Sorry in Advance: Another Disc Priest Thread

#0 - Dec. 18, 2009, 4:18 p.m.

In the thread "PW: Shield - vote kick?", Nethaera posted ( http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=21726258134&sid=1&pageNo=5#92 ):

Q u o t e:
Damage mitigation is a very powerful tool for Discipline priests. The problem is that there is still a population of people who do not understand how effective it is to prevent damage versus just healing it.

It's wonderful to see the return of blue to this forum. :) But...

This is an argument that's often used against Discipline Priests claiming that the spec lacks throughput. And we (most of us) don't disagree.

But this statement misses the point. When the tank is taking a significant amount of damage, DA + PWS (with its 15 second cooldown) and the benefits of WS, together with all the other benefits of being a Discipline Priest, do not add up to enough throughput to keep the tank up through damage that is manageable by any other class or spec.

( If you throw in a well-timed PS then we can sometimes manage one such incident every 2.4 minutes for 8 seconds at a time, which often isn't enough. And it's at the cost of a GCD at a time when you really want to be applying HPS. )

This may be fine in a large raid or a short fight, where others are available to do the heavy lifting after the Disc Priest has temporarily "saved the day" or the fight will soon be over, but in boss fights in small raids and 5-mans it's a serious, and unbalancing, handicap. It can be overcome by outgearing or outskilling the encounter, but the fact that this is a limitation placed on Disc Priests more than other healers means it is still an unbalancing handicap.

Do the game designers at Blizzard believe
a) Discipline Priests should be able to avoid such situations?
b) The 2.4 minute cooldown and expense of a GCD is balanced; that PS answers this problem?
c) Discipline Priests *do* have the throughput to keep a tank up when the relevant cooldowns are used up?
d) It doesn't matter because Discipline Priests are not designed to heal without one of the other classes present?
d2) Just keep bubbling the raid and be quiet? ;)
e) Something else?
f) All of the above?

I've never seen this question answered. Would anyone care to, please?

Oh, I almost forgot to add, for the haters: QQ :)

#75 - Dec. 22, 2009, 5:16 p.m.

It's definitely one of the strong points of the Discipline tree to be able to use shields for absorption, but players shouldn't view shields as the answer to every problem encountered. Discipline priests are still priests and have many other spells available to them. The absorbs aren't meant to totally replace the need to heal completely, and one shouldn't compare the amount a Discipline priest can absorb to the amount another healing class (or holy priest) can heal. Power Word: Shield is very powerful, not just due to its absorption effect but also due to the many benefits gained -- primarily through various talents.

Greater Heal, Flash Heal and even Penance should still be cast as needed.

In raids, we also think that far too many players want to put the healing classes into two "big buckets" -- tank healers (Holy paladin & Discipline priest), and raid healers (Holy priests, Restoration shaman & druids).

We simply do not think that's granular enough.

Discipline priests aren't supposed to be Holy paladins that rely exclusively on their absorptions instead of their heals any more than hunters aren't supposed to be rogues who simply stand at range.

We think Discipline priests are in a pretty good place at the moment.

As a side note, one thing we'd like to do is make changes to the game that allow healing meters to be able to properly identify absorptions.