Focused Will

[Lyro]

Do you think it will be the painkiller we need ?

[Deleted]

No.
It'll help with one problem, survival. The other is our toolbox.

Disc priest is
- less mobile than shaman, druid and monks
- has less ressources (rapture hotfix may help at higher gear levels, in 2-3 seasons)
- fewer CC-options
-- no slow
-- no interrupt
-- no baseline root
-- no baseline ranged CC
-- huge drawbacks on 2nd CC option (shared DR, one-hittable root, self-cc via mind control)
- strongest instant heal can be dispelled/stolen (PW:S)
- strongest pve ability nearly useless in pvp (spirit shell)
- atonement heal (and archangel) nearly useless in pvp
- some bugs with spectral guise

That's a long list of disadvantages and problems – some of them (not all, that would result in another OP class) should be addressed.

[Zethlar]

No.
It'll help with one problem, survival. The other is our toolbox.

Disc priest is
- less mobile than shaman, druid and monks
- has less ressources (rapture hotfix may help at higher gear levels, in 2-3 seasons)
- fewer CC-options
-- no slow
-- no interrupt
-- no baseline root
-- no baseline ranged CC
-- huge drawbacks on 2nd CC option (shared DR, one-hittable root, self-cc via mind control)
- strongest instant heal can be dispelled/stolen (PW:S)
- strongest pve ability nearly useless in pvp (spirit shell)
- atonement heal (and archangel) nearly useless in pvp
- some bugs with spectral guise

That's a long list of disadvantages and problems – some of them (not all, that would result in another OP class) should be addressed.

Getting Focused Will stacks back will definitely go a long way into making priests more competitive. While I agree with some of the points on this list, I don't think we're that bad off with our current toolbox, but yes some things do need to change.

Mobility - We've really always been the least mobile healer, we've held that title for 3 expansions now, its never really hindered our representation in arena though. People really underestimate our current toolkit of Phantasm and Spectral Guise. When used by a decent player, priests are pretty damn hard to control or make a play via a stun.

Resources - Somehwat agree, same as above that we've kind of always placed last in the mana regen department - we've learned to live with this and gear appropriately. Mana usually wasn't a cause for concern past the first season of an expansion, except when you're having a mana burn war with another priest anyway lol. That being said the mana regen discrepancy between healers is extremely noticeable in the current state of the game and that is a problem. I've yet to test the Rapture hotfix in arena though.

CC Options - Psychic Scream - an AoE 8 second fear on a 27 second cooldown is still one of.. if not the strongest CC in the game for a healer. That alone has carried our beloved disc spec for a long time.

Dominate Mind -I do lament the loss of baseline mind control as I loved the awesome CC chains we could run in 2s as mage/priest but it's still quite useful even with a CD, also the ~1.5 casttime makes it pretty easy to land.

Void Tendrils - I actually usually run with the root since survivability is our biggest problem right now and the breathing room from melee is quite nice. I've never personally seen the root one-shotted, takes two or three hits most times which is more than enough time to quickly place a PW: Shield on it which buys you even more time to get away. It was pretty funny when you could void shift off the void tendrils before the hotfix lol.

Psyfiend - This isn't something you dismiss simply because it shares DR with fear, it's amazingly powerful in its current state which is no doubt why it's receiving quite a significant nerf. I don't know how viable this will be when the HP and casttime of it get hit in 5.1 but as of right now, all of our CC options are in a pretty good place imo.

Mind you this doesn't mean I think other healers CC is fine, I think paladins personally need to be toned down in the CC department if any class right now.

Shit being dispelled - This right here I agree is a problem, not the fact that our stuff can be dispelled, I'm fine with that - rather it's more the fact that offensive dispels (purge, dispel magic, and spellsteal) has no cooldown and pretty much no noticeable mana cost in the games current state. This is a problem that affects priests more than any other healer right now, they're changing spellsteal in 5.1, but I'm not sure it will be enough.

Spirit Shell - You're right it was designed to be a pve ability and at first I didn't know how to make use of it in pvp. Now I use it to greatly reduce the dmg of an opener and I love it for that atleast, I know some priests I watch on stream are working it into their play a lot more than I currently do but I'm working on it.

Atonement - Agree, rather useless lol.

Bugs - I love Spectral Guise for so many reasons - it prevents casted CC (if phantasm's down), it's a vanish for stuns like deep freeze and shockwave that reduces the impact of them, it allows you to cause misdirection whether you're trying to get away from someone or trying to get on top of them for a fear. There is however a bug where if you don't use it quick enough, sometimes shit still lands on you and you stealth anyway, a lot of times the enemy's not aware of this though so it ends up working out.

The other bug I don't like is if you use void shift too close to death, your ally can still die but the void shift goes off anyway leaving you with very little health which can suck lol. However other than that Void Shift is an amazing new cooldown for us priests that has already saved me or a partner more times than I can remmeber.

I do really love our toolkit for this expansion, I think with a few adjustments to the problem areas noted above, disc will be in a great spot pvpwise. Our biggest problem right now is definitely survivability, but the extra 20% dmg reduction on top of resil when getting trained is a good change so far.

[Deleted]

I just wanted to point out a few things without going to deep. Good – better – analysis than my list, think we can agree on most points.
Some some tweaks and disc will be fine… I'm just not convinced dmg reduction is enough.

CC options:
You're right. Instant AoE fear is huge.
I still think another ranged CC option (that's not fear) would help a lot, like baseline mindcontrol or a simple snare… yet, having druid's cyclone via symbiosis feels so overpowered, maybe it's asking too much.

Spectral guise:
For NE priests, spectral guise into shadowmeld or shadowmeld into spectral guise -> fun.

Glyphs:
We didn't talk about glyphs. Would be nice to have some choice here. One slot isn't that much.

[Lyro]

the story is: druid has 3x cyclone, cat stun, bear stun, root.
paladin has repentance, blind, hammer

both heals more than we do. both has more armor, mobility, mana regen.

what do we have ? shadowspec maybe...

[Zethlar]

Glyphs:
We didn't talk about glyphs. Would be nice to have some choice here. One slot isn't that much.

Oh yes I was actually thinking of mentioning glyphs but my post was already becoming too long lol. I would love to see Inner Focus glyph become baseline at the very least, Desperation would be nice too and I don't think it'd be asking too much personally considering other defensive cooldowns already enjoy this benefit baseline (looking at you, barkskin). But yea I definitely agree we should have more glyph choices that aren't mandatory in pvp for us to be competitive.

[worsthitmanNa]

Your better at avoiding cc then a paladin. Priest have shadow word death, phantasm, spectral guise, and fear ward. Paladins have sac but it is dispel able and death isn't. We need a regen buff and with focus will + inner fire we should be a bit better defense wise. Raw armor isn't that great lyro casters ignore it and only sub rogues(which aren't viable from what i have heard) and warriors do physical damage. every other class is half magic and half physical or just straight up magic damage. That would make 15% damage reduction a lot better then 15% armor. Druids instant cc needs to be looked at for sure. We get dominate mind with no cool down next patch that will help some but i have only played a couple games as disc this season rerolled druid, till they fixed disc.

edited: ferals do phyiscal damage but i am pretty sure rip ignores armor making 15% damage reduction better again. Death and aura mastery being baseline would be dope as well.

[reckoner04]

Getting Focused Will stacks back will definitely go a long way into making priests more competitive. While I agree with some of the points on this list, I don't think we're that bad off with our current toolbox, but yes some things do need to change.
[...]

I agree, I'm actually pretty content with our toolbox/utility. I especially like Phantasm for it's targetting aspect, it's awesome.

I also wouldn't like more mobility. The PW:S-"freedom" did already feel pretty unpriestly to me, and the T2 talents (Phantasm) provide already enough mobility options in my opinion. I actually like Priests being dependent on their team mates to peel, aside from Psychic Scream which belonged to the class since forever.

The same is the case with our mana regen. Priests have always been the healers which run out of mana the fastest in an arena setting, and being able to take a drink (at the right time) has always been an important skill for Priests. I like that, and the past shows that it isn't necessary to change it in order for us to become competitive.

So, if Focused Will turns out to be tuned correctly (which shouldn't be that much of a problem, since it's independent from PVE balance afaik) Priests would be in a nice spot in my opinion.

As pointed out already, though, our glyphs are really badly done. Also, too much got removed from our pre-MOP abilities and put into a glyph. I think either the Pain Sup glyph (casting while stunned) or the Inner Focus glyph (interrupt/silence immunity) should become baseline (though they haven't been before) to allow more choice between Mass Dispel, SWD, damage glyphs (which are split among too many glyphs) and so on. The glyphs themselves are interesting and strong, but since a select few are so important, there isn't really any choice anymore.

And of course, it's fucking frustrating to "waste" a glyph slot for something you've had before already but got taken away with MOP. Extremely unsatisfying and unfun.

[Maleric]

I do really love our toolkit for this expansion, I think with a few adjustments to the problem areas noted above, disc will be in a great spot pvpwise. Our biggest problem right now is definitely survivability, but the extra 20% dmg reduction on top of resil when getting trained is a good change so far.

Priests' toolkit for this expansion is their toolkit from the last few expansions minus all the good tools. The stuff that priests have historically done well - Mana Burn, burst damage, strong dispels - are either gone or nerfed in to the ground. There are still some abilities left, but nothing that goes beyond what every other healer also has, in one form or another, and other healers certainly have things that priests don't.

The Focused Will buff is ok, but it isn't even close to enough. Focused Will in past expansions served the role of allowing priests to survive long enough to take advantage of their strengths; Mana Burn, burst damage, strong dispels. As priests don't have those strengths anymore, Focused Will doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond allowing them to live longer while still being the worst healer available.

Blizzard needs to either sit down and redesign healing priest PvP, or give back some of the class's strengths. It's not a numbers problem, and survivability alone won't fix it either.

[Zethlar]

Priests' toolkit for this expansion is their toolkit from the last few expansions minus all the good tools. The stuff that priests have historically done well - Mana Burn, burst damage, strong dispels - are either gone or nerfed in to the ground. There are still some abilities left, but nothing that goes beyond what every other healer also has, in one form or another, and other healers certainly have things that priests don't.

The Focused Will buff is ok, but it isn't even close to enough. Focused Will in past expansions served the role of allowing priests to survive long enough to take advantage of their strengths; Mana Burn, burst damage, strong dispels. As priests don't have those strengths anymore, Focused Will doesn't serve much of a purpose beyond allowing them to live longer while still being the worst healer available.

Blizzard needs to either sit down and redesign healing priest PvP, or give back some of the class's strengths. It's not a numbers problem, and survivability alone won't fix it either.

Our dispels are still the strongest in the game, we remain one of the two healers that can spam offensive dispels which is huge when it comes to aiding your team in getting a kill. And on top of that we have mass dispel which gets rid of iceblock/bubble which again makes us amazingly helpful offensively as we always have been. MD has gotten kills more times than I can count.

Agree on the point of burst damage, while we have decent burst (anyone below 50k in range of my SW/halo/fireworks launcher is usually dead) I wouldn't mind seeing dmg buffed. Holy just got a 50% buff to dps spells in chakra while reducing their spellcost by 90%, I'd like to see something like that for disc, a buff to holy fire/smite but I know it's tied into atonement for pve.

Mana Burn.. meh - I never considered this a huge part of our toolkit, maybe in a 2s stalemate where you had nothing else to win but honestly I almost never tried to win a match with mana burn but maybe that's just my playstyle. In any case I don't think it's coming back and I don't miss it too much.

I'm not so quick to jump on the "zomg priests are so useless, redesign class plz blizz!!1!" QQ Train - Its already been discussed in this thread the advantages of our current toolkit so I won't reiterate here. My biggest problem right now is our susceptibility to being focused down, living longer is actually a pretty damn important part of playing healer.. even if you can't mana burn(lol). Will it get us in the ideal place? Probably not. Is it a good change and a step in the right direction? For sure.

[Yvaelle]

The return of Focused Will is definitely going to help, as the least mobile healer we need our survivability - and historically Focused Will was like 90% of our survivability - it makes us much harder to pressure down, much harder to cleave, less likely to die inside a stun/swap before we get a chance to react.

But will disc be as competitive as the other healers after these changes? That's not obvious. The 5.1 changes are significant, that much is sure - but what we actually contribute to a team is still lacking - and our mana regen in pvp is still a real problem. What's more, if atonement was generally considered useless in pvp on Live, it's going to be even less useful in 5.1. I suggested they make pvp power only increase the damage of dps specs, and only increase the healing of heal specs - that will tidily solve hybrid healing scaling too well by pvp power stacking - but it's going to nerf disc damage by 30-50% and in turn nerf atonement healing by 30-50%. For most healers, that change doesn't mean anything - but to disc that's a big potential nerf. I hope the buff to atonement range makes it semi-valuable - but I suspect it will never be the right call: particularly because of the mana issues.

TL;DR - Focused Will returning is a big buff, but disc will probably remain as the weakest of the arena healers (albeit by a small margin).

[Lyro]

Well as most said mana is the least of our problems. I played like 140 games this season an in every one of them my mana lingered between 40-20 whereas all other healers had %80+ problem is we got our utilitie removed and other healers got more of them so it renders us useless. I mean yes we play defensive with my druid dude but then again only thing i offer to him which can make a difference is a 40k mana destroying mass dispel.

I try to benefit from everything. I stay in will and cast renew after shield to get 1 more thing etc. Try everything in my hands and barely keep up with other healers where a druid goes treemania and spams while never going under %80 isnt that absurd ?

[Maleric]

Our dispels are still the strongest in the game, we remain one of the two healers that can spam offensive dispels which is huge when it comes to aiding your team in getting a kill. And on top of that we have mass dispel which gets rid of iceblock/bubble which again makes us amazingly helpful offensively as we always have been. MD has gotten kills more times than I can count.

Agree on the point of burst damage, while we have decent burst (anyone below 50k in range of my SW/halo/fireworks launcher is usually dead) I wouldn't mind seeing dmg buffed. Holy just got a 50% buff to dps spells in chakra while reducing their spellcost by 90%, I'd like to see something like that for disc, a buff to holy fire/smite but I know it's tied into atonement for pve.

Mana Burn.. meh - I never considered this a huge part of our toolkit, maybe in a 2s stalemate where you had nothing else to win but honestly I almost never tried to win a match with mana burn but maybe that's just my playstyle. In any case I don't think it's coming back and I don't miss it too much.

I'm not so quick to jump on the "zomg priests are so useless, redesign class plz blizz!!1!" QQ Train - Its already been discussed in this thread the advantages of our current toolkit so I won't reiterate here. My biggest problem right now is our susceptibility to being focused down, living longer is actually a pretty damn important part of playing healer.. even if you can't mana burn(lol). Will it get us in the ideal place? Probably not. Is it a good change and a step in the right direction? For sure.

Offensive single target dispel is still OK, but Mass Dispel certainly took a huge nerf and so did defensive dispel.

And I'll agree that, compared to dispels and offensive damage, Mana Burn was a small part of the toolkit. But it was definitely a part, and it was pretty useful in certain types of PvP, such as RBGs.

Nitpicking aside, though, I don't think any of the "advantages of our current toolkit" that you discussed come close to measuring up to the advantages of the priest toolkit in past expansions. When you list abilities one by one any healer looks good, the real question is how the sum measures up to what others have. And I don't think it requires a side by side analysis to explain why the list that you came up with in your first post here doesn't really measure up to what other healers can do in PvP.

[Lyro]

offensive dispel okay ? did you play againts a glpyhed shammy dispelling everything you have ?

[Maleric]

offensive dispel okay ? did you play againts a glpyhed shammy dispelling everything you have ?

I think this thread is about priests, not shamans...

[Lyro]

yes and getting all of your priests heal dispeled is about a priest

[Maleric]

yes and getting all of your priests heal dispeled is about a priest

Well yes, but the context of me saying "offensive single target dispel is still OK" was that I was talking about priest's offensive single target dispel. Meanwhile, you're apparently talking about shamans' offensive dispel. Maybe that means priests need better dispel protection, I don't know, but it certainly isn't what I was talking about.

[Venaliter]

CC Options - Psychic Scream - an AoE 8 second fear on a 27 second cooldown is still one of.. if not the strongest CC in the game for a healer. That alone has carried our beloved disc spec for a long time.

CC options:
You're right. Instant AoE fear is huge.

I'm sorry, but what? Fear is the easiest CC in the game to nullify. Tremor Totem, Lichborne, Fear Ward, Berserker's Rage all make fear fairly useless. I want all these abilities removed. They completely unbalance PvP for Priests and Warlocks.

I still think another ranged CC option (that's not fear) would help a lot, like baseline mindcontrol or a simple snare…

fair bet next expansion Psychic Horror will be baseline for all priests if Blizzard does their jobs. Fingers AND toes crossed.

[Zethlar]

I'm sorry, but what? Fear is the easiest CC in the game to nullify. Tremor Totem, Lichborne, Fear Ward, Berserker's Rage all make fear fairly useless. I want all these abilities removed. They completely unbalance PvP for Priests and Warlocks.

I'll give you Tremor and Berserker. The cooldown on Berserker Rage makes warriors near impossible to fear since it matches up so nicely with Psychic Scream. Tremor Totem on a 1 minute cd means you can only land 1 out of every 2 fears on a team with one (assuming you're fearing close to cooldown). Lichborne is a 2 minute CD so I don't consider that a big threat and you shouldn't ever fear into a Fear Ward if you have any sort of awareness.

So yeah 2 classes out of 11 can fairly consistently shut down fear, hardly what I'd call useless. It's still the strongest CC of any healer right now.

That being said, I do agree that I'd love to see Berserker Rage removed too lol, just cause.. cause warriors.. -_- =p

[worsthitmanNa]

Aoe fear is only a problem for boomkins, ferals and rogues atm every other class has a built in ability to negate fear.

---------- Post added 2012-11-14 at 10:21 PM ----------

disc priest don't need an instant 3 second cc with all the other instant 3 second ccs. So fing tired of being reelzed this season. Dominate mind with no cooldown baseline would be better, you have to cast it and someone can interrupt, you if they want to stop it.