the little tips, tricks, ideas and suggestions that I've come to expect from the MMOC spec discussion threads. Now, I still have half the pages here to work through, but I ended up skipping to the end to make this post because I had become so frustrated with the absolute crap this thread has been dominated by in at least 50% of all posts I've seen so far. And i get here to see that, for the most part, this same crap is still being argued about. I'm talking about the ABSOLUTELY SHIT AND UNPRODUCTIVE DEBATE about whether disc is viable for this, that or whatever. Its not interesting, its not helpful, its not informative, after 29 god damn pages its just childish bickering. Whether it is or isnt viable doesnt stop us from discussing genuinely useful things. Or apparently it does actually, but it damn well shouldnt.
Make a god damn FAQ to redirect all the shit one-off questions from first time posters asking whether they should let discs in their guild raids or if their RL is being fair saying they have to play holy not disc. For the multi-post culprits who seem to want nothing but to argue with those defending discs viability make a thread specifically for their tiresome fight, and infract either side if they bring it up here again.
FFS, is it too much to ask for a discussion thread where you might learn something new 29 pages after the original post? The best damn thing I've seen so far was my own bloody post about felmouth frenzy/fishbrul special food. The second best was whether Light's Wrath added 10% damage multiplicatively or additively, and im not actually sure that got a clear answer.
/RANT

Get over yourself. It's a process and we're at the beginning of it when all the dumb questions need to be gotten out of the way. Hell, I didn't even know shadowmend applied atonement because you pick up the spec and get information overloaded while fiddling with your UI. So yea theres lots of dumb questions floating about.

The tips and tricks will come later when people have settled into the spec. So calm your tits / reign in your ego / go make an elitist jerks clone site and mod the shit out of it.

[Jimjam38]

Get over yourself. It's a process and we're at the beginning of it when all the dumb questions need to be gotten out of the way. Hell, I didn't even know shadowmend applied atonement because you pick up the spec and get information overloaded while fiddling with your UI. So yea theres lots of dumb questions floating about.

The tips and tricks will come later when people have settled into the spec. So calm your tits / reign in your ego / go make an elitist jerks clone site and mod the shit out of it.

Read my post again and you might see that my entire issue is specifically with people arguing about whether disc is viable, and the frequent questions that keep reigniting that stupid debate. I'm quite happy for people to ask genuine gameplay questions like whether shadowmend applies atonement or whatever. What I'm sick to death of is the one's where they watched a stupid method healer comparison video or something and want to know if disc is viable for their raid group, which triggers the usual suspects to restart that stupid debate and baits the almost equally guilty disc-defenders into the argument again and again and again.
As such, I've just finished writing and posting my FAQ thread to hopefully answer most of those questions before they have the chance to derail this thread again.

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Does anyone know if the alchemy trinket will be worth it? I'm guessing since mana is going to be rough the added bonus to the mana pot during the fight might prove quite useful in mythic+ / raids etc. Not sure if the versatility and other effects on it will be good enough though compared to other trinkets.

Cheers.

Without any numbers I can't say for certain, but my gut feel is that with the mana pot effect, the Alchemy trinket might be an okay 3rd or 4th best option in the situations where RNGesus just wont give you the trinkets you need.

[Supliftz]

Important thing to remember about dungeons is mana doesn't matter basically at all. Which basically breaks all healing specs' "rotational" complexity.

It's not exactly true that mana is completely irrelevant in 5 mans. If you're doing high level tyrannical bosses, it's quite likely the bosses will last like 3-4 minutes. If you're spamming shadow mend every gcd for 3 minutes, you're likely going to go oom.

That said, disc is likely one of the best healers for this type of damage pattern, because shadow mend instantly clearing is quite literally the best single target heal in the game, and it's also quite likely you'll have high uptime of twist of fate.

[Noradin]

Important thing to remember about dungeons is mana doesn't matter basically at all. Which basically breaks all healing specs' "rotational" complexity.

That one is only true if everyone is willing to wait for you to fill up your mana and cooldowns between every pull.
I rarely see that happen. Most of the time you are lucky the tank (especially if they are new and undergeared) stops running when he encounters a boss, and that is because those tend to cage you in some area for the duration of the fight.

[Saiyoran]

That one is only true if everyone is willing to wait for you to fill up your mana and cooldowns between every pull.
I rarely see that happen. Most of the time you are lucky the tank (especially if they are new and undergeared) stops running when he encounters a boss, and that is because those tend to cage you in some area for the duration of the fight.

The situation you're describing sounds like a pug heroic or normal dungeon, in which case you could quite literally afk and people still probably wouldnt die. There's no use discussing the strengths and weaknesses of a spec or playstyle in content that simply doesn't matter. If your tank in a Mythic+10 is doing this, you tell him to stop.