[Sailormoontw]

I remember the devs said disciples shouldn't be able to tank 4 dots, but our counterattacks are only viable when we are getting attacked, and that's one of our utility spells.

Not to mention the bonds system, it's unique in design, but when you compare with the buffs other healers get, bond aren't that powerful, with lots of drawbacks.

The drawbacks I can list it here:
1. short duration : 1 min
I remember when in beta clerics complain some of their buffs don't have enough duration, so they get a globally increased duration, but disciples' bonds remain short duration.
2. One bonds per target :
Whenever you cast bond A on a target, you cannot cast bond B on the same target.
3. One target per bond :
Whenever you cast bond A on a target, you cannot cast another bond A on another target.
4. You cannot use bonds on yourself.

If you check the buffs from other healers, they are plain simple, but a lot more powerful than ours. Our debuff bonds suffer the same drawbacks too.

And take a look at one of the bond for example :
Gift of Vitae : Gives Endurance vs Clerics' Renew : Endurance regeneration

We get it at 42, while clerics get it at 12. They can cast it on everyone, we can only cast it on one member, with short duration and the drawbacks listed above, and the spell would drain our own endurance to give to other, while clericss wouldn't.

I can compare the other bonds with similar buffs of other classes, it's obvious ours are surpar, but I'll stop here.

And about the DPS part, from some experiment of a player who play both disciples and bloodmages, the number shows disciples take 4-6 times time to defeat the same mob as bloodmages do. And from my own experience the clerics tank better, buff better, and kills mob faster(clerics have spells and offensive stance), I would say clerics heal better in healing stance too.

Bottom Line :

The disciple is a unique class, but so are other classes, we shouldn't be supbar just because our class is fun to play. I hope the dev could some day put the issues of disciples on the table, either give us better group utility, or buff our damage, or maybe add a path like shaman. Personally I don't like the path system of shamans, and there shouldn't be too many classes with path system.

Remeber, we are the only healer that doesn't have a stance, we need something to make our healing and damage enough in some situation.