Disc Viability In Emerald Nightmare Heroic

[Deleted]

Non-priest here looking for a little Disc info. I'll try and keep this short and sweet! Our guild have been doing Ursoc Heroic this evening in a 10man:
5 competent dps
2 competent tanks
3 decent healers - 1x mistweaver, 1x holy priest, 1x disc

We continually wiped due to tanks dying because they weren't getting healed enough. Mechanics weren't an issue - the tanks were always taunting before building stacks - but tanks often died.

A quick look at the metres showed that our Holy and Mistweaver had almost double the HPS of the disc. My understand (correct me if I'm wrong) is that the niche of Disc priest is efficient and large HPS on multiple targets, especially useful when expected big damage is taken (as opposed to unexpected raid damage as I believe Disc is not a great 'catch-up' healer).

My questions are:

1. Should Disc be getting high HPS, comparable with Holy?
2. Is Ursoc a good fight for Disc? & what is a good fight for Disc?
3. What sort of DPS should Disc be doing?
4. What are the key identifiers of a good/bad Disc player?

Thanks in advance Priest bros

[pseudoJ]

Personally I would say that neither of these classes excels at tank healing. Even though I am not sure about monk, I think that out of those three Holy priest would be best for the job, however something like holy paladin / resto shaman would be better.

Ursoc is pretty much the dream fight for discipline priest (+ smaller raids are optimal for disco). Even with my limited experience I would say that double the hps certainly means your discipline priest is doing something wrong. Go through your log and have a look at his atonement management -- you should see him blanketing the entire group (since you run only with 10 people) with atonement before each dmg spike.

[Krbl]

Double seems off, especially if the raid wasn't toped off all the time.

As disc you need to cycle through atonement spread (very mana intensive) + DPS CDs as often as mana allows.

At this point of the addon, if you have mana left as disc at the end of the fight you probably could've healed more.

Most probable reason is not enough atonements out (and/or at the wrong time) and CDs not used often enough.

[osmo]

disc here


your disc priest should be within 10% hps range of your holy/lowest healer if played correct and if played well do around the same as your holy/lowest healer (so says howtopriest.com dunno if its true true) ...but neither are made for tankhealing..and both hang on the lowscale of hps/healing currently
beter get a pala for tankhealer...their artifact power is made for it

ursoc is 1 of the fights where disc can excell, altho there are some butts , they wont be healing constant of do sustainable healing... it will be spike healing
basicly your disc will only really heal your soak groups after charge (maby in your raid a bit more i run a bigger raid) and keep tanks attoned...why? because that is predicatable dmg
so soak group sniffs ursocs butt...your disc attones all and should finish this around the time the charge starts so he can heal the whole group after with a burst (lw+pen) (mb+pen) (pi+pen+smite) ... i take for a fact he isnt running schism...if so ... slap his butt

then goes back in the sad conservative phase till its time for the next soak group healing

at 50% he needs to help healing regular tho (tanks + 2/3 rolling atonements max) while still saving mana for the soakgroups...

[Leenaleena]

My questions are:

1. Should Disc be getting high HPS, comparable with Holy?
2. Is Ursoc a good fight for Disc? & what is a good fight for Disc?
3. What sort of DPS should Disc be doing?
4. What are the key identifiers of a good/bad Disc player?

Thanks in advance Priest bros

1. No, and yes. On (long) fights with constant raid damage, a Disc will never compete with Restos (either Druid or Shams). On fights with spot healing, pally's will take the cake. Monks, HPriests and Disc are either odd all-rounders or so super niche, that they are special for distinctive fights.

2. Ursoc is, in theory, awesome for Discs. No damage outside of the big hits, which can be prepared for with good Atonement/CD execute of Disc healing. The most important requirement for good Disc fights is the number of people: Never more than 20. Going above the sweet spot makes atonement blanketing a hassle that is simply not worth it anymore. As for bosses themselves, my personal experience regarding Disc fights puts Elerethe very high on my favorite boss list. The P1 feedings are brilliant to line up atonements and burst people back up.

3. Depending on overall raid gear and the fight itself, Discs should be doing around tank damage. With my gear (853 atm) I do something between 110-140k on HC bosses.

4. Key identifiers....that's rather tricky. There currently is a huge discussion regarding viable playstyles. However, Discs should have high uptimes of their DoT, and always keep their Mind Bender on CD. Keeping Penance on CD is a strain on Mana, so that is up to the player. Properly aligned bursts of a good disc are unreachable by any other healing CD. Don't let your Disc play with Shism (as someone else pointed out), at least on Raid.

[Deleted]

1. No, and yes. On (long) fights with constant raid damage, a Disc will never compete with Restos (either Druid or Shams). On fights with spot healing, pally's will take the cake. Monks, HPriests and Disc are either odd all-rounders or so super niche, that they are special for distinctive fights.

2. Ursoc is, in theory, awesome for Discs. No damage outside of the big hits, which can be prepared for with good Atonement/CD execute of Disc healing. The most important requirement for good Disc fights is the number of people: Never more than 20. Going above the sweet spot makes atonement blanketing a hassle that is simply not worth it anymore. As for bosses themselves, my personal experience regarding Disc fights puts Elerethe very high on my favorite boss list. The P1 feedings are brilliant to line up atonements and burst people back up.

3. Depending on overall raid gear and the fight itself, Discs should be doing around tank damage. With my gear (853 atm) I do something between 110-140k on HC bosses.

4. Key identifiers....that's rather tricky. There currently is a huge discussion regarding viable playstyles. However, Discs should have high uptimes of their DoT, and always keep their Mind Bender on CD. Keeping Penance on CD is a strain on Mana, so that is up to the player. Properly aligned bursts of a good disc are unreachable by any other healing CD. Don't let your Disc play with Shism (as someone else pointed out), at least on Raid.

Thanks for the detailed replied. Our disc is a good player (but new to disc) and open to critisism/advice so I'll pass a lot of this on.

Our disc has 856ilvl and was always under 50k dps. I don't see any discs with decent Hps without high Dps so this might be part of the issue.

You mentioned to avoid Shism - IcyVeigns guide gives it a tick, why don't you?

[Deleted]

Thanks for the detailed replied. Our disc is a good player (but new to disc) and open to critisism/advice so I'll pass a lot of this on.

Our disc has 856ilvl and was always under 50k dps. I don't see any discs with decent Hps without high Dps so this might be part of the issue.

You mentioned to avoid Shism - IcyVeigns guide gives it a tick, why don't you?

I would avoid it for being a mana hog atm, when mana is an issue for disc priests. Further more, you don't have that many free gcds in a raid, where atonement spreading takes a lot of time. You wont be smiting a lot, so all it does is buff penance and your dot, and penance can be buffed for free by taking the Castigation talent.

Then again, I'm a rather medium skilled disc priest and I find learning to manage atonements on a 30 people group hassle enough to not need further hurdle micromanaging schism too.

[Deleted]

You mentioned to avoid Shism - IcyVeigns guide gives it a tick, why don't you?

Schism is good for solo and 5 mans but in raids you barely have the time to cast it and if you did you would barely ever be able to make use of its full duration, thus lowering the value you get for the cast time and mana. Castigation is therefore regarded as superior for raids as it increases Penance dps while not increasing mana consumption.

[Leenaleena]

Thanks for the detailed replied. Our disc is a good player (but new to disc) and open to critisism/advice so I'll pass a lot of this on.

Our disc has 856ilvl and was always under 50k dps. I don't see any discs with decent Hps without high Dps so this might be part of the issue.

You mentioned to avoid Shism - IcyVeigns guide gives it a tick, why don't you?

No probs

With that ilvl, he/she really needs to step up their dps game. On Disc, DPS = HPS. You cannot push your hps, without also pushing the dps. However, and that's where I admit having had my own struggles at first: you also cannot just purely push dps and then expect your hps to miraculously follow along. It takes time, practice and in my opinion a great deal of gut instinct or intricate encounter knowledge to find the proper balance between the two. There are still fights where I do insane dps but sit at 50k hps. I obviously neglected the healing. On some fights, I align the atonements perfectly, shield and plea and SM the right people and congratulate myself on making it so neat....but completely forget to do damage, so there is no healing actually coming in.

Shism is...difficult. I don't claim being an expert, and I only losely follow(ed) beta discussions and current discussions on either forum or Discord. I tried it once and found it clunky. Shism itself costs a relatively high amount of mana for a very short-lived damage buff. It makes the already stressful "rotation" even more complicated but offers no real increase in either dps or hps. The time and mana it takes to weave in shism nullifies its advantage. The 4-tick penance in the same talent tier is just a no-cost, no-brain flat increase to your damage AND healing.

EDIT: I forgot to mention: If you happen to have any owls running around, give their innervates to the Disc. They'll kiss your feet in return. I personally hate asking for buffs, but slowly grow towards loving the innervate. It requires tuning (and voice chat) but it's absolutely game-changing for Discs.

[CptEgo]

I recommend watching Proper Bird on YouTube, she's in a top 40 guild and she is playing Discipline. She talks alot about the good and bad things about it. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoH...XLyWjox2nqqBSg

[Simulacrum]

Thanks for the detailed replied. Our disc is a good player (but new to disc) and open to critisism/advice so I'll pass a lot of this on.

Our disc has 856ilvl and was always under 50k dps. I don't see any discs with decent Hps without high Dps so this might be part of the issue.

You mentioned to avoid Shism - IcyVeigns guide gives it a tick, why don't you?

Schism is pretty bad if the disc has mana problems, especially in big raids. In a 10-12 man raid I'd pick schism every time, though. It takes no time at all to atone the entire raid in that setting, and to keep atonement up on everyone that needs it (something you can usually literally never do in larger raids), giving you tons of free time to not just cast schism but spam smites as well.

Imo, you should make your disc choose a playstyle. Either he should focus on keeping atonement up on as many people as possible throughout the fight, healing the raid with his DPS (he should easily do 200k+ hps and 100k+ dps this way, but won't be doing great spot-healing), or he should go grace and spam shadow mend on the tanks if neither of the other two healers are able to keep the tanks alive, which sounds like a problem you were having. Disc has insane single-target HPS with grace, so a disc focused on doing that is going to very easily keep the tanks alive... at least until he runs out of mana. I feel like this is really wasting their potential, though.

[Redfullmoon]

I had my doubts about disc to in till our new disc was putting out really good numbers i'm a holy priest
and the disc priest and me were neck and neck on alot of the fights there are some fights where disc isn't good
the spider boss and the heart of corruption. we tried some herioc to on first boss we didn't down it but it
wasn't couse of heals a few of our dps were low and a bit new but me and the other priest were pushing
out 200k+ heals on it. over all i'd say disc is viable. ill link my logs for this weekend.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/rhptJDzxnQacf347 first night

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/wGbYv47g8pjCLtXM second night

[Deleted]

I had my doubts about disc to in till our new disc was putting out really good numbers i'm a holy priest
and the disc priest and me were neck and neck on alot of the fights there are some fights where disc isn't good
the spider boss and the heart of corruption. we tried some herioc to on first boss we didn't down it but it
wasn't couse of heals a few of our dps were low and a bit new but me and the other priest were pushing
out 200k+ heals on it. over all i'd say disc is viable. ill link my logs for this weekend.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/rhptJDzxnQacf347 first night

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/wGbYv47g8pjCLtXM second night

He's casting 50-70 pleas per fight and has a total of two PW:R in four kills. I believe that's highly ineffective GCD wise.

[Deleted]

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statist...gregate=amount

Statistically speaking if your priest is anywhere close to your other healers he's doing ok or at least better than other healers. Doing half the hps of the rest though suggest he hasn't quite gotten to grips with the spec yet. Its probably just a case of being patient, most discs went from running significant amounts of 5 man content to raids which demands a fairly different style of healing.

My advice to your disc would be to do a bit of work on his holy spec.You can get it to a decent level without investing all that much artifact power, so he can use it on fights where he struggles with disc. Il'gynoth in particular right now is one disc priests seem to have trouble with as the damage is quite random and focused on small number of people at once.

[Goshko]

1. Should Disc be getting high HPS, comparable with Holy?
2. Is Ursoc a good fight for Disc? & what is a good fight for Disc?
3. What sort of DPS should Disc be doing?
4. What are the key identifiers of a good/bad Disc player?

[/B]

1.Depends on the boss, but on average, no.
2.It is depending on what you have him do. If he's spamhealing tanks don't expect anything close to amazing, heal of damage-wise. Best fight for disc in Emerald Nightmare is Dragons of nightmare.
3.That really depends on how well you execute the fight, what is he supposed to be doing and what the rest of your healing team is. Tank damage at best, usually lower.
4.Not sure what to tell you here. Being able to correctly switch playstyle depending on boss and group composition?

[Deleted]

3.That really depends on how well you execute the fight, what is he supposed to be doing and what the rest of your healing team is. Tank damage at best, usually lower.

I can't agree. I out dps the tank on basically every single target encounter and am at least always on par with them.

[Xadefinn]

Non-priest here looking for a little Disc info. I'll try and keep this short and sweet! Our guild have been doing Ursoc Heroic this evening in a 10man:
5 competent dps
2 competent tanks
3 decent healers - 1x mistweaver, 1x holy priest, 1x disc

We continually wiped due to tanks dying because they weren't getting healed enough. Mechanics weren't an issue - the tanks were always taunting before building stacks - but tanks often died.

A quick look at the metres showed that our Holy and Mistweaver had almost double the HPS of the disc. My understand (correct me if I'm wrong) is that the niche of Disc priest is efficient and large HPS on multiple targets, especially useful when expected big damage is taken (as opposed to unexpected raid damage as I believe Disc is not a great 'catch-up' healer).

My questions are:

1. Should Disc be getting high HPS, comparable with Holy?
2. Is Ursoc a good fight for Disc? & what is a good fight for Disc?
3. What sort of DPS should Disc be doing?
4. What are the key identifiers of a good/bad Disc player?

Thanks in advance Priest bros

1. It is fight dependent. Fights with raid wide mild to moderate ticking damage holy will outperform disc. If the damage is large and very predictable disc will be on top.
2. Ursoc is an amazing fight for disc. With regards to Emerald Nightmare the only two fights I would say are not good for disc are Illgynoth (random, unpredictable damage) and Cenarius (constant mild ticking damage over the entire fight).
3. They should be around tank dps.
4. When looking at logs check a few things. Power Word: Shield casts. This number should be high, the spell should be on CD constantly, no excuses. Look at times when the raid takes large chunks of predictable damage, i.e. Ursoc's charge/roar. Does the disc priests healing skyrocket right after? It should! This means the priest was well prepared, knew the mechanics, and blanketed the raid with attonement ahead of time for high burst aoe healing.

[Goshko]

I can't agree. I out dps the tank on basically every single target encounter and am at least always on par with them.

Props to your raid team, but you're very far from the average.

[Al Gorefiend]

I personally feel that a good Disc should be able to be within range of your 3 healers, but never at the top and that's perfectly fair. On Nythendra I out DPS'd both tanks and was within a 2% DPS difference from the lowest dps in the group. The raid should be understanding of the fact that taking a disc means you're trading off that bit of extra healing to down the boss quicker. That's really where we should be, and in a world of dehomogenizing the classes it's cool that they have various spots only they can fill.