Discipline and Holy WotLK Talent Preview and discussion. - Page 31

Kortar · 08/21/08, 2:32 PM

Originally Posted by bengali

Did you mean to say Spiritual Healing?

Yes, I meant to say Spiritual Healing - Spiritual Guidance (Spirit -> Spellpower) does indeed affect PW:S in the same way it affects all spells that make use of spellpower.

Tainter · 08/21/08, 2:38 PM

Originally Posted by Kamakaze

Yes PWS applies the "healing" much quicker than any other spell but that only really matters on mages AoEing or reacting to big damage spikes, or even in PvP. Most of the time you want a steady HPS with decent mana efficiency.

PW:S doesn't only have the highest HpS it also is the most mana efficient heal of all, it generates mana. And besides that it can't overheal. In the "worst" case of the target not taking enough damage the shield increases the targets effective health by a huge chunk.

It really is an all-round awesome spell.

constantius · 08/21/08, 2:58 PM

It would be an awesome spell if:
a) it didn't have a 4 second cooldown
b) it didn't have a 15 second 'Weakened Soul' effect
c) if it was dispelled, it would heal the person it was on for half the remaining absorption

Not necessary all 3, but at least some modifications. If it's supposed to be so useful to Disc priests, it needs to not have a 4 second internal cooldown on top of the 15 second WS effect.

Ellyh · 08/21/08, 5:09 PM

The problem with borrowed time is that it makes the spell a decent, not great Oh Shit spell. The problem is that because of how Rapture interacts with it you are an idiot not to be casting it every time the cooldown is up. This makes the cast time reduction close to pointless as we have already agreed that a disc priest won't be spamming heals 100% of the time, and if it's part of a rotation it's not available in an emergency.

Look at it this way with this talent. It increases PWS power but is only 40% as efficient at that as points in T2 of the tree. It increases mana regen by interacting with Rapture but has only ~1/7th the power of a point in meditation. It speeds up your casting rotation a small amount. lets be generous and say it saves 1 second every 15 second cycle or ~6% haste overall. this is about 1% haste per talent point. (these numbers assume 2 shields every rotation) It does a lot of little things but all of them much worse than dedicated talents and as a result is week overall. I've been looking at it and if penance doesn't bring anything to the table you would probably get as good a result with a spec similar to this one. In my experience you generally have about 70% of your spellpower as your buffed spirit value so at 2k spellpower you will have ~1400 spirit or an extra 350 spellpower added to every single spell you cast. This gives a boost to PWS of 280 which is a loss of ~120 compared to borrowed time and it adds over 600 to the amount that your GH will land for! Now for me penance will need to be amazing for me to want to pass up on this build. Borrowed time certainly won't justify the loss.

*edit* need more coffee

Crosshairs · 08/21/08, 7:19 PM

The major benefits to Disc is the preventative healing. The major down side to rage generation is preventative healing. I was trying to look into a 10 man set up, and I have a hard time putting in myself as a Disc priest if some of my major tools create a threat cap.

Prima · 08/21/08, 7:36 PM

I really think threat will be a non-issue for any decent tank out there. They are dumbing down the gear for tanking so that there are really no choices for tanking, which means no one can make the wrong one. Then they are integrating huge threat bonus' into the tanking trees and adding a very...vague...threat (mod) that only tells you whether you are high or low. Basically, it will be hard for tanks to mess up and blizz only wants threat to be an issue on the fights they choose.

While I may be completely wrong don't get mad at me yet because I have a question: Is anyone else considering at all getting reflective shield for a 10 man spec? Some people were referring to huge PWS numbers earlier in the thread, and if they truly are going to be 4k shields, 50% of that every 15 seconds (130 dps) is nothing to sneeze at for a spell you are casting anyway.

The spec I was considering was:

This one
I consider Inspiration a necessary tank healing talent, but that may change in wotlk, so I really didn't have enough points for 5/5 which dimishes this idea somewhat. All I really sacrificed was the regen of improved healing or mental agility, which I don't expect will be an issue if regen stays the same as it is now (It is impossible for me to go oom tank healing as disc even today). Anyone else feel that venturing here for the added dps may be worth it?

EDIT: I assumed the threat mod was so vague because they didn't expect dpsers to be riding the tanks threat as hard as they do today, however this could be wrong.

uh...ok · 08/21/08, 8:10 PM

Originally Posted by Caligula

I believe it takes the thinking out of the game because it allows for spamming of heals. Spamming of anything is not skill based. It can be done with a mousewheel scroll or a G15 set to auto. You snipped out the context of my post. Sure, there are amazing healers that already use every spell they have to it's maximum potential on every fight. I find those healers to be few and far between. Down ranking promotes brainless activity, even if you use it as a cheap Flash Heal with a longer cast time. This creates another problem in that they have to balance mana regen and gear around that unintended use of the spells. Any way you look at it, the way WoW is designed down ranking heals isn't good for the game.

As for having to take points in the Holy tree as Disc. Blues have publicly stated that this is intended. They want every class to have a good reason to dabble in multiple trees rather than putting every single point they have into one. There isn't a class or spec in the game that is absolved of this.

I fail to understand why you think that the existence of bad players who mindlessly spam a downranked heal implies that the downranking mechanic itself takes thinking out of the game. Those players are not healing correctly. They are not fulfilling the potential that their class has to offer in a raid. Even though they may never run out of mana doing what they're doing, they certainly aren't doing their jobs and wouldn't get a raid spot in any respectable end-game guild that cares about what its healers are doing. Should we remove Flash Heal from the game because plenty of bad priests spam Flash Heal? Does CoH deserve a cooldown because some people spam CoH mindlessly regardless of the situation?

It's also more a problem with encounter design than class design. It's not the fault of the class that certain encounter requires them to spam one spell or another (hi Brutallus and Felmyst). But even in these encounters, nobody's role can be done with "a mousewheel scroll or a G15 set to auto". It's also not the fault of the class that certain people don't play it correctly, nor is it the fault of a spell if people can't learn to use it in the right context. And as others have already mentioned: how is forcing everyone to spam a single, max rank of a spell solving the alleged problem in any way whatsoever?

And for the sake of argument, let's pretend for a moment that downranking didn't exist in the current game. And as a result a lot of people are spamming Heal 4 mindlessly because that way they won't ever run out of mana. Does that mean the existence of Heal takes thinking out of the game? No - all it suggests is that there are a lot of players out there who would rather spam a single button and sit with a full mana bar than actually think about what they're doing. It's one thing to say that downranking is broken because an intermediate spell you get while leveling should not become a staple heal in the end-game. It's an entirely different thing to try to claim that downranking promotes bad play. The only thing promoting bad play is the fact that some guilds let their healers get away with not doing their jobs.

There are a good handful of classes and specs that pretty much do throw all their points into one tree. PvE Resto Druid is the one that comes to mind primarily - both in TBC and in WotLK with the way their talents are shaping up. Resto Shaman will likely be doing the same thing. There's also a fundamental difference between "dabbling" in trees to pick up useful abilities with leftover points vs. basically being required to go a certain number of points down a side tree in order to pick up some essential talent or another, at the cost of not being able to have some otherwise useful abilities in your main tree.

• Aeverius · 08/21/08, 8:20 PM

Originally Posted by Prima

I really think threat will be a non-issue for any decent tank out there. They are dumbing down the gear for tanking so that there are really no choices for tanking, which means no one can make the wrong one. Then they are integrating huge threat bonus' into the tanking trees and adding a very...vague...threat (mod) that only tells you whether you are high or low. Basically, it will be hard for tanks to mess up and blizz only wants threat to be an issue on the fights they choose.

You are making a number of sweeping generalizations and ill-advised assumptions here. I'm assuming this is in response to the "PW:S gimps rage generation (and also Paladin tank mana regen, but that's a little different)" problem, and the contention that tanks may not see enough throughput in rage/mana-to-threat, and thus Disc may cause threat issues.

A) Your comment on gear suggests that differences in tank threat are caused by some tanks making bad gear choices. This can happen, but I'd feel confident in saying that the discussion centers around competent tanks, geared and talented for their role in raids/instances. If you assume a bad tank to begin with, it makes little difference what a healer does or doesn't do.

B) The threat bonuses were all removed from tanking talent trees and added into base abilities. For instance, Defiance used to increase threat by 15% in Defensive Stance; the base version of Defensive Stance now adds 15% more threat than it used to, and Defiance has been removed. This isn't a buff to tanks in general, only to tanks who aren't actually talented for tanking (Fury Warriors, Ret Paladins, whatever). Your Prot Paladin today will have the exact same threat modifiers the day WotLK goes live.

C) No idea what the threat display has to do with anything. The addition of a Blizzard threat meter is more likely to imply that they expect us to be concerned with and monitor threat than the opposite.

D) Rage/mana throughput affects the amount of threat a tank produces; this is not in question. The question is "How much will Disc abilities affect this throughput?" and that's not something that's definitely answerable right now. I lean toward "Probably not all that much on progression content," but that's an impression and not the result of calculations. Until you know what incoming damage will look like (and a host of other things), it's probably not worth trying to ascertain with math.

I think the question of Reflective Shield is one of "What is my role, and is this the best use of my talent points to fulfill that role?" Trading Improved Healing for Reflective Shield just isn't something I'd do, because it gimps my primary mission (more mana spent on heals means I either have to gear/gem for regen more so than otherwise, which means other stats take a hit) in favor of a less important mission (raid DPS simply isn't a healer's job). You can pull points from elsewhere to fund it, of course, I only used Improved Healing because that's what you dropped- but I don't believe that any points could be better spent on Reflective Shield than whatever they're currently allocated for.

◊ s4dfish · 08/21/08, 10:49 PM

Glyph of Power Word: Shield - Your Power Word: Shield also heals the target for 20% of the absorption amount.

Am I obtuse and missed this the first time around?

Caligula · 08/21/08, 11:23 PM

Originally Posted by uh...ok

I fail to understand why you think that the existence of bad players who mindlessly spam a downranked heal implies that the downranking mechanic itself takes thinking out of the game. Those players are not healing correctly. They are not fulfilling the potential that their class has to offer in a raid. Even though they may never run out of mana doing what they're doing, they certainly aren't doing their jobs and wouldn't get a raid spot in any respectable end-game guild that cares about what its healers are doing. Should we remove Flash Heal from the game because plenty of bad priests spam Flash Heal? Does CoH deserve a cooldown because some people spam CoH mindlessly regardless of the situation?

It's also more a problem with encounter design than class design. It's not the fault of the class that certain encounter requires them to spam one spell or another (hi Brutallus and Felmyst). But even in these encounters, nobody's role can be done with "a mousewheel scroll or a G15 set to auto". It's also not the fault of the class that certain people don't play it correctly, nor is it the fault of a spell if people can't learn to use it in the right context. And as others have already mentioned: how is forcing everyone to spam a single, max rank of a spell solving the alleged problem in any way whatsoever?

And for the sake of argument, let's pretend for a moment that downranking didn't exist in the current game. And as a result a lot of people are spamming Heal 4 mindlessly because that way they won't ever run out of mana. Does that mean the existence of Heal takes thinking out of the game? No - all it suggests is that there are a lot of players out there who would rather spam a single button and sit with a full mana bar than actually think about what they're doing. It's one thing to say that downranking is broken because an intermediate spell you get while leveling should not become a staple heal in the end-game. It's an entirely different thing to try to claim that downranking promotes bad play. The only thing promoting bad play is the fact that some guilds let their healers get away with not doing their jobs.

There are a good handful of classes and specs that pretty much do throw all their points into one tree. PvE Resto Druid is the one that comes to mind primarily - both in TBC and in WotLK with the way their talents are shaping up. Resto Shaman will likely be doing the same thing. There's also a fundamental difference between "dabbling" in trees to pick up useful abilities with leftover points vs. basically being required to go a certain number of points down a side tree in order to pick up some essential talent or another, at the cost of not being able to have some otherwise useful abilities in your main tree.

A good handful is one or maybe two specs in high end raiding situations? Out of 27, soon to be 30 talent trees? This still does not change the fact that Blizzard has stated they do not want people to put all of their talent points into a single tree.

In any case, it was precisely my point that the down ranking of heals has led to the design of encounters where the use of that tactic is encouraged--if not required. In Molten Core, and BWL even, the encounters were perfectly healable without the necessity to down rank. I know my days spent their involved cast-canceling and healing/regen rotations. There wasn't even enough + healing on gear to be able to use anything but max ranks. Now we look at Brutallus, in which if you are not landing a (usually down ranked) heal on the tank at 1s intervals, you are probably going to wipe. This is why I feel down ranking promotes poor play. Perhaps you are different in that you consider this more skillful. If so, perhaps we need to agree to disagree.

With the addition of the new heals and utility spells coming in WotlK, I certainly wont miss encounters and classes being balanced around down ranking.

• Aeverius · 08/21/08, 11:31 PM

Originally Posted by s4dfish

Am I obtuse and missed this the first time around?

If you did, so did I. Going by this post and a quick search, it looks like this is the first mention of it, so I'd say nice catch on that.

It's an interesting glyph, definitely worth taking. Makes shielding a tank look a lot better, especially considering that they're almost guaranteed to take hits big enough to get the full value of the heal.

Shan · 08/21/08, 11:39 PM

Caligula,

I can agree that the mana efficiency gained from downranking is too much (because too much bonus healing is applied to lower spell ranks), but you're also missing the other aspect, that downranking encourages decision making, flexibility and adaptation.

I don't mind at all if mana per point healed of my downranked spells is changed to be the same as that of my max rank spells, but I will miss being able to match health deficits. Yes, doing so will increase my efficiency but not because of a flaw in a formula but simply because of skill as player. This should be encouraged and even required in a raid setting.

glowacks · 08/21/08, 11:54 PM

It takes 35 points to get to Rapture (which 35 to take I will not discuss), and there are 18 non-Pain Suppression points available beyond that point, all of which are considered extremely useful. With the remaining 18 points in Holy for Improved Healing, do you just skip Pain Suppression? Personally I see it much more as PvP tool, but it certainly can have a lot of PvE uses. The way the talents are set up though makes it much like Holy Nova is now: potentially useful, but not to the point I want to actually spend a talent point in it. Is it really all that useful in raids? I can't come up with situations myself where I'd really want to spend the GCD on it over PWS.

Zaroua · 08/22/08, 12:13 AM

Originally Posted by glowacks

It takes 35 points to get to Rapture (which 35 to take I will not discuss), and there are 18 non-Pain Suppression points available beyond that point, all of which are considered extremely useful. With the remaining 18 points in Holy for Improved Healing, do you just skip Pain Suppression? Personally I see it much more as PvP tool, but it certainly can have a lot of PvE uses. The way the talents are set up though makes it much like Holy Nova is now: potentially useful, but not to the point I want to actually spend a talent point in it. Is it really all that useful in raids? I can't come up with situations myself where I'd really want to spend the GCD on it over PWS.

Random secondary high damage dots (Burn) or to help reduce your top DPSers' threat. If the boss has a 10% Enrage type ability, then PS would be great to use on the tank if his threat is high enough. Also good for when the tank if stunned and is just a nice tool to have if the situation calls for it. Plus it has great out-of-raid utility for dailies, especially on a PvP server. I'd say it's a well spent 1 point even in a min-max build even if it's only for the threat component, your top DPS without a threat dump will love you for it.

Caligula · 08/22/08, 12:26 AM

Originally Posted by Shan

Caligula,

I can agree that the mana efficiency gained from downranking is too much (because too much bonus healing is applied to lower spell ranks), but you're also missing the other aspect, that downranking encourages decision making, flexibility and adaptation.

I don't mind at all if mana per point healed of my downranked spells is changed to be the same as that of my max rank spells, but I will miss being able to match health deficits. Yes, doing so will increase my efficiency but not because of a flaw in a formula but simply because of skill as player. This should be encouraged and even required in a raid setting.

I'm not disagreeing with any of that. I down rank. I always have at least 2 or 3 ranks of Greater Heal on my bars at all times. It would be silly not to. That doesn't change the fact that every time I use a Rank 4 or 1, I think of how flawed that model is in it's entirety.

Maybe this will give people looking for that mid-range heal some hope?

WoW Forums -> [Suggestion] Bring Back Heal!

Raglu · 08/22/08, 3:40 AM

Originally Posted by constantius

It would be an awesome spell if:
a) it didn't have a 4 second cooldown
b) it didn't have a 15 second 'Weakened Soul' effect
c) if it was dispelled, it would heal the person it was on for half the remaining absorption

Not necessary all 3, but at least some modifications. If it's supposed to be so useful to Disc priests, it needs to not have a 4 second internal cooldown on top of the 15 second WS effect.

The Weakened Soul effect is a very good limiter effect on the spell, and should definitely stay. Imagine Power Word: Shield in its current state if you could keep re-spamming it on yourself every four seconds, reflecting 50% of the damage taken, restoring mana every cast, and having time during those 4 seconds to cast other things.

You wouldn't die.

The only way you could die is a holy-school lockout, and it'd still be hard to kill a Discipline Priest even if their holy spells were out for merely 8 seconds at max.

In addition, Weakened Soul makes it more appealing as a "heal" to throw around the raid as a raid healer, because there is no cost to you other than the global cooldown, and no overheal. Without Weakened Soul, it would be encouraged to use all your global cooldowns specifically on shielding the tank.

Perhaps Borrowed Time should affect the 4-second cooldown, but Weakened Soul is PW:S's balancing factor.

Kamakaze · 08/22/08, 6:11 AM

Originally Posted by Kortar

Actually, the Holy Priest wouldn't intermix PW:S because their PW:S would be too weak. For a Discipline Priest, it's almost certain that a fully spec'd PW:S would be significantly higher throughput than Greater Heal - on the order of 50% greater throughput. The numbers I used were merely a demonstration of the mathematical principles involved, not representative of actual game design.

Spiritual Guidance has never - and does not currently in Live - affect Power Word: Shield. Did a recent beta change I missed occur?

And while a Holy Priest can certainly muster greater throughput, that's not the point. The point is that for a Discipline Priest, interleaving PW:S with conventional heals ramps up their throughput more than not interleaving it.

You're also missing the fact that while a Holy Priest will generate greater single target throughput, they won't do so predictably. This is a rather significant element in multi-healer environments for a tank healer.

As I pointed out, a holy priests PW:S is about 3% less effective than a fully talented Discipline priest PW:S. Yes the talents add that little. The 3% can vary based on how much spirit/healing a player has, but I would guess it would eventually reach about 5-6% since spellpower is usually higher than spirit values.

Spiritual Guidance (the 25% of spirit to +spellpower) will give over 50% of the effect that Borrowed Time gives to PW:S, but also improves all damage and healing spells a priest has. So in exchange for a 3-6% weaker PW:S, they gain a large improvement to all damage and healing spells instead.

Most of the benefits Discipline brings to PW:S are NOT throughput based but merely improve the efficiency and add additional effects to PW:S. The HPS of a holy priest using PW:S is only slightly less than a Discipline priest because of the huge improvements to the HPS of all healing spells instead of just ONE.

Also a holy priests throughput is much higher and more constant than a discipline priest who is relying on a 15 second cooldown spell AND critical hits.

firebird · 08/22/08, 6:11 AM

If PW:S don't have Weakened Soul debuff and you can spam it on yourself every 4 seconds, it will equivalent to about 500-510 HPS at lvl 70 with 2500 healing. On the other side, 3x LB stacks produce higher HPS (HPS 850 HPS at 2500 healing) than it with less casts and almost no mana cost (LB mana cost is laughable) and on top of this not dispelable, so I don't think it will be something that we never seen.

PS: the claculations are rough but are quite close to the real numbers.

Kamakaze · 08/22/08, 6:13 AM

Originally Posted by Raglu

The Weakened Soul effect is a very good limiter effect on the spell, and should definitely stay. Imagine Power Word: Shield in its current state if you could keep re-spamming it on yourself every four seconds, reflecting 50% of the damage taken, restoring mana every cast, and having time during those 4 seconds to cast other things.

You wouldn't die.

The only way you could die is a holy-school lockout, and it'd still be hard to kill a Discipline Priest even if their holy spells were out for merely 8 seconds at max.

In addition, Weakened Soul makes it more appealing as a "heal" to throw around the raid as a raid healer, because there is no cost to you other than the global cooldown, and no overheal. Without Weakened Soul, it would be encouraged to use all your global cooldowns specifically on shielding the tank.

Perhaps Borrowed Time should affect the 4-second cooldown, but Weakened Soul is PW:S's balancing factor.

I dont think they are suggesting removing the weakend soul, but just reducing the weakend soul through talents, and/or the 4 second cooldown.

Yes it needs weakend soul to prevent spamming, yes a Disicpline priests needs something to improve how often they can cast PW:S otherwise 13 (or 18) talent points are totally wasted.

uh...ok · 08/22/08, 6:16 AM

Originally Posted by Caligula

A good handful is one or maybe two specs in high end raiding situations? Out of 27, soon to be 30 talent trees? This still does not change the fact that Blizzard has stated they do not want people to put all of their talent points into a single tree.

These aren't high end raiding specs at all. They're specs that are good for 5 man, heroics, and raiding at all levels, and even PvP to a certain degree. If we want to dig down to specifics, I can name a few more currently viable PvP/PvE specs, such as 61 point Frost Mages, 50+point ferals, 48 point pallies, and so on. Sure, these talent trees are changing in WotLK, but Feral druids will still have little reason to invest any points outside of their main tree, and with Blizz's attempts to make each Mage tree unique, I can easily foresee some 60+ point mages too.

It's certainly not arguable that Blizzard has stated that they don't want people to put all their points in a single tree... but they have stated many things in the past that rarely if ever got followed through upon. And it's hard to believe that the talent trees for the aforementioned classes will change very drastically between now and 3.0, so clearly there are still some classes where this doesn't hold true at all.

And, Blizzard's intentions aside, it's a rather silly mentality to try to force people out of whatever main tree they're trying to spec into anyway. There are two ways of doing this:
- fill up the main tree with worthless talents that nobody in their right mind would ever take (hai2u Imp Inner Fire)
- create 1 or 2 indispensable talents in some other tree, and place it just deep enough so that you have to invest a non-trivial amount of points to get there - points that would have otherwise bolstered the focus of your main tree

Calling this "choice" is merely a euphemism for bad design. It was what they used to justify the placement of DS/IDS (among other reasons) - I didn't buy it then and I don't buy it now.