Shan

It makes no sense to add even more talents that boost single target throughput and efficiency (imp. holy conc., test of faith, serendipity) when there is a concern that holy priest single target healing could be too good.

 

constantius

TBH, Empowered Healing *was* too powerful. Not by a lot, but by a little. And the sole reason is that they forgot to make it be effected by the downranking penalty.

If instead it was Downrank_Coefficient * 0.20 * Healing ... no problem. Balanced talent.

Right now, it's not, so Greater Heal:1 gains a disproportionate amount of healing, and becomes our most efficient nuke heal by a huge margin. I mean ... it's nice healing for 3600 for 314 mana (11.5 HpM) ... but it's not reasonable that a level 40 spell be that good. It's the same issue we had at the end of Vanilla with Heal (Rank 3).

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Starfire

That's the Blizzard way. What? Devout has more spirit than Transcendence? Let's nerf Devout.

The real question is, do multiple Devs read the priest forum? Or did Koraa draw the proverbial short-stick?

And, more importantly to this thread, assuming Empowered Healing is an intended nerf, how does that change things with Discipline vs. Holy on a purely Greater Heal perspective?



I don't know about you, but the difference is, I keep finding myself having to use higher ranks for anything in Sunwell. So it's not the same. Sure, I can go to BT and use rank 1 for almost every fight. I use it pretty frequently for Illidan himself. But in Sunwell, even mixing rank 1's with other ranks, I am more frequently throwing Rank 7s than 1s.

I don't ever remember needing to use the HPS in Naxxramas. Eitherway, didn't they massively penalize downranking in Beta so this is moot? (Still no key).

 

Tainter

Blizzard was talking about making all spells scale by "spell power" only. To compensate for the obvious lowering of healing they wanted to increase base healing values of spells. Are the base healing values of spells higher in beta than in current live?

If healing scales purely on the unmodified spell power (rather than healing power being 1.88 times spell power or whatever the number was) then healers wouldn't scale as well as they currently do. The impact of gear on output will be smaller and talents and base abilities will carry more significance.

If I did PvE I would be concerned about that. From a PvP point of view though the gap between PvP and PvE gear, in terms of healing output, will narrow because the raw spell power difference will be smaller than the current +healing difference.

Dang, I want a Beta account to test stuff.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

Kortar

There's a third possibility: a developer told one of the database guys to change Empowered Healing by a factor of 2, and the database guy mistakenly divided rather than multiplied.

Personally, I find this by far the most likely explanation. There really isn't any balance justification for doubling the empowerment of Healing Touch but halving that of the various Priest direct heals.

 

Ana

This is my third alpha/beta for WoW and I have to say that the implementation of the talents this time around is just shoddy. I don't know if they are busy with DK's or what, but while the zones are coming out relatively bug free, the talents aren't. You can't even test some of the talents because they simply don't work. And they haven't worked since beta was released. We've had at least 2 (maybe 3) patches and serendipity still doesn't work. Not that it doesn't work correctly, but that it flat out doesn't function.

This just shocks me because of the stage of beta we are in. I know a lot of people are saying oh don't worry, its early beta. But it is NOT early beta. They are already sending out the opt-in beta invites. They are already talking about things they will patch in (including talents) because it wont make the ship date. The zones are farther along in this beta then they were much closer to release in the last. And we can't even test all of our talents. To make it worse, we are playing guessing games about whether things are just flat out errors or if they are intended. We should not have to be guessing about their intent!

The level of communication has ranged from ignorant and vaguely insulting to nonexistent. I'm not even expecting that they will instantly fix the bugs (although I would hope that they would in time for us to actually provide some decent testing). They could at least post and say "we know emp healing is broken, we are working on it." Or they could tell us why it was changed if that is their intent. They have totally ignored our inner fire threads, although there have been numerous both in alpha and beta. I know that they are busy, but the posts in other class threads is simply of higher quality and provides a lot more information and explanation.

 

Voljun

Looks like the Empowered Healing change wasn't changed correctly from what Koraa just posted.
WoW Forums -> Empowered Healing: Test & Numbers

 

constantius

One fix down; Divine Spirit probably a lost cause. I guess the next thing is to try to write up some real math that will support why Inner Fire needs a buff. Xi- decided to scream at me in the BB when I tried to explain that Improved Inner Fire sucks as a talent, so I'm just going to move to the Beta forums and carefully explain my math there. Maybe someone will listen.

(as an aside, Imp IF, in pvp, against a rogue or warrior with 1500 ArPen, is worth a whopping 2% mitigation. When IF is up. For 3 talents points. And we've dropped over 12% physical mitigation from Vanilla -> now, not even factoring in ArPen gear. There are literally rogues who have more ArPen than Imp IF gives ... that's a little ludicrous.)

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Starfire

We can take solace in knowing that when we have 0 armor they're wasting their item budget on useless ArP?

Maybe that was his hidden point >.>

 

constantius

I do like how all the people saying Inner Fire is fine are rogues & warriors, precisely the ones who hit the hardest against priests in pvp. And the ones who stack ArPen to effectively negate a 3-point talented buff, that happens to be purgeable and removable through the charge system.

Anyway, I posted WoW Forums -> Inner Fire: Where do you want it to go?. I'm not necessarily advocating massive buffs to Inner Fire ... just some coherent design and clear implementation. If that means removing it entirely as Armor, so we basically go in naked but with a Physical school buff that grants 120 spellpower ... heyo, let it happen. They'll have to modify the other talents to give us more mitigation to balance it out, and that's fine by me, because they'll actually have to think about priests for a little while.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

constantius

And I got a response within a half hour!!

WOOOO.

Also, it appears Koraa is Santa Claus today:
along with

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

• Aeverius

Nifty, rebuffing Inner Fire is a skill! That explains a lot. But, you know, if we didn't have to keep rebuffing it all the time, maybe the mana cost being higher wouldn't matter? Hm.

Interesting though, it's nice that there will be some new data to play with soon. Hopefully the new stuff comes across without any obvious bugs and everyone in Beta can worry about balancing and scaling issues more so than bugfixes.

[e] Realized I didn't properly attribute the quote at the beginning of the post: Beta forums thread.

Improved Lay on Hands is really fucking good:

 

tritium4ever

I still think it's a bit silly that the other two cloth wearing classes now have "armor" self buffs that are non-dispellable, yet we're still stuck with an Inner Fire that can be removed by 6 of 10 classes via dispel mechanics (Dispel, Purge, Shield Slam, Devour Magic, Arcane Shot, and Spellsteal), or in 20 or so seconds of PvP combat against physical DPS classes. The 10 minute duration (v.s. 30 minute duration of all mage and warlock self buffs) just adds insult to injury.

Oh and the deep disc tree is still a mess, but that's another story altogether.

That's apples to oranges. A warrior will know exactly when his shout is going to drop off. Inner Fire can be purged at any time, and will drop off extremely quickly regardless if there's melee on the priest. I don't know about you guys, but when I'm under attack in arenas, I usually can't spare the global cooldown to put up IF again, especially since I know I'll have to refresh it in 20 seconds anyway because of the stupid charges.

 

constantius

The main issue I have with his comparison is that shouts last for ... 2 minutes. One cast, 2 minutes, non-purgeable. Static benefit. If Inner Fire was a 2-minute duration physical buff ... HELLO. It would be powerful then. Probably too powerful.

I do remain worried about Wrath, though, simply because having a spellpower (read: healing) armor that can be purged is just dumb. It's the same as Fel Armor being purgeable from warlocks -- it was dumb. It's fundamental to their design; it was made physical, and now things are kosher.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Sinndir

I just want to say thank you to those in Beta, it is very important to make these steps early. Also lets keep giving the Beta testers feedback (since we cannot post on the forums).

Nid, Ana, and others. For the Inner Fire dilemma please have them loot at the armors vs. each other.

Inner Fire - 2440 Armor, 120 Spell Power - 10 minute (but 20 charges) - Magic
Demon Armor - 950 Armor, +20% healing done to them - 30 minutes - Physical
Fel Armor - 180 Spell Power plus 30% of Spirit to Spell Power, 30% mana regen while casting - 30 minutes - Physical
Ice Armor - 930 Armor, 40 Frost Resist, Move & Attack speed slow - 30 minutes - Physical
Mage Armor - 40 Resist to all, 30% mana regen while casting, 50% duration on magic effects - 30 minutes - Physical
Molten Armor - 170 Fire Damage Shield, +3% spell crit, -5% chance to be crit - 30 minutes - Physical

Though of course we would rather have the regen, or even more spirit to spell power percentage that would not be fair. I think if they were to just mimic the other abilities and remove the charges and place to 30 minutes with a physical property instead of a magic one we would be finished. The ability would be complete, no need for anymore buffs as we have 2.5x as much armor as Demon and ice armor, less spell power than Fel Armor, but more than the others.

I just see no need for the 10 minute duration, combined with the charges and of magic property.

Thanks guys, keep up the good work(testing).

 

constantius

They have stated they don't want armors to be cookie-cutter; we're never getting Fel Armor. Everyone wants it, but it's a warlock buff which theoretically might keep them competitive in Wrath, since their talents are otherwise a mess.

I'd settle (at this point) for physical, 20 charges, 30 minute duration. The main issue in PvP is that not only can rogue/warrior/ret/hunter remove it actively, but their healer can (for 2/4 cases) remove it as well, and instantly. It doesn't even really have dispel resist, aside from Silent Resolve. There's a balance somewhere ... here's hoping they find it.

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

Sinndir

Yep I don't mind charges (since I'm not a big PvP'er) but I was just suggesting that for those who do PvP rigorously. 30 minutes is a must, since it has charges there is no reason for the short time.

 

Starfire

I think 30 minutes duration is a fair olive branch... For the PVE uses. Although, lets be honest here... If they don't, we'll just go back to using mods like we did for the 3 minute version.

 

Ana

I still think many of our inner fire woes are because they are trying to cram too much into a single armor buff instead of letting us choose between 2: one that is armor and one that is more pve/spellpower friendly. I have a mage alt and I never use ice armor in pve. I use molten or mage depending on if my mana is sucking (generally molten). If we had a choice between 2 armors (one w/ armor and one w/out) they wouldn't have to keep playing games with the balancing issues. Although the charges are still ridiculous regardless of the armor buff.

 

Shan

There is another aspect of Inner Fire which hasn't been mentioned, in my opinion one if not the most frustrating one, and that is opportunity cost.

When being hit in PvP, Inner Fire just isn't worth recasting since there better options to spend a global cooldown on. Armor penetration just makes it worse.

In my opinion, the best thing would be a percentage reduction to physical damage taken, a 1-2 sec cooldown between charges charges lost and undispellable. Recasting is okay as long as you can rely on Inner Fire (currently you can't).

 

Brinas

I'm not sure on the duration, but Inner Fire used to be a short duration buff like you suggest. It sucked to constantly refresh the thing, although I guess it would be nice for arena. People complained about it so much that they increased it to 10 minutes but gave it charges.

Personally I think it should have charges in the same fashion that shamans have charges, i.e. remove one charge every 3-5 seconds of being attacked. That way it would have the same duration whether you're being hit by 30 lvl 1 mobs, 1 dw rogue, or 1 4-second swing timer warrior.

Although your 30 minute duration idea is nice, I still think they need to make it so that we are not more vulnerable to really fast hits than we are to big slow hits.

Since there were all the complaints about Emp healing, I just wanted to point out that the devs have stated multiple times that right now they are not focusing on numbers. They are testing talent functionality, and will focus on number crunching in a later phase.

 

Ana

Well no. First of all emp healing is an old talent not a new one. Secondly, they were referring to mana costs primarily and damage/healing amounts of NEW talents. Lastly, Voljun just posted the blue response a few posts above stating that it was an error.

 

Brinas