The Disc Priest playstyle debate

[VigilantRose]

I misunderstood your numbers for light's wrath at first, reading them again makes more sense. However looking at just the burst phase I can see where you're coming from. However there is one strength to Penance (and castigation itself) that I don't think we're regarding, movement. While any class certainly suffers from it, I think in a raid scenario here you need to move, Castigation will better over the entire fight, but not the burst phase.

Schism has no real impact on movement because you’re just replacing cast-time spells with it. At best you could argue that if you’re constantly at a dead-run, Schism is useless because you aren’t using any cast-time spells. However, what we’re primarily discussing is replacing part of a Power Word: Radiance buried in the middle of a wall of Power Word: Radiance that need to be cast in rapid succession. So saying “but Schism means you can’t move!” sounds like a particularly strange argument since you can’t move anyway using that model.

I think in dungeons Schism can be problematic for this very reason - every bit of non-mobile cast time you have is often consumed with Shadow Mend. But the entire point of the healing model you’re championing is to generate aggregate healing while not concerning yourself with keeping people alive - letting the other healers worry about spot-healing so you can sit in an ideal inflection point and maximize aggregate healing.

The mana burned with 3 extra atonements (which would just be 1 more PW: R) would be worth it IMO.

Then quantify it. I did and I came to the opposite conclusion.

You flat out mentioned mana when you explained above so I considered it on the table for debate.

I mentioned mana in an entirely different paragraph that wasn’t even part of the bullet list containing the Plea/Smite example. The very beginning of that particular bullet read ‘disregarding mana’. So it’s not unreasonable to expect that someone wouldn’t blunder in without reading and say “but what about mana!”.

Well of course, but PW: S is just more valuable for reasons I said above. The bulk of Disc healing comes from atonement in raids, Smend in dungeons, I'm not debating that. The true strength of PW: S over Plea is inflating someone's health pool, we can look at it overall, but if it saves someone's life in a pinch then it's more valuable than anything else we could have casted.

This is a qualitative argument for PW:S. But you need to be aware of the quantitative repercussions. In terms of total damage healed/mitigated, PW:S isn’t significantly better than Plea but - at low numbers of Atonement - is significantly more expensive. You’re probably keeping up Atonement on the tanks - are you sufficiently worried that your full health tank is going to get hit for his entire health bar (but not his entire health bar + 2%) that it’s worth spending the mana?

I think it would be clear that, in most situations, we’re not talking about staving off imminent death but simply adding some extra healing to the raid. Even it’s not clear, to make the argument you’re trying to make you first need to assert a value for ‘shielding over healing’.

What's the point of not being able to use a real raid scenario in your logic? Every other disc discussion I've seen at least takes it into consideration. We can't theorycraft and debate in a vacuum.

Theorycraft is a precursor to any rational debate. Before you can hold an opinion about how to play the spec, first you have to understand the mechanics of the spec. That’s why we theorycraft.

Later, once people understand the mathematical origins of all these elements, only then do they form opinions and test them. What I’m seeing is that some Discipline Priests skipped the entire “understand how the spec works” part and just jumped straight to the “form opinions” step - and are thus unable to actually test anything.

Bear in mind, I have zero vested interest in the outcome here. I could care less how people decide to play their Discipline Priests. I’m not advertising my stream or website. I’ve got entire classrooms of people who think I’m pretty damn smart, so I don’t really need the ego boost of random Internet strangers praising my wisdom. My only interest is in getting it right. I was actually surprised when I started looking at rotations and saw Schism saving mana over Castigation - it was (as I stated) a counter-intuitive result that I had to figure out after-the-fact.

[Djriff]

Before I get into this, this is an acceptable form of debate when discussing differing playstyles for disc.

Schism has no real impact on movement because you’re just replacing cast-time spells with it. At best you could argue that if you’re constantly at a dead-run, Schism is useless because you aren’t using any cast-time spells. However, what we’re primarily discussing is replacing part of a Power Word: Radiance buried in the middle of a wall of Power Word: Radiance that need to be cast in rapid succession. So saying “but Schism means you can’t move!” sounds like a particularly strange argument since you can’t move anyway using that model.

I think in dungeons Schism can be problematic for this very reason - every bit of non-mobile cast time you have is often consumed with Shadow Mend. But the entire point of the healing model you’re championing is to generate aggregate healing while not concerning yourself with keeping people alive - letting the other healers worry about spot-healing so you can sit in an ideal inflection point and maximize aggregate healing.

Sure, but if you miss casting a smite it's not a huge loss, if you miss casting schism then the talent is dead in the water. It would require good play on super heavy movement fights and dungeons to be useful. Additoinally as Pos said above, trying to squeeze in that with atonements about to fall off and LW cast + travel time would be difficult, especially if you're max range for some reason.

Then quantify it. I did and I came to the opposite conclusion.

Ok.

With Schism:
The entire raid takes a hit, you only have 14 atonements out (5 from plea, 3 from PW: S, and 2 PW: R's), you cast Schism and LW and top those 14 people off. You've burned a good chunk of mana doing this and now the entire raid is about to take another hit. 6 people died.

Without Schism:
Same scenario, you have 17 atonements out, just 1 more PW: R, you cast LW and PW: S while it's in the air to hit 18, 2 people died.

This isn't counting other healers into the equation so take it with a grain of salt, but I would rather those 2 people just get a cheap big heal from another healer than to have the other healers burn mana on expensive heals. While it costs disc a bit more mana, it saves the other healers mana in the long run. It does require coordination though.

I mentioned mana in an entirely different paragraph that wasn’t even part of the bullet list containing the Plea/Smite example. The very beginning of that particular bullet read ‘disregarding mana’. So it’s not unreasonable to expect that someone wouldn’t blunder in without reading and say “but what about mana!”.

That's fair and if it was any other expansion I'd be inclined to agree, but Legion is the first one that mana has actually meant something so it always needs to be on the table.

This is a qualitative argument for PW:S. But you need to be aware of the quantitative repercussions. In terms of total damage healed/mitigated, PW:S isn’t significantly better than Plea but - at low numbers of Atonement - is significantly more expensive. You’re probably keeping up Atonement on the tanks - are you sufficiently worried that your full health tank is going to get hit for his entire health bar (but not his entire health bar + 2%) that it’s worth spending the mana


I think it would be clear that, in most situations, we’re not talking about staving off imminent death but simply adding some extra healing to the raid. Even it’s not clear, to make the argument you’re trying to make you first need to assert a value for ‘shielding over healing’.?

Yeah that's definitely an outlier scenario, but I would still choose PW: S over plea. Mainly because PW: S rarely overheals while plea usually does. The tank is actually the one I'm least worried about but the shadow priest with rot on them from nythendra is a good candidate for my PW: S regardless of atonement count. Especially if you undergear the encounter, it's more than worth the extra mana.

At the end of the day I think it's more of a situational type decision, the best heal for the GCD.

Theorycraft is a precursor to any rational debate. Before you can hold an opinion about how to play the spec, first you have to understand the mechanics of the spec. That’s why we theorycraft.

Later, once people understand the mathematical origins of all these elements, only then do they form opinions and test them. What I’m seeing is that some Discipline Priests skipped the entire “understand how the spec works” part and just jumped straight to the “form opinions” step - and are thus unable to actually test anything.

Bear in mind, I have zero vested interest in the outcome here. I could care less how people decide to play their Discipline Priests. I’m not advertising my stream or website. I’ve got entire classrooms of people who think I’m pretty damn smart, so I don’t really need the ego boost of random Internet strangers praising my wisdom. My only interest is in getting it right. I was actually surprised when I started looking at rotations and saw Schism saving mana over Castigation - it was (as I stated) a counter-intuitive result that I had to figure out after-the-fact.

Theorycrafting is entirely debatable and saying that only my stuff is correct leads to people attacking you (as we saw in the closed thread).

I'm not talking about how to play the spec, I'm just arguing that while Schism might save you some mana, it may not be good for the raid as a whole.

It is interesting to note that Schism is only worth 2 atonements.

[Deleted]

I think using Schism with the mentality that you need to cast it as part of a rotation could cause issues both with mana and I found myself tunnel visioning into feeling the need to cast it before doing any healing, so ideally I think it possibly should be used as an initial atonement heal and a burst potency buff to be used primarily with penance + LW, it wont have the constant output of Castigation but I don't think its suited to non burst situations.

Personally in regards to the playstyles while I fully understand the burst capability of disc I don't feel right only handling burst mechanics, so I generally speaking weave between handling the some of the burst and keeping the raid stable to the best of my ability, of the 3 healers, Druid, Pally, Disc, I usually sit either equal or above on logs in heroic and healing generally speaking is rarely an issue.

[PosPosPos]

The problem with Schism is ultimately not a mana issue, but a usability issue.

It greatly interferes with an already tight window to burst, especially when it's proponents are also consistently advocating for less haste. Good luck playing Schism disc on Mythic Ilgy/Elerethe/Ursoc, you might be able to pull it off on most other encounters especially Dragons if you are the portal healer, but it's also going to severely drop your maximum throughput because atonements are inevitably going to drop off by the time you try and squeeze penance into the rotation.

[Jimjam38]

If you have proof that another stat would be more valuable, please provide it.

Haste:
- Increases the amount of PWR's we can cast for our burst prep
- Increases mana regen from talents
- Increases the duration of our "burst window" since getting more PWR's out in a shorter window means more will be up concurrently for a longer duration
- Increases the amount DPS we can do in our burst window
- Reduces the cooldown of PW:S and Penance, our two abilities that should be used on CD to maintain Atonement and do healing during our cooldown phase
- Increases HPM of SW:P and PtW

Haste, by a large margin, makes us more effective healers, as well as increasing our DPS.

Reduces the cd on penance? was this a mistake or have I missed something this big? or is that say if you have the legendary belt or something specific?

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Also, on the topic of this playstyle debate - does the Estel Legendary Chest offer any possibilities for shifting playstyles at low Atonement count?
Or, alternatively, for making use of it at high Atonement count during Innervate?

I was particularly interested in the style someone suggested which makes extensive use of Borrowed Time procs at low Atonement count, and I was wondering about how an extra 8-12% haste by using Plea at 4-6 Atonements could affect this?

Oh and a strange thing I've noticed with this Estel legendary - What I find is that it acts as expected up to an atonement count of 4, but once I hit 5+ it seems to be giving roughly 2% more haste than expected, as though I'm using Plea with one atonement count higher than I have. Its supposed to give 2% haste/atonement, so when using plea at 5 atonements you'd expect to gain 10% haste, which is what the buff says, HOWEVER, when I open my character stats and watch them, my haste increases by a definite 12-14% in 5mans (12% when I can only maintain atonement on 5 targets, 14% when one of the players has a pet I can put atonement on aswell).

The only thing I could think of is that it's interacting with my human racial (+2% more secondary stat rating)?

[Bareturtle]

I can't comment on the math, but the chest is a small but welcome boost at low Atonements, and an incredibly powerful boost if you can use it during an Innervate at higher Atonement numbers. It's amazing right now if you get Innervate, and will probably be more competitive next patch for those of us without Innervate since we are likely to be sitting on higher "static" Atonement numbers due to Contrition.

[Jimjam38]

I can't comment on the math, but the chest is a small but welcome boost at low Atonements, and an incredibly powerful boost if you can use it during an Innervate at higher Atonement numbers. It's amazing right now if you get Innervate, and will probably be more competitive next patch for those of us without Innervate since we are likely to be sitting on higher "static" Atonement numbers due to Contrition.

How does the contrition change (3 sec, up from 2) help us sit on higher 'static' atonement count? Plea's mana cost isn't changing?

[Djriff]

@Atonement are you by chance a human?

[Supliftz]

How does the contrition change (3 sec, up from 2) help us sit on higher 'static' atonement count? Plea's mana cost isn't changing?

Shield Disc being the best will push the playstyle to be more about higher atonements outside of Light's Wrath burst. This doesn't really change if you have contrition talented.

[Jimjam38]

@Atonement are you by chance a human?

If you're referring to how much I'm posting today, I'm procrastinating, very badly.

[Serpicoxl]

Also, on the topic of this playstyle debate -

Oh and a strange thing I've noticed with this Estel legendary - What I find is that it acts as expected up to an atonement count of 4, but once I hit 5+ it seems to be giving roughly 2% more haste than expected, as though I'm using Plea with one atonement count higher than I have. Its supposed to give 2% haste/atonement, so when using plea at 5 atonements you'd expect to gain 10% haste, which is what the buff says, HOWEVER, when I open my character stats and watch them, my haste increases by a definite 12-14% in 5mans (12% when I can only maintain atonement on 5 targets, 14% when one of the players has a pet I can put atonement on aswell).

The only thing I could think of is that it's interacting with my human racial (+2% more secondary stat rating)?

I noticed same thing. Figured it was a bug, but I also play human so maybe it is the cause.

[Coffeh]

Quick question. How does Disc fair in leveilng/questing, and soloing rares and elite rares? They effective, great, meh? Also, world quests. They any good at doing them quickly solo?

[Zka]

Quick question. How does Disc fair in leveilng/questing, and soloing rares and elite rares? They effective, great, meh? Also, world quests. They any good at doing them quickly solo?

The dps is about the half of what a proper dps does but disc doesn't die easily. Pulling 6-8 normal mobs is not lethal unless they stun or something like that.

[Deleted]

Quick question. How does Disc fair in leveilng/questing, and soloing rares and elite rares? They effective, great, meh? Also, world quests. They any good at doing them quickly solo?

Levelling was easy due to survivability, rares including those with group level HP are solo able although they take a while to kill, and world quests simply require you to Halo, dot, and kill everything one by one. Even Suramar elites are not much of an issue unless you pull more then 4 or 5, you can survive and kill them or run away with little issues.

[VigilantRose]

Also, on the topic of this playstyle debate - does the Estel Legendary Chest offer any possibilities for shifting playstyles at low Atonement count?
Or, alternatively, for making use of it at high Atonement count during Innervate?

For the high Atonement count scenario, you'd need 6 - 7 Atonement before you cast Plea to reach a break-even point and the rewards for doing so are negligible (since the haste is primarily going to speeding up PW:R enough to pack the Atonement stacks you lost by casting Plea over PW:R).

In terms of the steady-state rotation I was discussing, you're looking at a 3 - 4 Atonement steady-state at relatively low values of haste. The extra 6% - 8% haste (near-100% uptime) would likely justify using nearly pure Plea over PW:S/Shadow Mend (assuming there was no immediate need for the upfront heal), so it would akin to getting another 1800 - 2000 worth of secondary stats on your chest. However, I haven't actually modeled the legendary chest - there's a point at which adding more non-Borrowed Time Smite to your rotation stops paying off as opposed to simply having more Atonement in play.

That being said, I can't really see much of a 'shift' in playstyle aside from potentially emphasizing Plea more than PW:S/Shadow Mend. Whether you're using a simplistic rotation or the more complex, dps-style rotation I was discussing, you've still got the same basic tools and the nature of the buff precludes usefully spam-casting Plea.

I was particularly interested in the style someone suggested which makes extensive use of Borrowed Time procs at low Atonement count, and I was wondering about how an extra 8-12% haste by using Plea at 4-6 Atonements could affect this?

Aside from the decision between single target Atonement applicators, it wouldn't affect it any more than any haste boost would.

[Supliftz]

all the chest would really do is make staying at 5 atonements always optimal.

there's no way you would stop going up to high levels of atonement for burst healing because of haste from chest.

[Djriff]

If you're referring to how much I'm posting today, I'm procrastinating, very badly.

No actually meant in game race xD

...Although

[Jimjam38]

Quick question. How does Disc fair in leveilng/questing, and soloing rares and elite rares? They effective, great, meh? Also, world quests. They any good at doing them quickly solo?

I honestly find it disc to be extremely effective for general soloplay. Certainly I find it heaps easier than as shadow. Shadow suffers from poor 'on-demand' burst damage due to being a dot based spec, and the added ramp up time of void form, where as disc actually has very solid bust from the combination of Schism and Penance and a couple smites, and extreme tankyness thanks to Focused Will + Smite Absorb + PWS + Atonement healing.
For questing, where you're pulling a mob every 10 seconds or so, the penance+schism combo is actually really effective (even moreso if you go choose to take PotDS trait asap), and if you want to pull multiple mobs, multidotting+halo will (eventually) get the job done, and there's no chance of dying. Soloing rares is made easy with Shadowfiend/Mindbender + Power Infusion on top of what I've already mentioned.

Honestly, the most dangerous thing for disc is a pack of wild imps when Halo is on cooldown.

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The dps is about the half of what a proper dps does but disc doesn't die easily. Pulling 6-8 normal mobs is not lethal unless they stun or something like that.

Even getting stunned usually won't kill you because if you're pulling that many you'll be dotting them all up anyway so there's a constant stream of healing on you too. Also, Pain Sup can be used while stunned, and most mobs won't get through the 40% DR before you can shadowmend.

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all the chest would really do is make staying at 5 atonements always optimal.

there's no way you would stop going up to high levels of atonement for burst healing because of haste from chest.

I was thinking about this a lot the other night, because I've noticed (mostly in 5mans where I have a little mini-game of trying to maximize the use of my legendary) - with my current levels of haste and the legendary chest, Borrowed Time goes partially to waste, since it ends up reducing my Smite cast time below 1sec.

Someone mentioned a theoretical scenario where you stacked Crit>mast and only ever cast smite, penance or LW with Borrowed Time. The idea behind it was a high damage, high conversion build.

Now, I don't think (or want) this style to be better than the haste stacking preburst style that currently dominates, especially in raids, however it occurred to me that it might have potential in 5mans, especially if you have the legendary chest like I do.

So, could this be a viable style: stack haste to the point where smite has a 1sec cast time with BT + 5stack Estel haste bonus (supposed to be 10%, seems to be 12%), then stack Crit>Versatility/Mastery (whichever scales better for an atonement count of 5, I would assume versatility)
Playstyle then consists of weaving BT Procs and Atonement Applicators, prioritising Plea every few casts for the legendary proc. It gets more complicated when you want to optimize adding in refereshing dots and Schism, but idk, seems like it could have potential?

[Deleted]

Personally I like to have crit/haste in mythic+ playing with schism/grace. Cleared a m+ 10 so far as disc on time and it feels really rewarding and sometimes stressful as disc. For trinkets I use flask of the solemn night and DMC: Promises. I play really offensive with deadly grace pots cyclings CDs (PS, PW: S all the time).

This playstyle didn't fit into the raids so I managed to ask Kiná from method a few questions. He was gearing haste, mastery so I gave that a try resulting in big improvements. Trinkets DMC: Promises and the amalgam trinket from brh.

He noted that the most effective healing combo as disc priest is Power Infusion, Mind Bender and rapture combined together (MB hitting while you apply shield maxing atonements) which gave me a huge hps increase and better viability for our raids. I like to use castigation and purge of the wicked.

From personal experience I like to do these combos:
1) PI+MB+RAPTURE
2) MB+HALO (applying atonements beforehand - adds)
3) MB+LW (applying atonements beforehand, get used to LW travel time - single target)

Other than that using shadowmend on low targets preferably cycling around not spamming one and shielding one of the tanks at all time.

Sorry for the bad English it is not my native language

[PosPosPos]

He noted that the most effective healing combo as disc priest is Power Infusion, Mind Bender and rapture combined together (MB hitting while you apply shield maxing atonements) which gave me a huge hps increase and better viability for our raids. I like to use castigation and purge of the wicked.

From personal experience I like to do these combos:
1) PI+MB+RAPTURE
2) MB+HALO (applying atonements beforehand - adds)
3) MB+LW (applying atonements beforehand, get used to LW travel time - single target)

Other than that using shadowmend on low targets preferably cycling around not spamming one and shielding one of the tanks at all time.

Sorry for the bad English it is not my native language

It's idiotic to waste PI on rapture when you could use the mana cost reduction as well as increased haste to just PWR blanket the raid.

Method may well be one of the top guilds, but that doesn't automatically lend whatever they say any credence, especially if it's just plain wrong.