Patch 5.3 PTR. Attonement Nerf

[schwank05]

I am so not happy with this change, I recently started leveling my priest for Atonement healing. Now I see this BS, guess Ill be leveling my monk instead.

[Mazi]

I am so not happy with this change, I recently started leveling my priest for Atonement healing. Now I see this BS, guess Ill be leveling my monk instead.

It's a slight nerf, it doesn't make Atonement useless. You're overreacting. Atonement also scales far too well with gear, so this nerf in 5.3 will be to compensate for gear levels as well.

[Deleted]

Everyone in here needs to calm their butts.

This wont destroy Disc, it will just push Hpallys more ahead, but maybe blizz is going to address the Problems with disc now and to our Directhealing.

Sure smiting is fun, but it becomes Boring very fast.

also already stated that atonement scales too well. I have now ilvl 524 and jesus christ, Penance is hitting harder than some of our Hunters ability, not to mention with 5 stacks. The healing that is created from that is bigger as Greater Heal and bigger as flashheal.

[Fraeblood]

Never got why it is called Smite spam when Penance is by far the more powerful of the spells used in the DPS/Heal rotation. Every time I read people say things like "smite spamming is easy, one button, gosh." I just laugh because they have no idea what the class does for heals. you cast 1 Pen, 1 HF, and 1-2 Smite in a rotation... would you call casting a spell once more then the others spam? Just comes off as ignorant to me.
I am not all that happy to see a nerf, but I have played a priest for many years now and I almost wait for the nerfs. It seems no matter what spells we use, at some point they nerf it. It is not like other healers use 20 spells. All healers, and for that matter DPS, use a small batch of spells to get the job done. Look at logs of any healer and you will see 1-2 spells that make up a bulk of their healing, along with 3-4 other ones that fill in the gaps. Also any DPS will have a log about the same.
Someone has to be on top, and when you are, they seem to just nerf you. Now why not just balance others and buff more then they nerf I don't know.
They seem to find it easier to make us strong and lower us, then to make content hard and then buff us. I think they would get a better community if they did it the latter. Everyone loves a buff and a challenge. But like I said, it is nothing new, and the next popular mechanic to heal with will get a nerf at some point too.
Long as bosses die, I get loot, and have fun with friends, that is all that really matters

[Deleted]

You realise heroic Tortos categorizes -NOTHING- as overhealing? Hence why MWs are at the top.

Which tells you what the output of each healer is excluding overhealing, which tells you exactly how low disc output is compared to other healers. Max disc 130k, max holy priest 170k. That is the massive difference in throughput between disc and other healers. Throughput refers to your ability to produce high HPS, not your ability to maintain good HPS in high overheal fights.

As soon as HPS rises above 130-140k, disc is gone from the first page. In any fight where HPS is 70-90k. Disc is on top along with palas. The new encounters don't allow particularly high HPS and hence the difference between disc and effectively every other class is masked. That does not mean that disc has a high throughput, but rather the encounter design is rewarding for disc.

The nerf to atonement won't be felt at all, because of the scaling difference. It will keep the relationship between atonement and your other heals to approximately the level you had with 500 ilvl gear.

[Mazi]

Which tells you what the output of each healer is excluding overhealing, which tells you exactly how low disc output is compared to other healers. Max disc 130k, max holy priest 170k. That is the massive difference in throughput between disc and other healers. Throughput refers to your ability to produce high HPS, not your ability to maintain good HPS in high overheal fights.

As soon as HPS rises above 130-140k, disc is gone from the first page. In any fight where HPS is 70-90k. Disc is on top along with palas. The new encounters don't allow particularly high HPS and hence the difference between disc and effectively every other class is masked. That does not mean that disc has a high throughput, but rather the encounter design is rewarding for disc.

The nerf to atonement won't be felt at all, because of the scaling difference. It will keep the relationship between atonement and your other heals to approximately the level you had with 500 ilvl gear.

Not all healers know that the overheal counts on world of logs, some healers cheese it, like I do. You really can't look at that fight AT ALL.

[Kelesti]

Why are people calling for a nerf to the damage done? Do you want Discipline's one good thing holding them in PvP to be ripped away from them too?

Nerfing the healing done from atonement means that Spirit Shell, Prayer of Healing, Prayer of Mending, Power Word: Shield, et al are all untouched. It means when you push archangel because you need to heal harder, that you still can and in doing so will be unphased completely, but your ability to stand at max range and spam a basic dps rotation with little regard to actual healing patterns is no longer supported.

As pointed out, Atonement at one point in time replaced Heal. That's it. Not Flash Heal, not Greater Heal. Just Heal. At this point, with it being a top heal on most fights, it's pushed a few too many boundaries. Sure you could say it's "three spells", but given that the other spells are rotationally cast on cooldown and that all three spells are all smart heals using the exact same mechanic, I would like to call butts on that.



Atonement nerf: Needed. Doesn't affect Discipline's PvP offensive burst, or its burst healing, cooldown usage, or actual utility when using "real" healing spells. If you want to spam dps spells on a boss all day long, and nothing else, roll a mage?

[Zenotetsuken]

If I wanted to Heal using healing spells. I would fucking spec Holy.

Well this blows, I spent the last 3 weeks gearing my Attonement Disc priest because I love the way it plays and now it is going to go down by 20 fucking %

G fucking G.

Back to Tanking/DPS for me since all other healers are lame and boring.

I kind of have to agree with this. I leveled and geared as Disc, because I like the idea of Attonement. If I wanted to play just another boring healing spec I would have gone holy.

[Bizerk]

Yes because spamming smite for 80% of most fights isn't boring at all.

[Noradin]

If he was 'spamming smite' for 80% of the fight he would be holy and in smite chakra, because only spamming smite doesn't heal very much.

[nobodysbaby]

I agree and been saying Paladins are too good, especially IH. Very surprised they didn't nerf it yet, but I understand it is more OP with some spells than others but it shouldnt be hard to tweak it accordingly then.

Havent been focusing on that (and it rly disturbs me more than Disc atm) since the thread topic is Atonment.

[luma]

You guys talk about atonement as if we did that and nothing else. As if we were not putting a lot of shields, using PoM, Barrier, SS, and Pain Suppression, controling Rapture and all the things that makes disc so complex. And it's funny to hear a priest to say "Yey, we need a nerf just because I hate this spell!". It's so selfish!

Atonement was the reason for me being a priest at first place and trust me, I'm not the mindless type of player. I picked up this talent since Cata, with the talent points system. I was the minority and I even without a huge DPS, at least I was having fun.

Today you guys use Atonement just because it is overvalued. I've always used, because I really like to be doing something useful to my group even in times with low damage. And guess what, I'm still able to use all my toolkit. Boring is to stand there and pray for something to happen, so I can drop my biggest cooldown. Apparently it would be more challenging to cast PoH on a single target and heal five people at the same time over and over again.

Are you a shielder? Good to you. You are so happy with nerfs and so happy to be rid of Atonement, while I am so upset by the possibility of seeing it vanish due some people who abused from this ability and put Atonement on the spotlight, and they don't even like it! I'd rather see Atonement in oblivion where it was. If you don't like it, don't use it, go back to your great-hard-smart-people rotation, so Blizzard can see that it really sucks and gives you the properly buff, but do not spoil the fun of those who actually wants to be a little more than an ordinary healer.

[jimbodan]

I am so not happy with this change, I recently started leveling my priest for Atonement healing. Now I see this BS, guess Ill be leveling my monk instead.

This is exactly my plan too if the change goes live. I leveled my priest because I like attonement healing. Any nerf at all to it and I'm making a Monk also.

[Googolplex]

Looking at the Dps/Healing priests can do with Attonement, I'd say this is not enough. They could easily have gone to 60%, and probably should.

[Sarevokcz]

Atonement is still a single target spell. Please show me which other healer actually uses single target spells for more than 10% of his healing.

Shaman does

[Isheria]

Please enlighten us, which other healing spec has a spammable smart heal that costs virtually no mana?
Shamans are probably the only one with chain heal but chain heal actually costs mana and also doesn't have 40y on jumps which is exactly why the chaining glyph that increases jump range has a cd, every other smart heal in the game has a cd associated with it to prevent abuse like this.

[nobodysbaby]

I voted for upper the manacost of Atonment healing a few times across forums, to match the actual output wich is almost the same as using ST heals. As many already said, it also have 1 additional advantage wich is; it will heal the lowest HP in the entire raid at the time the cast is finished, and that can't be matched with targeting a player and cast a 1,5s-2,5s heal that has a high risk to overheal and a much higher cost. Not only that, it also do non neglectible dmg, and it's definitly not calculated right if you take all that into consideration.

As I said, Atonment takes away the decisionmaking of "Who do I heal and what spell do I use?", something every other healer needs to do. This is my biggest concern for Disc.

"We don't have anything else", I can't rly agree with that. You have all the other spells even if they feel unattractive compared to Atonment right now as Kel stated. Perhaps those spells need a little tuning, I don't know cause I haven't really seen any Disc heal with PoH, FH/GH/Heal in some time now, but it can't be THAT bad with Mastery buff and AA. Afterall, Disc also have a pretty cool 1 min CD to toy with.

[Deleted]

This is exactly my plan too if the change goes live. I leveled my priest because I like attonement healing. Any nerf at all to it and I'm making a Monk also.

You're more than welcome to, perhaps experiencing fistweaving will make you appreciate what priests have

[laplacedemon]

I don't understand why every holy priest is acting like they're casting sooooo many single target heals and actually spend effort on carefully choosing their targets. A few pages ago I wrote what kind of single target spells Isheria was using and almost all of them were on tanks. Please do tell me, what's the difference between keeping Renew up on tank, casting a GHeal on tank once every minute and using Sol/Smite/Penance? I would understand it if it was coming from 10man raiders, but with the amount of smart heals we have nowadays, the amount of spot heals are getting less and less; they are either really good like PW:S and EF or they're necessities like Rejuv, Riptide or SM to get Chi.

Comparing AoE smart heals and Smite is also very strange. Are there any other smart single target heals even?

I do believe Atonement is too good, but it's not like every other class isn't just as mindless at healing. LoD? No target. WG? No target. PoM? Can get away with casting it on tank most of the time, or yourself at AoE. For PoH, CoH, HR and CH, Grid and Vuhdo can both show the ideal target. Swiftmend might require more attention than all to be honest.

Smart heals do have cooldowns, yet Smite doesn't have the hps any of them have, does it? Because it's single target. Yet, Penance (which is pretty much a AoE heal if used offensive)does, it's almost 3 times the hps Smite has and if I remember correctly, at current gear levels with 5 Stacks of Evangelism, it has almost the same hps as a PoH with AA and all that with almost double HPM; on a 6 second cooldown with T14 4p, which almost none of the disc priests have broken yet. With the 20% buff, it is healing for absurd amounts and there are only a few times where you would refrain from casting it on cooldown. And it's not like it was hard to foresee this either (Penance was like LoH on bosses like Mel'jarak), yet Blizzard chose to fix disc like this because they didn't want to change how disc plays too much in the middle of the expansion.

[Fraeblood]

Yes because spamming smite for 80% of most fights isn't boring at all.

If you really atone healed like this, then you are a terrible healer.

And in all honesty one of the ways people will heal with is after the nerf is NOT using Smite unless you have a HF debuff up, meaning we would use Smite even less. It is already only used one more time then other spells in the atone rotation, and that is only every other rotation, if you don't have to move or cast any of the other spells we use as Disc.

Pen, HF, Smite... Pen, Smite, Smite.. Pen HF, Smite.... Why do people still call this Smite Spamming?!?
What healer doesn't have a heal they use more then others, and most use it even more.
And we only do this some times. We also used PWS for BT, and shell and POM, and even cast Flash or Greater Heal now and then.
But even with all these other spells, when we are just doing Atone. We are NOT spamming Smite, at all.

<Semi-rant over>