Originally Posted by
isuridedes
What is the point of commentary like this? It's just an ad hominem because you disagree with my own arguments. But to address your ad hominem, with the exception of a few months during Cataclysm I have played Discipline exclusively since Vanilla. While the class has seen numerous changes throughout the various expansions we've always had a focus on mitigation, with varying abilities to directly heal (including via AoE).
Legion is the first expansion where our direct heals have been so severely reduced. That in itself is not so terrible, but our ability to mitigate damage has also been reduced via the addition of a cooldown to PW:S and the removal of Divine Aegis.
We are no longer a damage mitigation class - we are Fist Weavers. Our shields, once the core of the class, are now merely an accessory for Atonement. It's a pretty decisive shift on the part of Blizzard, so I'm not surprised to see Discipline Priests having difficulty making the adjustment, or finding the overall class change to be somewhat unappealing. We lack any proper AoE healing spell. We lack a filler spell like 'Heal' or 'Renew'. In fact... if you do not spec to allow Penance to heal friendly targets, your only direct heal of any reasonable amount is Shadow Mend. Shadow Mend is a great spell, but as the sole direct-heal in our toolkit it is inadequate.
So our new focus is healing via Atonement. That's GREAT! I loved Atonement all throughout Mists of Pandaria as well as Warlords of Draenor so to me... this is exciting. I also find the shift in how Atonement is applied to be rather ingenious to making us a more active class, instead of just passively sitting around spamming damage spells and hoping X player gets Y heal.
But the end result? Not so much. Atonement is a mini-game of watching your timers re-applying and making sure you've got it on all the people who might possibly need it. All this while also functioning as DPS. Your ability to handle points of spiking damage is dependent entirely on your ability to prepare well in advance... 6+ seconds if you want to get up the most efficient number of Atonements.
Mind you... a Holy Priest can heal just as many players just as effectively. You lose the DPS, but you gain a wider array of healing utilities. Assuming two players are equally skilled and equally geared the choice between bringing a Holy Priest vs. Discipline seems clear: Holy can handle more scenarios with less ramp-up time.
It's the very opposite of "Bring the Player; not the class"