Spirit Shell is back! wait..

[Basmothh]

And of course the first genuinely fun looking part of the spec is just a bug and not at all intended by Blizzard... that's how its always been for disc though, the bugs have more vision than the devs

How exactly is it fun though? Getting passive procs of PoM by spamming Atonement doesn't seem engaging at all. :\

[Deleted]

How exactly is it fun though? Getting passive procs of PoM by spamming Atonement doesn't seem engaging at all. :\

Fun doesn't need to be engaging. Fun can be lots and lots of PoMs whizzing about. Fun and engaging would be passive PoM through Atonement with shield and AoE healing weaving and getting neat procs!

Fun, of course, is totally and utterly subjective!

[Jimjam38]

Fun doesn't need to be engaging. Fun can be lots and lots of PoMs whizzing about. Fun and engaging would be passive PoM through Atonement with shield and AoE healing weaving and getting neat procs!

Fun, of course, is totally and utterly subjective!

^this
And the PoM procs aren't mindless spam, you actually need to apply them to people via a direct heal. The engaging part would come from the weaving required from managing the PoM procs, WoM Stack generation via atonement, and SoL Procs to apply to PoM's to the best target, as well as maintaining things like FW, ToF and Archangel. That sounds a lot better to me than just spamming PW:S on people, maybe some CoW here and there.
It would be comepletely OP, but if multistrikes also generated WoM stacks, (and this is all assuming they let atonement generate them at all) then a heavy MS build could be generating a new PoM every 4-5 seconds at a conservative estimate, allowing you to have so many PoM's flying around at once, just imagine that for something like Iron Jug with periods of pulsing AoE. You'd spend the build up generating as many PoMs as you can and then once the pulsing AoE begins watch them fly like mad. The more i think about this the more devastating it is that it wont happen :'(

[Isheria]

This talent (Words of Mending) is currently mega useless because PoM heals for basically nothing. Even if you have 10 PoM up if that was even possible you'll still do no healing because PoM heals for 4k fully raid buffed on a 280k health pool. Until PoM gets super buffed this talent is worthless.

[Jimjam38]

Well, that is indeed sad news. As a concept its great, but until it can be generated a lot more easily, and PoM heals for a decent amount, I guess we cant expect this to be a viable talent. If the same is true for Holy, I expect we'll see it tuned a bit better soon enough considering the massive hardon the devs seem to have for Holy at the moment, despite still not quiet getting it (*cough* chakra *cough*).
Even if it doesn't get fixed before live, I'm expecting a hotfix or massive buff in 6.2 for it, cause if there's one thing the devs are always willing to do its balance talent choices within a tier. Doesn't matter where the tier stands in comparison to the rest of the game balance, it can be woefully useless or despised (ie, Mage t6, Dk t5), or game breakingly OP (Priest healing t6), all 3 choices in the tier need to be equally valuable. Just look at cascade, like priest t6 healing needed a buff, but come 5.4.something they realized it didn't compete with the other 2, so they buffed it so that it would hit all members of a 25man raid. Healing Tide OP? Better make it baseline and introduce something else that's more in line with the other two. Executioner sentence is useless in pvp? Better make it so that dispelling it triggers the final burst.
Even if they balance nothing else, they'll make sure that talents within a tier are comparable. I'm not worried about WoM, its the rest of the (disc) spec i'm worried about.

[Well]

Fun would be a PoH applying PoM via WoM to all affected targets <3

[Deleted]

Looking at the raid testing videos there are still plenty of niche fights for disc. It is all going to boil down to numbers and mana. I mean look at gruul. That inferno slash is fairly predictable and comes every 30s or so. Plenty of time to heal the raid up between slashes. Most of the remaining damage is tank healing and the constant aura. If disc has enough mana to roll CoW/PWS/Spirit shell constantly on the next group to get hit popping archangel on CD. You will very quickly see disc blocking out a massive amount of damage. At least on hc, not sure about mythic.

Also the damage pattern is as predicted. They have a shallow constant damage aura and infrequent spikes. The spikes just last longer, but the raid still spends a good chunk of the time at fairly high health and there is clearly quite a bit of overhealing. Its just that instead of the inferno slice being healed out in 3-4 seconds it takes 5-10 seconds, then back to 20s of 20k odd ticks on the raid. Plenty of time to restack evangelism and gogo roll absorbs.

Not sure if it will really be like its been touted i.e. a low overheal, low average raid health environment.

[Deleted]

How does mana look though? You suggested previously that SS via PoH was prohibitive due to mana costs - is this still the case?

Looking at the raid testing videos there are still plenty of niche fights for disc

Niche as in "Oh, look. Halfus" or niche as in half a raid instance against the other healer's full thing?

[Isheria]

1 spirit shell aka 4 casts of PoH which is what you can squeeze in the 10 seconds the buff lasts costs 56320 mana and your max mana is 160000. So on gruul for example the chance to spirit shell every inferno slice is pretty much zero unless you like being oom at about 70% of the boss hp and stand there looking pretty. There's a bandaid fix to this issue on t17 4p which reduces PoH cost by 50% for 10 sec after you activate archangel which surprisingly matches the duration of the spirit shell buff.

[Deleted]

How does mana look though? You suggested previously that SS via PoH was prohibitive due to mana costs - is this still the case?



Niche as in "Oh, look. Halfus" or niche as in half a raid instance against the other healer's full thing?

I haven't done the fights as I am not in the beta. I just looked the quest log and the videos of fights that have been released. When I say niche, I mean as in very OP in some encounters and terrible in others.

As things stand though, without the 4set and in PvP gear you can barely use spirit shell, but we don't know exactly what the mana situation will be, given the 4set and we don't know for sure what a fully geared priest will be like regen wise on release. That is why I said it depends on the final numbers and mana.

1 spirit shell aka 4 casts of PoH which is what you can squeeze in the 10 seconds the buff lasts costs 56320 mana and your max mana is 160000. So on gruul for example the chance to spirit shell every inferno slice is pretty much zero unless you like being oom at about 70% of the boss hp and stand there looking pretty. There's a bandaid fix to this issue on t17 4p which reduces PoH cost by 50% for 10 sec after you activate archangel which surprisingly matches the duration of the spirit shell buff.

You can't spirit shell every slice. You can only spirit shell every 2nd slice maximum and potentially less depending on how mana is tuned on release. Its all about mana and numbers.

With archangel boosting crit you can put on a massive spirit shell on 10 people. For every second slice you will still pop AA at -10s, but you will start rolling CoW/PWS (to benefit from borrowed time) 20s before the slice, with a single PoH (under borrowed time) to use up the 100% crit bonus.

If disc has enough numbers to not be massively below everyone else in any encounter with constant damage, then it will be devastatingly OP on this one.

The only problem is stacking archangel. Without looking a log to see the exact timing I can't tell if it will be easy to squeeze something in.

Disc desperately needs a better option than atonement for stacking archangel, especially since its only value now is archangel.

[Deleted]

I haven't done the fights as I am not in the beta. I just looked the quest log and the videos of fights that have been released. When I say niche, I mean as in very OP in some encounters and terrible in others.

Yeah, that is exactly the type of niche that you don't want to inhabit. Dragging out the Discipline Priest to make the best of buggy or poorly tuned abilities (Rapture and Infest for example) isn't super fun. Perhaps the idea is that we are seeing a simplification of healers? Instead of Blizzard identifying Discipline as its own distinct healer we are moving back to a singular Priest healer which is predominantly represented by Holy with Discipline as a token third spec.

Disc desperately needs a better option than atonement for stacking archangel, especially since its only value now is archangel.

Or improve Atonement?

[Noradin]

To be honest I don't think any healer should inhabit any niche, it's just another way of saying "poorly tuned" or "unbalanced". Niches are for spells (or talents) not for whole specs, and they are currently in the process of getting rid of those spells, too. (Clutter presumably.)

(The correct definition of 'niche' translated into 'gamer-speek' would be: costing on being overpowered in one situation only but (nearly) useless in any other. Do you really want that for a whole spec?)

[Jimjam38]

I don't understand the nerf to atonement, when they haven't actually nerfed any other smart heals. Monk eminence is the same, and it got buffed, not nerfed. Monk's surging mist just got changed to make the smart heal glyph effect a baseline effect for MW. I haven't seen anything about Chain Heal, Wild Growth, CoH, or LoD becoming 'dumb' smart heals either (i haven't looked very hard, but that's still the kind of thing that jumps out at you). Or healing rain, sanctuary and mushroom either for that matter.
Just another lol fak u disc from blizzard. I'm really starting to think they don't have a single dev dedicated to disc, and it just gets offloaded onto whichever dev has some free time each week, because none of the changes reflect an actual understanding of the spec. All the changes they made were to nerf disc in a MoP raid environment, despite the fact that they completely reworked the raid healing model for a new expansion. Its like they had decided on all these nerfs long ago and set them in stone, and then never thought to change them when they reworked the entire game play model, and no one's noticed because there's no one dedicated to disc. I don't know how it actually works a blizzard, but I'd imagine you'd have a team of devs for each role with one dev per spec. Idk..

[Deleted]

Atonement is not going to fix disc. It worked for MoP only because of the specific damage environement and the fact that disc had very little to do between the level 90, spirit shell and PWS, which made up the majority of our our healing. Especially after the Aegis change and removal of auto aegis from PoH, our healing shifted massively towards a few short term CDs, meaning it paid off massively to conserve mana with atonement between those CDs, since atonement did decent damage (in 10man) and the smart heal component made it a great sniping tool and you got archangel for free to line up with the CDs that make up the brunt of your healing anyway. That way disc sniped with absorbs, then sniped with atonement and had archangel on demand, to use with the level 90 and spirit shell.

That isn't going to return, because the new design philosophy is that you must care about who you target. Also atonement is low HPS and a high HPS environment where your big heals are things like PoH, PWS and CoW, atonement is terrible terrible terrible. You will feel like you have to stop healing just so you can stack archangel and that is really frustrating, when you really need to get archangel up, but there are people who needs heals RIGHT NOW.

Disc needs to move away from atonement. In order for it to be usable it needs to be buffed to be comparable to our other spells, so that you don't feel penalised for using it. But since it is smart if you buff it like that you will want to use atonement as a bread and butter heal, which defeats the object of the exercise.

I would love to see healing penance, nova and flash heal give evangelism stacks, because it will add more synergy between our heals. If you need to tank heal hard then penance and flash heal are your emergency buttons and by giving stacks you can also use that to buff your CoW/heal and PWS afterwards. The same with nova and PoH. If you are aoeing you will need to use some nova and then you can use the stacks to coax the maximum healing out of PoH which is your main mana sink.

I would also love to see spirit shell changed, into a CD that reduces damage instead of absorbing. It should make your heals apply a damage reduction on the people it hits that ramps up depending on the amount of healing received. That would make it a fanstastic tool to complement the limitations of barrier and consolidate disc as a utility/mitigation spec. It would also be lovely to pick another heal in addition to holy nova and give it a special function for disc. E.g. I would love to see PoM automatically trigger on an injured target with aegis on with the heal being buffed depending on the amount of aegis present. That would make us want to target PoM carefully and it will make it a powerful heal for disc. Also you could pick WoM instead of CoW for heavy aoe damage and it would help rebalance our heal/absorb ratio.

[Deleted]

Atonement is not going to fix disc. It worked for MoP only because of the specific damage environement and the fact that disc had very little to do between the level 90, spirit shell and PWS, which made up the majority of our our healing. Especially after the Aegis change and removal of auto aegis from PoH, our healing shifted massively towards a few short term CDs, meaning it paid off massively to conserve mana with atonement between those CDs, since atonement did decent damage (in 10man) and the smart heal component made it a great sniping tool and you got archangel for free to line up with the CDs that make up the brunt of your healing anyway. That way disc sniped with absorbs, then sniped with atonement and had archangel on demand, to use with the level 90 and spirit shell.

None of that means that Atonement providing a sufficient amount of healing can't resolve the issues currently faced by Discipline... Purely because it worked well in a different environment does not mean that the toolset - semi-smart direct healing via damage - can't be retuned to provide strong single target healing and allow for building of Evangelism.

I would love to see healing penance, nova and flash heal give evangelism stacks, because it will add more synergy between our heals. If you need to tank heal hard then penance and flash heal are your emergency buttons and by giving stacks you can also use that to buff your CoW/heal and PWS afterwards. The same with nova and PoH. If you are aoeing you will need to use some nova and then you can use the stacks to coax the maximum healing out of PoH which is your main mana sink.

Yeah, this is a nice change in some ways but also serves to further dilute Discipline and make it another healer that needs to heal with X to improve Y. As someone that actually enjoys the DPS-to-Heal play style I just can't get behind it. However, it also doesn't solve the issue of Discipline being weak outside of Archangel. Sitting with five stacks of Evangelism, regardless of how it was generated, isn't going to enhance healing until AA comes back off cooldown.

Your idea for SS is really nice but... how long will it be until demands are received for meters not to be blind towards it? From the perspective of other healers this is often a complaint towards PW:B and it was definitely controversial back in ICC when PW:S didn't parse correctly. I guess this is more indicative with the idea in the community that everyone should be "meter balanced". There might need to be a shift in perception with regards to healer worth (and not just within the upper echelons) for something like that to work socially. Mechanically though, it sounds great and I'd love something like that personally. Could also see some nice interplay with the new mage ability.

That would make us want to target PoM carefully and it will make it a powerful heal for disc.

So, PoM would automatically trigger on a target that is HP < 100% with DA > 0? And the heal would be proportional in some way to DA? That sounds... horrible, not least because the default UI (and most commonly used UIs) don't have a good way of showing specific absorbs on a target. Not to mention, the chance of DA being stripped or target being healed during the cast. Perhaps if PoM was still instant and the UI was actually tailored to show absorbs in some way...

[Hjorim]

I don't understand the nerf to atonement, when they haven't actually nerfed any other smart heals. Monk eminence is the same, and it got buffed, not nerfed. Monk's surging mist just got changed to make the smart heal glyph effect a baseline effect for MW. I haven't seen anything about Chain Heal, Wild Growth, CoH, or LoD becoming 'dumb' smart heals either (i haven't looked very hard, but that's still the kind of thing that jumps out at you). Or healing rain, sanctuary and mushroom either for that matter.
Just another lol fak u disc from blizzard. I'm really starting to think they don't have a single dev dedicated to disc, and it just gets offloaded onto whichever dev has some free time each week, because none of the changes reflect an actual understanding of the spec. All the changes they made were to nerf disc in a MoP raid environment, despite the fact that they completely reworked the raid healing model for a new expansion. Its like they had decided on all these nerfs long ago and set them in stone, and then never thought to change them when they reworked the entire game play model, and no one's noticed because there's no one dedicated to disc. I don't know how it actually works a blizzard, but I'd imagine you'd have a team of devs for each role with one dev per spec. Idk..

If you check the Retuning Healing Spells section of the Beta Patch Notes, you will see that they are making all the smart heals less smart.

Quote (both from the mentioned section):

We also took a look at healing spells that were passive or auto-targeted (so-called "smart" heals). We want healers to care about who they're targeting and which heals they're using, so that their decisions matter more. To that end, we're reducing the healing of many passive and auto-targeted heals, and making smart heals a little less smart. Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets, of course.

or:

Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range, instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets.

[Larynx]

If you check the Retuning Healing Spells section of the Beta Patch Notes, you will see that they are making all the smart heals less smart.

Quote (both from the mentioned section):

We also took a look at healing spells that were passive or auto-targeted (so-called "smart" heals). We want healers to care about who they're targeting and which heals they're using, so that their decisions matter more. To that end, we're reducing the healing of many passive and auto-targeted heals, and making smart heals a little less smart. Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets, of course.

or:

Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range, instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets.

I believe he's referencing how atonement explicitly had its healing numbers nerfed, rather than only the smartheal nerf.

Disc is really a lot of nerfs on top of nerfs for WoD. Nerfing absorbs, nerfing the environment absorbs work in, things like that. It's overkill.

[Hjorim]

I believe he's referencing how atonement explicitly had its healing numbers nerfed, rather than only the smartheal nerf.

Disc is really a lot of nerfs on top of nerfs for WoD. Nerfing absorbs, nerfing the environment absorbs work in, things like that. It's overkill.

Since he mentioned not knowing about other classes smart heals being "dumb" in his post, I don't think he was mentioning a nerf in the numbers :P. Anyway, it might seem a lot, but as far as I could test so far (very little with all the disconnects/crash) disc is doing fine in the 5man dungeons. I did not have enough time to test into a raid setting, guess it might fall behind there, but I expect it to be better once they start balancing numbers.

I agree, though, that using heals to get Evangelism stacks sounds way better than how it is now, but that might be because I prefer not having to DPS when playing as healer, and the way it is it forces us to from time to time DPS a little bit.

[Darkener]

Their goal with Atonement may have been to tune for the +50% healer role when you need a little more healing but don't want to lose 100% of a dps to get it.

Edit: and nothing is actually "tuned" yet if they are still mucking with talents.

[Deleted]

None of that means that Atonement providing a sufficient amount of healing can't resolve the issues currently faced by Discipline... Purely because it worked well in a different environment does not mean that the toolset - semi-smart direct healing via damage - can't be retuned to provide strong single target healing and allow for building of Evangelism.



Yeah, this is a nice change in some ways but also serves to further dilute Discipline and make it another healer that needs to heal with X to improve Y. As someone that actually enjoys the DPS-to-Heal play style I just can't get behind it. However, it also doesn't solve the issue of Discipline being weak outside of Archangel. Sitting with five stacks of Evangelism, regardless of how it was generated, isn't going to enhance healing until AA comes back off cooldown.

Your idea for SS is really nice but... how long will it be until demands are received for meters not to be blind towards it? From the perspective of other healers this is often a complaint towards PW:B and it was definitely controversial back in ICC when PW:S didn't parse correctly. I guess this is more indicative with the idea in the community that everyone should be "meter balanced". There might need to be a shift in perception with regards to healer worth (and not just within the upper echelons) for something like that to work socially. Mechanically though, it sounds great and I'd love something like that personally. Could also see some nice interplay with the new mage ability.



So, PoM would automatically trigger on a target that is HP < 100% with DA > 0? And the heal would be proportional in some way to DA? That sounds... horrible, not least because the default UI (and most commonly used UIs) don't have a good way of showing specific absorbs on a target. Not to mention, the chance of DA being stripped or target being healed during the cast. Perhaps if PoM was still instant and the UI was actually tailored to show absorbs in some way...

Atonement never provided strong single target healing, except on fights with complementary mechanics. Healing wise it was at its best 10-20% above heal with penance on CD. The main benefit of atonement was that you could spend the majority of your time DPSing and then unlease a massive healing burst (DS, Spirit shell, IF PoH and so on). This is because even if you spend your time casting a higher HPS heal instead of atonement you wouldn't get a lot more healing, because there wasn't that much to heal. You can check logs and you will see. You often see people casting dps spells well 60-65% of the time, but have atonement heal for like 20-30% of the total, because the brunt of their healing, is divine star and the aegis it generates as well as spirit shell. You need just 13s a minute to cast star and SS.

Now consider the current environement. This is one where you don't have massive burst any more. So every GCD taken to DPS really hurts your healing output. On top of that this is an environment where there is a lot to do almost all the time.

So lets buff atonement to the point where atonement has HPS roughly the same as heal/CoW in HPS and smart. You will never use heal at all and you will severely curtain CoW. You will also not cast holy nova. You will mostly cast atonement because it is smart and it does damage.

A common complaint from other healers was that disc was free to spend a lot of its time DPSing, so it had an unfair advantage, because on top of being great at sniping it also did 2x-3x more damage than any other healer. Blizzard has said they want DPS to Heal to be a tradeoff not a default mode.

If you just make atonement a little stronger and even return the smart behaviour then you gained nothing. You will still feel penalised for using it rotationally, which is actually what blizzard intended.

Discipline still plays very very differently from other healers, because it relies a great deal on pre-emptive healing.

You can have spirit shell absorb a proportion of the damage taken instead of reducing it directly and it will show up on the meters just fine.

Finally the PoM thing. Here is the problem. You have just finished heal up a burst and you have a few seconds where there isn't much damage coming in. But healthbars are low. This is the time to pop the proposed PoM. Also if you have PoM running on an injured target and you hit them with a crit heal it will make PoM pop and heal them more. If you have WoM stacked and you pop an AA auto crit PoH on an injured group then PoM will rapidly jump between the targets doing extra healing. You can even change the mechanics for PoM preferring targets with aegis on for discipline.
The default blizzard UI, shows you not only if an absorb is present, but also how big it is. All frames can be configured to show the same these days. Change to the default UI for a sec and cast PWS on your self and you will see what I mean. If you pick the wrong target from PoM and it does not go off then and there, then you picked the wrong target. That is no different from casting a CoW on a target that won't take any more damage or a PoH on a group that gets healed up before it lands. Its your mistake. Even if aegis gets stripped assuming PoM is tuned correctly to the point it is worth casting for disc and holy. It will certainly have the healing from PoM buffed considerably this way and it will help give disc a mechanic to keep PoM jumping. The real downside of using the PoM this way is that it is complicated and obsessive players, might feel they are forced to track absorbs too much in order to squeeze a couple of points of healing more from PoM.