Discipline Priest Healing Guide — The War Within (11.0.5)

The Discipline specialization relies on healing players through dealing damage (thanks to the Atonement passive), but also has traditional heals and absorption spells. Healing through dealing damage allows Discipline Priests to contribute to the raid's DPS while still performing well as a healer. Discipline Priests provide very significant, on-demand AoE burst healing on a very short cooldown.

Balancing healing and dealing damage can be difficult to master at first, but through research and practice, Discipline can be one of the more rewarding specializations to play.

To properly play a healing role, you will need more than just class-specific information. To better understand healing in general, we recommend that you read our healing guide.

Strengths

• High burst healing on a short cooldown.
• Strong cooldowns that increase the effective health of your group (through absorbs or damage reduction).
• Provides significant damage with low opportunity cost.
• Strong tools for both group wide and single target healing in a Mythic Plus environment.

Weaknesses

• Reactive, raid-wide, emergency heals are limited compared to other healing specs.
• Mistakes made by the Discipline Priest are far more punishing than on other healers.
• High barrier to entry for raid healing.
• Poor personal mobility options.
• One of only two specializations in the game without access to an interrupt.

For open-world questing and leveling, Discipline is viable but slow. If you plan on questing to level, we recommend you quest as Shadow instead of Discipline if your goal is speed. Discipline does, however, have the benefit of being significantly safer while leveling despite being slower. If you plan on leveling through dungeons, Discipline is a fantastic choice. Our leveling guide is a great starting place for basics, as well as some tips and tricks to help when healing.

Hitting max level and then trying to dive straight into end-game content as a healer can be quite daunting. To ease this transition, you should try to implement relevant macros and addons as you are leveling. While not all are necessary throughout the leveling process, getting started in modifying your UI and how it impacts your performance as a healer early on will make it much easier to dive head-on into the end-game content when you reach max level.

Discipline Priest plays very differently depending on the content type you are participating in.

In raid content, Discipline is a very proactive style burst healer. Utilizing our passive in Atonement, we prepare for large, raid-wide, incoming damage bursts and reverse them very quickly. This style of healing requires extensive knowledge of the encounter's incoming damage and benefits heavily from planning/researching the encounters ahead of time. Due to this, the specialization will not be for everybody but will also provide a great sense of accomplishment for those seeking a challenge.

In Mythic+ content, Discipline attempts to utilize Atonement as much as possible to stay aggressive and keep people topped while contributing damage. With the ability to apply atonement to the entire group with a single Power Word: Radiance, it is very easy to have a high uptime in regard to DPSing. With cooldowns like Rapture and Power Word: Barrier to nearly negate or reduce incoming mechanics, it can be fairly easy to achieve the above goal. In situations where atonement is not enough to keep someone alive, Discipline falls back on their direct heals like Penance, Power Word: Shield, Flash Heal, and Power Word: Life. Learning how to balance being aggressive and trusting your atonement and falling back on direct heals is the biggest challenge in the path of mastering Discipline Priest in a mythic plus environment.

To learn more about the fundamentals and make sure you are doing the basics right, familiarize yourself with the Spell Summary page, then move on to the Easy Mode page.

If you have played Discipline Priest recently and you are looking to dive more in-depth in regards to current talent recommendations, rotations, and other topics, check out the below pages.

Gearing as a healer is fairly straightforward in regards to the basics. You will generally prioritize item level in most situations as the value of your different secondary stats is close enough that more stats is better than targeting a specific one. This can be complicated by gear with effects or tertiary stats like leech or sockets.

To assist in handling the edge cases that gearing can throw at you, as well as what gear to look out for, take a look at our stats and gear pages below.

After obtaining your new gear, be sure to look at our Enchant and Consumable page to get the most out of your character.

Identifying the content type you plan on focusing on overall or in a specific instance is crucial to determine how you gear and play. Whether you plan on raiding, sticking to Mythic Plus, or focusing on PvP, understanding the basics of your class and the spells at your disposal is the important first step. Hop into our specific content-type guides for more tailored information.

To be successful as a Discipline Priest in any type of content, having the ability to analyze your mistakes and gameplay is crucial. Identifying common issues, logging your play, and learning to analyze those logs are the best next step in your path to Discipline Priest mastery.