Welcome to our Discipline Priest guide for World of Warcraft — Midnight Season 1. Here, you will learn how to heal as a Discipline Priest in both raids and Mythic+ dungeons. We cover everything from the basics all the way to min-maxing techniques to optimize your output.
Discipline Mythic+ Resources
Discipline Priest 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 group's DPS while still performing the duties of
a full healer.
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.
Discipline Priest delivers strong, consistent healing through Atonement
as well as strong effective HP pool increases
via 
Power Word: Shield, Lenience, and 
Power Word: Barrier.
This allows disc to provide significant contribution in both raw HPS as well as
in mitigating damage through damage reduction or shields.
With the release of Midnight's Season 1, a variety of new content has opened up for all types of players: new Raids, new rotation of dungeons, and a new season of PvP are all ready to be tackled! If you are interested in learning about the content itself, we have various pages explaining everything you need to know about each type below:
With the release of Season 1 on March 17th, Discipline Priest is
receiving a small numerical adjustment to the damage and healing of
Penance. While this is a nice adjustment targeting a spell
that needs help, it was not a large enough adjustment to influence any
build changes. As such, the recommendations have remained the same.
As Blizzard has implied that there will be further tuning after the initial week of the season, this section will continue to be updated as needed if Discipline Priest receives further attention.
The first few days of Midnight max-level play have given us data and feedback needed to make our first tuning pass, with the goal of reducing outliers. We will continue to keep a close eye on class balance as both Heroic week and week 1 of the PvP season start, and players continue to gain gear and begin using tier sets.
Discipline Priest: Penance damage and healing increased by 20%.
Going into Midnight, the developers have pushed a significant number of changes targeting healers in general with the goal of reducing the number of cooldowns in the game, reducing burst healing, and in general flattening and slowing down healing. The following as the quote provided about their goals with Discipline Priest moving into Midnight.
Developers’ notes: The primary aim of these changes is to consolidate and remove cooldowns and damage/healing modifiers to make base spell casts feel strong. With removing Schism, Shadow Covenant, and several supporting talents, we can focus on Mind Blast, Penance, and Shadow Word: Pain dealing solid consistent damage, so you can access chunky burst healing on a more consistent cadence. Evangelism has also been redesigned as a way to quickly apply Atonements to allies in raids, providing a much snappier way to ramp up your area of effect healing. The result should be a smoother gameplay experience that requires a little less planning and aura tracking, but still retains depth.
With that in mind, the following is a list of the major gameplay related changes to be aware of going into Midnight.
Oracle has been redesigned and no longer has any active
abilities to maintain. Instead, you get a second charge of
Penance and a handful of other passive benefits.
Evangelism has been redesigned. Instead of simply extending
your active Atonements, it now instantly casts a
Power Word: Radiance and then makes your next 2 Radiance casts
instant cast. This drastically simplifies your ramp sequences in Raid
as Evangelism with two Radiance charges can cover 15 Atonements on its
own very quickly.
Plea has been added to our class tree to fill the same
niche 
Renew did previously. This allows us to have an instant
cast Atonement applicator that is cheaper than
Flash Heal.
Shadowfiend is a new talent that can summon a pet
when hitting 
Shadow Word: Death on an execute target.
Mindbender is a talent that summons a Mindbender when
you cast Evangelism. Finally, 
Voidwraith now summons
a Void Wraith when your 
Entropic Rift ends.
Shadow Covenant
has been removed and replaced with a simple passive Shadow damage and
healing increase in 
Occultist.
Ultimate Penitence and Power Word: Barrier now share a
choice node with each other, forcing you to pick either one at a time.
Discipline Priest's Apex talent, Master the Darkness, has 4 total ranks with
3 different effects in total. The first 
Master the Darkness,
provides a 30% chance for your next Power Word: Shield after
casting Penance to be turned into 
Void Shield. This shield
is significantly stronger than normal and splashes to two additional nearby
allies. Your second and third ranks of Master the Darkness,
Master the Darkness, are simple passive nodes increasing both your
overall Atonement healing and all shadow damage per rank.
Finally, your fourth rank of Master the Darkness, 
Master the Darkness,
causes a percentage of your Void Shield amount to be reflected back
as damage when absorbed. This damage does contribute to healing through
Atonement, making this talent incredibly powerful.
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.
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. 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.
This guide is written and maintained by Clandon, Healer in Vindicatum and Owner of Warcraft Priests Class Discord. You can often find him streaming on Twitch or by checking out his Youtube channel.
