I'm pretty sure the PW:Barrier nerf comes irrespective of Disc's current ability to heal in raids. Like the recent Shield buffs, its coming from top end guilds using and relying on these abilities way more than they were intended.

Hopefully in 4.2 there will be some attention paid to Disc's AoE healing abilities in comparison to Holy's.

Yeah Disc IS holy now... but weaker.

Discipline healing: you are two 3-minute cooldown abilities. Nobody else gets them, so they will be steadily nerfed. Oh, and I guess you can do some healing, but nothing particularly impressive.

Blizzard pretty much ruined the Disc class for me. I begged. I cried. I wrote rational, and sound suggestions for improvement along with many other priests on their forum. I asked over and over again for Blizzard to explain these changes -- we either got zero response from a blue, or the response we got made it more than clear they have no idea what they're doing with Disc.

When the players, who play the class can speak about their class better than the dev's who are posting, their is an issue.

Tonight was the first night that I healed a heroic as holy. It felt funny, and wrong. Yet nobody died, and I didn't have half the mana issues I had as Disc. I would hazard to say there was plenty of times where I found myself missing the smite to heal mechanic of Disc because there was actually -down- time between heals as holy.

The iron is not lost on me.

Holy still feels clunky to me, I find myself wishing I had better macros for it. I know in time however it will begin to feel more inherent. For now it's just my off spec. It might become my main spec if Blizzard doesn't get their act together.

I've been playing discipline ever since Naxxramas came back in Wrath. I was surprised discipline got buffed as we did in Cataclysm even when i was topping healing meters. Some of the changes made sense, but with the current nerfs i notice i can heal a lot more easily as holy. I can actually look at Healthframes, withouth switching focus to my mana bar every 10 seconds...it still feels dirty though.