Discipline Priest Raid Guide

Welcome to the Discipline Priest Raid guide for the World of Warcraft patch 11.0! This guide covers everything you need to know to understand your character! Are you starting out and leveling up from 70? Check out the leveling guide!

Discipline PriestRaid

Overall Healing

Strong

Cooldown Strength

Excellent

Utility

Strong

Survivability

Weak

Mobility

Subpar

• Voidweaver focuses primairly on your own benefits, as it increases your damage every mini ramp, while Oracle focuses on enhancing your big healing cooldowns and providing utility to the team.

Tier Set

• 2-Set: Atonement healing increased by 5.0%.
• 4-Set: Smite and Penance increase the damage of your next Mind Blast by 25% or absorb amount of your next Power Word: Shield by 15%, up to 3 times.

Priority List

Only follow this list outside of any ramp sequences.

1. Keep Purge the Wicked on your target.
2. Cast Power Word: Shield on Cooldown.
3. Cast Flash Heal on anyone in major trouble.
4. KeepAtonement active on Tanks.
5. Cast Mind Blast on Cooldown.
6. Cast Penance on Cooldown.
7. Cast Halo on Cooldown.
8. Cast Smite.

Cooldowns

Showcases of all the different cooldown sequences used by Discipline Priests in Raids.

Evangelism

• Your default ramp which results in 19 Atonements at a time. Practice this sequence outside the Raid until it is fully ingrained in your muscle memory. Make sure not to cast Renew, Power Word: Shield, or Flash Heal on yourself, as you miss out on the free Atonement from Binding Heal.

Rapture

• This is a weaker version of the Evangelism ramp, which results in the same amount of Atonements. Always ensure to use the Evangelism ramp first.

Evangelism Rapture

• Use this sequence if you need more healing for a single moment rather than maximizing your total healing done.

Ultimate Penitence

• The newest addition to the Discipline Priest's arsenal of powerful cooldowns, you can combine this with Evangelism if you are not playing Overloaded with Light and do not have a pet for your ramp. However, generally, you want to use it as a cooldown when your Shadowfiend is on cooldown. Make sure to target an enemy when casting this!

No Cooldown

• A sequence that does low healing and is used to avoid overcapping on Power Word: Radiance.

Min maxing Shadow Covenant

• Your top priority is extending the duration of Shadow Covenant as much as possible. You do not only benefit from the buff itself, but you also gain a lot of extra mana by having your pet auto-attack more frequently.

Optimize using Power Word: Radiance

• Unless you consider your Raid's positioning in spread fights, you can't consistently achieve your 18-20 Atonement count. A simple way to increase your chance of having a higher Atonement count for your Ramps is to cast a Power Word: Radiance on a ranged player and another on a melee player. It is inadvisable to cast Power Word: Radiance on classes like Mages or Hunters, as they tend to be away from their allies, causing your Power Word: Radiance to not spread to anyone, resulting in a single Atonement.

When to cast and not to cast Halo

• Halo is not included in any of the ramp sequences in the Rotation section. Incorporate Halo into a ramp sequence if the cooldown reduction from Void Summoner is not needed. Otherwise, cast it as a healing spell outside of Atonement windows whenever the raid is taking moderate damage, or simply cast it on cooldown as it also deals great damage.

Min maxing Power Infusion

• While Power Infusion is your spell, the optimal usage is to disregard yourself and instead fully focus on your teammates. To achieve that you need to see your party members' offensive cooldown uptime. It is recommended that you use either addons or WeakAuras like those discussed in the Addon section to do this, or simply communicate with them and ask for them to request at the exact time they want it!

Understanding Mechanics

Rotational min-maxing is just one aspect of mastering a specialization, but there are numerous other key mechanics that influence your performance. Use the following guides to improve them.

• Pandemic
• Spell Queue Window
• Stat Diminishing Returns

Understand your secondary stat priority and the tertiary stats needed for optimal performance during Raid boss fights as a Discipline Priest. For more detailed information, visit the Stats and Attributes guide.

• All secondary stats are affected by diminishing returns. Click here to learn more!

Tertiary

• Avoidance - Reduces damage taken from AoE effects.
• Leech - Returns a portion of your damage and healing done as healing to you. (Excludes self healing)
• Speed - increases movement speed. (Does stack with other movement speed abilities)

The only time you should think about picking a lower item level is if it has Leech or Avoidance. Speed is nice to have, but you shouldn't consider this stat when choosing between two items.

• Here is a showcase of how powerful Leech is for a Healer: Breakdown of Mythic Fyrakk

Trinkets

Below you can find active and passive alternatives to our recommended trinkets. Do note that some trinkets are better than others depending on the scenario.

Passive Trinket alternatives

• Empowering Crystal of Anub'ikkaj
  • A very strong stat stick, granting you a huge random secondary stat proc.
• Ovi'nax's Mercurial Egg
  • Very interesting Trinket, that gives you a mix of main stat and your highest secondary. Use it when a big raid movement is happening to keep a good distribution.
• Ara-Kara Sacbrood
  • Another very good stat stick that also deals a very minor amount of damage.

Embellishments

• Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension
  • Very strong stat stick that gives you a high amount of a random secondary stat that changes every 8 seconds.
• Writhing Armor Banding
  • Doubles the effect of your Darkmoon Sigil: Ascension.

Remaining Sparks

• Crafted items are 636 item level and regular items are 639 on max item level, therefore, it's not beneficial to equip crafted items outside of your 2x embellishments unless you don't have access to other high item level gear on that slot.

• Phials
  • Flask of Tempered Swiftness
• Food
  • Feast of the Divine Day
• Combat Potion
  • Algari Mana Potion -- Recommended
  • Potion Bomb of Recovery
• Health Potion
  • Algari Healing Potion
• Weapon Oil
  • Algari Mana Oil
• Augment Rune
  • Crystallized Augment Rune
• Sockets
  • Masterful Emerald
  • Culminating Blasphemite -- Unique, use one of each gem colour to enhance your Blasphemite.
    • Quick Ruby
    • Quick Sapphire
    • Quick Onyx

Enchantments

For min-maxing a Discipline Priest in Mythic Raiding, different racial traits can provide a tremendous benefit to your characters. If this is not your top goal, picking a race that fits your style works just as well.

• Rocket Jump -- Goblin
  • Jump forward, can be cast while falling or being knocked.
• Spatial Rift -- Void elf
  • Spawn a shadow traveling into your facing direction, activate again to teleport to it.
  • Maximum range of 100 yards.

Recommendation:

It is highly recommended to play a Goblin! Priests can be pretty slow-moving, and the Goblin's extra mobility really helps in those sticky situations.

Discover recommended macros for Discipline Priest during Raid encounters and watch a quick video guide on creating simple macros for your character.

Macro Import Guide Video

Mouseover Macros

All spells in this Discipline Priest Raid Guide are available as mouseover macros for your convenience!

Penance

/cast [@mouseover, help] Penance; Penance

Power Word: Shield

/cast [@mouseover, help] Power Word: Shield; Power Word: Shield

Power Word: Radiance

/cast [@mouseover, help] Power Word: Radiance; Power Word: Radiance

Renew

/cast [@mouseover, help] Renew; Renew

Flash Heal

/cast [@mouseover, help] Flash Heal; Flash Heal

Rapture

/cast [@mouseover, help] Rapture; Rapture

Power Infusion

/cast [@mouseover,exists] Power Infusion; Power Infusion

Leap of Faith

/cast [@mouseover, help] Leap of Faith; Leap of Faith

Pain Suppression

/cast [@mouseover, help] Pain Suppression; Pain Suppression

Recommended Macros

If you press shift while using this macro you get the Angelic Feather automatically placed under you, skipping the control click.

/cast [mod:shift, @player] Angelic Feather; Angelic Feather

Replace your Purify macro if you wish. This macro makes it so that if you target an enemy you purge and if you target an ally you dispel, saving you a keybind.

#showtooltip Purify
/use [@mouseover, help] Purify; [harm] Dispel Magic; [noharm] Purify

Your Mass Dispel instantly goes off when you press the button without having to confirm click, use with caution.

#showtooltip
/cast [@cursor] Mass Dispel

A nice little Priest only macro, if you know you know.

/cast [nomod] Levitate
/cancelaura [mod:shift] Levitate

Below, you see a screenshot of the author's User Interface for their Discipline Priest, outlining which addons are used and how they are utilized in Raids to make your life easier.

Addons

• OmniCD -- Party CD Tracker
  • Addon to track your party members' Cooldowns, mandatory for M+
• ElvUI / BetterBlizzFrames -- Party/Raidframe Addon
  • Addon to replace your Unitframes and other UI Elements with a more clean look. Takes quite some time to configure but there are plenty of pre done profiles that you can easily import and check out.
  • Alternatively, you can also use BetterBlizzFrames if you want to not spend hours of configuring.
• WeakAuras -- Jack of all trades
  • WeakAura allows players to create and customize graphical displays of game information. These displays, known as "auras" can show various aspects such as buffs, debuffs, cooldowns, health, and other important events.
• Plater -- Nameplate Addon
  • Plater is a nameplate addon with an extraordinary amount of settings, out of the box debuff tracking, threat coloring, and support for scripting similar to WeakAuras + the WeakAuras-Companion for Mod/Script/Profile updates.
• BigWigs -- BossMods Addon
  • BigWigs is a boss encounter add-on. It consists of many individual encounter scripts, or boss modules; mini add-ons that are designed to trigger alert messages, timer bars, sounds, and so forth, for one specific raid encounter.
• Details -- Damage Meter
  • Shows you Damage/Healing throughout the dungeon

WeakAuras

These WeakAuras are recommended for optimal performance in raids as a Discipline Priest.

Power Word: Life Glow

Glows your frame when Power Word: Life is useable

Stamina Tracker

Shows an icon when you need to buff stamina

Power Infusion Handler

Notifies you when someone requests PI of you

Atonement Tracker

Shows your active amount of Atonements

Patch 11.0.1

• PRIEST
  • All talent trees have had many talents move locations or have had their pathing updated.
  • New Talent: Cauterizing Shadows – When your Shadow Word: Pain or Purge the Wicked expires or is refreshed with less than 5 seconds remaining, a nearby ally within 40 yards is healed.
  • New Talent: Phantom Reach – Increases the range of most spells by 15%.
  • Manipulation has been redesigned – Now causes you to take 1%/2% less damage from targets affected by Shadow Word: Pain, Purge the Wicked, or Holy Fire.
  • Power Word: Life healing increased by 15%.
  • Void Tendrils now root targets for 15 seconds (was 20 seconds).
  • Power Word: Shield and Luminous Barrier's absorb values now have a 5% variance, like other healing spells.
  • The following talents have been removed:
    • Mindgames (moved to PvP talents)
    • Shattered Perceptions
• Discipline
  • Rapture increases the absorption of your next 3 Power Word: Shields by 80% (was increases by 40% and lasts 8 seconds).
  • Luminous Barrier absorb amount increased by 400%.
  • Luminous Barrier now decreases its absorb amount beyond 5 targets.

Patch 11.0.2

• PRIEST
  • Flash Heal healing increased by 20%.
  • Power Word: Shield absorb amount increased by 20%.
  • Power Word: Life healing increased by 20%.
  • Cauterizing Shadows healing increased by 60%.
  • Healing done from Void Shift to the Priest’s ally is now capped at twice the Priest’s Health.
  • From Darkness Comes Light now increases the healing of Flash Heal by 3% (was 1%), and stacks up to 20 times (was 50).
  • Prayer of Mending is now removed from all allies except for the last ally that received one from the Priest when a raid encounter begins.
  • Fixed an issue causing Holy Nova to not benefit from Phantom Reach.
  • Fixed an issue causing Halo to damage enemies out of combat.
  • Updated the visuals and animations for Void Shift.
  • Fixed an issue causing Divine Image’s teleport to fail on transports.
  • Added a counter to the Heal spell for tracking the status of Lightweaver.
  • The following talents are now 1 point:Manipulation
    • Surge of Light
• Discipline
  • All healing is no longer reduced by 3%.
  • All damage increased by 5%.
  • Holy Nova healing increased by 23%.
  • Power Word: Shield absorption increased by 30%.
  • Power Word: Radiance healing increased by 10% and its cooldown reduced to 18 seconds (was 20 seconds).
  • Pain Transformation now heals for 15% of maximum health (was 25%).
  • Penance healing increased by 20%.
  • Rapture cooldown now starts when pressed, and it lasts up to 30 seconds.
  • Bright Pupil now reduces the cooldown of Power Word Radiance by 3 seconds (was 5 seconds).
  • Abyssal Reverie now increases Atonement healing from Shadow spells by 5%/10% (was 10%/20%).
  • Fixed an issue causing Indemnity to not increase Atonement duration by its intended amount.
  • Fixed an issue where Atonement healing was only being increased by 50% outside raid instead of the intended 70%.
  • The following talents are now 1 point:
    • Contrition
    • Heaven's Wrath

Patch 11.0.5

• PRIEST
  • Power Word: Fortitude now costs 1% base mana (was 4%).
• Voidweaver
  • Entropic Rift now has a hostile variant for PvP combat, so you can differentiate it from a friendly Entropic Rift.
  • Entropic Rift now displays a low-noise version for your allies, instead of being completely invisible.

Priest

• Discipline
  • Developers’ notes: We’re increasing Discipline’s direct healing throughput to help in situations where no enemy target is present to trigger Atonement. We would also like to nudge Discipline’s performance up in raid, particularly for Oracle.
  • Power Word: Radiance healing increased by 20%.
  • Flash Heal healing increased by 15%.
  • Premonition of Piety increases healing done by 20% (was 15%).
  • Preemptive Care increases Atonement duration by 4 seconds (was 3 seconds).

Q: Why do I keep dying?

A: Start using Pain Suppression as your own defensive cooldown.

Q: Why do I keep running out of mana?

A: You are missing to many global cooldowns, and don't have enough Shadow Covenant uptime.

Credits

Written By: Rycn

Reviewed By: Velo