Discipline rant & suggestions

[Chob]

Hello fellow MMO-champers, I'm going to warn you beforehand that it's going to be a bit of a wall of text. I also ask that before you respond, please read the whole thing so we can constructively discuss the matter rather than dwell on misunderstandings. Also I speak from a 10m point of view, just so we're clear.

First of all let's begin with the rant. A short 'history' recap for discipline. At the start of Cataclysm it became clear very fast that Discipline in general was underpowered. Our mana regen suffered, our throughput from our absorbs were laughable. Thankfully however we got a fairly quick hotfix increasing our rapture by a fair amount. A while after that we got a major increase on our shields throughput, 208 % to be exact. After this patch I finally felt like the class had the throughput and tools to compete with holy spec.

However; in highend 25m raids we had several disc players spamming shields with the aid of several innervates/tides, resulting in ridiculously high disc priest parses. This was immediately countered by Blizzard by majorly increasing the mana cost for shields, effectively making it unspammable. This however, in my opinion nerfed disc priests in 10m too much, we never had access to that kind of mana regen and thus shield spamming just wasn't viable either.

What comes across to me as plain odd is that a lot of our disc talents are designed around the regular use of power:word shield. Soul warding, Rapture, Borrowed Time and Strength of Soul are all talents that don't increase shields effectiveness, no it promotes regular use. Which they're trying to counter in the first place. This sounds like a dilemma to me. Which brings me to my first suggestion: Redesign these talents to increase effectiveness, but without promoting regular use. Now I'm no game developer, so as to how to redesign the talents I'll leave that to the experts.

Next patch they're going to half the duration of our shields. This effectively destroys any form of pre-shielding. Before you start jumping the bandwagon and scream 'l2play you need to predict incoming damage' hear me out. The playstyle I use in 10m is that I'm mainly the tank healer, I keep up the tanks. However, I help out on the raid when people get low, I usually toss them a shield to give them a 'buffer' sort of speak so the other 2 healers can top him up again. If the player doesn't get hit for a while, sure no problem it's not that much of a mana waste as it's reasonably possible the person will get hit by something else in the 30 seconds after that. However with shields being reduced to 15 seconds, that's really not a whole lot of time. It only becomes useful to cast on people who you know are going to take imminent damage. I do this already, I don't just mindless spam shields, but with the duration nerf you really have no choice now but to save it as a 'panic' button, where the above mentioned talents just go against that idea completely.

The last item on my list I was planning to mention is our mastery. Our mastery affects a total of TWO mechanics. Power:word shields directly, and our Divine Aegis, which is random as it's based on crit. It also has a cap on how high it can be. Now let's look at the holy mastery. It affects... well pretty much all spells. They don't need to crit or anything, no random based element there. And definitely not based on a spell that is discouraged to use often. This brings me to my second suggestion. Completely redesign our mastery to make it affect more spells in our arsenel. A way to do this for example is to make mastery ALWAYS add divine aegis to our direct heals, not just on crits. Obviously this would need to be a lower value than DA in it's current state, but I'm sure with some rebalancing with numbers we could make it work where it's not overpowered. If this doesn't promote using direct heals I don't know what else will. It will much better fit within the definition of a discipline priest, we use absorbs to increase effective HP, and a much more controlled procrate of DA would help towards this goal. As for actual numbers, I'll leave that to the professionals, I'm merely suggesting the possibility.

So what do you think? What flaws do you discover about my suggestions? What do you suggest instead?

Discuss.

[Tharrag]

Sorry but i see there absolute no problem.

Ok i rerolled to disc Priest with cataclysm, so i don't play disc very long, but for me it works fine.
In my raid i usually have focus on tank healing and i think you will accept that 15sec or 30sec shield on tank will not make any difference cause it will normaly used up before 15sec ends.
If we have a alot of raid damage and i can switch to raid healing (tank need less heal) then i can always prevent somebody from dying with shield there it will be also no difference 30/15sec and i can cast some PoH to bring up DA.
I think the greatest problem is you have to get away from shield spamming, disc priest isn't shield spamming anymore and i like this, so normally i shield tanks and heal with penance and GH the most time until i can set up a new shield and really like this mechanik and see not the problem with disc priest.

[Chob]

I get your point, and I really also do not want to go back to the bubblebots we were in wrath of the lich king; that was not my intention. I posted this in mind with direct comparison to holy spec output, currently our talents and mastery enhance our absorbs, while they want us to use our entire arsenal of heals. I'm merely suggesting that if that's what they want, then reflect that in talent adjustments and mastery adjustment, so that our direct heals actually benefit from our mastery. Hence the suggestion to let all our heals land small absorption bonusses, which in turn could be enhanced through talents and/or mastery.

[Kencredible]

It seems to me that disc is a slight after thought for the WoW developers after all they invested into chakra for the holy talents. I agree with you on some points, and made a point raising them after the shield mana increase hot fix, which I still believe to be a very short sighted fix. My play style differs from yours where our holy paly is our MT healer, our resto shaman or druid is our raid healer, and I do a little of both, but typically more on the raid.

To your points, I agree that the spec is built around PW:S, and that a lot of talents affect our PW:S or depend on it. I think that talent changes should be made as well. I also agree with the mastery being absolute garbage, even with the auto proc and now critable DA from PoH. Im not sure I agree with you on the 15 sec nerf, especially with you being a tank healer. If you are tank healing you should be receiving the rapture mana return on CD, so that isn't the issue. Also I really can't think of a fight, except maybe first phase Cho'gal, and maybe the Rohash healer where people aren't taking damage for more than 15 seconds.

My issues are lack of AOE healing. The PoH nerf was because it was too powerful for holy, so our only AOE healing spell (I don't count ProM, though it is affective, still random and dependant on proximity and incoming damage) was nerfed. Now Blizz says bring the player not the class, and I understand each healing class has their own unique abilities and fill certain rolls better, but raid healing is some what difficult with only one real spell. We've already touched on the Mastery. Our four set is garbage. Holy priests get a free 540 spirit for the whole fight, and spend no mana to get it...their four set might as well just be +540 spirit. Now they said they are going to change ours, but lets be honest Im sure Firelands will come out before they do, and the proposed change is every time we penance. So if I penance on CD I can keep up the 540 spirit, but it is still crap compared to holy. I think two set is garbage as well, especially if you are in a raid healing roll, if it affected atonement healing that would make more sense.

I do agree with you that some disc talents need to be looked over and possibly changed, Im just tired of being an after thought to holy and the red headed step child of the healer classes.

[Tharrag]

I think our mastery is still very great cause of shields are permanent on tanks and we can also as raid healer get DA up to everyone in raid. Holy priests has other mechanics to heal and i am very happy with disc specc but i have to say i don't know the direct compare to holy because i don't use any holy specc and don't have one in raid.

[Chob]

I think our mastery is still very great cause of shields are permanent on tanks and we can also as raid healer get DA up to everyone in raid. Holy priests has other mechanics to heal and i am very happy with disc specc but i have to say i don't know the direct compare to holy because i don't use any holy specc and don't have one in raid.

Try to compare the holy mastery and the discipline mastery together. Our mastery gives better absorbs through the use of a spell which they're discouraging to use often, and increase on a spell that's only procced after a critical heal which is completely RNG based and unpredictable.

Now here comes holy spec. EVERY direct heal they do, it leaves a HoT based on the amount it does, more so if it crit (see what I did there? We only benefit from a crit whereas they benefit 'more' from a crit) and I'm suggesting to adjust our mastery to something similar.

@Kencredible

I agree with your point that the shield duration nerf may not be all that big of a problem from a tankhealing point of view, but as you raise the AoE effectiveness as an issue yourself, I feel no need to further comment as I completely agree on that front too.

[scarryterry25]

I don't feel nerfed in 10 man's, I am OP. As far as ideas. You could reduce the mana cost of shields again and redesign Soul Warding so that in addition to reducing the cooldown it also increases the mana cost. You could redesign Borrowed Time to will stay active for the entire duration but reduce the haste buff. You could also redesign the mastery to increase the duration of shields and DA.

[totalfailure]

I don't feel nerfed in 10 man's, I am OP. As far as ideas. You could reduce the mana cost of shields again and redesign Soul Warding so that in addition to reducing the cooldown it also increases the mana cost. You could redesign Borrowed Time to will stay active for the entire duration but reduce the haste buff. You could also redesign the mastery to increase the duration of shields and DA.

Wow - this sounds like a ridiculously way to make Disc better conform to the Cata "design philosophy."

[Nesco]

Try to compare the holy mastery and the discipline mastery together. Our mastery gives better absorbs through the use of a spell which they're discouraging to use often, and increase on a spell that's only procced after a critical heal which is completely RNG based and unpredictable.

Now here comes holy spec. EVERY direct heal they do, it leaves a HoT based on the amount it does, more so if it crit (see what I did there? We only benefit from a crit whereas they benefit 'more' from a crit) and I'm suggesting to adjust our mastery to something similar.

What's with the condenscending part? This only asks for flaming.

For tankhealing disc is fine indeed, since all bubbles will break.
For raidhealing disc is fine too, since with PoH everyone healed will get a DA:
If you compare the masteries and just take the DA part from disc and Chakra: Sanctuary from holy, then you see that for the PoH spell, disc puts up at least 3.13 times as strong "heal"on the target. So the DA bubble has to break for at least 31,9% of the time to be as effective as a holy priest casting the PoH spell.

[Docta]

disc has a poh over 3x stronger than holy? im confused

[Chob]

What's with the condenscending part? This only asks for flaming.

For tankhealing disc is fine indeed, since all bubbles will break.
For raidhealing disc is fine too, since with PoH everyone healed will get a DA:
If you compare the masteries and just take the DA part from disc and Chakra: Sanctuary from holy, then you see that for the PoH spell, disc puts up at least 3.13 times as strong "heal"on the target. So the DA bubble has to break for at least 31,9% of the time to be as effective as a holy priest casting the PoH spell.

I did not mean to sound condescending, if it did then please try not to read it that way, I apologize if people took it the wrong way. I was pretty clear in my post that I wanted this to be constructive only.

However I disagree with pretty much everything else you post. Just because all bubbles break it doesn't mean disc is fine, that's jumping to conclusions. That's like saying holy spec tankhealing is fine because renew ticks to it's full duration. The same applies to your argument why 'raidhealing disc' is fine too, you're comparing holy to discipline, but only one spell and you conclude that the entire spec is fine based on that one comparison. And that's a pretty big 'if' the DA bubble breaks. The DA that gets left behind from a PoH is too little to be worth the mana cost to 'pre-shield' this way, and for PoH to be entirely effective aoe healing it needs to be cast during channeled/continueous type of raiddamage. It is a crappy aoe heal for any other situation.

[Crypsis]

Now I started playing a Disc priest right around the time ICC came out, and yes it was liable to have two disc priest in the raid, one on the raid spamming bubbles and the other on the tank. But since Cata came out we can not do it, which is perfectly fine with me I hated having to spam bubbles. Disc priest in my opinion the best tank healing class in the game do to the fact we have extremely good life savers, and is what I would prefer to do than raid heal.

To comment on your statement about AoE healing Kencredible, if you want to raid healing don't be disc, even though on Chogal we destroy everyone solely bc of DA proc for PoH.

Our Mastery is great, terrible compared to holy you can't argue that. The simple fact is it needs to get redone to be equalized to holy.

Now to your comment on talents, I couldn't agree more. Blizzard needs to stop contradicting themselves, disc priest are all about absorbs, oh yeah btw we are going to make them crap. Another suggestion for the talents is that they need to change Evangelism and Archangel, for disc not shadow. If you are a smite spec disc priest you are spending too much mana on smite and not getting much in return. Yeah the 5% increase in healing is nice, but from the mana you spend on the smite would have been better deserved on a different heal. Now if they change it so you can pick which target you heal from the smite as a different version of beacon and increase the mana you get back from Archangel then I would reconsider using it. Or since it is an increase in healing from Archangel, why can't you gain it from a healing move. For example, allow us to gain it by using Penance. I'm not saying take out the smite aspect of it but add to it and give us more mana back so we might actually use it in a raid.

On your comments about our Power: Word Shield; the 15 sec reduced is in may opinion a nerf. I have seen my bubble stay on a geared tank for almost the full duration on a raid fight. So to me thats a pain, but whatever I can get over it as long as something else is changed.

Now if you are having mana issues you are doing it wrong, or are just not geared enough, but most likely still trying to heal like WotLK. I am only ilvl 353 but if im solely healing tanks I will not go OOM ever.

Our t11 4 piece completely sucks compared to holy and as someone stated it is getting changed. So hopefully it might be worth getting t11, even though I think we look retarded but thats my opinion.

[Aiurwyn]

Disc is designed to raid heal about as well as holy pallies, as in they are not. They have AoE capabilities that work in 5-mans but that is it. The moment people start complaining about raid healing as Disc is generally the moment you deviate from it's intended design and are going to have problems.

With that being said the Talents we have that are centered around PW:S are great. Borrowed time is a single target life-saver. It's not meant to have a high uptime, only something you really need in emergencies, kinda like Holy's Surge of Light only 100 times better. Not sure how Rapture promotes regular use of PW:S, if anything it tries to limit how often you use it by putting a CD on the mana returns it. Strength of Soul is again a Single target talent, promoting the use of it on A TANK, the one you will always want to have shield on anyways. For this purpose the talent works great. The only one that might seem to promote using PW:S too much is soul warding. IMO it is there for emergencies when a multiple people ae about to die and you need to help out your raid healers, or maybe you have to pick up slack and heal two tanks at a time.

The PW:S duration nerf will not even be noticed by people that already use the spell as it is intended, IE on tanks or, as you put it, "people who you know are going to take imminent damage." The sole purpose of this "nerf" is to further discourage bubblebotting. That's it, end of story, no sky is falling chicken little BS (Hint: This is where you see the beauty of Soul Warding). The real bonus of this is the INCREASE to the DA duration. It makes our raid SUPPORT even better and allows more usage of our mastery. If you can't figure out how that will help there really isn't much anyone else can do for you.

Speaking of Mastery, it's great, for it's purpose. SINGLE TARGET HEALING. The DA procs help us to keep up with pallys on Tank healing. It also helps Disc priests scale well with all the secondary stats. Using Inner Focus on CD you can put out Gheal crits pretty regularly and those alone will give you a massive amount DA bubbles on your tank. Plus when you PoH during a big AoE, those bubbles make a difference. As it stands, our Mastery DOES effect every spell about 25% of the time, or more with IF usage.

[Deleted]

Disc is designed to raid heal about as well as holy pallies, as in they are not. They have AoE capabilities that work in 5-mans but that is it. The moment people start complaining about raid healing as Disc is generally the moment you deviate from it's intended design and are going to have problems.

With that being said the Talents we have that are centered around PW:S are great. Borrowed time is a single target life-saver. It's not meant to have a high uptime, only something you really need in emergencies, kinda like Holy's Surge of Light only 100 times better. Not sure how Rapture promotes regular use of PW:S, if anything it tries to limit how often you use it by putting a CD on the mana returns it. Strength of Soul is again a Single target talent, promoting the use of it on A TANK, the one you will always want to have shield on anyways. For this purpose the talent works great. The only one that might seem to promote using PW:S too much is soul warding. IMO it is there for emergencies when a multiple people ae about to die and you need to help out your raid healers, or maybe you have to pick up slack and heal two tanks at a time.

The PW:S duration nerf will not even be noticed by people that already use the spell as it is intended, IE on tanks or, as you put it, "people who you know are going to take imminent damage." The sole purpose of this "nerf" is to further discourage bubblebotting. That's it, end of story, no sky is falling chicken little BS (Hint: This is where you see the beauty of Soul Warding). The real bonus of this is the INCREASE to the DA duration. It makes our raid SUPPORT even better and allows more usage of our mastery. If you can't figure out how that will help there really isn't much anyone else can do for you.

Speaking of Mastery, it's great, for it's purpose. SINGLE TARGET HEALING. The DA procs help us to keep up with pallys on Tank healing. It also helps Disc priests scale well with all the secondary stats. Using Inner Focus on CD you can put out Gheal crits pretty regularly and those alone will give you a massive amount DA bubbles on your tank. Plus when you PoH during a big AoE, those bubbles make a difference. As it stands, our Mastery DOES effect every spell about 25% of the time, or more with IF usage.

Sry to say that but you dont seem to have seen official blizzard posts about healers having NO fixed roles as tank healing or raid healing specs.
And even IF disc is pure tank heal as pally is according to you why use a disc when a pally is way better ?
You might know that a holy pally heals ONE tank better than a disc PLUS another person for 50% of that ammount.
Not even talking about way more and better buffs and better cds than a priest can dream of.

[Bigslick]

A fairly large proportion of discipline healing is in the form of absorbs. Blizzard has to account for disc healing + absorb throughput potential when balancing them against other healers. When we're single target healing, our absorbs are normally fully utilized, meaning it's very easy for Blizzard to put us on a relatively comparable level with other healers.

In raid healing, that all breaks down. If the raid's incoming damage is intermittent, random, or whatever and you're seeing very little of your absorbs utilized before the next damage is sustained, then you are losing that portion of your 'balanced' throughput relative to other healers. If Blizzard makes it where the actual healing is competitive in situations as such, then the absorbs make us overpowered in raid healing on fights where repetitive damage to the raid is sustained such that absorbs are utilized. The larger the proportion of our blended healing absorbs becomes, the greater this imbalance in performance will become -- and increases in mastery on our gear will ensure a widening of the breach.

[Repo123]

Our mastery, in PVP, is completely useless because it's easily dispelled. That fact alone warrents the mastery to be changed.

[Bigslick]

And even IF disc is pure tank heal as pally is according to you why use a disc when a pally is way better ?
You might know that a holy pally heals ONE tank better than a disc PLUS another person for 50% of that ammount.
Not even talking about way more and better buffs and better cds than a priest can dream of.

Well, a few things... EH. A priest can build a larger EH pool when capping the tank than a pally. Situation, yes -- but true. A priest provides Inspiration for 10% less physical damage taken, again contributing to EH. All in all, I have an easier time keeping up my assigned tank in our 10-man runs than our comparably geared and skilled holy pally while offering comparable levels of 'throw-out' heals to the raid (including when his beacon is not on my target, and regardless of which tank we're taking for the night). And in terms of CD's and buffs, since you're focusing on the specific argument regarding disc vs holy paladins as regards sustaining the tank, disc brings PS and PW:B (while it could and often is reserved for raid use, it can certainly be counted as a viable tank cd), so I don't think disc is falling behind in that department.

Not arguing that disc is by any stretch a 'pure tank healer' but I will argue that they're easily as capable of keeping up a single tank as a pally (though of course I'm not going to argue against the value of beacon on a second tank when it is applied).

[Aiurwyn]

Sry to say that but you dont seem to have seen official blizzard posts about healers having NO fixed roles as tank healing or raid healing specs.
And even IF disc is pure tank heal as pally is according to you why use a disc when a pally is way better ?
You might know that a holy pally heals ONE tank better than a disc PLUS another person for 50% of that ammount.
Not even talking about way more and better buffs and better cds than a priest can dream of.

In raids there are not "fixed" roles. But it is incredibly naive to suggest every class/spec can both raid heal and tank heal as effectively as any other. It's just not possible without complete homogenization. An intelligent raid leader will not assign say...A holy priest to tank heal over a holy pally. Or a Resto shaman to Raid heal over a Resto druid. Each class has it's strengths and weakness. Holy Pallys and Disc Priests happen to line up pretty well, though Disc Priests have more raid support than Holy Pallys.

[shiryo]

Make a debuff on the priest that stacks whenever the priest casts a shield. Lasts for 7 sec. When it reaches 3-5-7 stacks or whatever the priest gets weakened soul.

Then you can revert the increased manacost beacuse you can't spam it anyway.

[Deleted]

The fear I have with disc priests getting better raid healing is that our tank healing will have to be reduced to compensate.
We have good raid SUPPORT with all our shields, giving other healers a chance to heal people up while saving them from immediate danger, but then that doesn't look good on the meters for us, does it?

As others have said, I don't see the problem with classes and specs having different roles or at least different role biases. It's a balancing act.