Discipline Healing in 25 Mans (A Rant)

My main is a Discipline Priest, and I don’t think I’m a horrible one, but I seem to always run into trouble when I’m asked to Main Tank heal anything that is not with my guild.

This morning I ran an ICC 25 half-pug with my friend’s guild, and I ended up rage quitting. This was just about the worst thing I could have done, but I did it. Emotional priest is emotional and erratic. Sorry.

Here’s the thing, I am a Discipline Priest. While we are designed as Single Target healers, we are not designed to solo Main Tank heal. At least this is my understanding of my class. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong and call me a baddie.

Since I started raiding as Disc during this expansion I have tried desperately to be a Main Tank healer, and I always fail (unless I overpower the raid dungeon through gear). Maybe I’m doing it wrong. Maybe my rotation is wrong. Maybe my gear is wrong. I don’t know. I do tend to be OCD about getting my slot bonus for gems even when I don’t really need it, so my gemming is probably a bit wonky. I’m fairly confident that my spec is good.

I can’t solo heal a single tank through the Festergut fight on 25 man regular. Is this wrong? Should I be able to do this? I don’t know.

This is not a new issue for me. This is part of the reason I left Resolution and quit raiding so long ago. This is the main reason I rarely do 25 man raids. This is the reason I am always hesitant to 2 heal a 10 man dungeon. This is THE reason I don’t do VoA EVER. I’m a fail tank healer that needs back up. You’re better off bringing a Holy Paladin than bringing me into your raid. I will only disappoint you, and in turn end up disappointing myself.

I’m awesome at being a support healer. I can balance any group by helping with tanks or with raid healing. I am awesome on fights with AoE damage because I can mitigate this with bubble spam. Put me as the Main Tank healer on any fight and expect me to be able to pull it off without any help from other healers, you’re asking for a dead tank.

I know there’s a ton of Discipline Priests out there in the Blogosphere. Help me out here. What am I doing wrong? How do you tank heal? Am I really as fail as I’m feeling? Time to roll a Paladin?

TLDR: Disc Priest fails to keep tank alive in ICC 25.