With the TWW 11.1 PTR Discipline Priest is receiving some long-awaited talent changes that have been announced in a recent blue post. While a handful of these changes directly address requests that have been made by the community, others have had mixed reactions in regards to how they’ll play out.
Patch 11.1 PTR Discipline Priest Changes
Patch 11.1 PTR Development Notes
- Discipline
- The goal of these changes is to reduce the number of cooldowns Discipline has access to and bake some of that power into other abilities. In addition, we’re resolving some pain points in the talent tree and making it easier to quickly get Atonements on allies by moving Overloaded with Light into a more central location. Finally, we’re re-theming Purge the Wicked into a Shadow spell so that Twilight Equilibrium can be more consistently activated.
- New Talent: Divine Procession – Smite extends the duration of an active Atonement by 3 seconds.
- New Talent: Inner Focus – Flash Heal, Power Word: Shield, Penance, Power Word: Radiance, and Power Word: Life have a 20% increased chance to critically heal.
- Purge the Wicked renamed to Encroaching Shadows and has been updated – Now causes Shadow Word: Pain to spread instead of overriding Shadow Word: Pain with a new spell.
- Evangelism now heals all targets affected by Atonement for 4200% spell power, split amongst targets healed. Evangelism continues to extend Atonement by 6 seconds and its visual has been updated.
- Contrition has been made baseline, and now logs as Penance healing.
- Penance healing now triggers Divine Aegis.
- Power Word: Shield absorption increased by 15%.
- Power Word: Radiance healing radius increased to 40 yards (was 30 yards).
- Luminous Barrier healing increased by 20%.
- Indemnity increases the duration of Atonement applied by Power Word: Shield by 4 seconds (was 3 seconds).
- Ultimate Penitence now shields the Priest for 100% of their health (was 50%).
- Smite damage increased by 25%.
- Shadow Word: Pain damage increased by 25%.
- Developers’ notes: Shadow Word: Pain should be an important part of Discipline’s healing on Atonement targets to provide a steady stream of healing over time. Its damage has been weaker than we would like, especially compared to other spells in the kit like Entropic Rift, so we’re bringing it up and reducing Entropic Rift’s damage. This has a side effect of boosting Oracle’s damage comparatively to Voidweaver.
- Pain and Suffering increases the damage of Shadow Word: Pain by 15/30% (was 7/15%).
- Void Summoner now only triggers from Mind Blast and Penance casts. Void Summoner reduces the cooldown of Shadowfiend by 8 seconds or Mindbender by 4 seconds (was 4 seconds and 2 seconds).
- Divine Aegis no longer triggers from periodic healing or Atonement or causes Power Word: Shield critical heals to be stronger. Absorption increased to 30% (was 5%).
- Divine Aegis now displays on raid frames.
- Ultimate Penitence has swapped positions with Castigation in the talent tree.
- Overloaded with Light is now in a new position, directly below Ultimate Penitence in the talent tree.
- The following talents have been removed:
- Heaven’s Wrath
- Rapture
- Train of Thought
- Oracle
- New Talent: Twinsight – 3 additional Penance bolts are fired at an enemy within 40 yards when healing an ally with Penance, or fired at an ally within 40 yards when damaging an enemy with Penance.
- Premonition now has 2 charges baseline.
- Divine Providence has been removed.
- Voidweaver
- Entropic Rift damage reduced by 20%.
We’ve had our Discipline Priest expert and Guide writer Clandon take a closer look to break down these changes, in order to figure out what they might mean for the specialization as a whole.
Table of Contents
Current Issues with Discipline Priest
Before we dive into the actual changes, let’s first take a look at some of the issues that have been plaguing the spec for quite some time now.
Discipline Priest was originally designed during the Legion expansion to fill a specific niche: Be a low-cooldown burst healer during a time where most healers had a single 3-minute cooldown available to them. Discipline’s combination of strong DPS contribution and extremely low-cooldown burst healing allowed it to excel in this “burst healer” niche.
The specialization provided significant value during dangerous moments that no other healer could reasonably deal with, but it also came with drawbacks and limited value outside of these moments, allowing other classes to shine by covering the parts of the encounter where Discipline Priest was weakest.
A Spec Left Behind
As the healer ecosystem evolved over the last few expansions, Discipline has gradually lost its niche. The DPS contribution of other healers has slowly increased to the point where the gap is much smaller than before. Additionally, the sheer number of healing cooldowns that have been added to the game has resulted in every healing spec having two or three major healing cooldowns, often times on 2- or 3-minute cooldowns.
This shift in class and combat design can also be brought to light by examining the evolution of tools used for planning healing cooldowns for an entire raid encounter. While such tools existed during Legion to some extent, healing requirements for an entire fight were not dictated by an intricate, 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of cooldowns covering every single damage event – but they are now.
Because of the ever-increasing number of healing cooldowns across all healer specializations, encounter damage has had to be scaled accordingly as well, with fights now expecting a healing cooldown to cover nearly every moment of significant damage. As a result, Discipline’s role as a low-cooldown burst healer has been made somewhat obsolete, as almost every healer in the game can now cover just as many healing events as us – without the inherent drawbacks designed into the spec.
Mobility Issues
One of those weaknesses is its abysmal mobility. Discipline (and Priest as a class in general) is one of the least mobile specializations in the game. This issue is further exacerbated because 
Time Spiral, an Evoker cooldown that grants everyone in the group or raid an additional use of their major mobility ability for 10 seconds, simply gives us another use of 
Leap of Faith – a spell intended to assist others’ mobility, not our own.
This has often led to a “Passenger Princess” problem on many Raid encounters, where the priest needs to be ferried around via 
Rescue, or allowed to skip mechanics entirely via 
Blessing of Protection and 
Blessing of Spellwarding, because it simply does not have the ability to heal and meet the mobility requirements of the fight without incurring significant losses. In some cases it was virtually impossible for Priests to deal with mechanics by themselves without dying, like avoiding the 
Spiked Balls on Painsmith Raznal or dealing with the pushback of 
Hurricane Wing on Raszageth, the Storm-Eater.
Awkward Hero Talents
The Hero-Talent system also brought its own issues alongside with it, with the worst offender being the design of 
Void Summoner for Voidweaver. Having 
Smite‘s CPM (casts per minute) tied directly to pet cooldown reduction has resulted in many variations of degenerate gameplay loops, where you forgo casting higher-value spells or doing anything else, other than spamming Smite, just to get your pet back when you actually need it. Oracle as a Hero Talent tree has been largely unplayable ever since its inception, despite receiving a large rework during the Beta.
There have been some attempts over the years to help alleviate some the aforementioned issues, but without significant changes to the spec, Discipline continues to be heavily reliant on just simply being tuned better than the competition to be worth bringing into a raid, as Holy Priest or Shadow Priest can both provide 
Power Word: Fortitude and 
Power Infusion as well.
The Good
- New Talent: Divine Procession – Smite extends the duration of an active Atonement by 3 seconds.
- New Talent: Inner Focus – Flash Heal, Power Word: Shield, Penance, Power Word: Radiance, and Power Word: Life have a 20% increased chance to critically heal.
- Evangelism now heals all targets affected by Atonement for 4200% spell power, split amongst targets healed. Evangelism continues to extend Atonement by 6 seconds and its visual has been updated.
- Contrition has been made baseline, and now logs as Penance healing.
Evangelism
A variety of talent positioning adjustments, as well as some new talents, have shaken up our tree, resulting in an overall positive impact. 
Evangelism has long been both a core and mandatory cooldown for Discipline Priest in raid content. Previously, its placement in the bottom portion of the tree contributed to talent points being heavily contested and feeling very restricted, effectively leaving players with one less point to move around. With its new placement, Evangelism is far more accessible across all talent builds.
Additionally, the inclusion of a heal built into the spell is an extremely elegant way to give the button an additional benefit for Mythic+ content without altering its use case in a raiding environment. However, if Blizzard does intend for this spell to be a significant cooldown on its own in Mythic+, the heal itself could be a bit stronger to feel truly impactful. The flexibility of this heal being split only between targets with 
Atonement also means that you can intentionally focus the entire amount into one or two targets, instead of always splitting it between five. Unfortunately this effect would be significantly easier to use, and more accessible, if the healing were distributed among targets that actually needed it via smart-healing, rather than encouraging players to intentionally drop Atonement from specific targets.
Divine Procession
This issue is further complicated by the introduction of the phenomenal new talent 
Divine Procession. We saw a version of this talent on our Amirdrassil Tier set bonus during Dragonflight, and it provided a lot of value. I believe, however, that this talent would be more interactive and interesting if it always extended the shortest active Atonement – even if that required a small nerf to the extension itself. This would allow you to actively play around this effect by sequencing casts very deliberately, instead of it just being a strong passive node. Regardless, I believe both of the changes mentioned so far are net positives overall.
Speaking of Divine Procession: The talent took the place of 
Contrition on the talent tree, which has now been made baseline. Contrition is something that has existed for a long while on various iterations of our talent trees and has always been plagued by the same major issue: The opportunity cost of investing in a minor effect over more impactful talents, and the inability to significantly buff it to be an attractive option without upsetting the balance between offensive and defensive 
Penance usage. By removing the opportunity cost and making this talent baseline, it can remain a minor, beneficial effect that is nice to have but by no means is a significant, gameplay-defining ability.
Evangelism‘s new position also allows us to pick Lenience at the same time again. Despite being entirely passive, Lenience can provide incredible value over extended periods of time, especially when combining it with the extended uptime of Atonement via Evangelism. While it is a nice addition to be able to use this in Raid once more, we may have to worry that Blizzard decides we deserve some level of nerf to our HPS to compensate for the “hidden” value of Lenience that no other healer specialization can provide.
Void Summoner
- Void Summoner now only triggers from Mind Blast and Penance casts. Void Summoner reduces the cooldown of Shadowfiend by 8 seconds or Mindbender by 4 seconds (was 4 seconds and 2 seconds).
Void Summoner has been a contentious talent since its introduction, and while I’ll have more to say on it later on in this article, removing Smite from the list of triggers was a desperately needed change. Tying a filler spell to the cooldown reduction of a major ability resulted in degenerate gameplay loops, where higher-value spells ended up being ignored in favor of spamming more Smites. Overall, this is a much-needed adjustment.
Oracle
- Oracle
- New Talent: Twinsight – 3 additional Penance bolts are fired at an enemy within 40 yards when healing an ally with Penance, or fired at an ally within 40 yards when damaging an enemy with Penance.
- Premonition now has 2 charges baseline.
- Divine Providence has been removed.
-
The Oracle Hero Talent Tree is receiving some love in this patch as well, having the additional charge of 
Premonition (
Divine Providence) made baseline to make way for a new tuning knob in 
Twinsight. Twinsight is an idea that Blizzard had played around with before on a Tier set that never made it live. Overall it is a strong effect that will do some heavy lifting to bolster the throughput of the Oracle Hero Talent tree. Fortunately for Oracle, 
Ultimate Penitence is being moved out of the capstone section of the spec tree as well, making it more accessible, which greatly benefits Oracle with its 40% Penance damage boost from 
Preventive Measures. Again, these changes aren’t without issues, but we’ll get to those in a later section of the article.
The Bad
Rapture
Let’s get into one of the most controversial change of them all – the removal of 
Rapture, a spell we’ve had in our toolkit for a very long time. While Rapture has not had a very impactful role in Raids for a while, the changes the spell received coming into The War Within once again gave it a larger role in our Mythic+ spot-healing capabilities, specifically when we needed extended spot-healing. The biggest concern over its removal is ensuring that Discipline’s capabilities in these situations are not diminished too much as a result. Spot-healing is something that Discipline has struggled with for many years, so it’s unfortunate to see a spell return to our bars and help so much in that department, only to lose it one Tier later.
Despite 
Train of Thought‘s minimal impact on the specializations overall throughput capabilities, it was immensely popular for a different reason – feels. The lower cooldown on Penance, and even Power Word: Shield, is something that many believe makes the class feel significantly better to play – especially now that Rapture will be gone. Now that Train of Thought will be gone too, either reducing the cooldown on those two spells slightly, or changing Penance to a hasted cooldown, would allow those spells to keep a similar CPM value (Casts Per Minute), while also propping up the value of Haste a little bit.
Void Summoner
- Void Summoner now only triggers from Mind Blast and Penance casts. Void Summoner reduces the cooldown of Shadowfiend by 8 seconds or Mindbender by 4 seconds (was 4 seconds and 2 seconds).
While, as mentioned earlier, the removal of Smite from Void Summoner was an overall healthy thing for the game and spec, some questions remain for this talent. First, leaving the cooldown reduction tied to Penance and 
Mind Blast remains an accessibility issue. One of the most frequently asked questions among beginners is what the expected cooldowns of each pet are because of the Void Summoner cooldown reduction.
The average player does not know the upper and lower limit of Penance and Mind Blast casts per minute per encounter to understand what cooldown-timings are possible. Just changing this talent to be a set amount of cooldown reduction for each pet would allow the average player to approach cooldown planning for fights without needing to first consult a table of upper and lower cooldown limits for their 
Mindbender or 
Voidwraith.
From a throughput perspective, the changes to Void Summoner likely won’t have much of an impact for Raid at all, as similar cooldown timings can be expected with the new numbers anyway. In Mythic+, however, Discipline Priest might end up in a much worse position. Many bosses and encounters in dungeons have very frequent bursts of damage, and those were typically being solved by degenerately lowering the Voidwraith cooldown as much as possible in order to have it available for each healing event.
This will simply not be possible with this new design, and will be a pretty significant hit to our AoE healing output for certain dungeon damage patterns. Hopefully Blizzard keeps an eye out on the potential impact of this change and makes adjustments if needed!
Inner Focus, Divine Aegis and Eternal Barrier
- Divine Aegis no longer triggers from periodic healing or Atonement or causes Power Word: Shield critical heals to be stronger. Absorption increased to 30% (was 5%).
- New Talent: Inner Focus – Flash Heal, Power Word: Shield, Penance, Power Word: Radiance, and Power Word: Life have a 20% increased chance to critically heal.
While Discipline has always primarily revolved around Atonement healing, it has also included a handful of direct healing talents. This remains true with the addition of 
Inner Focus, the reworked 
Divine Aegis, and the freshly renamed Eternal Barrier (formerly Aegis of Wrath), all of which focus on direct healing and shielding. Unfortunately, there are issues with these talents.
First, having all three in the capstone section requires them to be exceptionally well-tuned to justify taking, as they aim to support a weakness in our kit rather than augmenting its strengths. For example, Inner Focus’s design, which increases Crit chance, raises concerns.
While Crit chance provides value over many subsequent casts, Discipline’s low amount of casts of the most impactful direct heals creates a variance that can feel frustrating – if you don’t get a Crit on any of them, you simply struggle to keep people alive. In emergencies, direct heals like Flash Heal are often cast out of necessity, not efficiency. If, for instance, you cast two Flash Heals in a minute to stabilize a low-health party member and neither of them crit, you effectively gain no value from two-thirds of your direct healing capstone talents when it is needed most.
This high variance on low-CPM emergency healing makes these talents a hard sell, even if tuned well for high-roll scenarios. Moving them out of the capstone section and exploring alternative designs – rather than relying on effects triggered by direct heal crits – could significantly improve their appeal and usability.
Twilight Equilibrium and Shadow Word: Pain
- Developers’ notes: Shadow Word: Pain should be an important part of Discipline’s healing on Atonement targets to provide a steady stream of healing over time. Its damage has been weaker than we would like, especially compared to other spells in the kit like Entropic Rift, so we’re bringing it up and reducing Entropic Rift’s damage. This has a side effect of boosting Oracle’s damage comparatively to Voidweaver.
Despite the Bluepost by Blizzard stating that the 
Purge the Wicked and 
Shadow Word: Pain changes are being made to increase the usability of 
Twilight Equilibrium, these changes are unlikely to have much of an impact for that stated purpose, as your Damage over Time spells are not something you want to be casting in high damage moments. In addition, Voidweaver was already lacking Holy spells to trigger Twilight Equilibrium, not Shadow spells, so the reasoning provided has left a bit of confusion within the community. A different approach to this talent may be needed in the future if Blizzard wishes for this talent to stick around for the long run.
Additional Changes
Pain and Suffering, despite having both its base DoT and the talent itself being buffed, remains a hard sell for two Talent points, with how small of an overall contribution our DoT will continue to be. We will either need to see even more significant buffs to our DoT’s, or have this talent reduced to a one-pointer before it can be considered a viable choice.
Luminous Barrier receives another buff in this patch, but still comes in a bit weak for a 3-minute cooldown. Blizzard obviously wants to be conservative with the overall strength of this button, so a reduction to the cooldown of the spell could be a viable way to increase its effectiveness without just piling on more power. As it stands, however, don’t expect to see it used despite the twenty percent buff.
Finally, 
Expiation remains a relic of its past iteration, when we still had two charges of Mind Blast. While Blizzard is already making adjustments to Discipline’s talent tree, this is a prime talent to receive some attention for further adjustments.
The Ugly
Last but not least, the Ugly. We’ve got three major things to talk about here that desperately need to be addressed.
Shadow Word: Pain and Purge the Wicked
Firstly, with the removal of Purge the Wicked and moving back to just Shadow Word: Pain as our sole DoT we need to have Shadow Word: Pain inherit Purge the Wicked’s longer duration. There have been many patches over the years where we have considered using Shadow Word: Pain instead of spending talent points on Purge the Wicked. However, we quickly realized the impact on our raid rotation that the shorter duration would have had, and almost always opted for Purge the Wicked as a result. Refreshing SW:P to full pandemic value directly before a Raid ramp needs to result in the DoT lasting through that ramp, and not require us to reapply the DoT at the height of our burst.
Oracle, Penance and Heaven’s Wrath
Secondly, the removal of Heaven’s Wrath has a massive impact on the usefulness of Ultimate Penitence in our kit. As its new position in the tree moved the base spell out of the capstone area of the tree, we can only assume Blizzard wants to see increased use of the spell as another core cooldown in our kit. Unfortunately, the surrounding talents supporting the base spell (Heaven’s Wrath and 
Overloaded with Light) were doing the real heavy lifting, not the base spell itself.
Additionally, with the clearly visible goal of increasing Oracle’s viability for this patch, Ultimate Penitence was a significant portion of Oracle’s potential throughput due to Preventive Measures in the Oracle tree. Losing access to the 2-minute Ultimate Penitence cooldown that you get the spell down to, essentially undoes any buffs the tree received elsewhere in this patch. Heaven’s Wrath either needs to be baked into the base spell, or the cooldown needs to be reduced to two minutes by default. The spell is simply not powerful enough to warrant a four minute cooldown.
Spell Base Power Dilemma
Finally, there seems to be a clear goal of reducing the number of cooldowns Discipline Priest has access to, and increasing our base power instead.
A major pain point we have been dealing with for many iterations of the spec, however, is the large number of stacking modifiers that ultimately restrict the base power of our core spells. Let’s look at an example for Penance, with the following list of modifiers that can increase the power of a single Penance cast:
Harsh Discipline
Power of the Dark Side
Shadow Covenant
Schism
Abyssal Reverie
Casting Penance under the maximum benefit with all of the previously mentioned effects is going to be five times as strong as a regular cast. The two biggest offenders of this issue are Harsh Discipline being a 25% amp per additional bolt (capping out at a 100% increase) and Power of the Dark Side being a 50% amp of its own. To make matters worse, both of these increases are consumed on cast and require additional spell casts to receive the benefits again, unlike Shadow Covenant’s amp which will apply to any Penance cast during its buff duration.
The nature of these large increases makes it difficult to buff the spell baseline, and the one-time benefits of many of these buffs makes the effect of abilities like Premonition of Insight significantly less powerful, since such a massive percentage of the spells power disappears after its first cast. If Blizzard wants to move more power into our base kit, instead of the spec essentially requiring a cooldown or multiple buffs to be active to do any meaningful healing, the impact of these modifiers needs to be looked at.
Closing Thoughts
While many of the 11.1 talent changes are positive and strike at the core of some of the most heavily requested changes by the Discipline Priest community over the last few patches, they are not without concern. The push to increase the impact of our baseline spells is a much-needed and well-received direction, but requires careful tuning and adjustments to the many moving parts that are involved, not just a select few. The removal of Rapture leads to some questions about our spot healing capabilities and the change to Void Summoner raises some questions about our ability to meet some of the tighter Mythic+ encounter HPS requirements.
The removal of Smite from Void Summoner and the elimination of Train of Thought largely address the pet cooldown-focused gameplay loop that many in the community found frustrating. However, the community’s desperate pleas for any form of mobility improvement appear to have fallen on deaf ears once again. As a result, Discipline will likely continue grappling with the “Passenger Princess” problem for the foreseeable future.
Furthermore, none of these changes are substantial enough to alter the core design of the specialization. Most adjustments are minimal, focusing on addressing a few key complaints, removing some dead talents, and improving the viability of Oracle, which has been virtually irrelevant in PvE content since its release – but none of these fundamentally change the role that Discipline fills, a role that has been claimed or overshadowed by the many improvements other healing specializations have received in recent years. As a result, it is likely we’ll continue to see the trend of raid groups not willing to invest in the added difficulty and requirements to play with a Discipline Priest for the limited benefit it provides over other alternatives, unless we end up significantly overtuned comparatively in raw healing output.
Overall, we look forward to seeing further iteration and what is in store when the PTR goes live shortly, as well as further iteration for Discipline Priest. The current changes are going in the right direction, they simply aren’t going far enough – yet.
If you’d like to chat with us or ask further questions about these changes prior to patch 11.1 going live, feel free to join me and many other Discipline Priests in the Warcraftpriests Discord! – Clandon
