Discipline Priest State in Shadowlands Alpha - Mythic+ Viability, Lackluster GCDs, Covenant Abilities

Shadowlands Posted 2020/06/22 at 3:30 AM by Squishei

IntroductionBastionRevendrethTorghast, Tower of the DamnedThe Necrotic WakeHalls of AtonementPlaguefallDe Other SideMists of Tirna ScitheshouldNy'alotha Eternal Palacemajor

This article is written by Jaydaa a veteran healer and contributing writer to both World of Warcraft content and other Blizzard games content here on Wowhead. I've been raiding in WoW for almost 15 years at various levels of progression. I've contributed to the theorycrafting of multiple healing classes, notably Mistweaver Monks and Restoration Druids. Find me on Twitter or on the Wowhead Discord.

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Jak, Healer for Future on EU-Twisting Nether, author of the Holy, Discipline, and Advanced Mythic+ Priest Guides.
He is also the Host of the official World of Warcraft Mythic Dungeon International events. You can catch Jak on Twitter and streaming on Twitch.

Discipline PriestAtonementThe Ever-Rising TideMemory of Lucid DreamsBaseline Toolkit Changes

New Baseline Discipline Priest Abilities:
and Shadow Word: Death - This array of damaging abilities offers up additional damage to Discipline Priests, but does so with limited to no Atonement interaction. shares a similar design space to Holy Nova so the choice of use is a bit muddled. Though Shadow Word: Death got a recent 100% damage buff when used on targets below 20% health, it will equally increase the damage done to the player if the target doesn't die. How much more damage and whether we'll use all these abilities during periods of healing downtime will likely depend on final tuning.

Mind Blast - An interesting addition to the Discipline toolkit, Mind Blast gives us a baseline shadow damage cooldown spell with the absorb that used to be part of Smite. With decently high damage, you'll definitely want to press Mind Blast quite often to maximize your healing throughput, but with a 15s cooldown and high mana cost you'll likely need to be more sparing with Mind Blast to ensure you don't run out of mana or miss incorporating the spell into your Power Word: Radiance and Schism burst windows.

NEW Power Infusion (Level 58) - The haste steroid returns as a baseline ability and can now be cast on any player rather than just the Priest. An interesting piece of utility that I'm sure everyone in your raid/party will be clamoring for during their cooldowns. As a Discipline Priest, most of your throughput is baked into short burst windows so any cooldown that helps you pack even more into that window is fantastic. Lining up Power Infusion with Power Word: Radiance, Evangelism, and Shadowfiend will be phenomenal. Add in the Boon of the Ascended covenant to this lineup and your burst will be insane. Other players in raid will likely have to pry this ability from your cold dead hands before you give it up for them, but they might have a chance to nab it occasionally in Mythic+.

NEW (Level 52) - After its removal in Mists of Pandaria, Mind Soothe returns. While it was extremely niche in most situations, it might possibly have renewed use in Mythic+ as skips can be highly valued. i don't expect this one to be cast very often, but I'm sure we'll see a video of a Mind Soothe skip in Shadowlands at some point.

Shadowlands Leveling Perks:

NEW Rank 2 (Level 17) Fade now reduces the range at which enemies will attack you when used while active.

If Mind Soothe is meant as a group-wide aggro radius reduction, then this perk is the personal version. Niche perk at best but I'm sure someone will find a use for it somewhere.

Rank 2 (Level 54)

As something that already exists in the live game, it seems weird to remove this for the prepatch just to re-add it as a leveling perk for Shadowlands. On the plus side, you'll likely see this used more often in PvE content such as removing One With Death from Sathel the Accursed in Theater of Pain.

Rank 2 (Level 48)

The Priest strobe light just got a whole lot more spammy. Overall not a huge change, but a nice quality of life one. Brings the spell up to near levels of damage. This perk creates an issue for AoE damage where you now choose between the player-centered Holy Nova with a mana cost and miniscule healing or the target-centered that's free but does not offer healing.

Reworked Discipline Priest Abilities:

Smite Smites an enemy for (47% of Spell power) Holy damage. Cost changed from 0.5% to .7% of base mana.
With losing the absorb to Mind Blast and the increased mana cost, Smite feels even worse than before. As the filler ability, it's the final spell you cast after the long and growing list of cooldown based abilities that Discipline Priests are expected to manage. Sure you'll use it, but you won't feel good about it.

Power Word: Fortitude

Already the least mandatory buff, cutting Power Word: Fortitude in half makes it feel even less mandatory, but will still be a nice buff when you can bring a priest.

SmitePower Word: FortitudePower InfusionMind SoothePain SuppressionPower Word: BarrierRaptureAtonementBurstingGrievousTalent Changes

NEW Allies are healed for (210% of Spell power) when they gain benefit of your Power Word: Barrier, and healed again for (210% of Spell power) if they are under your barrier when it expires.
Tier 7 Talent, in place of Lenience
Light's Caress rewards players for smart and well-timed positioning of your Power Word: Barrier and for players staying within it for the entire duration. You'll likely find yourself yelling at your raiders to stay in the bubble until it disperses for that last pulse of healing. For reference, each pulse of healing is a little less than a Revival in healing meaning Light's Caress could be a fairly potent throughput talent. With the addition of Light's Caress, the level 50 talent row starts to feel a bit weird. There's a talent that rewards you for good Power Word: Barrier timing and positioning; one that allows you to gain some absorb value out of Power Word: Barrier especially when you can't stack up for the Power Word: Barrier; and Evangelism to create larger burst windows. I'm not sure if having two Power Word: Barrier talents on the same row is weird or if Evangelism is the odd man out for not modifying Power Word: Barrier. What I do know is that for a specialization that is struggling in Mythic+, this talent row doesn't do a lot to help in that scenario.

As a mandatory pick for entirety of BFA, it makes sense that would be getting a nerf in Shadowlands. The cooldown increase hurts the most as it has the same issues that Mind Blast does in that lining it up with the Power Word: Radiance cooldown of 20s and shorter Atonement duration can be frustrating occasionally forcing players to delay the ability for their larger burst windows. Having two 15s cooldown abilities doesn't help that at all.

The laundry list of short cooldown abilities continues to grow with the recent additions: Schism, Penance, , Mind Blast, and sometimes Divine Star/Halo, and Shadow Covenant. Perhaps instead of adding to this list, could augment Mind Blast or could replace Mind Blast baking in all the goodness of both spells into a single ability. This could go a long way in pairing down the laundry list.

The new incarnation of Shadow Covenant is highly thematic to Discipline conjuring images of a Priest so consumed by the void that they can't reach the light. I could envision and would welcome an entire rework of Discipline Priest around this very concept of balancing light and void. Keeping both in check or succumbing to the insanity of the void or the blinding light.

As for the actual talent, this is a strong replacement even from a throughput standpoint. There's still some concern as to the lack of shadow damaging spells beyond Mind Blast, Schism, and Shadow Word: Pain. Perhaps allowing a Power of the Dark Side proc to turn Penance into shadow damage could be a very cool interaction that Priests could play around.

Covenant Abilities

Kyrian:
Boon of the Ascended via Ascended Nova and Ascended Blast - Due to Ascended Blast's short cooldown, you'll utilize a combination of Ascended Nova and Ascended Blast to heal and build up stacks culminating in a huge detonation of healing and damage via Ascended Eruption increasing based on the number of stacks built. Because Boon of the Ascended is classified as a Priest spell, the damage from Ascended Nova, Ascended Blast, and Ascended Eruption all convert to healing via Atonement. For Ascended Nova, only a single target of damage transfers via Atonement similar to Holy Nova; however, all of the final explosion Ascended Eruption damage transfers via Atonement for all targets hit resulting in a overwhelming burst of healing throughput. Properly coordinating your burst windows around the covenant will be key to maximizing your throughput including using Power Infusion to build as many stacks as possible and applying Schism to a target to amplify Ascended Eruption. With no stack cap, the potential of this ability is only limited by the number of stacks you're able to generate and any scenario where you can hit multiple enemies will dramatically increase your throughput. The only downside to this ability is the long 3 min cooldown, but beyond that this covenant is absolutely insane for Discipline and will be hard to top in any scenario.

Summon Steward - The steward offers some quality of life options like free talent changes or a vendor to sell things, but it essentially boils down to Phial of Serenity, a glorified healthstone for all intents and purposes. The healing will be nice and contribute albeit minimally to throughput, and the personal bleed, curse, and poison dispel for Discipline Priests could come in handy as you can't normally dispel those; however, the circumstances where the phial will be invaluable will be few and far between compared to other covenant abilities which are more universally valuable.

Venthyr:
Mindgames - A cool idea of turning an enemy against themselves and utilizing their damage to heal is awesome. I dream of a world where I can turn N'Zoth the Corruptor's Evoke Anguish against him to heal the raid, but I feel like the limitations on this one are just too difficult to overcome. For starters there's no upfront healing, but the upfront damage will transfer via Atonement. Beyond that, you'll only get roughly 400% spell power worth of healing and 4% of mana from the damage conversion out of each 45s use. Compare that to the massive amounts of AoE healing you'll get from the other covenant abilities and this one starts to feel a bit small potatoes. Interesting concept, but the numbers need to be there as well. Has maybe some potential in PvP maybe when trying to secure a kill?

Door of Shadows - Quite possibly the star of the covenant signature abilities, it's hard to say no to a 35yd teleport with a minute cooldown even if it has a 1.5s cast time. This type of movement is almost universally valuable and it's hard to think of an occasion where it'd be useless. Full Venthyr dungeon groups can plan skips around this ability. As a Discipline Priest, I will never say no to more mobility.

Necrolord:
Unholy Nova - A massive 15yd AoE heal that also infects enemies with an AoE DoT that has a Judgment of Light-like healing component. As of the current build, they've nerfed the healing from striking enemies with Unholy Transfusion down to 12% spell power and applied a ~1.5s internal cooldown to the healing component per player for each target struck. The damage of the Unholy Transfusion converts to healing via Atonement. As such, the more enemies you're able to hit the stronger this ability becomes. This will likely be an exceptional ability in Mythic+ where multiple enemy targets are pretty standard to scale the Atonement portion of the damage and pretty bland in raid where you're relying on the Judgment of Light portion to scale based on the number of players. With the significant access that a 1 min cooldown allows for, this could really help shore up some of the power that Discipline Priest seems to lack in Mythic+. It's worth noting that the 1 min cooldown also considerably desynchronizes with Evangelism and the Unholy Transfusion DoT lasts 15s compared to the Power Word: Radiance Atonement duration of 9s.

Fleshcraft - This extra self survivability will be nice and as an absorb will contribute minimally to overall throughput, but where this one loses me is the 4s channel. Adding a long channel to our toolkit is not exactly something we want. I would really like to see the channel time reduced or allowing this ability to channel while moving would go a long way to making this ability more palatable. Could be an excellent tool for surviving burst damage especially in high Mythic+, but it's a bit of a hard sell against the other movement oriented covenant signature abilities.

Night Fae:
Fae Guardians - While the other Covenant abilities focus more on raw throughput, Fae Guardians is primarily focused on utility. The 10% damage reduction from could be strong in Mythic+. If you plan your spell usage correctly, you can keep the 10% damage reduction rolling on your tank and another target for 1min and 15s out of every 1.5 mins, an 83% uptime. While it's not much, for Discipline Priest that has to rely more on the damage reduction abilities in dungeons to compensate for their lacking single target throughput, this could be very help. Where I start to become skeptical on this ability is the remaining two benefits. Because Power Word: Shield still has the Weakened Soul effect and you can only bypass it with Rapture, you'll likely be using this on a few different targets unless you're willing to burn that cooldown in the process. So you're looking at best 200% resource or 20% mana spread over a few different targets. While that can be helpful, the granted mana hardly pays for the 3.4% mana cost for each Power Word: Shield paid by the Priest. So you're actually making Power Word: Shield more efficient in the process of granting mana to other healers. It's more efficient to generate resource and therefore damage but how much damage is questionable, especially when you consider that you're not picking another covenant ability which has damage baked into the cast so you're already losing out on that. Finally, the Power Word: Radiance benefit grants the 5 targets 3s off one of their major abilities. Because Power Word: Radiance has a cooldown, at best you're going to get 2 of these upfront and then maybe 2 more as the charges come back up. On top of that Power Word: Radiance is 5 injured allies that don't already have Atonement so selecting who is getting the cooldown reduction beyond the first target is questionable in raid. Finally, suboptimal usage of Power Word: Radiance nearly destroys their throughput as careful timing and setup are key to their success. Now consider that Discipline Priests are sacrificing the added damage and throughput of other covenants just for this utility and this covenant's outlook is bleak. For me it's just not worth it. I'm sure you'll see videos of a Priest reducing cooldowns or granting resource here and there for the spectacle, but it's just not a realistic scenario.

Soulshape As someone who adored Displacer Beast, it's nice to see this come back as an option although more watered down. Blinks and teleports are universally valuable and while it might not be the Venthyr ability this is a strong second place option. You likely won't be coming up with skips for such a limited 10 yard blink, but you get 3 in the 12s duration so you may have some opportunities to blink over some particularly nasty mechanics. It should be noted that you can cast while shapeshifted. Comes with a cosmetic collecting minigame which is fantastic.

KyrianBoon of the AscendedNecrolordLackluster GCDs

Rapture - At the start of BFA, Rapture was put on the GCD and given 2 extra seconds of duration to compensate. For Rapture, that first activation GCD delays the actual power of the cooldown making it feel a bit more hollow. Fortunately this one is an easy fix. Simply make Rapture a targeted spell that applies a large free absorb to the target on activation in addition to its current effect.

Evangelism - While the talent has been near mandatory in raids for all of BFA and doesn't need any additional power, the GCD hasn't felt like a particularly strategic or powerful one for awhile. As long as you press Evangelism sometime before your large number of Atonements expires, you're doing it right. Ideally, if there was a moderate pulse of healing on all of your Atonement targets when you activate Evangelism the spell would feel more impactful and could be used more strategically. Repurposing a Contrition heal for this seems easy enough.

Power Infusion - With the return of Power Infusion, there's been some concern about whether it would be on the GCD or not. Before it's removal at the start of BFA it was intended to be placed on the GCD, but due to it's removal this never occurred. With its return in Shadowlands, Power Infusion remains off the GCD. For parity with abilities like Innervate, it probably should be placed on the GCD, but I urge developers to reconsider this and so many other abilities. With Power Infusion once again being allowed to be used on any ally player, the Priest shouldn't have to pay the GCD cost for another player to have fun.

Shadowfiend & Mindbender - The immediacy and level of impact that these pets cause players to feel less than excited about pressing these GCD abilities. Combine that with an unforgiving pet AI and the complaints start to make a lot of sense. I'm not terribly attached to either of these abilities, but if they can be salvaged I'm all for it.

Mythic+ Viability - While there are a lot of factors that determine how well a spec performs in Mythic+ (utility, damage, single target throughput, etc.), I'd really appreciate if future development could be focused on helping Discipline Priests become stronger and more relevant in dungeon content. I know it's a big ask and there isn't an exact solution, but perhaps the additional systems of Shadowlands could really offer some more tools for Discipline Priests. Since it's rework in Legion, Discipline has always been the healer with the highest skill cap but has rewarded players for mastering this challenging playstyle. While that tends to work out in raid, putting in that same effort in dungeons has only seemed to land them somewhere around the average.

Leap of Faith - While it's cool to be able to move your allies across the field of battle, I miss the added mobility of Reverse Life Grip allowing you to grip yourself to an allies position. While I think it'd be super similar to Druid's Wild Charge, perhaps we can give it a more Clash-like functionality that causes the two players to meet in the middle.

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Comment by dr7swagI can't remember any recent "state in shadowlands" post that doesn't include "lackluster GCDS" in its title. So every healing class is crap?Comment by ticks187I think it’s as sign of that there’s not that much wrong with the classes if the complains are regarding the <1.5s GCD’s on spells with a 1.5min cooldownsComment by Dandorian1The DPS hybrid spec sucks, just return it back to the bubble glory days.Comment by DayonI can't remember any recent "state in shadowlands" post that doesn't include "lackluster GCDS" in its title. So every healing class is crap?Comment by MelilithiaThe DPS hybrid spec sucks, just return it back to the bubble glory days.Comment by MalOSBThis does not address issues outside of combat, where Disc lacks a big slow heal, Grievous weeks are so painful I take that week off M+.

I have found that with the Spirit of Preservation this season has been much better because it makes Shadow Mend actually affect the tank's health, then the increased crit helps the next heal. With that gone, I fear Shadow mend will feel like a wet noodle again.Comment by endolexNo mention of ? It's becoming baseline too, isn't it?

Also in general I think it's ridiculous that the one healer spec that is *required* to do damage in order to heal has such a convoluted way of doing it. It will always feel more logical to me to just to start DPsing when not much healing is required instead of going through this "ok apply atonement first, THEN dps as much as you can to keep your party alive" routine.
In short: MoP Disc felt great - you healed a little through atonement, much like applying a HoT. But when people started taking *real* damage, you had to switch to *real* healing and absorption.
Nowadays, Disc doesn't have real healing anymore, you *have* to make do with atonement becase it's all you have. And that reliance on absolutely having to DPS in order to meaningfully heal has been the problem of this spec since WoD.Comment by SaadiaI enjoy playing fistweaver but I can't get myself to try out disc, it's seems too complicated for the result (but as said there's definitively a high skill cap). If they added an out of combat spell to heal the group it would be so good for M+.Comment by Ukitsu556"Discipline has always been the healer with the highest skill cap"
ok... u have only one set up to do every 1min30

BTW u want disc be the god for raid, AND mm+ too now ?

Joke.Comment by faustiaThe DPS hybrid spec sucks, just return it back to the bubble glory days.Comment by Fifagreenyeah disc need some love in dungeons/m+ but for example right now in bfa it is fine with essences traits corruption etc... if you can't heal bursting or grievous try to play differnetly or switch if you still suck but in shadowlands you will have covenenat ability which will probably don't help you too much and what about other systems in shadowlands? well you don't know much about them yet so soulbinds or anima power or whatever they will add still can help us in dungeons
but we don't know so we will see how it goes
other changes like to our baseline adding mind blast,shadow word death, mind soothe, power insusion... i feel they are really cool even changes like shadow covenant seems pretty cool and viable the new talent ligt's caress isn't bad but like you mentioned you don't really want 2barrier talents in a same row as evangelism all these talents are just raid talents so picking between them to m+ don't feel any good beacuse you will not have too much choice there beacuse the new talent is good only if people stay in bubble at start until end so it heal twice everyone luminous barrier feel like a worse variant of barrier and evangelism feel bad in 5man beacuse you will don't get better ramp or anything just few more secs to damage before you will need to refresh atonement which would be probably better anyways than playing evangelismComment by THEBuzzardThe GCD situation with disc has been really effing bad for quite some time now. It's very reactive with a mandatory setup before you can start being effective, that does not work well with a mini cooldown on everything.Comment by MalOSB"Discipline has always been the healer with the highest skill cap"
ok... u have only one set up to do every 1min30

BTW u want disc be the god for raid, AND mm+ too now ?

Joke.Comment by LilithRayneThe DPS hybrid spec sucks, just return it back to the bubble glory days.Comment by SunlonghornI personally really like Disc! It's a more interactive/dynamic way of healing & breaks the mold a bit of just being a typical caster. We have Holy for that (or even Resto shaman).

Evangelism & the Shadow-fiend are good spells but they do feel a bit lack luster & the GCD on Rapture & spamming Pw:S feels very clunky however. My concern is the increased mana cost on spells like, Smite since Solace now will have a higher CD.

Evangelism should just be a base line spell at this point & a new 3rd barrier talent added in it's place that allows you to pick 1 of 3 barrier upgrades. It feels like the odd man out.

The rework Shadow Covenant spell sounds cool but apart from Mind Blast & Schisim I guess we are expected to either spam SW:P or Mind Sear? That probably won't feel right.

Over all I'll still main Disc will be a bit of learning curve at first but that's the fun of it :DComment by Wasselin Other players in raid will likely have to pry this ability from your cold dead hands before you give it up for them, but they might have a chance to nab it occasionally in Mythic+.Comment by joeboe610Our guild ran two holy priests in Legion. I decided to give Disc a try for the first time ever in BFA to add more variety to our healer roster. I fell in love it over time! My only major quandary with disc priest is with Mythic+, specifically during bursting week. Through gear, videos, guides, addons, I have been able to achieve a level of success with raiding and mythic+ that makes me happy, EXCEPT BURSTING WEEK. I gave up on bursting week halfway after 8.3. It is just not fun, and why do something that is not fun? I hope they add some Mythic+ tuning to the conduits, soulbinds, and legendaries as that is where I feel Disc could benefit the most from for handling Mythic+. Better yet, how about they just remove bursting and give us a new affix to deal with instead! :PComment by ColdleoThe DPS hybrid spec sucks, just return it back to the bubble glory days.Comment by EveloHoly has a lot more issues than Disc does. While there are things needed to make Disc feel better it isn't much.Comment by Awsyme01I can't remember any recent "state in shadowlands" post that doesn't include "lackluster GCDS" in its title. So every healing class is crap?I can't remember any recent "state in shadowlands" post that doesn't include "lackluster GCDS" in its title. So every healing class is crap?

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