How do we feel about disc's WoD toolkit?

[Deleted]

So it's been drummed in to us again and again that in WoD healing, they want spell selection and synergy to play a larger part in toolkits than simple spam, which had become the norm in MoP. Things like serendipity are given emphasis as it's stated that this provides "meaningful gameplay depth".

This is all good and fine, but as you know, most of disc's spell synergies and mechanics were removed: strength of soul, train of thought, inner focus and borrowed time (though it was given back in an... odd form). It has been said that these were removed due to their limited use over the past tier - this is due to horrific balancing which occurred alongside damage design, which pretty much made them useless. In the new "triage" environment which has also been mightily emphasised, these passives providing spell interaction would become more prominent - allowing depth for skilled players to use them to their advantage.

Comparing this to other healing classes it's fairly obvious that the discipline toolkit feels very incomplete, and this is not okay. And many of us have tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted and tweeted, and have so far received little info on the subject if any.

So let's have a poll and let the (QQ)opinion on the subject be gathered into one place to be shoved in the face of those who would see disc be released in what looks like a poor position. I'm going to include a poll as the main point of this for people (and discs) to give their opinion on whether or not they feel the current disc spell toolkit is acceptable.

Remember: This is not about us wanting to be OP or Extremely Powerful - it's about us wanting to have a balanced and interesting toolkit where spell choice matters, and inter-spell synergy is present.

[Deleted]

Disc mechanics are severely lacking. No one wants to spam one button all the time.

[Comfort]

Its genuinely been destroyed now. Can only hope that they intend to give us something in return for what they have torn away.

[Jimjam38]

I find the most curious thing to be inner focus - they pruned it then gave part of it back as a glyph that holy and shadow can also use, and the other part as a frustratingly baked in perk. As if holy and shadow weren't already so superior in pvp, but you go and give them our interrupt immune too. Its just careless. There's no other way to describe these changes. Careless. Pruning required the finesse of sculpting a bonsai, instead they ran at it with a chainsaw like it was a pack of zombies. IMO WoD will just be a huge chain of hotfixes and patches to get every class back to where they were, and thats before they even start to address the real problems rather than just undoing the new problems they've made.

[Zka]

Nothing wrong with mechanics except for atonement which was nerfed to uselessness. Also, the HPS and HPM numbers are weak. It's a tuning issue mostly. I'd discard the damage dealing concept and attach the evangelism stacking to Heal.

[Deleted]

From the point of view of the mechanics, in my opinion Disc has been totally crippled. Atonement / Archangel interaction is now so bad and boring (Atonement is weak and AA is mandatory, not to say penalizing when you're not in it). Other spells simply do not synergize like Holy's do.

[Deleted]

Priest will be trash the 1st season of WoD just like it always is. Then will get some ridiculous overbuff and/or new talent that fills the gaping hole in our skillset and then various nerfs when their untested changes are too overpowered in the current meta.

[anon5123]

As it is right now, I'm bracing myself for a repeat of T11 where Disc was horribly underpowered and Holy was the only way to go.

Hopefully they'll fix Disc by the first major patch of WoD. And hopefully Holy will not fall behind and become useless by the final patch.

[Deleted]

When they pruned the majority of our passives, I was really hoping they'd give us a bunch of useful, new passives that would suit the current (MoP) disc priest style of healing. As Deleze said, a lot of our passive abilities haven't been interesting this expansion because of the strength of Atonement, Spirit Shell, and Divine Aegis/crit. Even with the changes to healing in WoD, I doubt Strength of Soul, Train of Thought, and the original Borrowed Time (not to mention the new, even crappier version) would have very interesting though. Certainly not as impactful as something like Serendipity, Tidal Waves, and Harmony.

Grace might have been impactful with the healing changes and triple Atonement nerf but, sadly, it was remade into a boring, passive 8% healing increase (the official patch notes don't even reflect this, not sure they missed it or felt the list of pruned disc abilities was getting too long already).

Train of Thought could have been interesting too if they had upped the cooldown reduction of Penance by casting Smite to 1.5 seconds instead of the current 0.5 seconds. Might have made Smite worth casting even with the current, awful damage and healing it does.

It would be a good first step if they fixed some of our talents too. It's pretty ridiculous that Twist of Fate and Surge of Light haven't been able to proc from our spec defining ability Power Word: Shield for an enite expansion already.

[Deleted]

Disc mechanics are severely lacking. No one wants to spam one button all the time.

Who cares discs will most likely get (over) buffed a few weeks in to WoD just like they did in MoP.

I'll play either of the priest specs depending on which fits best in mythic. If that means I have to spam one button then I'll do it. I'd rather be spamming pw:s instead of atonement crap. As it stands currently Holy is a 2 button spam spec so it's not any different.

[anon5123]

As it stands currently Holy is a 2 button spam spec so it's not any different.

If you're "spamming 2 buttons" as Holy, you're doing it wrong.

[Thirteen]

Nothing wrong with mechanics except for atonement which was nerfed to uselessness. Also, the HPS and HPM numbers are weak. It's a tuning issue mostly. I'd discard the damage dealing concept and attach the evangelism stacking to Heal.

I think that's the point though. They wanted discs to mainly focus on Smiting so you can get Archangel, and not use it as solid healing.

Who cares discs will most likely get (over) buffed a few weeks in to WoD just like they did in MoP.

Well, while I'm not particularly expecting it, I can't say I'd be surprised if they did. The thing is, with priests having 2 healing specs, it's hard to make both balanced so that one doesn't blow the other one out of the water. At the same time, it doesn't feel like they really care enough to do it (see: any expansion). I guess they figure everyone's gonna be playing the "better" spec anyway, so why bother making the other one any good.

[Larynx]

Disc mechanics are severely lacking. No one wants to spam one button all the time.

Basically this is the only correct statement.

The spec was deleted in the alpha and Blizzard hasn't decided to reimplement it. The ability prune is probably one of the worst things that has ever happened to WoW... Instead of thinking, "Which class do I enjoy the most?" the question is now, "Which class was gutted the least?"

[Comfort]

Everyone saying "disc will get buffs and it will fix it" are so wrong, thats just slapping band aids onto a gaping wound and hoping for the best.
It wont fix the real issues with the spec, it will slightly mask it, sure disc might look alright on meters after a few buffs but the spec is gutted, its not fun as it currently is on beta.

They need to fix the disc toolkit as a whole, not add flat buffs and hope it makes disc priests be quiet and go away.

and i still dont understand the crying over atonement being nerfed, it only existed for 2 expansions and has only been this strong for most (not all) of Mists, for me disc was a lot more fun in Cata.
if anything people should be more concerned over atonement spells use as tools for evangelism stack generation, now with the removal of ToT and the power of HN and pw: s spam.

And I do have to agree with Larynx it does feel as though disc is not a spec anymore.

I am just so glad at least holy is amazing and had QoL fixes.

[Arrowset]

The spec was deleted in the alpha and Blizzard hasn't decided to reimplement it. The ability prune is probably one of the worst things that has ever happened to WoW... Instead of thinking, "Which class do I enjoy the most?" the question is now, "Which class was gutted the least?"

So true. I'm going back to like 5th alts I haven't played in years just because they are the last guys standing in this brutal expansion.

[Jimjam38]

Everyone saying "disc will get buffs and it will fix it" are so wrong, thats just slapping band aids onto a gaping wound and hoping for the best.
It wont fix the real issues with the spec, it will slightly mask it, sure disc might look alright on meters after a few buffs but the spec is gutted, its not fun as it currently is on beta.

They need to fix the disc toolkit as a whole, not add flat buffs and hope it makes disc priests be quiet and go away.

and i still dont understand the crying over atonement being nerfed, it only existed for 2 expansions and has only been this strong for most (not all) of Mists, for me disc was a lot more fun in Cata.
if anything people should be more concerned over atonement spells use as tools for evangelism stack generation, now with the removal of ToT and the power of HN and pw: s spam.

And I do have to agree with Larynx it does feel as though disc is not a spec anymore.

I am just so glad at least holy is amazing and had QoL fixes.

The thing is, this isn't an issue exclusive to disc. There are many specs that ended up in just as horrible a position after the pruning, with the pruning introducing new issues and nothing to address their existing ones.
The primary example would be Frost DK's - sure they didn't get hit nearly as hard as we did in pruning, but blizzard has gone backwards in attempting to fix their existing issues. Blizzard specifically promised to fix the issue of the butchered DW frost rotation that became known as Mastersimple, where you just spammed Frost Strike and Howling Blast and didn't use obliterate. The DK theorycrafters have worked out that in WoD Mastersimple is going to become viable at unprecedentedly low ilevels - probably during the first tier. Blizzard said they were going to fix crit devaluing and the issues around Killing Machine. What happened is that frost now has agonizing levels of downtime and crit is just as devalued as ever. They tried to make frost value haste, made it their stat atunement. Frost becomes their worst stat with only 200 ish rating and versatility is their best, the stat that's meant to be tuned to be worst for every dps spec. There's plenty of other issues, no need to go into details on other classes here, we all get the idea.

I do, however, think that disc is one of the specs that got hit hardest and most carelessly with the pruning. They cut numerous abilities that simply could not be justified as bloat, especially as many of them were passives anyway. We were already one of the specs with less mechanics and passives that most, there was very little need for this level of pruning. If one class only had 20 abilities and another had 39, do you think taking the same number of abilities away from both classes was fair and balanced? No, of course not, but that's pretty much what happened, and disc was one of the specs that had less mechanics to begin with. All you need is to look at where we ended up CC wise to see it. Blizzard goes "Okay, lets reduce cc accross the board, gotta take something away from everyone, keep it fair you know. Okay druids, you guys had 9001 different CC abilities, so we're gonna cut a few there, but its cool you'll still have 4 or 5 left afterwards, oh and disc, you guys had 2 CC abilities to begin with, so to keep things fair we're gonna take 1 from you guys as well."
There was no other spec in the entire game that only had a single CC ability, AND it had to come from a talent. They did give us silence in the end, but ffs, what a ridiculous position to be in. And that's pretty much how I feel we ended up with mechanics too. We didn't have a lot to begin with, and atonement was obviously overpowered. Instead of just nerfing atonement and cutting the couple things that made sense to go to keep in line with the across the board changes - Inner Fire / Inner Will, HoH, Divine Fury - they cut all our core mechanics too. We eventually saw the return of BT, and in a somewhat better form too, but there's still a gaping mechanical void that hasn't been addressed.

A lot of specs have been reduced to a few buttons to spam, but that's been mostly the result of poor numbers tuning making the rest of their abilities not worth using and may or may not be fixed with the final rounds of tuning. But in the case of disc (and most likely a few other specs) we just literally don't have many mechanics, and the ones worth using are even fewer.

[Comfort]

I wasn't saying it was the worst for us (the post doesn't say that once), this is a thread about disc priest.
And my post addressed the fact the spec does't work, it should have been fully reworked, not had 1 spell added to it and buff after buff.

This is probably just going to lead to the class being unbalanced (and a problem) further along anyway, they could have put more time into fixing it for the launch of WoD, instead we are probably going to get more of their "fixes" some time during the first tier that may ultimately lead us somewhere we don't want to go (Maybe SoO disc agan...).

And regardless of all that, the ability pruning has lead to one thing for disc for me: lack of enjoyment. And I'm sure its the case for some others.

[Noradin]

Who cares discs will most likely get (over) buffed a few weeks in to WoD just like they did in MoP.

Read the opening post, this thread is NOT ABOUT NUMBERS.

[Deleted]

The problem with a lack of mechanics for a spec is that the spec has to then have a level of baseline power. For example, let's assume all specs must be balanced.
We have two healing specs: in honor of Dayani let's call them Pseudiscipline Priest and Mistweaver Mock.

Scenario 1:
They they both have only a channelled ST heal: the Pseudiscipline Priest channels Pe-Non which ticks every 0.5s for 1k. The Mistweaver Mock has Simulating Mist which ticks every 0.5s for 1k. Both specs have the same potential throughput.

Scenario 2:
The Pseudiscipline Priest still has Pe-Non only for 0.5s tickling 1k. The Mistweaver Mock, however has had their Simulating Mist Reduced to 0.5k every 0.5s. This obviously halves their throughput compared to Pseudiscipline Priest. However, Mistweaver Mock has a new spell: Enveloping Mist. Each time that Simulating Mist channels, the Mistweaver Mock gains one Chi. And at 4 chi the Mistwever Mock can add a hot of enveloping mist to the the target, which does quite strong healing. The result is that the Pseudiscipline Priest and the Mistweaver Mock have the same output, but the pseudiscipline priest has nothing to do other than use the spell and spam it to do so.


My point is that the end result is a spec which is capped by spell strength rather than skill, which is NOT interesting. With no synergy in our toolkits, our maximum HPS becomes a factor of spell sustainability and inbuilt power, rather than the ability to pay attention and manage any 2ndry resource, procs or spell interaction.

I need more coffee so I hope this made sense.

[nobodysbaby]

I said right away when they went on removing a lot of things: "Dont worry, they will ofc.add new and better mechanics instead!". Hm... hm......

I feel Holy had a whole lot of isses fixed that might as well been hotfixed in MoP, like pom overwriting, GS more reliant, Lightwell not cancel with damage, Chakras bonus/penalty removed, lvl 90 talents cap etc.

What is new and fun? Holy Nova??? Renew spam..? Im worried. This again... why dont they hire som real priest players :/