[Legion] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Deleted]

Ok it's not setup - the stars allign shields are consumed in full, PWR hits all ideal targets at random and you get to heal 13 ppl for 450%. The whole thing takes 15 seconds and 30.5% base mana. Still fairly underwhelming.

Anyway I don't think giving the absolute best, most perfect situation possible is the way to evaluate something.

Well no, you are missing out half the healing by omitting the PW:S Absorb and you need to think about total healing, since disc get stronger the more atonement targets you have. In this situation when you use rapture, it will be when you know a large aoe phase will happen, so those shields will be consumed. Also if you shield 8 ppl and cast PW:R the maximum atonement's possible is 14 not 13.

So that being said those 15s become 8*600% sp + (6*150%+14*300%) for PW:R(only hits 6 targets)+penance AND if you take Shield Discipline you get 8% mana back so in 15s you get 9900% sp total healing,for 22.5% mana. Thats not even factoring in Artifact traits or indeed the healing from SW:P and PtW which will be also ticking, i'd say thats pretty fucking good!!!!!

Edit: Btw i'm no coefficient maths wiz so the above may not be 100% accurate, but you get the idea. Someone like Atonement would be able to give a more in depth answer.

Edit2: And just to reiterate the point of why you need to think about total healing for disc is penance itself, in the above scenario it does a total healing of 4200% sp in 1 GCD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Totaltotemic]

Anything seems terrible when you ignore three quarters of it. Luckily we can just not do that and assess things accurately.

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It does "overheal" or in this case "expire" when you place it carelessley - just like any other healing.

Sorry but how does PW:S used less than 15 seconds before a raid-wide burst end up expiring?

[Anastacy]

Wild Growth doesn't take 1.5 sec to "complete". It takes 1.5 sec to cast, but 8.5 sec to complete.

This, coupled with WG's not-so-smart targeting.

[Deleted]

Atonement - Plea, Power Word: Shield, and Shadow Mend also apply Atonement to your target for 15 sec. When you deal spell damage, you instantly heal all targets affected by Atonement for 50% of the damage done.

Penance - Launches a volley of holy light at the target, causing [(200% of Spell power) * 3] Holy damage over 2 sec.

So total for Penance is 600%, half of that due to atonement is 300. Is the information for the spell wrong?

Ok it's not setup - the stars allign shields are consumed in full, PWR hits all ideal targets at random and you get to heal 13 ppl for 450%. The whole thing takes 15 seconds and 30.5% base mana. Still fairly underwhelming.

Anyway I don't think giving the absolute best, most perfect situation possible is the way to evaluate something.

All stars align and shields are consumed in full? Yes they are if you actually need to heal those targets with Penance. And heck, "stars tend to align" pretty often when even if I randomly spam PWS while prioritizing melee it's only like 10% overhealing. If it's a raidwide AoE damage skill(Because that's what you'd use Rupture for), everyone is going to take damage, yes. Radiance can be targeted, the skill is 0 RNG.

What are you even comparing this to, anyway, if you want to heal 13 targets after raidwide AoE? 3 Chain Heals? Do you know how much longer that takes after the damage lands(unlike PWS which is faster than instant), people could even die during the cast time.

[Yunzi]

My point about Wild Growth is that *casting it* is fast compared to the PWR - Penance sequence - yes it's healing is over 8.5 seconds, although it's front-loaded according to the Legion description, but Chain Heal is certainly a more direct example.

The complexity of the toolkit for Disc is one thing, but we also have to have a lot of logistical raid awareness as well, due to PWR being a location-based spell. So let's attempt to determine what an ambitious Disc priest is going to have to keep track of during a fight, in addition to the "standard" healer issues like what to cast and on whom:

What mobs are up and how long it's going to take non-boss mobs to die (to determine whether a SWP and/or PtW on them is worthwhile).

The distance between a PtW target and an adjacent target, to estimate whether Penance will spread PtW to that target.

The location of atoned players, so that PWR has the greatest chance to apply to 6 players.

[Isheria]

No spell changes for disc so far except some artifact trait values:

Sins of the Many: You deal 1% more damage for each person who has Atonement on them.
Power of the Dark Side: When Shadow Word: Pain deals damage, you have a chance to replace Penance with Shadow Penance, which deals 100% bonus damage and will bounce to additional targets.
Brightest Lights: Casting Holy spells has a chance to cause your staff to send a wave of healing to all targets with your Atonement for (100% of Spell power). Casting Shadow spells has a chance to cause your staff to imbue you with shadow energy, causing you to deal 3% more direct damage every second for 10 sec.
Barrier for the Devoted: Atonement heals for 100% more if the target is inside of your Power Word: Barrier
Share in the Light: When you Power Word: Shield another target, 15% of that shield is also applied to yourself.
The Light Returns: Power Word: Nova has a 15% chance to be cast twice.
Renewal of Faith: When you activate Pontifex, the duration of all active Atonement buffs is increased by 10 sec.
Speed of the Pious: While channeling Penance, you move 5% faster.
Rapid Atonement: When you apply Atonement to a target, the cast time of your next Mind Blast or Smite is reduced by 5%, or your next Penance will channel 5% faster.

[Totaltotemic]

Blah Sins of the Many is only 1%. That makes it almost entirely irrelevant of a trait, how sad.

OKAY SERIOUSLY THOUGH WTF IS PONTIFEX AND POWER WORD: NOVA? As far as I know, the Disc traits are the only ones in the game that reference spells that don't exist so what's going on?

[Deleted]

Updated first post with datamined patch notes. let me know if I've missed something, have been absent for a while!

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Blah Sins of the Many is only 1%. That makes it almost entirely irrelevant of a trait, how sad.

No point taking any of the values as anything other than placeholders at this point, we still have various abilities doing 0 damage in the tooltips.

[Totaltotemic]

No point taking any of the values as anything other than placeholders at this point, we still have various abilities doing 0 damage in the tooltips.

It was 0%, now it says 1%. They didn't change a placeholder to another placeholder, that would be stupid. The point is that it needs to be higher than 1%, probably somewhere around 3% or 4% to be relevant as a mechanic. That's true regardless of whether or not you think the 1% value is a placeholder.

[Pearl1717]

It was 0%, now it says 1%. They didn't change a placeholder to another placeholder, that would be stupid. The point is that it needs to be higher than 1%, probably somewhere around 3% or 4% to be relevant as a mechanic. That's true regardless of whether or not you think the 1% value is a placeholder.

What Red meant was that this is still Alpha. Numbers are almost certainly going to change between now and launch. They can't just go into Alpha/Beta with no number there whatsoever, hence it is just a placeholder number to start testing things with. Just because it says 1% now, it is highly unlikely this will be for launch.

[Deleted]

I actually don't think that 1% is bad at all. Seems very strong to me even at that point. Something like 3% would be insanity.

[Totaltotemic]

I actually don't think that 1% is bad at all. Seems very strong to me even at that point. Something like 3% would be insanity.

Not commenting on a matter of strength. A flat ~10% plus or minus 5% damage is a strong trait. It's just not one that affects gameplay very much.

You're never really going to want another Atonement out just for the sake of the damage buff if it's so small, making the trait not actually impact any choices. It's not bad, I just like the idea of of a 100% overhealing spell maybe meaningfully contributing to damage even if you don't plan on using the healing from that particular Atonement buff. You are right that it does get problematic if the percentage gets too high, like I think 5% would just be absurd because it might overshadow doing actual healing if it crosses into the realm of buffing ongoing DoTs too much. I would just like it to be as high as it can be without creating awkward choices, but still creating some choices.

[Jimjam38]

after all of the buffs you're looking at penance doing 1000%~ sp over 1.5 sec with a 9 sec CD

i would argue even with MB being too costly to spam, SWP, MB and Penance would provide some of the strongest ST damage the game will have ever seen.

i fully expect penance to get nerfed, especially as it looks like penance w/ atonement would be about twice/three times as strong as WG, CoH, LoD etc.

I'm not so sure about that. Yes the raw damage is probably stronger than almost anything else in the game, and if nothing else it will probably be nerfed for pvp, but having seen the talents and artifact traits for a number of DPS specs, I still don't think disc will come close to them in terms of dps for PvE.

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It's called moderation. A simple concept of which you and the other two obviously don't get. We don't need something like 7 buttons to perform a niche single function(see smite, sw: p, mind blast, penance amongst other talented buttons to hit).

It's ok to have like ~3 though.

We have 8 core rotational abilities, 4 damaging, 4 healing, and this makes up our entire Single target and AoE toolkit, not just some niche function.

I'm sure this isn't too much for someone of your calibre to manage.

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I'm so sick of the utterly spastic questions we get where it's clear they haven't even tried to comprehend how disc will work in legion.

You know, the one's that can be summarised as "Lol atonement is bad already and its at 100%, how can disc possible be good when atonement is 50% lolololol" and such.

[Deleted]

Not commenting on a matter of strength. A flat ~10% plus or minus 5% damage is a strong trait. It's just not one that affects gameplay very much.

You're never really going to want another Atonement out just for the sake of the damage buff if it's so small, making the trait not actually impact any choices. It's not bad, I just like the idea of of a 100% overhealing spell maybe meaningfully contributing to damage even if you don't plan on using the healing from that particular Atonement buff. You are right that it does get problematic if the percentage gets too high, like I think 5% would just be absurd because it might overshadow doing actual healing if it crosses into the realm of buffing ongoing DoTs too much. I would just like it to be as high as it can be without creating awkward choices, but still creating some choices.

Well, I don't think it would affect any choices regardless. You want more anyways. Still, it can't be much stronger than this and even this might be too much. It's double dipping, so to speak - The more atonement targets you have, the more targets get healed, for more.

Even 2% would be far too powerful as far as I'm concerned. You'd be looking at 30% damage increased Penances, on 15 targets. Insanity if you ask me.

[Deleted]

Well, I don't think it would affect any choices regardless. You want more anyways. Still, it can't be much stronger than this and even this might be too much. It's double dipping, so to speak - The more atonement targets you have, the more targets get healed, for more.

Even 2% would be far too powerful as far as I'm concerned. You'd be looking at 30% damage increased Penances, on 15 targets. Insanity if you ask me.

Yep totally agree, ppl are not seeing the woods because of the trees here, the average atonements you'll have up is probably 5-6 so a 6% buff is pretty nice, and it only gets stronger the more atonements you have up, so its great for aoe burst healing from some combo like rapture 8*PW:S into PW:R >Penance, this would result in a 14% increase to penance, which is pretty strong if you ask me.

[CorpShephard]

Does anyone have any idea if a Relic could be socketed to boost the Sins of the Many trait? Do we have any idea what sort of traits can be boosted by relics?

I dunno why some of ya'll think we're going to have a stable 15 people with Atonement on them. Even with the 20 second duration talent you'd be using 15 GCDs to line up that many buffed people. At which point they'd be dropping off! When do you cast the damage spells? Same thing basically goes for Power Word: Radiance. Casting three of those means that the first buff is almost expired.

You can't really expect any given artifact trait to be too strong but Sins of the Many seems pretty weak. I suppose it's really impossible to say though. Particularly with traits like Pontifex's ability to extend Atonement durations still undiscovered...

[Isheria]

All passive traits with multiple ranks can be boosted to 5/5 but the relics available limit this to a single trait since the artifact weapon comes with 2 relic slots.

[Deleted]

All passive traits with multiple ranks can be boosted to 5/5 but the relics available limit this to a single trait since the artifact weapon comes with 2 relic slots.

My understanding was it's only 2 relic slots when you first get it and the number of relic slots increases as you upgrade the artifact. I believe I remember hearing during the blizzcon/interviews that we'll already have a 3rd at max level and likely a 4th by the time we're in the first raid or perhaps from completing the first raid.

[Pearl1717]

I dunno why some of ya'll think we're going to have a stable 15 people with Atonement on them. Even with the 20 second duration talent you'd be using 15 GCDs to line up that many buffed people. At which point they'd be dropping off! When do you cast the damage spells? Same thing basically goes for Power Word: Radiance. Casting three of those means that the first buff is almost expired.

He was probably referring to PWR>PWR>Penance type sequence, for big bursts of damage, where you would have ~15 or so people with atonement. In which case it would be pretty strong, or rather a pretty nice bonus.

[Isheria]

My understanding was it's only 2 relic slots when you first get it and the number of relic slots increases as you upgrade the artifact. I believe I remember hearing during the blizzcon/interviews that we'll already have a 3rd at max level and likely a 4th by the time we're in the first raid or perhaps from completing the first raid.

That's true there's 3rd relic slot when you fully empower the artifact aka reaching lvl 110 which is when you get the upgraded version and skin but anymore is kind of doubtful.