Despite reading all the doom and gloom threads, I had a ton of fun as disc last night. A few experiences of mine.
- I topped the meters on the first boss. I raid with a resto Druid and holy pala. On normal this fight is braindead though, not much going on.
- trash healing was very low. I just kept PW:S on the tank and did a dps rotation since I couldn't do much of anything.
- Il'gynoth was a very challenging fight for me. It was the first boss in a while I actually ran out of mana during. Not only did I oom, I bottomed my HPS on this fight. Resto Druid did amazing here. The ludacris cost of dispels made this fight mana-starved.
- Ursoc was stupid easy for non-tanks. I spread atonement before each roar and followed with halo (taking grace talent) which was a massive heal on the whole raid.
- I outDPS'd both tanks and brought about 8% of the DPS. which in a raid of 11 people wasn't bad at all.
Some random musings of mine - I feel like disc is going to suffer immensely on fights with a constant DoT mechanic like final phase Blackhand. We've got burst heals with radiance spam followed by halo and light's wrath but not much for sustained healing. I'm really missing PoM right about now.
I'm in the same boat as you guys. I made a separate post. With smaller groups disc can do so much better than large groups. And mana is a huge problem. We just don't have enough MPS coming back to keep us going. Iv done many bosses and with every pull unless there is an early mechanic error and we wipe, I always use a potion. And still inevitably run out of mana again.
Yup huge mana stability issues which makes doing any semblance of dps impossible which is a shame, atonement is also a pain to manage even with the 2 second talent I'm all for being proactive as a healer but getting 10 atonement buffs in order to put out maybe a single penance at the exact timing after people take damage is a bit much in to the realm of min maxing before atonement falls off.
As we progressed I got a little bit more stable with mana by only casting when needed bar atonement pre stacks but my over all healing suffered and I may as well have not been doing any dps at all, If I had to heal more then 10 mans with the current setup of atonement I would likely lose my mind.
I did quite poorly, last on meters in all fights except for Dragons, where I was second to a resto druid. I think my second run will be way better, now that I have a better understanding of when the raid damage happens, I'll be better at having Atonements out.
Unfortunately, I left a bad first impression on the guild, and I was benched for team 2 in favor of healers that were higher on the healing meters. My fear is that I won't get a second chance.
It has been so-so for me doing heroic today. Overall, my healing is good on boss fights and i easily compete for top output. However on trash mobs i have a hard time feeling useful.
I have mixed feelings though. Contrary to most i enjoyed doing mythics and had fun healing with damage and a combination of direct heals. However raids feel off to me. Applying attonement is hit or miss. I can't just put attonement on 1-2 targets and heal them up, that way i lose way to much HPS. I found the ideal number to be around 5 attonements but after 5 GCDs most targets end up being at full health. Besides it's not fun doing 5 GCDs of cast on random selecting damaged players without seeing something directly happen to them. Also Schism seems lesser powerful in raids now that i got my legendary belt, so instead play with the 4 tick penance which essentially boils my rotation down to putting up atonements, applying pain and spamming smite til penance is off cooldown. At least schism added a bit of complexity but now it just feels bit braindead and random at best.
In terms of mana I don't feel more starved than other healers. Using mindbender pretty much on cooldown helps a good bit. Most other people ran oom as fast or faster than I did. Remember that at 4 or 5 active atonements shadow mend becomes more mana friendly than plea, and power word radiance is not something you should spam to keep attonement up. Also schism is expensive on mana which is also why i stopped using it.
But in terms of numbers we do fine. Most vids i seen disc gets out near top.
Last edited by mmocf0ad466cc1; 2016-09-21 at 09:42 PM.
Thinking back on the healing I believe my issues where me trying to do raid healing and failing due to atonement requirements but if I was to focus tanks and spot healing instead of mass group healing I think we would fair better of for mana and recovering those few players back to full.
We can do incredible raid wide burst healing when everything falls into place but in my next raid I won't be going in with a raid healing mentality that I had today as it takes way too many gcd's to cope with as little as 10 people and atonement stacks.
Terrible mana problems. Even knowing the boss, the mana just fly away. The plea becoming more and more expensive as well the insane cost of radiance (plus on only affect 3) is causing serious problems.
And how some users said, for raid of 10 people is fine, for 14 start to become a problem but still can keep up. Mora than 14 and not just cant save mana, also the healing will drop since heal all the raid will became near impossible while other healers can do easy. And in case you try....how many radiances and pleas will you need? that will erase the mana bar.
Even if on raid heavy damage you only uses 2 radiances (plus the tank ones) and a penance, the mana will fly.
Seriously, think that blizz should check:
- Radiance: to much mana cost for such a weak heal, that only affect to 3 and with a terrible slow cast. Also our only way to spread expiation on raid.
- Expiation: the buff duration is too slow. When you prepare to an incoming raid damage, the msot common is that the first buffed ones will lost the buff or being close. Also the short actual duration makes that constant raid damage becames a hell to a discipline. Also plea cost when there are certain number of expiation on becomes a problem.
- No related to mana, but think should comment about how weak mastery is. Since provide ZERO damage, each point wasted on mastery will make the encounter longer...and that is not good for mana haha
mana pretty much killed it, was in a raid of 30 and I simply wasn't able to target the correct people with radiance, 20 people get hit and 5 of my atonements are sitting on people on full health and it's just RIP. Pre-planning is cool but the lack of reactional healing really kills it in large raid sizes with 'whackamole' damage patterns. without the mana to sustain atonements on more people it was just pretty awkward playstyle, going holy felt much much better, the synergy between PoH and sanc was pretty much all that was needed to outperm disc in every way, not to mention doing similar to better DPS on a couple of the fights where holy nova was useful.
edit; i also found the 'big' damage where disc burst would shine was being sniped by healer CDs, in a large raid we ran 6 healers so pretty much every damage event was covered with a CD. I imagine with less healer CDs (less healers) there would be more opportunity for disc to maximise that burst
Last edited by mmocc73a7e76d4; 2016-09-22 at 12:26 AM.
I did okay. It had been a few months since I had last done the bosses and re-adjusting to them didn't really happen in the one pull it took to kill most of them. Trying to use Deadly Grace based on dummy testing was also a mistake, as in an actual raid environment we can't throw out enough DPS events to get the full value of that potion and I ended up just having no channeled mana potions which would have been far better. Dying and not doing mechanics properly didn't really help, but I shined on a few fights where I played it out properly.
Damage contribution was about 100k DPS per fight, which is going to be super helpful when we start Mythic.
A couple of fights made me wish I had Grace instead of PtW (Nythendra and Il'gynoth come to mind) but I don't know if that's just a product of having a raid of 30 people that don't know the fights and if that trend will continue in Mythic.
Boring and annoying at the same time. Disc is very fun in 5mans but totally disappointing in raids. I was in a ~17 man raid, could not decide who to atonement besides tanks. Besides spot heals and tank heals I was healing random people selected by PWR. It felt really weird and wrong. Atonement window felt short, application was cumbersome and slow. Mana was an issue all the time, it was impossible to keep my Schism build.
I was beating only the undergeared resto shammy on bosses. Holy priest and pala outhealed me almost all the time. My DPS was totally crap for I had to waste so much time with atonements.
I think I could enjoy the spec way more if the raid was only 10-12 people, not more.
Looted 3 trinkets of which 2 are completely junk for disc and the 3rd one is on par with my int/haste stat stick 840 WQ reward.
Boss encounters were also disappointing for me, so after all I'll stay away from raiding I guess.
it was quite the learning curve , being the first raid i actually healed after a decenia of being a lazy dps or ez mode tank, i noticed on the 1st 2 bosses i couldnt play like i wanted due to mana issues
even speccing out of schism ( sadpanda) didnt change alot
i then graduatly changed my play style and had less mana issues but saw my dps/hps lower too
in the end we went 6/7 and i wasnt the lowest healer and was above my tanks and 1 dps in dmg
all with all a very fun night, but the mana part is very frustrating... wich kinda is a shame...i could do so much more, but curently im just being sparse with certrain burst chains or saving burst a bit longer because abbility x is gonna kick in soon
but its a great specc i enjoy it alot... there is no downtime...always something to do or cast altho i do feel like blizz should give us some love
we currently need the skill/awereness of a dps , but also that of a healer , while also be pro active with smack a hoe for attonements or predicting dmg, working twice as hard for not that much benifit except loads of fun
An issue I'm having is finding a good filler spell other than Smite. Sometimes I know a good chunk of damage is incoming on the raid, but how do we approach spreading atonement efficiently without throwing away too much mana when we see the damage come and have fillers to spare?
-One could say Plea, but that spell very quickly becomes mana inefficient when usually you already have some about-to-expire atonements rolling (which won't help you for the incoming damage, but increases the cost).
-PW:S has too much of a CD for that.
-You could say Rapture, but thats on a too long CD to use too freely when you know you want it elsewhere or atleast you wont have it up every single time
-PW:R has an enormous cost attached to it and often I find that half of my atonements hit people I would never want (ignoring health% and simply going on the closest player without atonement). Plus you can't realistically keep this up without draining your mana pool either.
So what method is there to efficiently set up for incoming damage, without emptying the manabank or using Rapture? Disc's atonement setup can sometimes feel to be too long and too mana intensive for what it does most of the time (gotta admit, sometimes it's crazy good). But there should be a slow and mana conservative setup to apply atonement and the mana intensive and quick way to set it up(probably ment to be PW:R).
I sometimes am a bit sad when look at my manapool comparatively to other healers during the fight. Ofcourse I'm not providing logs and you won't be able to help me indepth, but I'm still at a bit of a loss.
I have been disapointed by my raid. The only problem is the mana that is spent in raid setup. I ended up being semi active to be able to get a little mana back, then heal/dps, then slow down ..
I think my hps / dps would be good if i could at least use my dps spells all the time without mana issues, as it would improve attonements healing.
I feel like one more heal spell as a good filler or atonement spreader would be amazing for our kit. Prayer of Mending or even cascade coming back would do wonders. There just isn't a good way to get AoE healing out, especially on fights with a lot of movement where we can't smite spam the boss. Druids have good spread and shaman have good smart heals plus SWG. I just want something to press that I can keep rolling on the raid that isn't as expensive as plea + atonement. A cost reduction of radiance coupled with an additional target it hits would be super cool as well to make it an affordable atonement spread.
I'm happy with the play style though, being able to contribute to DPS is awesome when not a lot of heals need to go out.
And also, like I said in the OP, fights with a constant raid damage mechanic is going to kill disc. Idk if there are any fights of those kind in Legion yet, but there isn't going to be a good way for disc to deal with that atm.
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