I, for one, support this change. During one of the many debates about how to solve the problem of balancing Priest racials, a lot of new systems were proposed, but no one really said "let's just wipe everything out except for the stuff people want to keep."

It was never right that blood elf and troll priests got the short end of the stick. It was never right that dwarf priests were required for Fear Ward. I dislike the loss of several cool spells (esp. Chastise, and I always wanted Shadowguard as a Shadow talented ability w/o being a Troll) but giving more than DesPrayer, Devouring Plague and Symbol of Hope 2.0 would have bloated the priests' hotbars with too many abilities. It provides Blizzard with the opportunity to improve on these abilities for the future, if they should ever make a comeback.

Rundown on what's getting lost:

Humans lose Feedback 2.0, which was miles ahead in usefulness from the pre-1.10 version, but still highly situational.
Night Elves lose Starshards 2.0, which was a somewhat useful free Arcane dot, but the very fact that it was Arcane meant that it didn't scale well.
NEs also lose Elune's Grace, which wasn't much of a damage reduction and wasn't nearly as useful as DesPrayer as an oh-shit.
Undead and Blood Elves lose Touch of Weakness, which was really just bait for Purge-spam more than anything else. Same goes for the Troll's Shadowguard.
Troll's Hex of Weakness was a diet CoW without any kind of synergy. The total absence of Troll priests meant this ability wouldn't have got any play even if trolls showed up.
Blood Elves lose Consume Magic, which made sense from a BE standpoint but was also kinda silly... if you get Mana Burned enough that you have to consume your own buffs to cast anything, you're on the ropes already.
Dwarves and Draenei lose Chastise, which was a good spell-interrupt, and gave all those old-guard dwarf and new-type Draenei priests something to cherish, but I'm not sure if it was really as reliable as a well-timed Earth Shock or Counterspell. The very nature of priest spell rotations meant that they often didn't have it on-hand when it could be handy, unless you're actually rolling Smite. And everything about the Wrath version of the Disc/Holy trees means that Smite is still a very esoteric off-spec that Blizzard doesn't seem to want to put a lot of design time into.

I dunno, what do you guys think?

I think they should of kept priest flavor by giving us the same spells with different names.

Devouring Plague feels like such a horrible name for a Night Elf to cast. I would be much happier if Devouring Plague kept its functionality and was called Star's Grace or something more Night-elfish or Alliance-y. It feels all levels of wrong for a holy priest to have a plague power.

Also lore-wise, its kinda disheartening that Druids seem to be more empowered by Elune than Night-Elves are... they have Starfall now, we have niether Elune's Grace nor Starshards.

I don't think its too much to ask for different names: Look at Bloodlust vs. Heroism.

It does kinda tick me off that all priests get an untalented, more reliable version of mana tide now though... especially after the exact same dev took the deep enhance snare break talent off ghost wolf, saying that that was too druid defining so they didn't want shamans to have it.

Sigh.

I agree that Devouring Plague doesn't match flavor for anyone but UD, so maybe that will get a good across the board rename. But I really think that part of this decision was realizing that racial choice shouldn't decide raid attendance, and weighing that prerogative against the number of cool racial abilities meant that they had to choose which ones stayed and which ones went.

I don't think it's been clarified if Hymn of Hope is going to be raid-wide. If not, Mana Tide is still the wider-ranging regen, and you just stick priests in the healer group. Given how fluid the lineup is going to be now that so many buffs stack raid-wide, I don't think this is going to be hard to accommodate.

Mana Tide is still party only as far as I'm aware.

Dev Plague gonna be decent spell for shadowpriests now. With the dk debuff ebon plague it gets +60% damage and its also affected by the shadow talents/shadowform. Reduced mana cost and cooldown should help as well.

Save your outrage, this new version of Symbol of Hope returns 20% of base mana.

The lvl 80 version will return less than the current lvl 70 version. If the values I'm using for base mana are correct then this current version is a 60% nerf from the current mp5 based version.

It's nothing game changing at all, they're just going for PvP balance.

You already cast: "Shadow Word: Pain", "Shadow Word: Death", "Mind Flay", "Mind Control", etc. I've always seen priests as the evil healing class, unlilke druids/shaman/paladins who seem "good", even when doing their damaging spells.

The problem with all three changes is all the unanswered questions.

1. Desperate Prayer goes from a 10min CD to 30 seconds? Are they going to kill it's health returns or give it a mana cost to compensate? Because that kinda affects the rotation for Binding Heal.

2. Devouring Plague: it's a 24-second duration DoT with a proportionately large mana cost and synergy with VE. It'll have a 30 second CD, which doesn't match with it's duration and messes with cost rotations. How will it synergize with other Shadow talents? Is the healing component still in play?

3. The same questions we've had here still sticks out: how does Hymn of Hope synergize with the new mana return mechanics? Will it be castable in Shadowform? Is the mana return intended to be so low?

Symbol of Hope (or I guess Hymn of Hope) is nowhere near the mana values of a Mana Tide. Perhaps it feels a bit rip-offish, but group mana restore isn't a particularly original or unique mechanic anyway.

Edit: Waaay too slow.

Life and Death are two sides to the same coin, there's nothing "evil" about it. The idea to be able to heal or harm even stems back to the D&D Cleric, I guess there's no Hippocratic Oath in fantasy games!

I have no idea why Priests have mind powers though, heh

I don't personally mind Devouring Plague's name, even though it is really heavily assosciated with the Undead in a way Symbol of Hope and Desperate Prayer are fairly generic.

1. Well it's an 11 point talent now remember, I think if we're spending a talent point on it 10 minutes -> 30 seconds is a good change.

2. No idea!

3. If it helps at all the current Draenei version is a Disc spell (and therefore castable in Shadowform).

From a pvp perspective: On beta, currently priests cannot cast penance on themselves (no confirmation if this is intended or not so far, AFAIK) and if it stays that way, a 30 second CD on desperate prayer is pretty much fine. If penance was self castable, this would be a little over the top, but without being able to use penance on yourself, priests have very low self HPS burst compared to the other 3.0 healers (except shaman perhaps, but I would consider a couple of Tidal Force'd lesser healing waves followed by a NS+HW to be very good, although nowhere near a 2 second window)

The current DP is a good racial, but all of its benefits (besides infinite HPM, which is almost touched upon by talented PW:S) are more or less covered by other spells in 3.0, except for a very needed self-HPS, in my opinion at least.

How much does Devouring Plague tick for in decent gear? If it does any significant healing, that could be a reason to limit the usage in Blizzard's eyes, despite the cost.

Yeah, I misread it. If it really is base mana, its pretty weak.

I don't know why people shortchange this racial when certain arena comps are built around having the healing debuff.

I suspect you're using values for base mana at lvl70 on live. It seems these values are being recalculated. On the PTR, they are increasing by 50% at lvl80 (except for Shamans, who get around 25%).

The current version returns 1149 mana over 15 seconds at lvl80. The new version returns the following amounts over 8 seconds at lvl80:

Druid 760
Hunter 1009
Mage 654
Paladin 879
Priest 773
Shaman 879
Warlock 869

So the new version returns rather less mana... not 60% less in any case, but still a nerf. However, it takes 8 seconds to return the mana instead of 15, giving it an overall boost in MP5 value for its shorter duration.

Looking at the numbers, I don't think it would be unreasonable to give Hymn of Hope an extra tick - assuming it's not raid-wide, anyway. Everyone except Hunters would still see a slightly lower mana return, but the numbers would be more closely aligned.

The Replenishment buff does not stack

In addition to this change, we also needed to address the "mana battery" roles in a raid. The mana regeneration effect they grant is no longer limited to their own party, and it no longer depends on the amount of damage they deal. Each time they trigger the mana regeneration effect, 10 people in their raid group will receive a buff which causes them to regenerate 0.5% of their maximum mana each second. This buff, Replenishment, will be given preferentially to raid members with the lowest mana, but will re-evaluate which raid members receive it each time it is fired. Replenishment is provided by Shadow Priests, Survival Hunters, and Retribution Paladins.

Activated cooldown abilites like innervate, mana tide, symbol of hope, etc... stack with replinishment (and eachother).

This is all as far as I know.

Did those websites also provide a download-able client? I remember Blizzard wouldn't provide one until some weeks after the release.

I had to get my brother to Fed-Ex me a box from California (to Taiwan) when TBC was released, and I'd love to avoid that if possible.

A friend of mine was in a similar problem when TBC was released. There were no copies available in his (backward) country.

The sollution was that I bought an extra copy and gave him the CD keys from it and he downloaded an ISO of the game discs from the net. The game itself isn't copy protected so it's easy (even if it takes a while on a slow net) to download an ISO of the CD(s)/DVD.

Invigoration does stack with replenish, but it requires a pet crit and is self only.

A little off the current topic, but has anyone does some armor value tests for the target dummies?

True I was using the lvl 70 base mana values, but keep in mind that SoH also scales with level. Draenei Priests get it at lvl 10 and it's like 11 mp5, 33 mana total then IIRC. So at 80 SoH would give more mana as well.

It's a pretty substantial (and rather unnecessary IMO) nerf.