[6.2.3] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Deleted]

so ive decided to try mindbender instead of Solace and sometimes when i use mindbender on trash that is close to dying dies mindbender doesnt attack closest and it just comes back next to me lol

Yes, one of the reasons that Solace is better! Silly Mindbender. You need to have attacked the other target for your Shadow Squid to get the idea.

[Well]

Yes, one of the reasons that Solace is better! Silly Mindbender. You need to have attacked the other target for your Shadow Squid to get the idea.

Indeed, that's the safety measure on Mindbender/Shadowfiend to not pull shit accidentally.

[Floopa]

just healed burial grounds CM on my alt disc in 612 ilvl and it was a lot easier than healing on my 636 MW XD

kinda funny imo

[Deleted]

just healed burial grounds CM on my alt disc in 612 ilvl and it was a lot easier than healing on my 636 MW XD

kinda funny imo

Mentioned this earlier - with a group that is willing to play in a structured, sensible and pragmatic manner, Discipline does well. Either that or maybe you are just a Priest at heart really. I think it is the latter of course.

[Floopa]

Mentioned this earlier - with a group that is willing to play in a structured, sensible and pragmatic manner, Discipline does well. Either that or maybe you are just a Priest at heart really. I think it is the latter of course.

nah MWs just fucking suck in 5 man content, its not really a balance issue tho so i dont care. i do CMs as WW on my monk anyway, disc priest was just lol, you absorb everything

[Deleted]

nah MWs just fucking suck

fixed that for you.

[Floopa]

fixed that for you.

no? in raids they're pretty strong.

[Soulstrike]

no? in raids they're pretty strong.

use that revivial in 40man ez top hps

- - - Updated - - -

just healed burial grounds CM on my alt disc in 612 ilvl and it was a lot easier than healing on my 636 MW XD

kinda funny imo

havent tried CM yet is it difficult??

assuming its easier than pre nerf cata dungeons 4.0

[Jimjam38]

Since 5mans is the main thing to do at the moment, i've found a few things:

General 5man things:

• Shielding Vs Healing; MoP made people forget that we're proactive, not reactive, we need to pre-empt the damage and shield before it happens.
  If you wait until the damage has happened and then try to react you're gonna have a bad time. Our main throughput abilities are shields (PWS, CoW), not heals, so disc in WoD is a bit like being stuck in an eternal malkorok fight, where you can't really heal people's actual health until its over (or, more realistically, until Penance comes off cooldown, or unti EAA is ready for PoH). In raids its fine, you've got other healers to do that, but in 5mans its just you. You need to be proactive, not reactive. Shield people, even at full health.
  
• Blanket PWS from the pull. Whenever someone's Weakened Soul drops off, PWS them again, doesn't matter if they're at full HP, its an absorb, not a heal, it will be useful. You want to stop the damage from happening, because you'll find it very hard to catch up. PWS is very mana efficient, and 5man fights aren't very long, so don't be afraid to go nuts with PWS.
  
• Preshield the tank before the pull. I cant emphasise enough how much it helps to have a fully capped CoW + a PWS when the tank pulls, it gives you plenty of time to build some AA, shield the dps and avoid the fire if needed. Depending on when you preshielded with PWS you'll often have a moderate amount of CoW left when Weakened Soul falls off, so you can PWS again and then have time to keep a comfortable buffer of CoW rolling while you do other things.
  
• Life Leap: This is something I covered in my Proving Grounds guide, but I want to talk about it again. Life Leap, which is what I've named Life Grip + Restored Faith Glyph, is much much more useful than in MoP, for two reasons. 1, the glyph lets you use it for mobility, and my personal favorite, for when you somehow loose track of the location of that pesky group or raid member who is in desperate need of healing, life leap to them and follow up with the 2nd reason its more useful than in mop: Enchanced Leap of Faith. This makes the next non-periodic single target heal within 8 sec on the LoF target 50% stronger. For this purpose, Penance doesn't count as periodic, so a lifeleap + penance is a really massive heal, easily worth the time spent using LoF, especially if you PWS the target before hand. It only works on actual heals though, so don't bother trying to use it on CoW or PWS. The other thing is if you combine it with EAA (see below) on a flash heal you get a massive, fast single target heal + Divine Ageis.
  
• Empowered Archangel (EAA) for catching up on damage. EAA is our sad replacement for Inner Focus, which guarantees 100% crit on the next Flash Heal or PoH after activating archangel, and as much as we mourn the loss of a ability, EAA is almost as good. It has a 15sec shorter cooldown (because its now tied to AA) and is independent of the number of stacks of evangelism consumed (ie, its always 100% chance, even with only 1 stack of evangelism). EAA + EAA should be your primary method of catching up on party damage in 5mans, as the DA makes a great buffer to give you time to follow up with another PoH. However, EAA doesn't reduce mana cost like IF did, so don't get too trigger happy with it. The other thing is that you don't need to use it on PoH, it's just as useful for catching up tank (or even dps) health with a flash heal. Combine it with life leap (see above) and you can get a massive Flash Heal + DA on the tank. Either way, its an excellent tool for 5man healing, if you're in a bad spot and need a big heal on the whole group and everyone has weakened soul, pop archangel and PoH, if you don't have any stacks then quickly get one from Holy fire (preferable) or Penance (if HF is on cooldown) and pop it with 1 stack for EAA.
  Also, take note that EAA has a very long duration, its almost as long as the CD on Archangel, so you don't have to use immediately. If you really need to plan for some big burst damage (such as in CMs) then you can almost 'pool' EAA by using AA and not consuming EAA until it's about to expire, by when you'll have another AA ready within a few seconds for another EAA.
  
• Don't forget Atonement. This might seem like an odd point considering all the Atonement QQing that's been going around since the beta, and I was no exception, but it's not completely dead. If you're blanketing well with PWS and managing the tank damage sufficiently with CoW then you'll actually be able to make decent use of Atonement. I get that it's weak and shitty compared to mop, but Offensive Penance and Holy Fire are still relatively decent and if you don't need Penance to play catch up (which you often will, but not always) then it's really beneficial to use it for evangelism. You still don't want to smite much, if at all, but there are even times to use it too (eg, on the pull if you preshielded well, you'll have time for Off penance, HF and 1-3 smites). It's not the end of the world if you use Archangel with 3 vs 5 stacks, but the difference between good and bad gameplay is being able to get the additional stacks for when you need them without falling behind on the healing.
  
• Flash Heal vs CoW. People talk about having to spam Flash heal as disc. This is so wrong, so so wrong. Flash heal (and Heal as well) is near useless because of CoW. CoW is significantly more throughput, even with the cast time, and is an absorb, meaning it's not going to be wasted as overheals. CoW can be refreshed, adding the new amount, not replacing. It can also be preshielded, as i discussed earlier. The trap people often fall into is thinking that if the tank is low health, that you need to 'heal' it, not shield. Why? It doesn't make a difference if its a shield or a heal, they both stop it from dying. Even if the tank is at 1% hp, as long as it's got a shield on him he wont die. The ONLY time Flash Heal is worth using *On the tank* is when you literally don't have time for CoW to finish casting AND you don't have PWS or Penance available. That's the ONLY time flash heal is better than CoW (except when using it for EAA as i discussed above).
  
• Healing DPS. Another thing is that some people might be trying to use CoW for healing the dps. This is really a bad idea, CoW is niche to 'tank healing' situations due to the 'slow and massive' nature of its throughput. It might be worth using on dps if they have some kind of fixate mechanic on them (or something like the iron prisons from Dark Shaman) but otherwise keep it restricted to tank healing. PWS and Penance on DPS, with EAA-PoH or EAA-FH if necessary. Now, Flash Heal is somewhat worth using on the DPS in this regard, but often the dps don't take enough constant damage that PWS gets completely absorbed before Weakened Soul ends. Of course, if they're standing in bad then you have a problem and PWS will get used way before WS ends, so Flash heal is going to be necessary in that situation, but if they're standing in that much bad then you have a bigger problem than your spell usage.
  
• The Bad DPS who take too much damage. If its just 1 dps who keeps standing in shit and is just taking massive, insane, unhealable damage, let them die, it's actually not worth the time and mana spent trying to keep 1 idiot alive, all that will happen is that everyone ends up dying, because you're either oom or you wasted too much time on the idiot. Let them die, and then it's clearly their fault, because everyone else was fine, where as if you try to keep them alive and everyone ends up dying it makes you look bad, not them. Obviously you shouldn't just let someone die because they stood in the fire once and you're some elitist turd, but if they just keep standing in bad, noticeably worse than the rest of the group, and PWS + penance just cant keep them alive, then it's their fault and they can die for it. They're not the tank, they shouldn't be taking more damage than the tank.
  
• One last thing I've noticed: Some tanks work really well with disc, and others not as much. Paladins, Druids and DK's work really nicely with Disc, cause their self heals top them up while your shields absorb the incoming damage. Paladins by far feel the best because they have a bit of everything, self heal, self absorb, block, parry etc and many many cooldowns, and Block tanks seem to be working the best at the moment. Second best i'd say is Bear tanks, their self healing is insane and works great with out absorbs, but their dodge don't seem to be as effective as block and parry and self absorbs that paladins (and dks) have. Dk's feel close 3rd best to heal, maybe even tied with druids, but appear spikier because of how Death Strike works. DK's blood shield actually works really nicely with our absorbs, because it takes the brunt of the physical damage while our absorbs take the excess and the magic damage.
  Monks and Warriors don't feel as good to heal, because they don't have as much self healing. Warriors particularly, feel more stressful to heal, because their active mitigation is all in their absorbs and blocks, so they don't really self heal in the same way as paladins. You can have a pala on 5% hp and a full CoW+ PWS and as long as you keep the absorbs up they'll eventually heal themselves to full, where as warriors don't have this, their absorbs will stack with yours, but they wont heal back to full, and since disc struggles with catch up, if a war tank gets low you really notice it as disc.

Talents:

Solace vs Mindbender vs SoL

This depends on the fight:
If it's a 'beat the bezerk' kinda fight, where the healing gets progressively harder towards the end, but the fight is relatively short, mindbender is much better, since the damage it contributes can make quiet a noticeable impact on the duration, and thus difficulty of the encounter. It's also very good for encounters where there's an add or similar that needs to be killed quickly (eg, the skeleton wall on the last boss of shadowmoon burial grounds). Mindbender is also a bit better for fights that are primarily tank damage, since the extra damage is always nice.

Solace is better for encounters that go for a fairly long time and/or need a lot of AoE (ie, PoH), since it is irrefutably better mana regen than mindbender.

Surge of Light I'm actually not finding good for really anything now, if you need to play catch up and Penance / EAA isnt cutting it then you made a mistake as disc. Now that we're hardly using Holy Nova, and since it doesn't proc from absorbs (PWS, COW) it hardly procs at ll for us. The sad and unseen victim of the Holy Nova nerf

Spirit Shell vs ToF vs Power Infusion
ToF has been neutered, as we all know. Furthermore, the proactive style of disc actually makes tof unsuitable, if we're dipping into the <35% zone we've really made some mistakes. So that kinda narrows us down to just Power Infusion vs Spirit Shell

Now, Spirit Shell is an essential tool for disc raiding, it fills a pretty significant void in our spec design. That being said, its nature as being a proactive ability makes it a little less suited for 5man healing, where damage is more spiky and unpredictable and also on less targets. We already have PWS and CoW, Spirit shell isn't all that necessary as a cooldown. I often find I don't have time for Spirit Shell, and cant make much use of it in 5mans, the damage is often too constant and / or spiky to use SS to properly prepare for anything. If we need a cooldown for 5mans, PI is much more effective for that purpose. In raids SS will be the way to go, but for 5mans we're often going to be better off using Power Infusion.

T90
I personally go for Divine Star, simply for the mobility. Positioning for Halo is often impractical in dungeons, and Cascade isn't very good for only 5 people, and 5mans are rarely spread enough anyway. A minor bonus of DS is that it procs SoL a lot more than other spells, if, for some reason, you are actually using SoL. Also, in 5mans, DS does seem somewhat noticeable, healing ~5k on each target, both going out and back, meaning ~10k on all targets hit. Not too bad for an instant cast if you hit everyone, and the other options really arent useful anyway. You're still better off using PWS if you can, but sometimes DS will be useful.

T100
CoW, there is no other option. Seriously.

Alright, infodump finished xD

- - - Updated - - -

Most of this will be obvious to most people here, i was just writing my observations and methods out, I'm probably going to use this for my 5mans section when i write my disc guide.

[Haywire5714]

Since 5mans is the main thing to do at the moment, i've found a few things:

Do you think it's justified to use CoW on the dps for a fight with consistent raid damage or large amounts of predictable damage such as:

- First and Last boss of SMBG
- 2nd boss of Skyreach
- First boss of Grimrail Depot

etc.

[Deleted]

I saw a druid or shaman go 100K HPS in MC. I felt so inadequate. Disc is absolutely worthless in those big raids unless only the tank takes damage.

HN isn't even viable.

[methz]

so ive decided to try mindbender instead of Solace and sometimes when i use mindbender on trash that is close to dying dies mindbender doesnt attack closest and it just comes back next to me lol

it attacks via threat table, so if you're not on a threat table for something, it won't think to attack it after you send it to the initial target. penance one thing, holy fire the next thing you want it to hit and you won't have this issue.

[Floopa]

I saw a druid or shaman go 100K HPS in MC. I felt so inadequate. Disc is absolutely worthless in those big raids unless only the tank takes damage.

HN isn't even viable.

yes let's balance around an anniversary event which you can AFK through

if any1 thinks disc is 'worthless' then they need a reality check

[Isheria]

I saw a druid or shaman go 100K HPS in MC. I felt so inadequate. Disc is absolutely worthless in those big raids unless only the tank takes damage.

HN isn't even viable.

I heard tranquility and healing tide on 40 ppl on fights that last less than a min are extremely balanced true story.
Jokes aside you should stop making conclusions on boss fights that last 1 min or less. When you'll be doing 5-6 or even 10 min fights in about a week you'll see that the picture is completely different.

[Deleted]

We'll see how you feel about that when you have 20 people to heal and not 5 and HN is gimped. And PoH impossible to not oom you if you do it SoO style. It's easy to say "lol MC is not raiding", but some people may look further than you think.

[Noradin]

All that incompartibility with absrobs need to be addressed. What is the reaseon why SoL, Lifeleech, FW, PoM, etc. all do not work with absorbs? why do our own solo play abilites do not work together properly (FW + Reflective Shield)?

[Jimjam38]

Do you think it's justified to use CoW on the dps for a fight with consistent raid damage or large amounts of predictable damage such as:

- First and Last boss of SMBG
- 2nd boss of Skyreach
- First boss of Grimrail Depot

etc.

No, it's not suitable for blanketing, it takes ~10 seconds to cast it on 4 people, by which time you've fallen seriously behind on someone. In that situation you'd be better off with PWS blanketing > EAA PoH. Depending on the exact mechanics, some will suit Spirit Shell PoH more than Power Infusion.

It is suitable if the mechanic is only going to hit 1 player, happens less than every ~15 sec and is predictable AND PWS won't cover it adequately. As I said, the cast time makes it largely unsuitable for raid damage.

However I'm not very familiar with the exact mechanics yet of every dungeon, so I can't specifically answer until I've had time to go through and read those fights specifically. So far I've just been avoiding the fire and shielding and have only looked up specific mechanics when they weren't immediately obvious to me.

- - - Updated - - -

I saw a druid or shaman go 100K HPS in MC. I felt so inadequate. Disc is absolutely worthless in those big raids unless only the tank takes damage.

HN isn't even viable.

Yeah, no. I did molten core as well, and I was toping both as disc and as holy. Disc I basically just tank healed the 4 tanks with CoW (because there were 4 other bloody disc priests so PWS spam was almost impossible) and always came top 3. Then I switched to holy to try it out (and also because we had 4 disc already as i just said) and was always top 3 again, always top on high raid damage fights but was getting smashed by the disc on fights with low raid damage / high tank damage.

Disc certainly wasn't worthless though, the tank damage in Molten Core was very high for an LFR and disc PWS + CoW tank healing was basically mandatory for keeping up the 4 tanks and to let the other healers actually focus on raid healing, I can only imagine that mythic tank damage will be even higher, and disc even more mandatory.

And that entire time I didn't see a single resto druid/shaman come anywhere near 100k. The closest anyone got was myself as holy using Divine Hymn which temporarily got me to ~ 50k. Tranquillity/HTT isn't that much stronger than Divine Hymn, so IF this did happen, its because they popped every cooldown + tranquility + the raid was basically wiping. And they didn't stay at 100k for long.

That's not to say that disc was particularly fun. It wasn't, it was boring, hence why I tried holy for the 2nd half.

And yes, Holy Nova isn't viable, we're well aware of this, hence our anger and the plan for #Learn2Dev protest.

And lets not forget that Spirit Shell is perfectly suited to 20 man and very poorly suited to 40 man. Especially one as wide spread as MC where the raid absolutely will not be stacked within 30yrds of everyone, hence PoH was horrible.

- - - Updated - - -

We'll see how you feel about that when you have 20 people to heal and not 5 and HN is gimped. And PoH impossible to not oom you if you do it SoO style. It's easy to say "lol MC is not raiding", but some people may look further than you think.

No one was suggesting SoO Style PoH, and if you were spamming PoH in SoO then that answers a lot.

[Deleted]

No one was suggesting SoO Style PoH, and if you were spamming PoH in SoO then that answers a lot.

Spare me your passive aggressive attacks. I meant the unlimited mana at 6.0 there in SoO, not any particular style.




Anyway, your molten core run had incompetent healers if they couldn't beat a disc.

You will never do 100K.

[Deleted]

So, after playing disc from WoD launch up to now (armory here), I was thinking I should probably get a holy set and get used to the playstyle, but I can't heal bloody anything with it. I understand that holy and disc have different stat priorities, but my healing really goes from CM-able to being able to barely heal HCs.

Am I just stupid, or does holy really just not work with my current gear at all?

[Deleted]

Spare me your passive aggressive attacks. I meant the unlimited mana at 6.0 there in SoO, not any particular style.




Anyway, your molten core run had incompetent healers if they couldn't beat a disc.

You will never do 100K.

It's lfr, OFCOURSE they're incompetent.

By the way, looking at highmaul gear are we going to have to go holy, or are we going to play disc with an abundance of multistrike gear? Can't say I want to do either.

The 665 crit/mastery crafted/boe gear won't last for mythic/in to blackrock foundry.