First, let me say how weird it is to be playing MoP again – it’s kinda the same, but not really?
Tl;Dr: So, disc has been nerfed a lot but I frankly don’t think it’s an issue unless you’re pushing cutting edge content.
Sidenote: we’re painful in arena and I do think we need a hot fix to address how rough it is for us ATM in pvp, specifically arenas.
Anyways…
I somehow stumbled into raid leading a group on classic. We’re not amazing, but we’re not terrible. We’re currently still on normals, but damn have I been proud at the group killing bosses well – 1-shot spirit kings, 2-shot final MSV boss. We were waiting for a tank and tried out the first boss of HoF and got it to 15% with 9 people. Grabbed another DPS and downed it quickly.
So let’s talk about disc nerfs. I personally think they’ve been overblown because what we excel at is mitigation. Who cares about throughput right now?
We eat the damage before it arrives – I’ve been arranging a lot of pug world boss fights, beyond my own weekly lockout, and it’s amazing practice for spirit shell due to stomp timing. We run as many healers as we can but I am basically doing 50% of the healing for Garelon due to spirit shell.
He’s great practice.
So back to MSV and HoF:
To maximize spirit shell absorbs, you want to be using inner focus and all of your archangel stacks. This will make your next prayer of healing incredibly strong and build absorbs.
Actually timing effects well will mitigate damage your team is taking, so your healing numbers will then shoot up. Avoid any team focused on these sort of numbers – you’re just doing absorbs. Someone like a resto shaman will pair well and shine because their mastery will pop off (they’ll heal more when people are low health).
Could disc be better? Definitely.
Is disc as bad as people are claiming? Imo, maybe they aren’t playing disc as it’s intended to be played…
It’s all about the absorbs…
Spirit shelling your way through tier 14
a little bit of everything all of the time 
I haven’t really put time into MOP Classic yet, but I do remember that MOP, especially the first couple of tiers, were basically disc heaven. At least to my recollections, a ton of big AoE mechanics came out on 1 or 2 minute timers, lining up incredibly well with Spirit Shell. I remember totally trivializing Horridon’s big AoE, for example, in ToT.
So if that’s still true, I can understand significant disc nerfs. I once wrote a blog pot about how tuning disc correctly was essentially impossible, because if you tuned bosses around well-timed mitigation, any group without a disc priest would be destroyed and if you tuned bosses around no well-timed mitigations, then a disc priest trivializes the encounter.
My conclusion was that you can’t tune disc if fights are well set up for their absorb-heavy cooldowns. You need to ensure outgoing damage patterns in raid encounters are very well varied, as some damage patterns don’t suit disc nearly as well. An all-out blitz of damage from beginning to end, for example, heavily favors pure throughput healers as absorbs quickly become no better than normal heals if there’s no preceding low-damage phase allowing disc to “preload” their healing for the high damage. There was more, but I’m not trying to re-write that post here!
All of this brings back good, nostalgic memories! I’m glad you’re writing about your experiences in MOP Classic.
I’d love to read that post if you have a link. Sorry for such a late reply, hadn’t seen this until now!
I agree that disc is incredibly hard to balance – especially if a team wants to bring two of them in the more modern retail mindset of player over class.
Now that we’re all geared up, I can really trivialize certain mechanics (eg windlord Tyrak 2nd HoF boss and unseen strike or resonance (the pulsing damage you need to hide in orbs for) on the first HoF boss.
Definitely looking forward to ToT as I agree there are even more pulsing damage fights. The hydra one is the best iirc, the head enrages line up perfectly with spirit shell.
Again, would love to read that post!
Hi! Ha, as it turns out, it’s the very last blog post I wrote. This is it:
https://holyworddelicious.blogspot.com/2014/09/discipline-tuning-neverending-story.html
It’s pretty long. I used to write pretty long posts, it seems. I don’t know how the classic version of MoP has been balanced/adjusted, so maybe some/all of this no longer applies. But I stand by it for the year of 2014! 😉