On builds (remember that I haven't seen AQ yet):

As far as I know, nothing about any content makes 8% extra mana more useful than 8% extra healing (actually, I haven't checked whether Spiritual Healing is more powerful than Spiritual Guidance, but it only affects one point anyway). That basically leaves us at 21/30 for the people who aren't PvP-inclined enough to get Power Infusion (not to say that 1 or 2 in a raid wouldn't be neat). The mana nuts will be 25/26.

Not everyone needs Divine Spirit, though. The Power Infusion lovers will often have enough of those to cover a raid. Is anything in the Holy tree worth giving up Mental Agility? Does AQ make Spell Warding, Holy Reach, or Imp PoH valuable, for example?. If so, 14/37 could be reasonable.

For PvE, I still maintain that Spell Warding is godly.

Here's a list of situations where it vastly improves your survivability:
Lucifron
Magmadar
Gehennas
Shazzrah
Baron Geddon
Sulfuron
Golemagg
Majordomo
Ragnaros
Onyxia
Emeriss
Lethon
Kazzak
Razorgore Phase 2
Vaelastrasz
Firemaw
(Ebonroc, though only if someone is a retard)
(Flamegor, though only if someone is a retard)
Chromaggus
Nefarian Phase 2
Skeram
Lord Kri
Viscidus
Huhuran
Twin Emperors
Ouro
C'Thun

Why would you possibly not want that talent? Healers in raid zones don't die to being melee'd, generally, unless it's already a wipe. We die to magical damage. Reducing that by 10% across the board is incredible.

And, actually, there are some uses for Imp PoH and a larger-range PoH, but they aren't as useful as Warding.

Uh-huh. It's really easy to assume that everything's going perfectly, and claim it's useless. But if your raid is executing perfectly, you hardly need any talent points to begin with. If Priests are dying, Spell Warding will certainly help.

I suppose a way to look at it is that it's 45-50 Stamina for 5 points, since the great majority of damage taken by Priests will be magical.

EDIT: while some parts of your list are a bit frivolous (Kazzak), I think Firemaw/Ebonroc/Flamegor are important to bring up. A common argument against Warding will be "when Priests take damage at all, they take a huge amount of it, so 10% will hardly do anything." An nice counterexample is the fact that Shadow Flame damage and typical Priest HP are so similar that Warding will make a huge difference in survivability.

Feels refreshing to actually have more viable choices than just 1-2. Lightwell is curious, as a HoT dispenser it would be awesome, but if it's just an additional bandage I can't see myself ever getting it.

I'm wondering if they're going to fix spiritual healing to account for gear like similiar talents other classes have. If not, I think I'll go with the following build:

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

Otherwise I'll probably swap 2 points from mental agility to spiritual healing. I often tend to leave renewing to other priests in my guild who have more +healing(I like to whore passive regen), so missing out on imp renew isn't that bad. I like inspiration combined with holy spec a bit too much to not have it.

About the spec you labelled as the new best pve healing spec Gurg, only a limited amount of priests need divine spirit, and I really don't see why anyone would put points in holy nova or holy reach over inspiration.

Overall I love these changes, there's multiple very viable specs for different purposes. Once we have AQ on lockdown, I can even go 31pt shadow for a huge boost on soloability and still be able to get all the essential disc skills and healing focus. Heck, I can imagine myself swapping to emergency dps with shadowform where necessary without having to sacrifice anything essential from my current healing capability. Grab the oracle set and switch rampant growth to Anathema and essence gatherer to a +20 shadow damage wand.

For a pvp healer, wow. I'm really eager to see a priest decked in armor gear perform in group pvp, this might be even too good. Think I might finally go do some pvp after these changes are out, I got tired of an average lifespan of less than 10 seconds after engaging the enemy. Priest survivability really got boosted a ton without having to resort to taking gear from warriors.

I don't know about "vastly improves"...some of those bosses on the list are questionable in terms of how much the encounter benefits from Spell Warding.

I acknowledge that it's great for MC, unfortunately the two AQ zones have pushed it off our raid schedule.

Onyxia: I'm up on the sides of the cavern so the fears don't run me into the lava. The incoming fire damage from phase 2 is negligible.

Razorgore: I usually hit my group with a PoH after each volley so the 90 less damage I take gets overhealed anyway.

Vael: It's solid on here, but again, I cast a lot of prayers so the effect is largely unnoticed.

Firemaw and Chromaggus: As a priest, I'm out of line-of-sight of these bosses, even as an off-tank healer for Firemaw. I take little to no magic damage during these fights.

Nefarian: After the landing I take (which can't kill me)...infernal AOE damage during the warlock call?

Emeriss: It really shines here.

Lethon: Decent, but again PoH cancel's the effect (I can usually get by with a two prayers every three rotations).

Skeram: It's kind of useful on Skeram, but with mind-numbing poison and on-the-ball melee the AE has been a nonissue for us except for one or two casts after a split. We've only had one day in AQ thus far so I can't speak for the rest of the zone.

The problem is that in fights featuring lots of secondary target magic damage, if it's hitting me then it's usually hitting everyone so AOE heals are the natural counter. And if everyone else in my group took 1500 damage, but I only took 1350, I'm still going to cast a prayer. It's very rare that I, as a priest, get singled out for direct magic damage. I can't possibly see sacrificing Imp PoH for it. Like I said earlier, if we were stuck on a boss that made this a stand-out talent then I'd consider getting it, but it's simply not useful enough for a general purpose build.

Give someone this macro, then stand next to me on a cleave mob.

/target Slug
/cast Power Infusion

That was my initial reaction, but I'm not sure I won't play around with some others, too. It seems so very odd to suddenly have actual choices in the priest tree without automatically sacrificing something that feels "must have".

just wanted to say on a decent forum with good people that I'm very happy about these changes. seems like they put alot of thought into all of this and gave us alot of the things that we lacked and gave us alot more interesting spec chooices than we previously had. saw two blue posts mentioning pretty big buffs aswell which isn't listed in this post:

-inner fire 50% stronger in it's base form.
-power word shield scales 10% with +healing gear.

this is all good news allthough there will definitly be some "nerf shadowpriests" cries.

talent trees are one thing but i'd rather wait until i have access to the test realm. From what i've read i;ll be going spirit/discipline/holy, but having a couple of 31 discipline priests in a raid will send mage and warlock dps through the roof.

oh btw, been playing with the calculator alot. who wants to be on my wsg team? :D
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/classe...000000000000000

You'll still get focus-fired in group combat if you're facing intelligent groups, but 1v1 or in group fights that aren't against intelligent groups, yes, your survivability should have increased somewhat.

I've seen some Disc/Holy Priests pull off some amazing things even now when focus fired upon. With good gear, their HP/s is quite mindblowing and barring a bad chain of stuns, my Disc/Holy friends had some amazing PvP survivability. 1.10 should dramatically increase that (especially given the PW:S changes).

Honestly, I can see Priests finally topping Druids in terms of sheer durability after 1.10 hits (perhaps not as durable as Innervate Druids) given a good Disc/Holy or Holy/Disc spec.

Yea- If you're playing against a coordinated group, they don't even need to focus fire. They just have their Mages and Felhunters constantly CS/SL you. <_<

But interesting point, though. A Priest, technically, provides the larges group damage mitigation simply by existing? Haha. :laugh:

Depends on what you mean by durability. My druid can survive longer than similarly-geared priests, but they can do more healing while being focus-fired. I have to shift into bear to have any hope of weathering typical DPS from 2-3 well-geared opponents, and I'm obviously not doing much good for my teammate who needs healing if I'm just sitting there soaking up damage and stuns for a few seconds longer before I eat it.

Druids can heal and take a beating, they just can't do both simultaneously. Pallies and shamans can, the tradeoff being they aren't as good at each of those things individually. It's all still theorycraft at this point, but I think your speculation that priests are going to be significantly less squishy come 1.10 is reasonable. I don't play AV all that much, but I can see priests potentially being exceptional flag/node defenders in WSG and AB (not that they aren't pretty good already).

Yes, exactly. In PvP, the tanking role is taken over by priests, at least against smarter people/groups. However your typical PUG group is even worse than instance AI's and will attack warriors without the warrior having to sunder, taunt, etc.

You need to Fade more, obviously.

Yea, I don't have any delusions about being able to withstand focused fire from an enemy group forever, but +50% to inner fire combined with imp. inner fire, chance to resist interrupts, -10% spell damage taken and blessed recovery should be enough to buy a bit more time for my group to kill the enemy healers. And even when they do kill me, I still have 10 seconds to be useful to my group.

Really? I think that an extra 75-100 +dmg/healing from talents is awesome for both PVP and PVE. I don't know about you but I can easily get close to 400 Spirit buffed. As for Spiritual Healing, do you really play a priest?

+healing is incredibly useful for any class that has a HoT and you can never get too much of it. Same with Spiritual Healing.

Obviously AQ20 max-rank GHeal with +700 healing is almost always going to be overhealing, but that's a spell that we'll be using more 6 months from now. As you've recognized, +healing makes your lower rank heals much more efficient, and that is mana efficiency right there.

http://wow.allakhazam.com/profile.html?341161

Yes I play a priest, only thing that's changed since the profile was updated is +30 healing to gloves.

As for HoT's, yes I know how effective +healing is with HoT spells, mine ticks for 355~. (Can't wait to get the next rank of it).

Spiritual Healing - 30 Points into Holy, huge benefit, at the cost of losing alot of Discipline talents. (Most notably Silent Resolve, aka the new Sublety talent, unfortunately this is a requirement for me, as my guilds healers are somewhat unreliable, so I end up having to heal for 25% more than majority of the other priests.)

Spiritual Guidance - Good alternative to Spiritual Healing, scales well with gear progression and buffs. (50% of the talent is useless to me, as I don't have a single use for +dmg. Raid buffed with ~440 spirit I'll gain a flat +110 healing from this talent, which is pretty nice for a scaling 5 point talent)

Holy Nova - Sounds like a nice change, no cooldown, no threat, instant cast. My only question is what % effectivness does it get from +healing. I've heard 7%, and 15%, never anything concrete. Also, I'd have to see the base numbers on the spell at max rank ect. (I don't see this spell being remotely useful without Mental Agility)

Prayer of Healing - -20% Mana cost is huge, especially with the new rank. ~1400 hp per player. For 850 mana(with talents). About 7000 Total HP, without crits. For progression and learning, I'd say this is something to good to pass up. Espeically from what I saw on Princess Huhuran last night >_< 2 attempts, both just hectic.

Anyways like I said, with the mana efficiency Blizzard is already adding for Greater Heal / Heal, and the additional Mana Efficiency from talents. The increased casting time (increasing both regen time, and greatly increasing bonus from +healing) I'm confident that I can sacrifice 10% +healing, take a noticable hit on my Renew, and maintain all of the discipline talents that increase my survivability, and still come out on top of where I was pre-patch. Which fortunately was already strong enough, not sure the reason behind buffing priests, I think they should have put this focus into Rogues and Mages personally.


Also as for max rank gheal, Yeah, it probably won't see much use untill Naxramas(sp) pending their implementations their. I'm more excited to see what Heal Rank 2 changes are :)

It was a rhetorical question since I can read your profile. If you knew how effective +healing is to your Renews and 8/8 Gheals, you would know that 400+ tick Renews with 221 Gheal Renews is ~620 health per 3 seconds. I don't know about you but I want that for both PVP and PVE. Not to mention the fact that once I pop my Hibernation Crystal, those two shoot up to 471 and then 291 from Gheal. Hmmm, ~760 health every 3 seconds, I don't know if I want that at all for PVP to survive.

I can also live with the extra mitigation on Inner Fire without having to go past Mental Agility to stay alive long enough to use most of my mana in PVP and THEN die and rinse and repeat.

As for you saying Priests are already strong enough? Hahhahaha, when we can't do shit when focus fired, I think it's time for a revamp.

Am I the only one who thinks that the argument "I can't do anything if I get focus fired" is a bit stupid? If it's enough focus fire that it'll actually take a priest like you down, its enough focus fire that no one can do anything about it effectively, aside from a paladin. A shaman or druid NS healing himself will buy him a few seconds at best, a druid going bear form will again only buy him a limited amount of time and take him out of the picture as a healer.

Martyrdom / Focused casting.

Also being on a PvP server a Dmg mitigation set would be in order. Priests can easily get 40% dmg reduction with inner fire, toss on MoTW, for another added boost, then 10% from the AV buff.

Priests are as much gear dependant as any other class, while I won't disagree that 8/8 trans gheal will be even more appealing post patch it still doesn't change the fact that after 4 or however many months of BWL we still haven't seen transendence boots(not even once). So no one in my guild has the complete set :(

I will let it be noted however, as I don't have 8/8 trans, I didn't even think about the added renew that's attatched to Gheal. 2.5 second casting will be very nice. My main heal will still (pending spell changes) be heal rank 2, but gheal rank 1 every now and again to keep the renew refreshed would be very nice. As for Hibernation crystal, it's nice, but i'd still take my Royal Seal / Rejuvenating Gem combo (don't have the gem yet unfortunately) over that. Like 99 passive +healing, with 14 mp/5s from trinket slots alone is a little to much to pass up imo.

Believe his name is Vhell from nurfed, check his profile out if you want to know how to survive in PvP, most of my armor stuff is bank'd but I can get ~2900 with inner fire in it's current form. Which is over 30% dmg reduction, post patch add in 10% from spell warding, the buffed inner fire, ~35% dmg reduction, 4.6k hp, and blessed recovery.... Priests will be unstoppable, even more so then before :P They're just making it more noob friendly, so retards in the blue pvp set can't whine anymore.