Introduction
This guide is written by FTM, who joined Method’s healing roster right before Amirdrassil. Before joining Method he was an Officer and Raider in BDG where he had played since Shadowlands Season 4.
Overview
In essence Discipline Priest is all about keeping your team alive through applying Atonement with spells like Power Word: Shield, Renew and Power Word: Radiance. After applying the buff you will want to follow up with strong damage spells to take advantage of the additional healing it provides. How this process is done works differently depending on if you are doing raids or dungeons.
In raid you will be trying to cover as much of your raid as possible with the Atonement buff. This is done through so-called “ramps”, where you apply as many Atonements as possible before they start running out, which usually comes out to around 18-20 targets. After this is done you will take advantage of the small window where all your targets have the buff applied and deal as much damage as you possibly can to fully utilize the raw potential of Discipline Priest.
In dungeons however you have a much smaller target count to worry about, which means you can focus more on individual targets and you are able to cover your whole team with Atonement with just one cast of Power Word: Radiance. This means that in dungeons your playstyle works much differently, as you are no longer focusing on building up large ramps but rather being able to take care of those 5 targets. Sometimes dealing damage and healing through Atonement is not always enough in dungeons, and that is where tools like Power Word: Shield, Power Word: Life and Penance come in. These spells help you out in situations where members of your party are taking heavy single target damage, rather than the whole group taking a sustained amount of damage spread evenly where Atonement usually shines.
Strengths:
- Can put out exceptional AoE burst healing to counter heavy damage intake.
- Has access to some incredibly potent damage reduction talents in Power Word: Barrier and Pain Suppression which can greatly aid your group/raid.
- Brings a lot of passive damage due to the spec being designed to heal through dealing damage, as well as being able to damage during downtime periods of low damage intake.
- Satisfying learning curve, as when you finally master the Discipline Priest you will always feel in control and able to cover designated mechanics.
Weaknesses:
- Weak burst mobility.
- One of the squishiest specs in the game. Requires you to be alert of what is happening so you can prepare with defensives.
- Sparse emergency healing, requiring you to always prepare ahead of time if you want to put out a meaningful amount of healing. This makes discipline extremely punishing, but also rewarding as you learn to anticipate upcoming mechanics that put your group/raid in danger.
- Due to a large amount of the rotation requiring you to stand in place to put out significant healing you are susceptible to being caught out during moments where you need to be on the move.
- Struggles to keep up in raid content where your raid goes over 20 players, such as heroic, normal and LFR raiding. Due to the nature of the spec you are hard capped to being able to heal a certain amount of targets at a time, while some other healers like Holy Priest get stronger and stronger the more targets that are present.
What has changed
Discipline Priest Changes in Patch 11.1.5
Discipline Priest received quite a bit of numerical tuning in this recent patch. All of these changes have made your healing in ramps weaker, this has then made the power of the shield buffing talents in raid stronger. However, these changes have not had any impact on the gameplay of the spec, but it has made some talents more favorable than others and we have updated our talent trees to reflect this.
Discipline Priest Changes in Patch 11.1
Discipline Priest has received a lot of changes going into patch 11.1, they dont change the general playstyle of the spec a lot but they’re impactful nonetheless, here is a brief summary of the changes that the spec is receiving:
- Rapture is getting removed as a button, this was spell was used either paired with evangelism to create a bigger 1.5 minute ramp, or the 2 were separated to create two smaller ramps that still had a lot of impact, this reduces the complexity of the spec a bit as there isn't any decision to make about assigning these cooldowns.
- You can now move during ultimate penitence
- We received a lot of numerical changes, just to summarize them penance and smite now hit a lot harder baseline, this leads to us relying less on modifiers and makes our ramp do a lot more healing outside of the first few globals, and this is very good especially for the Oracle hero talent tree.
- Lots of talents were moved around in the specialization tree, talents like Train of Thought Rapture and Heaven’s Wrath were removed, and we gained talents like Divine Procession and Inner focus, a few talents were renamed and tuned as well but these are all minor changes with little to no impact
- Void summoner was changed to longer be a talent that reduces the cooldown of your pet per cast of smite mind blast or penance, it is now just a 50% reduction to the cooldown of whichever pet you have talented. This makes the spec a lot less reliant on haste and uptime outside of ramps, this makes the spec a lot easier to play on difficult fights and is healthy for the spec long term.
- Voidweaver received a nerf to its throughput, through voidwraith getting nerfed in several ways when talented into mindbender and a nerf to Entropic Rift damage.
Discipline Priest Changes in Patch 11.0.7
Discipline Priest itself did not receive any changes going into this patch, but this patch brings a new exciting ring that will end up being a best in slot option for us a couple of weeks into the patch when the ring gets enough item level.
You can read more about what gems are recommended to equip in this ring's socket slots later on in the guide.
Discipline Priest Changes for The War Within
Discipline Priest has not received a lot of notable changes going into the new expansion. The main updates come in the form of the two new Hero Talent Trees: Oracle and Voidweaver. We will cover both of these Hero Talents and their impact on the spec later on in the guide.