- Author: Amery
- Date: August 17, 2022
- Updated: August 17, 2022
- Expansion: WotLK Classic
Welcome to the Discipline Priest DPS PvE guide for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King!
While most Priests dedicate themselves to the path of the Light or the path of Shadow, a certain type of Priest dedicate themselves to monastic discipline. Known as Discipline Priests, these healers have mastered the art of tempering pain through discipline alone, gaining the ability to prevent it from happening altogether by using powerful absorption and damage reduction effects. While they were formerly found exclusively in the battlegrounds, where their disciplined fighting style made them excellent combatants, they have now become reliable allies in the fight against the Lich King’s minions.
Discipline Priests weren’t exactly used in TBC unless it was for Improved Divine Spirit, Pain Suppression, and Power infusion as Circle of Healing outshined us entirely at this gear level and expansion, with Discipline viewed as a primarily PvP spec. However, in WotLK Discipline Priests make a massive comeback, putting other healers to shame with how overpowered our ability is to prevent any damage from happening. Other healers will be very upset at you, as they have nothing to heal due to your OP shields absorbing all the damage that people would have taken!
This guide will teach you how to properly play a Discipline Priest in PvE scenarios, preventing all the damage you could possibly prevent and then flex on your friends from the top of the healing meters!
Discipline Priest Strengths & Weaknesses
Strengths
- Incredible AoE healing through damage prevention
Discipline Priests prevent damage from ever occurring, by shielding allies ahead of time. And that is a task they’re extremely good at — you will regularly find yourself near or at the top of the healing meters, as your shields render a lot of boss mechanics impotent, preventing all the damage they would have dealt.
- Outstanding utility
Discipline Priests used to be seen as utility-focused spec, with powerful spells like Pain Suppression and Power Infusion but somewhat weak healing. We’re no longer a utility-focused at all, as our healing is exceptional, but our utility is still very much amazing.
- Not gear reliant
Like any other caster, gear of course make us more powerful. However, our Power Word: Shield — our main ability that we spam throughout a fight — has a very high absorption amount right from the start, and we don’t really need many other stats in order to shine. This makes us very powerful healers at every stage of the game, while others have to slowly power up by gaining better gear — and also means we don’t really care about the gear competition as much.
Weaknesses
- Low AoE healing beyond absorb shields
We of course have overpowered absorb shields, and amazing single-target healing thanks to Penance. However, once our Power Word: Shield gets used up on multiple people and they need healed, we can’t really top them off very well — our only AoE heals are Prayer of Healing and Prayer of Mending, which just aren’t very powerful. This is where other healers in your raid will have to step up and top those players off.
- Repetitive gameplay
A lot of people enjoy playing Disc due to its potential to be at the top of the healing meters with its overpowered absorb shields. However, the actual gameplay is very repetitive — you’re using Penance on cooldown and then spamming Power Word: Shield on the entire raid, over and over. Discipline won’t be as engaging as some of the other healing specs that have multiple different abilities they can use as they react to different situations.
Discipline Priest Utility
Besides our incredible damage prevention, Discipline Priests bring a few more things to the raid:
- Rapture (does not stack)
Blizzard decided to bless us with this incredibly strong effect in WotLK, which restores a target’s resources when their Power Word: Shield gets used up. The 12 second cooldown might make this look significantly weaker than the similar Resto Druid effect Revitalize, but the 100% proc chance makes it extremely strong; you will be generating a lot of rage and energy for your DPS players to spend, increasing your raid’s DPS, and a lot of mana for your healers, allowing them to keep healing where they’d normally run out of mana. This effect’s only weakness is that it does not stack, due to the Weakened Soul mechanic, so you can’t stack Disc Priests for it — but every raid will want 1 Disc Priest because of it.
- Power Infusion
Since its inception at the dawn of Classic, this incredibly overpowered raid cooldown has caused casters to get in violent fights over who gets it. This very much remains the case in WotLK, where it gets changed to offer a 20% increased cast speed and 20% mana reduction to its target for 15 seconds. You’re the only one that can offer this buff, and whoever you give it to will love you forever, as they top the DPS charts.
- Pain Suppression
This Disc-exclusive raid cooldown was added in TBC and sadly didn’t see a lot of use, as Discipline was not a very popular spec — but that is the case no longer. An 8 second 40% damage reduction buff will save the day when timed well, essentially functioning as an extra defensive cooldown for your tanks. Bear in mind that in WotLK it can no longer stack with other defensive cooldowns that tanks use, so you need to coordinate as to when it should be used.
- 3% reduced damage taken buff (does not stack) – Renewed Hope
We share this very underrated buff with Prot Paladins (Greater Blessing of Sanctuary). 3% might not seem like a lot, but it will make a modest difference over a fight’s duration, particularly on tanks. If your raid has 4 Paladins, your Prot Paladins can use Greater Blessing of Sanctuary on the entire raid so you don’t need to provide this buff, but fewer than 4 and it’s your domain.
- Mass Dispel
Players who did the Sunwell raid in TBC know how incredibly powerful this ability is, where it’s absolutely crucial in fights like Felmyst and M’uru. Great news: it’s still exclusive to the Priest class in WotLK! Any fight where multiple players need to be dispelled quickly, or where there are enemies with invulnerability-type effects, and it will be up to you as a Priest to save the day with a well-aimed Mass Dispel.
- Stamina buff (does not stack) – Prayer of Fortitude
The stamina buff has been a Priest’s unique trait since the dawn of time. Every raid will want 1 Priest of any specialization for this buff alone, as it drastically increases your chances of surviving dangerous raid mechanics.
- Spirit buff (does not stack) – Prayer of Spirit
This buff was previously exclusive to Discipline Priests, but has now become available to Priests of any specialization. Furthermore, Spirit is now a very useful stat for many caster classes, rather than a strictly healer-specific stat, making this buff a must-have. Affliction Warlocks can now also offer this buff with their Felhunter pet (Fel Intelligence), but their version is straight-up weaker than ours, and since every raid will want at least 1 Priest for our other amazing utility spells, it will be your domain to apply this powerful buff.
- Hymn of Hope
Priests of all specializations have access to this incredible mana regeneration raid cooldown. This spell can very often make the difference between a kill and a wipe due to your healers going out of mana. It is impossible to underestimate how useful this ability will be in your raid.
Conclusion
We hope this guide has been able to help you decide if PvE Discipline Priest is the class / spec for you. Make sure to check out our other sections, such as talents, gear, gems etc., to get more information on how to improve your performance as a Discipline Priest n WotLK!
About the Author
thank you <3
Very informative. Be reading your next articles. I am relatively new to WOW and disc priest seems exciting. Thanks.
“Discipline won’t be as engaging as some of the other healing specs that have multiple different abilities they can use as they react to different situations.”
Thats bullsh1t. U do quick heal/long cast heal, pennance, prayer of mending, prayer of healing. U take poison out like as debuffs, single debuff or aoe debuff. U cast big (6-8 min cd) aoe healing and mana recive. Pain supresion and infusion. U throw power word shield and renew before dmg happen. Its not repetable.
I have tried many classes of healers and priest is most balanced, logical spells for specific situations. You don’t use 2-3 spell whole the time but you don’t break your fingers on keyboard.
Shaman does not have much effectivnes than priest but need 20 totems and 8 macros all this stuff make u tired while playing. As priest u dont.
Additionally, holy word fire, shaodw blast, 2x DOT curses and pennance on enemy make u sometimes help kill something faster when situation needs that.
penance make + power shield makes HUGE very quick damage absorption when situation needs that. While other clases like druid/shaman have 2 min cd spell that makes your heal (under 10s cd) instant, priest have like 8s cd for penance and if target wasnt power shielded before u can do it fast (not once for 2 min)
While i give tank power word shield, renew and prayer of mending he have like 30% hp absorption before he even take first dmg. While he is losing that ammount u can heal other people. Other healers u must wait for someone lose hp before u can do anything.
The reason I put
“Discipline won’t be as engaging as some of the other healing specs that have multiple different abilities they can use as they react to different situations.”
is due to the fact that in ICC Discipline becomes a PWS bot and rarely are other abilities even used. So many bosses are AoE oriented that PWS is simply the best healing spell before any other. I can’t remember the last time I really had to use any other spells in ICC besides PWS due to how strong it is (even before the 30% buff).
Using my priest’s logs from ICC HLK
“PWS Shield casts 305
Penance casts 79
Prayer of Mending casts 40
Prayer of Healing casts 28”
Only 4 spells with the amount of casts being dramatically different. Now in other raids/dungeon, you may not use only PWS which is true you will add in Penance/PoM/Etc but for endgame raiding the only three healing spells you’ll more than likely use are PWS/Penance/PoM,
Now luckily in Cataclysm Discipline Priest loses the title of “Shield Bot” as Rapture is changed to not batching multiple shields together for massive mana returns and that is when Discipline priest starts being an engaging spec to play since you’ll have atonement and normal healing routes to play as and multiple other spells being used besides PWS.
The pathetic “hype” “Other healers will be very upset at you, as they have nothing to heal ” bruh this is in some imaginary best case cenario, altho discos are so good at absorbing and so much needed cause of that in raids, their actual healing abilities are the weakest from all the other possible healers. literally if they didnt had a shield spam ability they are nothing in a raid a useless filler and ye their shields do pop and people do need actuall heals after so no one will be upset what a bs hype is that
With how Ice Crown Citadel is going Disc priests are able to fully negate multiple mechanics on Heroic due to their ability to fully prevent damage from going out (let’s use Heroic 25m Lich King’s infest ability). Infest can hit raid members for 30k before resistance and buffs, with everything applied to the raid it still hits for 15-20k depending on the class and talents they have. With Disc priest being able to fully absorb 10-15k of the damage it almost fully negates the damage of one of WoW’s hardest-hitting bosses and proc’s rapture on top of that allowing seemingly unlimited mana without needing innervates.
It’s not really “hype” to say Disc priests are incredibly overpowered in Wrath and don’t revolve around their actual healing since they’re a completely absorb class instead of a healing class.