Disc 5.2 Nerf Discussion

[Noradin]

He is a far better Priest then you, and so am I. And WE say Disc priests will not be able to keep pace with the other healers as things are now. Whether Spirit Shell ensures us a raid spot despite our AoE woes is something I am willing to discuss, but this is not in doubt.

If it does, then its bad because it would be against bizzards stated design policiy, meaning they will try more changes in the future to get rid of it.

[Szer]

He is a far better Priest then you, and so am I

no problem, bro. Enjoy your 10/16hm =)

And WE say Disc priests will not be able to keep pace with the other healers as things are now.

Yep. YOU and such whiners cant keep pace and begging to keep yourself OP because you cant press something but 1 button.
Im disscussing all these changes much with "cutting edge" priests and noone amongst this group wont think that priests will be underpowered.

Only those who rely on their OP level thinks so.

[Deleted]

He is a far better Priest then you, and so am I. And WE say Disc priests will not be able to keep pace with the other healers as things are now. Whether Spirit Shell ensures us a raid spot despite our AoE woes is something I am willing to discuss, but this is not in doubt.

Isheria from Method would disagree with you.

In 5.2 the changes for disc priests simply remove the faceroll aspect of the spec which is cast prayer of healing till you smash your keyboard even if its 100% overheal but that doesn't matter cause rapture gives you infinite mana plus the only thing you care is getting divine aegis on every single person asap, add spirit shell to the mix and you have current disc priests. This strategy right now is stupidly effective and promotes facerolling to the maximum so inevitably it gets hit with the nerfbat to weed out all the fotm disc priests that will jump ship the moment they ain't overpowered anymore which is a similar situation monks were in before 5.1 and bring some well needed balance to healing.

In addition in 5.2 the strengths of each spec and emphasized correctly in regards to priests.
Want better healing output spec holy, want absorbs spec disc. The price you pay for speccing discipline is inferior healing output but you get absorbs instead, in other words you can't have your cake and eat it as well like you do now while being discipline which allows you to have the best of both.

Finally the sky is not falling like your implying in this thread it will because you haven't even tested how these changes actually affect disc in a 25-man environment because guess what no 25-man has been tested yet only a bunch of 10-mans and disc is perfectly fine on those after said nerfs.

Now who's better, Isheria (Method's Disc Priest) .... or any of you? Be honest.

[Fela]

(5) significant buff to penance and flash heal - nothing more to say always nice to have a buff and i believe these changes are intended to promote spell diversity.

If you think flash heal was buffed, you need to get your maths straight (unless you consider 0.1% a buff).

(1 - 0,3) * 1,43 = 1.001

[simland]

The only real comparison needed is that to the start of MoP.

1) How are Disc absorbs different now? Single target is better. AOE is worse.
2) Do we have similar single target healing potential? Penance is getting buffed as is PWS.
3) Do we have similar AOE healing potential? AOE is worse with the PoH throughput drop. SS is half as strong. Atonement will be better with penance buff and Glyph of Binding Heal is nice.
4) How has Disc scaled with gear? Pretty well. However, with the incoming changes, stat priorities will shift which could make scaling very different.

I think it's safe to say that Disc will still be viable and certainly worth a raid spot. The downside is, we may be back to the "only need 1 disc priest" mentality. Dear god I hate weakened soul. Quality of life for Disc priests will drop as AOE/raid healing is going from bad to worse. A good disc priest will still be able to cut it. You'll use a lot more mana, but that's fair as we should end every boss fight with 0 mana if properly designed. This isn't the first time we've been pigeon holed in the name of balance.

If this is news to you, then welcome to World of Warcraft. It doesn't pay to be FoTM as you get comfortable and then get nerfed. It's much safer being the chosen class, love ya paladins!

Constructive criticisms: I think they just need to get rid of absorbs. It is clearly too difficult to design encounters and to balance around. 4 years in the making and still struggling. Move disc to a run and gun healing with ALL instant casts, or "heals" that mitigate % of dmg done, or heals that provide buffs to resource regeneration...just something. It is their job after all to figure this out and they have had quite some time. Anyway, I give my seal of approval to get rid of absorbs if it will just end all this madness.

[Deleted]

AOE/raid healing is going from bad to worse

I disagree that disc aoe healing is in any way bad atm: its dumb, inflexible, buffed to a level to make it simply overkill if used efficiently. It's a huge hammer, big enough to suit any kind of nails, even if you dont really need such a big one all the time, but you dont have another better one.

Constructive criticisms: I think they just need to get rid of absorbs. It is clearly too difficult to design encounters and to balance around. 4 years in the making and still struggling.

While I dont agree with "getting rid" of absorbs, I think they should make up their mind - are they considered primarily healing or primarily utility? We've always been in some sort of limbo with this: healing buffs usually do not affect absorbs, but healing debuffs sometimes consider them healing (yorsahj purple). Spirit shell wasn't affected by archangel because..it was a heal, same with pws. Now they decided it is a heal after all, but apparently now its not an absorb, and cant benefit from mastery.

If they decide absorbs are primarily utility, then you cant have a class made 70% out of utility. If you put the dmg that a disc brings too as an utility, then you prolly have something like 80% utility vs 20% healing. That is impossible to balance correctly. No healer should have more utility than actual healing, that is not a healer, its a new role. In this case absorbs should be reduced to a more reasonable amount and the healing part balanced.

[Banzhe]

Disc is going to be just as bad as holy is, and thats how it should't be

But holy isn't bad, there's just a lot of people with holy spec who can't play it!

OT: I don't see how it's "smart" or balancing honestly, bringing the disc-spec more back towards WotlK style without lowering the rapture cd and maintaining the cost on Pw:shield (slight increase on rupture regen will do nothing as it excludes spr-proccs), lowering SS and to an extend also recently downgraded DA without giving any booster to our natural healing, ye.., I can see disc being brought specifically for their cd's, but only as fillers on very specific fights.

---------- Post added 2013-01-22 at 03:35 PM ----------

In 5.2 the changes for disc priests simply remove the faceroll aspect of the spec which is cast prayer of healing till you smash your keyboard even if its 100% overheal but that doesn't matter cause rapture gives you infinite mana plus the only thing you care is getting divine aegis on every single person asap, add spirit shell to the mix and you have current disc priests. This strategy right now is stupidly effective and promotes facerolling to the maximum so inevitably it gets hit with the nerfbat to weed out all the fotm disc priests that will jump ship the moment they ain't overpowered anymore which is a similar situation monks were in before 5.1 and bring some well needed balance to healing.

In addition in 5.2 the strengths of each spec and emphasized correctly in regards to priests.
Want better healing output spec holy, want absorbs spec disc. The price you pay for speccing discipline is inferior healing output but you get absorbs instead, in other words you can't have your cake and eat it as well like you do now while being discipline which allows you to have the best of both.

Finally the sky is not falling like your implying in this thread it will because you haven't even tested how these changes actually affect disc in a 25-man environment because guess what no 25-man has been tested yet only a bunch of 10-mans and disc is perfectly fine on those after said nerfs.

Now who's better, Isheria (Method's Disc Priest) .... or any of you? Be honest.

No Disc priest in current content would be able to spam PoH through an entire fight and sustain the output, or avoid going oom in less then 1/3 of the fight, it's simple math when you look at the cost of PoH, even including Rapture proccs, Fiend and the odd HoH / Innervate.
Unless your funneling everything into that 1 player, but if that is the case, I'd say the player is shit as he's healing inefficiently at the cost of his / her team!

What he's doing is trying to paint a very black & white image which is something I'd suspect from blizzard to validate a point, but not from someone playing at his level.., perhaps that's the reason, thinking people just soak everything he says no matter what.

As for his statement how disc will fair on 25's, more overall raid damage with less absorbs and no significant increase in mana gain to compensate the extra workload required, ye.., this is rocket science -.-

[Blergy]

Isheria from Method would disagree with you.



Now who's better, Isheria (Method's Disc Priest) .... or any of you? Be honest.

Isheria claims disc isn't saying disc is fine. He/she is saying that the faceroll aspect is removed (spam PoH). This is true. He/she says disc should have inferior HPS but absorbs should make up for this. This is also true. He/she says that 25m is still unknown on PTR. 10m is completely different from 25m.

Everything said was true, but nowhere does he/she say that disc priests in 25m are fine. PWS will be most of your absorbs in 5.2 if it goes live today. You will NOT be spamming PoH with crit gear to get aegis blankets because it's too unreliable. To keep aegis up, you'd have to keep critting on the same targets, which is very unlikely. What'll happen is your aegis will probably fall off before you get around to critting them again.

[Anastacy]

Isheria from Method would disagree with you.



Now who's better, Isheria (Method's Disc Priest) .... or any of you? Be honest.

Im certainly better at avoiding massive run-on sentences.

[Deleted]

No Disc priest in current content would be able to spam PoH through an entire fight and sustain the output, or avoid going oom in less then 1/3 of the fight, it's simple math when you look at the cost of PoH, even including Rapture proccs, Fiend and the odd HoH / Innervate.

Disc priest with 2+ shammys for manatides in fact DO have infinite mana. Easily accesible in 25man... And really no argument here against taking it away (still dont like the way they do it).

[Anastacy]

Disc priest with 2+ shammys for manatides in fact DO have infinite mana. Easily accesible in 25man... And really no argument here against taking it away (still dont like the way they do it).

You completely ignored the part where he said "unless they are being fed" certain buffs, yadda yadda.

I mean, it was even RIGHT UNDER what you quoted!

[Deleted]

I simply don't understand why they nerf disc priests THIS way. Their main problem is, that discs in 25s only (mainly) use PoH to blanket the raid with shields. So before changing a mechanic why not 1st tweaking the numbers? Here are two different suggestions.

- Getting back to the 30 % Aegis for PoH or even lower like 20-25 %. Absorbs are part of discs-playstyle, so they should make them not to rng. Simply reduce their amount. With the changes to PW:S and Penance there are good alternatives to NOT only spam PoH (especially in 10m).
- Blizz said they want PoH for healing and PW:S for absorbs. When they keep it, that PoH will trigger aegis only when critting they have to increase the amount of healing by PoH to make it a real group-heal! At least by 10-15 %. Without the shields PoH is such a weak groupheal it is not even funny. Especially with the restriction to be a groupheal and not a raidwide-heal.

I think it is okay to nerf/adjust priests output and performance. But (as always) Blizz is overzealous. Adjustments are okay, nerfing to the ground is not.

[Deleted]

I simply don't understand why they nerf disc priests THIS way. Their main problem is, that discs in 25s only (mainly) use PoH to blanket the raid with shields. So before changing a mechanic why not 1st tweaking the numbers? Here are two different suggestions.

- Getting back to the 30 % Aegis for PoH or even lower like 20-25 %. Absorbs are part of discs-playstyle, so they should make them not to rng. Simply reduce their amount. With the changes to PW:S and Penance there are good alternatives to NOT only spam PoH (especially in 10m).
- Blizz said they want PoH for healing and PW:S for absorbs. When they keep it, that PoH will trigger aegis only when critting they have to increase the amount of healing by PoH to make it a real group-heal! At least by 10-15 %. Without the shields PoH is such a weak groupheal it is not even funny. Especially with the restriction to be a groupheal and not a raidwide-heal.

I think it is okay to nerf/adjust priests output and performance. But (as always) Blizz is overzealous. Adjustments are okay, nerfing to the ground is not.

That's the point.

As long as DA is a guarantee on PoH, PoH will be used purely to blanket a raid. Blizzard want to remove that. They are removing it, and yeah Disc Priests are entirely fine.

[Anastacy]

That's the point.

As long as DA is a guarantee on PoH, PoH will be used purely to blanket a raid. Blizzard want to remove that. They are removing it, and yeah Disc Priests are entirely fine.

Thats not ALL they are changing, Hamsandwhichface.

Sheesh, people really like to create their own little box of logic, and really stick to it.

[Noradin]

As long as DA is a guarantee on PoH, PoH will be used purely to blanket a raid.

This is untrue. A nerf to the coefficient would be enough to make this no longer viable.

[Deleted]

No Disc priest in current content would be able to spam PoH through an entire fight and sustain the output, or avoid going oom in less then 1/3 of the fight, it's simple math when you look at the cost of PoH, even including Rapture proccs, Fiend and the odd HoH / Innervate.
Unless your funneling everything into that 1 player, but if that is the case, I'd say the player is shit as he's healing inefficiently at the cost of his / her team!

What he's doing is trying to paint a very black & white image which is something I'd suspect from blizzard to validate a point, but not from someone playing at his level.., perhaps that's the reason, thinking people just soak everything he says no matter what.

As for his statement how disc will fair on 25's, more overall raid damage with less absorbs and no significant increase in mana gain to compensate the extra workload required, ye.., this is rocket science -.-

He does not mean spam PoH exclusively. Its not the best HPS to do so anyway. I can currently chain cast PoH, with penance and HF to stack evangelism, PWS for rapture and cascade without going oom for all fights in the tier. I can go oom if I try to go for absolute maximum HPS i.e. skip rapture during the high HPS phases, but even then in most cases I can usually recover, by getting 2 rapture procs during mana tide.

My overall mana regen hovers somewhere around 24kmp5 without mana tide and spirit procs, when PoH has a mana drain of 27k. Isheria is quite right in saying that disc is unbeatable in many fights, because we can roll such a humongous amount of absorbs and have enough mana to spam our highest HPS spells 24/7.

He is 100% wrong when he says its ok for disc to have lower HPS if they have absorb. This argument crashed and burned at the start of MoP. We had more absorbs than we will in 5.2 and we were not in a good place at all.

This argument has been proven to NOT work in practice (start of MoP), yet people still continue banging on with it. I don't care if you play in method, I don't care if you are the god of wow, when you are proven wrong by the facts but continue to insist on the same thing, you dont know what you are talking about.

What the patch did was bring disc back to the point to effectively where we were at launch, a secondary niche spec that you bring on those fights where the abilities fit the raid mechanics. Does everyone have all the healing data for the 10man raid testing? I don't think so. What does being fine mean? Someone might believe it is ok to have 15 and 20% less HPS because the disc abilities fit some niche encounters and they can spec holy for the rest, but that does not make a spec fine at all.

No one is disputing that the nerf gutted disc output. Its just that some people including blizzard and Isheria appear to think, in the face of all available evidence, that absorbs make up for that. Their definition of fine then, is that disc good in those niche fights and should spec holy for the rest.

[HPLathus]

He does not mean spam PoH exclusively. Its not the best HPS to do so anyway. I can currently chain cast PoH, with penance and HF to stack evangelism, PWS for rapture and cascade without going oom for all fights in the tier. I can go oom if I try to go for absolute maximum HPS i.e. skip rapture during the high HPS phases, but even then in most cases I can usually recover, by getting 2 rapture procs during mana tide.

My overall mana regen hovers somewhere around 24kmp5 without mana tide and spirit procs, when PoH has a mana drain of 27k. Isheria is quite right in saying that disc is unbeatable in many fights, because we can roll such a humongous amount of absorbs and have enough mana to spam our highest HPS spells 24/7.

He is 100% wrong when he says its ok for disc to have lower HPS if they have absorb. This argument crashed and burned at the start of MoP. We had more absorbs than we will in 5.2 and we were not in a good place at all.

This argument has been proven to NOT work in practice (start of MoP), yet people still continue banging on with it. I don't care if you play in method, I don't care if you are the god of wow, when you are proven wrong by the facts but continue to insist on the same thing, you dont know what you are talking about.

What the patch did was bring disc back to the point to effectively where we were at launch, a secondary niche spec that you bring on those fights where the abilities fit the raid mechanics. Does everyone have all the healing data for the 10man raid testing? I don't think so. What does being fine mean? Someone might believe it is ok to have 15 and 20% less HPS because the disc abilities fit some niche encounters and they can spec holy for the rest, but that does not make a spec fine at all.

No one is disputing that the nerf gutted disc output. Its just that some people including blizzard and Isheria appear to think, in the face of all available evidence, that absorbs make up for that. Their definition of fine then, is that disc good in those niche fights and should spec holy for the rest.

So doing double the amount of healing over all your other healers in a raid, through 70% absorb abilities is balanced and how the game should be played?


Let's talk about how "Balanced" that is.



On a different note, the patch won't be coming out for at LEAST another month.. maybe 1.5 months with the rate they are going on testing/changes.

It's very likely disc will see some form of buff to either PoH or some other ability to increase raw throughput a little bit to balance out the amount of absorbs we lost from DA.

1) I don't think people need to be freaking out about the changes as much as they are *yet*

2) I don't think that the changes, if they stayed the same, will truly break disc. They just buffed PW:S for disc, so you are going to be seeing shields upwards of 200k come 5.2 if the changes stay. (Granted you are stacking mastery)


3) Absorbs will be the same probably on the meters, maybe a little less... obviously for balance sake. But instead of seeing "SS followed by DA followed by POH" you will probably see "PW:S/Spirit Shell (Depending on the fight) PoH, Atonment"


They didn't completely nerf our ability to heal, they simply changed the way we do it now...

[Venaliter]

So doing double the amount of healing over all your other healers in a raid, through 70% absorb abilities is balanced and how the game should be played? Let's talk about how "Balanced" that is.

That is mostly spirit shell, and pretty much everyone agrees it needed a nerf. I'd agree it needs to be nerfed even more, so as too discourage Disc stacking to completely negate certain mechanics. I suggested a 30sec debuff like "Weakened Shell" that means you can't be "shelled" again after benefiting from Spirit Shell or something similar.

[HPLathus]

I don't agree with shell not working with mastery, that's a half assed change TBH.


Just give it a cap.. 20% of our health similar to what DA has.

[laplacedemon]

Already has a cap; 60%. 20% is less than a single PW:S, reachable in one cast.

The problem is, you cap it in 10s and run out of targets unless the AoE already started. Yet, you don't run out of people to SS in 25s, even with one IF. So, in 25s it has a very, very big room to scale...