Discipline Priest Healing Easy Mode — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

This build is your primary build for raiding content. Focus on casting Penance and Power Word: Shield on cooldown and utilizing Evangelism to enable mass Atonement coverage during major damage events.

This build is your primary build for mythic plus content. Focus on casting Penance and Power Word: Shield on cooldown for strong AoE healing through Atonement and single target healing via Power Word: Shield and Penance.

The stat priority is as follows when deciding between equal item level gear:

1. Haste until 15-20%
2. Crit = Mastery
3. Haste past 20%
4. Versatility

When trying to decide between Crit and Mastery as your next stat after Haste, try to focus on whatever one you currently have less of. You want a fairly even balance (in rating, not percentage) of both.

The stat priority is as follows when deciding between equal item level gear:

1. Haste
2. Mastery
3. Crit
4. Versatility

Crit will slowly gain more value compared to Mastery the more mastery you get, so some level of balance between the two is ideal, but overall will have a very small impact on output as long as your are prioritizing Haste first. Haste is still our best secondary by a large margin.

While we provide stat preference lists, swapping gear to higher item level items — and their higher Intellect/total stats — should, usually, provide a larger upgrade than using lower item level items with better stats. The exception to this rule are items with important tertiary stats like Leech, which should still be used ahead of other items without them, unless the difference in item level is around 10 or above.

Keep in mind that these stat recommendations are for the simplified version of the spec only. If you are attempting to get into higher level raiding and looking to use our more advanced recommendations, please follow the stat recommendations on the main stats page below.

• Plea is an instant cast, single target Atonement applicator with a small direct heal effect tied to it. The largest benefit to using Plea is that it can be cast while moving.
• Power Word: Shield is an instant cast, single target Atonement applicator with a fairly strong shield tied to it. While this is a very potent option for applying Atonement to a single target, it does have a cooldown.
• Flash Heal is a 1.5-second cast, single target Atonement applicator with a decent-sized single target heal tied to it. With this costing more Mana than Plea, as well as requiring you to stand still, it will not see nearly as much play as your primary applicator outside of a few situations. The first situation where this gains significant strength is when the single target heal portion of the spell is relevant. The other would be to abuse other talents, like Surge of Light or Binding Heal.
• Power Word: Radiance is a 2-second cast, multi-target Atonement applicator with a decent heal tied to it. Power Word: Radiance applies Atonement to 5 people, but at a reduced duration. This is useful in raids for getting large coverage before a major damage event or in M+ to quickly cover the whole group in Atonement.
• Penance also applies Atonement when cast on an ally. When playing Oracle this is very useful considering Twinsight works with this. You can cast Penance on an enemy and the twinsight bolts will still apply Atonement to the ally it targets.

Discipline Priests rely on applying Atonement and then dealing damage to heal through Atonement.

In Raid, you want to be mostly casting Penance and Power Word: Shield on cooldown to both do healing and continue to apply some highly efficient Atonements. Combine this with cycling your Power Word: Radiance charges and you'll continuously do a very solid amount of HPS. When looking to utilize our primary cooldown, Evangelism, you want to plan out your usage around major damage events. The following sequence is an example of what your cast sequence should look like when utilizing Evangelism in a raid environment:

1. Refresh your Shadow Word: Pain to ensure it lasts the entire duration of your Ramp.
2. Cast Penance
3. Cast Power Word: Shield
4. Cast Flash Heal
5. Cast Plea
6. Cast Evangelism
7. Cast Power Word: Radiance x2
8. Cast Penance
9. Cast Mind Blast
10. Cast Penance
11. Cast Power Word: Shield
12. Cast Smite until Penance becomes available again or your Atonement's have fallen off.

Healing in a dungeon relies on Atonement in AoE healing situations or situations where the single target healing requirements are low. In situations where the incoming damage becomes significant, you have a multitude of cooldowns to augment your healing, both AoE and single target.

Your core method of handling AoE damage will start with Power Word: Radiance. This not only provides a large heal to the entire group, but also applies Atonement to your whole party, setting up the next part of your rotation.

Once Atonement is active on the party, focus on DPSing by casting Penance, Mind Blast, and Smite to heal through Atonement. When simply cycling your DPS cooldowns as well as Power Word: Shield isnt enough to keep up with the incoming damage, look to utilize Evangelism or Ultimate Penitence to provide additional output.

For single target healing, casting Penance directly on an injured ally followed by a Power Word: Shield benefiting from the newly acquired Weal and Woe stacks will provide a significant amount of direct healing. In situations where your Atonement healing plus direct healing is not enough to keep someone alive, consider utilizing Pain Suppression to reduce the incoming damage on that target. If that is still not enough, falling back on Flash Heal when Penance and shield on are cooldown is a last resort.

In Dungeon content, Evangelism immediately heals your whole group for a non-insignificant amount on cast. Additionally, it causes your next two casts of Power Word: Radiance to be instant cast. This buff lasts forever, so you can hold those Radiance casts for as long as you need them, making this a very strong tool to assist with mobility heavy encounters.

In Raiding content, this tool is a primary enabler for what we call a ramp. This concept will be described in the next section.

Evangelism also activates either Archangel or Mindbender depending on what one you are talented into. This either buffs all your healing and absorbs for a period of time or summons a pet for a short duration to both deal damage as well as interact with other talents such as Inescapable Torment if talented.

While this spell has an incredibly long cooldown at 4 minutes, its also incredibly powerful. When cast offensively, it will throw bolts at random enemies, dealing significant damage which translates to a large amount of Atonement healing if the group has Atonement active on them. When cast defensively, it will throw bolts at injured allies, healing them directly. In Raid, you will almost always utilize this offensively with a full ramp sequence described below to ensure proper Atonement coverage. In keys however, while your default will be to cast this offensively, there are some situations where you may need to cast this defensively for a significant amount of single target healing.

Power Word: Barrier shares a choice node with Ultimate Penitence, meaning you have to choose between one or the other. Power Word: Barrier can be incredibly powerful in any scenario where the incoming damage during its duration is significant enough. Keep in mind that it does require the group and or raid to be able to stack under the barrier for its duration to benefit, so some encounters it is very difficult to use even if the damage intake warrants it. While we are recommending Ultimate Penitence by default, keep an eye out for good situations to swap to Power Word: Barrier.

Pain Suppression is a very large Damage Reduction on a single target. Utilizing this either on the tank or on a player with a large damage over time effect on them can have a significant impact. When running the talent Protector of the Frail, you will have a lot of additional casts available of Pain Suppression, so make sure you use it often instead of just sitting on maximum charges.

Patch 11.1.7 has brought forth an incredible accessibility function in the form of the Combat Assistant. While I may be praising this as an accessibility option, its usefulness in regards to healers is questionable. The Combat Assistant will never recommend, or in the case of the one button rotation press, any cooldowns or healing buttons. For Discipline, it follows the following very simple priority list:

1. Cast Mind Blast when available
2. Cast Penance when available
3. Cast Smite

Overall, the best use case for this functionality is likely doing open world content or delves as Voidweaver with the addition of casting your Voidwraith manually off cooldown.