Introduction
With the addition of the new Talent tree system for Dragonflight, Discipline Priest has gained access to some previously known spells and abilities plus some completely new ones. Our artifact weapon ability Light's Wrath makes its return more powerful than ever and the satisfying Shadowlands legendary The Penitent Ones has gotten reworked into a passive without its frustrating rng-element via Harsh Discipline. These additions and many more leave Discipline's raid focused build looking to be one of its best iteration yet.
From an M+ perspective the tree attempts to give us a handful of additional tools, many of which in their current design fall short of their potential. Shadow Covenant is receiving another slight rework and gains some support from adjacent talent nodes, a new Capstone Talent Wickedness attempts to bring a Shadowy flair to the already existing spells Halo and Divine Star, and our ability to spread Purge the Wicked has never been easier with the addition of the new talent Revel in Purity.
While there are many things in this tree to be excited for we hope to discuss some of the fundamental problems we've found over the course of our alpha testing and discussions since the trees release.
Table of Contents
General issues
Tree Structure and Limited Pathing
One of the primary issues with the Disc Specific tree comes down to a lack of interconnectivity between the various nodes and sections in the tree. Due to the trees linear structure a lot of the potential decision making is removed because you’re taking the only path to the deeper traits that you desire with no alternative paths to get there. As you can see in the image below if I want to get to Harsh Discipline there is only one path starting from Atonement all the way down. This example can be replicated for many of the deeper talents and capstones. Increasing the possible paths throughout the tree allows for increased decision making in regards to which nodes you desire for the content at hand instead of being limited by the tree structure.
The Imbalance of Power due to lack of Synergy
While a lot of people would certainly enjoy a shadow themed Disc playstyle, the current iteration of the right side of the tree lacks Synergy with the rest of the kit and various talent nodes compared to its competitor. Wickedness' only synergy within our talents is that its damage done is shadow damage and thus amplified by Shadow Covenant. Beyond not having many Synergies we have also lost our primary shadow filler being Mind Sear. With the reduced amount of shadow spells it becomes even harder to fill the entire duration of Shadow Covenant with shadow spells as you're forced to path through Embrace Shadow to get to Twilight Corruption. Its competitor being Harsh Discipline however has synergy with a large variety of talents such as: Castigation, Power of the Dark Side and Dark Indulgence, Purge the Wicked and Revel in Purity, Evangelism, Indemnity and even itself.
Lack of Situational Effects
The current Disc tree lacks nodes that have varying amounts of power depending on the situation. A good example of a well designed talent that meets these goals is Revel in Purity, which gains significant power in multi-target situations where you can make use of the additional DoT cleave. Because this talent has varying strengths based on the situation, you can drop it for Utility or other situational effects based on the individual encounters. Adding additional effects with similar design will lead to a wider variety of builds and more interesting decision making.
In the following example raid build, the only points I could take out and put somewhere else are the points in Revel in Purity and in Dark Indulgence which I could move into Shining Force or Protector of the Frail.
Talent nodes with significant issues
Inner Light and Shadow
Inner Light and Shadow was previously a PVP only talent but has now made its way into the Disc spec tree. In its current state it triggers a GCD when swapping stances and its damage and Atonement amplifier “double-dip” meaning it increases the damage which then increases the healing and then also has the Atonement healing increased again. Without further information it’s hard to say if this is intended or not but knowing how these kinds of buffs usually interact with Atonement I think it's fair to assume it is not intended. On top of that Power Word: Shield is not being reduced by the mana cost reduction which again might be unintended or just be because Power Word: Shield is an absorb and not a heal. Ideally it's the first reason and will be fixed as without Power Word: Shield being on the list of spells reduced by it there's a really good chance you just stay in the damage stance and never swap at which point you might as well just make it be a passive that increases damage and Atonement healing. Additionally, the talent also has a 1% mana cost to swap between stances meaning you wouldn't even have much of a mana gain from swapping regularly.
To me this talent has a lot of potential for cool and fun gameplay interactions but it needs to not be an active spell that you toggle between as it's very black and white. You swap to mana reduction while applying atonements and swap to damage for the damaging portion of your ramps. Something I would much rather see is it being triggered by some kind of cast sequence (casting x amount of Holy / Shadow spells in a row) or even just rotate between the two on a certain timer. Given the positioning of this talent as a core talent on the same level as Atonement and Penance on our tree, it's current design as a flat damage/healing increase with no other interaction or synergy with our kit leaves a lot to be desired, especially with how gameplay defining the two previously aforementioned talents are.
Contrition
With Contrition making an appearance on the disc specific tree it's fairly clear that it's here to stay. Contrition itself in a vacuum compared to an offensive Penance does really well. Assuming you can get good value out of your defensive Penance healing you need a really large atonement count for the offensive Penance to even catch up with the Contrition one. This is however where the issue comes in: offensive Penance gets a lot of extra bonuses that make it pull ahead. These bonuses are things such as: Schism, Sins of the Many, Power of the Dark Side and even newly implemented talents such as Harsh Discipline and Inner Light and Shadow. Contrition needs to work with every amplification that offensive Penance has (except obviously Schism as that wouldn’t make sense) including things such as counting Contrition heals as Atonement events for Harsh Disciplines stacks. It would be a real shame to end up in a spot where Contrition is picked because it's in a required path, but you end up never utilizing it because it's just never the best choice to play around.
Protector of the Frail
Protector of the Frail is currently restricted to only proccing off Power Word: Shield. In 5-man content, this already fairly niche talent will see little value as discipline priest is forced into using Shadow Mend, causing your Power Word: Shield casts to plummet. Allowing the CDR to be triggered by both Shadow Mend and Power Word: Shield would help with keeping the cooldown reduction consistent across different content.
Purge the Wicked
Purge the Wicked in its current state is an absolute must pick. However, this isn’t actually because it got buffed or anything but rather because Shadow Word: Pain, the spell it replaces (which it doesn't even do on Alpha at the moment but will likely be changed), is lacking its Rank 2, meaning its duration is only 12 seconds. The issue with that is that a Disc ramp can easily have 15 seconds setup time during which you really don’t want to spend a GCD on a DoT refresh if you don't have to. Purge the Wicked on the other hand with its 20 seconds duration allows you to comfortably refresh it in the pandemic window before the ramp and then have it last not only during the build up phase but also till the end of the damaging phase. Purge the Wicked should not just be an improved version of Shadow Word: Pain in every scenario but rather a different version of it that excels in certain situations. For example, having Shadow Word: Pain be a stronger DoT by itself would be an incentive to not automatically path into Purge the Wicked whenever you have the option to do so.
Spirit Shell
The next topic will come as no surprise to anyone but seeing Spirit Shell still on the talent tree is very unfortunate. This talent has proven time and time again throughout various expansions and even during Shadowlands that whenever it becomes good, it becomes extremely toxic. Being able to apply a large amount of absorbs on the entire raid on a short cooldown takes away the ability to interact with incoming damage for the other players. On top of that, the current version on the talent tree is the version that has been nerfed multiple times already and it has lost its biggest partner in crime, Clarity of Mind. This legendary while specced into Spirit Shell extended all active Atonements by 3 seconds on cast of Spirit Shell turning it into a pseudo Evangelism of sorts and has been one of the main reasons Spirit Shell was even ever any good. Ideally this talent should be replaced by an alternative option on its current choice node that promotes a different playstyle.
Evenfall
Evenfall is an improved version of The Penitent Ones RNG-mechanic as it's no longer an all or nothing kind of thing. You are already able to generate Power of the Dark Side by yourself via your DoTs and thus you won't always be gambling on your Radiances to proc it. However, it is fairly important for this talent to allow Power of the Dark Side to stack up to 2 times with it talented. This is something we have gained access to via our 4-set bonus from Sepulcher of the First ones and only makes sense to stay. The reasoning behind it is that you have a fairly good chance to gain a second stack by using 2 Radiances in a row which would allow you to also use 2 empowered Penances during your ramp. Keep in mind that even The Penitent Ones, despite not being able to proc from anything but the Radiance casts, had the ability to stack up to 2 times while having the exact same chance to proc as Evenfall.
Shadow Covenant
In Legion Shadow Covenant healed 5 allies and placed a healing absorb for half of its healing done on them with no cooldown. Going into Battle for Azeroth it got a 12 second cooldown attached to it at which point its main use was a strong instant cast aoe heal that came with the cost of future healing. For Shadowlands this spell got a large rework changing its cooldown to 30 seconds, removing the healing absorb and instead applying a buff to yourself for a short duration during which your Shadow spells do increased damage and healing but you cannot cast any Holy spells. With the release of the new Dragonflight talent tree Shadow Covenant has again received a round of changes which now allows the player to still cast Holy spells but at the cost of 50% damage and healing done by them. Throughout the changes over the years Shadow Covenant has lost its core identity and needs a clear intent behind its design.
In its current state Shadow Covenant tries to cover a multitude of areas however it doesn't really succeed in any of them. Its still an instant cast aoe heal which then buffs your Shadow spells. This itself isn't bad but doesn't really fill any gap we have in our toolkit. If that is the goal of the spell then it just seems like a more restrictive version of Schism which we already have access to. It also increases all Shadow healing done which basically boils down to only Shadow mend since Dark Reprimand is only usable as an offensive ability and not both ways like its counterpart Penance. From a dps perspective Shadow Covenant lacks the proper spells as we have lost our previously used aoe-filler in Mind Sear to fill the increased duration of Shadow Covenant via Embrace Shadow.
Discipline has many different options in its kit already to help with aoe / burst healing and much less for the different areas. Having Shadow Covenant be a clear benefit for damage and Single-target healing would be more helpful as that's something Disc has historically struggled with.
Wickedness
When initially reading through Wickedness it sounded pretty exciting, however after playing around with the spells themselves and also potential tree combinations it simply does not hold up to the initial expectations. The issue with it starts with the fact that none of the extra damage done via the DoT transfers into any Atonement healing and that it doesn’t currently turn Halo or Divine Star into Shadow healing either, meaning Shadow Covenant actually reduces their direct healing.
The additional effects of Wickedness for Divine Star and Halo contradict with how they are being used by Discipline as a spec due to the nature of interaction with Atonement and aoe damage. Historically Halo has been a talent chosen strictly for Single-target fights, gaining no increased Atonement healing for additional targets hit, while its previous competitor Purge the Wicked did. Divine Star also gains no healing benefit from Wickedness as the extra damage only starts to ramp up after the first hit which is the only one that transfers Atonement. Due to these reasons Wickedness in its current state is a pure damage choice and provides little to no healing benefit.
Implementation of Shadowlands Conduits
Inside the Disc specific tree you’ll find four of our Shadowlands Potency Conduits which have had their numbers adjusted. While we understand that it’s still early in Alpha and numbers can always be changed, it's unfortunate to be forced through budget versions (Shining Radiance went from 88% in Shadowlands to 20% in Dragonflight Alpha) of our previous potency conduits just to get to nodes that we require. An example of this is Shining Radiance being before the second charge of Power Word: Radiance whereas Exaltation is the end of its branch allowing you to willingly augment Rapture without it being a blocker to the core functionality of the spell (This does not mean Exaltation is a good point to pick but rather that the design of its pathing is better than the others). A complete rework of Pain Transformation also makes sense as it didn’t see any play with its current version throughout Shadowlands either.
Dead Talents
Malicious Scission
This talent in its current state while sounding good sadly has very little value. The reason for this mostly comes down to the fact that Schism at 9 seconds base duration is already extremely fitting for the duration of our atonements in our ramp window. To get good value from this we would need some type of Radiance Atonement extension such as Enduring Luminescence or similar effects. Alternatively having Malicious Scission give Schism a second charge instead to allow for more flexibility would be an option too. Currently Disc is extremely tied to its Radiance and Schism cooldown to do any meaningful group wide healing. However with these also not sharing the exact same cooldown you'll often find yourself unable to pair them up perfectly or just dont have the ability to do multiple healing windows in quick succession.
Pain Transformation
Seeing the Pain Transformation conduit return as a talent on our spec tree is a huge dissapointment. It has been a never-pick for the entirety of Shadowlands and will likely remain this way on the spec tree too. In this case it's not even a numbers question as even with it 50-60% of the max hp it would still be questionable. Something that could take its place instead is our previous Artifact tree passive Tyranny of Pain that healed allies with Pain Suppression for a portion of their damage taken during it. This combined with Protector of the Frail would make for a very powerful single-target cooldown.
Exaltation
Exaltation has been one of the weakest conduits we’ve had when used in conjunction with Evangelism and is only rivaled by Pain Transformation itself. The numbers on this need to be significantly buffed to have any real value. The duration buff, in some cases depending on your character's haste, is not even enough to grant you 1 extra Rapture empowered Power Word: Shield and the extra absorb it gives is miniscule. On top of that this conduit was also put in the very bottom section of the Disc tree where it has to compete with strong single pointers such as Lenience, Indemnity and Power Word: Barrier.