Patch 5.3 PTR. Attonement Nerf

[Kiea]

Which is pretty much what it was in cata, except back then it also restored mana?
This would mean they admitting that the only thing they did for disc in mop is spirit shell. Blizzard doesnt really like to backtrack on major direction and its clear they wanted to play with atonement. Its flavor of the expansion, next to monks.

Well, not exactly, I believe atonement was made 40 yards in DS. But at the moment it's just silly, I always really liked Penance as a heal.

As for the mana return, not entirely sure if we want that back, since atm I'm fine with it being just a throughput cooldown since I really feel like Disc throughput is stupidly low, with their only big throughput heal is Binding Heal with the glyph, PoH is too slow, same with Greater healing wave, and Flash Heal is too weak in comparison.

Oh, and while we're on it, can we remove the penance glyph from the game? It's very useful but I hate having on the move castable abilities >.> less skill required (play hunter main lol, movement ftl)

[Deleted]

Yes, this is correct.

25% each, not 50.

[Deleted]

Well, not exactly, I believe atonement was made 40 yards in DS. But at the moment it's just silly, I always really liked Penance as a heal.

Nope, the range change was in 5.1, sometimes in the middle of t14. Penance working with atonement has a pretty good advantage of a possible 3 targets smartheal, which disc lacks painfully. Having your only aoe heal party bound is kinda meh. With penance glyphed, it can also work as a quick triage on the move, again, something all classes have, and disc doesnt. I know you can shield, but shields dont do much if the target already got hit.

As for the mana return, not entirely sure if we want that back, since atm I'm fine with it being just a throughput cooldown since I really feel like Disc throughput is stupidly low, with their only big throughput heal is Binding Heal with the glyph, PoH is too slow, same with Greater healing wave, and Flash Heal is too weak in comparison.

Another difference was evangelism only giving 3% healing to archangel, not 5%. I really wish they would do something with renew/binding for disc, its really underused atm. Mending belongs in the holy arsenal, but disc could get some more flavor from underused spells.

Oh, and while we're on it, can we remove the penance glyph from the game? It's very useful but I hate having on the move castable abilities >.> less skill required (play hunter main lol, movement ftl)

I'll have to respectfully disagree with you here. All classes have their signature spells instants: circle of healing, wild growth, holy shock, riptide. You can argue PWS is the disc signature instant, but then so do other classes have reju/lb/swiftmend, HW:serenity/reduced cd on pom with DI, wog/lod and the casting while moving/totems for shamans, so having the possibility of penance on the move at the cost of a glyph and still a channel is only fair. I picked the penance glyph late but atm it is the only glyph I would not ditch. Disc is pretty bad with movement as it is.

And you cant compare hunters constant dps while moving with disc having instant heals every 9/10/15 seconds.

[Kiea]

In general I dislike having too many instant cast or moving while casting abilities either way, but thats another discussion for another topic.

In 10man I've found Glyph of Binding Heal to be very nice to deal with burst damage periods, and it is the only spell where I can spam my mana pool away. I'm pretty sure that the glyph is also a smart heal.

I know om my Holy Pala I can easily burst to 200k HPS if I wanna spend the mana, can't do that as disc.


And as for "smart heals", Holy paladins don't have any smart heal beside Light of Dawn, everything in their arsenal needs to be targeted with the exception of that, and that spell isn't the most powerful ability in the game, having only smite and holy fire be smart heals for disc is fine.

And the whole idea is that movement hurts your DPS/HPS, and therefor everyone shouldn't just be able to avoid that punishment.

And disc has 9(Penance), 10(Holy Fire), 10(Prayer of Mending), 24(Cascade) I'm not exactly sure what 15 second is as I don't have access to WoW atm, but other than that you have shields and Renew (while not powerful, better than nothing).

[Dragon Claws]

Atonement shouldn't be #1 for Disc. Priests.

I'm being outhealed by casting Priests.

/facepalm

[Deleted]

Yes, this is correct.

No it's not. It's 25% from statue and 25% from stance, it's 50% total.

[Deleted]

Atonement isn't #1 for any disc playing like they should. It's admittably a strong smart heal but not by far the only, nor my #1 go to spell. Compare to a holy's PoM, atonement does percentually less of my overall healing.

Besides, if you're being outhealed by a disc who purely spams atonement, maybe the fault lies on the other end of the problem. (excluding Horridon)

[Deleted]

And as for "smart heals", Holy paladins don't have any smart heal beside Light of Dawn, everything in their arsenal needs to be targeted with the exception of that, and that spell isn't the most powerful ability in the game, having only smite and holy fire be smart heals for disc is fine.

You missed the point. All the other smart heals are aoe. Holy fire/smite are not. Penance is the only option for disc smart aoe. Further more, from the "classic single target healer" that paladin used to be, even they have 2 aoe heals - lod and radiance. Disc is still stuck on one, and that one has a group limitation. Every single class has the option to aoe heal on the move.

And the whole idea is that movement hurts your DPS/HPS, and therefor everyone shouldn't just be able to avoid that punishment.

And disc has 9(Penance), 10(Holy Fire), 10(Prayer of Mending), 24(Cascade) I'm not exactly sure what 15 second is as I don't have access to WoW atm, but other than that you have shields and Renew (while not powerful, better than nothing).

I was thinking at weakened soul for the 15 seconds - while not being an actual cd, it acts like one in the case of you trying to heal a kiter for ex (typical healing on the move).

Penance is not instant and even not castable on the move without a major glyph, you cant treat it same as instant spells that other classes have as baseline. Holy fire requires you to have a hostile target in range and also facing it, not always a possibility when healing a kiter (asides from not being actually a targeted heal). Mending requires dmg to happen for it to actually proc, its good as a buffer, but its not really gonna put your target to safety. Both mending as cascade are also in the holy arsenal, and holy also has coh/holy word serenity and a better renew than disc, plus buffer healing from lightspring on heavy movement fights. Or look at druids: reju, lb, swiftmend, the possibility of casting tranq on the move with symbiosis on a shaman - none of them 2nd hand choices (as renew is for disc, which, yes, its better than nothing but thats about it).

I'm not complaining about disc mobility, I just think your impression that the penance glyph "dumbs down disc" is not really well based. I looked the other day at a holy priest ranked log from a jinrokh hc log, 10% of his healing was from actually cast spells and another 13% was from DH. Rest was all from instants:
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/2...s/8/?s=3&e=285

He's the 2nd ranked holy priest for that boss, I'd have looked at 1st but hes german :P.

Or look at the top ranked paladin on same boss: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...5/?s=208&e=489
How many casts do you actually see there? Less than 10%?

Top shaman: http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=1325&e=1559 - hes got @9% from surges, which is a fast heal and less than 10% from other casts, most of them prolly possible to do under spiritwalker's grace.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/3...?s=2272&e=2567 - 2nd druid (first is german). Almost no casts. He had spiritwalker's grace for those tranqs.

So you see, everybody plays the instants game.

[Noradin]

You just dug yourself right into a hole. You said "if you decided to use atonement at the wrong time." That's not a fault of the spell, it's operator error.

Atonement at the moment doesn't have any real drawbacks all things considered.

That is a potiental drawback, even if it doesn't fit what you are trying to agrue for. Keep to the many uncontestable points it will weaken the argument you make less than using additional ones that have obvious holes in it.

---------- Post added 2013-04-23 at 11:03 AM ----------

Didn't they fix this as of like 5.1? That damage reduction effects (Shield Wall, Resilience) will have the heal triggered at full value, but the damage reduced?

Maybe partly, you still need a adequate target.

---------- Post added 2013-04-23 at 11:17 AM ----------

I honestly wish they would revert Atonement to how it was in early cata, basicly a tank healing tool.

My way to fix how Atonement is now is to -

Buff Penance damage (Since Disc DPS is lower than other healer's DPS, maybe exception being Resto Shaman)
Remove Penance from Atonement, I'm not sure when Penance was added to Atonement, but it's a bad a idea since Penance is your main big heal.
Nerf Smite damage but keep the amount healed the same.
Nerf the range on Atonement, so it only reaches within 15 or 20 yards of the target.

My biggest problem with Atonement is that Penance is part of it, it is too good and Penance should feel like a powerful heal, not a powerful damage ability AND heal.

With this healing should remain the same, but damage be nerfed a lot, however if we please we can use penance on the boss for additional DPS, but no healing.

I agree, that penance is what makes atonement so strong and show up so high on the meters, but I believe it is unlikely they will take it back out anytime soon as it is their fix to disc aoe healing for situations where PoH is unsuitable. Disc has no other multitarget smartheal than penance. They could cut it out and strengthen the remainder of atonement for the same effect but that would make smite not a filler anymore, thus it would require kind of a CD and we would be back where we are now. I'm beginning to think (again) that it was a bad move on their part to call healing caused by spells via atonement 'atonement' in the logs instead of after whatever spell was cast to caused it. That would of course leave the problem of spending too much time on smart heals, but at least it would make it easier to differentiate between this one and other possibly problematic parts of atonement: 'Spamming' and 'being to high in the logs as a spec'. Because, we really aren't spamming atonement, we are using (maybe spamming) three spells that all cause it, just as stacking spirit shell is not neccesarily done only bay casting PoH and DA is not caused by clicking some 'DA' button again and again. When other specs and classes look at our logs they can't readily tell which buttons and targets we really use like it is possible for other classes. How would holy priest healing logs look like if you made up a category and dumped all healing spells with more than one target into it and another with only single target spells and showed only those two in those logs?

[Deleted]

I'm beginning to think (again) that it was a bad move on their part to call healing caused by spells via atonement 'atonement' in the logs instead of after whatever spell was cast to caused it.

I can entirely agree that defining Smite, HF and Penance under the blanket of Atonement was an incorrect decision. It totally masks what is actually happening for what typically amounts to about 20% or less of my healing. There is no clear way to see if it is coming entirely from Smite spam or if Penance is being woven in as an AoE heal. It doesn't show if the player is retaining an HF cast in order to throw a Penance first and prevent diminishing the efficacy of the Smite Glyph buff.

One thing that has struck me since deciding upon Disc (due to being able to heal as a Gnome) is that I am having to work an awful lot harder in order to see good numbers than I did on my Druid. To actually be of any use I need to be constantly alert that my Atonement healing while building towards AA might be totally ineffectual at healing my tank. I need to be aware of boss or mob positioning in so much that one of my prime means to AoE could be entirely wasted due to range issues. I need to make sure the raid is topped off and stable for an extended period of time before I use a mana regeneration cooldown - considerably trickier than merely throwing on Innervate and then continuing with my healing. I need to weave the CDs for my mana regeneration as well, ideally ensuring I can get Hymn of Hope timed with Shadow Fiend and then fit in PW:S or HF at the end of the channel. I need to take 15 seconds out of healing in order to prepare for unavoidable raid wide damage and should something go wrong I have no reactive "Oh shit" buttons that I can hit unlike the previous healers I have played.

These are just some of things that I am finding needs to be juggled as Disc (there are more - Rapture, dealing with Weakened Soul and so on) that other classes simply don't have to tolerate. In exchange, sure we can do lazy healing in LFR and we can add around 1/3 of a good DPS on a standard encounter and currently we appear to be strong (at the expense of other healers) but Disc feels as though it is sitting on a fine line between being far too good or entirely abysmal. Noticeable and useful AoE healing is also entirely missing. As fun as it is, there are times when I miss the flexibility of my Druid but unfortunately Blizzard still hasn't seen fit to make Gnome Techno-Druids a reality.

Edit: And to add, regarding the comment about Atonement being mana positive: Sure, I imagine using spells which contribute to Atonement is mana positive when you are decked out in decent gear. For a large majority of people, even with double regen trinkets, Atonement based healing is not mana positive.

[tsokin]

Not sure why everyone is running around like the world is ending.

Atonement will be weaker at 90% but far from dead.

Just saw napkin math but lets see if I'm thinking about this properly.

Lets say our average atonement heals for 20 at 5 stacks of evangelism.

So pre-nerf. we are hitting for 20 with each smite, 24 during holy fire. Average 4 smites during holy fire, and 6 over all.

so 24+24+24+24+20+20=AVG=22.6

post-nerf we are doing
18+18+18+18+18+18=AVG=18

So just thinking of the changes to how smite interacts its an 80% total nerf to atonement healing.

Penance changes also hurt our atonement healing, but we should see a net gain(on heals from penance) if used properly. So, 80% off of our atonement

So on average we are doing roughly 20-25% of our healing through atonement. So it is roughly a 4-5% nerf. Not a world is ending situation, the kit we have is still extremely strong for handling the mechanics of the raid, but we will have to think about when atonement is the right choice.

This is just some quickly done napkin math, and I don't take the penance changes into account mathematically. I am sure someone with a better understanding of how to mathcraft will be able to give a more accurate idea of the changes numerically.

[Maleric]

So it is roughly a 4-5% nerf.

I agree with your conclusion, and the nerf is actually even less than 4-5% because offensive Penance and Holy Fire/PW:Solace don't benefit from Glyph of Smite. And as the content players are doing gets harder, they'll rely less on Smite for Atonement and more on Penance and HF/PW:Solace. So this is really a minor nerf.

Of course, going in to 5.2 the patch notes reflected a pretty minor nerf to Divine Aegis for awhile, too, until it got nerfed in to the ground. And I suspect that that's where we're headed. Blizzard didn't like DA blanketing and so removed it, and now there have been blue posts that they don't like how Atonement is working in 5.2 and think it's OP. Atonement looks like the next in disc's line of failed raid healing mechanics, following DA blanketing and PW:S spam. Hopefully they get disc raid healing right the fourth time around!

[Deleted]

I'm staggered how people can defend Atonement when it has 0 drawbacks.

If you take a look at FWing it has positives as well as negatives, firstly the positives:

> damage is high (surprisingly not as high as Disc DPS if you're unable to SCK > SCK > BoK)
> very mobile
> the healing is smart

.. But the negatives?

> healing is worse than "normal" healing (as it should be, to be honest)
> mana intensive (factoring in Renewing Mists you will go OOM, maybe a bit harder to OOM with the legendary meta but that meta is stupid and needs a nerf)
> you are in melee
> healing is centred 20 yards around you and 20 yards around your statue (means on spread out fights its hard to reach everyone)
> hinders throughput (if you're using Chi on TP/BoK you aren't using it on Uplift, bad times!)

You see? That's why FW is currently really horrible at the moment: the negatives outweigh the positives. It should be like this though, the fact that Atonement healing does more healing than the usage of your actual heals while providing sustainable damage (don't forget this, the damage does add up and it is insane) while being mana positive, while providing benefits to your throughput (takes roughly 7~ seconds to generate 5x AA), while being smart AND while being mobile is completely ridiculous.

I don't understand the worry: why can't Atonement just heal everyone for 50% of the damage (like it does the Priest)? What's the worry with that?

[Noradin]

If they overnerf atonement, PoH will be the next again (with and without Spirit Shell), then PW:S, atonement, rinse and repeat...
We will always tend to 'spam' 'spells' (on the meters) since our spells with CD don't get divided into different groups on the logs or the CDs are per player like PW:S.
The only spells we use that have an noticable (on the logs) CD are our lvl90 talents and PoM. If they want to divide our healing into smaller portions on the logs (which are what uninformed players whine about all the time) they either need to change how atonement, DA and SS show up in logs, give us more additional spells with higher CDs, or create more spell interaction thus forcing sequences of different spells to be used. The interaction between HF and Smite was actually a step in the right direction for than, a shame that they take it away thus making atonement (even) less engaging. I wish they had buffed FDCL a bit instead or given us the holy version of DI or somehing else to add some player targeting to the atonement sequence.
It would give us more freedom to adjust the balance between healing and damage to the fight, make the playstyle more interesting and diverse in regards of spells cast and targets choosen, as well as rise the skill needed to play well.

@Treseme, most of your post was already adresses before, aditionally please note that there are upsides to FW as well, such as that you are exspected to be in melee and thus won't get punished for it by encounter design as other healers are. Standing in the melee group next to the boss can be quite an advantage which is why many encounters have special debuff mechanics that force other healers and casters away.

Also, atonement is not mana positive, there is a certain amount of regen you need, as is the case for any healing style, just the numbers vary, atonement needs more alternative stats. The benefits to our throughput are counterbalanced elsewhere, other specs have similar mechanics that seem like a bonus but aren't overall (look at chakra for example). How can you claim FW hinders output because it prevents you from using other healing spells at the same time and not counting the same thing against atonement? We can't cast anything while in the process of casting smite either.
As to why atonement is not worse healing than our other heals - well that's because those were nerfed so much or have bad mechanics that they are plain subpar. (Penance) Atonement is a bandaid fix to the outdated mechanic of PoH, we use smite as filler because Heal so bad there is virtually never ever any instance where casting it does anything but take time and mana, PW:S cannot be cast again if a player takes damage twice and requires knowing who will take damage before it happens, GH with IF was nerfed by 33% last patch and is very very slow, so whats there to cast? Renew? FH?
I would (even) more cast other spells, but they just don't meet the requirements to stay viable.
And before you come with anymore off topic comparisons to other healers, yes I am aware of their play style as I have played them quite a bit as well (excluding monks, who are too new to claim to have played them quite a bit alongside other healing classes and specs).

[ramennoodleking]

Noradin,

That is a potiental drawback, even if it doesn't fit what you are trying to agrue for. Keep to the many uncontestable points it will weaken the argument you make less than using additional ones that have obvious holes in it.

If a player uses the wrong spell for the occasion, that doesn't indicate a drawback in the spell itself.

If that's the case, every single spell has that exact drawback, because any spell can be bad if used at the wrong time. Divine Hymn is awesome but isn't good if damage is low. It's faulty logic to pretend that using the spell at the wrong time is a drawback of atonement. That's just the player not using his spell book properly.

[Noradin]

Ah but it is a drawback, since claiming it had no drawback would be claiming it was ideal to never do anything but press that one button you bound the spell to constantly - which is exaclty what some here would like to imply.
Claiming having to choose when to correctly use a spell was no drawback would leave no spell with a drawback, since essentialy any drawback a spell can have aside from being unavailable leads back to this basic one.
The faulty logic you try to slip in here is that a drawback of one spell can not be shared with others or be of differing importance when concidering different spells.
You can argue about the drawbacks of atonement and compare them to the drawbacks of other spells, but claiming there are none is just untrue, and if it were that you have to press a button cast it.

[Anastacy]

You just dug yourself right into a hole. You said "if you decided to use atonement at the wrong time." That's not a fault of the spell, it's operator error.

Atonement at the moment doesn't have any real drawbacks all things considered.

It's...still a drawback. Atonement heals going to people that don't really need them.

Smart heals aren't always the smartest thing to use.

If the argument is that "Atonement is almost always the best thing to use," and a situation arises where it isn't...that's a drawback.

draw·back
noun \ˈdrȯ-ˌbak\
: an objectionable feature : disadvantage

The *disadvantage* to "smart heals" is they don't always go to the targets you want them to.

(oh, and just because people love to argue:
dis·ad·van·tage
noun \ˌdis-əd-ˈvan-tij\
a : an unfavorable, inferior, or prejudicial condition)

If heal A is *ever* a better option to heal B, heal B is disadvantaged in that situation.

But hey, I'm just arguing semantics at this point to see how far you'll go.

Atonement has drawbacks and limitations; some brought up that I haven't mentioned (needing hostile targets), and ONE in particular that none of the hardcore Atonement bashers have touched (aka healing the casting Priest for 50%).

Note: I'm still not arguing in favor of Atonement, I'm just saying don't say it doesn't have drawbacks (because then it WOULD be the smartest choice, always).

[Deleted]

I'm staggered how people can defend Atonement when it has 0 drawbacks.

If you take a look at FWing it has positives as well as negatives, firstly the positives:
>snip<
I don't understand the worry: why can't Atonement just heal everyone for 50% of the damage (like it does the Priest)? What's the worry with that?

Except that mistweavers have also the option of mistweaving, not just fistweaving, and mistweaving is viable and better than fistweaving. You can heal top notch by never touching the boss.

I invite you to try healing as a disc priest never casting an offensive spell. What spells will you use? Outside spirit shell, you will be a vanilla healer, casting spells that have close to no synergy atm. And even with spirit shell, you will still be casting the same vanilla old spells.

[Deleted]

Disc just needs something outside atonement (and penance) to do a decent amount of raw healing.

I don't find it being an annoyance often, as most other healer classes heal people up quickly enough where we focus on preemptive absorbs, but I do find ie Lei Shen 25 a pain in the ass during transitions.
Currently I heal a group alone during first transition, which is fair enough if everything goes according to plan, but the inefficiency of our raw heals become painfully evident when all the sudden my group takes a Static Shock that cant be solo soaked for whatever reason which then effectively takes my group of 6 ppl to around 10-20% hp. Now if I have time to sit still and PoH spam it's just about doable to heal that group up (asdsadsad at the crit design at those moments) but more so than often I physically cannot sit still to get PoHs off due to Bouncings, Overcharges, you name it. And when another Static then smacks you in the face a while later you do feel a bit stumped. And even this is excluding the random fails with adds and whatnot.
Those moments when we don't have a hostile target to abuse atonement on, it being the only reasonable raw healing mechanic (gg at flash heals and bindings, I know mana is mostly a joke but really) I find myself being at a loss of ideas.

If Blizz keeps nerfing atonement, as they realistically should, they should do it with a heavy hand and give us something else instead that wouldnt leave us rolling our thumbs when healing actually needs to be done when we can't lean on other classes to heal people up. I personally like atonement, as it allows me to be doing something nonstop without going oom which is how I want to play, but something is definitely wrong with how things work at the moment.

[Deleted]

> damage is high (surprisingly not as high as Disc DPS if you're unable to SCK > SCK > BoK)
> very mobile
> the healing is smart

.. But the negatives?

> healing is worse than "normal" healing (as it should be, to be honest)
> mana intensive (factoring in Renewing Mists you will go OOM, maybe a bit harder to OOM with the legendary meta but that meta is stupid and needs a nerf)
> you are in melee
> healing is centred 20 yards around you and 20 yards around your statue (means on spread out fights its hard to reach everyone)
> hinders throughput (if you're using Chi on TP/BoK you aren't using it on Uplift, bad times!)

And for Atonement:

> Damage is high - it needs to be, as by taking a Discipline Priest, AoE healing output of your healing composition is being sacrificed.
> The healing is smart - it needs to be, this is our excuse for AoE healing after all.
> Relatively mobile - we still need to stand still when we cast Smite and that is the most efficient way (excluding HF / PW:Solace) to build Evangelism and hence AA, which is essential to our healing.

The negatives?

> Atonement is lower HPS relative to our actual heals yet is required for AA. Without AA any of our other heals are comparatively weak.
> Atonement is centered around your DPS target and you are at range. Let's say you are healing as a Disc Priest on Megaera. You have been given Tank 1. Tank 1 ends up tanking the red head while DPS target is the green head. Your Atonement heals cannot reach Tank 1.
> Atonement is a lower HPS playstyle than a balanced usage of shields and other healers. When damage gets tough, I certainly don't continue with Atonement and hope for the best - that simply wouldn't work. Just as a monk would stop fist weaving when damage is high.
> Atonement is supposed to make up for Disc having no adequate AoE heals.
> Leads to other healers having a greater amount of overheal, decreasing raid group efficiency.

Unfortunately, remove Atonement (or nerf it too much) and you have a pretty pitiful excuse for healing left. The current changes are fine, but it would be wonderful if Disc actually had an AoE healing option instead of "grimace through it and Penance the boss".