Halo and Divine Star only transfer atonement healing from 1 hit, no matter how many targets are hit by the spell.
That's what he means.
We already have the solution to this fiasco in the game.
Halo and Divine Star only transfer atonement healing from 1 hit, no matter how many targets are hit by the spell.
That's what he means.
We already have the solution to this fiasco in the game.
Exactly this. The idea isn't to give disc a big hps bonus on AoE packs. It's to make the spec that is supposed to be a DPS/Healer hybrid actually able to do dps on more than a handful of targets (that we can put a whopping one DoT on!). The scenario that pops up all the time in m+ is that half the packs don't even need much healing, so why are you disc when you could be holy nova spamming until +15 for three times the total damage.
And this is where I guess I just don't understand how smite is better, like legitimately confused. Smite has an absorb shield that mostly goes to the tank, halo heals the whole party/raid and does more atonement healing. Yes you can't spam it but its definitely stronger. Is it because of the mana?
I guess I am more arguing whether ptw is better though as 20% extra throughput that will more than likely be a considerable amount of overhealing or a controllable burst of healing when you want it. I'm thinking like twist of fate vs castigation. (I think a 40 sec cd fits quite nicely into a 36 sec burst rotation)
Anyways I quite like disc aoe for the first 20 or so seconds(lmao), Halo, pain everything, and smite highest damage dealer; its when a new group of adds come into the equation and halo isn't off cd that I start feeling like its crap.
I somehow get the feeling that we have two visions of how discipline priest should be handled concerning damage in this thread, thanks to blizzard stating discipline is 50/50 damage/healing.
As far as I understood the 50/50 statement, the idea is that discipline priests use 50% damage spells, 50% healing spells in their "rotation".
The output delivered by that should heavily favor the healing portion. I.e. our damage is not supposed to be competitive. The damage spells are just a vehicle to push healing. The fact that we deliver some damage is just the cherry on top. Discipline Priest is NOT a hybrid healer. It is a full blooded healer.
But back to topic, i.e. why an aoe spell is a bad idea.
The scaling issue has already been mentioned multiple times. Healers are not supposed to scale with the amount of enemies present.
That leaves us with the method used with Halo and Divine Star, to limit the healing via atonement. Only the first enemy hit by the damage heals via atonement. The problem with this method is that for atonement, the spell becomes single target with this mechanic. I.e. it would have to have to compete with single target spells in regards to healing output. The issue with that is balancing. The healing output has to be the same otherwise spell usage would become somewhat complex. That leaves mana and damage as factors. If the AoE spell is more mana efficient than the single target spell, the single target spell becomes obsolete. If the efficiency is lower, the AoE spell becomes obsolete, since mana matters more than dps most of the time. If the efficiency is the same, the question which damage spell should be used is down to damage numbers only.
So is it possible to balance an AoE spell to make it work on paper? Sure. If only the first hit heals and the mana efficiency and atonement healing are the same.
But there is still one issue left. If you add additional spells, the toolkit becomes bigger.
Shamans have 6 core healing spells. Druids have 7 spells. Monks have 6 spells. Paladins have 5 spells.
Discipline already has 7 core spells. Adding another spell just to add dps via AoE is quite simply not in our best interest. It would simply make the class harder to play without any real benefit, since our damage is still not supposed to be competitive. Discipline is already one of the harder specs to play. Why would you want Blizzard to make your life harder, just to add some irrelevant damage?
Last edited by Geschan; 2017-06-10 at 08:56 AM.
Some dev said something along those lines VERY early on in Legion beta (I can never find it now when I go looking for it though). But I took it exactly as Geschan stated: around 50% damage spells, 50% healing spells. And if you look at it, this is remarkably close to what we do. I looked at a recent log of mine: 93 damage casts (penance smite, PtW, etc), 82 healing casts (shield, radiance, plea, etc).
After an hour of looking for it, I found it again.
The statement is from Tom Chilton during an interview with a german gaming news site called "buffed" at Gamescom 2015.
They start talking about it at 15:00. video link
As for a quote that they actually pushed that design live, I don't think there is one.
But like Memento1 I checked my logs and for the last 4 raids and basically for every fight the amount of damage spells cast and the amount of healing spells cast is generally in the same ballpark. Which is in the end the 50/50 split that Tom Chilton talked about.
Yeah, I think this "50% dps 50% healer" was referring to spell usage, not actual number output.
Because a class that does 50% of a DPS's dps and 50% of a healer's healing, does not fit with WoW's current trifecta model.
It'd fit in Rift, but not WoW.
because smite costs 0.5% mana, and halo costs like 4%.
Can someone link me to a single blizzard post ever saying disc is 50/50. I'm pretty sure this is an invention of the playersI somehow get the feeling that we have two visions of how discipline priest should be handled concerning damage in this thread, thanks to blizzard stating discipline is 50/50 damage/healing.
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no they didn't
Last edited by Supliftz; 2017-06-11 at 08:22 AM.
I can't show you a bluepost since there isn't one to my knowledge. But I did link the developer interview from Gamescom 2015 (link ~ 15:00) where the statement stems from, so yes they did. After the statement was made there even was a lengthy thread in the mmo-champion priest forum, how that statement is to be interpreted (link), since a Hybrid Healer that has an equal output in damage and healing simply wouldn't work in WoW. The conclusion that some players drew was, that the 50/50 statement doesn't apply to damage/healing, but rather to spellusage, i.e. you cast around the same number of damage spells and healing spells. Fell free to check your own logs, or those of others. It is exactly what we got.
The problem with that 50/50 statement is that if you take it the wrong way and see discipline as a hybrid healer, you want damage to be competitive.
But that isn't Blizzards goal. The damage is just an additional bonus.
Because of balancing issues, discipline priest damage can't ever be competitive. If it were, our healing would have to be severely nerfed. That would completely kill the spec for higher mythic+ levels. Additionally if Blizzard were to implement an AoE spell, it's healing can't scale with the amount of enemies. A small example why: Let's say the AoE spell becomes more efficient than the single target spell at 5 targets. That basically means that any additional enemy after 5 targets is basically invisible to the healer, since the additional enemy buffs both incoming damage and outgoing healing by 20%. I.e. especially in mythic+ you would always try to have more than 5 targets but not more than 20 (AoE spells in WoW are capped at 20 for those that don't know) since everything above 5 is virtually invisible.
That leaves us with an already quite full toolkit of spells without any room for more spells and a spell that doesn't improve the core function of the spec (Healing).
Why should Blizzard implement that? The spec is already one of the more complex ones in the game and an additional spell to improve the by choice minuscule damage wouldn't help with that.
Last edited by Geschan; 2017-06-11 at 10:00 AM.
If you look at the numbers for 7.2.5 and if we assume 25% mastery (for ease of counting,also to favor halo since most have more than 25%), this is how much smite heals and how much halo heals:
Halo: 215.5% atonement (431*0.5) + 287% = 502.5%
Smite: 149.5% atonement (299*0.5) + 337.5 = 487%
Obviously if you heal more than one target smite gets less effective since the absorb only applies to one target, but smite costs 0.5% mana and halo costs 2.7%. (It used to cost 3.6%, which is roughly what sups said a couple posts above)
So do you really want to pay slightly above five times as much mana for a minor increase?
Last edited by mmoca451bbeed2; 2017-06-11 at 12:41 PM.
To get our damage output target you have to look at damage trinkets.
For these to be balanced with other trinkets the percentage of damage they do for Disc has to match the percentage of damage of a DD Disc is supposed to do.
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They could give us a singletarget hael that does splash damage (which does not trigger atonement), reverse atonement so to say.
It could be weak healing for low costs, so it'd be just a quality of life improvement in old content, outgeared dungeons, and out in the world.