Welcome to WarcraftPriests Discipline Priest Guide. This guide is updated to patch 9.1 World of Warcraft Shadowlands.
This section covers the more nitty-gritty customisation which changes the way you play/view the game or provide a nice quality of life.
Table of Contents
User Interface
There are many different ways of setting up your user interface. Due to personal preference, the end look will always vary from person to person. While they are not mandatory, addons, macros and a well set up UI can make your time as a healer both easier and more efficient. Discipline spends a lot of time dealing damage to enemies for Atonement healing. As a result, newer players quite often switch their active target from enemies to friendlies continuously. This style of play can be very inefficient and cumbersome to achieve.
It is strongly recommended that your UI is set up in such a way that means you never need to switch off of having an enemy targeted. This can be achieved through the use of mouseovers which cast a spell on the target below your cursor without the need to switch active target. All healing spells should be cast on mouseover while damaging spells cast on the active target.
Mousebinding Mouseovers
This simply means that you have all your helpful spells bound to various mouse keys with shift/ctrl/alt modifiers. Unfortunately, WoW is not very user-friendly when it comes to this method as any mouse bindings are not usable over any frame (unless specifically re-bound in the default keybindings). This is very simple to overcome through the use of Clique as it allows you to intuitively bind all spells without the need for macros. The downside to this is that it will only work on frames and not on any player model. The raid frame addon such as VuhDo does similar with the functionality built-in.
Keybinding Mouseovers
This simply means that you have all your helpful spells bound to various keyboard keys with shift/ctrl/alt modifiers (for example Q,E,F,X can be used). The various macros you can use to complement this style will be shown below.
Addons
There are a lot of addons that do very similar things but look and set up differently. Which to go for is down to preference. I will highlight below the various popular addons below. Addon management is made considerably easier with the Twitch Desktop App.
All of the below addons have profiling available (basically the ability to copy what someone else uses). The plan is to gather a number of profiles from the community and create a compendium page here for all to use.
- Elvui - Full UI overhaul
- Bartender - Custom bars, easy re-sizing and keybinding
- Weak Auras - Display a large variety of different graphics
- Quartz - Casting bars
- Z-Perl - Unit frames overhaul
Macros
There are numerous ways you can write macros to do the specific things that you need. If you can't find what you're looking for below feel free to check out Elvenbane's Macros here. Alternatively, he is always around in discord to help.
Simple Mouseover
Mouseover only (help/harm depending on the spell)
#showtooltip Shadow Mend /cast [@mouseover,help] Shadow Mend
Mouseover > Target (help/harm depending on spell)
#showtooltip Shadow Mend /cast [@mouseover,help] [] Shadow Mend
You cannot cast Angelic Feather, Mass Dispel or Power Word: Barrier with a mouseover.
Penance
It's strongly recommended keeping Offensive and Defensive Penance components separated (i.e use a macro with modifiers or use two separate keybinds with harm/help modifiers).
Self (alt) > Mouseover Harm (mod) > Mouseover Help > Target
#showtooltip /cast [mod:alt,@player] [mod,@mouseover,harm,nodead] [@mouseover,help,nodead] [] Penance
Dealing damage to enemies only
#showtooltip Penance /cast [harm] Penance
Healing allies only
#showtooltip Penance /cast [@mouseover,help] Penance
Due to the way Penance works, when you try to queue another spell during its cast you can accidentally interrupt the last bolt of Penance. To avoid this apply the following condition to specific spells that cause it the most for you: "nochanneling:Penance" example below.
#showtooltip Smite /cast [nochanneling:Penance] Smite
Angelic Feather
To self-cast Feathers directly on yourself without using the targeting reticule use the following macro.
#showtooltip /cast [@player] Angelic Feather
Weak Auras
This addon can display a wide variety of graphical information. The following website, Wago, contains a large assortment of player-made auras to browse through and try out.