Discipline Priest Healing Rotation, Cooldowns, and Abilities — The War Within (11.1.0)

The Discipline specialization revolves heavily around healing through dealing damage, thanks to the Atonement passive ability. We detail this below, but for now all you need to keep in mind is that dealing damage is an integral part of healing as Discipline.

In the sections that follow, we will look at which abilities you should use to deal damage (to generate Atonement healing), as well as how to handle single target and AoE healing.

The core concept of Discipline Priest healing in raid is centered around spreading a large number of Atonements out, followed by using damage cooldowns to result in significant healing over many targets. This described process is what we will refer to in the rest of the guide as a "Ramp".

A ramp is primarily broken down into two distinct phases, the Atonement application phase and the DPS phase. Both sequences will be discussed in detail below.

Due to Ramps revolving around the rapid spread of Atonement, the primary limiter in regards to how often you can do so is Power Word: Radiance. The cooldowns used in conjunction with your Power Word: Radiance casts will determine the exact type of Ramp you will execute to cover a boss mechanic.

• Power Word: Radiance is a 2-second cast, multi-target Atonement applicator with a decent heal tied to it. Power Word: Radiance applies Atonement to five people, but for a reduced duration. This is useful in raids for getting large coverage before a major damage event and is the primary enabler for our ramps. Planning out your uses of Radiance is a significant part of playing Discipline Priest in raid.
• Power Word: Shield is an instant cast, single target Atonement applicator with a shield tied to it. With the mana cost of both Renew and Power Word: Shield being identical, Power Word: Shield should always be used over Renew if available.
• Flash Heal is a 1.5-second cast, single target Atonement applicator with a decent-sized single target heal tied to it. With this costing more Mana than Renew and requiring you to stand still, it will not see nearly as much play as your primary applicator outside of a few situations. The primary use case of this spell is to abuse other talents like Surge of Light or Binding Heal. When talented into Binding Heal, Flash Heal applies Atonement to both your target and yourself, turning this into two Atonements for a single cast.
• Renew is an instant cast, single target Atonement applicator with a small heal-over-time effect tied to it. Renew tends to be our least valuable single target Atonement applicator.

3.

Discipline Priest Raid Rotation

Due to Hero Talents playing a major role, use the tool below to display builds for each tree

Hero Talents
Voidweaver	Oracle

Use the boxes below to navigate Ramp Sequences

Voidweaver
Evangelism Ramp Voidweaver
Double Radiance Ramp Voidweaver
Ultimate Penitence Ramp Voidweaver
Mini Ramp Oracle
Evangelism Ramp Oracle
Double Radiance Ramp Oracle
Ultimate Penitence Ramp Oracle
Mini Ramp

4.

Voidweaver Evangelism Ramp

1. Refresh your Shadow Word: Pain to ensure it lasts the entire duration of your Ramp.
2. Cast Power Word: Shield
3. Cast Renew x6
4. Cast Flash Heal
5. Cast Power Word: Shield
6. Cast Power Word: Radiance
7. Cast Power Word: Radiance
8. Cast Evangelism
9. Cast Voidwraith
10. Cast Mind Blast
11. Cast Penance
12. Cast Void Blast
13. Continue casting Void Blast and Penance when it is available until all Atonement's have fallen off.

4.

Voidweaver Double Radiance Ramp

1. Refresh your Shadow Word: Pain to ensure it lasts the entire duration of your Ramp.
2. Cast Power Word: Shield
3. Cast Renew x6
4. Cast Flash Heal
5. Cast Power Word: Shield
6. Cast Voidwraith
7. Cast Power Word: Radiance
8. Cast Power Word: Radiance
9. Cast Mind Blast
10. Cast Penance
11. Cast Void Blast
12. Cast Void Blast
13. Cast Void Blast
14. Cast Void Blast
15. Cast Void Blast
16. Cast Penance
17. Cast Void Blast
18. Cast Power Word: Shield
19. Continue casting Void Blast and Penance when it's available until all Atonement's have fallen off.

4.

Voidweaver Ultimate Penitence Ramp

1. Refresh your Shadow Word: Pain to ensure it lasts the entire duration of your Ramp.
2. Cast Power Word: Shield
3. Cast Renew x2
4. Cast Flash Heal
5. Cast Power Word: Radiance
6. Cast Mind Blast
7. Cast Ultimate Penitence
8. Cast Void Blast (Clipping the previous cast early. See Advanced section below)
9. Cast Penance
10. Continue casting Void Blast and Penance when it's available until all Atonement's have fallen off.

4.

Voidweaver Mini Ramp

1. Refresh your Shadow Word: Pain to ensure it lasts the entire duration of your Ramp.
2. Cast Power Word: Shield
3. Cast Renew x3
4. Cast Flash Heal
5. Cast Power Word: Shield
6. Cast Power Word: Radiance
7. Cast Mind Blast
8. Cast Penance
9. Cast Void Blast
10. Cast Power Word: Shield
11. Continue casting Void Blast and Penance when its available until all Atonement's have fallen off.

4.

Oracle Evangelism Ramp

Rotation Switches
Is Clairvoyance next?

1. Refresh your Shadow Word: Pain to ensure it lasts the entire duration of your Ramp.
2. Cast Power Word: Shield
3. Cast Renew x6
4. Cast Flash Heal
5. Cast Power Word: Shield
6. Cast Power Word: Radiance
7. Cast Power Word: Radiance
8. Cast Evangelism
9. Cast Shadowfiend
10. Cast Mind Blast
11. Cast Premonition of Clairvoyance
12. Cast Premonition of Insight
13. Cast Smite
14. Cast Premonition of Piety
15. Cast Penance
16. Cast Smite
17. Cast Penance
18. Cast Smite
19. Cast Penance
20. Cast Smite
21. Cast Penance
22. Cast Smite
23. Continue casting Smite and Penance when its available until all Atonement's have fallen off.

4.

Oracle Double Radiance Ramp

1. Refresh your Shadow Word: Pain to ensure it lasts the entire duration of your Ramp.
2. Cast Power Word: Shield
3. Cast Renew x6
4. Cast Flash Heal
5. Cast Power Word: Shield
6. Cast Power Word: Radiance
7. Cast Power Word: Radiance
8. Cast Mind Blast
9. Cast Penance
10. Continue casting Smite and Penance when its available until all Atonement's have fallen off.

4.

Oracle Ultimate Penitence Ramp

1. Refresh your Shadow Word: Pain to ensure it lasts the entire duration of your Ramp.
2. Cast Power Word: Shield
3. Cast Renew x2
4. Cast Flash Heal
5. Cast Power Word: Radiance
6. Cast Mind Blast
7. Cast Ultimate Penitence
8. Cast Smite (Clipping the previous cast early. See Advanced section below)
9. Cast Penance
10. Continue casting Smite and Penance when its available until all Atonement's have fallen off.

4.

Oracle Mini Ramp

1. Refresh your Shadow Word: Pain to ensure it lasts the entire duration of your Ramp.
2. Cast Power Word: Shield
3. Cast Renew x3
4. Cast Flash Heal
5. Cast Power Word: Shield
6. Cast Power Word: Radiance
7. Cast Mind Blast
8. Cast Penance
9. Cast Smite
10. Cast Power Word: Shield
11. Continue casting Smite and Penance when its available until all Atonement's have fallen off.

For further tips and tricks in Mythic+ content, please check out our Mythic+ specific page.

Premonition is the core talent and ability that the Oracle Hero Talent Tree revolves around. The spell includes four different spells that rotate in a set order. The spell this starts on will always be the same as it resets back to the beginning on pull of a Raid encounter or Mythic+ Dungeon start, therefore there is no pre-pull manipulation to be done to influence the initial order. The following list is the exact order you will see the spells in and what they do:

1. Premonition of Insight - Insight provides 7 seconds of cooldown reduction to your next 3 spells cast. While there are a ton of possible uses of this and there may be scenarios where you want to get CDR on very specific spells to meet niche moments, the default use case of this talent will be to rapid fire Penance casts with a Smite in between to consume Weal and Woe and proc Twilight Equilibrium for the next Penance (Assuming you have a pet active to make Penance a shadow spell via Shadow Covenant). A spell must have a cooldown to consume a charge of insight, therefore weaving Smites in between will not impact the remaining charges.
2. Premonition of Piety - Piety both increases your healing done and redirects overhealing to other targets that are injured. This is both a strong healing increase and incredibly good at balancing out your HPS in scenarios where some players are taking significantly more damage than others.
3. Premonition of Solace - Solace applies a decent sized absorb and a small damage reduction to the target of your next single target healing spell. The damage reduction is tied to the absorb, therefore once the absorb breaks, the damage reduction is removed. Keep in mind that if you do not intentionally trigger this shield once activated, Twinsight from your next offensive Penance will apply the shield automatically.
4. Premonition of Clairvoyance - Clairvoyance comes last in the rotation and simply provides all 3 effects at once. This is your strongest cooldown available as Oracle.

After using Clairvoyance, the spell cycles back to Insight and continues to repeat through the order.

While the guidelines we have given so far will enable you to perform very decently as a Discipline Priest, there are some subtleties that you need to be aware of if you want to play your character to its full potential.

• Desperate Prayer — This is one of our primary defensive abilities, healing us and bolstering our maximum HP, allowing us to take larger hits while dying. Use this whenever you expect to take a large hit you are worried about surviving or just in general when you drop to low health.
• Fade / Translucent Image — Fade, when combined with Translucent Image becomes a small damage reduction on a short cooldown. With how weak our defensives are in general, using this often when damage is going out is very important. Many players struggle to utilize this effectively when it is one of the only defensive abilities in our kit.
• Protective Light — This is another option in our toolbox to provide damage reduction before dangerous moments. Due to it's usage in our Raid ramps, you will likely have this active already for most high damage moments, but it may require a bit more thought in dungeons. Note that casting Flash Heal on another target will provide the DR to yourself via Binding Heal.

There are a few advanced techniques that can be utilized when attempting to optimize usage of Ultimate Penitence. Firstly, you are able to cast a instant cast spell while flying up into the air prior to the channel beginning. While the use cases for this aren't significant, you can reapply your DoT, cast a Power Word: Shield, cast Holy Nova if talented into Rhapsody, ect. Again, this tech is not a significant gain, but useful to know. However, this second technique is a fairly significant gain and we recommend doing so in all cases when possible.

When you complete the Ultimate Penitence channel, you slowly float to the ground and incur a small delay until you may hard cast spells again. Because we want to consume our Weal and Woe stacks from Ultimate Penitence before casting Penance again, we ideally want to go straight into a Void Blast/ Smite but cannot while falling. However, if you clip the last bolt of the Ultimate Penitence channel by casting Void Blast or Smite early, it will clip the Ultimate Penitence cast and immediately begin casting Void Blast/Smite which will continue as you rapidly fall to the ground. This allows you to immediately consume the generated Weal and Woe stacks without delay. This is especially important when running Voidweaver due to your Entropic Rift duration. If you don't do this, you can very easily miss out on your Void Blast after the channel and instead end up with a regular Smite by the time you are back on the ground and able to hard cast again. The following video shows an example of a regular cast where you don't clip the last bolt compared to the tech I have described above:

Spell Queueing is a feature in World of Warcraft that allows the player to queue up their next spell before the previous one finishes. This feature is a major reason why World of Warcraft has such smooth combat as the game server does not need to sit there and wait for your next command after your previous spell has been cast since your next action is already queued. However, every once in a while comes along a way to abuse this system in our advantage.

Weal and Woe causes your Penance casts to increase the power of your next Smite/ Void Blast or Power Word: Shield. If you spell queue (cast a Power Word: Shield Immediately after your Void Blast via the games Spell Queueing system) you can gain the benefit of your Weal and Woe stacks on BOTH the Void Blast and Power Word: Shield. In Mythic+ this should be done fairly often and you will even see it utilized in a handful of Raid rotations. You can also use it heavily during downtime windows in Raid as well.

There are also times where the Spell Queueing system can hurt us. If you cast Premonition of Insight or Premonition of Clairvoyance as Oracle directly after (Spell queued) a spell with a cooldown (most often something like Mind Blast), the previously casted spell will consume a charge of Premonition of Insight. To avoid this, we recommend using the following macro as your Premonition button to clear your spell queue when you are about to use Insight or Clairvoyance and prevent this from happening:

Keep in mind that while this macro attempts to reduce the frequency of this issue occurring, it will not completely remove it. The only complete solution is Blizzard fixing it on their end.

• /cast Premonition
• /cancelqueuedspell [noknown:Premonition of Piety,noknown:Premonition of Solace]

Due to most builds, including Twins of the Sun Priestess, which will grant you Power Infusion when cast on an ally, you should never cast this spell on yourself. While there may be some niche situations where you want to utilize Power Infusion on yourself for hard healing checks in mythic plus, the vast majority of your casts should align with a DPS player's cooldowns to help maximize their damage output.

• While we generate healing through dealing damage, the way it is calculated is not as simple. For instance, things that increase our damage and healing (for example, Versatility) will not double dip. This is because only the healing portion of such buffs will modify Atonement.
• Mechanics that reduce our damage dealt do not affect the healing done with Atonement. For example, some raid bosses have phases with 99% reduced damage taken; Disc damage done will still heal for full through Atonement. That being said, immunities will stop our damage completely, which also means our Atonement healing.
• External buffs that increase our damage dealt will also not affect our Atonement healing (our own buffs do increase healing, for example, Schism). There is only one external buff that will affect Atonement healing — Chaos Brand, from Demon Hunters.
• Once Atonement is applied to a friendly target, the range at which the healing applies is extremely far. You will rarely find any encounter room where your Atonement will be out of range unless the encounter phases you and your target apart.
• Damage trinkets and Racials do not heal through Atonement (unless they increase our baseline spells damage).
• AoE damage effects, such as Halo/ Divine Star/ Holy Nova and Inescapable Torment will do healing through Atonement, but only on the first instance of damage.