[7.0] Legion Discipline Priest Guide and Discussion

[Pearl1717]

For raids, I hear some of you saying 12-16 PW:R are ideal for the burst phase; how do you target the people you cast it on? I find myself randomly clicking someone in melee, randomly clicking a caster, and maybe a tank or something and hoping for the best. Any tips on how to accurately spread those out would be great!

Honestly there isn't much you can do to target people. The purpose of getting out 12-16 atonements is to blanket the raid for raid wide aoe. Outside of the person you cast PWR on, you can't really target who gets it. This really isn't an issue since its raid wide damage, so everyone will be taking the same (more or less) damage. For me, I'll usually choose who I cast PWR on based on priority people in the raid, i.e. our best dps, other healers, tanks etc, so that I ensure that they have atonement on them

For rapture, its a little different. With rapture you can target who you cast it on and you just have to rely on old 6.x disc habits. So who is going to take the most damage soon, and who do you want to protect the most. Again, kind of the same principles as who you actually target with PWR.

Next, I'm a big Diablo fan as well. I love the addition of Mythic+ dungeons, but I'm afraid that Disc will never quite be able to push that content like Holy (or other healers). Currently, when there is high damage in 5mans, you have to Shadowmend a ton. It works, I get that, but it's also one button. It can do the job, but I don't really enjoy it (and I can't imagine others do as well) because it forces you to abandon the whole point of disc: igniting your enemies in holy fire to heal your allies. Once we don't overgear the content, I can imagine Disc will have a very hard time keeping tanks alive. Then again, maybe I'm just not getting something?

It's boring sure, but that's basically what every healer is reduced to in Mythic+.

Lastly, someone mentioned Barrier will be really good in legion. How so? From my cursory (noobish) glance, it lost 75% of its effectiveness, lol.

Barrier is still strong in Legion, but only when it can be used effectively, ie stacked raid. Its very strong when everyone is stacked, but that limits its potential uses.

This is particularly important, because it's irritating to have to cancel cast PWR after chaining on the next target, who of course had to get atonement splashed onto them.

Seriously the most frustrating thing for disc atm (at least for me lol). I'm still bad and forget to alternate back and forth a lot of times so I end up not getting as high of atonement counts as I should. But I'm still learning how to play.

[PosPosPos]

Seriously the most frustrating thing for disc atm (at least for me lol). I'm still bad and forget to alternate back and forth a lot of times so I end up not getting as high of atonement counts as I should. But I'm still learning how to play.

I thought I was so over arranging melee/ranged groups for PoH once prepatch hit, and then I realized that it was still necessary so I don't have to cancel cast PWR all the time.

Now I just PWR melee -> ranged -> melee and repeat the cycle. It definitely helps to reduce the occurrence of the queued cast of PWR overlapping with the atonement application of the previous PWR, because melee targets will tend to splash to other melee, and ranged targets will tend to splash to other ranged.

It's not foolproof, because it's definitely not impossible for some ranged or melee to be running around where they should not be or that the melee group are already blanketed and would default to splashing the ranged anyway.

[Pearl1717]

I thought I was so over arranging melee/ranged groups for PoH once prepatch hit, and then I realized that it was still necessary so I don't have to cancel cast PWR all the time.

Now I just PWR melee -> ranged -> melee and repeat the cycle. It definitely helps to reduce the occurrence of the queued cast of PWR overlapping with the atonement application of the previous PWR, because melee targets will tend to splash to other melee, and ranged targets will tend to splash to other ranged.

It's not foolproof, because it's definitely not impossible for some ranged or melee to be running around where they should not be or that the melee group are already blanketed and would default to splashing the ranged anyway.

Oh I know me too. First thing I do in raid is whisper RL for assist to fix frames, and I thought I was done with that.

Unfortunately a lot of the times my guild members are idiots, so there is always range in melee or we're not spread apart enough so I'll cast it on a range and it'll still splash to melee. And my guild just reformed and we have a lot of really old members who came back from SoO/early WoD who never progressed during HFC and so have no idea where to optimally stand and everything lol. It'll probably change during progression in Legion, since now its just kinda a FFA since prepatch+nerfs+lulul.

[anon5123]

Unable to form a coherent argument?

Without slathering it in passive-aggressiveness and insults, yes.

It's possible to disagree with someone and tell them they're wrong, without being a condescending asshole.

[Hodag]

Thanks for the quick responses everyone! Yea, I'm in the process of rebuilding my ui after 7.0, so I'll definitely need to invest in some atonement tracking. I know Disc is probably the hardest healer class to play, but, like most of you here, I enjoy the challenge and would much rather do that than click red health bars and press a button.

And honestly, when you think about it, everyone is crying that Disc is this different beast and it's too difficult..etc. It's difficult, yes, but it's not really different. In WoD, you did your HPS by pre-applying shields before damage spikes and then helping your healers recover after the burst. With Legion, you do your HPS by pre-applying atonement and then melting some serious face for 10 seconds to help level out the burst. Some more button presses are required to be sure, but nothing crazy in the grand scheme of things. Once people begin to recognize that, I think people will come around to it.

[Pearl1717]

And honestly, when you think about it, everyone is crying that Disc is this different beast and it's too difficult..etc. It's difficult, yes, but it's not really different. In WoD, you did your HPS by pre-applying shields before damage spikes and then helping your healers recover after the burst. With Legion, you do your HPS by pre-applying atonement and then melting some serious face for 10 seconds to help level out the burst. Some more button presses are required to be sure, but nothing crazy in the grand scheme of things. Once people begin to recognize that, I think people will come around to it.

Yes exactly. Disc is not that difficult to play in all honesty. The only reason this really gets thrown around a lot is because the level of skill required to be mediocre at 6.x disc was so low, so now you have so many people who could not even play 6.x disc trying to play 7.x disc and the cant adjust. They become complacent with how easy it was before. They were the kind of people who topped meters in their own raid and assumed that they were playing optimally, when really they weren't.

If you were at all decent at 6.x disc there really is no reason that you can't be decent at 7.x disc. You are literally doing the same things except now you're "building evangelismstack" much more than before by dpsing more.

[Krstl]

Yes exactly. Disc is not that difficult to play in all honesty. The only reason this really gets thrown around a lot is because the level of skill required to be mediocre at 6.x disc was so low, so now you have so many people who could not even play 6.x disc trying to play 7.x disc and the cant adjust. They become complacent with how easy it was before. They were the kind of people who topped meters in their own raid and assumed that they were playing optimally, when really they weren't.

I very much agree with this. I'm the type of person who tends to always play a healer, just because I like to know what all healers in my raid are capable of doing. If you think about your spells in the same way as another class, it tends to make more sense, they just have different names and may possibly work opposite of how another spell works. At least that helped for me. Your play style will adjust if you give it time, I donn't think it took me very long to get used to it. I do however find myself spacing out a bit more lately as the bosses in hfc die so quickly that I get out of habit of putting out my atonement and just do more damage because there really isn't a need to heal very much right now, but as new raid bosses come in an progression hits, I'm sure I'll get out of the laziness that is hfc.

[davesignal]

Or maybe pearl got lucky and just randomly picks a rotation to cast, and struck jackpot this week! /s

If you were any more defensive you'd be tanking.

[PosPosPos]

If you were any more defensive you'd be tanking.

What has that got to do with your ludicrous assertion that healing is all about luck?

[Pearl1717]

If you were any more defensive you'd be tanking.

As a side note, its always funny how people demand logs at times, but then never provide their own logs. So I'm curious, why don't you post your logs if you like calling out other people on theirs?

[Totaltotemic]

If you were any more defensive you'd be tanking.

What's the matter? Salty that you couldn't find anything in any of our logs to justify your own bad play and claim that everything we say is wrong?

After all, you were soooo eager to look at my logs when you thought I was also bad at Disc, then they suddenly didn't mean anything anymore. Do you want to show us what getting "unlucky" looks like or are you afraid that someone might actually point out things you could be doing better?

[Deleted]

Damn, this is one sassy thread.

[Djriff]

Mod Note:
This thread is for Discipline Priest Discussion and not about each other. Please stop the arguments about each other and instead focus on the topic at hand.

[Pearl1717]

Damn, this is one sassy thread.

MMOC is always sassy

[zekataz]

I think i'm slowly improving with the new Disc Priest. When asking for advice or review of some combat logs, should I throw it in this tread or create a new thread?

Thanks for all the discussions so far, it's very helpful.

[Djriff]

@zekataz, this thread is fine for posting logs.

[elmoe420]

Oh I know me too. First thing I do in raid is whisper RL for assist to fix frames, and I thought I was done with that.

Unfortunately a lot of the times my guild members are idiots, so there is always range in melee or we're not spread apart enough so I'll cast it on a range and it'll still splash to melee. And my guild just reformed and we have a lot of really old members who came back from SoO/early WoD who never progressed during HFC and so have no idea where to optimally stand and everything lol. It'll probably change during progression in Legion, since now its just kinda a FFA since prepatch+nerfs+lulul.

Since no more spells are group bound have you tried simply sorting your raid frames by role instead of actually moving the players into the same groups?

I was hoping to finally be done with needing assist as well.

Sent from my Nexus 6P using Tapatalk

[Yunzi]

I'd like to remind people who have seemingly forgotten that the DPS meters are far more accurate than HPS meters, which rely on a slew of factors that have nothing to do with how well the healer is playing, primarily the amount of damage per unit of time *available* to be healed, which is impacted by the ratio of healers to total raid members as well as how much avoidable damage the raid takes. Warcraft Logs should provide a meter that adjusts for this, but does not.

Since Warcraft Logs ignores what might be called Adjusted HPS, we ourselves need to adjust for it.

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In my personal experience so far raid healing as Disc I feel that the spec is very complicated. The frequently difficult decision is during a damage sequence when a non-atoned player takes damage, whether or not to atone him immediately or continue the damage sequence (healing the existing atoned players). There's also a constant mana-management issue of how many players to atone, which will be far more serious in Legion with the longer boss fights during progression.

I feel like the spec is tuned fairly well so far - it does the least amount of healing of any spec but that's fine as long as the damage more than compensates. It has to more than compensate because public opinion of any healing spec is basely largely on it's HPS - just like the HPS that a damage spec does is largely ignored the DPS (as well as utility) that a healer spec does is largely ignored by most raid leaders.

[Deleted]

Since no more spells are group bound have you tried simply sorting your raid frames by role instead of actually moving the players into the same groups?

I was hoping to finally be done with needing assist as well.

This will work fine until you run into a mechanic that you have to assign groups for, example this expansion would be the Gruul slash or soakers for Bloodboil, at least those were the first ones that I thought of. Doesn't make them impossible by any means, but you would probably prefer seeing the groups as they are and not have to remember which of the players were going to take damage next.

And in pretty much both of these cases Radiance would suffer because there are both melee and ranged in range of each cast. Would help if it was changed somehow.

[Deleted]

This will work fine until you run into a mechanic that you have to assign groups for, example this expansion would be the Gruul slash or soakers for Bloodboil, at least those were the first ones that I thought of. Doesn't make them impossible by any means, but you would probably prefer seeing the groups as they are and not have to remember which of the players were going to take damage next.

Well, I have raid frames with groups and under them I also have separate raid frames for both melee and ranged. You could always do that.