Discipline Priest

Right, so before I crack on with the stonetalon write-up for alliance I wanted to take a post to talk about discipline priest levelling in cataclysm. I could probably sum it up pretty easily by just saying its about 20,000,000 times better than shadow, but I want to go ahead and explain that, by level 23 you have 4-5 spells you are using on every mob, the rotation is dynamic, engaging and actually really fun. It is pretty skill capped, if you forget to archangel properly you run oom - that's an amazing feature. Let's just analyse a few bits at a time.

Firstly, the biggest perk of the discipline tree is that all the "levelling" talents, or at least the talents that enable the player to dps effectively are all in the first few tiers of spec. This is important, the main problems that shadow has is that you don't get a "feel" for the actual rotation until a much higher level, but as discipline by around level 20 you basically have all the tools you need to be able to dps effectively and level. I mean, that's just great I mean sure you need to have "progression" through a tree so you feel like you are becoming more powerful, but you can do that by spicing rotations up through talents like Pain and Suffering, the fact that your "core" is available so early on is just great.

The fact that discipline is such a good tree and actually you could see alot of merit in it's rotation could spring some arise of a "need" for a discipline dps spec, similar to feral tank/dps. I don't know whether it would necessarily be popular but a dual healing/dps spec similar to feral could have a great place in wow. The necessary tools are there and if you wanted to, I feel like you could easily make the discipline dps tree actually viable in raids. Now I realise this is highly unlikely, and tbh I prefer the playstyle of shadow, but I can see the attraction of discipline and see other people perhaps wanting the spec to become competitive.

Now, the only downside to the tree, although actually I wouldn't call it a downside to the tree persay but more so the others, are the talents arcangel and evangelism. Like or not they are designed for shadow priest mana viability and dps, it obviously has a discipline equivalent so that its a great talent to pick up for discipline in cases of downtime of healing and for overall levelling. Right now though, it is like.. well I need this for all 3 specs whilst levelling, I cannot imagine levelling as shadow or holy with this talent available in discipline and the other trees having no active source of mana regen until level 66 or so when they get access to shadowfiend.

Whilst this talent obviously fits the design for discipline quite well I feel like, it needs to be made baseline if you do not want to implement some of my suggestions for shadow in my other post. 15% mana regen every 15 seconds or so is very big for all 3 specs and at low level it just feels mandatory.

I've stated my feelings about discipline tier 2 already and there is just way too much going on, so making evangelism/dark angel baseline would free up the tree immensely.

That's probably all I have to say on discipline other than the fact that OMG I LOVE HOW PRIESTS HAVE WINGS NOW, this is awesome :D. Gonna finish all the stonetalon write-ups today and the supplements and hopefully start my Dwarf Shaman later.