Disco like it’s 4.0.1
I’ve now done some raiding since the patch. Specifically TOC10 heroic and ICC25. Mostly normal modes for ICC but we did try a couple of hard modes. The up shot of this is that so far it looks like nothing has really changed much for disco priests. The concept of a smiter priest in raids isn’t really viable yet. Taken as a pure healing setup, the mechanic for getting mana back (via Archangel) is interesting and fun, but we don’t really need that mana at the moment and often can’t afford the healing loss. From a purely dps+healing meters perspective my best guess so far is that we’ll put out less than half the dps of a shadow priest whilst doing more than double their healing.
But being able to dps and heal at the same time isn’t what the design is really about. It is more about the added flexibility. It means that in the course of one fight we can provide some dps whilst keeping some healing going. In a fairly mana efficient way. Then when the big heals are needed we can ramp up fairly quickly. Then go back to the trickle feed of both. Sadly this trickle feed doesn’t have a role in ICC at 80. From everything that has been told to us by Blizzard regarding healing in Cataclysm it could be very promising though.
Anyway, here’s a quick run-down of the new talents in the disco tree and my experiences of them so far…