Leveling disc priests should have a proving grounds of sorts to queue for dungeons.

[Omedon]

No, I don't actually believe the hyperbolic extreme of the thread title, but god damn, something has to be done about the discipline skill floor.

Yes, I know, dear hardcore reader... your dick is huge and you disc heal mythic+agjillion with one hand tied behind your back, you're so skilled. All hail.

But the leveling disc priest, responsible for the same workload as every other healing spec... is half a healing spec in the hands of an unskilled or newer player, far more so than if they chose any other healing class. There needs to be a frank discussion about the skill floor, the role of the dungeon finder, the social mores of said dungeon finder, and the "master of none" that is the still leveling, still gearing disc priest.

I've heard holy paladins have a rough time leveling, but at least their core gameplay has a single bank of targets: the party. You heal the party. That's the core of what you do (yes you can do damage but it's not required for you to do your core job). Like every other "full healing class" from level one to cap. The disc priest, almost from the get go, has to juggle the party and the enemies. Now yes, O big dicked reader, that's not a lot to ask of you... but everyone is new once, and literally every other class has an easier ride at healing. By a lot. And people will choose the class they think looks cool, and think "well this is a AAA head of its genre, clearly it's developed well so my experience will be reaonably on-ramped and approachable just like everyone else's." They'll be wrong, they will struggle, and it will show.

As a career tank, flanked by career healer friends who come and go from the game these days, we are in universal agreement that a good disc priest is a superhero, but a new or "more enthusiast than expert" disc priest is the weakest link of their group. By an obvious lead.

I can't be the only one seeing a problem here. Why isn't this a bigger discussion? Disc started BFA where they should be: good enough at both damage and self sustain to solo effectively (the only priest spec that could claim that), and maybe a bit OP in groups. Honestly, that's how you do a class like that. A jack of all trades. They went from the jack of all trades to the master of none. You can't have a master of none still responsible for healing a 5-man group that can't be expected to care how new they are, as well as a similar player using a different class. "The holy priest was fine, what's wrong with you newbiedisc?"

Again, your dick is huge O hardcore reader, but this is an issue. It just is.

WoW has had this problem for a while where classes have strengths and weaknesses and baked in "difficulty levels" from one to another, which in theory is fine, but when the weakness of the class is SOLOING (don't get me started) or in this thread's case "learning to do what the community expects of you," those baked-in difficulty levels are just manifesting in bad ways. It's a bad concept.

Solutions I can possibly think of:

1) Go back to "smart atonement." Let them be DPSers that throw the odd heal and don't have to do so as a way to keep atonement active. Make atonement passive. I beg you. Make them the chloromancer from RIFT.

2) Give them a fully supported, switch-flipping talent or two that gives them a fully viable "you just heal the party" playstyle. I'm sure some big-dicked hardcore superhero can make the current iteration sing, but there needs to be an approachable on-ramp to the class. I've tried it, it's too much.

The whole "the disc priest just needs to anticipate the phases of the fight-" idea is a flowery way of saying "don't be new." We do that enough to new tanks, and EVERYONE IS NEW ONCE. This is not a sustainable or fair model for tanks, and it's not fair for one healing spec out of many!

High ceiling, some people's dicks are big enough to hold that ceiling up, but there needs to be an idiot-proof skill floor because some players, bless their hearts, are idiots, and I need to be able to rely on them even if disc priest fits the character they want to play. I honestly can't do that right now. My whole gang groans when they see health yo-yo'ing in a dungeon and, without fail, confirm that the priest is a disc priest.

Some of you are great, some of you are not. You all need to be as useful as the newbie [insert other healing class here], and that's not happening. That needs to change.

Thank you for reading, regardless of dick size.

[DazManianDevil]

No, I don't actually believe the hyperbolic extreme of the thread title. Muh Dick.

I haven't personally touched Disc at low levels in quite a while, you make me want to try it.
Similar to your plight seems to be leveling Brew master Monks, and most Prot Paladins even into end game.
Maybe it's just me, but I've yet to run with a single Prot Pally since Tomb that didn't feel like a wet napkin to heal.

They're the rarest of all tanks in my M+ PuGs, but they may have better representation in dedicated teams, I haven't checked the rankings.

I'll be honest I didn't read the entire OP, but Disc never seemed that hard to me, even when compared to other leveling healers.
Yes you can't play it the same and sometimes it's hard to come back once you fall behind, but it just promotes a more aggressive and pro-active style in my experience.

[LordVargK]

Proving grounds was the best thing to be implemented into the game. Fight me.

In MoP (praised be it) proving grounds were introduced and in WoD it got useful: As a requirement to queue heroic dungeons. Why they abandoned that requirement is beyond me. Maybe because nobody played WoD and thus all that was changed in WoD got reversed (obviously not true), but yeah.
For any role/spec there should be a test before you are released upon other players in the lfg/lfr. Of course that comes with the downside of not being able to change specs in a dungeon (or only change to specs which you have "unlocked") and surely there are lots of other problems with that. But it would be more effective than any nerfs to lfr bosses can ever be. Also it would give trainers a purpose again

[DazManianDevil]

Proving grounds was the best thing to be implemented into the game. Fight me.

In MoP (praised be it) proving grounds were introduced and in WoD it got useful: As a requirement to queue heroic dungeons. Why they abandoned that requirement is beyond me. Maybe because nobody played WoD and thus all that was changed in WoD got reversed (obviously not true), but yeah.
For any role/spec there should be a test before you are released upon other players in the lfg/lfr. Of course that comes with the downside of not being able to change specs in a dungeon (or only change to specs which you have "unlocked") and surely there are lots of other problems with that. But it would be more effective than any nerfs to lfr bosses can ever be.

*Rolls up sleeves for a round of fisticuffs*
I'm of a different mind set. I distinctly recall doing my first ever Proving Grounds dps as a Prot Pally, by mistake. Got Silver, died 15th of 15 rounds for gold and didn't go back til WoD, when it was required to queue for Heroics.

So I do my Silver trials, on every alt. Only to wipe endlessly in Heroics with people who also got Silver, who wouldn't interrupt or move out of fire and blame me for their deaths.

I'd be on board for proving grounds to come back, provided they had a certain degree of randomized mob spawns with different spells/CCs. I fear too many people got Silver back in the day by mindlessly grinding it, or copying a video and not actually learning a damned thing
Or heck, even something like ilvl locked Horrific Visions as they exist now.
"Before you may fight Nzoth, you must traverse the perils of a Horrific Vision, alone and unaided. Only then may your mettle be up to the task"

Granted this has it's own slew of issues and isn't perfect, but fuck did I hate that tiny room with lizard folk and mantid casing me in amber!

[Popastique]

Why would you level as a disc priest when holy does the job better in dungeons as you level up? Disc only shines at max lvl when you have all your core talents and spells available, and that is the starting point for many disc priests. I myself switched to disc from rdruid back in Uldir while progressing mythic and learned all the things from the start, spent quite a few hours learning timings/spells/setting UI.

Maybe a few changes here and there would make disc priest leveling more smooth and better for new players, but i doubt Blizz will implement such.

[Barzotti]

To the OP: disc is very enjoyable and well designed currently, please let it that way.

I'll be honest I didn't read the entire OP, but Disc never seemed that hard to me, even when compared to other leveling healers.
Yes you can't play it the same and sometimes it's hard to come back once you fall behind, but it just promotes a more aggressive and pro-active style in my experience.

While it may seem easy (you're not overloaded with buttons like resto shaman, dps rotation is pretty straightforward), there's a lot of finesse. The same way Legion Shadow Priest had only a few buttons but was difficult to master. I watched Moadmoad's stream (EU disc priest who timed +22/+23s) a couple of times and it requires more planning than the other healing specs to deal with some affixes like Bursting and Grievous. Shit can hit the fan quickly and you don't really have a deus ex machina button or an easy way to recover. The difference between skilled and average disc priests is night and day.

[LordVargK]

*Rolls up sleeves for a round of fisticuffs*
I'm of a different mind set. I distinctly recall doing my first ever Proving Grounds dps as a Prot Pally, by mistake. Got Silver, died 15th of 15 rounds for gold and didn't go back til WoD, when it was required to queue for Heroics.

So I do my Silver trials, on every alt. Only to wipe endlessly in Heroics with people who also got Silver, who wouldn't interrupt or move out of fire and blame me for their deaths.

I'd be on board for proving grounds to come back, provided they had a certain degree of randomized mob spawns with different spells/CCs. I fear too many people got Silver back in the day by mindlessly grinding it, or copying a video and not actually learning a damned thing
Or heck, even something like ilvl locked Horrific Visions as they exist now.
"Before you may fight Nzoth, you must traverse the perils of a Horrific Vision, alone and unaided. Only then may your mettle be up to the task"

Granted this has it's own slew of issues and isn't perfect, but fuck did I hate that tiny room with lizard folk and mantid casing me in amber!

Well, I think you have beaten me

No, the WoD implementation of Proving Ground is far from perfect. But the principle should not have been abandoned. BfA tested various new technologies in that regard and I'm sure that Blizz could deliver a much more "fleshed out" version of the PG. IF they wanted too and had time and ressources for it. Which they lack atm, I think. But think about the mage tower at a much smaller scale. A test, that checks movement, usage of skills and throughput. Semi-randomized. Can't be just outgeared. Something you can't just learn off of Youtube. That would be my dream and maybe the moment I would consider using the lf tool again.

[Tradu]

They have a talent that swaps them to a more traditional healer. Press N and respec Holy.

[Azerate]

You're bringing up some good points, but wow has always been tragically bad at introducing new players to the gameplay and it seems they don't intend to change that and expect 3rd party sites to do that job for them.

I do think they have something on the starting screen though, that tells you which spec is recommended for a new player for a given class. That's probably as far as it will go.

[Ragedaug]

Proving grounds was the best thing to be implemented into the game. Fight me.

In MoP (praised be it) proving grounds were introduced and in WoD it got useful: As a requirement to queue heroic dungeons. Why they abandoned that requirement is beyond me. Maybe because nobody played WoD and thus all that was changed in WoD got reversed (obviously not true), but yeah.
For any role/spec there should be a test before you are released upon other players in the lfg/lfr. Of course that comes with the downside of not being able to change specs in a dungeon (or only change to specs which you have "unlocked") and surely there are lots of other problems with that. But it would be more effective than any nerfs to lfr bosses can ever be. Also it would give trainers a purpose again

Agreed 100% with proving grounds, just not sure how it's implemented for the leveling process. Would love to see it implemented for end game before any level cap dungeon and LFR.

And I'd put the queue for proving grounds in the LFR/LFD interface, so like dungeons would be grayed out, but the new user could see the proving grounds option available.

[Puri]

Actually I am wondering if you even leveled a disc/holy priest lately.

Disc healing (the direct heal shadowmend as well as radiance (the initial cast only, not talking about following atonement healing)) is vastly superior to the approriate holy abilites (FH and poh) fully heirloomed up until ~lvl 100. They heal around 100% more, you can just play it as holy variant with pws and penance as jokers. Using atonement healing is completely optional while leveling.

Only starting with Legion your direct healing abilities start to fall behind their holy counterparts, and the issues that disc has also in the current endgame start to show. But I don't see why this would be an issue, considering you can switch to holy anytime you like.

[qactuar]

The subject of this thread is specifically disc spec, not really how it compares to holy nor the notion that 'well holy's fine, just play holy'. It's about the belief that disc is rough to play for a newcomer, and that it places an undue burden on the others in group content having to contend with a healer who's likely not being very effective. Assuming a new player sees disc and wants to level up as that, what can be done to make the spec easier to learn/play?

[Omedon]

Why would you level as a disc priest when holy does the job better in dungeons as you level up? Disc only shines at max lvl when you have all your core talents and spells available, and that is the starting point for many disc priests.

And yet people can, and they do. And suck at it. yet they're allowed to. Thus the thread.

You basically proved my point.

Someone reads the concepts for the disc priest, likes the lore flavor, and rolls disc.

They are already at a disadvantage. They have every right to try to enjoy that concept, but they're fighting an uphill battle. On other peoples' time.

That's ridiculous.

[crakerjack]

That's just the case when people don't know how to play their class. I don't mind playing with people who are inept, but they have to promise me or show through action that they'll work on becoming better and better. If someone wants to play a fraction of their class and can't possibly be burdened to become better for the sake of others, then I just won't play with them. Not trying to say that with a snobby tone, but if someone doesn't care how they perform, especially if meters show they're very inept, they probably don't care about doing challenging content in the first place.

[Popastique]

Someone reads the concepts for the disc priest, likes the lore flavor, and rolls disc.

They are already at a disadvantage. They have every right to try to enjoy that concept, but they're fighting an uphill battle. On other peoples' time.

That's ridiculous.

It is an uphill battle only if they choose it to be so. No one is forcing them to go blindly about it. You can read guides, read abilities, learn timings and improve. Thing is - you can't just play disc priest like rdruid or holy pala where the concept is pretty simple, therefore you need to get better.

Let's just imagine you simplify the whole 1-120 leveling concept for disc priests, make them less about damage+heal combo and more about : simply press X to heal player or press Y to heal party - what will they do once they hit 120 and that concept is taken away from them? They will either quickly abandon that spec or get better. So i don't see the need to change the leveling process, those who wish to master disc spec - will do so.

[Omedon]

It is an uphill battle only if they choose it to be so. No one is forcing them to go blindly about it. You can read guides, read abilities, learn timings and improve. Thing is - you can't just play disc priest like rdruid or holy pala where the concept is pretty simple, therefore you need to get better.

.

Ok but that's... you're still proving...

You know what? Never mind. Be well in life.

[Razion]

A lot of the issue with Disc at the low end is applying the Atonement before they can heal. A stance where you swap between single target or multi target healing that is automatically applied to the friendly target with the lowest amount of health would probably be best in terms of making it accessible to more people. Disc would still need a way to focus healing into specific targets even when they aren't low on health while still maintaining the most important part of the appeal of Disc which is not having to actually target friendly players. I think targeted location or aimed spells much in the way Divine Star, Halo, or HW:S function would work, if they were inefficient but spammable so in these situations you could still direct healing without actually having to target the players still. Another method is to make a CD of sorts that replicates healing, perhaps as a HoT, or perhaps to duplicate outgoing healing in the way maybe Ascendance works for Resto Shaman so that you can still get healing out to targets who still need triage but aren't yet low enough to be prioritized by heals made by damage. One final method to consider may be a second stance that swaps between the normal distribution of healing to the most damaged targets to controls that invert heal targets with the least amount of missing health (while still having missing health, or heal absorbs, etc).

[Popastique]

Ok but that's... you're still proving...

You know what? Never mind. Be well in life.

You too, and unless disc undergoes a big change in SL ( which i doubt it will ) - things will stay the same. And hope your *gang* always finds a good healer who wishes to improve himself/herself.

[LedZeppelin]

All OP is saying is that disc has a much higher skill floor than the other healing spec and he is 100% correct. There should probably be a little more of an 'on-ramp' to the disc spec than there is currently.

[LordVargK]

The Chakra Stance swap from Mists where in one stance you focused any damage you dealt automatically as healing into the most damaged party member, while the other stance split any damage you dealt automatically into healing across multiple targets. The one thing about Chakra back in the day people didn't like was having the two dedicated buttons to press to switch between the two stances. But the buttons could be consolidated into one that you press that switches to the other one.

Atonement was an answer to a problem where you couldn't focus healing into targets who weren't the most damage, even if they were going to be beaten down by lots of damage and needed to be healed up quickly in order to survive multiple spikes of large amounts of damage. I still think Atonement could stick around to serve this function, but applying Atonement to do this would be on longer cooldown so that it wasn't how you base-line did all of your healing - so you didn't spend all of your time applying Atonement.

A lot of the issue with Disc while leveling is applying Atonement and how that converts from the damage you deal - everyone just gets the same amount regardless of if there's one or multiple targets, but applying multiple Atonements is what costs mana. But in reality, you should probably have more or less damaging abilities that line up in mana costs to slow and efficient or fast and inefficient heals that other healers are using as their balancing baseline, while the switching between single-target and multi-target healing taking up effectively none of your GCD - if Chakra stance swapping on the same button was off GCD for example, it would be really easy for healers who heal by dealing damage to just focus on the intensity of their spells, and how that converts to healing rather than having to worry about applying Atonement before they can heal at all outside of a few outlier abilities. And maybe one damaging ability can increase healing effectiveness when split with the multi Chakra so it can be considered your dedicated heal damaging button, even when there's only one target to damage available.

Chakra was a holy thing and did never worked the way you described it. In MoP it was single target chakra, multi target chakra and damage chakra. But the last one did not support healing at all. You are describing Mistwalker monks in MoP, which had a button to switch between healing and dps/healing. Stance of the crane it was called I think. And Atonement was implemented to combat smart heals. And keep in mind that discipline is by design a proactive spec. All other healers are reactive, but discipline should not have the healing potential of other healers, because they do damage while actively healing. The problem is, that this does not fit into WoW. The shield disc was always a problem, because sometimes raids took no damage at all, cause of the shields. Now their healing is too strong. Also disc profits from damage amplifiers, which sometimes is huge.

The best option would maybe to display a warning for newer players. Something like "This spec is intended for experienced players, your dungeon experience might suffer if this spec is played without knowledge".