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1d	Shadowlands: Mounts, Pets, and More (Part 1)
1d	Shadowlands: Mounts, Pets, and More (Part 1)

1d	Shadowlands: Mounts, Pets, and More (Part 1)
1d	The Mythic Dungeon International is Back -- Live Today
1d	The Mythic Dungeon International is Back -- Live Today
2d	Remembering the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj: Call of the Scarab
3d	1.13.7 PTR Discussion - Class Issues

Discipline Priest State in Shadowlands Alpha - Mythic+ Viability, Lackluster GCDs, Covenant Abilities

posted 2020/06/22 at 4:30 AM by Squishei

IntroductionBastionRevendrethTorghast, Tower of the DamnedThe Necrotic WakeHalls of AtonementPlaguefallDe Other SideMists of Tirna ScitheshouldNy'alotha Eternal Palacemajor

This article is written by Jaydaa a veteran healer and contributing writer to both World of Warcraft content and other Blizzard games content here on Wowhead. I've been raiding in WoW for almost 15 years at various levels of progression. I've contributed to the theorycrafting of multiple healing classes, notably Mistweaver Monks and Restoration Druids. Find me on Twitter or on the Wowhead Discord username Jaydaa#2814.

SupsFocused Will Discord

Jak, Healer for Future on EU-Twisting Nether, author of the Holy, Discipline, and Advanced Mythic+ Priest Guides.
He is also the Host of the official World of Warcraft Mythic Dungeon International events. You can catch Jak on Twitter and streaming on Twitch.

Discipline PriestAtonementThe Ever-Rising TideMemory of Lucid DreamsBaseline Toolkit Changes

New Baseline Discipline Priest Abilities:
Mind Sear and Shadow Word: Death - This array of damaging abilities offers up additional damage to Discipline Priests, but does so with limited to no Atonement interaction. Mind Sear shares a similar design space to Holy Nova so the choice of use is a bit muddled. Though Shadow Word: Death got a recent 100% damage buff when used on targets below 20% health, it will equally increase the damage done to the player if the target doesn't die. How much more damage and whether we'll use all these abilities during periods of healing downtime will likely depend on final tuning.

Mind Blast - An interesting addition to the Discipline toolkit, Mind Blast gives us a baseline shadow damage cooldown spell with the absorb that used to be part of Smite. With decently high damage, you'll definitely want to press Mind Blast quite often to maximize your healing throughput, but with a 15s cooldown and high mana cost you'll likely need to be more sparing with Mind Blast to ensure you don't run out of mana or miss incorporating the spell into your Power Word: Radiance and Schism burst windows.

NEW Power Infusion (Level 58) - The haste steroid returns as a baseline ability and can now be cast on any player rather than just the Priest. An interesting piece of utility that I'm sure everyone in your raid/party will be clamoring for during their cooldowns. As a Discipline Priest, most of your throughput is baked into short burst windows so any cooldown that helps you pack even more into that window is fantastic. Lining up Power Infusion with Power Word: Radiance, Evangelism, and Shadowfiend will be phenomenal. Add in the Boon of the Ascended covenant to this lineup and your burst will be insane. Other players in raid will likely have to pry this ability from your cold dead hands before you give it up for them, but they might have a chance to nab it occasionally in Mythic+.

NEW (Level 52) - After its removal in Mists of Pandaria, Mind Soothe returns. While it was extremely niche in most situations, it might possibly have renewed use in Mythic+ as skips can be highly valued. i don't expect this one to be cast very often, but I'm sure we'll see a video of a Mind Soothe skip in Shadowlands at some point.

Shadowlands Leveling Perks:

NEW Rank 2 (Level 17) Fade now reduces the range at which enemies will attack you when used while active.

If Mind Soothe is meant as a group-wide aggro radius reduction, then this perk is the personal version. Niche perk at best but I'm sure someone will find a use for it somewhere.

Rank 2 (Level 54)

As something that already exists in the live game, it seems weird to remove this for the prepatch just to re-add it as a leveling perk for Shadowlands. On the plus side, you'll likely see this used more often in PvE content such as removing One With Death from Sathel the Accursed in Theater of Pain.

Rank 2 (Level 48)

The Priest strobe light just got a whole lot more spammy. Overall not a huge change, but a nice quality of life one. Brings the spell up to near Mind Sear levels of damage. This perk creates an issue for AoE damage where you now choose between the player-centered Holy Nova with a mana cost and miniscule healing or the target-centered Mind Sear that's free but does not offer healing.

Reworked Discipline Priest Abilities:

Smite Smites an enemy for (47% of Spell power) Holy damage. Cost changed from 0.5% to .7% of base mana.
With losing the absorb to Mind Blast and the increased mana cost, Smite feels even worse than before. As the filler ability, it's the final spell you cast after the long and growing list of cooldown based abilities that Discipline Priests are expected to manage. Sure you'll use it, but you won't feel good about it.

Power Word: Fortitude

Already the least mandatory buff, cutting Power Word: Fortitude in half makes it feel even less mandatory, but will still be a nice buff when you can bring a priest.

SmitePower Word: FortitudePower InfusionMind SoothePain SuppressionPower Word: BarrierRaptureAtonementBurstingGrievousTalent Changes

NEW Allies are healed for (210% of Spell power) when they gain benefit of your Power Word: Barrier, and healed again for (210% of Spell power) if they are under your barrier when it expires.
Tier 7 Talent, in place of Lenience
Light's Caress rewards players for smart and well-timed positioning of your Power Word: Barrier and for players staying within it for the entire duration. You'll likely find yourself yelling at your raiders to stay in the bubble until it disperses for that last pulse of healing. For reference, each pulse of healing is a little less than a Revival in healing meaning Light's Caress could be a fairly potent throughput talent. With the addition of Light's Caress, the level 50 talent row starts to feel a bit weird. There's a talent that rewards you for good Power Word: Barrier timing and positioning; one that allows you to gain some absorb value out of Power Word: Barrier especially when you can't stack up for the Power Word: Barrier; and Evangelism to create larger burst windows. I'm not sure if having two Power Word: Barrier talents on the same row is weird or if Evangelism is the odd man out for not modifying Power Word: Barrier. What I do know is that for a specialization that is struggling in Mythic+, this talent row doesn't do a lot to help in that scenario.

Power Word: Solace

As a mandatory pick for entirety of BFA, it makes sense that Power Word: Solace would be getting a nerf in Shadowlands. The cooldown increase hurts the most as it has the same issues that Mind Blast does in that lining it up with the Power Word: Radiance cooldown of 20s and shorter Atonement duration can be frustrating occasionally forcing players to delay the ability for their larger burst windows. Having two 15s cooldown abilities doesn't help that at all.

The laundry list of short cooldown abilities continues to grow with the recent additions: Schism, Penance, Power Word: Solace, Mind Blast, and sometimes Divine Star/Halo, and Shadow Covenant. Perhaps instead of adding to this list, Power Word: Solace could augment Mind Blast or Power Word: Solace could replace Mind Blast baking in all the goodness of both spells into a single ability. This could go a long way in pairing down the laundry list.

The new incarnation of Shadow Covenant is highly thematic to Discipline conjuring images of a Priest so consumed by the void that they can't reach the light. I could envision and would welcome an entire rework of Discipline Priest around this very concept of balancing light and void. Keeping both in check or succumbing to the insanity of the void or the blinding light.

As for the actual talent, this is a strong replacement even from a throughput standpoint. There's still some concern as to the lack of shadow damaging spells beyond Mind Blast, Schism, and Shadow Word: Pain. Perhaps allowing a Power of the Dark Side proc to turn Penance into shadow damage could be a very cool interaction that Priests could play around.

Covenant Abilities

Kyrian:
Boon of the Ascended via Ascended Nova and Ascended Blast - Due to Ascended Blast's short cooldown, you'll utilize a combination of Ascended Nova and Ascended Blast to heal and build up stacks culminating in a huge detonation of healing and damage via Ascended Eruption increasing based on the number of stacks built. Because Boon of the Ascended is classified as a Priest spell, the damage from Ascended Nova, Ascended Blast, and Ascended Eruption all convert to healing via Atonement. For Ascended Nova, only a single target of damage transfers via Atonement similar to Holy Nova; however, all of the final explosion Ascended Eruption damage transfers via Atonement for all targets hit resulting in a overwhelming burst of healing throughput. Properly coordinating your burst windows around the covenant will be key to maximizing your throughput including using Power Infusion to build as many stacks as possible and applying Schism to a target to amplify Ascended Eruption. With no stack cap, the potential of this ability is only limited by the number of stacks you're able to generate and any scenario where you can hit multiple enemies will dramatically increase your throughput. The only downside to this ability is the long 3 min cooldown, but beyond that this covenant is absolutely insane for Discipline and will be hard to top in any scenario.

Summon Steward - The steward offers some quality of life options like free talent changes or a vendor to sell things, but it essentially boils down to Phial of Serenity, a glorified healthstone for all intents and purposes. The healing will be nice and contribute albeit minimally to throughput, and the personal bleed, curse, and poison dispel for Discipline Priests could come in handy as you can't normally dispel those; however, the circumstances where the phial will be invaluable will be few and far between compared to other covenant abilities which are more universally valuable.

Venthyr:
Mindgames - A cool idea of turning an enemy against themselves and utilizing their damage to heal is awesome. I dream of a world where I can turn N'Zoth the Corruptor's Evoke Anguish against him to heal the raid, but I feel like the limitations on this one are just too difficult to overcome. For starters there's no upfront healing, but the upfront damage will transfer via Atonement. Beyond that, you'll only get roughly 400% spell power worth of healing and 4% of mana from the damage conversion out of each 45s use. Compare that to the massive amounts of AoE healing you'll get from the other covenant abilities and this one starts to feel a bit small potatoes. Interesting concept, but the numbers need to be there as well. Has maybe some potential in PvP maybe when trying to secure a kill?

Door of Shadows - Quite possibly the star of the covenant signature abilities, it's hard to say no to a 35yd teleport with a minute cooldown even if it has a 1.5s cast time. This type of movement is almost universally valuable and it's hard to think of an occasion where it'd be useless. Full Venthyr dungeon groups can plan skips around this ability. As a Discipline Priest, I will never say no to more mobility.

Necrolord:
Unholy Nova - A massive 15yd AoE heal that also infects enemies with an AoE DoT that has a Judgment of Light-like healing component. As of the current build, they've nerfed the healing from striking enemies with Unholy Transfusion down to 12% spell power and applied a ~1.5s internal cooldown to the healing component per player for each target struck. The damage of the Unholy Transfusion converts to healing via Atonement. As such, the more enemies you're able to hit the stronger this ability becomes. This will likely be an exceptional ability in Mythic+ where multiple enemy targets are pretty standard to scale the Atonement portion of the damage and pretty bland in raid where you're relying on the Judgment of Light portion to scale based on the number of players. With the significant access that a 1 min cooldown allows for, this could really help shore up some of the power that Discipline Priest seems to lack in Mythic+. It's worth noting that the 1 min cooldown also considerably desynchronizes with Evangelism and the Unholy Transfusion DoT lasts 15s compared to the Power Word: Radiance Atonement duration of 9s.

Fleshcraft - This extra self survivability will be nice and as an absorb will contribute minimally to overall throughput, but where this one loses me is the 4s channel. Adding a long channel to our toolkit is not exactly something we want. I would really like to see the channel time reduced or allowing this ability to channel while moving would go a long way to making this ability more palatable. Could be an excellent tool for surviving burst damage especially in high Mythic+, but it's a bit of a hard sell against the other movement oriented covenant signature abilities.

Night Fae:
Fae Guardians - While the other Covenant abilities focus more on raw throughput, Fae Guardians is primarily focused on utility. The 10% damage reduction from Shadow Mend could be strong in Mythic+. If you plan your spell usage correctly, you can keep the 10% damage reduction rolling on your tank and another target for 1min and 15s out of every 1.5 mins, an 83% uptime. While it's not much, for Discipline Priest that has to rely more on the damage reduction abilities in dungeons to compensate for their lacking single target throughput, this could be very help. Where I start to become skeptical on this ability is the remaining two benefits. Because Power Word: Shield still has the Weakened Soul effect and you can only bypass it with Rapture, you'll likely be using this on a few different targets unless you're willing to burn that cooldown in the process. So you're looking at best 200% resource or 20% mana spread over a few different targets. While that can be helpful, the granted mana hardly pays for the 3.4% mana cost for each Power Word: Shield paid by the Priest. So you're actually making Power Word: Shield more efficient in the process of granting mana to other healers. It's more efficient to generate resource and therefore damage but how much damage is questionable, especially when you consider that you're not picking another covenant ability which has damage baked into the cast so you're already losing out on that. Finally, the Power Word: Radiance benefit grants the 5 targets 3s off one of their major abilities. Because Power Word: Radiance has a cooldown, at best you're going to get 2 of these upfront and then maybe 2 more as the charges come back up. On top of that Power Word: Radiance is 5 injured allies that don't already have Atonement so selecting who is getting the cooldown reduction beyond the first target is questionable in raid. Finally, suboptimal usage of Power Word: Radiance nearly destroys their throughput as careful timing and setup are key to their success. Now consider that Discipline Priests are sacrificing the added damage and throughput of other covenants just for this utility and this covenant's outlook is bleak. For me it's just not worth it. I'm sure you'll see videos of a Priest reducing cooldowns or granting resource here and there for the spectacle, but it's just not a realistic scenario.

Soulshape As someone who adored Displacer Beast, it's nice to see this come back as an option although more watered down. Blinks and teleports are universally valuable and while it might not be the Venthyr ability this is a strong second place option. You likely won't be coming up with skips for such a limited 10 yard blink, but you get 3 in the 12s duration so you may have some opportunities to blink over some particularly nasty mechanics. It should be noted that you can cast while shapeshifted. Comes with a cosmetic collecting minigame which is fantastic.

KyrianBoon of the AscendedNecrolordLackluster GCDs

Rapture - At the start of BFA, Rapture was put on the GCD and given 2 extra seconds of duration to compensate. For Rapture, that first activation GCD delays the actual power of the cooldown making it feel a bit more hollow. Fortunately this one is an easy fix. Simply make Rapture a targeted spell that applies a large free absorb to the target on activation in addition to its current effect.

Evangelism - While the talent has been near mandatory in raids for all of BFA and doesn't need any additional power, the GCD hasn't felt like a particularly strategic or powerful one for awhile. As long as you press Evangelism sometime before your large number of Atonements expires, you're doing it right. Ideally, if there was a moderate pulse of healing on all of your Atonement targets when you activate Evangelism the spell would feel more impactful and could be used more strategically. Repurposing a Contrition heal for this seems easy enough.

Power Infusion - With the return of Power Infusion, there's been some concern about whether it would be on the GCD or not. Before it's removal at the start of BFA it was intended to be placed on the GCD, but due to it's removal this never occurred. With its return in Shadowlands, Power Infusion remains off the GCD. For parity with abilities like Innervate, it probably should be placed on the GCD, but I urge developers to reconsider this and so many other abilities. With Power Infusion once again being allowed to be used on any ally player, the Priest shouldn't have to pay the GCD cost for another player to have fun.

Shadowfiend & Mindbender - The immediacy and level of impact that these pets cause players to feel less than excited about pressing these GCD abilities. Combine that with an unforgiving pet AI and the complaints start to make a lot of sense. I'm not terribly attached to either of these abilities, but if they can be salvaged I'm all for it.

Mythic+ Viability - While there are a lot of factors that determine how well a spec performs in Mythic+ (utility, damage, single target throughput, etc.), I'd really appreciate if future development could be focused on helping Discipline Priests become stronger and more relevant in dungeon content. I know it's a big ask and there isn't an exact solution, but perhaps the additional systems of Shadowlands could really offer some more tools for Discipline Priests. Since it's rework in Legion, Discipline has always been the healer with the highest skill cap but has rewarded players for mastering this challenging playstyle. While that tends to work out in raid, putting in that same effort in dungeons has only seemed to land them somewhere around the average.

Leap of Faith - While it's cool to be able to move your allies across the field of battle, I miss the added mobility of Reverse Life Grip allowing you to grip yourself to an allies position. While I think it'd be super similar to Druid's Wild Charge, perhaps we can give it a more Clash-like functionality that causes the two players to meet in the middle.

Comments

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Comment by Grigory432Currently leveling Discipline priest. The way it works in BFA is kinda old Shadow armed with Vampiric Embrace: PWS everyone who might be taking damage & DPS enemies. Atonement fading > recast PWS or just Radiance > spam some more Smite. Uh, this a healing spec, or a DPS spec with inbuilt party support?
Flash baseline would be good, Shadow Mend feels bad in combat when you just delay damage on tank instead of really healing.
In general PWS seems to suck and it's only use is putting Atonement on 1 target. Needs beefing up.
Penance is good for DPS. No joke, it's castable while moving, and really weak as heal, but slightly better than Smite in DPS. So why does this spell has healing function again if it doesn't heal people, just keeps them walking a while longer?
Power Word Barrier is a cheap copypasta of Anti-Magic Zone, like the small indie company couldn't squeeze out some $ for graphics team to make a new "holy yellow-white bubble" effect (instead of palette swap) and new sound effect (pure old Wrath AMZ). Too strong to ignore, too long CD to actually use as something else than cheesing a big raid-wide hit.
Mind Blast & Sear baseline = meh/good. Good because Discipline gets ranged AoE. Meh because Blast is YET ANOTHER DPS ability to bind & use on cd when you are, y'know, the healer.
The whole thing with Discipline being labeled "HEALER" gets old when you play it a bit and realize it heals more by damage dealing abilities than actual healing abilities. Really, VE Shadow + some yellow-tinted spells. Who the heck put that label? It's obviously DPS... :D
Power Infusion, Evangelism, Rapture, Shadowfiend/Mindbender should be off GCD, feels incredibly bad to waste 1,5s doing nothing but casting INSTANT buff on SOMEONE ELSE, or yourself and not benefit from it for that 1 gcd. Bad enough Discipline doesn't really have tools to sustain healing party/raid, it doesn't need more GCDs.

The DPS hybrid spec sucks, just return it back to the bubble glory days.also cannot really heal people while being heal specagainI can't remember any recent "state in shadowlands" post that doesn't include "lackluster GCDS" in its title. So every healing class is crap?doesn'tComment by DuckworthA lot of this thread is just selfish wish lists and it shows that a lot of the comment section doesn't really play discipline priest at the highest of levels. Discipline is a specialization made for mythic raiding, by using Power Word: Radiance and/or Rapture before huge burst windows they become a perfect raid healer. The issues are not that there are lackluster GCDs... if you are actually complaining about rapture and evangelism being boring; it shows that either you aren't grasping what the abilities are meant to do or you aren't using them right. The Devs gave discipline priests the perfect cooldowns for high intensive healing. Both Evangelism and Rapture are at the same cooldown time of 1.5 mins, while other classes such as holy paladins need essences to fix their base kit to even use glimmer correctly. It also gives the user an opportunity to use them in succession or use them at two different times which Holy paladins don't get the option to do that.
Furthermore, shadowfiend/mindbender isn't meant for you to see results right away! They are abilities used prior to large damage mechanics or when the raid has rot damage. For the thread to say that it doesn't feel good I'm not sure what you want out of this ability? When used in tandem with 15+ atonements on the raid, shadowfiend almost doubles the healing throughput. Discipline priests aren't BM hunters or Frost Mages so I guess I'm not completely understanding why you think we need an action bar for a pet that is solely there to help you heal and in other variations of the game also a mana battery.
Lastly, I want to address two big things regarding the thread. First, Power Infusion is not always meant to be used on yourself. In higher raiding content when the spell was in the game before removal; Power Infusion was always used on the caster that utilized the haste the most and this will still be the case in Shadowlands. Yes, healers want to see everything used on them such as Innervate/Power Infusion/Wisdom/Etc. However, just like what they did for Innervate, where it now has the secondary effect for putting there cast on another player these abilities aren't meant to be used selfishly. Power Infusion will be primarily put on strong casters during their burst windows and not used on yourself. Unless Discipline priests get nerfed so hard that they start to have mana issues this spell should almost never be cast on the user. Leading me into my last point.
Reading the Night Fae covenant portion of this article, it is obvious that you are saying the ability is not worth using. But every high end raider I have spoken to about this covenant ability has said this ability is busted. Multiple clips have shown things such as spamming a Frost DK with Power Word: Shield during their Breath and it extended their Breath for more than double its normal uptime, and for Warriors in execute they will literally be able to constantly be casting execute if the ability is used in that regard. And when you don't need to buff up a dps you can then spam shadow mends on the whole raid to give everyone a 10% dr on top of the already amazing Power Word: Barrier. Which is the issue with this covenant ability... The Night Fae ability is not an issue for it not being good, the issue is that the ability is TO GOOD. The issue is that instead of using Rapture as a way to do throughput it will now be used to buff up their fellow party members and this makes for very unhealthy gameplay. Most world first guilds will have to create comps around this ability to utilize the ability and completely amplify a single player every 1.5 mins. As I mentioned prior Rapture is also a 1.5 min cd which now you can see where the underlining problems lie. I think they will need to completely scrap the Night Fae ability or discipline priests will have no choice to choose it and basically become an equivalent to a Bard or a raid utility healer.
I would love to hear anyone else's opinions on what I had to say! Furthermore I want to address that I do not hate the author nor the article written, I am just not fully onboard with specific comments made that would influence the reader into thinking a specific way. I also love almost all the changes with what they did to the discipline priest in Shadowlands and by complaining about minor things such Mind Sear not doing enough damage or Mind Blast having to long of a cooldown that it feels bad to press it will cause the Devs to inevitably remove the abilities instead of fix them.Comment by PoromaniaI think it’s as sign of that there’s not that much wrong with the classes if the complains are regarding the <1.5s GCD’s on spells with a 1.5min cooldownsComment by ekidnaI doubt Disc will ever return to "bubble lord". Blizz has stated that absorbs are too powerful and detract from other healers. More direct throughput would be a nice medium. During high damage use a direct healing/absorb cycle, and during low damage/constant AoE a primarily DPS cycle. The 30% damage "target" (as mentioned in some presentations and interviews) is where a lot of the complaints seem to lie. The option to switch to 10% damage with more upfront healing/absorbs would be nice.Comment by NathasilImho it would be best to simply add atonement as a talent to Holy and come up with something completely new for Disc.

I know a lot of players will hate on this proposal, but as long as NEITHER priest healing spec can have something cool "because the other spec has something like it!" priest will always have the worst complete package out of all healers.

If i play Disc, i cannot access the throughput talents/spells of Holy. If i play Holy, i have no access to the absorbs/damage<>healing conversion of Disc. Other healers always have access to all their healing-talents.

Priest having 2 healing specs is NOT a bonus - its a liability. Especially if the expansion forces you to specialise into ONE spec (Azerite Armor in BFA, Covenant in SL).Comment by DuckworthImho it would be best to simply add atonement as a talent to Holy and come up with something completely new for Disc.

I know a lot of players will hate on this proposal, but as long as NEITHER priest healing spec can have something cool "because the other spec has something like it!" priest will always have the worst complete package out of all healers.

If i play Disc, i cannot access the throughput talents/spells of Holy. If i play Holy, i have no access to the absorbs/damage<>healing conversion of Disc. Other healers always have access to all their healing-talents.

Priest having 2 healing specs is NOT a bonus - its a liability. Especially if the expansion forces you to specialise into ONE spec (Azerite Armor in BFA, Covenant in SL).Comment by YizimistEvangelism should be a base line ability and they need to add better talents.Comment by Alatheiasadly shadowlands seems intent on keeping priests on the weaker side of things overall.

2 healing specs, neither of which is particularly good.
1 dps spec that is slow AF.

I just wish we had a good damage spec to go with the lackluster healing specs priest has. Soloing content is just decidedly slower on a priest than any other class, even in shadow.Comment by AlatheiaImho it would be best to simply add atonement as a talent to Holy and come up with something completely new for Disc.

I know a lot of players will hate on this proposal, but as long as NEITHER priest healing spec can have something cool "because the other spec has something like it!" priest will always have the worst complete package out of all healers.

If i play Disc, i cannot access the throughput talents/spells of Holy. If i play Holy, i have no access to the absorbs/damage<>healing conversion of Disc. Other healers always have access to all their healing-talents.

Priest having 2 healing specs is NOT a bonus - its a liability. Especially if the expansion forces you to specialise into ONE spec (Azerite Armor in BFA, Covenant in SL).Comment by DuckworthImho it would be best to simply add atonement as a talent to Holy and come up with something completely new for Disc.

I know a lot of players will hate on this proposal, but as long as NEITHER priest healing spec can have something cool "because the other spec has something like it!" priest will always have the worst complete package out of all healers.

If i play Disc, i cannot access the throughput talents/spells of Holy. If i play Holy, i have no access to the absorbs/damage<>healing conversion of Disc. Other healers always have access to all their healing-talents.

Priest having 2 healing specs is NOT a bonus - its a liability. Especially if the expansion forces you to specialise into ONE spec (Azerite Armor in BFA, Covenant in SL).Comment by AlatheiaImho it would be best to simply add atonement as a talent to Holy and come up with something completely new for Disc.

I know a lot of players will hate on this proposal, but as long as NEITHER priest healing spec can have something cool "because the other spec has something like it!" priest will always have the worst complete package out of all healers.

If i play Disc, i cannot access the throughput talents/spells of Holy. If i play Holy, i have no access to the absorbs/damage<>healing conversion of Disc. Other healers always have access to all their healing-talents.

Priest having 2 healing specs is NOT a bonus - its a liability. Especially if the expansion forces you to specialise into ONE spec (Azerite Armor in BFA, Covenant in SL).Comment by DuckworthI mentioned in my first comment that disc is not good in mythic+ and there is an underlining issue with that but the solution is not to gut the spec it is to just add more talents that can fix this. Shadow Covenant is a good step in the right direction but instead of it just increasing shadow damage by X% it should just make it so it increases the potency of shadow spells by X% this makes it so shadow mend will also be affected by this ability. Its little things like that, that can help discipline. Besides this in all content other than M+ disc is probably one of the most well-rounded healers. However, as I mentioned previously disc excels at raid healing it feels like it was created for this specific purpose. The problem is that almost all the healers aren't in a good place for M+ besides druids and monks, holy pallies just recently came into the meta for M+ but that is because Holy paladins have spiraled out of control for scaling in the current expansion. The whole argument started because someone mentioned that disc should just be scrapped and turned into a holy talent. The solution is not to just get rid of something because of inconvenience. I think the Shadowlands Devs need to look into all healing specs and see why some specs are performing well in M+ while others are flopping.Comment by AcccattoneIts =/= it's.

Every. Single. Article.Comment by mozpiozNo mention of ? It's becoming baseline too, isn't it?

Also in general I think it's ridiculous that the one healer spec that is *required* to do damage in order to heal has such a convoluted way of doing it. It will always feel more logical to me to just to start DPsing when not much healing is required instead of going through this "ok apply atonement first, THEN dps as much as you can to keep your party alive" routine.
In short: MoP Disc felt great - you healed a little through atonement, much like applying a HoT. But when people started taking *real* damage, you had to switch to *real* healing and absorption.
Nowadays, Disc doesn't have real healing anymore, you *have* to make do with atonement becase it's all you have. And that reliance on absolutely having to DPS in order to meaningfully heal has been the problem of this spec since WoD.Comment by mozpiozThese comments make me feel sorry for the priest discord.Comment by HaelthyrDisc would be miles more optional to bring to m+ (and more consistent raid throughput) if we had a few things:

- A slow Heal spell baseline to counteract many of the “rot” damaged or bursting effects we see in mythic plus in a way that won’t make us OOM in 5 spells like shadowmend feels. The ability to have any sort of efficient out of combat heal would be great as well in comparison to shadowmending our hearts out.

- Reduced recovery rate for Radiance to improve AOE healing capability OR alter our mastery back to how it used to be. Having atonement be a proximity based heal off the target you’re damaging and increase that healing by x% and absorption by x% based off mastery is leaps and bounds more appealing than “if you’re healing someone that already has atonement on them, here’s a little more to add on”

- A SILENCE/INTERRUPT. Even on a 45 second Cooldown, we’ve experienced things like the horrific visions where solo encounters are just less favourable for you to be doing while in Disc because we lack an ability like this.

These are some of the only things that I actually find bothersome with it. As my main character, I manage to get the job done but you can also visibly see how much harder disc is working to output as much as it is in comparison to other healing specializations.Comment by KuroiiThe DPS hybrid spec sucks, just return it back to the bubble glory days.Comment by MalOSBI really would not mind Disc struggling in Mythic +, if Holy was good... but every season both Priests specs are the least desirable healer any group wants. Mass Dispell cannot keep up with the utility of the other healers, the so-called damage healer cannot compete with a paladin (or Resto, Monk?) for damage.Comment by Ukitsu556disc in raid is god tier since many years.
disc in PvP is really good
disc in mm+ is ok, not best tier but not worst tier. Ppl like Moadmoad do 26-27 timed, but ppl just prefer to play with Pal or Drood

Disc player want to be god in all format...Comment by DisbeatleFor my personal wishlist I would add Shadow Covenant to not only increase damage done by shadow spells, but also healing. This would be really helpful talent in m+ scenarios with Bursting / Grievous affixes. Running completely oom after second mob pack because of shadow mend spam is just not fun

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