I don't like the new disc.

[angrys13]

Personally was attracted to this conversation strictly to see the debates between why or why nots. Not disappointed. Helping to make a decision personally, so the thread is going in a positive direction. Glad the debates are staying civil, but would like to see more honestly.

[Supliftz]

Love me some aabbcddeeff posts.

The whole spec is on the fringe of situational. In raid, it is hard to imagine the spec functioning alone without the support of other healers, whereas I don't think it's reasonable to expect that other healers will need disc priests. A lot of what disc does is planned out long before it happens and that makes almost everything it does dependent on things going the way you thought they would.

Why does it even matter if disc doesn't function as a solo healer in raids? In what world do you solo heal progression raid content? How is this even a relevant argument to make. This would be like saying 6.2 Disc priest sucked because you couldn't 1 heal content with it.

Regardless being dependent on planned out damage is also quite a stupid argument to make. Name me 1 fight in recent history with random damage pattern. Besides, when has a healer needing to know the damage pattern been a bad choice for progression if their numbers weren't bad. Mistweaver in MoP had the exact same problem as disc, and was brought to progression raiding contributing far less to the raid.

Light's Wrath is such a HUGE part of the spec's potential that I think it compounds #1. It's a 1.5 minute cooldown with a cast time and travel time that represents a potentially very large amount of your total healing, but it delivers that healing when it does damage and based on how many atonements you have up. It is hard to imagine a raid cooldown contingent on that many things not being situational. It is a raid cooldown, but the high-value usage of it is actually quite rigid. Other healer cooldowns have a lower ceiling, but an incredibly high floor comparatively.

So how is a travel time + a cast time a problem, but taking 10 seconds to deliver it's total output not a problem for raid cds like HTT or Dhymn? Light's Wrath is about the same amount of total hps for disc priest as HTT or DHymn is for shaman/holy priest respectively.

I personally believe your argument here for travel time + cast time being dumb is one thing, but willingly ignoring the damage contribution of Light's Wrath is another thing. Doing over 2520% SP in damage is actually quite a big advantage Light's Wrath has over other raid cds, but you just ignored that to create this argument of Light's Wrath being situational.

I don't really see how being based on atonements being a huge issue either. You can very efficiently burst out a number of atonements every 2 minutes with PI, or every 90 seconds with boomkin innervate.

Let's just say something catastrophic happens to the raid relatively quickly and non-tanks are at <30% health. You were in the middle of your 5-8 atonements, penance, keep up the dot, halo disc priest stuff. Now, you could have placed PW:B on the miraculously stacked raid to reduce the damage reflexively if you weren't on GCD or casting, you could have used your latent psychic abilities of what someone in this thread called "foresight" and started putting atonement on people if as if you were about to let out the biggest Light's Wrath of your life for no reason, or you could be completely boned and at least 4-8 seconds away from having it on anything resembling the size of the raid with 30% haste and PI. What's the prognosis in that situation with Revival? With Tranquility? You press the button. Healing happens. That's it. Is that less situational? I think so.

Where does this random catastrophic damage come from? It would have to be a truly random damage pattern for the disc priest not have anything CDs or atonements ready for this "catastrophic damage". You would also have to be a pretty clueless to not accurately predict this damage happening on 20 people well in advance when you're researching the fight.

Arguing with these imaginary scenarios where there's random damage and you solo healing is extremely relevant in progression raiding. What do you really want me to say here mate. "yeah I agree, if you're solo healing and you randomly take 90% of your hp in damage, disc priest is a dog shit healer". This is just not the reality of the game.

It's a bad design and I'm not writing a guide for icy-veins. I think a few years ago when they threw Fistweaving in a dumpster Blizz would have thought it was a bad design. I've already admitted that I think it could easily be the best spec in the game if it was tuned in a more aggressive way. What else is there to say? It's a either an overtuned or undertuned volatile mess, a lot like mistweaver was. More than half of the content of my posts has been about faulty logic in appraising disc more than actual appraisal.

Or maybe they didn't execute fistweaving for monks well? Monks problem was entirely based on the ReM Uplift mechanic (mostly ramp-up) and mana balancing, and had very little to do with fistweaving. They removed fistweaving because they needed to balance disc priest, not because it's hard to balance for.

Anyway, looking back at mistweaver it was an a state of being top tier of shit because the ReM Uplift mechanic is fundamentally so broken when you have very little overhealing. This is part of the reason why I struggle to believe disc priest being a bad progression healer.

My experiences on resto druid and tanking with a resto druid have been really stable in comparison, even despite them theoretically having issues with burst. I do think the tank probably matters a lot in this regard.

"i'm going to make an argument about disc priest being bad because i'm comparing it to the literal best 5 man healer"

u wot m8

I mean, every aspect of that part of my posts is referring to the absurd example I was given to why disc shouldn't be considered a fraction of a healer that essentially boils down to:
"Hey I have some concerns about valuing mostly periodic healing the same as more directed forms of healing"
"Yeah but check out this fat light's wrath healing the whole raid hypothetical I just made up that totally took place over a couple seconds! I'm pretty sure this proves that disc priests are just as good a healer as anyone."

Where's your posts about resto druid sucking dick then? I'm pretty sure resto druid is basically a hps aura with no ability to do any real directed healing in a raid setting.

I would be fine with your arguments about lacking direct healing. That is a real weakness of disc priest in a raid, but it is covered by your co-healers. Just like Holy paladin's weakness of garbage raid healing is covered by your disc priest/resto druids/shamans.

Healers co-exist in relation to each other. Of course if your raid is full of nothing but resto druids and disc priests, you're going to have problems with progression. But that's not disc's problem, that's the player's fault for not respeccing to a spec that can cover that.

Why would a resto shaman being bad on Ursoc affect my argument? My whole point is that while shaman is losing the utility of doing some amount of healing while doing some amount of dps, priest is being cordoned off entirely from the concept of snappy, effective spot healing that isn't gated entirely by setup and cooldowns. These two things are not typically equally valuable to a healer slot in a raid. I have to emphasize (again) how much it's an argument about logic and not about the viability of disc.

There seems to be this idea that disc can't contribute on demand spot healing. While it isn't better than other healers, it's simply wrong to suggest disc can't contribute to spot healing. So while yes, Shaman can do on demand spot healing, they aren't going to passive delete boss hp from the game by existing in the raid.

I also really have to go back to resto druids here, where are your posts about resto druids sucking dick for progression? They basically just spam shitty hots and have no real spot healing that isn't gated behind cooldowns/rng procs.

Anyway, I'll circle this back to the original argument. So long as you have effective classes covering the role, what's the problem with Disc? What's wrong with your co-healers covering your weaknesses so you can exploit your strengths? This would only be a problem if you're solo healing progression, which is not the reality of the game.

I think it depends a lot on what the encounters actually demand, but I would generally consider direct healing to simply be more valuable. Atonement outside of the very potent burst windows will mop up plenty of healing, but I have reservations about how useful that actually is.

But it's not like disc can't function on these style of encounters. When I did Dragons of Nightmare raid testing, I was only healing ~4-6 people at a time. So I just took schism and did far more directed atonement hps.

In another vein, more conventional raw throughput might enable raids to take less overall healers which makes doing tank dps seem a lot less useful. On the other hand, disc priests might fit perfectly into doing exactly the amount of extra dps a raid needs while also providing the healing it needs, but that seems less likely. This was actually the crux of my first post.

Why would disc priest be bad on 4 heal boss fights? You seem to think that Disc is doing less healing than other healers. This really isn't the case with current numbers. You can only really make an argument like this if disc did less numbers.

Disc actually gets better with less healers because your atonements would overheal less, and you would have higher uptime of ToF.

I know the underlying reasons why, that's actually why I'm asking the question to someone that thinks disc is just an equal healer to any other that also happens to do tank levels of damage. It's not that simple, which you seem to understand perfectly.

Disc is equal to other healers (I think ahead actually) hps wise. But there's a difference of healing style which gets better/worse depending on the encounter.

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And while some people like myself enjoy the challenge I actually find that holy has alot more depth than disc due to the amount of modifiers that if managed well, will have a big impact on your healing. If you have everything set-up in a nice way , disc isnt as hard as some people like to give it credit for.

Yeah man, you can really get into depth with that flash heal spam

xD

[aabbcddeeff]

Setup for HTT:
You put it down and continue healing during it.

Setup for Dhymn:
You cast it and it makes everyone else do more healing while it also heals

Setup for Light's Wrath:
Obtain PI/Innervate
Put up your atonements
Cast it, it lands
It does a lot healing and makes you do as much damage as a tank which I guess makes the first two steps not matter to how immediately usable it is?

I just don't understand in what world that is not effectively a more rigid and situational cooldown for healing. You might consider it not situational because it can be used on cooldown for damage, or precasted nearly on cooldown in the event of any damaging event, or to kill priority targets. Those are still more rigid conditions for value than of any other healing cooldown that has ever existed, assuming you want any kind of emergency raid triage that wasn't predicted 10 seconds in advance from your time traveling 100k DPS ripper healer.

The hypothetical is something that happens to guilds on progression when people make mistakes. I think the most recent one is probably something like Xhul, where if two mistakes happen simultaneously it can deteriorate very rapidly in a very bursty way. It's not that hard to make happen and I would say almost every guild probably had at least a couple attempts like that, definitely at least before the ring changed things. Saying you envision a tank missing a taunt and/or imagined someone would stand in voidstep with the fel debuff 8 seconds from now and started applying atonements just sounds certifiably insane. Fights can be chaotic, I personally don't think disc copes with chaos well.

Why would I need to elaborate on resto druids? They've been in the same spot since at least foundry. Periodic effects are not awesome, tranq is probably the only thing they have to hang their hat on. Nobody is making crazy claims about resto in raids. Is there a "I don't like the new resto" thread where someone buts everyone else's claims to bed by saying resto druids are doing the same quality of healing as everyone else while also doing free damage? I guess I just missed it. Also, tell me why disc shouldn't be compared to the best 5-man healer? Is this a thread where we only compare awkwardly rigid healing archetypes out of their element to each other? Oh man, it's down to the wire between holy and MW in the battle to be the most inadequate 5-man healer! I guess that is.. good news for disc priests?

They never got the damage element of mistweaving right because there was no obtainable perfect medium. Think of the way disc priest functioned when it was absorb based. Either it was uniquely good because it provided tons of basically unconditional throughput and mechanic trivializing goodness or it was middling and not worth playing because the numbers on PW:S or PoH just weren't good enough. Absorbs were a degenerate mechanic where if even reasonably good would immediately be the best. When you make a healer do non-trivial damage you have crossed the rubicon in a very similar way where thereafter you have to compare every other healer to someone doing tank level damage while healing. It's interesting, but the prospect of that being balanced while being compelling enough to take to raid doesn't seem tangible.

[Floopa]

it would be interesting to see some disc logs from the raid tests today. Disc logs with the caveat that they haven't been doctored via excessive use of innervate or abusing scaling on older items xd

[Supliftz]

Setup for HTT:
You put it down and continue healing during it.

Setup for Dhymn:
You cast it and it makes everyone else do more healing while it also heals

Setup for Light's Wrath:
Obtain PI/Innervate
Put up your atonements
Cast it, it lands
It does a lot healing and makes you do as much damage as a tank which I guess makes the first two steps not matter to how immediately usable it is?

All these things take roughly the same amount of time to deliver it's total output. Sure I guess you can argue you can more reactively place HTT and cast Dhymn, but like I said, it's pretty fucking rare for reactive burst healing to happen.

I just don't understand in what world that is not effectively a more rigid and situational cooldown for healing. You might consider it not situational because it can be used on cooldown for damage, or precasted nearly on cooldown in the event of any damaging event, or to kill priority targets. Those are still more rigid conditions for value than of any other healing cooldown that has ever existed, assuming you want any kind of emergency raid triage that wasn't predicted 10 seconds in advance from your time traveling 100k DPS ripper healer.

It's only a more rigid/situational healing cooldown if you're dealing with a world of random burst aoe damage. The trade-off is the spell does a fuck ton of total damage and generally more total hps compared to other raid cds.

But like I keep saying, random damage really isn't that common, so in reality it is hardly situational.

The hypothetical is something that happens to guilds on progression when people make mistakes. I think the most recent one is probably something like Xhul, where if two mistakes happen simultaneously it can deteriorate very rapidly in a very bursty way. It's not that hard to make happen and I would say almost every guild probably had at least a couple attempts like that, definitely at least before the ring changed things. Saying you envision a tank missing a taunt and/or imagined someone would stand in voidstep with the fel debuff 8 seconds from now and started applying atonements just sounds certifiably insane. Fights can be chaotic, I personally don't think disc copes with chaos well.

But Light's Wrath isn't the only raid cd with this problem mate. On Xhul pretty much only SLT/revival could cover these problems. When our resto shaman tied to use HTT to react to this damage, people would still die because HTT took far too long to deliver it's output.

This is pretty much the only WoD encounter where you can use this reactive burst damage as an example. In a world of nerfed raid cooldowns, stuff like this is going to be far less common.

Why would I need to elaborate on resto druids? They've been in the same spot since at least foundry. Periodic effects are not awesome, tranq is probably the only thing they have to hang their hat on. Nobody is making crazy claims about resto in raids. Is there a "I don't like the new resto" thread where someone buts everyone else's claims to bed by saying resto druids are doing the same quality of healing as everyone else while also doing free damage? I guess I just missed it. Also, tell me why disc shouldn't be compared to the best 5-man healer? Is this a thread where we only compare awkwardly rigid healing archetypes out of their element to each other? Oh man, it's down to the wire between holy and MW in the battle to be the most inadequate 5-man healer! I guess that is.. good news for disc priests?

I asked you to make posts on resto druid because I personally believe resto druid is in a far worse spot in your world where hots are the devil.

You seem to be continuing this point about Disc not doing the same quality of healing compared to other healers. I don't know where you're getting this from. I've said Disc Priest either does the same total hps, or more compared to other healers. I've never once said "yeah disc priest is amazing at ST spot healing like holy priests". That is a narrative that you're making up.

I also pointed out you shouldn't compare Disc to the literal best 5 man healer, because you can't even compare the other healers to Resto Druid in 5 mans. Resto Druid is -so- much better in comparison. This is why your problems with disc in 5 mans when you compare it to resto druids is just dumb to me.

When you make a healer do non-trivial damage you have crossed the rubicon in a very similar way where thereafter you have to compare every other healer to someone doing tank level damage while healing. It's interesting, but the prospect of that being balanced while being compelling enough to take to raid doesn't seem tangible.

Well Disc Priest is in this state right now. Disc is doing the same total hps as other healers (or more!) and doing tank level dps. For some reason people think this is bad because it can't emergency spot heal because your 3-4 other co-healers have their pants on their head.

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it would be interesting to see some disc logs from the raid tests today. Disc logs with the caveat that they haven't been doctored via excessive use of innervate or abusing scaling on older items xd

I hate to break it to you but what you'll find is 2 things;

1. good players didn't show up or private logged

2. people don't have timers so disc priest is automatically a lot worse

[Tyrgannus]

I like the damage dealing skill cap CONCEPT of disc and I'm currently toying with a bit, but if a group just screws up I find it is harder to compensate with disc's current play style than holy's. Maybe I just suck a lot. I pretty much have to pop Rapture and wrap all the noobs in a shield when they screw up, and that's a whole lot of damage I'm not doing and thus atonement I'm not healing from.