New changes to Disc!

[Ashleycakez]

Hello there! Feel free to discuss your impressions with Discipline in the Mists Beta here.

I'll start with some obvious changes that I've noticed while running dungeons and otherwise playing the Beta.

Discipline has lost the spell Heal. In its place is Spirit Shell. Its an interesting spell and I'm personally having trouble figuring out who its best used on. Stack it on the tank? Roll it on a few dps? Spirit Shell does benefit from Mastery - which raise a few questions to me:

1. Is it worth stacking Mastery for this spell since when it expires (not gets consumed) it heals the target for 80% of the remaining amount, thus a bigger heal for a bigger absorb?
2. But if the damage is so high that it is completely absorbed, it would obviously be better to stack Haste to reduce the cast time?
3. Will this spell see any use in raiding, unlike Holy's Heal spell?

It seems neither the absorb cast or the heal after can crit, so the ideal stats for this one spell would be Haste and Mastery.

Power Word: Shield now has a 6 second cooldown. It's a little hard to shake the habit of rolling a few Shields on targets when damage ramps up!

As of the current beta build, our friends Borrowed Time and Rapture are gone. What is left of in-combat regen is Meditation, Shadowfiend, and Hymn of Hope - just like Holy!

Discipline also no longer has Divine Hymn, which makes Power Word: Barrier our only raid CD at this time, and it costs quite a chunk of mana!

I found it easier to heal dungeons as Disc than Holy. I'm not entirely sure what my spec or glyphs are as the client keeps crashing whenever I try to click my Disc spec. Maybe the groups were just better ^.^

[Veiled]

Spirit Shell needs some work. They're either going to have to make it more powerful or reduce the cast time. I took it off my disc bars because it's just useless right now. Hopefully they do something with it soon.

[Ashleycakez]

Yeah I'm confused to where it fits in, and the 6 second CD on PW: Shield is clunky. Why even have Mastery on a Disc Priest in Mists?

[Kaesebrezen]

Why even have Mastery on a Disc Priest in Mists?

I'm wondering that to...

PW:S on a 6 sec CD, then PoH, the others left are Flasheal and Gheal, for which we also need crit...

Spirit Shell in the current build already reaches its absorb cap with practically no Mastery at all. So that spell scales with neither crit nor Mastery...

[Ashleycakez]

Actually, Spirit Shell does scale with Mastery, although not as much as PW: Shield does:

Spirit Shell also scales with Mastery. Quite interesting considering the heal once it expires... but what are the odds it expires with a significant amount remaining assuming heavy AoE/tank damage?

No gear (0 points of Mastery, 8.00 baseline) = 10,224
Full gear (1696 points of Mastery, 17.46) = 16,574

PW: Shield is 14,692 without gear and 25,407 with.

Note that this is my alt Priest which has significantly less gear than my main Priest. I can't tell you what the values are for my geared Priest because I'm stuck with Shadow OS. These were just the values on the tooltip. I was testing if the effect can Crit and I think Spirit Shell was something more like a 21k absorb without Foul Gift of the Demon Lord equipped. With Foul Gift's proc the absorb would go up (I think 28-30k? I'll poke around with it more later).

[Ashleycakez]

Here's a combat log just casting Spirit Shell/PW:S so you can see the effect of a Mastery proc. I didn't have any +Int proc gear on for this:




Edit to add that at level 90 I would expect our health pools to be much larger than they are at 85. Perhaps stacking Mastery won't be a waste if Spirit Shell doesn't get capped with one cast (assuming its a viable spell to use in a raid, unlike Heal) as it is currently doing with my Disc Priest on Beta.