Dragonflight Beta - Upcoming Changes to Discipline Priests

[Lumy]

Dragonflight Beta - Upcoming Changes to Discipline Priests

Hello Priests!

Thank you for your feedback on our recent changes to Evangelism. Discipline healing scales faster than other healing specializations, as target count increases, which makes it challenging for us to tune the spec to be competitive in both small-scale and large-scale content.

To address this, we’re changing Sins of the Many to a low-level passive and increasing its effectiveness. Discipline is currently overperforming our tuning targets in raids in Dragonflight, so we’re doing this alongside several changes to decrease the specialization’s overall power.

You’ll see the following changes as hotfixes to the Dragonflight Beta over the coming days.

Discipline

• Sins of the Many is now a passive learned at level 12.
  
  • Increases damage by 30% (was 12%).
  • Damage increase diminishes above 5 Atonement applications (was 1).
• In the talent tree, Sins of the Many has been replaced with Blaze of Light.
• Blaze of Light increases the damage of your Smite and Penance by 8%/15% and Penance increases or decreases your target’s movement speed by 25%/50% for 2 seconds.
• Blaze of Light is no longer a PvP Talent.
• Evangelism once again has a 1.5 minute cooldown (was 3 minutes).
• Spell damage heals all targets affected by Atonement for 40% of damage done (was 50%).
• Power Word: Radiance now applies Atonement for 60% of its normal duration (was 50%).
• Schism increases spell damage to the target by 15% (was 25%).
• Malicious Intent increases the duration of Schism by 6 seconds (was 3 seconds).
• Harsh Discipline has been redesigned.
  
  • Every 10 / 5 casts of Smite, your next Penance is free and fires an additional 3 bolts. (Was: When Atonement has healed a total of 200 / 100 times, your next Penance is free and fires 3 additional bolts).

Please note: these changes will not be applied all together to the Dragonflight Beta. We expect to deploy them for testing separately over the next few days.

Thanks again for all of your feedback.

[Soulsinger]

I wonder how many of us they think have head injuries that keep us from remembering more than one patch back. 70%? 80%? It seems to be a high number.

[Calauza]

Once again discipline is tuned based on top 1% elite , the same people that eat, breathe and sleep on slave meta composition. At least now in pre-patch you can change the game style of not a true healer not a true dps and go shield spamming like in the good old days when people didn't have logs for breakfast/lunch/dinner.

[Valysar]

Once again discipline is tuned based on top 1% elite , the same people that eat, breathe and sleep on slave meta composition. At least now in pre-patch you can change the game style of not a true healer not a true dps and go shield spamming like in the good old days when people didn't have logs for breakfast/lunch/dinner.

I wonder how the game would have been if they never listened to the top 1%

[tomten]

I wonder how many of us they think have head injuries that keep us from remembering more than one patch back. 70%? 80%? It seems to be a high number.

As someone who doesn't play priest or healers at all. Context?

[Elbob]

I wonder how the game would have been if they never listened to the top 1%

longer but less impactful schism window, Harsh D requires less perfect attonement upkeep, shorter CD on Evan. These changes are good for non perfect players that won't have perfect rotations so I guess you are looking at your answer.

[Healerme]

longer but less impactful schism window, Harsh D requires less perfect attonement upkeep, shorter CD on Evan. These changes are good for non perfect players that won't have perfect rotations so I guess you are looking at your answer.

The new Harsh Discipline is worse than old, even with average atonement upkeep you'd have the buff most of the time without thinking about it, no you have more direct control over it and it's harder to guarantee while you're trying to do burst (as you're using other damaging abilities that aren't smite).

[Segus1992]

longer but less impactful schism window, Harsh D requires less perfect attonement upkeep, shorter CD on Evan. These changes are good for non perfect players that won't have perfect rotations so I guess you are looking at your answer.

Overall good changes but harsh discipline should be changed to include more spells than just smite. If it's changed to 5 damaging non-penance spells cast I'm down.

[Elbob]

The new Harsh Discipline is worse than old, even with average atonement upkeep you'd have the buff most of the time without thinking about it, no you have more direct control over it and it's harder to guarantee while you're trying to do burst (as you're using other damaging abilities that aren't smite).

but its simpler for a less involved player. If you are going for perfect line ups on things, you are probably going for a pretty high tier of play. You have to remember what my quote was referencing. I was speaking to a poster who complained about balance being around the 1% and I pointed out these changes make mediocre performance for mediocre players simpler and less min/max focused. I'm sure you are right that these changes hurt the 1% but thats not the point, nor was I saying otherwise.