Devs you didn't think through the disc changes did you?

[Dierdre]

TProblem right now is since atonement is no longer smart, it CAN be useless, and since there is no other way to build evangelism stacks...

Atonement is not useless because there is no other way to build evangelism stacks. A +25% healing bonus is far from useless, and that's what atonement gives you.

I can understand if you want that 25% bonus to be baseline and if you want to be able to heal tons by spamming atonement as a filler. I just don't share the love for such a mindless playstyle. If I wanted that I'd heal on a healing stream totem. I mean a resto shaman.

[Noradin]

Atonement is not useless because there is no other way to build evangelism stacks. A +25% healing bonus is far from useless, and that's what atonement gives you.

I can understand if you want that 25% bonus to be baseline and if you want to be able to heal tons by spamming atonement as a filler. I just don't share the love for such a mindless playstyle. If I wanted that I'd heal on a healing stream totem. I mean a resto shaman.

Please stop throwing around insulting assumptions and intentionally misundering people.
We are complaining about 'mindless spamming' not campaining for it.

[anon5123]

if you want to be able to heal tons by spamming atonement as a filler.

NOBODY WANTS THIS

Seriously, are you even reading my posts? Nowhere did I say that I want Atonement to be a "heal tons by spamming" mechanic.

I'm saying that in its current state, it heals for far too little; way less than what the blue posts say it's supposed to heal for.

[PosPosPos]

Atonement is not useless because there is no other way to build evangelism stacks. A +25% healing bonus is far from useless, and that's what atonement gives you.

I can understand if you want that 25% bonus to be baseline and if you want to be able to heal tons by spamming atonement as a filler. I just don't share the love for such a mindless playstyle. If I wanted that I'd heal on a healing stream totem. I mean a resto shaman.

A 25% bonus after losing 90% of your throughput for 5 spells, please do not forget.

- - - Updated - - -

In 25man, sure.

10man, they performed fine in Heroic, and they're performing fine in 20man Mythic now.

And with the mastery and uplift buffs leading into the pre-patch, our WoD healing got even better.

That's nice, but still unreliable in the world of triage healing, so still not a first choice healer class, not even by a long shot.

[TenDance]

Side Note: I keybound HN to my scroll wheel which i found made it a very cool playstyle imo. I run around scrolling my butt off while using all my other abilities simultaneously.

Maybe you should tell that to Logitech, might be a great sellingpoint for their mice with the scrollwheel of endless rolling

@topic: to me, Blizzard really doesn't know what they should do with disc since the moment they decided to make it viable in PvE. In my opinion, they have two options now: make atonement do perfectly smart, but extremely little heals (and don't **** up the scaling) so that it is some sort of efficient heal where you trade off a very large amount of HPS AND some mana to gain some DPS (depending on the mana spent, could aswell be almost a meaningful amount, like half of what a tank would do or even almost as much as a tank would do) or scrap atonement completely and give smite some DPS-boost so that you deal some DPS and spend mana during times of low HPS needs, but build up evangelism stacks -> the incarnation of a bursthealer. And that had been my impression of arcangel the first time I heard about it: Blizzard wanted a tradeoff, you sacrifice time which you could've spent healing and gain an even greater potential for bursthealing. To depict it graphically, you would shift some of the "sacrificed" healing you could've done during your DPS-time to a later point in time where you truly need it.

But right now, the specc isn't fun at all. I would rather see some variation of the Wrath-playstyle (sans OMG I'M SHIELDING THE FULL RAID) or even the very first incarnation of rapture they implemented than the abominations we see right now.
To me, PW:S had always been a very expensive kind of "instant pre-heal" to give a single person some sort of cussion or to start an "oh shit he'll die"-rotation with PW:S-penance-gheal/fheal. Absorbs are powerful and therefore should be used wisely. Spiritshell seemed interesting, because it had been some kind of Raid-CD on a cooldown. They should really make absorbs more about making decisions, not being lucky with RNG. The same with paladins, if anyone should ask...

[Nurasu]

I don't get where they're going with the set bonus nerf. They weren't happy we were choosing not to use their complete waste of a cast (smite)? Shocking.

[Larynx]

I don't get where they're going with the set bonus nerf. They weren't happy we were choosing not to use their complete waste of a cast (smite)? Shocking.

Blizzard's response to set bonuses being too necessary and important for Disc: "Okay, we'll just nerf them."

[Floopa]

Blizzard's response to set bonuses being too necessary and important for Disc: "Okay, we'll just nerf them."

or they were too strong relevant to how strong disc was without set bonuses/compared to other spec's set bonuses.

nah, let's just #riot

[Deleted]

First of all I'll just say level 90 disc is the most boring thing I've ever played in the game, and that includes Arcane Mage in Firelands. Due to mana opiness, I can just slack using PW: Shield, or HN spam if the group is stacked. It might have been better to nerf mana in case people realized how nerfed it's going to be at 100, but I guess it won't change much, e.g. HN spam is going to likely be similar in viability, but PW:S spam not being there might make disc very weak on spread fights of high damage.

The Atonement portion of the game is so weak, that it just feels like a total penalty. Yes, you get more healing if it's up, but during building it up you feel like a moron. You feel like a moron because your heals are going to 80% of the characters that do not need any healing at all, let alone the numbers of both damage/healing are crap.

What I would do is stop being a Taliban and do a balanced approach as well. I don't get this "let's destroy a class" stance of these developers. Tune it, don't crap all over it.

[Floopa]

The Atonement portion of the game is so weak, that it just feels like a total penalty. Yes, you get more healing if it's up, but during building it up you feel like a moron. You feel like a moron because your heals are going to 80% of the characters that do not need any healing at all, let alone the numbers of both damage/healing are crap.

i think their plan of atonement changed (both for MWs/discs) from being a substitute dmg dealer who provides partial healing to a healer who's using space in fights to increase their potency later on where it counts. for discs this means saving evangelism for a healing boost, for MWs it means using fistweaving to generate a lot of mana tea stacks more efficiently (a MW for example is probably going to fistweave the first minute of a fight to stack up 15-20 mana tea stacks).

there is nothing wrong with this. it gives players choice, what's wrong with that?

[Deleted]

In your quest to make Atonement feel less "easy", you went to the other extreme. It now heals 99% HP people for half of the time. That makes atonement spells extremely unreliable to the point of being practically useless most of the time.

And at the same time, and for a similar reason, Archangel build up feels too clunky and a chore.

And the most major irony is in your quest to make it "more dynamic" you included nova spam.

We're not at max level anymore. You're basically saying "OMG Blizz, I ran Shadowfang Keep with a group the other day and the DPS was totally imbalanced, please fix low level content"

[Deleted]

i think their plan of atonement changed (both for MWs/discs) from being a substitute dmg dealer who provides partial healing to a healer who's using space in fights to increase their potency later on where it counts. for discs this means saving evangelism for a healing boost, for MWs it means using fistweaving to generate a lot of mana tea stacks more efficiently (a MW for example is probably going to fistweave the first minute of a fight to stack up 15-20 mana tea stacks).

there is nothing wrong with this. it gives players choice, what's wrong with that?

I don't know about you but it feels utterly horrendous being a completely useless healer for several seconds just because a dev thought I have to micromanage a cooldown, that does not even need any skill to learn or master in the first place. You might think you'll get a lot of fights that give no damage at all for that portion. That's not realistic.

[Floopa]

I don't know about you but it feels utterly horrendous being a completely useless healer for several seconds just because a dev thought I have to micromanage a cooldown, that does not even need any skill to learn or master in the first place. You might think you'll get a lot of fights that give no damage at all for that portion. That's not realistic.

you heal perfectly fine without evangelism. the numbers produced are perfectly fine without evangelism.

it's a bonus, not a requirement.

[Deleted]

you heal perfectly fine without evangelism. the numbers produced are perfectly fine without evangelism.

it's a bonus, not a requirement.

At the moment, yes. At 100 though things will look very different. Since there will be much less an abundance of crit, Empowered Archangel will look much more attractive. Even so, Atonement (or rather, Smite) is still far, far behind what it was supposed to be doing in terms of both HPS and DPS.

Editing extra on. I'm all for a mechanic where we can choose to DPS for a little bit and gain future HPS or forgo AA entirely but at the moment, with so much tied into AA, it really isn't a choice.

[Floopa]

At the moment, yes. At 100 though things will look very different. Since there will be much less an abundance of crit, Empowered Archangel will look much more attractive. Even so, Atonement (or rather, Smite) is still far, far behind what it was supposed to be doing in terms of both HPS and DPS.

Editing extra on. I'm all for a mechanic where we can choose to DPS for a little bit and gain future HPS or forgo AA entirely but at the moment, with so much tied into AA, it really isn't a choice.

let's forget for the moment that at lvl 100 with gear disc priests are probably the strongest healer (tied with druids) due to how well they scale (like druids) and assume that ALL healers heal the exact same values! in a world where this is true, healers who have methods to exploit space in fights (like disc priests/MWs do) have an innate advantage over healers who do not have such tools.

for the first minute of imperator mar'gok, even on mythic difficulty, you'll be able to dps as a disc/MW and build up your potential throughput bonuses for the parts of the fight which are tough. in this situation what would resto shaman, holy priests, holy paladins and resto druids be doing? they would be overhealing (ie: not efficient) or standing still doing nothing. a disc/MW on the other hand is exploiting space in the fight.

that is why atonement is weak, and it's why it doesn't matter that it's weak. it's strong because you have access to a tool that other healers dont. remember, i said assuming all healers healing the same - they don't. disc priests are arguably (with good evidence to back it up) the best scaling healer and strongest healer with gear as you enter mythic progression. even if they lost atonement, evangelism and archangel completely they would still be incredibly strong.

archangel/atonement are bonuses, they are not requirements.

[Deleted]

I'm a little confused by your point. First, any posting of logs is appreciated. This isn't because I don't believe you - I do - I'd just like to be able to check things out for myself in preparation. Secondly, what do you mean by exploit space? Do you mean directed heals at or around a target (i.e. spatial heals like HN) or do you mean downtime? This issue with downtime was discussed earlier - you are most likely better off using CoW and PW:S to build shields. In that case, Atonement is indeed a choice but one you'd probably not want to make.

Gear scaling is definitely an issue though. Hopefully Blizzard keeps a much better eye on things and does actually allow for a linear scaling of gear vs health pools.

[Floopa]

downtime

if that's the case then who cares, you're perfectly fine without atonement/archangel. it's nothing but a bonus for you. i think i keep saying that.

why do you think atonement should be mandatory.

[Isheria]

Dunno where you got that idea that archangel and empowered archangel is optional at level 100. It is very much mandatory if you want to do actual healing and not just pad meters by smashing your holy nova key like you do currently at level 90.

[Floopa]

Dunno where you got that idea that archangel and empowered archangel is optional at level 100. It is very much mandatory if you want to do actual healing and not just pad meters by smashing your holy nova key like you do currently at level 90.

so PW:S, CoW and PoH dont heal enough on their own?

[Isheria]

so PW:S, CoW and PoH dont heal enough on their own?

No they don't but you don't need to ask me just log into beta and do an instance without ever triggering archangel even once. It won't end well even though 5-mans ain't the perfect example.