We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Discipline Priest in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Discipline Priest!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Blood DK
Havoc DH
Feral Druid
Guardian Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Mistweaver Monk
Retribution Paladin
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Priest Tier Set
Why You Should Play Discipline Priest in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
Discipline Priest is an incredibly unique healer that deals damage to heal allies. The spec straddles the breach between Light and Shadow, wielding both to maximize burst damage which converts into healing on allies with Atonement applied. Discipline has grown every expansion since Legion, incorporating new spells from Shadow Priests in particular to produce additional output like Shadow Word: Death and Mind Blast. Dragonflight takes this to the next level with the largest quantity of damage spells yet in addition to numerous passive talents that dictate the order in which these spells are used.
In Raiding, Discipline Priest focuses on powerful bursts of healing to counter boss mechanics now taking advantage of the whole of Priest damage abilities from Shadow and Holy Priests to produce Atonement healing. The downside is that there is a massive amount of effort required in producing this healing compared to other healers specializations, resulting in the lowest “performance floor” of all healers. With previous expansions however, Discipline frequently had one of the highest “performance ceilings” that is, when performed at the highest level they could frequently produce the highest amount of healing. In Dragonflight, that performance ceiling has been lowered and there is often the feeling among Discipline players that the increased effort required in Dragonflight does not scale with the output rewards.
In Dungeons, Discipline has received improved 5-man Atonement scaling in Sins of the Many and now more than ever before is capable of producing consistent healing from Atonement along with the new tier set bonuses substantially buffing the effectiveness of Power Word: Radiance. Since Mythic+’s inception there has always been a meta for which healers are best performing. Shadowlands in particular brought balance closer together but Dragonflight has elevated that balance to the next level, providing Discipline the means to consistently heal the highest-end content, in particular, after the 10.0.5 balance updates improving the efficiency of Mind Blast. This has resulted in two distinct builds that allow the Discipline player to choose between greater overall/AoE damage with Mindbender or a safer/higher healing build with more consistent Penances derived from a Train of Thought/Blaze of Light-centric playstyle.
| Why You Should | Why You Shouldn’t |
Why You Should Play Discipline Priest in Dragonflight Season 2
Why should players bring Discipline Priest to Raid/M+?
Starting with all the things that haven’t changed from Shadowlands, Discipline brings a suite of spells that range from the niche to life saving utility any group could have use for including:
- Mass Dispel: Removes large numbers of dispellable buffs and debuffs at once, notably Bursting stacks and helpful buffs on enemies.
- Leap of Faith: Can save your teammate’s life or help your tank kite particularly dangerous mobs.
- Power Word: Fortitude: Standard Stamina buff, every raid should have one and it’s not too bad for dungeons either.
- Mind Soothe: Reduces the range with which enemy humanoids and dragonkin will aggro you or your allies. Excellent for a variety of skips in dungeons.
- Dispel Magic: Dispel dangerous offensive buffs from enemies.
- Purify Disease: Remove diseases from yourself or your teammates.
- Shackle Undead: CC for any potential undead enemies in dungeons and raid encounters.
- Psychic Scream, Dominate Mind, and Void Tendrils as control tools.
Besides the tools Discipline has had for a while now there’s the big one: Power Infusion / Twins of the Sun Priestess.
Twins of the Sun Priestess has been a great addition for Priest in Dragonflight and Discipline in particular. As a healer you would always cast Power Infusion on a DPS, you FINALLY have access to Power Infusion for yourself! While using PI in raids you may not always get to have the optimal timing, in dungeons there often is not a bad time for receiving the buff and improving your damage and healing.
With the addition of Class talent trees, Discipline has access to a new and powerful ability in Power Word: Life. It is easy to target in your class talent tree and gives Discipline access to powerful triage healing with minimal cost. Whether it is dungeon or raid healing, this is an excellent ability that can easily save the lives of yourself or your allies. Since Discipline is often very immobile and lacks many instant cast abilities, Life does an excellent job of providing spot-healing on demand when needed.
What role does Discipline Priest play in a party/raid?
In addition to the utility above, Discipline also brings Power Word: Barrier (which looks incredibly strong in the Aberrus raid), light absorbs, very strong passive damage, and high raid burst output. Many encounters in Vault of the Incarnates such as Dathea or Razageth had mediocre uses for Power Word: Barrier where maybe half of the raid would receive the damage reduction benefits. Going into Aberrus, there is a tremendous amount of oppourtunities on later encounters in particular to take advantage of Power Word: Barrier‘s damage reduction.
In addition, the 25% health/enemy damage increase we received recently heavily benefits specs that bring damage reduction by mitigating larger amounts of damage than before. This change came about as a result of healers being very strong this expansion, topping off health pools much more rapidly than the start of other expansions. To challenge healers, raid encounters become more bursty with encounters like Kurog as an excellent example of the “yo-yo” effect that health bars would have as they jumped between 100%, 30%, then back to full before the next pulse. With this 25% HP/damage change, encounters will still have some burst but healers will have more time to top players before the next incoming hit, this massively favors Discipline Priest’s ramp playstyle.
On the Rashok encounter in Aberrus, there is a mechanic called Overcharged where players are hit with a burst of damage and a Damage Over Time effect. In order to remove the latter, they need to run into the middle of the room, activating a pulse of damage to all allies. This mirrors a very similar mechanic from Castle Nathria on the Council of Blood encounter, Dancing Fever, where players had to jump pulsing raid damage to allies. In both instances, Discipline is excellent at countering these mechanics, using Power Word: Barrier damage reduction and large burst output to allow the raid to rapidly clear their debuffs with raid-wide damage reduction up to reduce the total healing output required.
In a dungeon environment, Discipline is better than ever. It took three iterations but the tier set going into 10.1 is wonderful for Disc Priests, providing more damage from Purge the Wicked, more healing from Power Word: Radiance in the 2-set Priest Discipline 10.1 Class Set 2pc and the ability for instant casts procs from the 4-set Priest Discipline 10.1 Class Set 4pc. Both bonuses are fantastic for Mythic+ and help the spec handle multiple types of incoming damage. On Watcher Irideus for example, the boss will regularly pulse vast bursts of damage for 6 seconds from Static Surge requiring extreme burst healing. The 4-set instant procs are excellent here for helping the spec “catch up” if the Disc Priest is caught off guard or falls behind.
In the same dungeon, Halls of Infusion, Khajin the Unyielding unleashes Polar Winds constantly throughout the encounter, demanding consistent high healing output. With reduced cost Power Word: Radiances, longer Atonement duration, and higher healing from them in general thanks to the tier set, Discipline is more easily able to space out charges and play more mana efficiently in a rot-style damage encounter. The tier-set does an excellent job of preparing Discipline for high-damage encounters regardless of the damage profile provided.
Season 2 Tier Set
As mentioned above, the incoming tier set for 10.1 is a wonderful addition to the spec, providing excellent buffs to Raiding and Mythic+ alike.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Discipline Priest in Dragonflight Season 2
Discipline is more advanced than ever in Dragonflight and more improved in dungeons than ever before. Unfortunately, there are some deep-set issues with the talent tree that force greater effort than ever on the raiding Discipline Priest but without standard high rewards.
Discipline Playstyle: Is the effort worth it?
As mentioned before, Discipline has a severe button bloat problem. In Legion, the start of “modern” Discipline Priest, the spec had Light’s Wrath, Purge the Wicked, Penance and Smite. In BfA, Light’s Wrath was removed and Schism was added. With Shadowlands, covenant abilities dominated and many baseline Disc damage spells were under-utilized because of how powerful covenant abilities like Boon of the Ascended were.
Now, in Dragonflight, Discipline has over double the amount of active damage abilities compared to prior expansions and has multiple passive talents that must be actively managed before and during ramps. Shadow Covenant, Twilight Equilibrium, Harsh Discipline, and Expiation all add to the cognitive load required to play the spec and in some cases reinforce the button bloat of the active abilities.
Complexity has long been what has set Discipline apart from other healers yet never before in Discipline’s history have we seen such massive effort required without the commensurate reward. After all, Discipline is consistently the healer spec with the lowest performance floor but in Dragonflight has yet to achieve the highest performance ceiling and is frequently on the mid-low end of overall output according to Warcraftlogs statistics. As a result, there is a significant risk associated for playing Discipline at a poor or even middling level in a raiding environment when so many other healers do not have the complexity and can provide similar or greater output. For hardcore raiding guilds, the benefit of Power Word: Barrier can outweigh these risks but for the average mythic raider, playing Discipline is often viewed as not worth the extreme effort.
The best way to mitigate these issues in this writer’s opinion is to look to under-used talent options that are raid-focused. Wrath Unleashed and its above talent options offer an “independent variable” to tune Raid Discipline Priest to reduce button bloat and cognitive load while still offering a challenging playstyle that is built around an iconic Discipline ability that players love.
About the Author
For more information on playing Discipline Priest, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Discipline Priest Guide
