Discipline jumping ship to Holy - Dawn of the new Bubble Bots

[Deleted]

Apologies up front before I offend anyone. I have mainly been raiding Holy in a casual guild with 'ok' progress (tier 11 cleared in 25) and tried to heal encounters on more than one occassion as Discpline.

My main hindrance is that the healing throughput is so reliant on cooldowns and that the absorbs (and thus mastery) is basically garbage at times, i.e. proccing Divine Aegis which doesn't gets used. In particular for stuff like healing up after a raid wide damage pulse - the DA is wasted since there's no damage following the pulse fast enough.

If anything, i'd like to see DA work more like EOL. Instead of letting it fade and let the absorb go to waste, let it turn it into a heal on fading (sort of like Lifebloom does). Or just increase the buff timer long enough. At least the mastery wouldn't be so useless then and i'd have more reliable throughput.

[Deleted]

This is coming from a holy paladin perspective, but i do have a disc priest i raid with.

Personally Grace just sucks in general for raid healing, its nice that you can have it on multiple targets purely so it doesnt drop off your tank when you heal others, but generally its just kack.

Paladins have healing throughput baseline, druids have to drop a HoT on the target for their mastery to give them throughput. Disc has to cast 3 heals on a person to get the throughput (or penance).

Just in general terms, thats 2 Sec cast for a holy paladin(as long as he keeps conviction up etc). Thats 1 gcd for a hot + 2sec for a druid (3.0-3.5 sec total), Or 6 seconds for a disc priest.

Its just to much time spent to get this up for raid healing.

Possible fixes without going back to bubble botting;
1) bake grace into baseline healing and remove it - tad boring

2) make grace cause your heals to then apply DA with 12% of its healing (or whatever max grace grace % was) - very like paladin mastery, but its got the added effect of you healing them keeps the DA stacks rolling from previous heals as there the same kind of shield. Making it better than the paladin mastery shields which mostly are wasted sue to overwrites and running out as its on a short duration etc.

3) Give priests a 2nd shield spell, a small shield with cheap cost that is spammable. Maybe bring a talent liek rapid renew. so it is meant to be spammed out on big aoes. Allows to keep the high mana cost on PW:Shield to maintain it for rapture proccing/tank heals only. Or saving lifes.

Now Personally ive always found disc doesnt have many spells it can use on the move compared to holy/resto druids etc.

But anyway, of the options. The first is the worst as it doesnt realy work well with the disc mastery. While 2 and 3 both do, which would make more sense from blizz's pov of making masteries actually useful.

[KnickKnack]

3) Give priests a 2nd shield spell, a small shield with cheap cost that is spammable. Maybe bring a talent liek rapid renew. so it is meant to be spammed out on big aoes. Allows to keep the high mana cost on PW:Shield to maintain it for rapture proccing/tank heals only. Or saving lifes.

This.

Only this time make this spell DISC ONLY.

[Deleted]

Ya disc only, holy has a decent renew as a bassically the same mechanic. But mini shields tie in with the disc ethos and mastery.

[nagina]

l2p issues only, this never ends as long wow excists.

[Sahjar]

Back in the Cataclysm Beta, there was talk of Discipline having a "Tank Shield" that could only be on one target at a time, and what amounted to a "Spam Shield." Attempting to force Power Word: Shield into filling both roles seems to be central to the balance issue; it's too powerful to be used as a raid-blanketing ability, or not powerful enough to be useful in pvp or tank healing.

The solution could be as simple as removing Soul Warding and replacing it with a talented ability such as (and I'm stealing from the old PW:Barrier):

Power Word: Brace
No Cooldown, Moderate Mana Cost, 40 yard range.
Absorbs X damage done to the target each time they take damage. Power Word: Brace lasts for Y sec or until it absorbs Z damage. Once braced, the target cannot be shielded or braced again for 15 sec.

Where Z is some amount of damage less than the amount that Power Word: Shield absorbs, Y is a relatively short period of time (maybe 15 seconds), and X is some percentage of Z.

This ability has the potential of letting damage through which makes it less powerful than PW:Shield, but it gives Disc another niche in dealing with Ticking-Damage-Aura type mechanics (which I know I hated in Wrath). It suffers from the same limitation in Weakened Soul, and prevents stacking both Brace and Shield on the same target. At this point, with the removal of Soul Warding, Power Word: Shield can be remain powerful and relatively mana efficient, since it's limited by cooldown.

[babylon]

without going into the whole mess with mana cost of shields followed by general nerf of discipline mana regen mechanics (rapture)

why did they buff shields for all 3 trees in the first place?

[Zeuq]

Folks, just work with it in the context of what we can understand Blizzard's framework to be:

Blizzard does not want us spamming PWS. Full stop. No arguing about the point of "Disc" being absorb or whatnot will change that. What solutions are there to incentivize Disc priests to invest in mastery, given that condition? Zeuq advocates creating a new "shield" spell that would be the Heal to PWS' Flash Heal. And then start modifying talents to make it work within the framework of Disc. However, that is doing a lot of work for little benefit. Why not just make heal *always* apply DA? That gives us a cheap way to apply shielding on someone in advance using a high HPM but low HPS shield. It feeds into our other talents by applying grace, etc. There is the elusive other shield that will help our spec. Possibly allow a cooldown that would turn that on for all of our spell in critical moments, though one is hardly necessary, I would think, and one has full use of our mastery while also maintaining the undesirability of spamming PWS. Does that mean we will suddenly start spamming Heal instead? No... because it does not have the capacity, alone, to do what blanked PWS provided. However, it gives us a way to, during pauses in damage taken, to shield up one or two targets (say... the tank and off tanks) with a decent chunk of DA (four/five Heals' worth) that would be noticable, especially on the back end of a PWS.

The problem with this is that you'd be casting Heal on high health targets for only 30% of it to go to absorbs. It wouldn't be very effective. However, this does give me a bit of another idea. How about reworking Soul Warding as a cooldown (probably around 30-60s) that converts X% (50-100%) of your healing done for some period (probably around 10s) to absorbs. Obviously, this would also require moving it down in the tree so it's inaccessible to Holy.

As such, if you can accurately predict the incoming damage you can get a PoH on several groups. It would essentially provide a CD that would turn PoH into one of the original PWB concepts of putting a shield on an entire group. And it would make Disc unmatched for handling predictable burst AOE damage, which I think fits perfectly with the absorb/mitigation nitch.

It could also be a powerful tank healing CD where, when you know some spike damage is coming, you use that to help increase the tank's effective health while other healers top him off, and suddenly, rather than a 120k hit dropping him to 50k, you can have a preemptive 60-70k on him and keep him above 100k. Again, I think this would fit perfectly with letting a good Disc priest take advantage of predictable burst damage.

So now you get the benefit of pre-emptive shielding, making them weaker, but much quicker to apply (5 casts vs. 25 casts), and limited by a CD. It also has fantastic synergy with Mastery, possibly even to the point that it would need to be nerfed a bit, and it would have good synergy with some talents like Inner Focus and possibly even Power Infusion.

What do you all think of that?

[Deleted]

Ok, u dont want bubbles ? we cant absorb efficiently because is waaaaayyyyyy to expensive. CHANGE our Mastery. What is the use of having 18 points in mastery if we dont have mana to even throw a fck.... shield ?!? Is this discipline thing new to blizz ?

[TiduZ]

Ok, u dont want bubbles ? we cant absorb efficiently because is waaaaayyyyyy to expensive. CHANGE our Mastery. What is the use of having 18 points in mastery if we dont have mana to even throw a fck.... shield ?!? Is this discipline thing new to blizz ?

Yep, I spend two months accumulating 21 mastery because even in 4.0.3 mastery was good and shields were in a decent spot. Now my gear is terribly itemized and I am not even rolling on gear anymore since disc is broken and holy will probably get changed soon.

It's nice that blizzard gives you a free talent reset on patchday, it would be nice if they gave disc priests a free gear itemization swap after this piece of shit patch they sent our way. Swap your 372 spirit/mastery gear for some spirit/haste or haste/mastery or w/e you want, would be nice being able to raid and look forward to gear and not have 2 months of gearing up thrown down the toilet in one retarded nerf by blizzard.

IM SO GLAD I GOT 21 MASTERY SO I CAN USE PWS IN TIGHT SITUATIONS LOL

[gotpriest]

Yep, I spend two months accumulating 21 mastery because even in 4.0.3 mastery was good and shields were in a decent spot. Now my gear is terribly itemized and I am not even rolling on gear anymore since disc is broken and holy will probably get changed soon.

It's nice that blizzard gives you a free talent reset on patchday, it would be nice if they gave disc priests a free gear itemization swap after this piece of shit patch they sent our way. Swap your 372 spirit/mastery gear for some spirit/haste or haste/mastery or w/e you want, would be nice being able to raid and look forward to gear and not have 2 months of gearing up thrown down the toilet in one retarded nerf by blizzard.

IM SO GLAD I GOT 21 MASTERY SO I CAN USE PWS IN TIGHT SITUATIONS LOL

So I'm supposed to feel sorry for you because you completely and utterly geared for one stat? You should have known better in the first place. Blizzard has always made it their goal to make multiple stats useful and not have classes stacking one solitary stat.

I'm not going to have any sympathy for a class spec that now has to render benefits from Haste, Mastery, and Crit instead of just Mastery now. None whatsoever. You dug your own hole Tiduz, and to be honest, every continued whiny post you make on this forum only serves to reinforce the idea that you found a clever spec, abused it, and now are pissed off that you're not getting your free epics.

Reforging, regemming, and reenchanting are all there for a reason.

[Vook]

l2p issues only, this never ends as long wow excists.

Idiots, they will never cease posting as long as WoW exists.

I agree with ContentsMayVary and Tortillagirl. Mastery is now shit because we're not supposed to use Shields often. It's like if they made Holy's mastery increase the healing of Flash Heal. I mean, cmon, WTF blizz? Even more than that, the mana increase to them further decreases the net mana gain from Rapture, our main source of non-spirit regen. This makes it so that until you've got about 100k max mana (and be specced into Mental Agility and be in Inner will), Rapture doesn't give you any mana back, it just makes your shield free every 12 seconds. So this essentially fucks Disc for normal dungeons and heroics, while you're still doing them for gear.

And yes, having a small, cheap, spammable shield for raid healing would be nice. Make it not proc Rapture though, and be low enough healing that you can't just spam it to get insane hps.

[Deleted]

just wanna say this to who is thinking holy is dominant:

DISCIPLINE priest is always on top..

well holy is kind funny to play atm but in the otherside disci is still powerfull if u can manage to use ur cd and spell.. is not just about bubbles spam.
Atm i'm healing in 10 men raid doing the same amount that the others 2 healers do (pala/pala; pala/druid). if u know how to play the priest u can't argue right now... we are in a good state.. but if u like to complain and u desire a huge nerf the road to obtain it is easy

[Siri]

Reforging, regemming, and reenchanting are all there for a reason.

Because reforging 40% of a bad stat is equivalent to having 100% of the good stat already

[timmyotoole]

Yep, I spend two months accumulating 21 mastery because even in 4.0.3 mastery was good and shields were in a decent spot. Now my gear is terribly itemized and I am not even rolling on gear anymore since disc is broken and holy will probably get changed soon.

It's nice that blizzard gives you a free talent reset on patchday, it would be nice if they gave disc priests a free gear itemization swap after this piece of shit patch they sent our way. Swap your 372 spirit/mastery gear for some spirit/haste or haste/mastery or w/e you want, would be nice being able to raid and look forward to gear and not have 2 months of gearing up thrown down the toilet in one retarded nerf by blizzard.

IM SO GLAD I GOT 21 MASTERY SO I CAN USE PWS IN TIGHT SITUATIONS LOL

Wait wait wait, back it up. From what I’m reading shield spam really isn’t dead, especially not in 10s, but those of us who didn’t bubble spam still get 40%ish heals from bubbles, which is quite a bit and thats ignoring DA. What other secondary stat is going to compete with that? Haste?

[Kelesti]

Wait wait wait, back it up. From what I’m reading shield spam really isn’t dead, especially not in 10s, but those of us who didn’t bubble spam still get 40%ish heals from bubbles, which is quite a bit and thats ignoring DA. What other secondary stat is going to compete with that? Haste?

TiduZ, being the person that he is, is talking about spamming cheap shields as Holy, without fear of going OoM thanks to the hotfix to Body and Soul.

Which makes Mastery worthless, continuing to play a style Blizzard wants to break, will result in another hotfix, and all for the sake of continuing to top World of Logs so he can say "I'm the best!", and anyone arguing with him doesn't matter because he's "#1".

[ZippyDoodle]

But of course, it's not just bubble botting. It's also Circle of Healing! Perhaps even a Renew or two. Certainly a better Shield:Heal ratio than Discipline had.

The question is, what will Blizzard do about it now? Will they let this slide? How can they? They can't fix this with a hotfix. I'll put my gold on them reverting the change to Body & Soul and then pretending they ever had a concern for Holy's mana for shields.

So, the discussion/point of this new thread is:

• How long will Blizzard let Holy bubbles go on for? A week again? A month?
• What is a viable change to Discipline now, rather than in 4.1 or 4.2, that can draw people back to it?
• Will the Discipline tree be changed? Not only to "improve" (be it throughput or to make it more appealing to others), but to stop Holy using bubble spam (goodbye low-in-the-tree [Soul Warding]).

And anything else I missed. Would rather have the discussion going on in one topic rather than having the State of Disc thread filled with Holy bubble specs and other threads.

I don't see this being viable for holy honestly.


Holy's raw throughput is still way higher using actual healing spells vs mitigation spells.

[timmyotoole]

TiduZ, being the person that he is, is talking about spamming cheap shields as Holy, without fear of going OoM thanks to the hotfix to Body and Soul.

Which makes Mastery worthless, continuing to play a style Blizzard wants to break, will result in another hotfix, and all for the sake of continuing to top World of Logs so he can say "I'm the best!", and anyone arguing with him doesn't matter because he's "#1".

I still don’t really get that whole thing. None of his numbers were massively better than these specs can produce normally and “topping” the charts was from the heal sniping inherent to shields.

[KaPe]

It's almost as if Echoes of Light and Holy spec in general wasn't designed with Shield spam in mind. And even though these shields are quite a bit weaker, it's still bypassing the intent of the hotfix. You can't look at Body&Soul and say with a straight face that purpose of this talent was to be chain spammed for speed buff. Rushed and lazy hotfix resulted in somewhat nerfed, but still very similiar bubble spam, except it won't scale with anything other than int, but is still very powerful.
There's also something about Tiduz being best priest evar, but maybe it's just me imagining things.

I still don’t really get that whole thing. None of his numbers were massively better than these specs can produce normally and “topping” the charts was from the heal sniping inherent to shields.

I think Blizzard was quite clear they didn't want bubble spam. Sure they meant Disc, but it's not like Holy version is somehow 'better' (not hps wise, but design wise), other than using instant casts, which Disc doesn't have anyway. Obviously the difference won't be massive, since Mastery scaling was big part of Disc hps... which even further proves the point, that competing for top spot by spamming spell that doesn't benefit from anything Holy has can't possibly be intended.

[Siri]

I don't see this being viable for holy honestly.


Holy's raw throughput is still way higher using actual healing spells vs mitigation spells.

Not if there isn't raid wide damage going on at the time. Sometimes you can look at the raid and come to the conclusion that "no, it isn't worth casting PoH right now", that's when you start shielding and it's insanely effective.