Only including the changes for easier reading. Source: http://www.worldofraids.com/v2/

Here are the changes:

Priest
* Prayer of Mending now has a 10 second cooldown.
* Circle of Healing mana cost reduced by 25%. (Source)
* The effectiveness of "Fade: Rank 7" has been increased by approximately 25%.
* The damage absorption of "Power Word: Shield" added by the caster's bonus healing has been increased to 20%.

Shaman
* The bonus of the "Wrath of Air" totem now applies to healing spells as well.

Warrior
* Increased the health bonus from "Commanding Shout" by 50%.
* "Improved Battle Shout" talent renamed to "Commanding Presence" and now increases the health bonus from "Commanding Shout" in addition to increasing the melee attack power from "Battle Shout".

* Tempest Keep: Arcatraz
o The damage dealt by Wrath-Scryer Soccothrates' "Immolation" and "Knock Away" abilities has been reduced.

* Auchindoun Shadow
o Cabal Zealots are now more threatening while under the effect of Shape of the Beast.

* Tempest Keep: Botanica
o Sunseeker Gene-Splicers' Death and Decay now deals significantly less damage and casts less frequently.
o Mutate Fleshlashers now deal less melee damage.
o Mutate Horrors and Fear-Shriekers now have less health.
o Sunseeker Researchers will now cast shocks less frequently.
o Sunseeker Chemists are now Paladin type instead of Warrior type.
o The Blue Seedlings in the High Botanist Freywinn encounter now slow players instead of immobilizing them.
o High Botanist Freywinn will now plant seedlings at a slightly reduced rate.

* Tempest Keep: Mechanar
o Gatewatcher Iron-Hand now wields a Jackhammer.
o Gatewatcher Iron-Hand is now more vocal when perfoming his Jackhammer attack.

* Karazhan
o The use of Divine Shield, Ice Block, or Cloak of Shadows will no longer prematurely detonate the Shade of Aran's Flame Wreath.
o Restless Skeletons will now summon a player if they are unable to path to that player, and deal more melee damage.
o The cooldown of Bellowing Roar has been adjusted to be a more consistent value.

Nice to see Power Word: Shield getting better scaling. Is it enough to make it a truly viable PVE spell now, or will it continue to fall to the way side?

Nice to see Priests get a couple bones thrown their way, and huzzah for the Shade of Aran Flame Wreath changes.

This is intriguing:
* Increased the health bonus from "Commanding Shout" by 50%.
* "Improved Battle Shout" talent renamed to "Commanding Presence" and now increases the health bonus from "Commanding Shout" in addition to increasing the melee attack power from "Battle Shout".

That'll be quite a bit more HP.

Yeah with the huge abundance of +healing gear now in TBC it should scale fairly well. Would actually give me reason to spec into Imp PW:S.

Shield will always be a pre-pull buffer for as many people as you can spam it on for AE/high damage type fights (Netherspite, Aran). After that it's best use is still in PvP and will continue to stay there. It is too mana inefficient to use in endurance type fights, but don't get me wrong it does have a bit of an "Oh Shit" ability to it.

I know we all say this but I'd love to see our instant casts scale as mages do (43% I think? not sure). As well a new 41 point holy talent, circle of healing is a joke.

I was kind of referring to this in PVE. Priests won't be able to use it as an "oh shit he's at 5% health let's buy a little time" type spell, right? My priest is only level 43 so, I don't know enough about raid healing or even proper 5 man healing yet as a priest.

Maybe next patch, Zyla.

I still really don't think it's enough scaling on PW:S, but hey, it's a start. I'd like to see it scaled to where 1400 healing would add enough damage absorption to absorb a single hit in Heroics if I cast it on the MT, but meh. Might be a bit TOO much for PvP.

I think that is maybe a bit over the top, but it should really work better in PVE.

Its back to the old wishful thinking that blizzard would just create skills so they work differently in pvp than in pve, same goes for gear, instead of just trying to balance it all out hence turning it into a mixed bag of everything that never truly delivers.

Sigh.

There, there, my fuzzy compadres. Your notes will come.

Said that bears aren't being changed back to what they were. At least Pallys aren't getting the nerf bat (yet at least).

PW: Shield at 20% will help mitigate the Mending change.

The PW:S change is nothing more then some BS so satiate the masses.

in my healing gear (+1060 heal) it worth an extra 106 hp, pushing PW:S up from 1450'ish to 1550... Big F'ing deal.

It can still be dispelled in PVP, and means jack compared to how hard BC mobs hit.


The Fade change is also a joke, the issue with fade is not how much aggro it removes, but that after 10 seconds that aggro comes right back.


I don't mean to make it sound like I'm QQ'ing up a storm, but they did some pretty hefty nerfs to the priest class, we were promised some sort of positive change on the priest forums by blues, and the only result we got was marginal improvement to PW:S, a boost to fade that doesn't fix its problem, a boost to CoH that doesnt fix its problem, (15yd ae range is not acceptable) and a drop in the nerf of PoM to 10 secs which still makes it useless in the one situation where it was better then normal heals (insta cast in pvp). Especially since that 10 second cooldown doesn't start until the first time it goes off.

With 1500 +healing gear in pve it will give extra 150 absorbion. It really makes no difference for tank healing. It should not be difficult to buff it for pve, for example add some short duration (5sec maybe) buff to it, that prevents crushing blows landing on a tank.

For pvp PW:S is not a solution. With arena gear at 1k healing, almost 11k hp and blessed resillience build I have been assist trained on 5vs5 match in 5 seconds when using preshield + prayer of mending + shield before my death. Extra 100 hp per shield really does not make any difference for our survival.

Interesting that they changed PW:S but not Ice Barrier.

I'd argue the problem with the fade reduction isn't that it's not permanent. I've always been fine with temporary aggro removal- it makes the aggro dance a little more delicate but not unreasonable and it's a unique facet to the priest class. The problem is with how much threat it actually removes- and whether that's enough to do what the spell is intended to do- give us a temporary breather on how bursty our healing aggro can be in battle while allowing another class (preferably a tanking class) the chance to build enough aggro to top out and maintain the mob's attention when we might have, otherwise, pulled aggro.

Healers are the only classes who cannot simply sit back when our aggro is getting too high in many (I'd argue most) situations. We have to keep healing and since we only gain threat from effective healing- it indicates that the balance between damage taken by the target and threat generated by the tank is skewed to our disadvantage.

Proper use of fade requires a deeper understanding of that threat balance than most (but certainly not all) healers have a feel for. Turning it into an aggro dump instead of a temp loss would dumb down the spell and make it easier to use- but it wouldn't make it an inherently *better* spell for healers. Why? Simply because the vast vast majority of encounters *require* no threat reductions to the healers to allow room for the tanks to build aggro. Healers can mange threat by spreading the healing out more carefully.

Fade gives you play room at the top of the threat meters to allow the tank to catch up *before* you pull aggro. The problem with fade in it's current form is that it simply doesn't give you enough room for 2-3 standard TBC heals, iirc it's only 900 threat which is (I believe) 1800healing. Bekah was putting out single GHeals in the 3.2k range. Fade at initial 60 healing levels gave you more than enough room to do lots of tricks- especially since the smaller Flash Heal was considered standard. With Priests throwing out massive GHeals like machine guns in TBC, fade needed a size increase to give us that same space to keep healing past 130% if necessary without pulling aggro.

If I am remembering correctly, and fade is a standard -900 threat atm*, a 25% increase would put it at 1125- increasing our ability to heal beyond the threat threshold by 2250hp.

Probably still not enough, imo- but it's a lackluster change for an entirely different reason than most priests would argue.

*Edit I'm remembering wrong on the size of fade. It's 1170 atm- 25% = 1462 giving us 2925 vs 2340 more healing to work with. That won't be enough in the long term, but it's much better than I thought.

I could be mistaken, but I believe -900 threat was the value for level 60 fade. Thottbot lists fade rank 7 as -1170, so that seems to bear it out. I haven't tested this however.

I do agree absolutely with Bekah though, the problem with fade isn't its mechanics but the scaling. At 60 with silent resolve fade was generally worth about one max rank gheal in value, roughly. The fade that's currently on live at 70 is closer to half of that, relatively speaking.

With current hp and dps scaling and with its current base value, I don't think shield would be overpowered with 43% scaling, although it would need some play testing to be sure. 20% is certainly better than 10% though. At the end of the day, it's understandable that spamming mending on a single target was not a playstyle that Blizzard really desired for priests in PvP. Giving it a small cooldown makes sense in that regard. Whether that will turn out to have a greater than desired impact on holy priest pvp viability it seems slightly too early to say, although i'm concerned about it like almost everyone else. I have no arena experience yet though, so I can't say.

Eventually Blizzard will have to deal with the fact that whether or not CoH is good "in theory", in practice the large majority of its playerbase does not like it. Minor tweaks probably won't overcome that reaction.

Anyone know by how much? Running Arcatraz on the warrior is just a pain as he is right now.

Any word on Nether Protection triggering? Wiped quite a few times because we've been unlucky with a warlock proccing it.

While any increase in fade strength is welcome, ultimately I very highly doubt 25% will be enough to solve the present issues. With the amount damage put out by quite a few creatures in game right now(coilfang heroic trash comes to mind, as well as a few others), the ability to wait a few seconds before you cast a heal, is simply nonexistant. That said, there is a level of reliance on fade, and on it actually working, to compensate for having to immediately be dropping 4k+ heals on your tank. Even with silent resolve, and extremely competent tanks, I've still found initial healing aggro to be a sizeable issue, and often a missed shield slam means some mob is going to give it to me in the face for 8k. For the most part, in its current form fade does nothing to solve that issue. More often than not lately, I find that I cast fade and look up to see the mob still running toward me.

In regard to fade not being a permanent threat removal, that simply isn't viable. Without going into unneeded detail, it is enough to say it would be a bit too strong. While healing issues may be the basis of your concern, the end result, a shadow priest with feint, simply isn't going to happen.

The PWS changes are more or less as minimal a buff as it was to originally implement the gains from healing. I get the point I suppose, to try to help mitigate the loss of mending without a cooldown, but a couple hundred more absorption on an extremely mana intensive skill isn't going to drastically alter priest survivability. In regard to that(survivability), instead of minimal changes to skills that don't really need it, I'd like to see something that has tangible gains. For instance, I'm sure most priests have noticed our base mitigation has dropped about 10% from where it was at 60, just based on armor values scaling and inner fire....well...not. An solid improvement to IF would be a significant passive enhancement. Perhaps instead, or I guess even in addition to that, some resilience could be added to the skill. Theres plenty of options.

According to Thottbot the damage was cut in half. You can look up the new spell here: http://www.thottbot.com/test?sp=35959. The differences are listed here: http://www.thottbot.com/test?ch=changed&start=100. The damage of Knock Away(http://www.thottbot.com/test?sp=36512) was also cut in half.

Honestly, a little FR goes a long way.

FR does help, yeah, but it also increases the damage I'm tanking since I'm the one tanking him, thus making it harder or easier on the healers depending on my luck with the resists.

But this "nerf" is warmly welcomed, not only by me but most melee's running that instance I would think.

Yeah, as said before, the PW:S change is a joke. 100ish more hp every 15 seconds isn't gonna do anything significant for pvp.