This is fiction but the facts are quite different. Disc has no where near the HPS potential that paladins have, or monks for that matter. In real terms when overheal is not a factor monks can push 50% more HPS than disc and paladins can push 20-25% more HPS than disc (check tortos 25hc as an example).Even if Blizzard nerfed Smite Damage AND Atonement Healing Priests couldn't complain... Disc Priests are simply too strong right now, doing HPS like a Holypaladin while also pushing 40-50k DPS was simply too much.
Didn't Blizzard say they want DPSing Discpriests/Fistweaving monks doing 50% DPS and 50% Healing while a Holypaladin is 100% Healing and 0% DPS for example?
Even after the nerf its something like 50% DPS and 90% Healing for Priests.
In this tier blizzard has used encounter design rather than healer mechanics to balance healers out. There are a lot of low to moderate HPS fights that are bursty and have reasonably high overheal, which work fine for disc, but disc is just balanced. Aside from lei shen no other encounters so far give you an overriding reason to take disc.
High HPS fights or fights with prolonged high damage phases really suck for disc right now. Not many of those around right now. Even so paladins, monks and druids are taking the top spots. And this is just the start of the tier. Lets see what happens as we get further ahead and people gear up more.
I don't disagree with this nerf. I think its good. I really hate how much I use atonement right now. I am happy with atonement as a filler and for stacking evangelism, but right now its a major part of disc healing no matter what you do. The nerf is certainly needed, but I don't think it will change things much. Look carefully at your parses and you will see that atonement heal is calculated in a pretty weird manner and it seems to be capped. Depending on how blizzard implements this nerf and on intellect inflation with the 522+gear, this is probably not going to be felt much.
The main reason for the nerf is because atonement scales faster than heals with intellect and with the new gear we can actually reach a point, where atonement gets so good we won't be using anything else.
That is an odd argument. Is there any difference to using solace, smite or penance on the boss? It is a DPS sequence, you use the solace/penance on CD and smite in between. You don't control who it heals where it heals or the right situation to use it. You don't even need to look at the healthbars. You just dps the boss, whether its 3 spells or 10^1000000 spells it makes no difference. You are DPSing the boss and its passively healing people. Especially with intellect proliferation atonement as it is right now can become good enough to eclipse every other spell. You already want to use penance and solace effectively on CD, which uses up to 30% of your available heal time.in heroic modes, in 10man, discipline priests use a lot more then just atonement. and to be clear - atonement comes from 3 different spells, so actually its 3 kinds of heals. just named the same.
compare to monks - 40% of healing done by ranking monk is renewing mist - noone cries.
or to ranking paladins, 30% of healing is their mastery - noone has a problem with it.
why the whole drama has to be always about disc priests? :/
im not against a reasonable nerf, but i believe that 20% to whole mechanic is too much and i also believe that the whole war-against-atonement is very extravagated.
Your arguments about monks and paladins is really out there. Pala mastery procs from every single spell they cast and these are spells they actually have to target and made decisions on. It is just a straight % boost to their spells and factored in the class mechanics. Holy light heals for x + mastery. You can't separate the mastery and say this is something separate from holy light. Shaman mastery has a similar high value in terms of healing healing done for shamans, but you don't actually see it, because its rolled into the spells so its not visible on the logs. Paladins have a lot of passive healing, but its not something they actually spend their healing time on. It has zero relevance to how they heal.
For monks renewing mists is their major source of healing, but that does not mean the monk is using nothing but renewing mists. He is using a lot of other abilities to keep renewing mists up and get them to do a lot of healing. So unlike atonement, which is just straight DPS, renewing mists really is an agglomeration of different spells and abilities.
Monk healing is relatively simple without question, but comparing renewing mists with atonement is comparing red apples with lead paint. Renewing mists and atonement both produce healing but their similarities end there just like the lead paint and apples have absolutely nothing in common aside from both being red.
Atonement nerf is good and the current disc playstyle is really lacking.