Big Changes to Disc Coming

[HolyLathusDisc]

For one, I am personally happy they are finally addressing that they have been lazy on the changes and nerf to disc.


While on some fights it is nice to completely gimp boss abilities for the sake of downing it quickly, the fact that disc is just plain boring is beyond overwhelming.


I really REALLY hope that blizzard can truly recognize the problem with DA/SS with prayer of healing and truly compensate the changes for something more *healing* based and not just pure absorbs.


What does concern me was the statement they made saying "We do want disc to use PW:S more".




Discuss your feelings on the nerfs coming to disc.

[Markle]

PoH Spam
I think their latest changes are an attempt to address the issue in 25 man where Discs just stack mastery and spam PoH endlessly. In ten man triage healing is required and PoH spam isn't all that effective other than building up Stacks of Spirit Shell. Ideally you should be using a variety of spells in your toolbox and i think blizzard is attempting to bring some more diversity to our healing in 25 man raids.

Mana Regen
the changes to our mana regen are welcome as rapture scaling with temporary spirit buffs is out of control and gives us unlimited mana. Clearly out of sink with the mana regen other healers experience.

Disc in General
I think disc's ability to negate some boss abilities is the advantage of bringing a disc priest. Many other classes have abilities that cheese encounter design (BoP etc) and for the bosses where a massive attack lines up with our 1 min spirit shell CD then yeah why shouldn't we be able to save the day.

All-in-all i agree we were in need of some nerfs and i like the idea of being more in line with the other healers interms of regen, reeling in the ridiculous PoH spam while still allowing us to shine on certain encounters/mechanics (*winks at H blade lord*).

[Saphiramoon]

Always considered the buff to aegis to 50% un-needed - especially for poh - so imo its a logical change. Disc has enough absorbs with spirit shell to give the spec flavor, but passive constant absorbs of that size are meh. Leaving 50% for single target spells would be oki I think. I would like the proportion for disc to switch more a bit towards healing and less on absorbs, its too unique of a niche to be able to balance it.

I think disc has been balanced mostly for 25 mans, resulting their absorbs in 10 mans to ignore some boss mechanics. Without saying that disc is weak in 25 mans (not the case), it feels even stronger in 10 mans.

Otherwise, comments like "disc is boring" are personal opinions. For me, its always been more fun than any other healer . Then again, that might imply not playing "competitively" on bleeding edge cutting progress. For what I do, plenty of fun is available.

[HolyLathusDisc]

I just think the absorbs got too crazy overall:

Spirit Shell: It should HELP, but it should not almost completely NULLIFY abilities to the point where you don't need raid cooldowns.

DA: I don't think this is terribly out of balance, but on some fights feeling like DA is the best way to help the raid.... just sucks to play that way.

Regen: I don't think the rapture nerf is going to be a really huge nerf, I think our regen will still be miles above any other healer tbh. The average Rapture on Wowlogs is around 30-33k. Spikes of course are higher.


However, for the people who have rapture used on cooldown, it won't really be a nerf because the 250% brings it right to where the average normally was.

[Saphiramoon]

I wouldn't say Spirit Shell nullifies boss abilities in 25 man - you get to cast 6-7 poh, putting a shield of 50-100k on the raid - which hardly nullifies any hc boss ability. In 10 man however, you can stack SS to cap (almost 200k shields) on top of the fact that boss dmg is lower. The fabled rain of blades blows up my SS shields in 2 seconds (25 man).

Aegis: I stand by my ground that it is a lot of "passive" healing does atm. You dont have a choice in aoe than to poh, and poh comes with aegis whether you need/want it or not. Aegis atm is disc free healing. Its a huge sponge and it implies no decision. I frankly considered giving guaranteed aegis to poh for disc a bandaid when they made it in cata, and with an ability like spirit shell for group shielding, I dont even see a lot of point in it, but removing it completely would leave disc poh lacking any personality.

Regen: the short term buffs for rapture needed to go. I dont think without those disc regen is op, disc lacks efficient aoe healing. Spirit Shell migh be a raid cd, but its an expensive one for a cd. I'm not sure rapture really needed to go from 200-250%, but after playing with 150%, it deffo wasnt enough, even with the short term procs working.

[simland]

The key problem is that Disc has little else in terms of raid healing. You have PoH, SS PoH and Tier 6 Talent. If you take any of that away, without providing a viable alternative, there is no reason to bring a Disc healer to a raid. You can't afford to have sole tank healers anymore with the amount of raid damage required to make encounters hard these days. And you can always get a Bacodin to cover that role.

Find a different way to allow Disc to reactive raid heal and balance can be found.

That and if they do nerf the amount of absorbs that can ultimately be placed on a raid, they may be able to tune encounters such that absorbs are not as required.

[Irialx]

I am torn on this.

I do believe Spirit Shell needed a nerf. That much is obvious. Do I feel it should completely ignore mastery? I'm not sure. Mastery itself is a sore subject for me. I feel it needs to be redesigned entirely but that is another topic itself.

However, I do not feel DA should be nerfed. I feel like Blizzard doesnt know what to do with us honestly. Its either one extreme or the other in terms of viability.

I think big changes need to be made to our class overall.

[Clebane]

Hopefully they will bring down DA to only 40%, that would probably bring us in line with other healers.

[Fenixdown]

To be honest, the easiest solution would be to simply remove the bonus mastery the spec gets. The second you get rid of that much mastery from the spec is the second all the numbers fall right in line with everyone else. Holy gets no base mastery increases for the reason that that much free healing would just be bordering overpowered (as it is I can get EoL procs to roll for 4k per). Discipline didn't need the baseline mastery boost for the same reasons.

That's the easy and logical fix.

[Rivelle]

I knew there would be changes and nerfs, I'm only glad that they seem to be approaching it with small, gradual changes to test things out instead of the huge knee-jerk reaction nerf that hit mistweaver monks which used to be my main (before I switched back to my priest).

The adjustments to spirit shell and rapture seem justified thus far, here's hoping they apply a minor nerf to DA and then nerf it more if need be, and not just apply a huge nerf to it and end up having to buff it back up.

I really, honestly would like to be able to go holy when I feel like playing holy instead of just playing disc all the time because it's so much more powerful.

[Sunna]

I am torn on this.

I do believe Spirit Shell needed a nerf. That much is obvious. Do I feel it should completely ignore mastery? I'm not sure. Mastery itself is a sore subject for me. I feel it needs to be redesigned entirely but that is another topic itself.

However, I do not feel DA should be nerfed. I feel like Blizzard doesnt know what to do with us honestly. Its either one extreme or the other in terms of viability.

I think big changes need to be made to our class overall.

This is exactly how I feel. I'm glad to see that they're trying to tackle the problem of us using PoH almost to the exclusion of all else, but I'm annoyed that they feel they have to nerf it into the ground to get us to change. I feel like we lack direction. Absorbs have historically been difficult to balance so building a whole healing spec around them was already destined to be a challenge.

I think having two different raid sizes has complicated the balance issue further. It's totally different when you can stack a spirit shell to cap on the entire raid. My spirit shell simply functions as a nice buffer in our 25man raids but never totally nullifies a boss ability. The problem is, I'm not sure how you could really redesign this ability so that it didn't inherently scale better in a smaller raid.

[Purpleisbetter]

The DA change is totally retarded.
Won't last.

[Havoc12]

Have you people lost your mind? Don't you see what has just happened. Disc received an overall nerf of 40% or more to sustained HPS and much more than that in encounters where disc HPS came from absorbing spikes.

PoH was base*(1+crit)*(1.5+0.5*mastery). It is now base*(1+crit*(2+mastery)).

With my unbuffed value of spellpower and buffed values for mastery and crit, PWS spam is 79656 HPS due to borrowed time and PoH spam is 79 447k HPS before overheal. Yes you read it right, PoH a slow, group limited heal is less HPS than PWS spam and a good chunk of its HPS is dependent on overhealing random crits, leaving behind aegis that you have no way of keeping alive. Compare that with pre-nerf PoH of 152 580k HPS.

You will not cast PoH, except "sometimes" with spirit shell, all you will be doing as disc is chain pws with penance and instants and you will be hitting 15-20% less HPS than other healers in everything including tank heals.

Even in those fights where atonement is strong, all that will happen is more overheal. In most damage buffs fights even smite overcaps aegis and it is so big that crits have a strong propensity for overheal. 20% boost to penance is going to be like 5-10% boost in real terms in those fights where atonement is good, but the 40% nerf to PoH and spirit shell, means for those fights where disc has heavy atonement use you will see a small drop and for every other fight you won't see disc at all, because everyone will respec holy.

Seriously everyone should be spamming the blizzard forums complaining about this change.

They nerfed PoH to the point of uselessness and they didn't actually give us anything else. If you replace all your PoHs right now by PWS you will end up with less HPS than you could do with the way disc was when MoP was released. It seems everyone here has forgotten what a train wreck that was. Well this is even worse.

[Spazzeh]

Hey, let's create another thread on the topic!

In all seriousness...since Blizz is so in love with abilities having charges this expac (Warrior charge, Monk roll, Pally clemency)...why not put a 3 (2?) charge on SS when activated? Solves 2 problems...limits how many people you can shield and (more specifically for 10man) how strong you can shield them. Keep the duration the same, so its not punishing if you have to move out of fire right after activating, and hell...it would force us to time it even better than we have to now (again more for 10man, as stacking the shield allows you to refresh duration).

That, with no mastery boost to SS (but still guaranteed DA on PoH, but a weaker DA) would solve a lot of the meter QQ.

[Rorschachs]

They may have reverted the spirit shell nerf. Doesn't really matter that much as they removed DA from poh.

[Randomerror]

I welcome the changes, I liked being able to use PW:Shield for more then just Rapture procs. I thought that it was stupid to have that great spell be used so infrequently.

[HolyLathusDisc]

I loved my disc priest in early Cata. Tier 11 I felt like I had such a diverse casting selection that really set disc apart.

I really hope blizzard brings tier 11 disc back to the table. The spec was so strong without being overpowered

[chocobo606]

i'm not sure "PoH at 100%, PoH at 75%, PoH at 50%, PoH at 25% PoH when we're dead" spam with pw:s on the tanks is in any way fun or interesting, but somehow managed to be overpowered. i've seen the disc spec make some of the worst healers i've seen look amazing, and contrary to what you might think, no they really were terrible.

maybe they should find more interesting ways to create DA and give more spells to use, since all they really do is share holys spells with added effects.

[Davron]

Disc priests are effective right now. what is the problem? quit complaining about disc priests. if you don't like to play them, don't. if you don't like they way they heal, find something else. ADAPT! HAVE FUN WITH IT! quit all your bitching and whining. Why would anyone that plays a certain class/spec complain that the class/spec is over powered? I say, and beg, "stfu. tell no one!"

Goddamn Debbie Downers here . . . fml

[Havoc12]

Bad healers are still terrible with disc. They might be above other healers with slightly better skills in certain fights, but they are miiiiles behind decent disc healers and decent disc healers are miiiiles behind good disc healers, which are still far behind excellent disc healers. They will also be behind skilled healers from other classes and holy priests in most fights.

Disc spent the whole start of MoP being just a step above non-viable. It is back in that position after 5.2