[Discussion] Disc Healing Compared To Other Healers [Comparison][Raiding][Mythic+]

[Lionpaw]

My cousins and I have been thinking about getting back into the game. I've been doing a little research and it seems like Discipline Healing has fallen out of grace. Holy isn't looking too hot either. Does anyone have any insight on the state of Priest healing and the vision Blizzard has for the class in the future?

How do they really stack up against other healers?

[Mayna]

Most people suck at Discipline so it's always going to have low parses. It's a very strong spec and rewarding to play but you have to be good at it. It's worth playing if you enjoy the play style and don't mind putting in the effort. Personally, I wouldn't play any other spec right now. If you want to faceroll just play Druid.

[Raiz]

Holy doesn't look too hot ? Judging from the graph, they're only 2% behind a resto shaman. Gimme a break
Disc is compensating the lack of heal for DPS. Also doesn't really work the same way as the other healers do. They're fine really. If you want to get back, there's nothing that forbid you to try the boosted characters. Just pick the one you like the most.

I chose Disc because they were the most fun to play with. Also because I don't play a lot of raid (once again they're fine in raid aswell, just completely different setup).

[Deleted]

Disc need perfect setup to perform well due to thier pro-active nature.

Also maybe its just me, but most of the Nighthold ramp-up weakauras are not working. For instance, on Aluriel, only the "Detonate:Arcane Orb" is working. Mark of Frost Explosion & Burst of flame dont work.

EDIT: just tried on krosus, everything seems fine. they were working perfectly.

When everything is figured out and timing perfected, you will see discs perform better.

[Lionpaw]

Most people suck at Discipline so it's always going to have low parses.

This isn't most people though. This is the max parse. aka, the best.

[Dracodraco]

The fact that Disc is less than 10% behind the other healers while bringing a stable 200K+ dps means they're just fine.
As others have pointed out, disc plays differently from all the other healers; Disc sucks absolute balls at constant, consistent raid damage, so any healer that does well against that sort of fight (such as a resto druid) is going to have far superior output. This doesn't mean Disc is bad; Disc is the most potent healer of all, being able to on-demand cooldown the raid multiple times throughout a fight, as long as (s)he gets ~10 seconds to prepare, and their output far surpasses that of a tranq/tide when they go all out.

Such potency comes with drawbacks though, so in short:

Disc -

Strengths:
-Able to burst multiple times outside of heavy cooldowns (not reliant on tranq/HTT to combat high raid dmg).
-Has the most potent healing output of all classes in a short duration timespan.
-Brings DPS while doing optimal healing (any other healer who does DPS, does so at the sacrifice of healing output).

Weakness:
Small group content (5-10 man, Lights wrath scales with number of atonements, so does damage output, and in a small raid you're more likely to be able to use semi-potent stuff like Wild Growth+artifact weapon to heal up the raid rather than a full on raid CD).
Bad sustained healing (keeping up a lot of atonements takes a TON of mana).

[Lionpaw]

-snip-

All solid points. I guess Disc isn't my cup of tea then. I like raw competitive throughput. How is Holy when stacked up against other healers generally? Pro's, Con's?

[Heathy]

I honestly haven't been able to try it in a heroic raid setting, from what i can tell its just bursty and has the extra damage reduction utility from smite on the boss and barrier for aoe/group wide damage reduction is quite unique.

the problem i think at least for me is that, its not as awesome as it used to be because you have to manually place atonement on ppl and it ticks off quite fast, but it is what stops you from being able to do 1 million hps, its bursty if you can get 5-10 atonements up your next penance is probably going to heal for millions but then you have down time while you restack atonement.

holy is just pure healing all the time, serenity saves lots of ppl who are on the brink of death, disc just doesn't have anything like that you got shield but that isn't even close to a 2-3m+ instant cast heal. if ppl spike below 60% then you have to shadow mend, its basically your 'oh shit' heal almost like flash heal but not as spammable, you only want to use that on ppl who are lower than 60% because atonement won't top them up as fast as just firing a shadow mend on them.

I like playing disc because its not just clicking heal bot, its fun to play but doesn't pump out the same numbers as holy. I like playing it with my current gear because with prydaz and the trinket from the dragons in EN plus your holy shield, at any one time you can stack a 1m+ absorb on yourself.

its fun for low mythics but doesn't really have the life saving ability that holy has. in 5 mans you can top a group off with sanctify and circle of healing, the aoe healing is too good, disc again doesn't really have that, the way i play it is by using radiance before a pull, using plea or shield on the 2 ppl without atonement, then go to town doing dps until atonement wears off then your back to plea and shield or a radiance, then back to dps, there is just annoying little down times where your doing basically sod all healing just reapplying atonement. you gotta keep smiting aswell because each smite is reducing the damage of boss melee swings on the tank by 80k or so per smite so if your not smiting your not really helping with reducing damage on the tank.

disc is by far a tank healing spec, it shines better when you only have to focus on one group, where as holy is fine for single target or raid wide aoe healing. disc in a raid is probably fine if you already have 2 really good raid healers, if you've got a druid or a shaman, then a disc priest would probably fill in that niche, although there is definitely a higher skill barrier when it comes to playing disc well if you can't play disc that well your best off just going holy because you can't lose.

i found karazhan fun to do as disc some bosses were actually easier as disc than they are as holy, but then you get a boss that does lots of aoe damage and then disc shows you why its shit.

if you go disc in a raid, i think ppl need to be aware of that fact and when a boss does an ability that hits hard ppl need to actually stack under your barrier so you do really kinda need ppl to be aware of the fact that your disc and you want to use your barrier at a certain point and ppl need to get in it to reduce the incoming damage, or just use it on the tank, unlike other healer cool downs barrier can be used to good effect but ppl do need to be aware of it and actually get into it you shouldn't just fire it off any time you want like hymn it should be worked into your tactic for that particular boss.

holy is honestly awesome, I am probably not using the best talents, they are all quite fun to use and certain talents are better for raiding and some are better for 5 mans. I am very used to firing off circle of healing on cooldown, its become a reflex for me so not having circle of healing is almost not an option for me, the cooldown you get on the same line apotheosis or something like that is very powerful but again, i used it a few times but still prefer the instant cast aoe heal from coh.

I think i play holy pretty well, so long as your using your holy words, use the light of t'urre ability on the tank when they spike, keep prayer of mending on cooldown, that is basically all there is to it, i personally use the talent that basically duplicates 40% of your flash heals on the previous target, also surge of light. remember to try to keep chastise on cooldown aswell because it can procc your little naruu pet and when that thing is out, oh boy the heals.

This is the build i use most of the time, when i was a bit under geared, taking light of the naruu is much better for 5 mans, having those extra 2 seconds on your holy word cooldown reduction is very very noticeable and will probably be the difference between a wipe and having serenity come off cooldown faster. all in all holy is not disappointing and can also do some seriously high burst healing, how much healing you do overall will probably be tied to how often your little pet thing procs, that pet doesn't quite double your healing but it can heal for a hell of a lot.

i've already said a lot but for mythic+ I prefer holy, as said above disc doesn't really have an ability that can bring someone from <20% to full in one instant cast, and in mythic + ppl are getting snapped all the time, i'd love to give it a try in like a +10 but i think it will just be a fail, i don't see the spec having enough throughput to keep the whole group alive and when random ppl get hit down low, you have no quick way of bringing them back up to full. perhaps with gear it wouldn't be so bad, my disc weap is like 15 ilvls lower than my holy weap so me going disc is a performance loss from the get go.

[Mintra]

The fact that Disc is less than 10% behind the other healers while bringing a stable 200K+ dps means they're just fine.

Really? In Mythic+ yeah maybe, but personally I've never had more then 140-150k in raid (thats with 53 traits and 887 ilvl) if I strictly focus to heal. Maybe 170k if there are adds long enough and I can spread PoW

[Dracodraco]

Really? In Mythic+ yeah maybe, but personally I've never had more then 140-150k in raid (thats with 53 traits and 887 ilvl) if I strictly focus to heal. Maybe 170k if there are adds long enough and I can spread PoW

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking.../974008/latest dunno, our discs' first time on heroic and he seemed to manage just fine (flip it to healing to see that he isn't falling behind there either).

[Goshko]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/ranking.../974008/latest dunno, our discs' first time on heroic and he seemed to manage just fine (flip it to healing to see that he isn't falling behind there either).

Unfortunately not everyone runs with 2 pocket boomkins and up to 5 innervates per boss.

[Dracodraco]

Unfortunately not everyone runs with 2 pocket boomkins and up to 5 innervates per boss.

15 kills, 6 wipes, 21 pulls for 51 innervates. He got a little over 2 per encounter.
That being said, DPS isn't at all reliant on innervate - in fact you'd be doing more damage without innervates, as you'd spend less time layering atonement and more doing your conserve-DPS instead (but obviously, HPS will suffer).

Also if you don't have 2 boomkins in a 30 man that's sort of sad considering how strong they are :s.

[Rucati]

I just started playing my Priest again the other day so maybe I can offer a fresh view on things, I'm only ~845 ilvl with 2 PvP trinkets that have no healing stats on them, so keep in mind this isn't some top tier raiding perspective.

Disc is pretty decent, and it's fun sometimes but I find it more frustrating than anything else dealing with Atonement. I understand it would have been OP to keep smart healing the way it was back in like MoP, but Atonement spam and then healing for 10 seconds and then more Atonement just feels like a chore. Disc is good, but they aren't so good as to warrant going through all that effort. Some people like that type of micromanagement, I just don't, especially when I don't feel like I'm being rewarded for it.

Holy is actually a lot of fun, I haven't done much high content (highest Mythic+ I've done so far is +9), but it feels solid even with my low gear level. The burst healing to recover from both AoE damage and single target damage is pretty impressive, and even though Renew is kind of shit it's still at least some sort of HoT that can help with small consistent damage. There are times though when I feel like I just don't have the healing required to keep people alive, spamming Flash Heal and seeing the tanks health not go up is pretty sad, but again that could just be a gear problem I'm not sure.

Overall both specs are fine, in fact all the Mythic+15s I've done on my main were with a Disc Priest and he usually competes perfectly fine in our raids as well with the other healers. It really comes down to which you prefer, he really likes the playstyle of Disc and the way Atonement healing works, I find it more of a chore than anything and prefer to stay away from it in PvE.

At the end of the day all 5 healers, and both Priest specs, are perfectly fine in mythic+ and raiding, it just depends what you enjoy the most really.

[MendUS]

Was this taken from current Nighthold rankings? If so, don't ever analyze the first week of a raid, especially being that it's only Normal and Heroic. Here are the reasons why:

A.) First week of normal/heroic. Disc priests need to understand damage patterns and when you're killing a boss in 1-2 attempts, it's hard to do.
B.) Normal / Heroic. Low damage going out so less to heal.
C.) Most guilds are overhealing the content, again, less to heal.
D.) Raids are typically more than 20 players. Healing CD's of other healers scale with raid size better than ours.

[Deleted]

15 kills, 6 wipes, 21 pulls for 51 innervates. He got a little over 2 per encounter.
That being said, DPS isn't at all reliant on innervate - in fact you'd be doing more damage without innervates, as you'd spend less time layering atonement and more doing your conserve-DPS instead (but obviously, HPS will suffer).

Also if you don't have 2 boomkins in a 30 man that's sort of sad considering how strong they are :s.

He is 5-7 ilevs above the other healers, with one bis legendary, bis trinkets and parsing 100% percentile rankings in a top guild that most likely is highly organized, which happens to be ideal conditions for disc. With all admiration to your disc priest, I wouldn't call that "regular stuff brought about generally by a disc priest", it's about as normal as saying "a shadow priest will bring 850k dps to your kill" - randomly took a high parsing dps from your log. Also why would he spend more time layering atonements with innervate if its not needed? A hasted innervate would allow him to stack those atonements faster. More mana usually does mean more dps for disc priests, as we need to stop smiting if we need to conserve mana. Not saying those innervates boosted his dps to the roof, but it surely didn't make it lower.

Edit: I wouldn't have commented, but you are replying to a person that is basically just rolling a character now. He is light years away from the point when he will be able to produce the numbers your disc priest is producing, if that will ever happen, and putting a fixed number down as a generic piece of info is just confusing. I think it's more productive to say that a disc priest will normally bring about a tank's level of dps (in your log, he's actually quite a bit lower than even tanks).

[Dracodraco]

He is 5-7 ilevs above the other healers, with one bis legendary, bis trinkets and parsing 100% percentile rankings in a top guild that most likely is highly organized, which happens to be ideal conditions for disc. With all admiration to your disc priest, I wouldn't call that "regular stuff brought about generally by a disc priest", it's about as normal as saying "a shadow priest will bring 850k dps to your kill" - randomly took a high parsing dps from your log. Also why would he spend more time layering atonements with innervate if its not needed? A hasted innervate would allow him to stack those atonements faster. More mana usually does mean more dps for disc priests, as we need to stop smiting if we need to conserve mana. Not saying those innervates boosted his dps to the roof, but it surely didn't make it lower.

"highly organized" first week of heroics is a good joke, I must say. We don't really have a clue, we spend the first week learning the encounters as we don't do PTR. That being said, my point was this is what disc is entirely capable of, and it's not a "fluke" that our disc does it, it's entirely consistent. It all comes down to the player, and the fact that disc brings a consistent damage output while staying competitive output-wise makes them extremely strong.

As for innervates, you could be pedantic and say that if he doesn't need to layer atonements, he'd use the innervate for DPS, which is entirely true, but lets be entirely fair here; If you have an innervate available you'd be a moron to not use it for when burst is comming to layer Atonements. Arguing that having innervates available raises your dps because "HE COULD JUST USE IT TO DO DPS INSTEAD!!!" is silly, because with the innervate available, it means he's spending more time casting radiance while they're free (thus not doing any damage) than smite. If he doesn't have the innervate, he'll burst less spikes, but will do more damage because he's spending more time using smite than casting radiance (hasted radiance or not).

[Deleted]

"highly organized" first week of heroics is a good joke, I must say. We don't really have a clue, we spend the first week learning the encounters as we don't do PTR. That being said, my point was this is what disc is entirely capable of, and it's not a "fluke" that our disc does it, it's entirely consistent. It all comes down to the player, and the fact that disc brings a consistent damage output while staying competitive output-wise makes them extremely strong.

As for innervates, you could be pedantic and say that if he doesn't need to layer atonements, he'd use the innervate for DPS, which is entirely true, but lets be entirely fair here; If you have an innervate available you'd be a moron to not use it for when burst is comming to layer Atonements. Arguing that having innervates available raises your dps because "HE COULD JUST USE IT TO DO DPS INSTEAD!!!" is silly, because with the innervate available, it means he's spending more time casting radiance while they're free (thus not doing any damage) than smite. If he doesn't have the innervate, he'll burst less spikes, but will do more damage because he's spending more time using smite than casting radiance (hasted radiance or not).

You should send him to my guild sometimes, and come along too. You would learn there the true meaning of "not organized". And there's far worse out there. I'm not following guild rankings, but I think yours is one that has been consistently clearing content (and farming it) way before nerfs. PTR? I'm fairly positive 90% of my guys never stepped foot in it, and the rest never found an instance entrance in it. I'd be shocked if half of them even watch a tactic video. I had raiders hearing about some boss abilities one month after we were progressing on it. Trust me, you do not know the real meaning of "disorganized".

Your point is that a top ranking disc in amazing gear can pull those numbers. 99% of the people playing disc can't. He's not ranked 100% in that fight for nothing. Yes, disc brings damage. I think my dps got my guilds a couple of kills that happened on enrage (yes, my guild wiped on enrage on star augur and tichondrius before we killed it), but often I wonder if me doing better healing (especially spot healing, at which disc is shit at) wouldn't have saved a dps that died. I'm not gonna deny it's an advantage, but your post still offers a skewed image for a person barely starting to play. 200k sounds impressive until you realize similarly geared dps pull 800-1.2 mil, and tanks pull 300-500k.

And ofc I could have been pedantic about innervate, and say he could have dpsed with the haste, but that would be silly. Your disc ranked high in healing too, so he wasn't chasing dps ranks. He is just a very good disc priest, with the gear and environment to compliment personal skills.

[Dracodraco]

You should send him to my guild sometimes, and come along too. You would learn there the true meaning of "not organized". And there's far worse out there. I'm not following guild rankings, but I think yours is one that has been consistently clearing content (and farming it) way before nerfs. PTR? I'm fairly positive 90% of my guys never stepped foot in it, and the rest never found an instance entrance in it. I'd be shocked if half of them even watch a tactic video. I had raiders hearing about some boss abilities one month after we were progressing on it. Trust me, you do not know the real meaning of "disorganized".

Your point is that a top ranking disc in amazing gear can pull those numbers. 99% of the people playing disc can't. He's not ranked 100% in that fight for nothing. Yes, disc brings damage. I think my dps got my guilds a couple of kills that happened on enrage (yes, my guild wiped on enrage on star augur and tichondrius before we killed it), but often I wonder if me doing better healing (especially spot healing, at which disc is shit at) wouldn't have saved a dps that died. I'm not gonna deny it's an advantage, but your post still offers a skewed image for a person barely starting to play. 200k sounds impressive until you realize similarly geared dps pull 800-1.2 mil, and tanks pull 300-500k.

And ofc I could have been pedantic about innervate, and say he could have dpsed with the haste, but that would be silly. Your disc ranked high in healing too, so he wasn't chasing dps ranks. He is just a very good disc priest, with the gear and environment to compliment personal skills.

In fairness, I don't think that's much different to some of our people. We might just be going at it a lot harder - for one, I didn't know that people with the shadow-soak debuff on Helya P3 couldn't be targetted by orbs, making the soak we forced our melee to do sort-of dumb in retrospect. Nor did any of our other raiders . We don't consistently clear before nerfs, but we do get most of it done and occasionally do.

Thing is though, this might be what a top ranking disc can do, but scale it down to what level anyone else would be playing at - a 50th percentile disc and a 50th percentile holy paladin would see much the same gap that they do at max potential. On a single target, he's also not really "far" behind tanks; Thing is most fights in NH has some sort of cleave (the only reason our spriest does 800K on trilliax is multidotting scrubbers for the explicit purpose of whoring, as they're a 100% irrelevant target that has 300M hp and aren't supposed to be killed). Here's the direct boss damage instead:
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...one&target=107

While, yes, the tanks are ahead, it's by a very small margin, really; And both of them are performing within orange percentiles DPS-wise as well, so it's not like the disc is just outplaying them.

The big downfall of disc comes at the fact that it doesn't have any sort of AOE or cleave, which makes the 200K seem a lot less significant, but applied at the correct spot it can be a significant help. Over the course of our first Guarm kill, our disc managed to do 35M damage - which is a 2% nerf to the healthpool of the boss. We didn't use it as we didn't progress into Helya P2 early enough for it to be an issue, but we had full intentions of having our disc switch sides depending on which platform had the Grimelord, as it has about 15% more hp than the mariner (thus shifting more damage to the platform needing it), while keeping most other assignments uniform (instead of shuffling multiple DPS from side to side).

[Deleted]

No such thing as disc whoring scrubbers, it does healing! "snicker". Besides, purge the wicked spreads, can't do anything about that!

I didn't get to see Helya Mythic, hated it as disc on hc, felt too hectic to prepare properly, and since our healers pop their cds as they see fit without any particular heads up, I just got frustrated and went holy, disc takes a bit of time to get used to for a new boss, and we didn't really "progress" on a hc boss. As for disc dps, it will generally be around that of a tank, plus/minus depending on the fight, considering equal skill. On our early kills of Ursoc, when the enrage was a real issue, I put myself in the healing team for the dps more than hps.

[Yunzi]

I think it's more productive to say that a disc priest will normally bring about a tank's level of dps.

That's not true anymore. Disc DPS has risen much less than Tank DPS over the course of the expansion so far. Here's where we sit right now at 75th percentile for Heroic NH -

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...gregate=amount

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...gregate=amount