Regarding SS:
The problem is really the way spirit shell is designed, you stack it before the aoe damage goes out, it absorbs all the damage for the first second of the X second long period of aoe, for X-1 all your healers still have to put out exactly the same amount of hps as if the spirit shell wasn't present in the first place. SS is amazing at dealing with bursts of aoe damage, it's actual impact on longer periods is abyssmal and mostly to pad the meters (which even then don't look that amazing for disc). Try to look past the meters and actually see what SS accomplishes for the raid, on some fights it's impact is massive, on some (the type of aoe damage where disc already is bad) it does close to nothing but pad the meter a bit.
See above why front-loading with absorbs isn't such a big deal (especially in 25 man) for much of the damage going out. No, the bt change isn't going to break disc in any way, it's a relatively small change, however it's still a retarded change aimed at the completely incorrect things and not addressing any of the issues/strengths with disc atm. It does absolutely nothing to our damage output, it does nothing to our ability to deal with periods of low/medium damage, it does nothing to our ability to deal with short bursts of aoe damage. Do you think that the relatively small niche, that is longer periods of heavy aoe damage, is where we need to be nerfed?I'm pretty sure you'll do just fine losing BT to instant casts, the GCD reduction isn't as crucial as you are playing it up to be. Where disc lacks in being able to play catchup on high damage it makes up for in being able to front-load in absorbs.
Do you seriously think that absorbs are the main perk of disc in 10 man right now? Do you really think that "balancing" a healer (especially one with another healing offspec) to be really fucking amazing in some situations and really fucking bad in some is the way to go (that's practically encouraging blizzard to balance priests around the fact that they change healing specs from fight to fight)? Some class diversity is good, too much is basically encouraging you to sit players for certain fights.If you want to be able to bomb the raid quickly, play holy. If disc wants absorbs then it has to sacrifice something.
Or how about we actually heal, just like holy and every other healer, and have a niche being some absorbs since the option of making disc almost completely about absorbs (which isn't really the case right now, considering that DA's actual function is more like a heal than an absorb like PW:S/SS, it basically completely lacks the primary advantage of absorbs, the ability to prepare for damage) will result in the spec being way too strong on some fights and way too weak on others.If you want to HEAL play Holy, if you want to ABSORB play Disc. Stop bitching cuz you can't have it all.
All of you seem to speak about how disc should "sacrifice something" or be an "absorb healer". I hardly see how this change contributes to this, so exactly why do you think it's such a good change (if anything promotes you to weave less shields=absorbs during aoe damage)? This really just seems to be a common theme with all priests playing holy, to celebrate any disc nerfs, regardless of if they are sensible or not (and this change is about as sensible as more restrictions and longer cds for chakra stances).