I posted this in our private boards but figured I'd share.

This is the sick kind of things a priest decked out in full transcendence, with an augur staff, and all that good shit can do.

With the new +damage and healing from 25% of your spirit talent, someone in gear equivalent to Raylen's will have about +843 healing.

Greater heal rank 1 will cost 417 mana talented, assuming the 10% reduction of 1.10 and the 15% from talent. Base average heal of 1277. Add in spiritual healing and it now has a base of 1404. It gains 715 from the +842 healing, and that results in 2120 average healed in only 2.5 seconds.

That's 5 health per mana. Then it casts a rank 5 renew. That gives 315 health base. That goes up by 25%ish with talents, to 393.75. It then gains full benefit of plus healing, so 1235 health total from the renew, (247 per tick (is that right??? that seems too high).

Total healed from the spell being generous and saying no overheal from the main spell or the renew is 3355. Total health per mana, 8.04.

Jesus christ.

On paper Lightwell just sounds incredibly broken and I am not sure why anyone would give up Power Infusion if they were set on a 31 point talent to get this in its current form. I haven't been able to determine by reading through the post yet and reading the spell tool-tip whether its a click and forget or channeled use like bandages, but it any rate its still going to be interrupted by damage which makes it kind of, "meh," to me.

I think that a 31 point talent should be powerful. When you dump 31 points into a tree you decided to specialize in that specific area of abilities available to you so why shouldn't it be amazing? IMO the best 31 point talent in the game right now is Innervate, although I am sure some would disagree, and this Power Infusion talent sounds VERY mighty and a step in the right direction. I think unless it has one or some combo of the following:

* Heals for more
* Receives a benefit from +heal
* Gets a shorter cooldown
* Is modified to heal like a HoT spell that is not interrupted by damage


it will just be another unused 31 point talent.

Some thoughts:

I'm amazed at Spiritual Guidance. Although the effect is about the same as Spiritual Healing, it changes a fundamental mechanic in WoW: it makes spell damage/healing scale with a stat, and at the same rate as dps scales with str/agi for rogues (14 spi = 1 heal/sec or dmg/sec). Besides the raw effect it's going to have for a priest in his existing gear, it makes choosing between spirit-based regen and +healing much less of a compromise.

Although I like Spell Warding..but I don't think it's worth five points. It's very situational, and I would consider spec'ing into it if my guild was stuck at an encounter where it would help, but I wouldn't take it for general use.

I'm pretty excited about the new Holy Nova. It will make AOE'ing mobs a lot easier by sticking priests in Mage/Warlock groups so they can not only provide a steadier stream of heals to the whole party through chain-casted Novas, but also add some DPS.

I'm not sure what to think about Spirit of Redemption. In ten seconds I can get off three PoH's or 3 GHeals..I guess it's good for one talent.

Lightwell would be great if it didn't break on damage...what's that about? Provided the spell doesn't break it's insanely mana efficient and frees up the priest from having to look for renew targets. What a waste; I hope they change it on test before the patch is released.

Making Silent Resolve the new Subtlety was a good move since it now allows a 31 Disc raiding build without sinking points into PVP talents.

The only thing that still bothers me is the low-quality tier 1 disc talents. I'm still wasting my first five points there. Overall though, I'm really impressed by the changes and greatly look forward to 1.10.

Jesus christ. And I thought Paladin mana-efficiency with BoL was something amazing. With enough Spirit and the passive regeneration from Transcendance and talents, I could imagine certain Priests being able to simply chain-cast low rank spells a-la Paladins without ever going OOM.

I'm very, very happy. I have some slight concerns though:

- PW:S and Inner Fire scaling not fixed. They've given PW:S a flat boost instead of recognizing that the reason it's too small in the first place, is because it hasn't scaled with gear. In the current form, PW:S will likely become underpowered once again in 6 months. Making the talent give it a certain % increase based on +healing would have been a smarter, more long term solution. Inner Fire is the same thing, except it should probably scale with armor (just make the spell a % increase already).
- Unless they've done it and just didn't mention it, nothing has been done to rectify the weird behaviour of +%healing talents. They apply before +healing (contrary to +%damage talents), which makes them relatively worse as you gear up. Spiritual Healing, once a fantastic talent, is marginalized with every gear upgrade I pick up. At last count, it was down to ~7% increase. Improved Renew suffers from the same, but is now cheaper at least.

In the end, Blizzard has made a huge upgrade to the d/h priest, but it looks somewhat like a bandaid. Priests were in bad shape simply because they scaled worse than other classes, and few things has been done to fix that underlying problem (Spiritual Guidance and a usable heal with cast time reduction helps). I am slightly worried that this will be like wow launch all over again: Massive whines about overpowered priests in the beginning, then a slow descent towards mediocrity as gear keeps scaling.

About the mana efficiency you posted Beef, it's a fun number, but it's not applicable in a real raid situation. Paladins can exploit their mana efficiency because the heals come in perfectly sized chunks, and it's all direct heals. Priests will suffer from some of the same problems as druids: Their mana efficiency on paper doesn't translate well to real (raid) situations, since the HoT part will be constantly overwritten, and the heals are slightly too large. For 5-player groups, where that efficiency can be exploited fully, I don't see myself ever running out of mana.

No doubt about it though, the new priest is a healing monster.

Orgasm of the day: Spirit of Redemption.

That suffering is alleviated by doing the same thing druids do, drop to even lower ranks of heals.

Lets say a take a well geared but not insanely geared priest that has +500 healing.

Heal rank 3 would be 1305 healed for 287 mana, done in 2.5 seconds. That's 4.5 health per mana.

Flash heal costs 380 mana, heals for 973 base, and 1188 after +healing is factored, done in 1.5 seconds. That's 3.12 health per mana.

Do you really still see yourself spamming flash heals all day long?

Heal rank 2 with its shorter casting time, with its .5 second shorter casting time may end up commonly used as well. It'd be a 2 second cast and would probably heal for about 800ish (haven't crunched the numbers on it).

Ah yes, Heal/GH will indeed be amazing heals now.

But the "Heal" spells don't trigger the Transcendence bonus, as far as I know, so you can't drop lower than GHeal Rank 1 if you want to keep that.

I was just pointing out that even though it looks pretty on paper with that insane efficiency, it can't be directly translated into raid value in the same way as a paladin can. But hell yes, the changes rock.

There are two talents that I think need to have the way they work clarified. One is the lightwell talent which has already been discussed quite a bit in this thread. Another one I'm curious about is blessed recovery. If somebody were to crit on you more than once in 6 seconds (not too uncommon for rogues to do), would the effects of the first HoT component (as I would have to guess that it must be a HoT) be overridden by the second?

Yeah, that sounds like a nice-to-have, not something you build a talent tree around. Net result is that 5 people get an extra bandage before their debuffs fade, and I certainly wouldn't expect a priest to spend 31 points for that.

If the priest dies early in the fight , casting lightwell while you're under the effect of spirit of redemption could be quite usefull. It's still a bit of a strange thing to have at 31 points though.

I'm not saying I'd want to bring fewer Druid/Paladins. They will certainly be pigeonholed less, which is good (either way, I generally like to keep a very flat class distribution).

But we're going by the assumption that, after these changes, Priests are going to be picking up a higher percentage of the overall healing done in a raid (probably in accordance with the original intentions for the class). It seems like a necessary result of emphasizing Priests as a dominant healing force that Druids/Paladins will have more trouble carving out a niche for themselves. They have to find more areas where their unique abilities add diversity to the raid which overcomes the extra power of more Priests.

It may well be harder for Blizz to design encounters for which a rational raid leader wouldn't want to stack a few extra Priests. Not necessarily 10 or something ridiculous, but for which having 7 or so, and only 4 or 5 of other classes, is more effective than 5 of everybody. They'll have to make sure to frequently address the specific strengths of Druids, Paladins, and Shamans (in ways that either do or don't involve healing).

I've a similar build except that I maxed out silent resolve. Is healing aggro no longer a problem for high end raiders, or has it never been the case? I'd love to put 5 points into mental agility, but with my guild just starting BWL, I'm a bit uncomfortable dropping the reduced threat that subtlety has afforded me so far.

Eyonix just posted that PW:S will scale with +spells (not +heal).

Initial try

Can't imagine losing mental agility, especially as a horde priest. Dispell costs way too damn much and having the extra gas tank to draw on is helpful. As well as starting from full again on a rotation type setup.

A lot of the talents in holy look like pure garbage to be honest save for the top end ones. I'd have to test a bit for the improved casting talent on Greater heal and such when combined with the mana reducing talent. Giving up Inspiration will be hard though, but doing so would easily free up enough points to get the reduced cast timer. And what the hell is with "on death" talents. If you are dying that much you probably need to re-evaluate your PvE strategies. Good for PvP I suppose, but...

I can't really see myself specing this way however. The 31 point discipline talent is too juicy to pass up in my opinion. Probably go with a 34 disc/17 holy type thing. It seems to me that you lose a lot of the raw lasting power that a more discipline focused build gives you for higher healing per second. Lasting longer seems more versitile to me, as you can have a shaman toss a heal occasionally in the new patch to keep the healing over time approximatly the same, while gaining some more lasting power.

Plus with the 31 point talent you can heal quite well for 15 seconds every 3 minutes. Enough to last through a frenzy if hunters are asleep or something, or give it to a mage on Nefarian or something. Lots more versatility.

Will be quite interesting to actually have choices as a raid spec.

Here's what I'd pick for a pvp healer build that does fine in raids:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classe...000000000000000

Improved inner fire in 1.10 will give about 2000 armor, I think that's too good to pass up for anyone who does a decent amount of pvp.

Power infusion I think would be too much fun to not grab. It's like a berserker buff on demand for your team, once every three minutes

You forgot they get 15% mana while casting and Inner Focus now. :P

The changes look pretty good to me (though playing a druid, I'm not all that knowledegable on priests) or at least our guild priests seem to like them.

The Lightwell thing I can't really seem to figure out. Though healing 5 x 1600 for 225 mana (unsure if the higher ranks cost more mana) would be pretty cool, it does seem quite a bit too situational for a 31 point talent.

I know absolutely nothing about shadow priests (apart from the fact they are annoying in battlegrounds) so I have no idea how shadow builds usually are, but it seems they will have Spell Warding within reach too.

Oh, and Eyonix just clarified the PW:S scaling: It benefits from all healing gear, i.e. damage/healing and healing.

This should make our priests quite happy and give the shield quite a needed buff. Edit: Oh, missed shield only get bonus based on 10% of +healing. Pretty bleh then.

PS: Beef turned Werebeef permanently now? :)

At least it won't scale with all of that +shadow damage cloth they have (as if that stuff is plentiful in the first place); however, the ones with spell damage gear are going to scare the shit out of me.

Yeah I'm perma werebeef now.

Here's what I would if I were a raiding shadow spec priest:

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classe...000000000000000

Being able to pick up meditation and shadowform is a nice boost for raid viability, as is improved vampiric embrace.

Cool. We only have had one non-healer change to healer in total. It just doesn't seem to happen that much :)

The talent spec you linked is 26/25 D/H. Figuring you either linked the wrong one or made a big joke on raiding with shadow priests :D

I am seriously pumped about these changes. Some really creative and effective stuff in there that I think most of the priest community believed were just pipe dreams (see Spiritual Guidance, O_O).

Although I'm still relishing the choices I have, I think my 1.10 build will be.

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classe...000000000000000

One thing that I haven't seen much about in this thread; the change to Inner Fire. Increased to a 10 minute duration, mana cost increased (I'm assuming by a substantial amount), and it now expires after 20 "successful melee or ranged hits." That's not a lot of hits.

Inner Fire's use in raids is to maybe avoid the two or three shot from an angry mob. While there was a lot of talk about giving it some raid utility (mp/5, something), that didn't happen beyond what it already had. Though the armor has been increased, I feel like the increased mana cost and 20 hit limit is going to lower its usefulness where it is needed most; PvP and solo PvE. 20 hits is nothing if a rogue is on me, and I'm really fucked if one of those 0.9 attack speed pets dashes at me and starts going to town. Also, there's no way a priest grinding Cenarion rep or farming runecloth is going to have a 10 minute buff expire before he gets hit 20 times. I think the changes to Inner Fire should at least be reconsidered.

Other than that, I'm ecstatic beyond belief. Still gotta decide if I'm going to be Inner Focusing Mind Blasts, healing my group from beyond the grave, or bribing nukers with PI.