Patch 5.3 PTR. Attonement Nerf

[Deleted]

And the lack of aoe dps :P

[Deleted]

With 5 times hymn of hope I reckon the priests will have enough mana to do a bit of mind searing. That does hit pretty hard.

[Deleted]

Mind Sear for disc is absolutely terrible, and you're not hit capped for shadow spells.

EDIT: Ok so you are hit capped for Mind Sear, still terrible though as Noradin said.

[wrynil]

I linked a Megaera log earlier, to show it's defo possible to do reasonable numbers on those kind of fights. I'll link it again:

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=7257&e=7629

Yes, I'm clearly not topping meters there, but the point is that often you don't need 3 healers to go all out, and filling up gaps is what disc is good at, at least for now.

If you actually wanna be high on meters atonement for sure isn't the way for you to go all out on. Im normally doing alot of atonementing for the extra dmg it provides cause our team sometimes are a bit low on the dps apartment. So last night we had our weaker healer along(resto drood ofc <_>) so i decided to actually do my job as a healer and let dps be dps and hps be hps. Normally i do 70-90k healing on megaera (while still healing with normal spells just less friquent), and last night i did 120k by actually healing instead of just mindless atonement. Sure if you are 3 healing shit you can get away with alot of atonement. But actually healing and using all the arsenal of healing spells we got you'll increase the surviveability by your team by tons and tons.

After all we are mostly high on numbers due to atonement sniping small heals.. Its not super great for hard healing times at all except on dmg modified bosses like elegon, horridon ji'kun and bosses like that. We dont bring same throughput as holy palies for one.

[Noradin]

Mind Sear for disc is absolutely terrible, and you're not hit capped for shadow spells.

You are hit capped on all spells, just like holy (which is why holy mind sear + halo in smite chakra did more AoE damage than a shadow priest). Mind sear is still horrible for disc.

---------- Post added 2013-05-09 at 01:48 PM ----------

If you actually wanna be high on meters atonement for sure isn't the way for you to go all out on. Im normally doing alot of atonementing for the extra dmg it provides cause our team sometimes are a bit low on the dps apartment. So last night we had our weaker healer along(resto drood ofc <_>) so i decided to actually do my job as a healer and let dps be dps and hps be hps. Normally i do 70-90k healing on megaera (while still healing with normal spells just less friquent), and last night i did 120k by actually healing instead of just mindless atonement. Sure if you are 3 healing shit you can get away with alot of atonement. But actually healing and using all the arsenal of healing spells we got you'll increase the surviveability by your team by tons and tons.

After all we are mostly high on numbers due to atonement sniping small heals.. Its not super great for hard healing times at all except on dmg modified bosses like elegon, horridon ji'kun and bosses like that. We dont bring same throughput as holy palies for one.

Exactly, which proves that disc does sacrifice healing for damage when using atonement, encounters are just forgiving enough to get away with 3 healers and one of them basically spamming some damage spells and pushing other heals into overheal with the resulting smart heals. Because make no mistake, casting atonement spells will increase the overheal other healers on your team do with their spells with no fault of theirs. (Which is not to say that overheal is inherently bad - you need some to keep a raid stable - it just screws with the distribution of overheal and makes it seem like the others are causing more of it than you are, but nowadays most of that is due to the time between targeting and landing of heals - which obviously is zero for smartheals - and only a small part is down to reaction time of the players.)

[ramennoodleking]

No one serious questions whether atonement needs to be supplemented with other spells or not to heal to full effect. However, atonement provides quick, cheap, and mindless smart healing filler during those times you don't need to be delving deeper into your arsenal. The fact that the dps (we're talking over the course of a fight knocking out valuable seconds) isn't trivial and that the healing that can be done strictly using atonement (70k+) is what makes this spell overpowered.

No other healer--and really at this point best to compare to discs direct competition, holy--is able to bring that similar utility. A disc third healer on Heroic Iron Quon 10 contributes to how quickly you get out of phase 1, helps push the second dog before a second wind storm, and helps burns the dogs in succession in the final phase. Just as an example.

If this alone was discs crutch, it may not be as big an issue. But compound it with the potency of absorbs and you have one heck of a healin machine. I think atonement is the greater of the two evils, because the weight of added dps on progression cannot be understated.

[Yetiman]

Mind Sear for disc is absolutely terrible, and you're not hit capped for shadow spells.

Actually, you are. It might be unintended, as the wording in the spellbook indicates that we only get hit-capped for Smite, Penance and Holy Fire/PW:Solace, but in our character pane it shows a straight up 15% to hit, and when I've casted it on target dummies and it doesn't miss (granted, this is not all-conclusive, and I did this test in 5.1; might be that it was changed with 5.2).

[Deleted]

Can someone please explain why mind sear would be terrible? I use it quite often as disc and it does seem to hit pretty hard. Obviously our mastery doesn't increase the output, but if you use a crit build (I, for instance, only have 60 mastery atm), why wouldn't it hit hard?

[Noradin]

Well it is better than nothing, but you don't get the dmage increase multipliers the other two specs get on it.

[Vilbu]

Can someone please explain why mind sear would be terrible? I use it quite often as disc and it does seem to hit pretty hard. Obviously our mastery doesn't increase the output, but if you use a crit build (I, for instance, only have 60 mastery atm), why wouldn't it hit hard?

I am using it also quite often in 10's to help aoe dmg, if star or halo is on cd. Seems to be rather good if you got ToF up at the time also.

[nobodysbaby]

I went on a few LFR to practice disc again, since I need it badly for Animus hc to SS before Jolts. Out of curiousity, since I hear you say Disc can't heal very well without Atonment, I did a few fights with more or less only using healingspells (using Atonment to stack AA and perhaps a few casts as filler) and the healing done is not bad at all and can for sure be better done by a MS Disc

I hear all the time how weak Discs real heals are, but if you have some Mastery that's just not true. Disc can do good healing and still have the benefits of being able to SS and prevent a whole lot of dmg by Aegis and Barriers etc. To say you need Atonment as strong as it is, is like begging to keep your villa while youre moving to a penthouse. Compare the numbers to a Hpriests and it's not very different. Aegis makes up for a huge part of my healing even though I have only 426 crit rating (kind of surprised), so that is what makes up the 25% bonus to Chakras if you compare to Holy I would say. It's a pretty good absorb, not much overhealing from it.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=1460&e=2047 Twins

Would be interesting if you MS Discs tried the same! Heal some, spend some mana, common! Be a real Daredevil... haha...

[Deleted]

The problem is, Drena, disc cant get above certain amounts in hps, no matter what they do:look at wol logs, disc is not highly ranked on fights that require high hps numbers.

Let's see fights where disc dominates: Horridon - 107k hps for top healer of all for that fight - why? Spirit shell dire calls, atonement to pick up trash in rest. Aside for the perfectly timed with spirit shell dire calls, the fight actually has a pretty low hps requirement. Ji-kun - another fight with lots of disc ranks has the highest healer on it at 111 k. Durumu has a few discs too - 123k hps. Primordius - 152k - and considering the buffs you get on that fight, the number isnt really high. Dark animus also has a 149k hps disc ranked pretty high - but 25% of his healing is atonement and I assume from the fact that hes barely using any spells that can proc aegis, that most of his aegis comes from atonement too - aka another 15%. Even in your log, using normal healing spells, you got 88k hps, with a 46% overhealing rate. Considering in a hc raiding environment your overhealing will be half of that it still puts you at best at @100k hps, which is hardly impressive compared to other classes. As for the thing of you not being main specc disc, as long as you barely use atonement, you are playing a holy priest without circle and with a spirit shell button every now and then, its not that big of a difference: replace circle binding with penance and there you go, you can push the same buttons as holy (which is what I do when speccing holy myself).

But that's pretty much as high as disc can go atm, before the upcoming nerfs. In any fight with high hps req, disc isn't cutting the hps. You say if you stack mastery your healing will be good, stacking mastery is pretty flawed if you dont crit enough. the fact that you did get a fair amount of aegis with low crit rating is quite a matter of luck. You can hope to happen but you cant count on it. Spirit shell doesn't scale with mastery. Then there is the problem of burst healing - most high hps encounters need that. I'm yet to see a disc priest reaching the peak hps of any other class bar druids prolly.

I'm not complaining about disc - we've been more than good the entire expansion past the first few weeks. I'm not particularly happy about what atonement is atm either, I enjoy smiting, but not to that extent. But I do in all honesty believe that disc actual healing could use a bit of tweaking. Otherwise, the whole atonement nerf is far from a "omg the sky is falling" thing, I'm fine with it. It just feels atm we're strong more by happenstance and gimmicks rather than actual control. Hope for the dmg to be predictable. Hope for the boss to have a dmg modifier. Hope for your spells to crit (you have no idea how much I hate admitting that atm crit is my best stat).

[Deleted]

I dont really find it hard to heal without atonement. Like you, last 25hc Megaera kill I used atonement mainly for stacking AA and the odd offencive Penance during Rampages and some smite fillers, atonement ended up being 15% of my overall healing done.
http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/0...?s=7933&e=8491

On Animus shields are sex and I mostly atonement to heal ppl oor for me during the beginning where the raid is spread and fairly immobile.

Atonement is still super strong on fights like Horridon and Jikun where the dmg modifiers rock'n'roll your world, but I completely agree with you; we can push out very good numbers without using atonement as the "go to" spell if your raid is even remotely stacked, or when you can anticipate the incoming dmg and boomblast Shields, which is most of the fights if people dont tard out.

Edit: That said someone will probably now say that a) I didnt rank and b) my hps was only 98k
but even so, people didn't die o/

[Noradin]

The problem really lies in the frequency with which we can put out reactive heals when not using atonement.

PW:S is nice but is just a bandaid if used for recovery. It makes the target stable for a moment but it fades in time and just buys time.

Binding heal and flash heal are great but costy.

PoH is incredibly clunky and people can't even react to it to help its effectivity like they can for healing rain. You pick your target so that the others are hopefully in range and then hope they didn't move apart in the ~2s it took to cast it, if you even get to complete it which is not always the case in those encounters where you would need it. Thus you need offensive penance which gets the ones you didn't catch with PoH and doesn't cancel if you have to move (if you have the glyph as you should), which then pushes total atonement healing up quite a bit.

If the healing from offensive penance turned up as, say, 'circle of healing' on the logs, it would look just like it does for holy priests in aoe situations.

I still wish we had the holy version of DI to take some of that dependence on offensive penance away, allowing for adjusting of those numbers with less unintended side-effects, but that would most likely make that talent mandantory...

[Deleted]

Then again the talent is pretty much mandatory for holy, why should it be any different for disc

And as previously quoting myself with:

we can push out very good numbers without using atonement as the "go to" spell if your raid is even remotely stacked, or when you can anticipate the incoming dmg and boomblast Shields, which is most of the fights if people dont tard out.

The "if" is strong, but for many fights is fairly easy to know where to aim poh to make it hit at least 4-5 people.
Offensive Penance is very neat tho, and I do use it more and less on cd.

I know Blizzard keeps repeating the "take the player not the class" but in some ways I just think that a disc IS that shielding/preventing class, rather than the class healing people up as their main job. All raids (95%) have another class who's healing throughput is what they do (vs shielding) and I find it more than fair that those classes get to heal up the dmg that went through/past shields, as fun as it would be to be able to do both as a disc.

Nerfing atonement would bring some kind of balance to it all. The only fights I can come up with in 25m raids where I'd have to heal 1 group alone without the support of another healer, is Ji'kun nests, which are perfectly fine to heal as disc without atonement, and Lei Shen transition, which is perfectly fine to heal without atonement (more than often you couldnt if you wanted to as no hostile target).

So I dont REALLY see the issue in us not being able to both rofllol prevent dmg AND push out straight healing. I really dont.

[Lansow]

Don't nerf Atonement directly, just change Archangel for Discipline.

Archangel / Evangelism could be changed for disc so that it automatically triggers @ 5 stacks, and doesn't benefit atonement heals. Just let each tick of Penance/Smite trigger it. That way it comes with a ramp-up period. Holy Fire could be changed to add 1 stack of Evangelism if there are no current stacks, but only resets the timer on existing Evangelism stacks. (introduces another skill element... HF after penance could be a bad thing if you have no stacks and need to get 5 up right now. Then you need to HF -> Penance -> smite for AA)

That way you can maintain 4 stacks, pop an atonement heal before heavy damage phases and proc archangel. Or you could maintain 2 stacks with HF and right as heavy AoE damage comes you pop penance offensively to proc AA then go to town with AA boosted AoE healing spam.

Archangel will then require more skill, atonement will require more skill since it couldn't be spammed due to mana costs, AND spamming becomes a net HPS loss overall because you don't have AA when you need it.

I really see no downside. It ups the skill cap (HOORAY!), reduces atonement spam, and disc loses NOTHING in the process. Bad disc priests stop topping meters, good disc priests get to start using more of their toolkit and get to manage another aspect in their healing (allowing real synergy which they lack), and other healers stop complaining that disc is a 1 button spec (which it isn't except by baddies in LFR).

[nobodysbaby]

The problem is, Drena, disc cant get above certain amounts in hps, no matter what they do:look at wol logs, disc is not highly ranked on fights that require high hps numbers.

Let's see fights where disc dominates: Horridon - 107k hps for top healer of all for that fight - why? Spirit shell dire calls, atonement to pick up trash in rest. Aside for the perfectly timed with spirit shell dire calls, the fight actually has a pretty low hps requirement. Ji-kun - another fight with lots of disc ranks has the highest healer on it at 111 k. Durumu has a few discs too - 123k hps. Primordius - 152k - and considering the buffs you get on that fight, the number isnt really high. Dark animus also has a 149k hps disc ranked pretty high - but 25% of his healing is atonement and I assume from the fact that hes barely using any spells that can proc aegis, that most of his aegis comes from atonement too - aka another 15%. Even in your log, using normal healing spells, you got 88k hps, with a 46% overhealing rate. Considering in a hc raiding environment your overhealing will be half of that it still puts you at best at @100k hps, which is hardly impressive compared to other classes. As for the thing of you not being main specc disc, as long as you barely use atonement, you are playing a holy priest without circle and with a spirit shell button every now and then, its not that big of a difference: replace circle binding with penance and there you go, you can push the same buttons as holy (which is what I do when speccing holy myself).

But that's pretty much as high as disc can go atm, before the upcoming nerfs. In any fight with high hps req, disc isn't cutting the hps. You say if you stack mastery your healing will be good, stacking mastery is pretty flawed if you dont crit enough. the fact that you did get a fair amount of aegis with low crit rating is quite a matter of luck. You can hope to happen but you cant count on it. Spirit shell doesn't scale with mastery. Then there is the problem of burst healing - most high hps encounters need that. I'm yet to see a disc priest reaching the peak hps of any other class bar druids prolly.

I'm not complaining about disc - we've been more than good the entire expansion past the first few weeks. I'm not particularly happy about what atonement is atm either, I enjoy smiting, but not to that extent. But I do in all honesty believe that disc actual healing could use a bit of tweaking. Otherwise, the whole atonement nerf is far from a "omg the sky is falling" thing, I'm fine with it. It just feels atm we're strong more by happenstance and gimmicks rather than actual control. Hope for the dmg to be predictable. Hope for the boss to have a dmg modifier. Hope for your spells to crit (you have no idea how much I hate admitting that atm crit is my best stat).

This is exactly what I mean, you want high hps, high utility, absorbs and above that dps. You would even like DI for Disc, what else are you missing? Want my CoH to? It's just not sustainable. Even with lower hps, you are valuable without being able to alsodo great raw healing aswell as everyone else, and Disc would still have 3 out of 4. Holy have 1/4 atm. Not much utility, no prevention mechanism since they removed -10% dmg taken on crit heal, no dps (no, I won't count dps Chakra, a Mastery&Spirit heavy Holy can't do a lot), just what the meters are showing, and it's not very impressive either, considering they have nothing else.

GC stated several times absorbs are more valuable then healing and dps should come with a cost to healing, but what are we seeing? It's a joke. The nerf to Atonment won't be big. They could and should nerf the healing from it down to 50-60% since you do dmg aswell and it would still be a good filler spell.

If anything, Hpriests are in dire need of redesign of Chakra and spells, and a buff to utility (besides buffing their 3 min raid CD in 25, doh, exactly what we needed... not) to ever be taken seriously. Other healingclasses have so much of that it's getting pretty insane in comparison already.

[Deleted]

I completely agree with Nobodysbaby, as stated in my last post, too.
Disc is too strong, and I dont understand how people can be fucked to whine we cant do enough straight healing, when our absorbs are retarded as it is. As I said before, I cannot think of a single boss where disc would NEED more straight output due to the reasoning that we'd be too far behind on overall healing compared to other healers. Because we arent, ever. And its never an issue, unless the last few 25heroics prove that to not be true.

What they easily could and should do to nerf atonement, os remove the DA procs from atonement heals. That would balance it out a bit even further, and make atoment at least remotely reactive, rather than reactive AND preventive (through DA shields) like it currently is.

If you want mitey aoe throughput, reroll holy. If you like your absorbs and dps utility stay disc, but dont whine to get to doubledip further, as it's seriously not needed. If you cant keep "your grp" up in situations where youre assigned to alone heal a group (which is the single only situation where we'd "need" more throughput as other classes do it otherwise) maybe the fault is in your own preactive thinking and shielding rather than a fault in the class. Disc works in a different way than other healing classes, as has been stated MANY times, we are pre-emptive over reactive, which I find is the fun part of the class.

[Noradin]

I went on a few LFR to practice disc again, since I need it badly for Animus hc to SS before Jolts. Out of curiousity, since I hear you say Disc can't heal very well without Atonment, I did a few fights with more or less only using healingspells (using Atonment to stack AA and perhaps a few casts as filler) and the healing done is not bad at all and can for sure be better done by a MS Disc

I hear all the time how weak Discs real heals are, but if you have some Mastery that's just not true. Disc can do good healing and still have the benefits of being able to SS and prevent a whole lot of dmg by Aegis and Barriers etc. To say you need Atonment as strong as it is, is like begging to keep your villa while youre moving to a penthouse. Compare the numbers to a Hpriests and it's not very different. Aegis makes up for a huge part of my healing even though I have only 426 crit rating (kind of surprised), so that is what makes up the 25% bonus to Chakras if you compare to Holy I would say. It's a pretty good absorb, not much overhealing from it.

http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/r...?s=1460&e=2047 Twins

Would be interesting if you MS Discs tried the same! Heal some, spend some mana, common! Be a real Daredevil... haha...

Hm, can't say I see anything special about that log unless you mean that you didn't use any single target heals (aside from the absurdly low penance heal you got out of 5 casts of penance). Disc doesn't get any 'penalty' from using those like holy does in aoe chakra, also, no binding heal?

Of course DA would make up quite a bit of the numbers, its (almost) all you would have gotten out of crit - it doesn't make up for the 25% bonus, 'it makes up' for other healers having the ability to get criticals with their heals.

An another note, I can't avoid to notice how much of the healing the holy priest did was from smart heals (>50%).

---------- Post added 2013-05-11 at 12:02 PM ----------

[...]
Disc is too strong, and I dont understand how people can be fucked to whine we cant do enough straight healing, when our absorbs are retarded as it is. As I said before, I cannot think of a single boss where disc would NEED more straight output due to the reasoning that we'd be too far behind on overall healing compared to other healers. Because we arent, ever. And its never an issue, unless the last few 25heroics prove that to not be true.

[...]
but dont whine to get to doubledip further, as it's seriously not needed
[...]

The problem is that absorbs are too strong and can't stay that way, so if the nerf comes and blizzard handles it as usual disc wont have enough absorbs nor direct healing. If the healing other than absorb was stronger, then there could be (more) encounters working around absorbs. Look at the other side of the medal for once.

look up what 'doubledip' actually means, the only thing currently double dipping for disc in the sense of the word is twist of fate.

[nobodysbaby]

Special? I was healing like only with heals, not using much atonment (penance), but pohs, poms, ss etc, only stacking for evangelism. That was the point of this experiment, not to take advantage of atonment as a crutch to heal. Twins was a good fight for the test since the whole raid was taking dmg pretty consistent in this LFR run.

DA does make up for quite a bit of the +25% Chakra to half our toolkit imo. I didn't say it was the same thing, just the fact you got it will make hps a lot better.

As I said, I see no reason why you should have both healingoutput like everyone else PLUS spammable & cheap smartheal, PLUS dmg, PLUS mitigation abilities. Do you?