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Our Class Writers share their expert opinions based on rigorous testing and theorycrafting in hopes of contextualizing the changes coming in future patches of the War Within. Check out all of our released articles in our Editorial Section.
Wowhead Editorials
Discipline Priest in the War Within So Far
Discipline Priest has consistently been improving since Dragonflight in both performance and gameplay with a lot of feedback being taken into consideration for the development of the spec. While the Amirdrassil tier brought a revamp to Discipline that resulted in high performance in raiding and much improved performance in Mythic+ compared to earlier in the Dragonflight expansion, The War Within has taken a sharp pivot away from the cooldown reduction farming that Void Summoner used to encapsulate and moved towards more consistent value while also developing two strong identities for its Hero Talents. Voidweaver focuses on bursty Atonement output through additional Pet and Mind Blast value where Oracle captures a more classic form of Discipline with more powerful direct healing and shielding.
While Discipline has had very high representation in both seasons, particularly for Mythic+, Season 2 is substantially better for a balance of playstyles with both Hero Talents successfully timing +17 dungeons or higher.
Season 1
Discipline in Season 1 excelled in Mythic+ where the healing checks for most dungeons were focused on bursty AoE damage that Voidweaver’s hero talents excelled at. Mind Blast triggering our rift to empower our Smites to deal Shadow damage substantially furthered the spec’s output in a dungeon environment to handle whatever was thrown at it. It also helped that the spec brought immense amounts of damage both from the Hero Talent and Power Infusion making it the dominant spec of the season in Mythic+.
Raiding was another story however. Discipline was not represented at high levels like the Race to World First but was still in a solid enough position for many Hall of Fame kills (this writer included). Part of this is certainly due to the dominance of Preservation Evoker in Nerubar Palace which operates with a similar ramp-burst healing profile as Discipline but a portion was also a result of Voidweaver being the only competitive Hero Talent in the season and the healing profile being too bursty in many cases. Healers are quickly able to push up health pools in raiding and when you have the majority of your healing happening over ~10 seconds every 1.5m it can very easily turn into too much of your output going to waste.
The season ended with Discipline absolutely dominating the Mythic+ leaderboards and having some solid representation in high level Raiding.
Season 2
Discipline walked into Season 2 with a great debate over which hero talent would be more recommended. From a math perspective Voidweaver was doing more healing but we very quickly discovered just how bursty that output could be with a huge amount being wasted on overhealing. With multiple significant buffs to ORacle coming into the season like Twinsight which also impacts Weal and Woe stacks, Void Summoner being turned into consistent cooldown reduction and new talents like Eternal Barrier being added into the mix the playerbase very rapidly picked up Oracle Discipline in Raiding with it being the highest HPS spec for Race to World First. While the math put Oracle at a slightly lower amount of total HPS, the Premonition of Piety overheal redirect effect has been so powerful that it more than surpassed Voidweaver thanks to the higher level of efficient healing. Discipline was finally back in its historic niche of dominating high damage events every 1.5mins and even post-Race to World First nerfs it still remains one of the highest HPS healers in Liberation of Undermine. This will only continue until the next patch as the stacking Liberation of Undermine %healing/damage buff will continue to benefit the spec that has enormous overheal redirect potential.
In Mythic+ we went in with the mindset of thinking of encounters based on what last season was throwing at us, quick bursty damage events that needed to be topped quickly. What we found was that there was a massive increase in single-target “triage” healing required, specific nerfs early in the season more heavily impacted Voidweaver than Oracle, and of course the insane stacking modifier potential of Twinsight, Weal and Woe and Eternal Barrier allowed for insane shield values to soak up damage and provide incredible safety to the team. This has been an excellent part of the season not only for being able to discover another side to the spec but also to better understand in what situations it can shine at high level play. While the tuning definitely pushes Oracle in both content forms at the moment, you can see the vision for the future where (in a perfect world) you could look to swap around Hero Talents depending on the dungeon’s hardest healing checks.
I’m very glad to see the push for Oracle to be stronger in Season 2 as it really pushed the community, and myself, to fully examine the strengths and weaknesses of the other Hero Talent and get very familiar with them. We gained a better understanding of how theorycraft can make a suggestion based on raw healing but the artform of healing can call for a different tool due to the changing environment and damage patterns.
Current Issues for Discipline Priest
Talents
Some of the goals set out by Blizzard going into 11.1 were to make our Shadow Word: Pain stronger and that really didn’t happen unfortunately. The supporting talents are often just barely good enough to utilize, while supporting talents like Expiation are still far too weak to use. I would not be surprised to see more work being done on this in the future but it was strange to have this as a primary stated goal for the spec for the season and not see much come from it. Personally, I would love to see Lenience be removed going into 11.1. This talent was nerfed slightly before the 11.1.5 patch from 3% to 2% damage reduction and while it has existed for an extremely long time it is by far one of the most boring mandatory talents for the spec at the moment. With the change in 11.1 to move Evangelism higher in the talent tree it made Lenience a mandatory pick for all forms of content for the first time in its existence. While it is amazing utility to high end Raiding and Mythic+ alike, it is annoying to be forced into a talent that does not increase your healing but instead provides unique mitigation. Discipline already has a good mitigation tool in Power Word: Barrier and I think it is far more enjoyable to have our mitigation tools built into big, active abilities rather than small passive effects.
Complexity and Healing Profiles
This one is a challenge. Discipline has historically been one of the hardest healers to play in the game with a high level of punishment assigned to messing up your “ramps”. Oracle has helped this somewhat with baseline longer Atonement durations but the spec still operates under the style of Raid that we had in Legion or Battle for Azeroth where you had significantly less movement requirements and players took longer to be topped off (particularly BfA). It feels much more forced for the spec to have to stand mostly still to set up its Atonement healing and maintain constant uptime on the boss to produce healing through damage. This has been the way for the past decade but that does not mean it has to stay this way, particularly when specs like Preservation Evoker can set up their burst-ramps with significantly greater ease.
In addition, more healers than ever are cooldown-centric. It used to be that many healers had higher sustained healing with fewer cooldown to ratchet up their output. Now, many healers are stacking multiple cooldowns on top of each other to burst as high of healing as possible (see, Holy Priest stacking Halo and Apotheosis to min-max output). With encounters being more bursty than ever, with less sustained healing profiles required, more healers being burst-focused, these factors have really eroded a big part of what it means to be a Discipline Priest in a raid and the spec is dangerously dependent on overheal redirect from Premonition of Piety to be successful. A nerf to that in a Raid without some sort of redesign to the spec or how healing works at large could be very destructive for the spec.
Discipline Priest Hero Talents: Oracle vs. Voidweaver
As mentioned earlier, Voidweaver is the absolute burst/blaster Atonement healing spec, while Oracle breaks up its healing into Penance cleave healing, shielding and increased direct healing output. Both have well defined niches though tuning is certainly in Oracle’s favor at the time of this article.
Oracle
Shields are a tricky thing to balance but I believe they’ve done a fair job with the nerfs just before 11.1.5 that brought down the shield bonus from Weal and Woe. The nerfs to defensive Penance healing hurts Twinsight and overall healing quite a bit but the sub-spec is still incredibly powerful in Raiding and Mythic+ at the moment. Blizzard has focused the many tuning patches that Discipline has received since 11.1’s launch on making sure that Oracle stays the dominant sub-spec for all PvE content and it shows with the vast majority of players making the swap. There’s been a decent amount of growing pains with the playerbase getting used to Premonition’s rotating cooldowns and synergizing them with the rest of the spec’s kit but it has made for a great hybrid between Atonement healing and direct healing/shielding that the spec historically has revolved around.
While the abilities are off-GCD they do have an internal delay to prevent you from double-tapping two buffs at once. This is usually good but can be frustrating when you want to use Premonition of Insight and Premonition of Piety together like you commonly do in raids. Some talents like Waste No Time for instance do not give additional Atonement duration to the Power Word: Radiance casts and due to how the GCD works actually results in lower Atonement duration in a raiding environment, pushing players to run the other talent node to prevent this from occurring.
While the sub-spec does buff baseline Penance and Smite damage, these abilities are both very weak when not buffed by other modifiers, keeping the spec in a position where (like Voidweaver) you still are reliant on multiple stacking modifiers in order to do effective healing. This was a key issue that lead to Discipline’s revamps in 10.2 and the Hero Talent still continues this similar issue in a different package.
That said it is an overall fun spec to play and provides a good foil to Voidweaver’s near-pure Atonement focus.
Voidweaver
Voidweaver was the perfect sub-spec to start The War Within and while it has taken a step back in Season 2 it still is a fun and viable playstyle. Adding an Entropic Rift to our Mind Blast cast that buffs Smite is a great way of keeping our focus on raw Atonement healing with a great visual splash added on. This sub-spec succeeded not only due to tuning in Season 1 Mythic+ but also for the wealth of damage mechanics that were burst-AoE centric, hitting all allies at the same time for similar amounts. This allowed Voidweaver Discipline’s to rapidly reverse incoming damage in a way that felt natural to Discipline players who had just come from Dragonflight.
In this vein I think Voidweaver is an ideal Hero Talent in that it is passive-centric, has excellent visuals, and has very clearly defined strengths and weaknesses. Not having an active button to press, being great at quick bursts of AoE, and having limitations for spot-healing are very effective ways to carve out a foil for itself compared to Oracle and I think the devs have done a strong job of designing this Hero Talent.
The real challenge going forward is encouraging a balance between the two sub-specs. In both seasons thusfar there have been clearly defined strengths for each of the sub-specs but if the tuning is too far apart it will not matter if one theoretically does better against one type of damage profile vs another if one sub-spec just does more overall healing. I do like that Voidweaver is much greater DPS at the cost of less flexible healing as I think that is a fair trade off, but I’m interested in seeing how tuning may better balance both specs going forward.
Season 3 Discipline Priest Wishlist
Discipline is no stranger to reworks, receiving a wealth of them over the past two years in Dragonflight and The War Within. At this point there are some looming issues that might need to be addressed and some quality of life that would be nice to see some iteration upon.
For looming issues, chief among them has to be Premonition of Piety. Overheal redirect is historically enormously powerful and even moreso in environments where a healer is able to push up health bars very rapidly. Early Battle for Azeroth for example, healing was incredibly slow and it took a long time to top off a raid much less than individual player. In The War Within, healers are very quickly topping off players and leaving a ton of overheal in their wake. A big reason Discipline is so successful in Season 2 compared to Season 1 in Raiding is due to Premonition of Piety and this will only continue for the rest of the season as we gain 3% additional healing every 3 weeks with the Undermine Renown track. With this in mind it is important to note that Discipline’s bursty healing profile would also be incredibly weak if we did not have access to Premonition of Piety as the ~10 second windows of blasting insane HPS every 1.5mins is much more difficult to be efficient with in a world where every healer can push up health bars quickly and there are fewer Rot based encounters than expansions past. Premonition of Piety is an excellent band-aid for the spec’s healing profile and its removal would seriously hurt the spec if other more large-scale changes were not made alongside it.
On a lower priority I think are cleaning up some of the “dead” or “rotting” branches on the Discipline tree, with talents like Expiation and Twilight Equilibrium seeing extremely low play time this expansion and Shadow Word: Pain damage in particular being quite low. Discipline does not need to be a DoT based class by any means and the powerful, punchy Penance hits feel great to cast! That said, it is unfortunate having certain talents that are just never utilized and I would argue that removing talents like Twilight Equilibrium entirely might just be better for reducing overall complexity rather than forcing it upon players. With talk of rotation assistants for damage dealers it does beg the question of how many “high activity” passive talents that should be kept in the tree rather than more simple passives like Eternal Barrier that provide excellent QoL and a passive HPS increase that does not change how you have to play the game. Food for thought!
Lastly, Lenience was nerfed just before 11.1.5 from 3% —> 2% due to how powerful this passive mitigation is for the raid. I think it is healthiest for the game overall if this talent is removed outright and that most players would enjoy not specing into it at all. For one, small passive mitigation tools like this are not fun to play with as they yield their value in small quantities that are not tangibly felt by players in the micro situations. For another, players just like having tools that increase their healing and help them get a bigger number on the screen. This talent is excellent to ensure you kill bosses without players dying, but already you can see plenty of logs of players dropping this talent in favor of others that will increase the number on their parse. Some talents that do not increase your healing should exist, like Power Word: Barrier, but the difference is that Power Word: Barrier is an active ability you are placing that has a tangible impact on your team’s survivability. Put quite simply, it is strong enough to be felt and it is hard to say the same about Lenience which is 1/10th the strength.
While I had major concerns about how the spec was progressing entering into Season 2, I am very pleased with how their final product has developed in this season and I am hopeful for some small tweaks and refinements towards Discipline as we near Season 3.
About the Author
| This guide is written and maintained by Jak, Healer for Incarnate on US-Tichondrius, Author of the Holy and Discipline Priest Guides. You can catch Jak on Twitter, Youtube and streaming on Twitch if you want to check out more of his content! |
About The Author
