So how do we play now? I can't even remotely "rotate" anything. [disc]

[Deleted]

I know that healers are not supposed to have a rotation, and they shouldn't, but this time they went to the other extreme: Atonement is very weak, not only it's nerfed in numbers it's also extremely unreliable since half of the time it heals people on 98% health, and this is not hot ticks, most of the major heals were penance and holy fire instants.

I honestly think they didn't do a good job with disc this time around. Someone had the forced thought that "Atonement is too easy" but he didn't think it through:

He didn't think it through because if it works as it works, if you give 99% HP people your major heals, atonement is useless or extremely unreliable.

[Deleted]

Good, Atonement isnt supposed to be a valid way of healing. Its gives a Disc priest a chance to do some extra dps while his co-healers are covering his slack. MoP version of Atonement was the shittiest idea.

I ENJOY having to cast actual heals on my Disc Priest now.

[Larynx]

I ENJOY having to cast actual heals on my Disc Priest now.

At what cost?

[pkm]

You do realise it changes at 100 right?

Right now no one has their lvl 100 talents or their enhanced perks. Everything right now is just empty because of this not just disc.

Also, the damage output and flow of raids has been compensated for in WoD to the new healing changes. SoO should be just a testing ground for your healing, not to see how you perform.

[Deleted]

I know that healers are not supposed to have a rotation, and they shouldn't, but this time they went to the other extreme: Atonement is very weak, not only it's nerfed in numbers it's also extremely unreliable since half of the time it heals people on 98% health, and this is not hot ticks, most of the major heals were penance and holy fire instants.

What you're describing is exactly what they set out to do. One of the biggest problems with healing in MoP has been the dominance of smart heals which automate the gameplay and choose the lowest-HP target for you. Circle of Healing, Wild Growth and other smart heals are also following suit. Making the smart heals less powerful and "less smart" is the best possible thing they could have done.

You still use atonement to build up stacks of Evangelism, and as 'filler', but that's all it should be used for - it shouldn't be an auto-healing mechanism which plays the game for you while you hammer a 3-button DPS rotation.

[PosPosPos]

What you're describing is exactly what they set out to do. One of the biggest problems with healing in MoP has been the dominance of smart heals which automate the gameplay and choose the lowest-HP target for you. Circle of Healing, Wild Growth and other smart heals are also following suit. Making the smart heals less powerful and "less smart" is the best possible thing they could have done.

You still use atonement to build up stacks of Evangelism, and as 'filler', but that's all it should be used for - it shouldn't be an auto-healing mechanism which plays the game for you while you hammer a 3-button DPS rotation.

Oh yeah, now we get to hammer 1 button the entire fight which also does damage and auto targets people for heals. What a drastic improvement there.

[Deleted]

Problem with atonement wasn't that it was a smart heal imo. Problem was that

- In cata, it replaced Heal as your small, mana efficient heal
- in MoP, it replaced Flash and Greater as your go-to single target heal.


No one complained about atonement in Cata. If you used it or not came down to your playstyle. It was a viable alternative, not a must.

[PosPosPos]

Problem with atonement wasn't that it was a smart heal imo. Problem was that

- In cata, it replaced Heal as your small, mana efficient heal
- in MoP, it replaced Flash and Greater as your go-to single target heal.


No one complained about atonement in Cata. If you used it or not came down to your playstyle. It was a viable alternative, not a must.

Penance and PW:S replaced Flash and Greater all by their own anyway - even without Atonement entering the picture.

Not to mention, direct tank healing has very few uses in MoP.

[Noradin]

Its gives a Disc priest a chance to do some extra dps while his co-healers are covering his slack.

Just like autoattack...

[Deleted]

Oh yeah, now we get to hammer 1 button the entire fight which also does damage and auto targets people for heals. What a drastic improvement there.

So your solution to that is to bring back the broken atonement design from 5.4?

[PosPosPos]

So your solution to that is to bring back the broken atonement design from 5.4?

At the very least, it was more engaging than a one button spam. The lesser of two evils I say.

Atonement wasn't even the biggest contributor to disc healing in 5.4 anyway.

[emni]

So your solution to that is to bring back the broken atonement design from 5.4?

Well, I personally had more fun playing that broken spec than this broken spec.

During our mythic clear this reset I was still sitting on top of the meters, so it's not like they fixed that part of disc. The playstyle feels just as spammy, though it's somehow worse because before I wasn't spamming an instant cast AoE heal and an instant cast shield all the time. Once I got used to ignoring Smite completely, there were very few situations when I actually had to stop and cast something, and that was mostly just PoH during high damage phases of fights like Norushen. By the end of the raid night I wasn't even using PoM, what's the point. My guildies kept taking the piss out of me for jumping around all the time, it felt like playing a druid... which is ironic because druids now have a cast time on WG so they stand around more than disc priests.

That said, things won't stay this way until lvl100, but right now the spec is very much feeling broken.

[laplacedemon]

What you're describing is exactly what they set out to do. One of the biggest problems with healing in MoP has been the dominance of smart heals which automate the gameplay and choose the lowest-HP target for you. Circle of Healing, Wild Growth and other smart heals are also following suit. Making the smart heals less powerful and "less smart" is the best possible thing they could have done.

Have you checked beta? Because WG and CoH are really, really good spells and the only reason you might want to not cast them on cooldown would be mana concerns (and that's mostly for druids). What they said about how healing's going to be and how it actually is are quite different.

[PosPosPos]

Have you checked beta? Because WG and CoH are really, really good spells and the only reason you might want to not cast them on cooldown would be mana concerns (and that's mostly for druids). What they said about how healing's going to be and how it actually is are quite different.

They didn't say smart heals are going to be obsolete, they just said smart heals are going to play a smaller role than they did in MoP.

You still have to single target heal and shield for a huge part of your throughput in WoD, and unless you are a holy paladin(that's specced into EF) or druid, you just spammed aoe smart heals across all classes 24/7 in MoP.

[Noradin]

They didn't say smart heals are going to be obsolete, they just said smart heals are going to play a smaller role than they did in MoP.

You still have to single target heal and shield for a huge part of your throughput in WoD, and unless you are a holy paladin(that's specced into EF) or druid, you just spammed aoe smart heals across all classes 24/7 in MoP.

And the opposite is true for disc.

Before a huge contribution was from DS (no smartheal in 5.4, but a smartheal now in 6.0), now most is from HN (at lvl 100).

[laplacedemon]

They didn't say smart heals are going to be obsolete, they just said smart heals are going to play a smaller role than they did in MoP.

You still have to single target heal and shield for a huge part of your throughput in WoD, and unless you are a holy paladin(that's specced into EF) or druid, you just spammed aoe smart heals across all classes 24/7 in MoP.

So, what exactly did change? CoH was bad during MoP, now it's good. LoD was bad during MoP, now it's not that bad. WG is same. Holy Nova replaced Atonement. Chain Heal seems about the same although I haven't really checked shamans.

In the healing blog, it sounded like they were making bigger changes and I personally can't see them after trying most of the raid encounters.

[Deleted]

The solution would be to not be extremists on design. They hated the "ease" of disc and they completely destroyed it. A saner approach would be to nerf what Atonement does and leave it at that, e.g. nerf damage and keep healing, or remove smite from healing, leave it only for building up archangel in an emergency and have only the time-limit of penance and holy fire being smart, this extremism of making "smart" heals completely dumb and unreliable - read: they can and WILL kill people if you do the mistake to rely on them - makes the spec worse.

They left a broken spec. Atonement feels like a clunky gimmick that has to only be "managed". It is not fun, just a logistical necessity being kept around for archangel.

And holy nova, I have no words, or rather let me find them: It's one of the ugliest spells in the game. It's annoying to watch, to use and I hated it on my mage too.

[anon5123]

Its gives a Disc priest a chance to do some extra dps while his co-healers are covering his slack.

If there is a fight where one of the healers can completely stop healing for extended amounts of time, then maybe that healer should just go DPS. Or if for whatever reason you *need* that extra Smite DPS, tell your DPS to stop sucking so much because smite does very little DPS.

Atonement in its current state is all sorts of fucked, and pretty much useless for anything Blizz says that it's intended to do.

[Jimjam38]

Atonement in its current state is all sorts of fucked, and pretty much useless for anything Blizz says that it's intended to do.

Pretty much this.

- - - Updated - - -

Until they give us back some mechanics disc is just going to be completely spammy. Without propper mechanics we're always just going to calculate what our best spell is and spam it with no variation. If they nerf holy nova we'll just spam pws. Nerf that and we'll spam CoW. Nerf that and well be useless and get benched, and anyone still playing will spam Heal. Nerf that and wtf is the point anymore.

[Oneirophobia]

I liked disc more than holy, but between the holy nova encouragement and the atonement shinanigans I really don't want to stay disc.