Pyros

Even if you drop it in the "middle" of everyone, people will still have to run to it, barring very specific fights, such as reliquary and so on. Most bosses have mechanics that prevent players from staying all together. Either it's a 2group fight, with melee near the boss and everyone else far from the boss, or it's a spread out fight with everyone at least 5y away from each other, with the melees stacked, or it's a move around a lot fight with multiple phases. While there's some optimum placement for a lightwell, in the end, unless you drop it on the boss and the boss isn't moving, so melees are always in range of it, there will be running, and by the time you reach the lightwell, you'll be lucky if a random heal didn't hit you. Even if it didn't, then you have to wait for lightwell to tick, which accentuates the time where you will not be at max hp, which will usually get healers to target you.

It's a good idea on paper, but really not practical. On a lot of fights you can't even have your people bandaging, because you lose too much DPS for enrage timers when they exist, and the mana healers save from that lifebloom is easily lost by the additional time it will take for the boss to die. Let alone run around to pickup a bandage effect, unless the lightwell is right on top of them. Again, placement issues and so on, only work on very few fights.

One good change would be to make lightwell healing instant. You hit the sunwell, you get an instant heal, you can't interact with it for 30s-1min anymore. At least that should prevent people from healing you even though you have the sunwell effect on(without having to config grid to display it and hope a random spell effect won't break it). Maybe have the lightwell leave an AE healing effect once it's been consumed.

Definitely better than what it is now, but still not quite there.

 

Bjork

They (finally!) make Lightwell a viable talent when it only breaks on direct damage. In Sunwell it's totally useless (guess you can heal the AoE on Kalec with Lightwell, but that's about it?) because of constant damage going on. As someone already mentioned, Lightwell can now counter predictable dot-dmg ("everyone who gets curse use a Lightwell charge") and become a useful tool in raiding. Only use I've had from Lightwell in TBC was when doing 5 man content. Then I could use the Lightwell myself and knowing that I would be healed up while focusing on the tank, saving a GCD or mana during the boss fight.

My first impression of all the new stuff is that deep disc will become mandatory in raids, which makes me a bit sad. If I understand it correctly Grace will buff the target (tank, I guess) with 9% less damage taken and 9% more healing taken when fully stacked. If we (again) are forced into a "gimp" spec to provide a needed buff instead of going full out in Holy I will be very disappointed.

Deep holy looks too good to be true. Hard to say anything without seeing any content, but it looks like mana management will be a joke compared to what it is today (it's already easy after 2.4). I don't like it if they make us into spambots that don't need to worry about mana, it will trivialize the class. After seeing new skills and talents it should be safe to say that priests stay king of 5 man healing at least. Question is how this will play out in raids where synergy and buffs play a larger role.

 

Anedris

Serendipity is amazing. It will put you in the FSR if the spell you cast cost you mana (because you spend the mana and then it is refunded to you), but if the spell was free (due to clearcasting or IF) it will not put you in FSR (but you will almost certainly still get mana back).

Improved holy concentration is amazing. This is not "unreliable haste" - look at the uptime estimates above. This one has to be nerfed, probably both the haste portion and the proc chance. Due to the way our mechanics work (FSR), a 16% chance to proc a free heal, even without the haste, is going to make it really hard to run out of mana when healing intelligently with gheal, flash heal, and binding heal.

Mark of divinity is amazing. You can't say "you overheal 50% so it's only a 15% increase" - if I overheal 50%, then 15% is 30% of my total effective healing. The only situation where this is less than a 30% throughput increase is where you are forced to heal other targets when the marked target is topped off - which will happen, but even as *only* a 15% increase... we get a 15% throughput increase trainable.

My overwhelming impression of the deep holy tree is brokenly powerful. Especially given that the 51-point talent is actually kind of weak (it's okay, functions kind of like NS in that it saves one 8-10k hit on a hard-hitting boss, so it's effectively a panic heal for 8-10k in such a situation), I would expect holy concentration to see tuning. Mark of divinity, though not holy-specific, is also in its presently understood format way out of line unless they intend to return us to our pre-BC position as healing gods (well, we *are* priests, but still...).

Lightwell - making it not break on direct damage is a good step. Giving it more charges is a good step (although I would really prefer they either make it unlimited charges or remove the cooldown on the spell... it's dumb that I have an extremely situational spell and I can't even use it more than once or twice per fight). Making it be unable to overwrite itself would be good. The big problem though is that it's a HoT. I get that they don't want tanks using it, but as long as it remains a HoT, unless they make it absurdly powerful, it's always going to be marginal because 99% of the healing it does is going to be healing that someone else could have done.

For example on Bloodboil, it can heal one entire bloodboil DoT... but someone else has to heal the next 24, so your raid has to be capable of healing a bloodboil without it. If there was an encounter where healer mana was actually a factor it might be different, but as it is long cooldown heals are only really useful when they have some benefit when things go wrong - a HoT that people have to think in order to use is not going to be what you need in such a situation.

I can think of one encounter where it would be pretty nice, though - Loetheb. (Assuming you had at least one extra healer not needed for keeping the tank up.)

 

Havoc12

This is not a thread about LW alone so I will be brief

@kalwell: L2 use armoury mate. I dropped LW after the first two bosses in kara, which was back in patch 2.1. Its too underpowerd to raid with. Lightwell needs 2 things to become a worthy 31 pointer either (A) remove the break on damage mechanic or (B) completely remove CD. Blizzard has opted with a version of (A)

@ellyh: In 5mans lightwell is well worth the talent point even now, especially at low gear levels, because fights are v short compared to CD and you are the only healer so you can minimise overheal. It does save you a lot of mana. True you might not need it past a certain gear level, but it does make some encounters much easier e.g. 2nd boss in Sh Labs, 1st boss in SV, Serpenthea in Mecha. In raids its not worth it because in long fights with more healers and more unpredictable damage, it just heals too little due to the CD. One of our priests did spec into it just as we started MH against my advice, so we have seen LW in use at the endgame content. The stats say LW is worth 10-12k healing on average every 6 minutes. Compare it with inner focus a tier 3 talent (2x free spells in the same time).

@Mavsteele: All it takes is a little preparation and forward thinking. A perfect example using the current lightwell is FLK Caribdis. You can have the ranged interrupt heal themselves via lightwell and make this completely trivial to heal (No it was not my lightwell, I have not had it since patch 2.1).

The WotLK changes assuming it means the HoT wont break on dot/aoe damage will certainly result in *much* greater returns from LW. This should make the talent worthwhile, but I suppose it remains to be seen.

===================================

@ Kortar, although the new holy priests talents are also good for raid healing, they are even better for MT healing. Priests in the new expansion will be more proficient in MT healing than they are now (and that says a lot).

IHC currently gives you 20% haste for 20 seconds. 16% is on average 1 in 5 spells. With 20% haste from gear and 20% haste from IHC you are looking at 1.79 second gheals. That is at least 10 gheals per IHC. A priest MT healer will spam downrank gheal coupled with a max rank every 10 seconds to proc serendipity and is certain to keep the buff up at least 82% of the time.

I am pretty sure that serendipity will refund the cost of the spell regardless of mana cost reduction items/abilities. A current example is illumination. It returns 60% of the unmodified cost even when the paladin uses their 50% mana cost talent, so that crits actually give the pally mana back.

The idea that low overheal is the mark of a good healer is foolish. Serendipity does not reward bad play, it rewards only very skilled healers, who can juggle the cooldown without wasting their mana.

I dont understand how people can underestimate guardian spirit so much. Your tank has heals channelled on him pretty much at all times and healers ready to react with instants in case he drops low. Its practically guaranteed that if your tank survives a killing blow due to GS he will have heals landing on him before the mob can land another hit. Yet GS is even more important for saving DPS from being one shot or from deadly RST abilities. Also remember that if the killing blow is absorbed then the target will take no damage. If your target took a 10k hit and has 8k HP he will have 8k HP after the hit. Better GS also has a healing component. IF you have the equivalent of 2k healing and it scales 100% than you are looking at 1k ticks every 2 secfonds. That is a pretty powerfull HoT. So the fact that you take a GCD to land cost you a effectively nothing in HPS terms. Even better you can follow GS up real quick with PWS/PoM, to give other healers even more time to land big heals. GS is the imba long CD Oh Shit button priests were missing.

If there are fights like Kael in TK, then GS is brokenly imba. It can completely negate a 50k pyro. Also think of a fight where the boss uses a very high damamge ability on a short timer. Such an encounter would require that your tank HP be kept high at all times. GS reduces gib chance because even if the tank gets low enough to be in gib range once, you can save it with GS.

I think GS would greatly simplify some fights. A simple example from the current content is the big bad wolf. GS would guarantee that the first red riding hood survives, which reduces your wipe chance quite drastically, by guaranteeing a certain amount of free DPS time before you actually start losing people. Less time spent learning, more time spent looting. Also think of fights like gruul or maiden, where there is a period of predictable silence. GS can easily buy your raid a good chunk of extra DPS time. Think of a fight with a short enrage timer. GS can buy your raid precious few seconds after you hit the enrage timer.

You can't put a price tag on an ability like that.

I think you will find that a lot of ppl will be ecstatic to take the "gimp" spec spot due to the improved PvP performance of disc.

Your objections have already been addressed and for the last time no, DPS dont have to move to use lightwell. Its not rocket science. If they are close enough to use it without moving they use it. If they are not close enough they *just dont* use it. Lightwell is there to save you some mana, not replace you as a healer

 

Shan

Personally I can only agree with what has been said about lightwell being flawed at concept level. I just don't see it fitting in. It's possible to get some use out of it but it feels awkward and doesn't make any tangible difference in practice.

 

aadric

Grace is 3% fully talented, not 9%. On its own it won't be a compelling reason to bring Disc Priests to raids.

 

Kakitajamie

Grace stacks 3 times thus 9%.

 

aadric

I realize that is what it says but in testing it doesn't stack (which is why no one has been able to confirm/deny whether or not Penance would apply a full stack, even though Penance was testable on alpha). Maybe this was a bug and the text is correct, but as currently implemented its 3%. Unfortunately no one can double check this as alpha is currently down.

In any event, most raids have forgone asking their Warlocks to nerf their DPS for a 5% damage reduction. I'm not sure significantly nerfing Priest healing for a 9% reduction will be worth it, especially if Penance doesn't apply 3 stacks.

 

Bjork

The tooltip says that it stacks three times, if it doesn't then disc is something completly different when it comes to raiding (no Havoc12, I appreciate your posts here, but PvP-viability in a PvE-spec is not interesting IMHO).

Most raids do not ask their warlocks to spec Malediction because it will lead to a 500+ DPS-loss and you can still get the healing done without it. If the DPS-loss was 1-200 DPS you would see Affliction locks in raid, for sure. (We had affliction lock for both Brutallus and Felmyst in Sunwell, so on occasions they are still viable.)

Grace will directly affect the healing priest's main functionality in a raid, preventing people from dying (a warlock is in a raid to deliver DPS mainly). If the tooltip is correct it's 9% less damage taken fully stacked and 9% more healing taken. If numbers posted in this thread and the Disc-thred are correct a Disc-priest will heal for around 20% less than a deep holy priest. Just common sense tells us that if you're gonna have two healers on a target a disc-priest+random healer is better than a holy-priest+random healer. That is to me broken, because "the first" healing-priest in a raid will be disc, that's what I mean by forcing us into a gimped spec. Just by looking at the points we have to waste in order to get Grace is horrifying. I don't like disc, I like it even less after WotLK as it seems now, but I will still spec deep disc if it will give my guild the best chance of killing a boss.

If Grace doesn't stack up to 9%, but will stay at 3% it will have it's occasional uses and that's fine. 9% is just too much.

E: Sorry for QQ, but I can see this coming from miles away that we're turned into Grace-bots.

 

Sinndir

I'd love to see 1 of each spec, of each class in a raid (minus three!).

I think a nice synergy to help with tank healing would be an affliction lock combined with a disc priest for -14% incoming damage and +9% healing, that is a lot!

I know the changes are sometimes hard to stomach but I honestly think that in the end blizzard is trying to make each tree, of each class, viable in a raiding situation.

Currently there are some that just can't. Sub rogues, Marks hunters, Disc Priests, Deep Frost mages, Aff/Demo Locks.

I, for one, would welcome changes to the trees to make each spec viable and bring something unique (not overpowered) to the raid.

 

Ellyh

Final word on why I hate lightwell for 5 mans in any incarnation: Pugs. Why does the effectiveness of our 31 talent rely on the skill of 3 random people you found Via LFG?.

Havoc12 the reason people are disliking the current incarnation of the 51 holy talent is not the effect but the difficulty of timing the damned thing. Currently Tanks die for two reasons. General attrition and healer loss/overload, or massive burst damage of a almost unhealable nature.

In case 1 saving the target now won't help as your raid is already sinking fast because of excessive damage or loss of people. Case 2 is where the obvious use of this talent lies and by definition you don't know when this will occur. Given the current mechanics (and indications are strong that changes are coming) you don't want to use it until you know that the tank is in deep trouble, ie has been under 25% for more than a second. The problem is that anyone in a position to cast it on the tank is (should) be casting a heal on him already so is in the classic dilemma of "let this spell land or interrupt for a cool effect". For me with a 450ms ping I don't trust my screen info all that much on such a small timescale so that makes it even harder to time.

On the Grace front I have to assume that the non stacking is a bug as the wording is totally unambiguous and 3% is really really weak. Currently theorycrafted healer viability says that disc is only raid viable because of grace and personally I don't expect it to stack with either BoL and/or Amp magic so I doubt that the gain in healing from it will be quite as wonderful as some might expect.

For those thinking that Grace makes the first healer disc by default in a raid, it is probably that like the afflock situation that gear will obsolete the requirement for it quite quickly as it scales poorly with raid gear compared to the powerhouse of holy. Also Grace becomes exponentially more powerful the more healers you have on a target so in multi target fights suck as FLK, or P2, P3 of Kael the disc priest will be at a significant disadvantage compared to holy. If most new raids only have 2 healers on a tank and everything else being raid healing or offtank healing then a lot of the assumed advantage of Grace is lost. IF however most fights have say 4 healers on the main tank then grace is far far more powerful. Personally I expect to see the situation end up somewhere in the middle between these 2 extremes.

 

Iluminati

I must disagree in this case, if the benefit to grace is so powerful, how can you say that it is a "gimp" spec? Just because you're not topping healing meters or bombing massive heals, doesn't make your spec gimp. Right after Grace is Rapture, which looks fairly amazing. The other abilities in the tree are very powerful as well.

Power Infusion and Pain Suppression are great for taking advantage of weakness phases or countering RST abilities.
Improved DS - spirit is getting "buffed" for pretty much all classes, greatly increasing the power of DS in general as well.
Mental Strength = 15% int = larger mana pool / increased spirit gen
Divine Aegis = hard to tell. It'll take some mathing to determine it's real worth as priests have generally low crit rates, but still looks good/interesting.

Penance is kind of a question mark at this point (unless someone has some details about it's scaling, level 70 base effect, etc.) but...I have high hopes for it.

I'm hard pressed to say that Discipline will be a "gimp" raid spec in wotlk (and that is without knowing how penance will work/scale). Will it be a radically different raid role / play style from Holy? Definitely, the deep holy talents make holy a powerful multitasking raid or tank healer, whereas Disc is an all purpose buffer / dispeller / healer. What makes it gimp?

You bring up an interesting point. However, this hinges on one thing I cannot seem to find on the talent calculator - how long does the Grace buff last? It's completely possible that it lasts around 10-15 seconds making it entirely possible for a discipline priest to maintain the buff on 2-3 tanks by getting up a full stack before the pull, and rotating low/mid rank flash / hasted Gheal (not unlike lifebloom stacking the druids do now). Again that depends greatly on the specific encounter and the grace buff time (but I honestly cant see grace having a duration shorter than 10 seconds), but it's entirely feasible and INCREDIBLY powerful.

edit - err: how did we start talking about Disc in the Holy thread >_>?

 

Bjork

Well, you say it yourself. Playstyles that are centered around keeping a buff up on different targets will be viable. To me it's bad gameplay. We agree on that it's INCREDIBLY powerful, that's the whole problem. It's gimp because you need to take a bunch of mediocre/crap talents to get to deep disc - and when you are there you can't take everything because then you miss Improved Healing from holy.

Regarding your last comment about disc being discussed in a holy thread - I think it's interesting to discuss the balance between the specs. As I said in my first post in this thread, deep holy seems to have a lot of uility and "fun" and should make priests incredible 5 man healers, but it's still impossible to say how things will turn out in a raid enviorment when you play in a team of 6-9 healers. Deep holy still doesn't bring anything to the raiding table in terms of buffs, it's just pure healingpower. And we know from experience that healers providing better buffs will have it easier coming into raids. Deep disc however is already "secured" a raidspot because of a Grace.

 

Iluminati

Theoretical "grace" build
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

The only talents I would consider mediocre/crap are absolution and focused power. Again, their usefulness is greatly encounter dependent, but I will be honest and say that even on a felmyst type encounter (regular / fast Mass dispel required) the benefit is not much. I didnt take aspiration because unless there is some radical change in encounter design, most encounters are simply not long enough for the reduced cooldown to matter. The trade off to these "bad" talents is an incredibly powerful tank / healing buff (that more than makes up for 4-5 wasted points imo). And I think Rapture on top of Grace is incredibly powerful. I just spammed some Gheal randomly on myself and mathed out Rapture being worth at least 36mp5 (using level 70 values). That could be entirely wrong however, if overheal does not proc the rapture affect. This basically makes the disc priest a shadow priest "lite."

Still, you bring up a valid point that I (think) mentioned earlier - there are a bunch of very good / important talents at the bottom of the trees, and not enough near the top. It's one of the problems of having 2 "healing trees."

I think the stark difference between disc/holy is actually very nice. The power of Grace and the power of Holy as a healer that can basically take ANY role (Above average tank healing and insanely powerful raid healing), means it will be much easier to accommodate multiple healing priests in a raid, rather than 1 priest for IDS/grace and the rest shadow. Deep holy is just so incredibly powerful at raid healing, possible even more so than shamans, depending on the encounter.

 

Incoherence

What this probably means is that even if they implement switchable specs in the expansion, a dedicated PvE priest will just have a deep holy spec and a deep discipline spec (and use the former for 5 and arguably 10 mans, and the latter if their 25 man doesn't have one already).

 

Thorongil

Illuminati, how do you come to the conclusion of 36 mp5? To me, this sounds like a very conservative estimation.

I´ll try to math out the most extreme example:

GH9:
Heals for 3950 to 4590 (average of 4270)
Assuming 2.200 +heal (easily obtainable raid-buffed, even now) would equate to: 4.270 + (2.200/3,5*3) = 6.155

6.155 * 2,5 % = 153 mana per cast (every 2,5 seconds) equating to roughly 300 mp5 when spamming GH9.

Note that this assumption is based on untalented spells and does not take spell crit into consideration. Also, the value of 2.200 +heal will be easily obtained at lvl80 thus values of 350 - 400 mp5 return from Rapture in a raid-buffed environment should be possible when spamming GH9. Of course, you won´t want to spam max-heal GHs most of the time, I simply tried to show the theoretical potential of Rapture, which is quite high in my opinion.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Idril.png

 

Havoc12

1) A common error. In pugs I mostly use lightwell to heal myself and its really valuable. E.g. kargath in heroic shattered halls.

2) I dont think timing is a particular problem. I have often found myself seeing a tank in danger, (i.e. Hit points dropping alarmingly fast and no heals landing) while doing something else and had react with a PWS/PoM and a prayer. Sometimes its enough other times it has been a tank death. GS would really help a lot here. Also there are cases where a boss strongly ups his damage for a short period of time. If say you go through a 20 second phase like this every 2 minutes. GS is really valuable. The raid can plan its cooldown usage to minimise the chance of tank death. GS lasts 10 seconds and will probably add 1k HPS to the tank while that happens. Another example leotheras the blind. Your warlock just took an 11k hit and another fireball is on the way. GS will guarantee that no matter hwat happens you have time to bring his health up. Also at the very end of the fight, when you have to kill both, if it takes you too long to kill leotheras you can buy precious seconds for the warlock by using GS when the fire debuff has a high enough stack to one shot him. I think its a very powerful ability that will be very much desired and expected of holy priests in raids. I suspect there will be fights that will be made much much easier by this talent.

I think that 20% less is a gross overestimate imho. 20% is just the difference from the clearcasting haste buff, which leaves out empowered healing, the boost from spirit and spiritual healing.

In real terms I would expect that a holy priest will be able to replace a disc priest on tank healing despite grace. I suspect disc priests will be very strong in a few encounters, but would be an optional not a required spec. I think grace is there to give disc priests a PvE viability should they so choose.

 

Ellyh

Havoc, I doubt they will ever design a fight mechanic around an end tier talent. They have never done so and while it seems reasonable for a 25 man raid they totally can't justify it for 10 mans. If you think about it all the gimmick abilities they have designed fights about have been base skills so they can reasonably expect the skill to be there. The best example of this is spellsteal tanking for mages or spell reflect for warriors. I can't think of any situation where a MUST HAVE ability is a talent rather than a base ability. There are several very nice to have abilities at the end of the tiers but none of them are a case of auto wipe if they are not present, they just make everything much much easier.

As for lightwell being only used to heal myself on 5 mans because the rest of the crew are retards, this is kind of redundant given we already have CoH, PoH, binding heal and for me desperate prayer. The only place it actually justified itself as a valuable addition to my abilities was Murmer with his silence bomb. If that's the best justification for it being a good talent we will have to agree to disagree over how good we think it is. By this stage anyone reading the thread probably knows our positions by heart and has probably formed their own opinion of the spell.

 

Havoc12

Other classes also have abilities which can be used in place of GS. Pain suppression, grace, PWS and spirit link for example. Or last stand and shield wall, even BoP/bubble/ice block/CloS could be useable workarounds. I disagree that there is no precedence around balancing encounters around high tier abilities. Do you really think that blizzard did not design the t6 encounters with CoH and the improved chain heal talent in mind? How about BoF on vasjh for roots and BoP on zul'jin. Don't you think that hexlord malacrass was designed without having CoH in mind? Or how about kael with shield wall and last stand. You can do without, but it makes a huge difference to your raid if these abilities are there.

As for lightwell I would say its quite the contrary. Although BH is great, lightwell+GH is both higher HPS on the target and much greater efficiency. In an encounter like kargath lightwell makes the encounter a lot easier and results in a steep drop in the gear requirement. I did not find the spell usefull on murmur. Its much safer to not rely on lightwell here. Its a fight where lightwell can be a liability. Its great for boss 2 and 3 in shadowlabs.

 

Crow

As far as I understand Blizzard intends to have a lot more 10-man raiding in WotLK. If they indeed implement a 10-man parallel of each raid, that is probably where Lightwell will find its most uses. Especially when running in 2 healer setup, where you don't have a dedicated raid healer. My guild is still struggling in T5 content, but think of 10-man versions of current end-game bosses. As far I understand those encounters, properly balanced Lightwell would be extremely useful.

 

Thorongil

Havoc, concerning balancing encounters around skills of specific classes: You missed to see the important distinction Ellyh is making. There is a difference between balancing the encounters around abilities of certain classes and balancing them around high-tier skills. Many encounters are balanced around specific abilities (Illidan + shield block, RoS + Spellreflect, etc...). If Blizzard wouldn´t balance specific encounters around specific classes/abilities they would hardly be able to come up with more than, say 10 encounters that differ significantly from each other.

On the other hand I can not think of an encounter that is balanced around 31 or 41-point talents of a specific class. Of course, the skills make encounters easier, but it is not mandatory to bring the one specific talent without which you could not beat the encounter. You have to differ between skills like GS, Pain Suppression or upcoming Grace and abilities like Blessings, Bubble, Ice Block etc...

From what we know until now it seems Blizzard aims to drastically reduce stacking of equally talented players in 25-mans by giving many speccs very viable utilities deep down in the tree. At least, great diversity in speccs seems to get rewarded much stronger than stacking.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Idril.png

 

Brinas

Lightwell:
The only reason pugs don't know how to use it is because they never SEE it. In its current implementation, it sucks, but saying something sucks cause people don't use it, imo, is a bad argument. Do healthstones suck because people forget to click it? I think that with any new ability like that, there is a time frame that people have to learn to use it properly, but once they do, it becomes valuable. Healthstones aren't useful in every situation, only ones where you have time to react to the damage. If you pull aggro in a 5 man a healthstone won't always save you, and neither will lightwell. I really think that currently lightwell is caught in a rut because it's an ability that people have to be used to thinking about. The way it's currently implemented, it could only be useful in certain situations. People don't use it in those situations because they're not used to thinking about it. Lightwell's viability will be totally dependent on whether or not is is helpful in enough fights that people will remember that it's an option.
As far as wording, I see "direct damage" as meaning anything that would kill a totem, so dots and aoe's won't break it.

Guardian Spirit:
This is basically the priest Nature's swiftness. They're both on a 3 minute cooldown. GS is hard to time just right, and so is NS. Just because the "cheat death" didn't proc doesn't mean the ability is wasted though. You still get 6420 base healing. My guess is there will be higher ranks as well. 6420 healing over 10 seconds at lvl 60 is more than a priest's full health bar (and probably a lvl 60's tank's hps when you include the +healing bonus). And since you will be using it when the tank (or anyone for that matter) gets low, after GCD you will get the Test of Faith bonus to help get that person back up in health. One question would be if Test of Faith affects healing done by the GS. I would guess not, but would be cool if it did.

Mark of Divinity:
My belief is that the concept behind this ability is meant to be "healing done to anyone other than the target of mark of divinity" and I'm guessing it will be reworded to that sometime during beta. I see it as basically a way of not falling behind on tank healing when you have to spot heal someone, or help on tank healing when you're assigned to raid heals. Although, imagine MoD on a BE ret paladin or a warlock.

 

Iluminati

As I said, I was using level 70 +healing values (I spammed some Gheal 3 on myself at a 2.2 second cast for about 3000 per cast). Thank you for that math though, I have very little knowledge of the new ranks, etc. of spells in WOTLK.

 

Crosshairs

I have Lightwell as an option in my healing toolbox.

I have found it is most helpful to use on myself. I know when to use it, and when I want to use it. Once in awhile other people will use it. Sometimes I put it in front of warlocks who use it after life tapping in 10 mans.

The biggest problem I had was that the aoe damage can be dot side affects. So I still need to go around and top people off as the lightwell is useless in that situation. However, now when I get a poiston dot, I can use light well and continue on.

I give it 2 thumbs up on the changes.

 

Sinndir

Even more changes for us:

Circle of Healing (Holy): Now works on any targets in the caster's raid, and is now a "smart" heal and chooses the lowest health targets to heal first within it's range. Also now has a 6 second cooldown. Also no longer will heal summoned Snakes from Hunter's Snake Trap.

Lightwell (Holy): Cast time reduced to .5 sec, down from 1.5 sec. Charges increased to 10, up from 5. Now breaks from any attack that hits you for 30% or more of your total health. Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 5.