Discipline Priest Healing Easy Mode — 12.1

This build is a straight forward and simple build in run in Raid. Focus on pressing Penance and Mind Blast on cooldown for damage and to cycle for Void Shield procs. Use Power Word: Radiance to apply Atonement when healing is needed. Just be careful to not overuse Power Word: Shield/ Flash Heal/ Plea as you can easily run out of mana if you are not careful.

This build is your primary build for Mythic+ content. Focus on casting Penance and Mind Blast on cooldown for damage and to cycle for Void Shield procs. Shadow Mend and swapping your Penance targeting to allies will help you get through single target healing situations when needed.

This build is your primary build for delve content. Pushing large damage windows with your Entropic Rift and Mindbender to AoE down medium sized groups of enemies. Make sure to heavily utilize Dominate Mind in this content to bring along the strongest enemy you can find to fight on your side as they will often do more damage than you yourself will. Additionally, make heavy use of Fade to utilize Spectral Illusion to keep focus off yourself so you can spend more time dealing damage and less time worrying about your own health bar.

Discipline Priests rely on applying Atonement and then dealing damage to heal through Atonement for a portion of your healing. Direct healing via things like Penance, Flash Heal, or Shadow Mend (in Mythic+ specifically) as well as strong absorb effects from Power Word: Shield or our Apex talent Void Shield provide the rest of your healing.

In Raid, you want to generally cast Penance on cooldown. Power Word: Shield is strong, but you want to make sure your casts are providing good value as if you over-utilize them, you can quickly run out of mana. Make sure you use any proc of Void Shield that you get.

Combine this with cycling your Power Word: Radiance charges and you will 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. Try to ensure you have Power Word: Radiance charges available to use with Evangelism.

Your primary focus for dungeon healing will heavily revolve around casting Penance on cooldown. With talents like Twinsight and the passive from Penance itself, you get strong single target healing and solid Atonement healing. Additionally, each cast has a chance to proc Void Shield, which will is your strongest spell by far in your kit. Cycling Penance often for more Void Shield casts is incredibly important. Casting Mind Blast on cooldown is also important as it also procs Void Shield.

Additionally, Shadow Mend is a major throughput tool in dungeon content to assist with single target healing. Swapping to defensively casting Penance, casting some Shadow Mends, and some Void Shields will be your primary single target methods.

In most cases our Apex talent is very simple to play around. With the buff lasting quite a while once procced, simple ensure you utilize the available cast prior to casting your next Penance to not potentially waste a proc. Outside of that, keep in mind that both the primary target of Void Shield and its additional targets will receive Atonement.

• 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.
• Void Shield is the upgraded version of Power Word: Shield applying a shield on 3 targets instead of one. From an Atonement application perspective, it's very important to understand that all three targets hit by Void Shield will receive Atonement.
• 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 Heals. When Flash Heal is upgraded to Shadow Mend, it still applies Atonement and acts as a single target applicator.
• 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.

• Evangelism
  • 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.
• Ultimate Penitence
  • 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. Similar to how it is used in raid, it will be used almost exclusively offensively in dungeon content as well, but without needing a full ramp sequence to be effective. Still make sure you apply Atonement to the group via a Power Word: Radiance before casting it.
• 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
  • Provides 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.

Our two piece bonus, Priest Discipline 12.1 Class Set 2pc, is incredibly powerfuil. It both increases the damage and healing of Penance by 20%, but also causes every Penance cast to reduce the cooldown of Mind Blast by 2 seconds. This is incredibly powerful for a few reasons. First, Mind Blast now procs Void Shield on cast. With this tier set directly increasing your Mind Blast CPM, its also increasing your Void Shield CPM. Additionally, when playing Voidweaver, this drastically increases your access to Entropic Rift which is a huge spike in power. This two piece is incredibly important to get as soon as possible.

Our four piece bonus, Priest Discipline 12.1 Class Set 4pc, while not nearly as strong and impactful as our 2-piece bonus, still provides a meaningful boost to our output by increasing the size of your next Void Shield after casting Mind Blast.

The stat priority is as follows when deciding between equal item level gear. For more information on what's presented on this page, check out our main Stat Priority page.

Since Patch 11.1.7, World of Warcraft has an incredible accessibility function called 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. Maintain Shadow Word: Pain on your active target
2. Cast Mind Blast when available
3. Cast Penance when available
4. Cast Smite

Overall, the best use case for this functionality is likely doing open world content or delves as Voidweaver.