[7.0] Discipline Priest Guide

[Deleted]

<Unfinished>Testing wether I can post links/images yet and making sure this doesn't get deleted while I work on it.

Content

• Introduction: How does Discipline Priest work? What has changed to Legion?
  
  • The general playstyle
  • Rumors
  • Difficulty
• Discipline Priest spells
• Mana - or "why can't I cast anymore?"
  
  • What do the legion changes mean?
  • How can you deal with them?
• Talents - or "reasons to get into heated arguments with other priests"
  
  • For Dungeons
  • For Raids
• Secondary Stats
• Dungeons - or "how to heal up the mistakes of others"
  
  • Low damage
  • High damage
    
  • No damage
• Raids - or "not stepping on other healers' toes"

Introduction: How does Discipline Priest work? What has changed to Legion


The general playstyle
Blizzard has decided that the whole absorb healing mechanic is unhealthy for the game. One can agree or not, but this has happened. Following this decision, discipline priest does not focus on absorbs anymore. We still can do some absorb, but not much anymore.

Instead they focus on atonement healing. The developers did however not leave it in it's first form. Simply DPSing the enemy and everyone getting smart-healed would be pretty boring, right?

Instead, atonement is now a buff that you can apply to players. If you deal damage, 40% of that damage (increased by mastery) is transferred as healing to every player with the atonement buff - this healing is not split among those players.
This means that discipline priests heal by dealing damage.

Rumors
Many of those reading this will probably have heard that discipline priest "is not a real healer anymore" or it's "half damage dealer half healer". However, while I believed those things myself going into legion, I have to say, for better or worse, that they are not true.

On the negative side, I always hoped blizzard would make a new role - a true hybrid. But that's not what happened.

On the positive side of things however, Disc is simply an insanely powerful asset to a raid. You heal as much as other healers and deal some relevant damage along the way.

Difficulty
One thing I have to address is the difficulty of discipline priest. Especially after it was essentially a "noob tube" in WoD. Even mediocre or bad players could have a great impact simply spamming one spell - Powerword: Shield. Great players used Archangel, Penance and other spells to great effect, but they were simply just a bit better than those spamming one button.

In Legion this is the polar opposite. Discipline priest is hard to learn and hard to master. If you expect to have an easy time going into the spec, you will quickly fall on your nose. Holy is much more effective with much less skill. However, Holy is also much less effective with a high amount of skill.

Discipline Priest Spells

With the basic idea explained, we can now continue and explore what this spec has to offer. Use this section to get a clear idea of the discipline priest playstyle. We won't go in-depth yet, because I will reserve that for the dungeon and raid sections.

The first thing one has to learn is what spells apply atonement.

Atonement
Plea, Power Word: Shield, Shadow Mend, and Power Word: Radiance also apply Atonement to your target for 15 sec.

When you deal spell damage, you instantly heal all targets affected by Atonement for 40.0% of the damage done.

Plea
Powerword: Shield
Shadowmend
Powerword: Radiance

All these spells do heal by themselves. You will often use them despite the initial heal being wasted (not Shadowmend). The application of the Atonement Buff is simply much more important.

To actually make use of the atonement buff you need to deal damage. These are the basic spells we deal damage with:
Shadowword: Pain
Penance
Smite

Please note that Penance cannot be used to heal anymore - only by using The Penitent Talent, which is a very bad choice. Don't fall into the traps of The Penitent and Shadow Covenant - do yourself the favor and just skip these two talents or you will have trouble switching later.

Mana - or "why can't I cast anymore?"

What is the big deal with mana you ask?
Blizzard has still nightmares of WotLK, where healers could spam any spell they wanted, because mana was such a non-issue. Since then they tried to make mana more of an issue. The first big change was in WoD, where spirit was only on a few items anymore and the amount of mana regeneration gained from spirited was massively reduced. Still you could get a lot of spirit from trinkets.

In Legion spirit is gone. Every healer has a fixed mana regeneration.

What does this mean?
It means that no matter your gear, mana will always be an issue. There is not much you can do to have more mana at your hands.

So what can you do?

• Artifact traits to increase mana regeneration (not discipline priest)
• Trinkets
• External cooldowns (innervate, mana hymn)
• Playstyle

Talents - or "reasons to get into heated arguments with other priests"

There is a few choices to make here. I will try to explain what can be used when.



For dungeons, I use the talent setup above.

15 - Schism provides a lot more damage at the cost of mana. Mana is no issue in dungeons, because you can drink often.
30 - You could take any here
45 - Dominant mind allows you to mind control one enemy - making him your pet. It simply makes this spell useable, which is better than what the other spells do. If you need a short knockback, Shining Force can work too.
60 - Mindbender for the damage it gives - plus it only costs one GCD per minute.
75 - Twist of Fate because it triggers often. Power Infusion is still good and can be taken as well.
90 - I prefer Halo over Divine Star, but both can be taken. Since their heal got gutted so hard in WoD it doesn't matter much anymore. Halo simply works as a single target spell, while for Divine Star the GCD is wasted.
100 - Grace, simply so you can spam Shadowmend (this is our Flash Heal) to great effect. In easier dungeons (heroic) you can take Purge the Wicked.



For Raids you mostly just want to change a few talents.
15 - Castigation, because Schism costs too much mana, simple as that. You also can't take advantage of Schism that much, so it isn't as effective.
75 - Power Infusion, you need the mana cost reduction and Twist of Fate doesn't trigger nearly as often, making it flat out worse
100 - Still a toss-up between Purge the Wicked and Grace. You have to decide depending on the boss and your playstyle and role in the raid.

Can you take other talents? Sure! Experiment as you like. Just don't expect that you of all people will find that one new talent thousands of people overlooked - there is often a reason if a talent isn't used.

Secondary Stats - or "why nearly all gear you get is trash"

Now it may sound a bit harsh, but it's really not easy to get gear with good stats.

Dungeons

Haste > Crit > Versatility > Mastery

Raids

Haste > Crit > Mastery > Versatility

For Dungeons mastery is lacking, since it doesn't affect Shadowmend (our best spell for dungeons) and it does nothing to increase our DPS, which is the main selling point of discipline priest.

For Raids, this looks entirely different, because our healing will be mostly atonement, thus mastery gains a lot of value. If you are mostly worried about your healing, mastery can be better than crit even. The reason you can generally go for crit is because your healing throughput in the important moments is not a big problem - crit benefits your DPS and that's one of the selling points of discipline priest.

Your damage is about as much as a tank would do, which can become quite a bit. In Dungeons you do a lot more damage.



There is a constant debate going on, a very heated one, whether haste is the best stat or not. From my personal experience I can say that it definitely is.

The main argument against haste is that it doesn't provide HPM. HPM means heal per mana, which essentially means mana efficiency. If a spell heals 100 points and costs 100 mana the efficiency is 1. If you have 100% crit the same spell will always heal 200, but still cost 100 mana, making the efficiency 2. Now if you have 100% haste you can cast the spell twice in the same time, but you will spend 200 mana, since you're casting it twice. So the efficiency is still 1.

However, there is more complicated mechanics to take into account. For example, for druids haste provides HPM because their heals over time will heal more in the same time frame, but cost the same. We only have one dot (which translates into a hot for us due to Atonement) - so this doesn't provide much HPM.

This isn't all of course. Mindbender attacks faster, so it does a lot more damage (and thus healing) with haste, as well as giving us mana with each attack. More attacks = more mana.

Most importantly is how our playstyle synergizes with haste. I will quote myself here from Totemic's Disc guide which he removed from this site:

Imagine with 0 haste, you need 7,5 seconds to apply 5 atonements. Now you have 7,5 seconds to cast damage spells before the first atonement falls off. In this time you could cast 5 smites (we take smites as example, since every spell scales same with haste and this is for simplicity). The time in which atonements fall off will be ignored, I will explain later why.
With 50% haste, you would need 5 seconds to apply 5 atonements. Now you have 10 seconds to cast damage spells before the first atonement falls off. In this time you could cast 10 smites.
So you get twice the healing over a slightly longer period of time for the same mana cost in regards to the atonement application spells. Yes the DPS spells cost twice as much because you cast twice as many, but the spells used to apply atonement are essentially cheaper, because you can heal a lot more during the atonement duration.
Ok, why do we ignore the time atonements slowly fall off? Well with no haste, one falls off every 1,5 seconds, a smite cast takes 1,5 seconds. With 50% haste, one falls off every 1 second and a smite cast also takes 1 second - this time is not influenced by haste at all.

Note that what I describe is not a realistic situation - it's simplified so you can grasp the concept more easily. However, if you think about it for a moment, even in a realistic situation, this is how it works.

Even all of this combined doesn't make haste better in HPM than crit. However, it should make clear that haste is not giving "no HPM", it just is giving slightly less than other stats.

Never forget that as healers we are not casting continuously - there are breaks, even as disc, especially as disc.

Dungeons - or "how to heal up the mistakes of others"

This will be the easy part of the in-depth section. Dungeons are just not really challenging until you get into mythic +5. This can change depending on the patch, but as of now - 7.0.3 - none of the non-keystone modes are hard if you aren't horribly undergeared.

The one spell to highlight is Shadowmend. This spell is our bread and butter for dungeons - the more challenging, the more we will use it. So why is it so good? It is a flash heal, with the same mana cost but with a much higher spell power coefficient than that of other healers. The drawback is that it leaves behind a dot. In nearly all cases this dot can be ignored, because if the target takes damage equal or higher than the dot damage, the dot is removed. Shadowmend also applies Atonement, making it even better.

When players are taking low amounts of damage

• Cast Mindbender if you don't need it specifically for something later (generally you don't)
• Apply atonements with Plea and Powerword: Shield
• Keep Shadowword: Pain up on many targets
• Use Schism on cooldown (please don't do dungeons without Schism)
• Use Penance on cooldown (make sure Atonements are up if anyone needs healing, and make sure the Schism debuff is still running 2 seconds)
• Smite the rest of the time

It doesn't matter if everyone is taking damage or just the tank, as long as the damage is low, atonement will easily take care of it. Often (thanks to Schism) even medium damage can be healed with just atonement.

When the tank or other members are taking a lot of damage

• Cast Mindbender
• Use Shadowmend on everyone taking damage
• Use more Shadowmend if they are in immediate threat of dying
• Use Schism and Penance (in that order) - because Shadowmend applied atonement to the people you want to heal
• Cast Smite if people are stabilized
• Or keep using Shadowmend if people are still taking a lot of damage
• You can substitute one Shadowmend for a Powerword: Shield if you need to move
• Try to keep Shadowword: Pain up on as many targets as you can

When players are taking no damage

• Apply Shadowword: Pain to as many targets as you can
• Use Schism on cooldown
• Use Penance (make sure Schism debuff still lasts two seconds)
• Smite

Important: Always buy water for dungeons. You are dealing lots of damage, so you won't stop casting if everyone is at 100% health. Unlike other healers your damage spells cost mana, so you will always run low eventually.

Light's Wrath - Use your artifact simply on cooldown. This is so you get the Overloaded with Light proc faster/more often. Sadly the damage of it is very low in dungeon groups and thus the heal is equally mediocre.

Overloaded with Light
This buff you sometimes get (outside of Raids!) increases the damage of your next Light's Wrath by about 1000%. Yes, you read that right. You can easily critically strike with this for above 6 million damage.
Save this for a boss fight preferably, as it will instantly heal everyone with atonement up by way more than their healthbar.

Raids or "not stepping on other healers' toes"

There is a reason I named this section this way. Essentially there is two common ways to play discipline priest in a raid - I'm not saying these two are the only two that exist nor that they are the best, but that they are the most common.

First is an adaptive healing style. While not the most powerful, this is the style most will have to go for. This style is mainly suited for PUGs and less organized raids, for example casual raids.
Second is the burst heal style. This plays discipline to it's strengths and can have pretty insane results, however to work properly and actually reap the rewards you need to have a well-organized group, because otherwise it can be lackluster.

Proactive
The first thing you need to learn for raids, which is not that important for dungeons (though still helpful for them as well) - you are a proactive healer, the only one really. What this means is that you need to prepare for incoming damage. If you play reactively, you will not perform, I promise you that.

What does this mean in practice?
Watch your DBM timers and know the boss fight. When a large damage burst is incoming, you need to have atonements up already. It doesn't matter if the small initial heal of Plea or Powerword: Radiance is wasted - this isn't what makes or breaks discipline priests. What does is whether you have atonements on the targets taking damage before they take damage.

Adaptive Healing Style

• Keep atonements up on the tanks - you can use Powerword: Shield for that
• Use Plea and Shadowmend on people with dot effects on them so they have atonement to counteract the dot
• Watch your targets with atonement closely, if they require healing, use Penance and Smite to heal them up
• Use Shadowmend to spot heal people - the spell is powerful, don't underestimate it, but it's also expensive
• Make sure you keep Shadowword: Pain on as many targets as you can

To summarize, you want to spread a few atonements, Penance, cast a few smites and repeat. During periods of high damage you can use some Powerword: Radiances and Mindbender to help heal. Don't waste too much mana when other healers are using their big cooldowns.

Burst Heal Style

• Prepare for large damage spikes (like Ursoc charge) by spreading atonements with Powerword: Radiance
• Cast Mindbender before the damage hits
• Pre-cast Light's Wrath before the damage hits, so the slow particle hits when the damage does as well
• Follow up with Penance and a few smite casts
• Rest of the time, try to conserve mana (explained further below)

The biggest problem with this style is the coordination. Your other healers need to know when you will burst-heal, so they don't waste big cooldowns or mana on expensive spells like Wild Growth. Imagine your burst heal like Tranquility - you would announce that too, wouldn't you?

The other problem is that this doesn't work reactively - you need to be prepared.

The amount of times you can do this is limited, but not by cooldowns, but by mana. So if you can get innervate or mana hymn for you - do it. It's worth arguing with your guild a bit there, because disc does make better use of innervate than other healers, simply because you can throw out so much mana in 10 seconds and convert that into healing later with atonement.

What are the benefits?

• You free up the cooldowns of other healers, because you are not limited by cooldowns. 3 burst heal phases in 2 minutes? No problem.
• You allow them to save their mana in exchange for yours
• Especially with Innervate and Mana Hymn the mana your other healers will gain indirectly is immense
• Burst heal is fast, basically like a Revival, so the danger of dying is low for others

Mana Conserving

• It's not a sin to just stop casting for a bit, so do that
• Avoid Shadowmend and Powerword: Radiance
• Use Plea to apply atonement, preferably below 3-4 atonements
• Use Powerword: Shield for more atonements
• Try to avoid smiting if the heal is not healing more than 2 people - instead just do nothing
• Use Mindbender on cooldown

Go into this style of healing when you need to conserve mana. This is very important between burst heal phases and can be useful for the adaptive healing style too.

Rapture
To really make the most out of this spell you want to use it a bit like the burst heal style.
10 seconds before the damage

• Cast a plea and Powerword: Shield
• Use Rapture (it resets the cooldown of Powerword: Shield too)
• Cast as many Powerword: Shields on different targets as you can until the damage hits
• Use Mindbender/Light's Wrath if ready and not needed later
• Follow up with Penance and Smites

[Pearl1717]

Bro. Please specifically mention that stat prio is for dungeons.

[Spike`]

suggestion: put a new image showing talents for raid or only show the raid image one

the majority of the people will only see the image and follow that and not reading properly

also what Pearl1717 said

[Djriff]

Also you can link spells directly to wow DB so you don't need to type out descriptions. Definitely needs some formatting.

[Bareturtle]

That raid stat priority is wrong, like most stat priorities being thrown around. I'm interested to see what the "Raid" section is going to look like.

[Pearl1717]

That raid stat priority is wrong, like most stat priorities being thrown around. I'm interested to see what the "Raid" section is going to look like.

This is what happens when you have random people out of nowhere, who have not been part of the past few months of discussions making guides.

[davesignal]

This is what happens when you have random people out of nowhere, who have not been part of the past few months of discussions making guides.

Totaltotemic flounced off in a huff, let the new guys have their chance.

[Deleted]

That raid stat priority is wrong, like most stat priorities being thrown around. I'm interested to see what the "Raid" section is going to look like.

This is what happens when you have random people out of nowhere, who have not been part of the past few months of discussions making guides.

This sounds really condescending. I've been part of the Totemic thread since page one, I only made an account later, because I didn't want to argue with anyone. I've posted several logs that showcase my ability with the class and that I clearly know what I'm doing.

Also what is your guess on the stat priority Bareturtle? Because it can't possibly be anything more than a guess.

You are also commenting an unfinished guide. Would you let me finish at least before you throw insults and condescending remarks my way?

[Bareturtle]

This sounds really condescending. I've been part of the Totemic thread since page one, I only made an account later, because I didn't want to argue with anyone. I've posted several logs that showcase my ability with the class and that I clearly know what I'm doing.

Also what is your guess on the stat priority Bareturtle? Because it can't possibly be anything more than a guess.

You are also commenting an unfinished guide. Would you let me finish at least before you throw insults and condescending remarks my way?

This is a joke, right? Asking to see the most important section of an unfinished guide is condescending? And the best part, I must be guessing when it comes to the stat weights I use for raiding, no way they're backed up by personal experience and math. Instead of getting defensive and accusing us of being insulting and condescending, maybe you should spend some time working on your unfinished guide.

You want condescending? From looking over your logs, I'm not entirely sure you "clearly know what you're doing". If you think a good parse on heroic Elerethe where 3 of your fellow healers were beaten by a Blood DK gives you the right to post of the topic, you're going to be very sorely mistaken.

I have no problem with new players attempting to write a guide on how to play Discipline, in fact I encourage it. However, if these posters are going to resort to personal attacks as soon as their logic is disputed, they're no better than Total, and he at least provided math behind his logic.

[Deleted]

About the stat priority.

I also started out with the dungeon priority however I found it didn't work out at all in raids. So I checked out what Kina was doing and realised he was going haste > mastery. When I asked him about it I basically facedesked because I really should have realised this beforehand.

Basically, you can't stack crit high enough yet to really make a difference. So you won't get a reliable amount of crits to invest secondaries in it right now, especially since secondaries make such a huge difference right now.
In raids you also don't really use shadowmend much at all, instead you spread atonements and work from there, which means your mastery stat is practically always used quite well. When I switched stat priorities and changed some WA's I improved a noticable amount.

[Bareturtle]

Basically, you can't stack crit high enough yet to really make a difference. So you won't get a reliable amount of crits to invest secondaries in it right now, especially since secondaries make such a huge difference right now.

Your stat priority is correct, but your logic is flawed. Crit will provide the same benefit at low levels as it does at high levels, mastery just straight does more healing when >65% of your healing is from Atonement.

[Deleted]

Your stat priority is correct, but your logic is flawed. Crit will provide the same benefit at low levels as it does at high levels, mastery just straight does more healing when >65% of your healing is from Atonement.

Sorry what I meant by what I said is;

During Mists of Pandaria we could stack crit so high we got to the point of almost constant critting. We don't have that (added) benefit here, we just have regular crit, which is still good but it's not the god stat it would be at the ridiculous levels we sometimes get to end of expansion.

[Bareturtle]

Sorry what I meant by what I said is;

During Mists of Pandaria we could stack crit so high we got to the point of almost constant critting. We don't have that (added) benefit here, we just have regular crit, which is still good but it's not the god stat it would be at the ridiculous levels we sometimes get to end of expansion.

What does having a larger crit % have to do with anything? Even if we could reach 50% crit, mastery would still be a better stat point-for-point in terms of hps.

[davesignal]

He probably means not enough to be reliable.

[Deleted]

That is indeed what I meant.
If I could have reliable enough crits I would go for crit over mastery. I might lose some healing over it but I would gain a LOT more damage which is something I do consider when choosing priorities as well.

[Deleted]

This is a joke, right? Asking to see the most important section of an unfinished guide is condescending? And the best part, I must be guessing when it comes to the stat weights I use for raiding, no way they're backed up by personal experience and math. Instead of getting defensive and accusing us of being insulting and condescending, maybe you should spend some time working on your unfinished guide.

You want condescending? From looking over your logs, I'm not entirely sure you "clearly know what you're doing". If you think a good parse on heroic Elerethe where 3 of your fellow healers were beaten by a Blood DK gives you the right to post of the topic, you're going to be very sorely mistaken.

I have no problem with new players attempting to write a guide on how to play Discipline, in fact I encourage it. However, if these posters are going to resort to personal attacks as soon as their logic is disputed, they're no better than Total, and he at least provided math behind his logic.

You simply said "stat prio is wrong" - that is condescending. Apparently I'm not worth your "math" and "personal experience" because you refuse to share it. This is a guide so people can learn something, but all they learn from reading your comment is that you believe the stat prio is wrong, nothing else, because you failed to post anything constructive in both posts. You don't even mention what you think is the correct stat prio. How do you want to anyone to benefit from that?

What's the reason you posted at all? Obviously not to share helpful information.

And I didn't just post one log that contained one fight. But better just cherry-pick what suits your argument best.

[Bareturtle]

I'm done discussing an unfinished guide. Finish the guide, then we can have a proper discussion about its content instead of the quality of my posts.

[Evry]

Honestly crit and mastery are close enough in a raid setting it's not worth getting into arguments about. Mastery provides more healing over `55% atonement healing, but crit contributes dps, whose weight contribution is subjective. If you prioritize haste > crit in a raid you'll still do fine, and your ability to play the spec will make a greater difference in output than the difference between those secondaries will for the majority of players.

The main thing for stats is to just take the haste.