Prayer of Healing & PW:S Nerf Seriously???

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

go look at the current worldoflogs. yes the nerf to priests are needed, are you even thinking this through from a balance point of view or just from your own class view?

[Liliyah]

My PW:S, according to the tooltip, absorbs 26204. If yours is around 20k (slightly higher than Holy) you are either...

A. Specced wrong
B. Haven't been raiding much, and thus are not properly geared for present end game raiding.

I said my HOLY bubble is 20k. My disc bubble is... 24543 now that I've gotten rid of as much mastery as I can.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=7244&e=7588

IF you go back further in those logs, you'll see Attonement really shining on halfus hardcore pre 4.0.6. Imagine pulling almost 10k dps WHILE being the top healer BECAUSE of attonement. Attonement's big benefit is it casts faster than heal, and heals, in general, for more. This means if your job is to "raid heal melee", you pretty much just dps the boss and watch they all stay topped off. It's rather ingenious if you can afford it. Since the patch, however, it's suboptimal to go that route, but pre-patch it was very popular in raid settings.

Halfus was a gimmick fight. I'm more than aware of the numbers us disc priests were pulling on it. It was the only reason I kept an atonement spec as my secondary. Given the changes to the Halfus encounter, I just don't bother.
I'm not told to "raid heal melee". We make our shamans do that.

Lightwell was never a BAD idea. Ever. It was just poorly implimented, but the funny thing was isn't really that it was useless (it really wasn't), it's that DPS would find any excuse under the sun to NOT use it. Sure, blizzard finally catered to them, but lightwell was never a bad idea. The only mistake the spell ever had is that it changed your target when clicking it. Having a 20 yard range, interrupting casting, etc... not really overall big issues when you consider it didn't use a global CD, and survival is always > dps. However, dps just refused to use it. We got some people in wrath to use it in situations in ICC, so it had it's uses, just like attonement still has it's uses, but now with the buffs to other areas of disc it just isn't viable right now.

It's fundamentally a bad idea. They've just managed to finally make it usable. It didn't heal for much, the range was tiny, you had to actually target the lolwell to click on it... so bad.

Wait... what? Paladins aren't raid healing. In fac,t if htey are on both tanks (with beacon they are), that is litteraly all they are doing. The over residual benefit of the 2ndary ability of a Disc priest outweighs any other benefit a holy pally has. Hoyl pally doesn't provide PW: B (and trust me, that cd is so f'in OP that top tier raid guidls are bringing a disc priest JUST FOR THAT SINGLE CD). In addition, with twin stacking grace, we actually can heal two tanks pretty effectively in raids, especially since they RARELY take damage at the exact same time (usually one takes a hit, then the other takes a hit) and thye don't get spikey kill damage like in wrath anymore, giving you time, with grace stacked to heal them both. It's not as "easy" as Holy, but it's already been proven that since the patch Disc can tank heal almost as well as holy. Do we have the throughput that Holy paladins do? No, but we don't need it because we're not allowing the tanks to take as much damage. That's a massive factor in our tank healing. We are just as effective, and we have better ability for 2ndary actions with PW: S and PW:B, plus we can haste up our DE PoH's for times like Chiemaron (sp?).

Paladins spot-heal the raid. In situations where people clump, they AoE heal.
I am aware that top tier guilds bring disc priests just for barrier, I know from experience. Barrier does not a superior tank healer make. Combining absorbs and raw healing, holy paladins still outclass disc priests(PS: they do absorbs too, just like us).

Now that beacon is nerfed (it was nerfed with cata's release) and we can stack grace max stacks on two tanks, we're perfectly capable. Have you even bothered trying?

Yes, I have. And I have found, as I said before, holy paladins do the job better.

[Merin]

Disc isn't a tank healer. Disc HPS is still quite high, but it does have an identity issue. I'd rather they splice out more healing and conjure up more types of shielding.

[TwistedCross]

You guys implying Disc was viable before 3.0 are gonna make me pee my pants laughing. In no way, was Disc ever a viable spec in Burning Crusade (outside of Arena) or Vanilla. Nobody spent more than a few points in the Disc tree, and then, it was just to augment the Holy tree with talents like Meditation (everyone) and Improved Prayer of Spirit (some). If you didn't have CoH in BC, you'd have to be kicked out of the raid for having Down's Syndrome.

[-Ethos-]

You guys implying Disc was viable before 3.0 are gonna make me pee my pants laughing. In no way, was Disc ever a viable spec in Burning Crusade (outside of Arena) or Vanilla. Nobody spent more than a few points in the Disc tree, and then, it was just to augment the Holy tree with talents like Meditation (everyone) and Improved Prayer of Spirit (some). If you didn't have CoH in BC, you'd have to be kicked out of the raid for having Down's Syndrome.

Untrue, almost every guild that was pushing into Black Temple took a token Disc Priest.

[vazar_da_priest]

i feel like the whole "shields and heals" spec doesnt work

for it to be fair with other heals they cant have the equal healing out put as the other heals
since they have an abilitie no one else has (stoping incoming damage)

so somethings gotta give. uve gotta have equal heals (when compared to other classes) and shitty shields. or really good shields and shitty heals

otherwise disc could heal with the rest of em AND mitigate

the class can work, but somethings gotta give, and shield spamming is definately NOT the way too go (boring as hell)

maybe if they made disc like having different kinds of shields and less healing it would work better
/shrug

[Kelesti]

Untrue, almost every guild that was pushing into Black Temple took a token Disc Priest.

Technically, 23/38 wasn't a "Discipline" spec, it was a "Holy + a Raid Buff" spec.

[-Ethos-]

Technically, 23/38 wasn't a "Discipline" spec, it was a "Holy + a Raid Buff" spec.

Well, with 23 in Disc, you couldnt take CoH, so it wasnt much of a Holy spec!

Edit - Not to mention i think one of our Priests went full Disc for Mage-tank healing on Illidari Council.

[Lilyana]

On my priest I pvp heavily as disc, and used a different disc smite spec before halfus was nerfed (it isn't needed now). I also use smite spec disc for when me and my rogue friend dual retro bosses for gold.

I prefer holy for raid (and tank) healing simply because it has a huge arsenel of tools available. I can flip to raid heal or strong single target healing. If the event called for it, I can happily be either spec for it.

With disc you want to use penance, shield and heal. heal is really good because it reduces the cooldown on weakened soul, and also applies a +10% mitigation buff when it crits (it will obviously crit if you use it enough).

As for holy you want to use renews a lot, and serendipity in absolute emergencies ie 1-2 flash / gheal or poh; you'll also pom as both specs and flip between inner fire and the other buff depending on what you're doing as disc. As holy you'll want to spec body and soul. I know its a bone of contention among holy priests but I really swear by it for getting raiders (and myself) out of trouble way fast.

As you can see how I mixed my post, im just freely speccing both for when the situation calls for it.. I certainly wouldn't call either spec cookie cutter.

Sounds like you quit during wrath when all you did in wrath was spam shield, flash heal and penance. Game's changed since then and so has your class. Back in TBC it was holy with coh spam. And in classic you would've sat there timing your gheal with someone elses' gheal then run off and wait till you regenned :P

I don't think priest has ever been in such an interesting place as now.