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

[Evrx]

Yes it was. I pvp'd heavily in TBC - Disc was -the- priest spec for pvp. No one played holy - there just wasn't the survivability.

Actually, holy was very good throughout season 1 in TBC and for a while in season 2. Disc was only really viable in 2v2 in season 1. You probably recall the often quoted 27/33/0 cookie cutter spec that was heavily used at the beginning of TBC.

This was because originally, at lower resilience levels, blessed resilience was superior to focused will. What changed was that in Season 2, the available resilience and other factors increased priest survivability to make disc's mana efficiency and utility overtake the the advantage that blessed resilience had over focused will.

[Mazi]

Actually, holy was very good throughout season 1 in TBC and for a while in season 2. Disc was only really viable in 2v2 in season 1. You probably recall the often quoted 27/33/0 cookie cutter spec that was heavily used at the beginning of TBC.

This was because originally, at lower resilience levels, blessed resilience was superior to focused will. What changed was that in Season 2, the available resilience and other factors increased priest survivability to make disc's mana efficiency and utility overtake the the advantage that blessed resilience had over focused will.

I didn't pvp in S1 - but I don't ever recall Holy being any sort of good - I did 2s, 3s and 5s up to 2k :\

But I guess you're saying just S1?

[Evrx]

But I guess you're saying just S1?

Yeah, pretty much. Though season 1 was wacky for other reasons as well. I remember there were was a short period of time in season one, maybe a couple of weeks, when prayer of mending had no cooldown and it was impossible to die while you still had mana because you could just spam it on yourself. Yeah, prayer of mending originally had zero cooldown, haha. This was finally corrected in 2.0.10.

[ContentsMayVary]

Most of us would not, that's the very reason we went holy. Unfortunately, there will always be people that want to win at the meterz by pressing one button and think they are good healers. That's why we are already seeing people adopt Tiduz's holy shield spamming spec. It's unfortunate that people can't just play the way the developers intended, using a multiple of healing spells. Now disc and/or holy or both will receive even more nerfs to PW:Shield because people like Tiduz find it fun to exploit shields at the expense of the other healers on his team.

Yep, because Holy can't do that by just casting PoH. Oh no.

The problem here is that Blizzard's solution to PW:S being overpowered was a bad one.
Since shields are Disc's defining characteristic (as reflected by their mastery) then a solution must include the ability to cast shields quite a bit. Otherwise, what exactly is the point of Disc compared to Holy? Penance?



---------- Post added 2011-02-17 at 05:07 PM ----------

The Pally forums have erupted in exactly the same hue and cry with each round of nerfs to bring them in line too, and guess what - they are still great healers and great tanks. The sky isn't falling.

They are truely great tank healers indeed - to the extent that, given the choice, you would NEVER pick a disc priest over a pallie for tank healing.

[Deleted]

They are truely great tank healers indeed - to the extent that, given the choice, you would NEVER pick a disc priest over a pallie for tank healing.

I don't see why not. This isn't wrath where palas were all but essential to not let your tanks die. Almost any spec can tank hal fine - and disc has a lot of good cooldowns to go with it. Priests and shamans also have an advantage over palas for tank healing in the form of a 10% physical damage reduction buff.

So what is it paladins bring that makes them essential tank healers?

[hikamiro]

Please switch Soul Warding with Power Infusion, and buff the raid healing mechanics of discipline.
Thanks.

[ContentsMayVary]

IAlmost any spec can tank hal fine - and disc has a lot of good cooldowns to go with it.

Holy priest is therefore as good as Disc, in which case why take a Disc priest rather than a Holy one, when Holy has a better toolbox?

[TiduZ]

The funny thing is, I have played holy for like, 5 hours since togc came out, and I am terrible at it. During magmaw's inactive phase I was pulling spells out of my spellbook and putting them on the bar because I didnt have time before the pull, and on some fights I had like 80% uptime on chakra because I didnt have an indicator on my UI for it yet. Not only that, my gear is all focused on mastery which does very little for this holy spec (spirit/haste would be awesome). If I actually had the proper gear and I had my UI setup like I do now I could of done much better, and I don't doubt tons of people will pass my parses using the same spec this week. It's really quite powerful. Mana as holy is actually better than disc when you have the overpowered holy 4 piece, and the other spells holy has are way better than the shit that disc is left with. CoH is a solid 40k heal for 1 gcd and poh is only competitive for disc when the damage pulses and uses DA and even then you sorta need archangel to really compete.

What blizz needs to do to fix disc is basically buff poh ~10%, revert the mana cost of pw:s to 4.0.6 levels and nerf the absorb so that its around ~25k after mastery with 369 ilvl (my pws was 34k). Maybe a bit less than 25k but meh ^^. It should obviously be much lower than that w/o mastery and thus not great for holy.

There is no reason to play disc aside from PW:B until blizzard fixes this shit. I am personally fairly pissed off that I have a full gearset of mastery/spirit which is now completely worthless, except for every once in a blue moon when I cast pw:s "in tight situations". If I had 17x180 more haste rating instead of 17x180 mastery rating, my holy parses would be absolutely ridiculous.

@spiritus - I suggest you try and control yourself when posting zealously about the evils of too much PW:S usage, you don't understand how disc is supposed to play and spreading bad advice that gets picked up by people who don't know any better isn't helping WoW. It was obvious PW:S was overpowered, but using pw:s a lot is the best way for discipline to play. I think around 50% healing coming from pw:s is a good thing, and being able to heal when other classes are waiting for damage is a rewarding aspect of playing disc, or at least it was. I hope you can see that when you play now but if you can't, try and keep it to yourself.

[Aliahna]

He's not exploiting anything, he's providing a huge benefit to his raid. He's not exploiting, he's simply playing at an optimal level. It's unfortunate you can't understand such a concept and the niche that discipline had in raids. But hey, all this crying got us somewhere, right?

I would expect this response from you because it is no secret that you enjoyed spamming one button as well. The fact it while it may not be an "exploit" he didn't provide as much to the raid as you would like to believe. Just as he's not providing that much benefit now doing it as holy.

Another thing people need to remember is that just because one player does it, and it appears "effective" on meters it has more to do with the nature of PW:S getting first dibs than heals than anything else. Therefore the potential for abuse is high with the spell, which we've seen thanks to Tiduz. Again, more nerfs are probably incoming because it's not what Blizzard intended.

I personally don't think the increased mana cost of the spell was the answer to the problem, but that is not the topic of this thread.

---------- Post added 2011-02-17 at 11:44 AM ----------

...or Tiduz, disc priests can push the parsing programs like WoLs to calculate the mitigation/absorb value of Power Word: Barrier. I have no doubt if that was figured into the meters people would quit saying disc priests are underpowered, because they aren't.

[Memoryz]

I would expect this response from you because it is no secret that you enjoyed spamming one button as well. The fact it while it may not be an "exploit" he didn't provide as much to the raid as you would like to believe. Just as he's not providing that much benefit now doing it as holy.

Another thing people need to remember is that just because one player does it, and it appears "effective" on meters it has more to do with the nature of PW:S getting first dibs than heals than anything else. Therefore the potential for abuse is high with the spell, which we've seen thanks to Tiduz. Again, more nerfs are probably incoming because it's not what Blizzard intended.

I personally don't think the increased mana cost of the spell was the answer to the problem, but that is not the topic of this thread.

Yea, you're right. I spammed one button to victory.
Didn't prayer of healing.
Didn't PoM, didn't Barrier when the situation came.
Didn't flash heal the tank for emergency heals.

I just used that one button.
Your ignorance is laughable.

I agree shield's were too potent. They just needed to decrease the absorb. But gutting a disc priest with the inability to pre-shield is just awful.

[Aliahna]

I agree shield's were too potent. They just needed to decrease the absorb. But gutting a disc priest with the inability to pre-shield is just awful.

If people keep making excuses for this playstyle eventually PW:S won't be worth casting for anyone. I'm not sure Blizzard ever intended for disc priests to be able to "pre-shield" the entire raid, it actually appears that they don't. So as long as priests continue to find ways to do that, Blizzard will probably continue to find ways to discourage it. That's just my guess though.

[deneweth]

I think they need to sit down and reassess what they want discipline to be and how PW:S fits in as tool for both holy and disc. There are too many outdated ideas that were designed with WotLK healing in mind and simply just don't work in cataclysm.

I'm not sure its possible to make PW:S viable to holy without making it over powered for disc. The reason being that holy has too many tools already. Where is the concern for renew being viable for disc? Holy had renew turned into another aoe tool for them, but shield spam shouldn't be viable? IMO renew fits my vision of disc being mobile while holy didn't really need the aoe help and has stronger cast time heals.

The mistake they made was disc's mastery and talent tree spotlight PW:S as one of the defining aspects of the spec. They tried to be smart and design a unique playstyle without practicality in mind. Shields are great in theory but too hard to balance. Its impossible to find a sweet spot between faceroll shield everyone, and requiring skill at predicting damage. Being a proactive shielder will always be more difficult than a reactive healer, and yields no benefit.

[Liliyah]

If people keep making excuses for this playstyle eventually PW:S won't be worth casting for anyone. I'm not sure Blizzard ever intended for disc priests to be able to "pre-shield" the entire raid, it actually appears that they don't. So as long as priests continue to find ways to do that, Blizzard will probably continue to find ways to discourage it. That's just my guess though.

We don't do it necessarily because we find spamming PW:S to be entertaining, we do it because it's the best damn thing we can do. And we'll keep doing it until Blizzard nerfs shield spam into the ground(or takes it away) or if they make actual heals more attractive to cast. =\

[Memoryz]

We don't do it necessarily because we find spamming PW:S to be entertaining, we do it because it's the best damn thing we can do. And we'll keep doing it until Blizzard nerfs shield spam into the ground(or takes it away) or if they make actual heals more attractive to cast. =\

Exactly. Nothing in our healing arsenal is good enough.

[Aliahna]

We don't do it necessarily because we find spamming PW:S to be entertaining, we do it because it's the best damn thing we can do. And we'll keep doing it until Blizzard nerfs shield spam into the ground(or takes it away) or if they make actual heals more attractive to cast. =\

Well most priests can say that, others cannot. I hate to keep mentioning the name, but he's probably the reason this thread was created so you know who I'm referring to. You cannot tell me that he spammed PW:S as a holy priest last night because it was the "best damn thing he could do." No he did it because he knows it is very effective at heal sniping and thus making him look good on the meters. That is the only reason he did it. Now, we will probably see even more nerfs thanks to his demonstration on how effective shields are at taking first dibs at damage. Unfortunately as long as there are priests playing like this and drawing so much attention to the spell, Blizzard will keep "tuning" it.

[PlatedPriest]

I think they need to sit down and reassess what they want discipline to be and how PW:S fits in as tool for both holy and disc. There are too many outdated ideas that were designed with WotLK healing in mind and simply just don't work in cataclysm.

^this.
i think they need to take the spec back to the drawing board. the spec (imo) just doesn't seem to flow. my starting advise to blizz would be to add more abilities (disc only) to play off of absorbs. because PW: shield and divine aegis doesn't cut it imo.

[Zeuq]

I think there's a few problems with Discipline that make it extremely difficult to balance. One of those is definitely trying to make PWS useful for both Holy and Discipline... it doesn't need to be. As Holy, I don't use it a whole lot, and when I do, it's usually for B&S. In either case, I can live with the increased mana cost because it's worth it in those cases. I think the comparison to Renew is apt, because its something that Holy uses, it has talents for it, and Discipline doesn't, so nerfing it has little effect on Discipline because they rarely use it.

Soul-Warding is fine, but it shouldn't be accessible to Holy. Move it down a bit. It probably needs to be replaced with another talent, but I'm not sure what they could move up. Maybe add something else and find a way to combine other points later to keep the total the same.

The Discipline Mastery is also a problem I think because it just scales too well with shield spamming. The probably need to redesign it a bit, perhaps nerf its contribution to PWS, while keeping it's contribution to Divine Aegis the same, and perhaps compensate a bit in some other way to make it useful for some other heals.

Overall, though, I'm just not sure how well the original intent behind Discipline really works in the Cataclysm model. Nerfing the cost of PWS is, at best, a temporary solution, because of gear scaling. Bubble spam will continue to be OP in situations with predictable burst damage, which seems to be the MO for at least T11 encounter design, unless they are nerfed too hard, at which point Discipline no longer has a niche on which to hang its hat and it will fall behind Holy if, for no other reason, because of lack of versatility. Hopefully, this approach is just temporary and the designers will take a harder look at the overall design in 4.1. Hopefully by that time, having seen how the various specs have actually played out, they'll be able to do some serious revisions to address the problems.

[TiduZ]

It's not like pw:s is some anomaly that is impossible to balance without adding unnecessary changes to how it works. At the right cost in mana and absorb, it can be used a lot in low damage situations, preemptively, or to save deaths, while poh/pom/penance will be useful as well. 40-50% pw:s would be a good # and achieving that is as simple as reverting the mana cost change and decreasing the absorb to the right level. The other issue, other than pws, is that poh is really weak for disc atm and particularly when DA is wasted. If you look at my holy logs from last night I had 40-50% pws usage because the absorb for the mana and all that is good but not the end all be all, while holy's other spells like poh/coh/pom and even renew somtimes are also good options, sometimes better options. Disc doesn't have a lot of options and the tuning on pws was way too good pre "hotfix" and way too terrible post "hotfix."

You do not need to add an arcane blast mechanic.
You do not need to remove soul warding.
You do not need to change mastery.
ETC ETC

Simply needs the mana cost returned to where it can be used often enough to make mastery worthwhile and the absorb scaled so that with mastery its a very good spell but not the one button ticket to raping wol like it was pre hotfix.

4.0.3: Initially you didn't use pws at all due to mana constraints, with a bit of gear you used Pw:S only while moving because poh was a much better choice in nearly any situation other than when a 16k absorb was going to save someone from dying (not terribly often).

4.0.6: PW:S was so efficient and incredibly high hps that it wasn't really worth using pom cus even with 5 bounces it was probably less healing per gcd. PoH after nerf was pretty bad frankly, if you have archangel 5 stack up ur poh is what it was before without it. PW:S was more efficient than poh in ideal situations for poh, with the added advantage that the healing could be applied to the people most at risk of dying/lowest hp, which helps out other raid healers using aoe heals. Pretty much pw:s was the best.

4.0.6 hotfix: PW:S is incredibly inefficient but high hps, only really worth casting to prevent a death on a tank or raid member, during power infusion, or for p3 burn phases if you have a ton of mana saved up. PoH is still shit. Holy PW:S is still efficient, fairly high hps, and has CoH which was buffed 30% and a much harder hitting poh/renew. Body and soul adds even more to PW:S. All the mastery gear disc priests intelligently acquired beforehand is now useless in either spec.

If they reverted the mana cost to original 4.0.6, adjusted base value to be weak for holy and 23-25k absorb with ~20 mastery (369 ilvl) for disc, and gave poh a bit of a buff, I guarantee you I'd be using pw:s a lot but I'd be using pom/penance/poh as well and it would play out very well.

Disclaimer: I didnt put much effort into that 23-25k figure, it sounds about right to me but actual balance might be slightly lower than that figure tbh.

[Vook]

Well, gratz blizz on hotfixing something which only breaks the specs further. I just respec'd my offspec to a "Holy Bubblespam" spec, and...jeez, 22k bubbles for only ~3500 mana? GG knee-jerk hotfixes!

[PlatedPriest]

the only thing is, blizz has shown they are very against overuse of PW: shield. if this play style continues to make a rise in logs no doubt they will break it