Hero Talent Showdowns in The War Within
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For more information on Hero Talents coming in the War Within, check out our Hero Talents Overview.
The War Within Hero Talents Overview
Discipline Priest in the War Within
Discipline Priest in The War Within has had minimal changes from Dragonflight but the Hero Talents do increase your output in a variety of ways. The spec continues to shine in a raid environment with excellent burst healing from their large ramp healing and powerful damage reduction in Power Word: Barrier. In a Mythic+ environment the spec blasts large AoE healing but struggles in more spot-healing situations. Pre-emptive use of Pain Suppression in particular helps substantially with this.
In this article we’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the Voidweaver and Oracle Hero Talents for Discipline Priest as well as which Hero Talent is better in a variety of content forms.
Hero Talent Showdown: Voidweaver vs. Oracle
Discipline Priest chooses between Voidweaver which focuses on empowering your abilities after casting Mind Blast and creating a powerful Entropic Rift that explodes for additional damage. The rift transforms your Smite into a powerful Void Blast that produces bonus Atonement transfers. While Oracle empowers your character with Premonition, allowing for cooldown reduction to your next ability casts (often used for Mindbender/Power Word: Radiance/or damage abilities), increased healing and overheal protection and a substantial absorb with a damage reduction component attached. These abilities cycle and are off the global cooldown, allowing for you to weave these in between spell casts to improve your output.
Voidweaver
When playing Voidweaver, your main priority is using Mind Blast as usual as your first major damage ability to produce large Atonement healing. Voidwraith turns your Shadowfiend into a 2min cooldown and maintains your Mindbender as a 1min cooldown, allowing for strong flexibility between ramp options when raiding.
The Void Empowerment is fairly noticeable now that the S3/S4 tier set bonus’ additional Atonement extensions are now gone, offering a slight increase in our duration. Since the Collapsing Void damage only converts into additional Atonement healing off of one enemy struck there are large swings in its output depending on if it hits a huge amount of enemies or a singular enemy, making it a powerful burst of healing on boss fights and mostly an AoE damage nuke that does less substantial healing on trash pulls.
Oracle
When playing Oracle you are able to leverage each of your Premonition abilities in differing ways to maximize your output. The cooldown reduction is excellent to spend on Mindbender/Power Word: Radiance in dungeons to allow for more Shadow Covenant/Atonement uptime. Your Piety buff is incredible for periods of high damage where you overheal frequently. In dungeons, Atonement is often applied to everyone even if only 2-3 players are taking damage so Piety can redirect that to the allies that need it the most.
In raids, there can be quite a lot of overheal due to Blizzard’s balancing of the overall healing environment. We historically overheal more in raids than we have in previous expansions, making the Piety effect potentially very powerful. The Solace effect provides a massive shield for ~50% of a player’s health and a follow-up damage reduction allowing for extremely flexible use if you want to use it on the tank, yourself or another party member when they are in danger. The cooldown reduction of Insight offers some interesting combinations that could be utilized, if you used them on damage abilities for instance like Penance during Shadow Covenant you could net more Inescapable Torment procs from your squid.
This spec is harder to effectively operate than Voidweaver and currently is tuned a bit on the weaker side for progress Raiding and Mythic+. The general feeling is that the longer Atonement duration of Preemptive Care feels good but your abilities feel weaker than Voidweaver, resulting in sustained but lower healing. Unlike Voidweaver which adds some good power both in and out of Shadow Covenant, Oracle only feels good to utilize during your Mindbender windows, resulting in extremely feast/famine moments for the spec. The bright side of the spec for Discipline is that Piety is very strong, so as fights get easier and healers get stronger, the overheal protection of Premonition will make this Hero Talent incredibly strong in specific raid encounters or farm content.
What’s Changed?
Voidweaver
Since our first review of Voidweaver there has mainly been tuning adjustments to the spec as it started off incredibly overpowered. They created Void Empowerment in early beta so that you have a choice between longer Atonements or a longer rift.
Oracle
Since our initial review, Oracle has changed from an empower to your allies AND yourself to just a personal output increase. The ability used to cycle from abilities casts, meaning that you would have to sequence your casts around it “landing” on the buff that you wanted and that hitting the “wrong” buff would be a performance loss. These changes have significantly improved the gameplay of the spec, and while it is still difficult to operate like the prior iteration it is easier to plan around how you will use the upcoming buffs.
And the Winner Is…
- Class Fantasy & Visuals: Voidweaver (Winner)
- Fun & Rewarding Gameplay: Voidweaver (Winner)
Voidweaver is very straightforward with its gameplay and as a result feels very rewarding in each and every cast. It looks great, empowers the abilities you are already casting and the rift detonation looks and feels good to use.
Oracle on the other hand can be more indirect with where you get your output from. Using Solace for example, (damage reduction/absorb) necessitates you cast very specific abilities on specific targets to maximize the benefit, making you think further in advance through your ability casts before you do them, same goes for Piety’s overheal protection as you might hold cooldowns and time abilities to maximize overheal protection.
- Difficulty: Oracle
Oracle’s cycling buffs, specific cast requirements to leverage maximum value and additional abilities to bind and push make it the very clear more challenging Hero Talent spec.
- Defensiveness & Utility: Oracle (Winner)
Oracle has substantially stronger defensive utility with Desperate Measures substantially improving two of your defensives, Premonition granting a massive absorb + Damage Reduction to one target that you select and Foreseen Circumstances offering a strong increase in Pain Suppression damage reduction.
- Leveling: Voidweaver (Winner)
Voidweaver’s straightforward damage improvements and slows make it an easy choice for leveling in The War Within.
- Mythic+: Voidweaver (Winner)
Voidweaver is more straightforward and easier to leverage. While your Atonement durations are lower you feel a noticeable improvement to the burst healing that Discipline is known for. Devour Matter has niche but extremely powerful uses for dungeons like Stonevault or Dawnbreaker where enemies have absorb shields.
- Raid: Voidweaver (Winner)
Voidweaver currently produces excellent healing for a Raid environment, is very consistent, and is easy to plan around. Oracle could shine as overheal gets high in farm content but at present seems underpowered by comparison.
- Best Overall: Voidweaver (Winner)
As mentioned (a few times!), Voidweaver is the more straight-forward of the Discipline Priest Hero Talent options, produces good healing in both raids and mythic+ environments and is easier to leverage than Oracle.
Hero Talent Feedback
Voidweaver
Voidweaver is really the ideal Discipline Priest Hero Talent. Easy to operate with some good passives that can be min/maxed by the pros. Some talent nodes are imbalanced like Voidwraith being much stronger than Depth of Shadows because a more consistent pet is stronger than improving our output during execute where we are already at our strongest but these are minor issues.
Oracle
It is okay for Oracle to be the harder of the Hero Talents to operate properly but the harder that you make something then the more that its overall power level needs to be kept in mind. If something is harder should it not also carry with it a larger reward? Currently it seems like you can only really achieve that maximum reward if there is incredibly high overheal where the Piety effect can carry and outpace other healers that do not have such overheal protection.
Disc especially notices the lack of Shadow Covenant uptime when playing Oracle and unfortunately there is not a good way to focus all the Insight buffs into one ability like Mindbender for more Shadow Covenant uptime.
The most actionable feedback I can provide is that the runes of the Premonition look extremely similar and should have greater color and shape changes to make it easier to differentiate between. Most all players will use weakauras to get around this issue but the base game should do a better job of differentiating these.
Base Discipline Priest Gameplay & Talents
Discipline Priest received some streamlining in 10.2 but was built with the Season 3 Tier Set in mind which substantially improved Shadow Covenant uptime. Now without that, the spec has to think much more critically on when to send or hold Mindbender in dungeons and will need to stand still even more than before now that we lack the haste and tier set to rapidly return our pet off cooldown.
The current Hero Talents do not mess with these options too heavily.
Oracle has very strong Atonement duration but lower burst healing. Voidweaver has less Atonement duration but more burst output. At the moment the burst output is king but neither spec feels great due to the issues with the spec tree and the dead/irrelevant talents that currently clog it.
Should You Play Discipline Priest in the War Within?
Discipline Priest is historically one of the hardest healers to get into in World of Warcraft and that only continues in The War Within. The Hero Talents help the spec in various ways but the lack of changes the spec received in Beta is particularly noticeable when playing the spec.
Raid Gameplay is between a 1min Mindbender/Voidwraith or a 2min Shadowfiend/Voidwraith. The spec looks to blast good healing and will likely be brought for Race To World First thanks to their burst healing, massive passive damage, and damage reduction in Power Word: Barrier. The gameplay itself can be more awkward with moments where additional movement could substantially mess with your cooldown reduction for your pet making mistakes even more punishing than they already were.
In Mythic+ the spec puts out solid burst healing but poor spot-healing. In dungeons with more single-target healing requirements and more tank healing needed the spec feels woefully equipped to deal with these damage events. Shields feel stronger than before but pre-shielding or pre-Pain Suppression’ing can only go so far when damage is so extremely high. The spec will also have some struggles with the heavy Curse/Poison dispels required in the season as well as the emphasis on interrupts and crowd control (which healer priests severely lack).
About the Author
For more information on playing Discipline Priest, please see our class guide updated for The War Within Pre-Patch:
Discipline Priest Guide
About The Author
