The Cataclysm Pre-Patch brings plenty of changes to class talents and abilities for World of Warcraft. Many new spells have been added to the game and others have been dramatically altered. Discipline Priests will have access to almost their entire Cataclysm toolkit at level 80, including some powerful new cooldowns and the first iteration of the spec’s damage-to-healing mechanic, Atonement.
What’s New
Atonement
Cataclysm marks the birth of a new approach to healing for Discipline Priests in the form of Atonement. This talent causes your Smite and Holy Fire damage to also heal a friendly target for the same amount. The Evangelism talent makes this damage and healing more effective, and the Archangel talent rounds out the playstyle with a new mana regeneration and healing buff on a short 30-second cooldown. (Plus it gives you glowy angelwings, which is pretty cool.)
You can’t rely on the healing from Atonement for the bulk of your healing output in Cataclysm. Absorbs and direct heals will still be your bread and butter. But this feature gives you another set of tools in your toolkit that can boost your overall performance when used well.
Mastery: Shield Discipline
Cataclysm adds a whole new stat to the game, Mastery, which works differently for each specialization. For Discipline Priests, Mastery improves your Shield Discipline, increasing the effectiveness of your absorption abilities (namely Power Word: Shield and Divine Aegis). The higher your Mastery stat, the more damage these abilities will absorb.
There is no gear available with Mastery in the Cataclysm Pre-patch, so aside from Reforging you won’t be able to make use of this stat until Cataclysm Classic launches in full.
Enlightenment
The Discipline Specialization gets a flat 15% increase to its Intellect through Enlightenment, which you get automatically when you select the specialization.
Meditation
Both Holy and Discipline Priests also get Meditation automatically, replacing the old talent. Note that this ability now specifies “mana regeneration from Spirit.” Spirit is a much more important stat for all healers in Cataclysm due to the removal of the MP5 stat.
Absolution
Both Priest healing specializations also gain Absolution, allowing you to remove two debuffs from friendly targets rather than just one.
Abilities
Along with Atonement and its related talents, you’ll have one new key ability in Cataclysm:
Power Word: Barrier
This is your new raid cooldown, and it’s a powerful one. It reduces all damage taken by 25% to friendly targets within its radius. It also prevents delays to everyone’s spell casts from taking damage. Your entire raid can stand inside it and they will all benefit from its effects. With Glyph of Power Word: Barrier it also increases the healing received by everyone inside. It’s on a three minute cooldown, so you’ll want to save it for a heavy damage phase or as part of a cooldown rotation.
Changed Abilities
There are plenty of minor changes to abilities in Cataclysm, but this section will only cover those that will significantly affect your gameplay as a Discipline Priest.
Power Word: Shield
The cooldown on your signature spell has been reduced to 1 second, making it fully spammable. Bubbles for everyone!
Greater Heal
While this spell was all but forgotten in WotLK, you may actually want to have it on your bars in Cataclysm, especially early on when mana is tight. Greater Heal is a big, efficient single-target heal that is improved by some of your talents, although not as much as a Holy Priest. There’s also Heal and Binding Heal, which can both be very situationally useful as well. Penance is still preferable whenever it’s not on cooldown.
Single Target Healing
For tank healing or spot healing, you’ll prioritize using Penance and Prayer of Mending on cooldown and keeping Power Word: Shield up on your primary target. All three of these spells are extremely powerful and efficient. While those are on cooldown, you can use Heal for lighter damage, Greater Heal for heavier damage, or Flash Heal for emergencies (or Binding Heal, if you also need to heal yourself).
AoE Healing
Whenever you’re healing multiple targets, cast Prayer of Mending on cooldown on a tank or another target who you expect to take damage. You’ll primarily cast Prayer of Healing whenever you need to heal up multiple targets. Otherwise throw out Power Word: Shield on anyone you expect to take damage, or anyone who gets low and may die before they can be healed. Spot heal with Penance, or use Flash Heal or Binding Heal if it’s on cooldown. Use Divine Hymn to counter a big AoE or if you need to catch up.
Atonement Healing
Healing through Atonement allows you to contribute to the group’s damage as well as healing, but it won’t typically be as effective as your direct heals and absorption effects. There are a few circ*mstances where you may choose to heal through Atonement:
- Your team isn’t taking much damage, so you can afford to sacrifice some healing to help deal damage instead
- The enemy is taking increased damage, which means you can do both more damage and more healing through Atonement
- Your team is struggling to defeat a boss before it enrages and needs every drop of extra damage to do so
To maximize your Atonement healing, use Holy Fire on cooldown and fill with Smite. Don’t use Archangel while Atonement healing. Only use it when you want to switch back to casting direct heals. For Atonement healing, your Evangelism stacks are more valuable.
Cooldowns
Power Infusion
Nothing is different with this ability in Cataclysm. You’ll still want to give it to your highest damage-dealing caster so they can kill the boss. At times you may want to use it as a healing cooldown instead, depending on the fight.
Inner Focus
Where this ability used to work for any spell, it’s now limited to a few of your direct heals. You’ll almost always want to use it with Prayer of Healing for maximum effect. It’s now on a much shorter 45 second cooldown, and it makes sense to use it every time it’s available. Don’t wait until you’re already low on mana.
Pain Suppression
This ability is unchanged except for the removal of the dispel resistance component. Use it on a target who is taking a dangerous amount of damage.
Power Word: Barrier
This ability is kind of a group Pain Suppression, so it’s pretty powerful. Use this to mitigate heavy raid damage.
Archangel
In order to use this you’ll have to first build up Evangelism stacks by dealing damage, but the payoff is that you can get up to 10% of your mana back and up to 15% increased healing for 18 seconds. If you can build stacks during low damage periods it can pay dividends when things get hairy.
Divine Hymn
Use this as a raid healing cooldown during heavy AoE damage or if you’re falling behind on healing.
Hymn of Hope
This is a powerful mana cooldown for your entire group, but it requires you to stand still and channel it (and not heal) for up to 8 seconds (reduced by your Haste). Look for the best time to use it so you don’t waste its cooldown or fall too far behind on healing during its channel time.
It’s a good idea to call out when you use this so that your team can pair it with their other mana cooldowns. The reason for this is that Hymn of Hope not only restores mana but increases maximum mana, so any abilities that restore a percentage of your total mana will restore more while it is active.
Shadowfiend
This little guy hasn’t changed. Use it when you need the mana, but make sure it’s hitting something. Cast it right before Hymn of Hope to maximize the mana return you get from it.
Talents
Cataclysm brings the first talent tree revamp to WoW Classic. You’ll now need to commit to a tree and put 31 points into it before you can dip into another tree. As mentioned earlier in this guide, selecting the Discipline tree will give you a few baseline abilities:
In addition, you’ll only get one point every two levels from 10 to 80, with each of the last 5 levels granting an additional point. At level 80 you’ll have 36 points to spend, while you’ll have 41 at level 85. The talents themselves have been moved around and compressed, with most only having one or two ranks and none having more than three. You won’t see many “filler” talents that can easily be skipped. Most of the Discipline tree is now non-optional, but there are still a few choices to be made.
The first row of the Discipline tree gives us some basic buffs to our abilities that will also help us reach deeper into the tree. Improved Power: Word Shield, Twin Disciplines, and Mental Agility are all well worth putting points into and there’s really no reason to ever skip them.
In the second row you’ll have to make your first choice. Evangelism and Archangel only make sense if you will have an opportunity to cast some Holy Fire and Smite in between heals, otherwise they are useless. These talents are best used alongside Atonement in the next row. Inner Sanctum will usually be skipped unless you skipped the other two talents, in which case you’ll need it to unlock the next row. Soul Warding is always worth taking as it reduces the cooldown of your Power Word: Shield to a mere 1 second, letting you throw out one of your best spells with every GCD if you choose.
Row three brings us to Renewed Hope, which makes your single-target heals stronger and is another core talent that will rarely be skipped. You’ll get two extremely useful cooldowns in this row as well: Power Infusion and Inner Focus, each at a cost of only 1 talent point. And then there’s Atonement, which you should take if you picked up Evangelism and Archangel.
In row four Rapture makes a return, providing a crucial mana return element to your Power Word: Shield. Borrowed Time is also a no-brainer, speeding up the next spell you cast after Power Word: Shield. Reflective Shield finishes out the row but will be skipped by most Discipline Priests. (It’s unclear from the tooltip, but the reflect only works when you cast the shield on yourself.)
Row five contains Strength of Soul as a follow-up to Renewed Hope. This talent can be useful in smaller groups and particularly PvP, but for most raid content, your points would be better spent elsewhere. Divine Aegis, on the other hand, is an absolute must-have, adding a free absorption effect to many of your heals. Pain Suppression will rarely be skipped either as your primary single-target healing cooldown. Train of Thought is worth considering for either tank healing or Atonement healing, but probably not at the expense of other talents.
From row six, Focused Will is almost never worth taking for PvE content. On the other hand, Grace is an essential tank healing tool that you’ll want to have on hand even if you’ll primarily be raid healing.
Alone in the seventh row is your capstone talent, Power Word: Barrier, a raid-wide damage reduction cooldown that you’ll always want to have on hand.
Once you’ve spent at least 31 points in the Discipline tree, you’ll be able to pick up some talents from Holy or Shadow. Holy has Empowered Healing and Divine Fury, both of which are good options. Improved Renew won’t be as useful to Discipline Priests as it is to Holy and should be skipped. Darkness is also a great option in the Shadow tree, buffing your throughput by boosting your Haste.
You won’t be able to reach any second row talents in the other trees until level 85. Desperate Prayer will be wanted by most Priests at that point. Surge of Light will also be a strong choice, especially for Atonement healing. Inspiration is great too, but not necessary if you already have a Holy Priest or Restoration Shaman in the raid.
Glyphs
Like the talent trees, glyphs also see an overhaul in Cataclysm. You’ll now have three tiers of glyphs: Prime, Major, and Minor, and you’ll get to choose three of each to use in your build. The new Prime Glyphs are the most powerful while the Major Glyphs are more situational and Minor Glyphs are smaller quality of life improvements.
Prime
Glyph of Power Word: Shield
This glyph causes your Power Word: Shield to also heal the target, making one of your most useful spells even more useful. You’ll always want to have this glyph equipped.
Glyph of Prayer of Healing
With this glyph, your Prayer of Healingalso adds a six-second HoT to each target. Again you’re making one of your most-used spells even stronger, so most of the time you’ll want to use this glyph.
Glyph of Penance
This glyph lets you use Penance more often, which is great for both tank healing and spot healing.
Glyph of Power Word: Barrier
In addition to its already-powerful damage mitigation effects, this glyph causes Power Word: Barrier to buff all healing done to targets standing inside it. Great for any fight where you need to be prepared for heavy incoming raid damage. You can even use Barrier as an extra tank cooldown.
Glyph of Flash Heal
This glyph buffs your Flash Heal‘s crit chance when the target’s health is low, making your emergency heal more potent. This also makes it more likely to proc Divine Aegis to even further protect a target who’s taking heavy damage.
Major
Glyph of Prayer of Mending
There’s almost no healing situation where you don’t want to keep Prayer of Mendingon cooldown, so you’ll probably want this glyph for any kind of content.
Glyph of Divine Accuracy
If you’re going to be doing Atonement healing or just throwing out some damage for whatever reason, this glyph will ensure that your Holy Fires and Smites hit their target.
Glyph of Smite
Another glyph that should only be used for Atonement, this one makes your Smites do extra damage to targets affected by your Holy Fire (which also buffs your Atonement healing.)
Glyph of Dispel Magic
This glyph makes your Dispel Magic into a heal as well as a cleanse. A good option if you don’t need the two Atonement glyphs.
Glyph of Mass Dispel
If you think you’ll be using Mass Dispel a lot, you may want to take this glyph.
Minor
Glyph of Fortitude
This glyph makes your Power Word: Fortitude cheaper to cast, which is especially useful if you have to rebuff someone while you’re in combat (usually a tank).
Glyph of Shadowfiend
Although hopefully your Shadowfiend won’t be dying in the first place, it’s nice to know that if it does, you’ll still get some mana out of it.
Glyph of Levitate
With this rune, you won’t have to worry about carrying around a bunch of Light Feathers anymore — or jumping off a cliff only to realize you ran out of feathers and forgot to buy more.
Stats
There are some big changes to stats in World of Warcraft with the Cataclysm Pre-patch. For one thing, Spell Power and Healing Power are mostly gone, replaced by pure Intellect. Intellect increases your throughput as well as your mana pool and your crit chance and will be the most important stat for you as a Discipline Priest.
MP5 has also gone away with the Cataclysm, leaving Spirit as your only choice for mana regeneration. This also means you’ll be competing more with other healers for Spirit gear.
Haste can be a tricky stat for healers, increasing your throughput but also increasing the speed at which you spend your mana. It’s therefore better not to stack Haste until you feel comfortable with your mana pool. That said, Haste can make you feel extra powerful, since you can get spells out faster and even lower your global cooldown. At certain breakpoints you can get extra ticks on your HoTs as well.
Mastery is a new stat in Cataclysm that has unique effects for each specialization. For Discipline Priests, each point of Mastery increases the absorption of your Shield Discipline. This amounts to free extra healing, making Mastery a more efficient stat to focus on when mana is tighter. However, there won’t be any Mastery available on gear in the Pre-patch, unless you reforge your gear for it.
Critical Strike is your lowest value stat as a Discipline Priest. It’s free extra healing like Mastery, but as a healer you’re usually aiming to heal just the right amount to top someone off, so a crit often winds up wasted as overheal. Your crits do proc your Divine Aegis, but that’s not enough to make the stat competitive (especially when it means giving up another, more valuable stat.)
With all of this in mind, your stat priority will generally be:
- Intellect
- Spirit
- Haste
- Mastery
- Critical Strike
Remember, this is not set in stone and certain gear levels, groups, fights, or any number of variables may shift this around.
