Discipline Revamp Review Patch 11.1
Discipline has received a massive revamp heading into Patch 11.1. The last major revamp for Discipline took place in Season 3 of Dragonflight where your Mindbender and Shadow Covenant were rolled into one ability with Void Summoner as a key passive to Smite your way to more pet uptime. These incoming changes reverse some of that cooldown reduction focus, make it easier to take Evangelism and Ultimate Penitence in both Raids and Mythic+ environments, creates a “PvP Quarantine Zone” of talents and adds some serious issues for PvE Discipline Priests.
In this article we break down the overall changes, what they mean for Discipline in a PvE environment and provide a conclusion/TLDR at the end with recommended adjustments as PTR testing gets started.
The Pruning of Shields
One of the most significant consequences of this rework is the incredible reduction in overall shields that Discipline will be casting in Patch 11.1. Rapture and Inner Focus being removed will significantly reduce the overall Power Word: Shield casts of Discipline as the spec seeks to “reduce the number of cooldowns that Discipline has access to”. This is an extremely strange change for the spec that literally has Power Word: Shield as their spec icon and even more strange when you consider that Rapture never contributed to the stacking modifier bloat which triggered the initial Discipline revamp in Season 3 of Dragonflight where Mindbender/Shadow Covenant where rolled together into one button.
Divine Aegis while not used this expansion is being changed to only work on direct-healing, effectively killing any chance that this talent gets used in a standard PvE environment while Luminous Barrier gets buffed for some strange reason.
Currently in a raid-ramp scenario you have to individually apply 10 Atonements, use 2 Power Word: Radiances, extend their duration with Evangelism and activate Shadow Covenant with Mindbender before you can produce substantial burst healing. This sequence is far more than most healers have to do to AoE heal and removing Rapture does nothing to reduce the setup time that Discipline mandates.
For Mythic+, Rapture was an amazing and flexible tool to apply powerful Power Word: Shields. You could blanket the entire party in Power Word: Shields before a big hit or you could spend that 30 sec empowered shield period to slowly put out Power Word: Shields as needed for allies that drop low from unexpected hits, allowing Rapture to fill in a “spot-heal” role that the spec historically has lacked. To make up for this, it seems that Blizzard is trying to make Penance a better direct-healing tool but it would need some significant additional tuning to make up for the loss of our powerful Power Word: Shield cooldown. Baseline Power Word: Shields are getting slightly buffed but again without our additional Power Word: Shield tools, and a tier set bonus that encourages frequent shielding for the new Insurance! buff, it seems like the spec takes a significant step back with the pruning of shields.
Unintended(?) Consequences
A number of changes with the incoming Discipline revamp result in some very strange consequences. By pruning Power Word: Shields, synergistic talents like Indemnity, Protector of the Frail, and Borrowed Time get significantly weaker with only a very small buff for Indemnity to seemingly make up for it.
When Void Summoner was the focal point in improving your Shadow Covenant uptime, many Disc Priests rightfully complained that this caused the spec to be extremely polarizing between low and high haste levels with Smite giving you huge amounts of cooldown reduction at higher levels, making the spec feel poor at low haste. In response to this, Blizzard removed Smite’s interaction with Void Summoner, kept Penance and Mind Blast’s cooldown reduction and doubled the cooldown reduction per cast.
This results in Penance/Mind Blast casts being even more important to cast on cooldown or else you lose out on a significant amount of Shadow Covenant uptime. In the shields section I mentioned how they were adding some buffs to defensive Penance healing but if you need to cast Penance on cooldown for Shadow Covenant uptime then it is even harder to hold Penance for any emergency healing when it comes at a heavy cost for your overall healing.
Purge the Wicked is also being removed in favor of Shadow Word: Pain. The stated reason was for Twilight Equilibrium value which is incredibly weird after Discipline finished a season where we played Voidweaver Hero Talents that turned our Smite into a Shadow school spell. Additionally, Purge the Wicked does about double the damage of Shadow Word: Pain and at present they only buffed Pain by 25%, making this a step backwards for making our DoTs stronger. Discipline should have stronger DoTs for healing in AoE trash pulls and having to care more about the value of the DoT on single-target boss fights, at the moment their tuning is not aligning with their stated intentions and I really do not see how they are making Twilight Equilibrium more valuable yet with their current changes.
Entropic Rift received some nerfs by their own admission to increase the value of our DoTs and seemingly make it more attractive to utilize Oracle. That said, just nerfing the Rift ticking damage does not really reduce the power of Voidweaver as a whole. The empowered Smite and their increased Atonement healing makes a massive impact on why Voidweaver is the optimal Hero Talent and making some slight tuning adjustments and a new Oracle talent in Twinsight where you get additional Penance bolts flying does not seem nearly enough to encourage more competition between the two Hero Talents.
Uppies and Evangelism
The start of the Discipline change article states that they want to reduce the number of cooldowns that Discipline has access to, but by moving Ultimate Penitence and Evangelism higher in the talent tree, it looks like both of these talents will now be utilized in a Mythic+ environment. In raids we always took Evangelism, with Ultimate Penitence having a number of strong encounters as well so not much seems to change there.
Both abilities have some improvements made to them with Evangelism now triggering an instant heal on all allies with Atonement and Ultimate Penitence now providing a 100% health shield. Unfortunately for Ultimate Penitence the cooldown reduction talent is now removed in 11.1, locking this talent to a 4 minute cooldown. The changes for Ultimate Penitence is fairly disappointing, mainly in that there is such conflict between PvE and PvP playstyles that it feels like this ability is continuously being pushed upon us in PvE when it was very clearly designed with PvP in mind while other core abilities like Rapture are being removed. The time spent in the air, vulnerable to the wealth of void-zones that ignore verticality, the lack of control on choosing your landing spot, and long channel of casting bolts add on to the list of things that a Disc Priest must consider when talented into this ability.
PvP Quarantine Zone
Discipline has a unique issue among healers where their PvE gameplay focuses on maximizing Atonement healing and their PvP gameplay more heavily features direct healing and absorbs. This can cause a number of issues with some talents being built for one content form or another and being in sub-optimal positions for selection. With the revamp, the talents Eternal Barrier, Divine Aegis, and Inner Focus are all very focused on direct-healing and absorption effects and are off to the side so that they are not in the way of other Atonement-centric options.
When looking at the new final tier of talents it looks strangely sparse from a PvE perspective compared to Holy Priest’s revamp with very heavy talent competition in the final row, or Mistweaver which looks like it has some of the highest quantity of spec-choice nodes, particularly in the final row. Rather than having a larger variety of talent options or choice nodes it seems that Discipline has these revamped PvP talents off to the bottom left side and the Oracle Hero Talent tree for PvP gameplay, with the rest of the talent tree and Voidweaver hero talents focused on Atonement-centric PvE healing.
I’m not sure how they could best make both PvE and PvP healing follow a similar playstyle but it seems to kill variety for the spec as there are a great deal of “trap” options for one form of content or another that you just need to avoid entirely. Mistweaver seemed to find a way to merge their PvP and PvE gameplay to be fistweaving/melee centric and that seems to have paid off quite well for them.
Conclusion/TL:DR
- Removal of Rapture significantly reduces our spot-heal potential in dungeons and does not change the high-setup requirement for raid healing.
- Void Summoner removing Smite interactions is good but forces casting Penance/Mind Blast on cooldown. Proposed Solution: Make Void Summoner flat cooldown reduction.
- Oracle Talent changes are interesting but do not do enough to make Oracle more competitive with Voidweaver in PvE content.
- Evangelism being easier to take allows for Lenience to be taken in Raids which is huge value even though it is a boring talent. The instant heal from Evangelism is interesting but I am surprised that they are not rolling Shadow Covenant/Mindbender into Evangelism to further reduce stacking modifier bloat.
- Ultimate Penitence being easier to take is great to see though the quality of life issues with take-off, time in the air, and landing in void zones still persists.
- Purge the Wicked removal currently makes our DoTs weaker than before so more tuning is needed.
- Our 4pc bonus in 11.1 increases our healing when allies have Insurance! or Absorption effects, this means that Luminous Barrier could be used for healing which I personally hate the idea of. Power Word: Barrier is iconic, make it a focus!
It is good to see the desire for Blizzard to update Discipline to become more modern and tackle some issues created with their last revamp in Dragonflight I think a great deal of the incoming changes will cause new problems that are worse than what we are currently dealing with. Nerubar Palace highlighted how archaic Discipline’s lengthy setup healing was, especially as raids challenge our movement more than ever before and it is incredibly disappointing to see how little is being done to tackle this issue while at the same time taking away some of our strengths in dungeons that have made the spec feel so fun to play.
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