How To Improve As Discipline Priest - Dragonflight 10.2.7 (2024)

Discipline at its core has a relatively simple mechanic, Atonement. However, players who are new to the spec can get tied upin some poor practices that eventually lead to the development of bad habitsand poor performance. If you are looking to improve your gameplay, thissection should be able to provide you with the most common mistakes and how toeliminate them.

In Raids, Discipline relies heavily on a concept we describe as "ramping",which is discussed in the rotation guide linked below. At its core, itinvolves spending a significant portion of time prior to a boss mechanic(damage event) to cover the raid in Atonement. This is used toimmediately reverse the damage when it happens via Evangelism plus aDPS combo. Due to the nature of this concept, you must know what damage events aregoing to occur and when so you have time to ramp for them. To be effective as aDiscipline Priest in raid, you can not attempt to begin applying atonement afterthe damage has happened.

The most common cause of Mana issues when playing Discipline Priest isover-utilizing your single target Atonement applicator( Renew)outside of a ramp. Individual casts of these two spells outside of a ramp sequencewill almost always be your least efficient Mana expenditure in regards to HPM(Healing Per Mana). Try asking yourself before casting one of these spells,"Is this heal necessary?". Oftentimes, you will find plenty of moments where theplayer in question is not in any significant danger, and you are consideringhealing them for the sake of keeping players health bars at 100%. Identifyingwhen these single target atonement applicators are both necessary and efficientwill lead to an overall much better utilization of your Mana pool during anencounter. Remember, the atonement portion of the spell is where you are lookingto get the majority of the value, not the direct heal, in most situations.

No.

As a healer, there is no such thing as maintaining an arbitrary amount ofhealing regardless of the situation at hand. Healing is partially reactive innature as your allies decisions and health bars will drive your micro decisions(spot healing, emergency healing, etc. Not your major cooldown usage and ramps).You should never strive to maintain X number of Atonement just because.

Atonement will vary in strength heavily based on how it iscurrently being utilized, and understanding its strength requires thinking aboutit in a few different ways.

First, Discipline is very cooldown-driven by nature. Shadowfiend/ Mindbender, Rapture, and Power Word: Barrier are all very powerful in their own ways. Rotating throughyour cooldowns correctly and utilizing them often will result in far fewersituations where you feel you need to rely strictly on your base Atonementhealing to cover a situation on its own.

Second, Atonement is about the sum of the whole, and not the individualcasts. Where your cooldowns do the majority of the heavy lifting, your constantstream of atonement healing from your multitude of Purge the Wicked DoTsas well as your Smite, Penance, etc., spell casts will add upto a significant amount of healing over time.

Make sure you are not sitting on your cooldowns for extended periods of time, and make sure to always be casting to see the biggest benefit of Atonement overthe course of a dungeon.

While it is very possible that your tank is not properly utilizing theirself-sustain and mitigation or simply pulled too much to handle, oftentimes,this is a self-inflicted problem. A lack of understanding of the tools availableto your tank, as well as not properly tracking their cooldowns on your own partyframes, can lead to situations where you feel stressed as a healer when you haveno real reason to be. You do not need to keep your tanks HP at 100% at all times, and if they have their own mitigation or self sustain available, simply lettingthem take care of themselves and continuing to utilize Atonement willallow you to stay ahead in regards to the rest of the party's health instead ofpanic swapping to spamming single target heals and falling behind elsewhere.

Being able to identify when to be utilizing Atonement and when it istime to use something else is one of the most challenging things to master fora Discipline Priest, so do not give up if you struggle with this initially!

Logs can be used for many things, but I will be focusing on two primaryfunctions: pre-planning cooldown usage and self-improvement.

The primary tool the World of Warcraft community uses to log encounters isWarcraftLogs. They have put together a wonderful guide on how to get startedwith their tool, found here:Getting Started with Warcraft Logs.

When approaching a new boss as a Discipline Priest, one of the most importantthings you can do is research the damage patterns of the boss to determine whereyour cooldowns will be most effective. Having knowledge of when the damage isgoing to happen is crucial to playing Discipline well. Start by opening the logof an encounter.

Once you see this screen, select the "Damage Taken" tab and change the"Taken By Friendly" selection to "Taken From Ability".

Once you have these selected, you should see a graph showing the damage theraid in the log took from the encounter and what abilities caused them. On thegraph itself, de-select "Total" and instead select the top 1-3 abilities shownon the list below the graph. You should end up with a graph similar to thefollowing.

Now that you have a decent idea of what the fights damage pattern lookslike, you can extract timings out of the log. To find the times in which anability happens within a log, you can follow the following procedure.

1. Pick whichever ability you are looking for the timings for. In this exampleMythic Grong Log, I will look for the timings in which the ability"Tantrum", the largest source of damage in the encounter, occurred.
2. Select a single player in the encounter, as shown below. Ensurethe selected player was alive for the entire fight, or your timings may beinaccurate.

   

3. Select the ability you chose in step one, as shown below.

   

4. Change the view from a Table to an Events list.

   

By following this process, you should end up with a chart similar to thefollowing, which shows the exact times that the ability in question occurred:

By doing this process for the most relevant damage events in a singleencounter, you can build out a damage pattern timeline of sorts, which you canuse to plan your cooldowns in advance.

The first step to analyzing your own performance within a single encounteris to understand an extremely basic Query in Warcraft Logs. Start by clickingon the "Queries" button on the far right of the header. You should see thisscreen below.

If you would like more information than what I am about to walk you through,Warcraft Logs offers plenty of information about how to get much, much moreout of this feature. For now, we will stick to the basics. The first thing Iwant to see is when the "Tantrum" ability happened, as that is the ability I hadpreviously decided I wanted to cover with my cooldowns. I can check off the"Damage" check box and type in "Tantrum" into the "Abilities" box and click"Create Pin".

The results of this query should look like the following.

Next, we will look at when I used my major cooldown, Evangelism, inrelation to Tantrum. Start by clicking on the Queries button again within thesame window. This time, we are going to check off the "Casts" check box insteadof the "Damage" one, and we will type "Evangelism" into the "Abilities" boxinstead of "Tantrum".

The results of this query should look like the following.

With these two graphs lined up, I can get a good idea of when I used mymajor cooldown, Evangelism, during this encounter. Now, we will repeat theprocess I completed for Evangelism for Rapture and Power Word: Radiance. You should get a graph that looks like thefollowing.

The last thing I want to add to this chart to give me a good picture of howwell I did is my Atonement count in relation to the rest of theinformation displayed. Click "Buffs" towards the top and select "Atonement"on the drop-down shown below. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and click"Stacked".

The results should look like the following:

Using this result, I can examine if I used my cooldowns and abilities at theproper time and did not miss any uses that I should have gotten off. For example,in the example log I have been using here, I missed Power Word: Radiancecasts in the following locations.

This is just a small example of how you can analyze your own performancewithin WarcraftLogs. Give these steps a try and poke around within the softwareto familiarize yourself with the tool. It will continue to be a valuableresource for the near future, so it is worth investing time into learning.

The final option for log analysis is approaching knowledgeable DisciplinePriests who are happy to look over your logs for you. While this can be dauntingto do at first, the rewards are more than worth putting yourself out there forand absorbing the constructive criticism that comes your way. For having othersreview your logs, we suggest visiting the #discipline channel on the Warcraft Priests Discord.