Disc 5.2 Nerf Discussion

[Bigbuffdaddy]

Lots of complicated to's and fro's going on but if you get back to basics... what is the problem and why/how does it happen.

Problem... Disc priests cream the meters compared to others.

Q/ How do they win the meters?
A/ They can stack DA through the roof, basically sniping the heals.

Q/ How can they afford to stack it so much?
A/ Ridiculously high mana regen makes it possible

Q/ Why do they do it?
A/ Shielding is all they have. If you look at the healing meters all of their "actual" healing is less than pathetic.

Q/ OK... so they heal for nothing, how do we nerf them so other healers can compete?
A/ Well, we're Blizzard so we can nerf their shields, basically reducing their AoE throughput by about 40%

Q/ Seems harsh Blizz... How will that affect 10 mans.
A/ Should screw them up nicely... lol. No-one will want a Disc priest in a 10 man when most fights are 2 healed. Muwhahaha!

You suck Blizz... just too nasty.

Blizzard: OK Mr knowitall, what would you do?
Player: Simple... If a Poh heals for 30k and procs a 20k shield, why not buff PoH to heal for 40k and proc a 10k shield. Change the Mastery and DA coefficients.
Blizzard: Hmm... no good, they'll still stack DA too high.
Player: OK then, what say you nerf their mana regen?
Blizzard: Nerfs... now you're talking our language.
Player: Maybe cap DA so it can't stack as high?
Blizzard: Interesting concepts... but I'm bored with your logical approach. You're aware of course that we've buffed Penance and PW:S?
Player: Saw that... looks like you want them to head back into the tank healer role.
Blizzard: Well yes... Just this minute Tank healers have become necessary in 10 man raids with 2 healers
Player: Pardon..? Maybe I misunderstood. Did you just say that all of a sudden Tank healers were necessary in current raid content?
Blizzard: Yes
Player: I have to disagree. When Draw Flames, Earthquake, Radiating Energies, Force and Verve, titan Gas, Crush and the like go off, what then?
Blizzard: Well it's obvious... The whole raid will die, but the Tank the Disc Priest was looking after will die last. Mission accomplished.
Player: Oh
Blizzard: Any other questions?
Player: Doesn't seem like a sound plan to me
Blizzard: Any other questions?
Player: I've been playing a Disc Priest for over 5 years and know them pretty well, could you at least consider what I've said?
Blizzard: Any other questions?
Player: Nevermind.

[Rivelle]

I'm sorry that you have to "relearn your class", but the spec is clearly broken. I'm playing both. Not only is this not even fun, it's not even how healing should work. At least BC holy priest used more than one spell more often than not to win at healing (for the old school priests, you know what I'm talking about here). Disc doesn't even do that. It's PoH = 100k HPS. Everyone else is healing their asses off to try and get close to that with everything in their arsenal while you just sit there going "la la la" targeting a random person in a party and pushing your 1 key. It's arcane mage for healers, and it's terrible.

Maybe you're not cut out for healing if that kind of playstyle doesn't bother you. I've been doing it for seven years, all on priest. I'm glad they're fixing it. It's justified and it's needed. Granted, I think there's better solutions (just simply remove the additional 20% mastery bonus discipline gets and boom, fixed), but anything to get people to realize that priests have more than one healing spec is good enough for me.

So because Disc Priests top the meters (In some cases, grossly so), they effectively take out competition, and they definitely eliminate any argument about which class/player you should bring, because the answer is almost always a Disc Priest, unless you already have 3.

I have to agree with these statements, particularly after an experience this week where my bored spamming in LFR led to me having up to 10% more healing done than the next healer (namely the second half of HoF) and the incredulous resto shaman linking a meter and begging me to leave them with something to heal.

I agree that disc needs a nerf. However, I'm uneasy because after playing a priest since early BC, I picked up mistweaver as a new main for the first two months of this expansion. I was quickly shown that this was a poor idea since Blizzard threw three different knee-jerk reaction nerfs at them with 5.1. I had agreed with the fact that mistweavers needed to be nerfed at that point too, but while I didn't agree with the "Sky is falling" people I was concerned that the people who said they'd still be fine were wrong as well. In the end, Blizzard threw two unannounced nerfs in on top of the announced nerfs, which were nearly as bad as they seemed.

I know that they'll probably put many more changes in to disc before 5.2 actually releases, but I'm just as concerned after seeing their knee-jerk nerf reactions before that they're going to do it again to disc priests. I'd be perfectly happy if it was nerfed just down to the point where holy and disc were both viable choices and could both compete with other healing classes at a level where player skill would allow someone to perform better than simple class mechanics.

I'd love to see more logs and math of people who are able to get some testing in on the PTR to make a more educated assessment of what disc might look like after this patch.

[Bigbuffdaddy]

Stacking DA is the disc priests only option for Aoe healing and I think it's this more than SS that's the problem, although I admit SS does need a nerf.

Without stacking DA we're worse than useless. If you look at our healing figures, in almost all cases you'll see the top three are SS, DA and PW:S. PoH and PoM are way down there, less than pathetic. PoH heals for around 8k less than Holy, but they also have CoH, The Serenity AoE heal, Divine Hymn, Lightwell/Lightspring and spammable Renew.

I fail to understand how so many people (even a few Disc Priests) can't comprehend that if the patch goes live as it's currently written, without an AoE healing buff of some sort we're as good as gone, given that so many fights are 2 healed. No co-healer is going to be able to up their heals by our lost 40% without ooming.

We're sniping all the heals with Shields, predominantly from DA. I agree it needs fixing but they're overlooking the most commonsense thing to do and that is simply to change the DA and Mastery coefficients a little. A PoH that heals for 30k and drops a 20k DA could easily be changed to a 40k heal that drops a 10k shield and cap its stacking amount at say... 50k (roughly 35% of current). This alone would stop the PoH spamming... keep the Rapture nerf and that will make sure of it.

Increasing the strength of PW:S and buffing Penance at the expense of almost all AoE capabilities points us in the direction of Tank healer and there's no place for them anymore. I fear for the class but have faith that the current notes will not be final. However, in line with the Disc Priests nature, I'm preparing for the damage by dropping Shadow and getting back into Holy... just in case.

[Darkener]

So wouldn't it make even more sense for them to see how they're doing against other pure healing classes and leave disc out of it? Seriously, just turn off absorbs on recount and disc will be at the bottom and then all the other healers can feel like they've accomplished something. That way I don't have to re-learn my class every patch.

Well, this may actually be happening anyway since PWS on the PTR no longer shows up in combat logs. Not sure if that is a bug or intended, but it would certainly make Disc priests look much worse than they are. OH, and Spirit Shell is bugged so that it causes every spell cast during SS to increase the mana cost of Flash Heal by 8 million mana (or thereabouts). I was able to see the mana cost of my Flash Heal go up as high as 26 million mana.

So, just as an FYI to all Disc Priests, do not look at any Raid testing during the current PTR Build 16486 to be indicative of anything. Too many bugs atm. Even for PvP, the Inner Focus glyph going baseline isn't actually working either. It's kind of a useless build as far as Disc testing. But the Binding Heal glyph does work, and it really does cost a friggin ton to use. Spam it a few times and you're at 50% mana. If you are a glutton for painful PTR testing videos you can check mine out: http://youtu.be/AsGUDs16aUQ

[wrynil]

agreed I like this aswell. Passive Divine Aegis was good, but only because we were lacking a spell like Spirit Shell. With Spirit Shell its nice to see the 100% passive go from divine aegis (in terms of prayer of healing).

As 10man disc priest I like the other changes aswell.

[Quilzar]

Why can't they keep disc exactly how they are, and all the other classes turn off absorbs on recount so they can feel like they're winning?

Really?

So right now you don't think Disc is OP?

To try and put this into another context.

If say Rogues where super OP and where 20% ahead of everyone else in DPS, the Rogues could say "well 20% of my damage is Melle attacks" just ignore them in Recount and then we are the same.

While I 100% agree the boss getting killed is what is important, under your logic it would be ok if disc could absorb 1mill dmg every 10 seconds but it does not matter because absorbs don't count.

Maybe try being a bit realistic about it?

[Skadovsk]

agreed I like this aswell. Passive Divine Aegis was good, but only because we were lacking a spell like Spirit Shell. With Spirit Shell its nice to see the 100% passive go from divine aegis (in terms of prayer of healing).

As 10man disc priest I like the other changes aswell.

That's the problem, it seems like it won't hurt 10 mans at all.
But I can't honestly think what I'm gonna do in 25 mans, atonement heal until ss comes back from CD?
PWS is gonna be more expensive overall, penance, binding don't really heal a lot of people, by the time I PoH ON 1 GROUP AND hopefully heal all the party members, any other healing spec is already healing all the entire raid. PoM and any 90 talent won't really fill the role of PoH with aegis.
So it looks like smite spam while filling a few other spells in between.
NOPE, whywouldIplaythat.jpg
Taking away the faceroll? More like taking away the fun, holy paladins will have more absorbs after 5.2 than the spec designed to pull absorbs out of its ass.

[Cookie]

I don't think that disc will be 'useless' in 10 man come 5.2 with the current changes, I think disc in it's current state will mean spamming 3 buttons (solace, penance and smite) for 95% of every fight which is way more boring than any dpsers rotation and really shitty design.

[Abitor]

I don't think that disc will be 'useless' in 10 man come 5.2 with the current changes, I think disc in it's current state will mean spamming 3 buttons (solace, penance and smite) for 95% of every fight which is way more boring than any dpsers rotation and really shitty design.

solace,penance,smite,poh,binding heal(glyphe),pw:s it's ok other healer don't use more spells imo.

[Cookie]

PoH will have 0 use outside of SS. Binding heal can barely be used with that mana cost. Every other healer is using way more spells than that (if you aren't you're doing it wrong), I'm using over 50 bindings as disc right now (I still will in 5.2, but I'll be able to do almost exactly the same healing without 90% of them). Spamming PoH constantly isn't very interesting (not that I'm doing that in 10 man atm, it's just one of my tools) but even that has more depth than atonement healing (0 thoughts about targetting/positioning, 0 thoughts about evengalism stacking, 0 thoughts about cd usage apart from PI).

My dislike is (mostly) not about the disc nerfs being too harsh (I do think that disc will be quite bad considering the emphasis most fights have had on aoe healing though, but on some fights the added atonement dps will be huge as well) but the fact that this patch promotes the most boring 'rotation' a spec has had since tbc.

[Havoc12]

PWS has not been buffed by 40%. That is just a tooltip bug.

Fenixdown, you must be joking. The fights where disc is topping the meters by miles are fights with huge fat spikes and little in between (windlord bladelord), fights with low level ticking damage and occasional spikes and tank healing fights with occasional aoe spikes. Disc currently has slightly less throughput than the top aoe healers, but a massive amount of absorbs, so it is consistently 3-10%, above shamans, paladins and holy priests, but monks are still 5% ahead of disc. Nerf PoH by 30% and remove absorbs and you will see that disc will go down like a rock. It is a mathematical certainty.

Elegon is not an aoe fight except at the end and in that fight disc is mostly spamming atonement, because of the damage on boss. Disc will still be doing really well on elegon after the nerf, except the last phase its not worth casting anything except atonement anymore.

As for the rest take all those fights where disc is really OP and remove 80% of divine aegis (30% of disc healing), remove 40% of spirit shell ~(30-40% of disc healing) and buff atonement from penance by 20%, which every disc uses at least once every 10s for stacking evangelism or they are not at the top of the ranks for sure.

We don't need to see the fights, we can predict exactly how disc will be by just looking at the all the experience we had from the start of MoP. Think back at the start of MoP. Now your regen will feel the same as it did back then (which blizzard agreed was bad). This is because rapture will yield less mana than before, but you will gain more mana from the new solace than you did from mindbender. Your PoH will feel weaker, because although it is only slightly lower, it has no guaranteed absorb, spirit shell will be 20% weaker. Binding heal will be much stronger, but really expensive and you notice a significant but not very large increase on penance. Back then would you say that would have been enough to fix discipline? I dare say if you suggest that people would be laughing at you.

Now unless every new fight is a niche fight, disc is going to be the same as the start of MoP. Not a very good place to be.

What will most likely happen, is a few weeks after the patch hits, you will have a huge crowd complaining about how bad disc is and we will have another horrible hotfix.

People who say binding heal is not good are dead wrong. You will be using the glyphed version of this spell, because it is incredibly strong, despite the mana cost. If you are injured then binding heal is an absolute no brainer. It has better HPM than it does now and better HPS and even now its a good spell to use if you can. The only downside is if you glyph it you can't use it unless you have a 3rd target. It is much better HPS than PoH. PoM is also much better HPM than PoH, especially with the 2 set. Once you get the 4 set your order of prefered spells will be penance, followed by PoM and binding heal when the others are usable. You have absolutely nothing that you can use for a situation where you have contant hard raid-wide damage. In this situation you will not cast PoH, you will cast PWS,penance,PoM every10s and fill in with binding heal. PoH will be used with spirit shell and Inner focus. Even with that what will happen is if the damage is challenging for other healers, you will just watch the bars drop and feel powerless.

[Cookie]

Binding heal will be great after the patch, but it still has a freaking high mana cost while rapture gets raped, we won't be able to support high use of it (and it's still shit compared to the 'aoe' healing options of the other classes). PoM actually being good again is nice though (too bad that and cascade will be our only solid aoe healing, like you stated).

[HolyLathusDisc]

Binding will only be decent as a spot heal, don't forget they nerfed the healing it does significantly and its mana cost is through the roof. TBH unless theres another fight like gara it's going to be an extremely situational spell

[Skadovsk]

Binding will only be decent as a spot heal, don't forget they nerfed the healing it does significantly and its mana cost is through the roof. TBH unless theres another fight like gara it's going to be an extremely situational spell

No they didn't, the nerf was for shadow, disc and holy get the 40% passive, same with flash.

[Havoc12]

Binding will only be decent as a spot heal, don't forget they nerfed the healing it does significantly and its mana cost is through the roof. TBH unless theres another fight like gara it's going to be an extremely situational spell

I am afraid as the poster below you explained BH was not nerfed at all. Binding heal has pretty insane HPS right now. With my ~ilvl 495 gear I can hit about 120k HPS with it with full raid buffs. In comparison PoH is like 90k.

As for mana regen BH currently is has better HPM than any single target heal. 35% increase in mana cost but a 50% increase in healing. Its HPM has gone up even though it was quite high already.

With my current gear and factoring in crit and aegis PoH hits for 250k, while BH hits for 190k. So PoH heals for 33% more and costs 39% less, so its HPM is roughly double that of binding heal. However binding heal has 25% more HPS than PoH, its much faster and its not party limited. When you are injured glyphed binding heal is now a no brainer, unless you have inner focus up.

The main problem is you need to be injured to do it.

[Rorschachs]

Just change the chakra mechanic so we can use be holy for almost every situation + make disc the worst spec to play in pve and I will be fine with it.

[HolyLathusDisc]

I am afraid as the poster below you explained BH was not nerfed at all. Binding heal has pretty insane HPS right now. With my ~ilvl 495 gear I can hit about 120k HPS with it with full raid buffs. In comparison PoH is like 90k.

As for mana regen BH currently is has better HPM than any single target heal. 35% increase in mana cost but a 50% increase in healing. Its HPM has gone up even though it was quite high already.

With my current gear and factoring in crit and aegis PoH hits for 250k, while BH hits for 190k. So PoH heals for 33% more and costs 39% less, so its HPM is roughly double that of binding heal. However binding heal has 25% more HPS than PoH, its much faster and its not party limited. When you are injured glyphed binding heal is now a no brainer, unless you have inner focus up.

The main problem is you need to be injured to do it.

Maybe I read another note, I thought after the glyph was added they nerfed binding heal alone... maybe it was just shadow?

[Mazi]

Maybe I read another note, I thought after the glyph was added they nerfed binding heal alone... maybe it was just shadow?

It was for Shadow. They also adjusted the +Flash Heal bonus for Holy/Disc to include BH

[Skadovsk]

Just change the chakra mechanic so we can use be holy for almost every situation + make disc the worst spec to play in pve and I will be fine with it.

Hur hur, nerf the spec I don't like, USHOLYPRIESTS XDDDDD

You're what is wrong with this community.

[Noradin]

Binding heal has pretty insane HPS right now. With my ~ilvl 495 gear I can hit about 120k HPS with it with full raid buffs. In comparison PoH is like 90k.

As for mana regen BH currently is has better HPM than any single target heal. 35% increase in mana cost but a 50% increase in healing. Its HPM has gone up even though it was quite high already.

Unless you actively seek to stand in fire all the time you won't really be able to use all that HpS and it will go down to 80k HpS. Its high HpS and HpM are situational. If you did not take damage yourself or if no one else took damage it is not the spell you should use. It will never be able to take the place of PoH or any other AoE heal.
And if we cannot effectively spam it, then it is ok for it to have better HpM/HpS than other, spammable spells, as it raises our overall HpS/HpM only slightly and that is what gets balanced among specs/classes.