Discipline Priest 7.3

[Vlad 411]

Hey guys. Just an update to let you know that we have Zolvolt on board and I'm undertaking a significant revision of this (and the Holy) guide, which should improve things. I'll keep you posted :)

[Guest JellyMonster]

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who has contributed to this.  Guide creator and commenters. 

I found the commenters to be a bit brash, but the mature and professional response of Icy-veins was quite refreshing.  Reading through the guide and then the comments and then the responses to the comments has really helped me understand the disc priest.  I really felt happy when I saw icy-veins using it as constructive criticism on the class. I've been doing okay as disc priest, obviously under utilizing and valuing shadow fiend/mind bender.

Again - Thank you everyone.

[Guest ConcernedGuest]

Why is Penitent completely useless? I understand that Disc is supposed to be doing higher damage output, but the added utility of the extra heal is kind of hard to pass up. It allows you to quickly heal and move without adding atonement to the target, which would be highly beneficial if you are trying to keep your Plea cost down. Plus it becomes as equally strong as shadow mend. I don't know, maybe I wasn't switching between healing and then doing damage quickly enough - it's entirely possible. 

[Pandacho 286]

11 hours ago, Guest ConcernedGuest said:

Why is Penitent completely useless? I understand that Disc is supposed to be doing higher damage output, but the added utility of the extra heal is kind of hard to pass up. It allows you to quickly heal and move without adding atonement to the target, which would be highly beneficial if you are trying to keep your Plea cost down. Plus it becomes as equally strong as shadow mend. I don't know, maybe I wasn't switching between healing and then doing damage quickly enough - it's entirely possible. 

The IV guides are mostly focused for the raid environment. In said environment you will have another healers doing 'pure healing' job. So cutting away one of your most powerful damage-to-healing spells (this conversion is your job as a disc) doesn't seem to be the best choice. Spreading the Atonement and healing through damage done is your work and your strength as a disc, no need to compete with throughput healers.

P.S. you don't keep Plea cost down converting Penance to a healing spell but rather use PI, Rapture with PW: Shield and PW: Radiance when a quick wide Atonement coverage is needed. Frankly, I even wouldn't do that a lot because the Atonement buff will tick away unused while you are trying to spread it to too many targets. Rolling PW:S and 5 Pleas (if I recall it right, this is the amount of Plea to be worth to cast for the right mana management) and dpsing in between would keep you full time busy without adding additional direct heals :)

[Guest LessConcernedGuest]

15 hours ago, Pandacho said:

The IV guides are mostly focused for the raid environment. In said environment you will have another healers doing 'pure healing' job. So cutting away one of your most powerful damage-to-healing spells (this conversion is your job as a disc) doesn't seem to be the best choice. Spreading the Atonement and healing through damage done is your work and your strength as a disc, no need to compete with throughput healers.

P.S. you don't keep Plea cost down converting Penance to a healing spell but rather use PI, Rapture with PW: Shield and PW: Radiance when a quick wide Atonement coverage is needed. Frankly, I even wouldn't do that a lot because the Atonement buff will tick away unused while you are trying to spread it to too many targets. Rolling PW:S and 5 Pleas (if I recall it right, this is the amount of Plea to be worth to cast for the right mana management) and dpsing in between would keep you full time busy without adding additional direct heals :)

Very true. I won't lie to you, I wrote this while enjoy some Budweisers, so I failed to consider that this entirely written from a raiding perspective. I'm currently gearing through dungeons on my disc priest, and I've found it difficult to get the full experience while everyone is expecting me to fully focus on healing - hence my preference for Penitent over Castigation. 

[Ayfid 1]

I just released the AtonementBar addon to help with timing atonement buff windows around aoe bursts. Hopefully it'll be useful to someone.

[Guest Cyran]

Hey, I don't believe my comments were brash at all. Unless you consider stating why schism isn't competitive as brash, which if anything is absolutist, but it has backing.

And the reason you don't want to use penance as a heal... well. Let's think of it in a few ways compared to the other talents.

1) You use Penance as a heal. It's only healing one target, Disc's healing strength doesn't come from it's direct heals to target, but it's atonements (which is funny because it's mastery is actually fairly bad. Correct me if I'm wrong on this, but when I was checking it, I had a mastery % of 15%. Instead of increasing atonement heals by 40+15% to be 55%, it instead was only 6% which would mean it's 15% OF that 40% to be 46% which makes it even worse than a lot of people thought.

2) You gain an extra tick to penance through castigation. this means a little more damage (I wouldn't say 25% more because you're still taking a little more time away where you could be smite spamming, but it's pretty much 25% so let's just go ahead and use that) and for each person affected by atonement it would simply only having two targets affected by atonement before you see castigation giving higher HEALING returns than healing a single target with penance.

3) Schism. Does burst damage, so gets atonement heals that way, and increases heals of *gasp* penance by 30% if used after, which again would mean you'd only need 2 target for that heal on penance with atonement for it to be stronger than The Penitant. And of course, that initial burst damage, and the time it'll probably yield more healing through 30% stronger smite/Purge the wicked.

The only reason to take that talent would be because you want to be lazy, you're in a dungeon, and you have the talent Grace (so that it'd be 30% stronger on the target healed). However, if you're going to do that, just go holy. Holy has much better lazy single target heals and snap AoE.

[Guest Kergamus]

I'm having a very hard time validating Purge the Wicked. It would be alright if each bolt of Penance spread it to a nearby target. But honestly, all this does is spare me the trouble of DoTing two targets (if there is only two, because otherwise I need to be spreading it manually anyway). It just seems to me like Grace is a much, much stronger option by improving your Shadow Mend on priority targets, and Power Word: Radiance.

Give me an argument in favor of Purge the Wicked instead of Grace. Because right now I'm struggling to see its utility, unless they buff the damage it does compared to Shadow Word: Pain.

[Crazyyelir 0]

Ive been playing Disc for a bit now and this is what I have been doing.
For raid healing i have had Purge the wicked, solace, and Castagion.  Reason is that i believe schism is too much of a hassle for me to keep it up.  I like Solace because it adds to my DPS rotation to have a constant stream of mana regen coming in, instead of a burst from mindbender.
I have been maintaining PW:S on the tanks, unless there is a point where they are not tanking someone. I keep purge up on many targets as i can. i normally use plea to put out spurts of atonement to the raid when needed.  For major aoe heals i have combined PI with PW:R and get about 3 or 4 casts out before using penance to get alot of those heals out to those atonement targets.  I have not been using shadow mend much at all and im still trying to figure that out.
In dungeon healing i actually had taken Shadow covenant  for my aoe healing. This was before i started raid healing so I will prolly go back and check on that.
So far i really like Disc priest.  I can keep a  5 man party alive, and im not always in last on the heals charts in raids.  I think they are pretty viable.

[Guest smeagol001]

hey somehehow the  shadow word pain macro wont work other than spammining its content into /s i ust copy pasted the content in a new macro...

[Vlad 411]

1 hour ago, Guest smeagol001 said:

hey somehehow the  shadow word pain macro wont work other than spammining its content into /s i ust copy pasted the content in a new macro...

I can't imagine why it wouldn't work. Everything after #showtooltip Shadow Word: Pain should be on a separate single line. Is that how you're doing it? And probably also check for any trailing characters.

[Guest smeagol001]

On 31.8.2016 at 8:04 PM, Vlad said:

I can't imagine why it wouldn't work. Everything after #showtooltip Shadow Word: Pain should be on a separate single line. Is that how you're doing it? And probably also check for any trailing characters.

yeah i simply copy pasted it from the page..

[Damien 1,514]

4 hours ago, Guest smeagol001 said:

yeah i simply copy pasted it from the page..

I've had this problem before. Sometimes, when you copy paste a macro (depends on browser and in-game addons), it's going to add a leading space at the beginning of each line. It's really hard to notice, because all the lines still look as if they have the proper indentation when in fact they all have an extra space. Try going through each line to see if there's indeed an empty space before the command (in which case the macro won't work).

[Guest Matisia]

On 2-8-2016 at 0:17 AM, Sugartits said:

how do you track this? i just tried LFR with the elvUI and it was difficult to see who even needed healing let alone who i had atonement on which should have only been the 2 tanks

I use an addon called atonement tracker, you can find it on Curse client 
 

[neytirri 3]

ok Question- what does the color of the ilvl on our artifact weapon mean? between 2 toons and many specs ive got some weapons that say (for example) 

 

750 in red on priest, Disc spec

805 in Yellow on shadow

below 750 in green on my DH

 

??

 

[Valks 2,373]

1 hour ago, Sugartits said:

ok Question- what does the color of the ilvl on our artifact weapon mean? between 2 toons and many specs ive got some weapons that say (for example) 

 

750 in red on priest, Disc spec

805 in Yellow on shadow

below 750 in green on my DH

 

??

 

I'm not sure what you mean by this. I just checked in game and it is yellow for me, regardless of the item level. is this an addon changing it perhaps?

[neytirri 3]

no i dont think so. I think my weapon was under the lvl it should have been, i had an empty slot for a relic and when i got n upgraded one from a dungeon i equipped it and now my weapon is higher level and showing up in yellow instead of red.

[Valks 2,373]

7 hours ago, Sugartits said:

no i dont think so. I think my weapon was under the lvl it should have been, i had an empty slot for a relic and when i got n upgraded one from a dungeon i equipped it and now my weapon is higher level and showing up in yellow instead of red.

I wonder why I don't have the changing colours. I checked on a few characters, but can't find anything of the sort. Anyway, I imagine it doesn't have that much of an impact on your game and playing! As long as it's not a huge issue, I imagine it will just be some indicator of ilvl, as you said.

[Guest Tereasa]

In regards to offensive macros:

How can I make an offensive macro prioritize the actions within the macro. For example, I use a macro that looks like this:

/cast [@mouseovertarget, harm] [@mouseover, harm] [@targettarget, harm] [harm] Shadow Word: Pain

If I have an enemy hard targeted, I want it to choose that target to cast at first. If I have no hard enemy target, then I want it to prioritize casting at my mouseover target, and then at my targetoftarget mouseover (like when I am mousing over the raid frames).

The macro I have been using above was working pretty well for almost everything except when horde come into the picture. The spell seems to always prioritize horde. Even if I hard target the boss and have no mouse over target at all. This is a big problem this expansion with shared world quests.

If anyone could help me tweak my macro that would be fantastic. Thanks!

[neytirri 3]

On 9/9/2016 at 3:00 PM, Blainie said:

I wonder why I don't have the changing colours. I checked on a few characters, but can't find anything of the sort. Anyway, I imagine it doesn't have that much of an impact on your game and playing! As long as it's not a huge issue, I imagine it will just be some indicator of ilvl, as you said.

 

 

 

It has to do with the level of your relic you have slotted! my disc priest weapon was in the red and when i put a higher level relic i got from a heroic my weapon is now yellow. =D

[neytirri 3]

question about disc priest- i am using atonement tracker but healing in dungeons as a disc makes me nervous for the following reason- dps'ing to heal is fine but since atonement only lasts a few seconds i have to constantly stop dps'ing and target the tank to apply atonement. Before anyone trolls me, I am fairly new to wow and priest. I played a similar class in another game but i always had a single target ability that stayed on the tank the entire time and everytime i dps'd those heals would go to tank without me having to apply anything. 

 

Currently whenever I press power word shield- it shields me and not the tank (because if i am dps'ing i cant always have tank targeted) is there a way to change this?  I consider myself good at what i do once I have all the info.

Currently since I am only doing dungeons my talents are as follows-

castigation

angelic feather

psychic voice

mindbender

power infusion

divine star 

grace

 

Edited September 11, 2016 by Sugartits

[Valks 2,373]

39 minutes ago, Sugartits said:

Currently whenever I press power word shield- it shields me and not the tank (because if i am dps'ing i cant always have tank targeted) is there a way to change this?  I consider myself good at what i do once I have all the info.

It sounds like you need a mouse-over macro. 

Quote

#showtooltip
/cast [@mouseover,help] [help,nodead] [@targettarget,help,nodead] [@player] Power Word: Shield

With this macro, whoever your mouse is currently hovering over, it will cast PWS on them. If it hovers over nobody, it will cast it on your target. If you have no target or your target is an enemy, it will cast it on you.

[Valks 2,373]

19 hours ago, Guest Tereasa said:

In regards to offensive macros:

How can I make an offensive macro prioritize the actions within the macro. For example, I use a macro that looks like this:

/cast [@mouseovertarget, harm] [@mouseover, harm] [@targettarget, harm] [harm] Shadow Word: Pain

If I have an enemy hard targeted, I want it to choose that target to cast at first. If I have no hard enemy target, then I want it to prioritize casting at my mouseover target, and then at my targetoftarget mouseover (like when I am mousing over the raid frames).

The macro I have been using above was working pretty well for almost everything except when horde come into the picture. The spell seems to always prioritize horde. Even if I hard target the boss and have no mouse over target at all. This is a big problem this expansion with shared world quests.

If anyone could help me tweak my macro that would be fantastic. Thanks!

You might find help here, but I imagine you'll be better off asking in our UI forum. The macro gurus and such all live there. 

[Guest Xanthia]

A few comments on Schism, Twist of Fate and The Penitent. 

The guide, a some commenters, seem to assume that the uptime on schism should be maximized for it to be worth your time. I think that is a misunderstanding. It improves your burst damage, which is all you get to do under pressure, which is where talent choices matter the most.

As a disc priest you periodically apply atonement, periodically damage to heal. Schism allows you to burst at a maximum in those short burst damage windows. Atonement -> Schism -> Penance. With respect to cool downs, and Schism -> Lights Wrath is obviously very strong. This again asks for max amount of uptime on atonement application rather than smiting.

So basically Schism is good because it allows you to deal better burst damage, which allows you to "do more stuff", be that apply more atonement, or something else. 

The same line of reasoning can be applied to Twist of Fate - you don't need to maximize its uptime, because that extra healing matters the most in a pressure situation, in which case it will always be up.

In other words, assuming that these buffs/debuffs should be up all the time is probably a mistake.

The Penitent taken with Grace adds flexibility to hard dungeon fights which may requires a lot of single target healing. You can't change your spec in the middle of a dungeon, but you can change a talent. 

Choosing Castigation over Schism is IMO done in situations where mobility is a issue. 

All this from a dungeon perspective, and my 2c since these thoughts haven't been brought up very much in the comments so far. 

[Guest Xanthia]

BTW the emphasis above was not intended:)