I'll preface this by pointing out that I really don't know healing. In about nine years of playing World of Warcraft, I've never taken a healer into a heroic dungeon or raid. I figured out that I liked being a tank very early on, and of course almost everyone likes playing DPS (if not waiting in DPS queues) but healing?
I'm no expert.
Priests are the only class in the game to have more than one healing spec, and the two of these specs have always had a weird and perhaps asymmetrical relationship.
Holy is clearly the most iconic healing spec. Holy's theme is "you are a healer." It traces its roots back to, like, every healer in RPG history.
Discipline is weirder. For one, it's focused more on preventing damage with shields, which is basically either absurdly overpowered or cripplingly underpowered depending on subtle changes in development. But it's also the healing spec that always wanted to do some damage as well.
Priests have some damage spells, like Smite and Holy Fire, that were originally put in the game so that Priests could at least try to solo while leveling up in an era before they could dual-spec to Shadow. In Cataclysm, Discipline got Atonement (it may have been a Glyph at the time.) This allowed them to pump out damage and thereby heal their allies with some smart-targeting healing.
When Monks were introduced, Mistweavers were given a similar theme - being able to fight in melee like other Monks and keep the team alive as they did it. This is actually why Mistweavers are the only healing spec I've really spent any significant time working on, though I haven't broken out the second Monk since Warlords came out.
In a recent interview, one of the lead designers (I want to say Jay Allen Brack, and apologies if I spelled that wrong) said that they want Discipline to lean into this weird DPS/Healer dichotomy, hoping to make them 50% healer and 50% DPS.
That's pretty fascinating. And could be hell to balance.
The thing is, having a healer sacrifice healing for damage kind of works in a raid setting (at least one where your aptitude is not judged solely on meters.) People bring different ratios of healers and DPS all the time (especially in the flex-mode era,) so having a raid with two tanks, six and a half DPS and three and a half healers is fine. Tossing a Discipline Priest into a raid with these changes is arguably less of a problem than any other spec, as you know that you can't be upsetting the healer-to-DPS ratio all that badly.
Where I think this could become tricky is 5-player dungeons. A dungeon requires a tank and a healer, and unless the dungeon is no longer that dangerous due to gear or such, the group is going to need a full-fledged healer.
This is definitely something to keep an eye on. They could of course go the Mistweaver route they went in Warlords, creating two "modes" for them to either be a pure healer or a hybrid damage/healer. I haven't really been following Mistweavers this expansion, so I can't really say whether that was a success or not.
Now, if they want to give Discipline a damage-focused Gladiator's Resolve-style talent, that might work out just fine. The game doesn't really have a Holy-magic DPS caster, which could be cool (Exorcist's Resolve? That would be a cool name for it, even if Exo is a Paladin ability.)
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