How did your first raid as disc go?

[Noradin]

I did quite poorly, last on meters in all fights except for Dragons, where I was second to a resto druid. I think my second run will be way better, now that I have a better understanding of when the raid damage happens, I'll be better at having Atonements out.

Yes, Dragons were surprisingly good for disc.

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During our heroic clear I mainly focused on burst healing. Sustain costs too much mana to realistically "sustain" (hah). Where you really shine is healing up high predictable burst damage. I've used Ursoc as an example quite a bit recently because he is literally the perfect discipline fight. If you stack your atonements correctly you can near single handedly heal up the entire raid after every single charge.

The problem with this is that our artefact ability's and the boss abilities' cooldowns are multiples of the the same high number, so the time span between the damage incident and our heal will gradually become bigger and other healers will snipe us when we try to use it as soon as possible. (This happened to me a lot on Ursoc.)
Especially when they rotate CDs. We could just ask them to count us as a "raid cd" with a very short CD, but for one they that would mean they get less healing on the meters and, two, there is much more that can go wrong with the setup of our buff and damage combination than there is for other raid CDs.
Those debuffs every encounter seems to have where you have to run somewhere absolutely kill our Atonement setup if we get them.

[Ctz]

I'm 5/7 N, did quite decent/good on Nythendra / Spider / Ursoc / Dragons.

On Il'gynoth though, don't know if it's me but i'm bad. My mana still evaporates and i'm very low mana after first P2.
Maybe part of my issues are that i'm a dispel bot with dispell / mass dispells (?), not sure of what to do better on him yet

[Deleted]

The problem with this is that our artefact ability's and the boss abilities' cooldowns are multiples of the the same high number, so the time span between the damage incident and our heal will gradually become bigger and other healers will snipe us when we try to use it as soon as possible. (This happened to me a lot on Ursoc.)
Especially when they rotate CDs. We could just ask them to count us as a "raid cd" with a very short CD, but for one they that would mean they get less healing on the meters and, two, there is much more that can go wrong with the setup of our buff and damage combination than there is for other raid CDs.
Those debuffs every encounter seems to have where you have to run somewhere absolutely kill our Atonement setup if we get them.

Honestly though, if you're in a raid group that cares more about how their numbers look on the meter than they do about being able to preserve cooldowns, it doesn't really matter what you play. Raiding is a team game, if the team doesn't recognize where discipline's strength lies you'll never be able to utilize your toolkit to its full potential unfortunately.

[Noradin]

Honestly though, if you're in a raid group that cares more about how their numbers look on the meter than they do about being able to preserve cooldowns, it doesn't really matter what you play. Raiding is a team game, if the team doesn't recognize where discipline's strength lies you'll never be able to utilize your toolkit to its full potential unfortunately.

I agree, basically, but it is still a point against the spec if it not only requires the one playing it to put in an extra efford but also requires additional micro managing from everyone else the group with.

And can you really blame peopel for wanting to use their cool abilites instead of keeping them back just in case.
And why do they have to be the ones to hold back part of their healing for emergencies? Because disc cannot react or is easily kept from reacting with strong healing if something goes wrong.

[Franarok]

Il'gynoth is a pain for our mana, indeed. Also is a boss with a lot of random damage and more or less continuous damage, and that is bad for discipline.

At least in normal I focused more on heal tanks and small groups and do damage. On healing surely other healers will pass us by a nice margin, but our damage on this boss is kinda high spreading PtW, halo... The main is help the raid and, if you think will help focus a bit more on dps than heals, go ahead.
Just a shame we dont have the holy nova (no op about attonement healing since area skills only count one objetive for the healing).


Also anyone feels that smite should hit a second target for the 50% of his damage? (maybe thanks to a talent or by his own). I think smite damage and "shield" is kinda poor. Also that could help a bit to solve our lack of real aoe damage. Specially interesting on hardest M++ dungeons.

[Simulacrum]

Cleared normal and 2 heroic (ursoc) on my disc in a pug this week, since I'm waffling around still trying to decide which of my characters to main.

Did really well in this relatively bad raid of 15 people. Easily outhealed them all while doing about ~100k DPS for most the bosses, even out-dpsing a DH and a shaman on most bosses and on overall... but yeah, they were pretty bad, so it's hard to tell if I was doing well or if they just made me look like I was doing well. Also didn't really have any idea how to properly heal the fights, since I didn't play beta or really study the fights, so I was just near-randomly using my abilities, so my potential was much higher than what I achieved. For example, on Xavius I at one point spent like 20% of my mana preparing for burst damage that never came, resulting in near-0 healing from it. But I had dream simulacrum for it so I guess it was fine...

Disc seems really strong with 10-15 people, though. So easy to hit everyone with atonement and do massive healing. Problems are as expected; if you can't predict the damage, you're pretty bad- to average. The healers I were with did low enough healing that even my delayed aoe healing was able to contribute huge amounts of hps, but I expect in a more competent group that wouldn't be happening (since the burst-healing was enormous amounts of HPS delayed by several seconds, which is great if people are at 60% health, but not if they're at 70-80% health). Definitely won us two boss kills myself though, through my damage contribution, on fights that would otherwise have resulted in wipes to enrages. Not sure how relevant that's going to normally be, but it was very relevant in the group I was in.

Overall, I'm... not sure what I learned from this, other than disc seems like a bad choice unless the DPS is relevant. And that hpaladin is a much safer bet as things stand right now... but then, hpaladins are top candidate for most likely to be nerfed among the healers, so I don't know. Overall I was really satisfied with my disc, doing relatively well in spite of massive room for improvement, but the atonement healing style is just so... conflicting.

I always wanted to apply more atonements to do more HPS, but at the same time I also always wanted to dps more to do more HPS to the people with atonement. It's (or at least, it was for me) often hard to tell which is the right choice at the time. Should I apply more atonements and do way more healing but potentially delay it enough that people may die? Or should I just heal them up now, but lose out on the potential to heal even more people? I find that a much harder problem to get a grip on than anything any of my other healers have to struggle with. They always seem to have an obvious 'optimal' move. Though I suppose disc does too; I just need to learn to how spot it better.

[anon5123]

Had horrific mana issues as Disc. I'm talking, completely OOM when the boss is at 50%. Even after using potion. I was just horribly struggling with mana, and went Holy after that.

Even when I was just throwing around Pleas and doing some smiting, I was still just burning through mana. Before I OOM'd I was a good 15% ahead of the Rdruid and Hpriest, but ended equal with the druid at the end of the fight.

Even as Holy, I was ending fights around 0-5% mana, after using a potion. And this is specced into Enlightenment, Surge of Light and Apotheosis for tons of mana savings.

Were the DPS just bad, or...?

[Ctz]

Had horrific mana issues as Disc. I'm talking, completely OOM when the boss is at 50%. Even after using potion. I was just horribly struggling with mana, and went Holy after that.

Even when I was just throwing around Pleas and doing some smiting, I was still just burning through mana. Before I OOM'd I was a good 15% ahead of the Rdruid and Hpriest, but ended equal with the druid at the end of the fight.

Even as Holy, I was ending fights around 0-5% mana, after using a potion. And this is specced into Enlightenment, Surge of Light and Apotheosis for tons of mana savings.

Were the DPS just bad, or...?

is it on every bosses ? The only one i had such big (huge) mana issues was Il'gynoth.
Nythendra & Ursoc, i have been able to heal / dps almost as i wished without falling oom.
Drags & Spider, had to slow the dps down, mainly by only using penance to be able to sustain mana. On drags I was the only dispell on my side and had to mass dispell every root + aoe though.

[Franarok]

On discipline for mana stuff by the moment, power infusion is a must.

But even with that one the mana, indeed, could be a real problem. Il'gynoth is a pain, and Cenarius could be really a problem to if you focus on doing to much dps.

At least on Cenarius the shield discipline helped me a LOT. Sure you lost some dps and healing from quit the mindbender, but is better than get OoM since the shield on the tank will be consumed on 1 or 2s. Will no quit all our mana problems, but helps.



And talking about other topic, monitoricing the shields for the mana problem I realiced that them, as I comemnt, on the tank who is suffering damage stands 1 or 2 seconds....then our tier is a bit weak....isnt it? If shield has no cd will be an OP bonus...but with cd you usually spam them to tanks (unless you use extasis)

[Deleted]

I don't feel like ditching mindbender because it's quite a great healing cd - if anything, it feels annoying that you have to choose between using it for mana or using it for healing. Without mindbender, I don't feel penance/LW burst that much of a thing.

[anon5123]

is it on every bosses ?

The only boss I tried Disc was the first boss, and I was completely OOM when the boss was only at 50%.

I feel like using PWR at all just burns through my mana.

[Whicker]

PW:R costing the same as POH and healing/ applying atonement to 5 targets would go a long way. They could even nerf the healing it does to compensate even though its not even that high. Maybe even reduce cost and mana scaling of plea so its still more mana efficient to only PW:R after 5-6 atonements. I dont think we are the only healer with mana issues, I think spell cost for all healers should probably be reduced by 10%. I can't imagine next tier mythic fights longer than 4 minutes being heal-able unless they introduce some really good regen trinkets.

[Deleted]

I only healed LFR and first few normal bosses but it was all terrible. Theoretically I know what to do and how to setup healing burst but doing it in raid enviroment is different story. Snipe healing everywhere makes it really hard with our long preparation for attonement. Attonement duration is way too short for my skill lvl. Felt like shit and played like shit. :s Rerolled priest from MW to try something different and it may be beyond my capabilities lol.

[Mazeari]

I cleared 7/7 hc, and I went disc for the first boss (I had to pug it because I missed it). For the vagina boss, and xavius. Disc is really nice on xavius. Though I did feel if I went in the dream as second. I had so much mana left in the end. Mana is tight for both specs, and I don't necesarily feel alot more mana deprived as disc. That being said when I'm disc I claim 2 innervates, when I'm holy I only claim 1.

[Mil3High]

Disc has felt generally fine, with some mana problems. I have only cleared normal, sometimes with a disproportionate amount of druids, and it did feel like sometimes our burst healing got sniped by other healer cooldowns. I could also make better use of Barrier with a more organized raid that recognized our strengths. I do have 2 Disc healers in my guild group, which I think results in more deaths than is acceptable because of the setup time for both of us.