Priest Talent Trees part 1: Discipline

This is the second installment in my series of priest discussion/tutorial threads. In this thread I'll be taking a look at the 3 priest talent trees, their history, their current state, and some common specs for healing, pvp, and dps.

The roles that priest talent trees have played have changed radically over the years; possibly more than any other class. For example, with warriors, Arms has always been for PvP, Fury for dps, and Protection for tanking. Granted, my experience with other classes is quite a bit more limited than it is with priests, so I may be wrong there. Regardless, the roles that the different priest trees can play have changed.

Discipline began as sort of a wierd utility spec. It had all the necissary mana regen talents that holy and shadow priests covet early in the tree, but the deeper talents were very week compared to what the other 2 trees had to offer. For a long time, the final 31 point talent in Discipline was Divine Spirit. Mind you, this is not Improved Divine Spirit which is a pretty nice buff to bring for your raid today. It was simply a buff to spirit which at that time was used ONLY as a regen stat for holy priests and resto druids, and it required full dedication to the less-than-stellar discipline tree.

After a while, Divine Spirit was bumped up in the tree to the 5th tier of talents so that grabbing it only required 21 points rather than 31. To get Divine Spirit, a holy priest would only have to sacrifice 1 point in Lightwell, which has always been a pretty terrible talent, so the discipline tree got a little more love from the priest community.

Taking Divine Spirit's place at the end of the discipline tree was Power Infusion. This cooldown increased all spell damage and healing by 20% for a few seconds. It was neat, but hardly desirable for raiding. For PvP, however, a handful of priests noticed that hitting Power Infusion and Smiting the crap out of someone seemed to work out OK as a way to burst someone down, and thus, the Smite Priest was born.

Smite Priests made up a very very small portion of the priest population. I was blissfully unaware of their existance while I was level 60, but I spent a lot of time at level 70 smiting, but I have never encountered another priest on Stormreaver that shares my love for Smite crits, but there is very good reason for this. Smite dps was very poor, did not scale very well, and was difficult to gear for since not very much gear had enough of the stats that it needed to be even remotely viable. It was, however, a higher dps spec than shadow at level 70, which really wasn't saying anything since shadow was the lowest dps spec for any raider, and only got raid spots because of how amazing pre 3.0 Vampiric Touch was.

Debates over Smite Priests popped up at least 2 or 3 times a day on the Priest forums. Priests were confused by the presence of obvious dps talents in the discipline tree that increased offensive spell crit chance and Power Infusion, but then even with epic gear it performed poorly in raids and pvp. (* see bottom)

This is just one of many many examples of the Discipline tree being so unfocused and inconsitant. The only constant with Discpline is that its talents will never all work toward a common end. Is it a utility tree that focuses on party buffs? Is it a mana regen tree? Is it a pvp tanking tree? Is it a dps tree? Over the years people asked these questions, the talents were moved around, deleted, changed, reworded, and revamped, but 2 expansion packs later and it still isn't totally clear. If anything, all thats happened is that the list of directions that the discipline tree seems to be going in has gotten longer instead of shorter.

During the Burning Crusade, the discipline tree emerged as a great PvP spec with the addition of Pain Suppression and Focused Will, but the talents early in the tree were still a hodge-podge of regen and buff oriented abilities. Still, priests that wanted to heal in pvp finally had a place, and things were pretty good, as screwy as the tree was.

Priests even enjoyed a breif period of savage OPness as pvp healers during early BC. Prayer of mending currently has a 10 second (8 seconds with talents) cooldown. There was a time where it did not have a cooldown. It was seriously OP. Fun while it lasted though.

When Wrath of the Lich King was released, discipline got a "major overhaul." Many priests were expecting a completely new tree with completely new talents and finally a little focus for the tree as a dedicated PvP tree. What actually made it to live was the same old discipline tree with 2 higher tiers of talents that focused on single target pve healing. So instead of giving the tree some direction, the new talents just scattered it even more.

Don't get me wrong. I like the discipline tree for healing in raids right now. Its actually a very fun tree with a unique play style. Its numbers aren't as high as other healing trees, and even when its absorbsion effects are taken into account, it still doesn't quite measure up to holy in terms of tank healing, but it has the best efficency of any healer spec and better Inspiration uptime than holy. 3% reduced damage on the tank from Grace is neat too. In my opinion, what really makes Discipline healing strong is the fact that its 2 biggest heals (power word: sheild and penence) do not have a cast time. I can't tell you how many times the fact that penence healing starts right away instead of at the end of a 2 or 3 second cast has saved a wipe for me. Even if discipline never equals the through-put of other healers, that alone makes it worth it in my eyes.

What does the future hold for Discipline? Who knows? Blizz promises to "look at" discipline pvp every few months, but nothing significant ever happens to alleviate the problems that face the tree in pvp. They've also said that they would like Discipline to be more competetive with Holy Paladins in Pve. Well...we'll see. Personally I'm not holding my breath, but I'll be perfectly happy watching big green numbers fly across the screen every time I penence the tank regardless.

If you're curious about what a pve discipline spec should look like, this is the one I'm using right now.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classes/priest/talents.html?tal=050320313050510250102523125100505103000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000

You'll notice that I don't spend the 2 points to get Improved Divine Spirit. This is because the spell power boost from this talent does not stack with Flame Tongue Totem which all shaman can/will use this all the time in raids.


(* Smiting is now dead. I think Blizz finally realized that they were just jerking people around by including any talents that enabled this spec and many of them were removed or changed in 3.0. Also, unlike every other dps spec in the game, Smiting did not see any dramatic dps increase from 70 to 80. Elitist Jerks crunched some numbers and said that even in all Best-in-slot gear with perfect rotation, every buff in the game, and optimal conditions, smiting will never get passed 2k dps. RIP Smite Bomb)