PSGarak

Hm... take a look at Spirit Link in the shaman restoration tree. Having that talent lying around would basically make PW:S three times as spammable on your main target, and in return PW:S would decrease the likelyhood of spirit link breaking, saving the shaman quite a few global cooldowns.

http://armory.mmo-champion.com.nyud....88847noszh.png

 

constantius

Just one further note in terms of the GCD thing with PW:S -- the new WoA totem is 10% flat spell haste. Combine that with the 20%+ that most of the Sunwell priests will have going into the expansion (and that everyone else will rapidly get from drops/instances/etc), and you already have a solid 30% reduction on PW:S. That makes the talent reduce your PW:S GCD from 1.15 to 1.0, hardly an impressive accomplishment. The absorption is decidedly minor in comparison to the idea of reduction, which at least as far as I understand the mechanics, does indeed hard-cap at 1.0.

IF (big big if) Blizzard allows for the reduction of the GCD below 1.0, and if the combination of our haste + this talent means we can drop PW:S GCD down to 0.8 or so ... then it's a really really cool talent, and we can discuss further.

 

• Playered

How can you get 3k iDPS reduced to 2.1k iDPS when PW:S (due to weakened soul) gives a divisor of 15 making a 4k~ shield only -266 iDPS? to reduce that amount of iDPS on a tank your shield would need to do something in the region of 13k.
(The odd thing is you got the level 70 version at -150 iDPS which seems right.. but going from 70-80 gives a 600% increase? thats stretching things.)

One single hit being reduced by 4k~ isn't going to magically count as a generic DR effect which you seem to be considering it as, although if -more than one- hit got reduced by 4k~ you would be talking a different story.


Im confused by the increasing importance of PW:S for Disc and having Divine Aegis (crit vs pure spell power) there too... shouldn't that be put in the Holy tree where there could be some slight synergy with the intended playstyle?

 

Bjork

They will nerf haste as we level up, my lvl 70 haste won't be nearly as good at lvl 80. If anyone has numbers on haste rating at lvl 80, please feel free to post, but I would guess that we will end up at 20-30% haste towards the end of WotLK, not at the start. Still a valid point you have, by all means, the talent reducing CD on PW:S should not be valued from GCD =1,5 seconds.

Regarding deep disc, I still don't know what Blizzard want with the tree. If they want to make a PvP tree viable for 5 man healing and soloing or if they want to make a fully viable PvE raiding build (only the latter interests me).

We have to realize that reducing incoming damage is a lot stronger than healing damage taken. In a raid enviorment 5% less damage taken on your target is a lot stronger than 10% more healing done. This is pretty obvious, but let's not forget it. Aslo PW:S fully talented is a lot more powerful than a Flash heal. You can't really compare (lvl 70 values) 3k absorbed damage with 2700 healing from a typical Flash heal. Disc seems to offer many heals/absorbing effects making sure that a tank is never without any heal/absorbing effect for a very long time. This is powerful indeed, big question (for me) is how this play out with the better scaling from deep holy.

Personally I would like to see deep holy getting some serious raid synergy/buffs rather than feeding our "weaker" healing tree steroids.

 

Iluminati

I have to say that you are grossly underestimating the power of grace. The reality is that people do use affliction locks on fights like Brutallus (not to mention SE only reduces physical damage) because 5% is huge. Couple that with 6% increased healing from the priest, and at least 1 other healer + hots from others...that's hardly a "small" healing boost.

I'm not convinced that Discipline is a "gimp" spec for healing either. 15% intellect on mental strength + enlightenment (5% int/spirit +5% healing) combined with rapture go a long way to counteracting the lost mana efficiency of not having Holy Concentration / Serendipity. A big PW:S (that gives mana back) + Divine Aegis means you are completely preventing a ton of damage taken over the course of a fight.

That's not even taking into account the improved utility of PI / PS.

To start up a little talk on Penance, it's a 3 second channel with no outside effects (slow effect like mind flay does, for example) so it should scale like a "normal" spell with an 85% coefficient (3 / 3.5). With 3000+healing (a reasonable estimate given current level 70 healing values + the amount we will gain from new talents/abilities) it goes to approximately 1500 hp/s ((2139 [base] + 2550[+heal] = 4689 [total] / 3 ticks). Does anyone know anything else about Penance?

As an aside, the change to Innerfire is unimpressive. 120 spell damage? I'll take any kind of buff but that's pitifully weak (and the armor component is way too low, same problem as we had going from 60->70), especially compared to the mage armors and fel armor.

 

beann

With regard to Haste and GCD reduction talents, the Druid Talent Gift of the Earthmother was tested and confirmed via combat logging to drop the spell below 1.0 with haste. I would presume that this would carry over to similar talents.

With regard to Disc's throughput, it should compete with Holy in any situation where 2 or more healers are on the grace target. Disc loses some sustainability, for sure, but this may be addressed via talents like enlightenment and Mental Strength.

edit: Also, with regard to the grace change, I think the developers would prefer to have the spec depend less on a single buff and be a more competent healer overall, balanced around a more complete healing ability. If that is the case, I would assume that they work with the tree until it pases muster with regard to a Paladin-esque healing spot. This based on the previous comments and design goals revealed by the developers themselves.

 

Ellyh

remember that the 120 healing will be multiplied by the new coefficients so will be more like 210 + healing in the old system. That's over 1/2 a tiers gear worth of improvements, not bad for a tack on to a spell that costs us nothing to have up and running.

Grace only matters on Brut/patchwerk type fights where it's all about keeping a tank up through a short and nasty tank and spank. Even then it is very susceptible to being outgeared. That is what I think is the most concerning thing about grace, it can be easily outgeared and then the spec seems week.

With the change to serendipity being 60% but with no mention of an internal cooldown I think that holy will be massively better than disc for mana efficiency. Especially as grace has an 8 second buff duration so it will be close to impossible for the disc priest to get out of the 5 sec rule. Holy can play with the 5 sec rule whenever they like but if, as proponents of disc build suggest, you are relying on grace being up you will never get out of casting regen, especially if you are juggling grace stacks on 2 tanks, just talk to any tree now.

 

beann

If by this you mean to say that reducing damage done to a tank and increasing the healing done to them (perhaps compared with what is given up in holy to achieve this buff) is only necessary on fights that involve very large burst damage potential, then I think you are right, but you have to remember that at each stage of raiding, when appropriately geared, there is almost always 1 or 2 fights per zone that involve this kind of damage. In this case appropriate means simply "geared to begin progression in the zone."

Prince Malchezaar, Nightbane
Tidewalker, Alar(in some cases, such as a taunt resist)
Halazzi, Nalorakk, Bear Trash, Zul'jin(Lynx Phase)
Azgalor, Archimonde, Gurtogg(Felrage), Mother, Illidan(enrage)
Brutallus, Eredar Twins(I assume there is still a large burst potential in this fight)

Yes, most of these fights become trivial once tanks gear up in the zone (and healers to a lesser extent), but the point remains that these "Burst Limit" situations occurred at every stage of raiding in BC during progression content. Would the Disc priest respec to Holy once farming mode set in? Perhaps, but I do not think that detracts seriously from the talent as it is now. The ability is not trivial. Will it be necessary? I do not know, but I would imagine it will be invaluable for a non-trivial number of encounters during progression. The real question is, can the total Disc Package compete with Paladins for Tank healing, and can it stand on it's own when compared with Holy?

That being said, with the removal of crushing blows, we can expect boss damage to change. In fact, we can expect to see any number of changes to the way raiding works in Wrath. I understand that we can only do our best to evaluate new abilities and talents in light of present experiences, but we should also keep in mind that these talents are not designed for BT/Hyjal or Sunwell, they are designed for an entirely new set of encounters(or touched up, at least in the case of Naxx).

With regard to mana issues, I think these are the biggest concern for PvE disc and I look forward to seeing them tested rigorously. Given Rapture's functionality(only restores mana on effective heals), it seems like Disc will be Cast canceling, with an 8 second window in which they must land a heal. That does make for much tighter use of OOC time, but it does not mean that they will be unable to do so. I personally would like to see Rapture changed to help address the mana concern. If it restored mana based on total healing (including overheal) then that would be a step in the right direction.

 

corkee

That is a good point, the synergy is absolutely there. Between PW:S and Divine Aegis a disc priest would make sure that the shaman didn't just waste his mana by putting Spirit Link on the MT. I think the disc priests passive presence in a fight to mitigate instead of react to damage is nice and will allow a new pallette for Blizzard in terms of designing boss abilities in 25 man raids.

It doesn't yet seem like a very demanding role to fill though - and I'm a bit hesitant as having been holy priest since MC to be limited to MT spamming without really having the ability to do anything but shave off the peaks of incoming damage and nurse my maintank with mediocre greater heals. I bet that Blizzard had an idea to depart sharply from the AE/HPS role of a pure holy specced priest when they designed the disc tree - but instead of making an interesting raid role they've made a tame singletarget healer who will have a very situational use in Brutallus 2.0 type of fights. What remains is a very good arena healer - just like in BC. They clearly didn't hand the class over to an experienced raiding priest and measured his tilt meter when he was putting points into the disc tree in the present build. It's too bland in terms of being a dmg/heal hybrid - and offers IMO a very dull prospect of spending a night nursing the MT and pretty much nothing else.

So, IMO we're back to the inherently mutual exclusive traits of putting PVP and PVE in the same talent tree's. I'll echo the people who say that they should get back to the drawing table and look at how to increase the wider synergy of a priest in 25 man raiding. Neither Holy or Disc has given me confidence that we'll improve in usefullness in the present build. Ending a fight with more mana than anyone else and putting out the highest amount of HPS or making sure the tank is safer than fort knox isn't really gonna do it if we don't bring anything else to the other classes in the raid. Maybe just eating the bullett of obvious gamedesign and giving holy a +heal buff at the end of the tree and disc a dmg mitigation buff of reasonable value will make it so?

 

constantius

Come on; you're going way too far there. Holy "adding something to a raid" is a complete non-issue. They're revamping every single healing class' trees in order to give us all some form of AE heal, and we each have our strengths and weaknesses.

With CoH going 6 seconds, and no significant replacement (so far), we're going back to our "jack of all trades" role. That's fine by me. We can heal almost as well as paladins on single target (and with Imp HC, we can probably come even closer); we have CoH, PoM, and Binding Heal as "different" things that can help with raid healing, and we remain the only real HoT/direct hybrid healing class.

Arguing for Discipline getting a "focus" is absolutely fine, and most of us agree with you. Arguing that Holy is somehow weakened by the new talents is way off base. Holy, if anything, is made *stronger* by the CoH cooldown. It's boring and meaningless to spam CoH for 6 minutes, collect your epics (and badges ) and move on. I preferred the pre-CoH days, when we would be using PoH sparingly, Renewing many targets, using quick Flash Heals on dangerously low people, and sticking with our staple: Greater Heal. Going back to that but keeping the power of an intelligent CoH is a positive thing.

Look at some of the talent trees. Almost everyone is getting a proc-haste talent that is going to require watching cooldowns. Warlocks are getting Molten Core (check their tree) which is going to force them to switch between Shadow and Fire to do effective Destro dps. We get Imp HC that we have to watch for Haste procs for up-ranking (for the free spell) and then quickly down-ranking (to save mana). Druids are getting even more tools to use dynamically, including Flourish, an AE "hot explosion" that will be extremely interesting in implementation. Shamans are getting their Spirit Link and a couple of other not-quite-finalized abilities to force them to go beyond CHeal, and they *also* get a "use a spell, get haste on other spells" idea that is going to be very very interesting.

Basically ... if you're going to raid 25-mans in WotLK, you're going to have to be a good player. Seriously. I think a lot of these talents are going to be much much harder to use than we're used to (i.e. no mindless spamming), and I sincerely hope that raiding in WotLK is a true challenge that requires that you be among the best of the best to complete it. 10-mans will be accessible to everyone, as will heroics / dailies / etc, but 25-man raiding will hopefully push you to the limits of your playstyle, and possibly beyond.

 

corkee

Sorry for arguing about holy tree in the disc tree thread (it would be nice to have a WOTLK raid healer beta thread instead of one for each tree).

Don't get me wrong Constantius - I love the versatility of the new holy tree talents and don't doubt for one second that they will shine if you're a good player. I'm however a bit concerned that our raw potential as a healer is overshadowed by the lack of synergy we bring to the 25mans. Blizzard established a very devout attention among the average raider towards stacking for synergy in BC - and I'm not yet sure it's going to be any less for WOTLK.

But yeah, when I originally rolled priest and ditched my paladin back in 1.1 it was to be able to be a thouroghbred healer - perhaps the same motivation rogues has towards pure DPS. I guess that makes it wrong for me to sit here and wish for potent classbuffs that's undeniably going to come at a cost to my ability and repertoire to heal well. I don't want to be a paladin or shaman clone in a pair of cloth robes :|

 

beann

This seems to be exactly what the Devs are going for with all healers (and DPS to an extent). Spamming = boring, and they know it, whether it is chain heal, CoH, Shadowbolt, etc. The follow through on their end will come with the encounters that they design. While players like to break each healing role down to an assigned task (CoH group 1, heal tank 2, keep hots rolling on 3 tanks, etc) I would not be surprised if blizzard creates encounters where adaptation is essential for everyone and each task cannot be easily partitioned. Doing that at the 10 and 5 man level is considerably easier, but I am excited to see what will come down the 25 man pipe, so to speak.

 

constantius

There's absolutely no problem with talking about the holy tree, that wasn't my intention at all in the post. I merely wanted to point out that holy, if anything, got some variety and a strong push toward a more interesting style in the latest talent release. It's a GOOD thing. Talk about it all you want, just be aware that (most? of us? all of us? majority?) *like* the holy tree and the way it's shaping up, and are looking forward to WotLK because of that.

No more CoH spam! Variational haste procs from IHC! Mana return on overheal (like our T5 bonus, which remains one of the most powerful, interesting set bonuses in our history)! Increased healing on lower-HP targets.

It's all good stuff. I'm pumped.

 

Densor

I'm not sure if anyone has mentioned it, but mages will be getting a deep arcane talent Incanter's Absorption which increases their spell damage by 15% of any damage absorbed. In a fight like Brutallus, being able to toss a PW:S on the mage right before a big damage spike would be a nice way to increase DPS, as a 4k PW:S would be a 600 spell damage buff for them. Just make sure you check that the mage has the talent before wasting a spell cast on them.

Just wanted to point out that there are other things a good disc priest can be doing to help the raid than just babysitting the MT.

 

Lambi

Guardian spirit will be an amazing spell and separate the excellent players from the mere good... I can already see most fights having plenty of good opportunities to use the spell: Illidan and every single fight in Sunwell, with KJ in particular being the prime example. Imagine the slow tard being slowed and not making the shield on time, GS him and he's fine. I love the talents with unique and nifty gadgets, it makes the game so much more fun to play.

 

Ellyh

but would that only work for mage abilities such as mana shield? Does PWS credit to the caster or the target in the combat log?

As for GS how much time to you have to react? If it's a 2 sec window before the "tard" dies that's great, but trying to figure out who to target on the fly and select the right bar on your UI is kinda hard in a chaotic raid situation. Most of the things that kill players now are in the instagib category or are readily healable after the fact, assuming you don't suck.

 

Lambi

It will say "Absorbed" in the mage's combat log so I'd say it will work excellent for them. It's also a very good way for a priest to gain mana and lessen the burden for the raid healers.

 

Bjork

Yes, deep holy looks good indeed!

It seems like the main change for us raiding holy priest in WotLK will be the need for only two paladins (one most certain will be prot/ret) and two shamans (one being elemental) for all needed buffs. The raid-wide totems is a sublime buff to holy priest viability as the second, third, etc resto shaman only bring another heroism, not another set of totems. Competition for raid spot will be easier for priests as long as we still need 6-9 healers in raids.

Regarding Guardian Spirit: I'm a big fan already and it's definitely not a "pvp talent" if you ask me. I would say that it's at least decent on all Sunwell bossfights. On Brutallus, M'uru and Kil'jaeden it would be simply brilliant (especially before when Soul Flay was totally random and landing on newly ressed/ankhed players ...) When learning those encounters it would have been a lot easier with two-three (we run two or three holy priests) Guardian Spirits.

Healing setup for WotLK: One restoshaman, one restodruid, one holypala, one discpriest, then rest holypriests?

PS! CoH spam? No priest in Method has ever done that ..

 

Lambi

To me it looks like resto druids will be very good competitors at healing, they almost look overpowered.

 

Alcemon

I've been wondering if Improved Spirit Tap would prove useful to Disc and Holy specs.

Most likely the answer is no because of the Talents (too much good stuff to take in the bottom of both healing trees) and because of mana issues (basically you spend mana for a chance of getting mana back) though a math proof is doable on that last one.

People can argue that Disc will have a lot of crit anyways and mention cute tricks with Inner Fire but it still doesn't look that viable to me at the moment (but feel free to prove me wrong )