Page 1 of 4
1
2
3
... LastLast
  1. #1
    High Overlord tennis125's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    May 2010
    Location
    Matsuyama-shi, Shikoku-ken
    Posts
    113

    Disc Healing easier than Holy?

    I've been playing holy since LK and loved the feel of it, especially with the large group heals. Except when I got to cata I started having an extremely hard time (yes, I'm in greens so that greatly affects it). But more, I was having a harder time playing my holy priest than my resto shammy, which I've heard numerous reports that shammy heals are the worst currently. So obviously either my gear wasn't good enough / my new playing style was wrong ( PoM + renew before combat, heal spam. CoC every once in a while, ect.) So I switched to disc for the heck of it and everything was so much easier. I've found PW : Barrier + Divine Aegis to be quite useful in dungeons taking the really large AoE compared to my old holy spec using PoH + CoH. So I'm wondering, is disc supposed to be the 'beginner spec' for newly 85s or am I just weird for thinking it's much easier? o.0
    Last edited by tennis125; 2011-02-03 at 10:59 PM.
    "If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams." - Yann Martel

  2. #2
    no. if anything holy is the beginner spec. disc have weaker heals, worst mana regen, and if you look at the WoL rankings on any boss top 100heals are 90% holy pala/priest. resto drood here and there. shammys and disc are worst atm.

  3. #3
    I am Murloc! Oneirophobia's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jul 2010
    Location
    Northern Ontario, CAN
    Posts
    5,042
    Originally disc was more PvP and holy was more PvE but blizz wanted to make them more inline so you could pick what you wanted and do it.

    Unfortunately, disc lacks a looot of healing power and its supposed to make up for this with really potent and efficient shielding, but blizz decided that it was too 'spammable' so they made the sheilds pretty flimsy and increased their mana cost like 3 fold. What we ended up with was a class who specializes in something, but has been told their specialization is "too spammy" and so they're weak in their niche, but still weak in their healing power.
    Also known as pretty near useless. :c

    Penance, however, is probably one of the best single target healing spells we have. Unfortunately, when little of your talents actually increase your healing done, it'll end up weak.

    Is the spec fun? Yes! I love disc, I prefer it to holy. Is it weak? Quite so, hopefully this will change in 4.0.6.

  4. #4
    Disc Healing = "I'm going to throw this shield on you so that when you get attacked, the shield takes all your damage... or so I hope..."

    Holy healing = "Damn dude, you got fucked up... give me, like, five seconds, and I can mend you back to normal..."

    In a nutshell, basically...

  5. #5
    I do believe that you have more going on as a holy priest. Whether or not that's 'harder' is really up to the player. Holy is a stronger spec at the moment, which might become more balanced come next patch.

    Generally if your doing 5mans (which I assume you are since you said a basically fresh priest in greens), it shouldn't matter either way which spec you are. If you choose to be holy, then generally enter your 'heal' chakra, POM, Heal, and use your Holy Word: Serenity when needed. Ofc when three or more players are in need of heals, POH and if the tank or someone takes a high amount of dmg GHeal. It is a struggle in the beginning for mana, but its doable.

    Hope this helps. :]

  6. #6
    Generally, I think holy is slightly harder at first when played at a novice level simply because the number of unique abilities is slightly higher and you often have to think ahead to switch between chakra states at the proper time.

    However, when played at an high level, both specs require skill. In comes down to your individual timing, spell selection, positioning, prediction, and reaction to squeeze every extra iota of performance out of your priest. In this case, I don't see either spec really being harder and a skilled priest should be able to handle either spec easily.

    This is probably a gross oversimplification anyway because everyone is different; what may be harder for one person may be easier for another.

  7. #7
    Keyboard Turner
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Location
    Brazil
    Posts
    1
    Quote Originally Posted by phyx View Post
    no. if anything holy is the beginner spec. disc have weaker heals, worst mana regen, and if you look at the WoL rankings on any boss top 100heals are 90% holy pala/priest. resto drood here and there. shammys and disc are worst atm.
    I really do not believe that we still have players that think that the efficiency of a healing class is measured by the healing per second on Recount.

    The efficiency of any healing class is measured by the success of a raid/party doing a challenge (considering that the tanks and dps are doing their jobs). FORGET THE METERS!!!!

    The biggest diference is exaclty what MagusUnion said.

    Discipline is about prevention.. shields, divine aegis, things that avoid the damage or absorb it before it goes to the attacked player, and after damages happens you have some healing spells to cast while your prevention spells are on cooldown.
    Holy is: You got the damage, ok , i ll deal with it geting your life back to normal trough direct healing spells.

  8. #8
    High Overlord tennis125's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    May 2010
    Location
    Matsuyama-shi, Shikoku-ken
    Posts
    113
    Quote Originally Posted by Ayita View Post
    I do believe that you have more going on as a holy priest. Whether or not that's 'harder' is really up to the player. Holy is a stronger spec at the moment, which might become more balanced come next patch.

    Generally if your doing 5mans (which I assume you are since you said a basically fresh priest in greens), it shouldn't matter either way which spec you are. If you choose to be holy, then generally enter your 'heal' chakra, POM, Heal, and use your Holy Word: Serenity when needed. Ofc when three or more players are in need of heals, POH and if the tank or someone takes a high amount of dmg GHeal. It is a struggle in the beginning for mana, but its doable.

    Hope this helps. :]
    yes this helps very much, ty!
    "If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imagination on the altar of crude reality and we end up believing in nothing and having worthless dreams." - Yann Martel

  9. #9
    Deleted
    Quote Originally Posted by Thoraic View Post
    I really do not believe that we still have players that think that the efficiency of a healing class is measured by the healing per second on Recount.

    The efficiency of any healing class is measured by the success of a raid/party doing a challenge (considering that the tanks and dps are doing their jobs). FORGET THE METERS!!!!

    The biggest diference is exaclty what MagusUnion said.

    Discipline is about prevention.. shields, divine aegis, things that avoid the damage or absorb it before it goes to the attacked player, and after damages happens you have some healing spells to cast while your prevention spells are on cooldown.
    Holy is: You got the damage, ok , i ll deal with it geting your life back to normal trough direct healing spells.
    Disc is about nerfing your potential healing by about 30% compared to an equivalently geared holy priest, its also about crappy shields, lack of mobility and lack of flexibility.

    I made my preist to be disc, but I cant justify playing disc over holy, its just a broken spec right now.

  10. #10
    Damn disc is getting burned real bad in this thread.

    My mainspec is Shadow, but I use disc for when I'm forced to get a daily in or when our resto druid (i know, bad) is being whipped by his gf. I personally really like disc. It is highly efficient on single target healing. The throughput with holy is obviously much better than it is with Disc. However, on fights where I'm mainly focusing on a single tank, (Council in BoT) I found that my mana isn't a problem as disc, and that I can fairly well keep a tank up with shields, penance, and greater heal + inner focus + train of thought abuse.

    Hopefully next Tuesday 4.0.6 will go live; i'm excited to play around with disc then again.

  11. #11
    In general holy is stronger when it comes to aoe healing (PoH being very strong as holy), meanwhile discipline is the preferred choice to heal one target with. (Grace, penance)
    Discipline also brings the strongest cooldowns in the game which make them very useful for raiding, power word: barrier with pain supression as a bonus.

    Discipline is not broken, it's very useful in fact.

  12. #12
    The Patient Madam's Avatar
    10+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Jul 2010
    Location
    Azeroth
    Posts
    324
    Quote Originally Posted by Wericia View Post
    In general holy is stronger when it comes to aoe healing (PoH being very strong as holy), meanwhile discipline is the preferred choice to heal one target with. (Grace, penance)
    Discipline also brings the strongest cooldowns in the game which make them very useful for raiding, power word: barrier with pain supression as a bonus.

    Discipline is not broken, it's very useful in fact.
    Trouble is PW:B and PS don't show up on meters, but most good players already know the value of a Disc Priest.
    Reminds me of Wrath when others would post meters to show how well the did, but had no clue about absorbs.

  13. #13
    Disc is amazing right now. It's sad that most people don't fully understand the spec.
    Reckoning 10/13 (H) - We're recruiting!
    Kazomi - 85 Disc Priest

  14. #14
    I've spent a lot of time in both specs now for healing heroics and regular raid content (coming for you soon, heroic raids, be warned!!). My 'normal' spec is discipline.

    Imo, 5-man heroics are easier to heal as holy when things are going normally. But when all hell breaks loose and you find you've picked up 1-2 extra packs of adds or people are being complete idiots, discipline seems much stronger to me in its ability to manage extreme crisis due to its stronger CDs.

    For raiding, and I'll stick to 10-man since that's my only experience in Cata, they're both very strong. Holy will generally appear higher on the meters than disc for those who feel their worth is measured there, but that's in large part due to three key things:


    • Healers primarily on tank duty tend to heal less overall than healers primarily on raid duty. Discipline priests tends more to the former; holy priests to the latter.
    • Discipline maintains higher uptime of Inspiration on the tanks than holy. Given that tanks are the primary recipients of physical damage this leads to a further reduction in the damage they are required to heal.
    • Damage mitigated via discipline's two CD's (PW:B and PS) do not appear on any meters, even though they can account for a tremendous amount of effective 'healing' in the form of damage prevented.

    That being said, to those who would argue that those points aside disc is still weaker overall than holy, I find that on those nights when I run as discipline in counterpoint to another priest similarly geared and running holy, there will be many fights where I will still appear higher on the meter as disc. Disc priests don't risk being underproductive by spamming shields anymore (well, actually they can to a degree), but still risk it by tunnel-visioning their heals and not making the effort to constantly go to the optimal heal-of-the-moment to counter between raid and tank damage. Disc is far from broken, and personally while I welcome the incoming buffs and appreciate that they 'feel' right in line with the nature of the spec, I'm concerned that it may be a little too much and draw repercussions in the form of a followup nerf, which Blizzard historically tends to overdo in compensation.

    TLDR: Neither is really harder or easier in general than the other, though individual encounters or difference in healing counterparts can impact which spec would be optimal for a given fight.
    Last edited by Bigslick; 2011-02-03 at 10:01 PM.

  15. #15
    The Lightbringer Ultima's Avatar
    15+ Year Old Account
    Join Date
    Mar 2009
    Location
    London
    Posts
    3,399
    Quote Originally Posted by shifta View Post
    Disc is amazing right now. It's sad that most people don't fully understand the spec.
    I don't fully understand the spec.

  16. #16
    Maybe it's because I'm more comfortable with Holy, but I find Discipline to be a more challenging spec. I feel like Discipline has many buttons and timers it should manage to be played at its highest potential.
    This might also be related to the fact that my Discipline spec is Atonement/AA. While it is considered subpar it brings some extra tools which are also fun.

    I find myself having to track IF, PI and PS cooldowns, duration on Evangelism (during periods where I don't Smite for a period but don't want to lose the stacks), Rapture cooldown, and Penance cooldown. I also find that precisely since its PoH isn't as strong you end up using other spells. Maybe a precast PoH purely for the DA followed by weaving in PW: S. When the patch hits I'll definitely be going from 1/2 Soul Warding to 2/2.

    I really like Holy, but Chakra duration (with 1/2 SoM) isn't much of a chore to maintain and that's about it.

  17. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Ultima View Post
    I don't fully understand the spec.
    bubbles, duh. L2P.

    But seriously, I don't see this conversation going anywhere useful. Each spec has strengths and weaknesses that make each more or less "difficult" depending on a multitude of variables, which have been expounded upon umpteenth times in threads previous [e.g.-- Is having more "options" difficult, or having less "options" difficult (hint: each has a valid argument)].

    This can only devolve into a Billy Madison-esque "Shampoo v. Conditioner" argumentative structure.

  18. #18
    I have no idea how disc is going to go live in the next patch w/o a fast nerf.
    Not complaining though.

  19. #19
    I really dislike how these threads always seem to end up in the Holy vs Discipline war. :/

  20. #20
    Who heals one target? In all honesty I cant begin to think that anyone would be serious when they say that.
    I get the idea behind it, but its just not going through my brain the same way. Even holy paladins are raid healing more than disc, and tank healing even more in the same exact fight. No matter how you run your healing rotation it just can not compete at the moment.
    Disc is extremely broken right now, they are buffing it a little in the incoming patch just to justify that.
    Right now in a raid all I get is shield tank just to get rapture/BT because the shield is doing NOTHING, and spam POH/GH.
    My regen usually holds up well enough for me to do this (being smart, not actually spamming).
    That just sounds like a less mana efficient, less throughput, less fun holy priest 3.0.
    Last edited by Rocap; 2011-02-03 at 11:12 PM.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •