[Legion] Discipline Priest Discussion

[Isheria]

I haven't heard that spirit is being scrapped and that one comment is the only one I've seen saying it. It could be true but I haven't seen anything official.

Spirit is scrapped in case you still have any doubts, dungeon blue gear is already datamined and there's not a single item with spirit on the loot tables.
http://legion.wowhead.com/items?filt...;maxle=800#0-2

[Yunzi]

If Spirit indeed is being eliminated, that raises the chances that we're going to be mana-restricted throughout the entire expansion, perhaps bringing back the very old-school gameplay of simply not casting anything (besides mana regen abilities) when we expect no damage to be happening. Perhaps something's going on that hasn't been announced or discovered yet.

[*]Plea should not be cast while PWR-Atonement buffs are active.[*]PWR should also generally not be used while PWR-Atonement buffs are active from a prior PWR cast (diminishing returns of back-to-back PWR due to lost time for DPS).

It depends on whether 6 players need a ton of healing or whether 12 players need a lot of healing to determine whether to cast a second PWR immediately after the first. Do we know what PWR's cast time is? - Wowhead lists it as 2.5 seconds while the Talent Calculator from MMO Champion lists it as instant (1.5 second GCD). Blizzard's site also has it as 2.5 seconds, so that's probably it.

[PosPosPos]

You're correct that MW monk current and past is probably the currently most similar spec to Disc will be in legion. But you're forgetting that (for non cleave fights) we'll only need to spend at 2 gcds on our dots every 18/20 seconds, and while these are up, every target we apply atonement to will immediately start getting HoT heals (which combined are as strong as renew) as well as the direct heal we use to apply atonement, which will usually be Plea.

Think of it like this. In single target, Holy has to spend an entire gcd on every renew and every direct heal. Disc only has to spend 2 gcds on our 'renew' every ~20 seconds
There's nothing slow about this reaction. Plea is instant and does half as much as a flash heal, yeah its not heaps but considering your hots will then be immediately ticking without needing to spend a gcd on an additional cast, I don't see how this is uncontrolled. This seems quite controlled to me. Its like we can renew a target, where the initial heal is 225% spell power instead of 50% spell power.

Except you missed the memo that Renew lasts next-to-forever in Legion. Atonement doesn't.

[Geschan]

I think that addons will lessen the burden with attonement tremendously.
In theory it should be possible to write an addon that tracks attonement, missing health
and stats in order to gauge if Smiting/Mindblast/Penance are a healing gain or not.

In the end attonement will not be there for spot healing. Thats what we have Shadow Mend
and Power Word: Shield for. Depending on encounter mechanics I think Disc Priest will
feel a lot like Resto Druid. Anybody that needs healing gets a hot/attonement buff.
If nothing else to do, than we deal damage. The only difference should be the "threshold" where
additional attonement buffs produces less healing than directly using smite, etc.

I really hope that the rumor that spirit was scrapped is true.
Killing spirit for a static mana regeneration would fix a lot of problems we currently encounter
as an addon progresses.
Especially the "wack-a-mole" problem should be way better than with spirit.

[dextersmith]

If Spirit indeed is being eliminated, that raises the chances that we're going to be mana-restricted throughout the entire expansion, perhaps bringing back the very old-school gameplay of simply not casting anything (besides mana regen abilities) when we expect no damage to be happening. Perhaps something's going on that hasn't been announced or discovered yet.

Regen could be tied to haste or versatility; otherwise it's useless to bring up healer dps if you can't afford to cast. Also, it would give a reason to take versatility at all.

[Isheria]

Except it won't work like that most likely and your regen will be fixed from the start of the expansion till it's end. it is basically the only way to make mana matter throughout the expansion and not only for 30% of the first tier.

[Deleted]

Regen could be tied to haste or versatility; otherwise it's useless to bring up healer dps if you can't afford to cast. Also, it would give a reason to take versatility at all.

Tieing it to haste would be counter-intuitive, since if haste makes you regen faster it also makes you spend faster ooming you quicker, and since disc will always want to cast for heals through damage or just plain damage as we're being told its going to be significant (coefficients for MB match those of shadow atm, i know its early but still) haste could be a very bad stat if regen is too slow.

Except it won't work like that most likely and your regen will be fixed from the start of the expansion till it's end. it is basically the only way to make mana matter throughout the expansion and not only for 30% of the first tier.

I thought the whole point of disc was when your not spending mana on healing/atonement damage is that you can still just do very good damage during downtime (other healers can dps too but supposed to be no where near the output of disc, therefore would probably prefer to regen instead) so you will pretty much never stop casting, unless the regen supports you never going oom (mana doesn't matter) surely they will have to include some sort of regen increasing mechanics either through stats/gearsets/talents/trinkets etc otherwise there will be no power curve and the spec will play the same at the end of the expac as the start cause you just go oom from dpsing to much. That would be pretty boring don't you think?

[VigilantRose]

I think that addons will lessen the burden with attonement tremendously.
In theory it should be possible to write an addon that tracks attonement, missing health
and stats in order to gauge if Smiting/Mindblast/Penance are a healing gain or not.

You're probably overthinking it. In all likelihood, you'll have a baseline damage rotation - SW:P, Penance, maybe Mind Blast - and then you'll just interleave your heals. There will be some variation in the number of active Atonement, but that variation will almost certainly be based on who needs healing rather than trying to micromanage every last point of health.

Essentially, all of Discipline's spells come with a HoT tacked on. The size of that HoT can vary based on how much you emphasize damage, but the nature of the rotation is such that there's a tremendous fall-off in effectiveness the more time you commit to dealing damage.

[Yunzi]

Should we speculate on raid encounter design by Blizzard? With Power Word: Radiance and other spells (such as Paladin healing) targeting specific areas of the raid, I wonder if there will be more unavoidable area damage effects that need to be "soaked" by players, such as Xhul'horac's Black Hole but actually not cheeseable by single players. It would be very cool if the raid assigned 6 players to soak these effects, they group up prior to a soak, and then we use PWR on them to apply atonement to each, and then heal all of them up after a soak with damage spells.

[Totaltotemic]

There are actually a ton of localized area soak effects in HFC alone. Edict, Black Hole, Mannoroth's Gaze, Mark of the Legion, and Shadowfel Burst all exist on the last 4 bosses. The problem with these effects is that there are so many immunities in the game that they often end up becoming a game of raid comp and stacking classes with immunities rather than anything to do with healing.

Maybe in a world where they actually make those abilities pierce immunities it might have some effect on healing, but so far they've been unwilling to do that.

[dextersmith]

Tieing it to haste would be counter-intuitive, since if haste makes you regen faster it also makes you spend faster ooming you quicker, and since disc will always want to cast for heals through damage or just plain damage as we're being told its going to be significant (coefficients for MB match those of shadow atm, i know its early but still) haste could be a very bad stat if regen is too slow.

I agree with you but I think that's what they did with a mage spec (arcane?) at some point.

[Deleted]

I agree with you but I think that's what they did with a mage spec (arcane?) at some point.

It wasn't haste, they tied arcane's regen to its mastery so when you had enough your normal "maintain" rotation was pretty much mana neutral or even positive at higher gear levels, then they have a active cd evocation that restores 100% of their mana over 6s when they wanted "burn phase" with arcane blasts, i would have no problem if they gave that to disc lol!!

[Jimjam38]

Except you missed the memo that Renew lasts next-to-forever in Legion. Atonement doesn't.

With the legendary, sure. We still don't know how available those are really going to be. And also, we also haven't seen the a disc equivalent, which given that there is one specific to holy, I assume there will be.
Either way, it remains true that disc isn't entirely uncontrollable as some people seem to have thought.

- - - Updated - - -

If Spirit indeed is being eliminated, that raises the chances that we're going to be mana-restricted throughout the entire expansion, perhaps bringing back the very old-school gameplay of simply not casting anything (besides mana regen abilities) when we expect no damage to be happening. Perhaps something's going on that hasn't been announced or discovered yet.



It depends on whether 6 players need a ton of healing or whether 12 players need a lot of healing to determine whether to cast a second PWR immediately after the first. Do we know what PWR's cast time is? - Wowhead lists it as 2.5 seconds while the Talent Calculator from MMO Champion lists it as instant (1.5 second GCD). Blizzard's site also has it as 2.5 seconds, so that's probably it.

Yeah being mana restricted for the entire xpac will change things to say the least. Hopefully we'll get some tweets about this or something.

I hadn't noticed that PWR had a cast time on WoWhead. It will put a bit of damper on things if it's not instant cast, not to mention I'll have to redo some of my calcs. I did think it was unusual for it to have gone from 2.5 sec in the class preview to instant in the beta. It looks like the MMOC database also has PoH listed as instant, and WoWhead has it as 2.5 sec cast time. Sadly, it's probably a bug in the MMOC datamining

- - - Updated - - -

I think that addons will lessen the burden with attonement tremendously.
In theory it should be possible to write an addon that tracks attonement, missing health
and stats in order to gauge if Smiting/Mindblast/Penance are a healing gain or not.

In the end attonement will not be there for spot healing. Thats what we have Shadow Mend
and Power Word: Shield for. Depending on encounter mechanics I think Disc Priest will
feel a lot like Resto Druid. Anybody that needs healing gets a hot/attonement buff.
If nothing else to do, than we deal damage. The only difference should be the "threshold" where
additional attonement buffs produces less healing than directly using smite, etc.

I really hope that the rumor that spirit was scrapped is true.
Killing spirit for a static mana regeneration would fix a lot of problems we currently encounter
as an addon progresses.
Especially the "wack-a-mole" problem should be way better than with spirit.

I don't think an addon that assists to that extent will be a good thing, certainly I think it would result in some serious knee-jerk reactions from blizzard to counteract it.

But, tracking Atonement targets and dots will be fine and can be easily done using Weak Auras or Tell Me When.

Correct that Atonement is not for spot healing. By its very nature it requires ramp up, but fortunately between PWS, SM and Plea, combined with our dots, we have what looks to be a fairly solid and versatile spot healing/triage toolkit. PWR then provides some solid AoE when we follow up with Atonement healing.

- - - Updated - - -

Regen could be tied to haste or versatility; otherwise it's useless to bring up healer dps if you can't afford to cast. Also, it would give a reason to take versatility at all.

Keep in mind we don't know how well our mastery scales per rating, so its possible versatility could be better for us than mastery. I hope not though, as it would just be all round bad news for us.

- - - Updated - - -

Except it won't work like that most likely and your regen will be fixed from the start of the expansion till it's end. it is basically the only way to make mana matter throughout the expansion and not only for 30% of the first tier.

Its interesting because Healers don't just have to manage mana as a resource, for quite a while now time/gcds has actually been our more important resource.

- - - Updated - - -

Tieing it to haste would be counter-intuitive, since if haste makes you regen faster it also makes you spend faster ooming you quicker, and since disc will always want to cast for heals through damage or just plain damage as we're being told its going to be significant (coefficients for MB match those of shadow atm, i know its early but still) haste could be a very bad stat if regen is too slow.



I thought the whole point of disc was when your not spending mana on healing/atonement damage is that you can still just do very good damage during downtime (other healers can dps too but supposed to be no where near the output of disc, therefore would probably prefer to regen instead) so you will pretty much never stop casting, unless the regen supports you never going oom (mana doesn't matter) surely they will have to include some sort of regen increasing mechanics either through stats/gearsets/talents/trinkets etc otherwise there will be no power curve and the spec will play the same at the end of the expac as the start cause you just go oom from dpsing to much. That would be pretty boring don't you think?

Yes while our raw spells match that of shadow, the difference is that shadow has a multitude of mechanics designed to increase its damage. For example, shadowform(has this been removed or what?), Voidform and its mechanics, Shadowy Apparitions, Mastery: Madness, an extra DoT (Vamp Touch), and all their throughput talents.
Disc doesn't have these, our Mastery is for increased healing and our throughput talents are (generally) for healing increases. Furthermore, Shadow spends 100% of their time doing dps, and at the moment it seems that we will spend at most 50%, probably closer to 20-30%, of our time doing damage.
So we don't be even remotely comparable to a damage dealer. We'll probably be doing 10-15% of the damage of a DPS, at best.

- - - Updated - - -

Anyway, in other news, the Devs are having a very quite twitter week so far. Not surprising considering the amount of twitter pandering they did during the week following blizzcon. Still, its frustrating not to get some questions answered. Any ETA on when the beta will start going out?

[bloodmoth13]

I agree with you but I think that's what they did with a mage spec (arcane?) at some point.

How is it counter-intuitive? tying regen to haste makes haste mana neutral, without it its a mana drain, which we cant gear for so it would become a bad stat. Crit and likely mastery would be the only ones that increase our heal mana ratio while all haste would do, without regen, is make us go OOM faster without really giving us anything for it.

with mana tied to haste, all haste would do is basically speed up your playstyle.

Think of it this way, 30% haste would mean we heal 30% faster but lose mana 30% faster, 30% crit however would increase our healing by 30% while also making our spells 30% more efficient

[Jimjam38]

Okay so lets *try to* tackle the question of multidotting.

Specifically, when is multidotting better than adding another Atonement buff?

Well, from my spreadsheets we see that for a full 15s Atonement buff, each SWP gives 132.05 %spell power worth of healing, and each PtW gives 252.98 %spell power worth of healing, and we also get 333.6 per atonement target from penance, and the portion of Atonement buffs that last through 2 penances is given by (15/9).

So, loosely

H = 132.05(x)(y) + 252.98(x)(z) + 333.6(15/9)(x)

where:

H is the total healing from the DoTs

x is the number of Atonement targets

y is the number of SWP active

z is the number of PtW active

So we get basic partial derivatives of:

dH/dx = 132.05(y) + 252.98(z) + 333.6(15/9)

dH/dy = 132.05(x)

dH/dz = 252.98(x)

So for those who perhaps have not reached the point in their life where for whatever reason they needed to learn multi-variable calculus, I'll try to explain these a bit more simply.

dH/dx = 132.05(y) + 252.98(z) + 333.6(15/9)

What this is basically saying is that the increase in total healing for adding another Atonement target (x) is equal to the healing of swp (132.05) times the number of swp (y), plus the healing of PtW (252.98) times the number of PtW (z), plus the healing from penance..

dH/dy = 132.05(x)

this just means that the increase in healing for adding another SWP target is just the SWP healing (132.05) times the number of Atonement targets

dH/dz = 252.98(x)

and again, this just means that the increase in healing for adding another PtW target is the PtW healing (252.98) times the number of atonement targets.

So now we just have to plug some numbers in and compare the results. You can find this in my spreadsheet.

Anyway, now the results get kinda complicated, so I'd appreciate it if anyone comefortable with the math could cast an eye over both my interpretation below and the spreadsheet.
So starting with 1 atonement target, and 1 of each dot.

At 4 Atonement targets its worth having a 2nd PtW
At 5 Atonement targets its worth having a 3rd PtW
At 7 Atonement targets its worth having a 4th PtW

However it's highly unlikely you can get more than 3 at a time, nor would the cleaved dots provide the full heal, given the 20s duration and 9 sec CD of penance. It is also unknown if PtW can be directly cast on multiple targets or if it can only be spread via the penance-cleave type mechanic.

If PtW cannot be spread, but SWP can (perhaps due to distance between the enemy targets preventing PtW being cleaved) then it becomes worth applying a 2nd SWP when you reach 8 targets, however maintaining this number of targets leaves no room to cast anything except Penance.

Thus it would seem SWP isn't worth multidotting, while PtW is.

HOWEVER keep in mind this is for a maximum hps situation with as many targets as you need and no overhealing. This is an unrealistic situation, but does provide the groundwork for understanding what to do in realistic situations.

If you were in a situation that required higher HPS on less targets (eg, Gift of the Manari on Socrethar), multidotting, if possible, would result in a hps increase relative to putting more Atonement targets out on players not in need of healing.

These calcs also don't account for Atonement buffs applied with PWR. That will be for another day.

[Nexii]

Re: haste/regen, some spells can be reduced by a higher % than others (due to GCD cap). Granted that's at very high gear levels...I guess there would be a regen cap would just equal the haste cap. I would agree though, haste only increases HPS and not HPM, when regen is taken off of gear. Is haste even that interesting of a stat if tied to regen? I mean it helps reaction time I suppose.

When I think on Disc and controllability of raid healing, it may be a bit better than typical HoT healing due to upfront healing on Plea as Atonement noted. I stand by saying you'll have to mostly alternate healing and nuking though, Pleaing many times then nuking would be pretty situational (a large damage spike anticipated...and in this case PWR might be more appropriate).

I think where Disc may suffer is in deep single target healing. How will we as Disc deal with one target taking high damage (i.e. dungeons)? When I look at every other healing spec it just seems like their co-efficients and burst CDs are so much better. Will Grace and such talents really be enough to keep a tank up? This isn't unique to the Disc rework, I'd say it also performs badly in 5 mans right now for the same reasons. Only there isn't as much highly difficult content to make it as obvious.

[Biomega]

The regen issue is interesting. I could see several models replace Spirit as a mana mechanic.

#1 Constant Regen. Have a fixed regen rate for healing specs. This puts more emphasis on efficiency, and also on active mana mechanics. It also stops the sort of double-dip that happens at higher gear levels, where your heals get more powerful AND your regen increases due to more spirit.

#2 Regen tied to Int. Tying regen rate to int (for healers) would essentially emulate what happened before, i.e. the higher your overall gear level, the higher your regen rate. It would make gearing easier (no spirit pieces) but would remove some choices (swap regen for throughput).

#3 Regen tied to Artifact. It's entirely possible that the Artifact Weapons for healers will have a regen mechanic inbuilt. As those weapons are designed to scale through the content, tying that scale to regen would also create a "regen progression". There's even a possibility of introducing choice, via weapon talents or whatnot, so that you can still choose to forego regen in favor of throughput if you so desire.

Guess we'll have to wait and see!

[Deleted]

Haste shouldn't increase mana regen, it should just lower the cost of spells. Or perhaps increase regen but only while a cast or your GCD is going.. Or maybe after a cast give you a buff that refunds some of the mana over a duration thats as long as the cast time of the spell. That way you couldn't regen a ton while not casting anything.

I think that if haste doesn't affect mana in any way it's going to be the worst stat of all healers by far and that doesn't make much sense.

[Nexii]

Yea haste giving equivalent mana cost reduction on a per-spell basis was my first thought as well. Then I edited my post and I forgot about idle time. I think that one would make the most sense, we know they can do spell cast time on a per-spell basis already.

[Pearl1717]

I think where Disc may suffer is in deep single target healing. How will we as Disc deal with one target taking high damage (i.e. dungeons)?

We are definitely not lacking in single target heals. Basically we will PWS on 6 sec cd with no weakened soul, which also applies atonement. Then keep SWP up on targets and penance on CD and MB as needed. Shadow mend as emergency heal. Single target healing will be easy. I think we still excel at it since we can just maintain atonement on a 1-2 targets and just dps our hearts out.