Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
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I'm talking end of wotlk, ICC, at that point Discipline Priest was crazy good, probably the best in the game, since it scaled better with gear than Holy. In BC, Discipline had been the pvp spec. If you remember, back during this times many classes had specs designated to be more useful in PVP and less viable in PvE.

On your video, the Holy Priest doesn't really seems that good, considering how he never uses chastice despite it being instant and stronger than smite, sits on holy fire for most of the time and isn't applying shadow wordain, so I think it is not really the great gotcha example you want it to be. What difficulty was this, like normal or heroic? If you want to get a better impression of a holy priest well played, here is a +30 pov, so a holy priest on the very high end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrJhCaXQmH4

I think this video really shows off where the toolkits seem similar to white mage but are really worlds apart. Like, how he applies dots at the beginning of fights if he isn't bursting with boon of the ascended, which I think really beautifully demonstrates why dots are actually hella good in a game that has high healing requirements and often allows you only scarce uptime, its instant set and forget free damage that keeps ticking even if things go busy. Again, your thesis that Holy Priest is just like WHM is just not true, its toolkit works better with a more healing intense game and it still has more than WHM to press for dpsing situations.

And WoW encounters work different because yeah, you can play still individually more, there are less flashy dense mechanics, instead the battlefield itself is usually more busy during the encounter, while in FF the mechanics when something are happening are extremely scripted and usually involve the entire group participate in them, instead of aoe damage randomly going on on random locations.