How To Improve As Discipline Priest — Midnight Pre-Patch (12.0)

Discipline at its core has a relatively simple mechanic, Atonement. However, players who are new to the spec can get tied up in some poor practices that eventually lead to the development of bad habits and poor performance. If you are looking to improve your gameplay, this section should be able to provide you with the most common mistakes and how to eliminate them.

Logs can be used for many things, but I will be focusing on two primary functions: pre-planning cooldown usage and self-improvement.

The primary tool the World of Warcraft community uses to log encounters is WarcraftLogs. They have put together a wonderful guide on how to get started with their tool, found here: Getting Started with Warcraft Logs.

When approaching a new boss as a Discipline Priest, one of the most important things you can do is research the damage patterns of the boss to determine where your cooldowns will be most effective. Having knowledge of when the damage is going to happen is crucial to playing Discipline well. Start by opening the log of an encounter.

Once you see this screen, select the "Damage Taken" tab and change the "Taken By Friendly" selection to "Taken From Ability".

Once you have these selected, you should see a graph showing the damage the raid in the log took from the encounter and what abilities caused them. On the graph itself, de-select "Total" and instead select the top 1-3 abilities shown on the list below the graph. You should end up with a graph similar to the following.

Now that you have a decent idea of what the fights damage pattern looks like, you can extract timings out of the log. To find the times in which an ability happens within a log, you can follow the following procedure.

1. Pick whichever ability you are looking for the timings for. In this example Mythic Grong Log, I will look for the timings in which the ability "Tantrum", the largest source of damage in the encounter, occurred.
2. Select a single player in the encounter, as shown below. Ensure the selected player was alive for the entire fight, or your timings may be inaccurate.
   
3. Select the ability you chose in step one, as shown below.
   
4. Change the view from a Table to an Events list.
   

By following this process, you should end up with a chart similar to the following, which shows the exact times that the ability in question occurred:

By doing this process for the most relevant damage events in a single encounter, you can build out a damage pattern timeline of sorts, which you can use to plan your cooldowns in advance.

The first step to analyzing your own performance within a single encounter is to understand an extremely basic Query in Warcraft Logs. Start by clicking on the "Queries" button on the far right of the header. You should see this screen below.

If you would like more information than what I am about to walk you through, Warcraft Logs offers plenty of information about how to get much, much more out of this feature. For now, we will stick to the basics. The first thing I want to see is when the "Tantrum" ability happened, as that is the ability I had previously decided I wanted to cover with my cooldowns. I can check off the "Damage" check box and type in "Tantrum" into the "Abilities" box and click "Create Pin".

The results of this query should look like the following.

Next, we will look at when I used my major cooldown, Evangelism, in relation to Tantrum. Start by clicking on the Queries button again within the same window. This time, we are going to check off the "Casts" check box instead of the "Damage" one, and we will type "Evangelism" into the "Abilities" box instead of "Tantrum".

The results of this query should look like the following.

With these two graphs lined up, I can get a good idea of when I used my major cooldown, Evangelism, during this encounter. Now, we will repeat the process I completed for Evangelism for Rapture and Power Word: Radiance. You should get a graph that looks like the following.

The last thing I want to add to this chart to give me a good picture of how well I did is my Atonement count in relation to the rest of the information displayed. Click "Buffs" towards the top and select "Atonement" on the drop-down shown below. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click "Stacked".

The results should look like the following:

Using this result, I can examine if I used my cooldowns and abilities at the proper time and did not miss any uses that I should have gotten off. For example, in the example log I have been using here, I missed Power Word: Radiance casts in the following locations.

This is just a small example of how you can analyze your own performance within WarcraftLogs. Give these steps a try and poke around within the software to familiarize yourself with the tool. It will continue to be a valuable resource for the near future, so it is worth investing time into learning.

The final option for log analysis is approaching knowledgeable Discipline Priests who are happy to look over your logs for you. While this can be daunting to do at first, the rewards are more than worth putting yourself out there for and absorbing the constructive criticism that comes your way. For having others review your logs, we suggest visiting the #discipline channel on the Warcraft Priests Discord.