Maybe if they just severly cut the cooldowns of those abilities there will be a point for discussion...

I guess that I'm the only one that wants Discipline to be more than an alternative healing spec...

Most every talent tree, when specced 41 points in, results in the player casting a majority of their spells from the specialization that they have chosen. 41-point fire mages cast fire spells, and frost mages cast frost spells. Enhancement shamans don't cast lightning bolts or heal as their main ability; Mutilate rogues don't sinister strike. The only exception (other than the disc priest) are hunters and demolocks, but even then, they are defined by the talents that they take.

What I really don't want to see happening is that a 41-point discipline priest, by way of design or whatnot, is defined by how those 41 points affect how they cast HOLY spells. Discipline abilities should not be 1% of the spells cast in a given timeframe if the priest decides to major in it; it should be the other way around. The design should be such that it is both engaging and effective to be actively casting buff after buff, and the mechanics should reflect that.

I really want to echo this. I'd love discipline priests to be more than just another healer or damage slot. I could see a role where 60% of the time you are actively dispensing buffs as appropriate and the other 40% you are doing straight up healing or even damage. The problem is that priests just don't have tools like this. Consider the activated buffs with long cooldowns each of the healing classes will cast during combat:

Druid: Innervate, Rebirth
Shaman: Bloodlust
Paladin: Lay on Hands, Blessing of Protection, Divine Intervention
Priest: Power Infusion, Pain Suppression

Notice anything strange about that list? All the other classes get all their buffs as trainable abilities, but priests have to spend talent points to get their buffs. And those buffs are not in a tree that helps either damage or healing.

If they want to make discipline priests useful, they should give all priests power infusion and pain suppression as trainable talents (maybe with an increased cooldown, maybe 5 minutes). Then make new 31 and 41 point talents that actually create a new play style the way Vampiric Touch and Circle of Healing do. It's very hard to influence a playstyle with an ability that has a long cooldown. Witness the difference between innervate and swiftmend as 31 point talents, or the trainwreck that the old 31 point holy nova was (with a 1 minute cooldown).

Just as brainstorming, think about a spell like:

5 second channel, 10 second cooldown. Increases the damage and healing done by a friendly target by 100% while channeling. Channeling breaks if the target drops below 50% health.

Now you have a class that can double as an extra DPS or healer as needed. You can't use it to boost the tank's threat too much, and threat would be an issue if used on the same target over and over, so you'd want to rotate targets. Bonus points if you can time your channeling with their timers. Half of the time you boost someone's power, the other half the time you need to find someone to heal or whatever.

I'd also like an bonus effect that makes power word shield a spell you want to cast in more situations than just emergencies, and 50% damage reflect isn't cutting it. Maybe restoring some mana/energy/rage when the shield prevents damage would make it worthwhile.

While reading this thread that was sort of the idea I had as well, make both PI and PS a 5 second channel with a 5-10 second cooldown, so your basically running around looking for targets low on threat to boost their dps, or helping a tank with mitigation, or adding more spells that could perhaps lower the threat a target produces for 5 seconds, or other things along those lines.

I would personally love to play a class like this, you would have SO many options as to what to do, it would be an amazingly fun and unique class.

Given my limited raid experience, I can think of a number of fights where PS would be valuable:

- Magtheridon as he releases. For a guild new to this fight, the chances of your tank getting 3-shot off the starting line can be very high - mitigating 40% of that (and losing no real threat in the process) is priceless.

- Morogrim add tank (Prot Paladin). Give him PS before he starts spamming Consecrate, and he'll be eating 40% less overall damage from Murlocs. The same could be done on Solarian. Doing it before significant threat is amassed removes the aggro-reducing concern.

- Tidalvess tank on FLK. Give it to him whenever you're concerned there may be a gap between Grounding Totems, or as a Spitfire Totem spawns to cover him while you help heal the raid. Mitigating the insta-gib could be very valuable.



I don't think PS is meant to be used for the 5% threat reduction - I think that's a penalty put in place to prevent PS from being chain-cast on a raid tank. I highly doubt this ability will see much use on non-tanks in most raid encounters.

I can think of a few too, I.E. right before Gruul's Reverberation on the third tank.

Still, it does seem like a very situational talent in this sense...

Well Eyonix hopes to be able to give us some ideas of where the developers want to take discipline in Wrath.

Although obviously this will be vague info it should give us some idea of the likelyhood of discipline being raid viable.

post Here

Slight derail from 2.3 viability but we have a couple of titbits about disc for Wrath of the Lich King.

This sounds promising but as they say the proof is in the pudding.

Especially as a response to the never ending question about fixing the necessity of investing in 2 trees to heal yielded a response of "that's the plan" If this goes through as the quote suggests this would leave almost no talent trees totally non viable for raiding.

No hint about what the goal of the tree will actually be though. They could continue the theme of buffs they are starting to develop. However as has been discussed in this and other threads, is it that exciting to play musical buffs/debuffs for an entire raid?

Interesting ideas.

I personally still remember watching the old PvPriest videos way back in the day, and for that reason I've always associated the Discipline tree with gigantic Holy Fire criticals instead of healing. Of course, my priest has been Shadow from 1-70, so I haven't played from the tree other than the first 3 tiers.

Its interesting to look at the tree's evolution. After 1.10 (Priest Talent Review for Vanilia) the Discipline tree was a cross between a utility tree and a holy damage tree. When TBC was launched most of the new talents were geared towards survival and additional utility. However, the old damage talents remained in the tree, weakening the focus of the tree and bloating it.

What the Discipline tree needs most is a true job and focus. It can't be a cross between a holy-nuke/survival/support tree and be viable. I think that is the first thing that needs to be addressed before Discipline will have a place in this game, even after the 2.3 buffs.

If discipline is re-invented as a dynamic buff tree, it also has the potential to impact raiding, and especially raid composition, as much as shadow priests, enhancement shamans, and feral druids have. From a player perspective they're a support class, but from a raid composition class they could be the ultimate hybrid: by focusing their buffs on dps (PI) or tanks (PS) or healers (both), or some combination of the three (reflective bubble?), they effectively allow their raid slow to perform whatever function the raid needs, without swapping gear, much less talents.

I also think you guys are coming at the idea of dynamic buffing from the wrong angle... Channeling spells isn't a heck of a lot different than fire-and-forget instants with a cooldown, except you can't do anything in between. It sounds exciting because it's a huge change but it would get old fast.
Image instead the inverse of an affliction warlock: juggling three to five buffs of varying duration or cooldown on different people, with the interem spent either regenning or on more "mainline" spells like heals or nukes. As an avid affliction warlock I think it would be an interesting and engaging playstyle, and if certian buffs are mutually exclusive in some fashion there's a crapton of theorycrafting opportunity.
Personally, I'd rather be juggling reactive shield on two tanks, PS on the main tank, PI on a dps, SW:P and renew than alternately channeling PI and PS on two or three targets. But that's just me.

I really like this idea, and I agree that channeling would be extremely boring. It would be like doing full heal rotations over and over again. It definitely is in line with what the priest class has evolved to in PVP as well. Massive utility through buffs and dispels, moderate healing power and a few key long cooldown spells.

Its ironic though that most people who rolled priests probably wanted to be main healers (myself included) but priests have become the most hybrid of healers in TBC.