Ellyh

I still don't like the mechanic from an aesthetic point of view but the new lightwell does now look worth investing one point into. Requiring a 30% total life hit to break it makes it good for tanks in a lot of situations as well now.

 

Vihermaali

30% of 23k hp (tank) = 6900hp
30% of 10k hp (normal raid member) = 3000hp.

Places where a random raid member gets hit by over 3k dmg in SINGLE hit are quite limited. The 30% hp change should make lightwell quite usable, including the more damage heavy raid encounters. Even tanks should be able to use it, up to a point. The whole "here, heal yourself" -concept of lightwell is quite fun (remember all those random people at official forums claiming "no skill is required"? Well, then you have no excuse for not using this)! At level 70, Lightwell would heal almost 5000hp with single hot, which is quite nice amount.

"Why use over normal heals?"
-People who you are moving away from (heal yourself with this while I'm away)
-Too many targets to heal by yourself (pre-emptively cast this)
-Cheating 5-second rule
-Lifetap warlocks
-Order target to click it when <thing x> happens, for Yet Another Hot

First ones that come to my mind.

Main problem with this heal is that most people don't know how it works, but at least in guilds it will get fixed over time.

 

Finkum

While the 30% change is an improvement I think you underestimate the magnitude of many endgame RSTS/environmental AoE effects (e.g. Najentus' Needle Spine is ~3.5k, Supremus volcanoes is ~4.5k per tick, IC flamestrike/blizzard are ~5k). Those that are less than 3k are, funnily enough, typically DoT type mechanics (Impaling Spines, Incinerates, Bloodboil etc).

It's clear that Blizzard are trying to increase the effectiveness of Lightwell without entirely removing the breaks-on-damage limitation, but they aren't quite there yet.

On a different note, the shaman totem WoA change (10% constant haste) sounds somewhat overpowered - imagine a 10% raid-wide crit buff - and it will in turn boost IHC uptime even more than previously estimated.

 

Havoc12

GS - GS healing should certainly be affected by test of faith. I was including that in my calculations. That is why I said before even if the proc is not used up, the spell is still very powerfull because its instant meaning you will often catch it on test of faith, giving you an even larger return. Especially if the tank has grace or tree aura on, its going to be a great deal of healing. If mark of divinity works even if the person buffed is the person healed, then GS will return a very large amount of healing.

As for not balancing encounters around high tier talents, there are plenty of encounters out there balanced around CoH and improved chain heal. Also how about leotheras. Certainly balanced around having an SL/SL warlock. How about kael, although the fight is doable without shield wall, a high tier warrior talent makes a huge difference in that fight. Each class is given unique abilities that can in turn be used to balance encounters around them. Its silly ofc to balance something around that only a very specific spec can provide and indeed there are many ways in which a fight tuned to be used with GS can be done using other things. Pain suppresion, grace, PWS and spirit link, can easily turn damage that would kill the strongest tank into something healable. I am 100% certain that we will see a lot of fights balanced around high damage reduction abilities and GS is one of the best of them.

Currently haste buffs like PI and Icy veins dont stack. I wonder what this haste totem will stack with.


==============================================
Lightwell

The new change to lightwell is an interesting one.

Lets say you only get a single tick from each click: That is about 1800 healing. All 10 clicks give you 18000 healing for 400 mana every 3 minutes. This is very large return, now the question remains where shall that point come from. 3 min CD alone and 10 charges results in good return. With the improved break on damage component you will probably get an even greater return. I would be interested to see if lightwell benefits from spiritual healing and test of faith.

The new changes to lightwell means it can work really well for healing incidental raid damage.

 

Finkum

While this is true, they are both short-term active buffs rather than passive aura buffs. Moonkin aura and ToW are probably better used for comparison purposes, and they stack with each other afaik, as well as any short-term crit buffs (combustion?). If the haste effect doesn't stack, bringing a shaman to your raid basically halves the benefit of PI and IV, and reduces the power of heroism by 1/3 (which seems silly).

Still with the number of haste aura buffs now floating around (Shaman totem, Moonkin buff) and various self-buffs (IHC, the new deep holy Paladin talent which is basically 10% perma-haste) Blizzard may well revise the stacking status quo.

 

inzanor

Improved Innerfire:
Increases the armor bonus and bonus healing of your Inner Fire spell by 10%/20%/30%.

Does this mean Inner Fire will increase (damage and) healing?

 

Havoc12

Wow head has updated the talent trees for priest. Some Big changes.

Holy

- Serendipity: No CD 60% cost refunded. ---> Probably a buff.

- IHC: 20/40/60% haste for the next 3 GH, FH, BH. Lasts 20 secs --> A nerf

- Guardian spirit: No HoT, boosts healing done by 40%, prevents target from dying by sacrificing itself and if it does it also heals the target for 10% of their maximum HP.


The new serendipity will probably return a lot more mana, priests can now maintain very high overheal with exceptional efficiency. The new IHC changes things quite a bit. I presume that when you gain it, you will try to mix in as many other spells as possible with your three GH/BH/FH to take full advantage of the buff. The new GS talent is very interesting. The cheat death mechanic is certainly much improved. The 40% more healing can be very powerfull, but also less reliable.

 

Plitschplatsch

I'm really glad about the lightwell changes. It will still be situational, but so are most priest abilities and our strong point is having a nice tool for every situation.

Lightwell will be very strong on predictable damage in pve. Ad hoc I'd say it would be strong on Najentus and Morogrim like encounters, Morogrim includes both watergrave like effects and the quake.

Does the newest change in lightwell mean it does only break if there's an attack that takes away 30% of your health in one hit? Because that would make it grossly overpowered in pvp.
10 charges which cannot be interrupted or silenced for a lot of healing and almost mana free. Right now i have about 13k health on my priest pvp gear and it's just s1 and s2. There's hardly any way to take away 30% of that with one hit.



I'm not very fond of the CoH changes. If those rumored PoH changes, smart targeting raid wide, go live i can't imagine even speccing for it, because what can CoH do what PoH cannot?
Plus PoH has the advantage of the higher reach.
So it would save the points in CoH and holy reach. The few situations, I'm hard pressed to think of any, where CoH might be more useful wouldn't justify all those points.


Divine Hymn seems to be one of those abilities which shouldn't be needed but will be needed.
I'm thinking of trash pulls gone wrong. 20 seconds for people to apply cc and tanks to pick up targets. This will save a lot of corpse runs.


Divine Mark seems so overpowered to me that I just can't imagine it going live like that.


Edit: Guardian Spirit seems quite worthless to me as well, aside from Kael like encounters.
If the tank takes slow steady damage and it's not possible to keep him up it will just delay the inevitable for a few more seconds.
If the damage is too spiky it can't be predicted properly.
The duration is too low to be cast preemptively either.
I don't like that one at all.

 

Brinas

That's like a druid saying that NS+HT is worthless when you can just regrowth just because NS has a cooldown...
First of all, it's still instant cast. Second, why not do even more healing with a PoH then CoH? They gave PoM a 10 second cooldown because it was overpowered. It's still useful though. Sorry, but when raids bring a class to continuously spam one spell, it probably needs a nerf. Any idiot can stand there and spam CoH, but it takes a good healer to use all of his tools and manage cooldowns properly. 6 seconds is not exactly a huge nerf either. I think the smart heal, raid-wide ability more than makes up for the 6 second cooldown.

As for the GS argument, people need to quit focusing on the "cheat death" component. It's a 3 part ability. If nothing else you click it and all healing to that target gets increased by 40% for 10 seconds. Just off hand I can say this would be great for any fights with aoe silence, frenzy abilities, basically any time the tank takes spike damage. The "cheat death" and "heals the target for 10% of their health" are just gravy.

 

Crosshairs

I wonder if it will take longer for our current gear to be replaced. It seems the idea is that one robe could be used for all cloth types but Priests would get more healing out of it by going deep into Holy.

My thought is that my current gear would provide more healing then the spellpower item, and then the deep holy talents would make my gear pretty over powered.

 

Mode

Much like the addition of spelldamage to healing gear, all spell damage and healing gear is being retroactively changed to spellpower.

 

Crosshairs

I guess since healing gear has spell damage now listed it would also get retroactively fixed based on the logic that is it damage and healing now.

I was thinking in my head only gear that you would consider as damage gear would get this stat and the current healing gear would be unaffected.

 

• constantius

My notes:

1) Grace has been reduced to 2% per stack, 6% total.

2) Rapture now applies only to yourself. The combination of 1 and 2 remove any real suggestion of a serious Disc priest raiding spec for end-game. It's on the level of an affliction warlock now. No matter how hard you try to justify improved shields and better crits, you're a gimped healer with a one-trick pony (Grace) which isn't even that good now. If they keep tweaking the talents, I'm prepared to re-evaluate (happily): atm, the math shows deep Disc (50+ points) as being very weak comparatively.

3) Guardian Spirit is, like almost all 51 point talents, primarily focused toward PvP. I have strong doubts that anyone will take it for PvE when there's so much good stuff in the first 25 points of Disc, as there has been since TBC release.

4) Twin Disciplines is OMG. A T1 talent that gives us 5% spell damage and healing. At the current ratios if everything is maintained as the ilvls work now, this is FIFTEEN PERCENT HEALING SPELLS AND EFFECTS. At my current gearing, that's 405 HSE. For a T1 talent that replaces ... Wand Spec. Huge huge change if it actually goes live.

5) Serendipity and Test of Faith remain strong talents, and good reasons to spec deep Holy.

If the current talents go live, I suspect that myself + the other holy priest (assuming we run with 2) will spec: Spec 1 (with small variations at the bottom) and Spec 2 (with obvious variations if you decide you want 5/5 Divine Providence.

The one thing I'm currently unsure on is just how useful DP will be in WotLK. Obviously we can't know this until we get a feel for just how much healing we do with AE spells + PoM and Binding Heal. My suspicion is that getting 5 points in this will be slightly inferior to maxing out Test of Faith and Serendipity, but we'll obviously need to test it in raids before we'll truly know.

Anyway, I'm quite happy with deep Holy. I wish they hadn't changed Empowered Healing, but it was scaling just a bit too well ... I also suspect there may be a tooltip bug atm, since there are no more "bonus healing effects". If it's 10% of your "spell power", that's an entirely different kettle of fish, and is actually a net *buff*.

Anyway, positive things. If you get into Beta, make detailed, careful feedback, and let's give the devs something to think about with respect to deep Disc. If they want it to be raid viable, they're going at it exactly wrong.

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

 

Bjork

Agree 100%. Happy day

 

KamPa

Somewhat small question, but how does "intelligent targetting" of CoH/PoH treat pets? As it is now, it's theoretically possible to heal 10 targets - with being strictly limited to 5, it means they'll be skipped?

 

Havoc12

I dont agree that disc is not raid viable because of these effects. You are completely understimating what the new talents do for Disc. The previous version of rapture was probably too strong for PvE and too weak for PvP. More importantly it was too far up the tree as was enlightenment. Disc is just as viable as it was before, especially because of the nerf to holy concentration. Its not as big if the haste applies to all spells until its used up, but its very big if the haste applies only to GH/FH/BH. The new PWS talent makes disc priests easily as good as holy priests on tank healing and probably better than paladins, whose new talents are mostly unimpressive for tank healing. Their AoE renew is an impressive spell especially since the mechanic with which it works is really very clever, but otherwise using holy shock crits to get instant HL is better for PvP than for PvE. As for having to burn 2 GCDs to get 30 seconds of 10% haste. Its really just a mechanic to give holy pallys more utility by allowing them to judge the target than giving them more throuput.

As things stand, holy and disc are just about the best tank healers out there. Most raids will prefer disc priests on MT for high DPS encounters though because of grace, and PWS/divine aegis, which together represent at level70 values a total of 300-350 less DPS on the tank 6% less damage and 6% more healing, on top of inspiration. All in all if a tank is taking 3.5k DPS we are looking at 16% decreased damage on the tank on top of 6% more healing. The only way that disc will not be raid viable is if grace does not stack with tree aura.

Guardian spirit is ok for PvP, but not really. Just compare it with pain suppression. PS has less CD, is effectively undispellable now that we have 30% more dispel resistance absorbs more damage overall and it is not affected by -healing debuffs. Did I mention its a 41 not a 51 pointer? You want more? Compare it with nature switftness. Instant Healing Touch for effectively full HP.

Once again I think that ppl here are missing the big picture. Damage reduction is UBIQUITOUS. Spirit link, guardian spirit, pain suppression, and worst of all the new divine guardian talent for pallys.
"While Divine Shield is active 15/30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards is redirected to the Paladin."

This is patently absurd. Everythign teh paladin bubbles everyone around him takes 30% less damage! (the paladin is immune thanks to divine shield). I mean jeez.

There is one and only one conclusion from this. We are going to see a LOT of fights which involve around ppl surviving HUGE hits. Rather than being PvP only damage reduction talents are going to be required.



GS is not a PvP centric talent. Absorption of death blows does not make it cheat death. For a 51 pointer if it was really intended for PvP its a joke since effectively almost all of its power is affected by mortal strike. Even if you were trying to do a PvP holy build you would without question skip DP and GS. The only conceivable holy build for PvP is something like this Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft, without too much leeway high up. You could try to get 2 ranks of rapture as 10% mana retuned from PWS is quite significant.

The only place where guardians spirit can really shine is in high movement and your targets get hit for very big hits or where its important to survive an extremely large hit. Its a PvE talent alright.

Shadow is the only tree with a 51 pointer that is havily aimed towards PvP.

The talent specs you posted are very strange. Why are you taking 5/5 MA?

 

Bjork

This is my spec at 80 (as it looks now): http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

I guess you're right about disc being wanted if a tank is taking the vast majority of damage in the raid. After Sunwell and late BT it doesn't look like Blizzard are taking the game that way though.

 

Havoc12

If the tank is not taking a lot of damage, disc wont be a great tank healer, but with divine aegis working on PoH and with PWS actually giving you mana if its all used up and healing for just about 50% a max rank gheal. I think disc will have a lot of utility. Especially since I am 100% certain we are going to see fights which revolve around damage reduction. I am sure that disc will be a fixture in most raids. I fully expect one priest in the raid to switch in some crit gear and respec deep disc for a few select fights even for raids which wont bring disc priests.

That is exactly the spec I was planning too. I am agonising about finding a way to get 2/2 healing prayers and was considering dropping inner focus, but its really a very hard choice.

Anyhow if raids want divine sprit now, a deep disc priest is a better choice as a hybrid imp DS holy priest is less usefull than a deep disc priest.

 

• constantius

That's my feeling: Sunwell is an instance full of raid damage, and with CHeal, CoH, the new paladin AE HoT, and tree-form druids getting raid-wide ToL ... it's just going to continue.

You really really really have to justify Discipline. That's my point. If you are ONLY healing 1 tank, and it's a Brutallus-style fight, then there is a spot for a Disc priest. Maybe. But I really don't see the talents being as strong as, say, fully up-ranked healing from a deep Holy priest with every talent picked out. The only thing that makes it close is Grace, which basically turns you into a debuff bitch.

Once (if?) I get into Beta, I'll evaluate it first-hand, but I'm strongly leaning toward not bothering with Disc for raids at this point, at least until we get to Patchwerk v2.0 and see what Blizzard's version of "hard hitting" is for WotLK.

[e] I need the numbers on the final ranks of GHeal that we get, but I strongly doubt even a 3/3 Imp PW:S and 5/5 Borrowed Time shield will equal 50% of a GHeal. And remember: my GHeals will be landing every 2.0 seconds for a minimum (max-rank, at 70, current gear) of 6000, non-crit. Add another rank of GHeal, a bit more gear, and I'm going to be landing 7500-ish heals every 2.0 seconds. Spec'ing 51 points in Disc to get a powerful shield isn't my idea of a good spec for PvE.

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

Currently going to update my post (will only include Holy unless you guys want me to change it with Disc talents too).

Also I like the question about how will the 'smart' heals target pets... As far as I know with chain heal (someone please correct) they only hit pets if no other player character is missing health. I would assume CoH would be the same.

Nid, just curious why you wouldn't drop Mental Agility for full end talents in the holy tree?

Like Havoc and Rukli I plan on spec'ing something along the lines of this. Anywho, I'll be back with more thoughts after I update the first page.

 

• constantius

Basically, here's my rationale (which may change, who knows, we have NO clue what content we'll see): there's only one new regen talent in the bottom of Holy. They're nerfing mana pots. They're increasing mana costs of a few things, including CoH. Keeping Mental Agility helps with Renew/PoM/CoH mana costs at a cost of increased healing to my AE spells (basically).

I'll play around with it when I get a chance, but I figure I may end up going 23 Disc, since IDS is going to be *required* now that everyone is being pushed toward spirit-based regen.

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

 

Isin

Yes, According to wowhead's parses, ranks 8 and 9 of Inner Fire increase spell power by 95 and 120 respectively.

inner fire - Wowhead Search

3/3 Improved Inner Fire will be worth 36 spellpower at level 80.

 

Isin

But Constantius, why would level 80 be any different than 70 in terms of holy priest spec distribution in 25 man raids? Once one priest goes IDS, shouldn't the rest go GS? Even if it is gimmicky, It's better than 3 redundant talent specs.

 

Sinndir

They may have removed Mark of Divinity, I cannot find it listed as our current abilities on MMO-Champion.

 

Havoc12

At level 70 max rank with your current gear and deep disc PWS absorbs 2892 damage, however you are getting the benefit of their T6 bonus. Without that its 50% of a non crit gheal. Since it only takes 1 second PWS adds 2892 HPS when included in a spell sequence. A PoM/PWS combo adds about 5k in 1 second making it the best panic button in the game.

At max rank PWS absorbs 4370 damage with a 1 second GCD and you are looking at 8.2k gheals. Only 50 points are required for the powerfull shield. And in addition to that you get grace, divine aegis, rapture for yor mana efficiency, pain suppression, PI and 20% more intellect. Deep disc is certainly a lot better than any impDS holy build, no matter how much you look at it, due to the nerf in IHC. If the spell haste is for all spells but the buff expires after 3 GH/FH/BH, then holy impDS is ok I guess, not as good as disc, but ok. If haste only applies to those 3 spells, impDS = disc and disc alone.

In general the number of classes getting damage reduction talents (e.g. dispersion, spirit link), especially the ridiculous pally 30% AoE DR, leads me to think that damage reduction is going to be necessary in PvE as well as PvP. This is why I think that disc will do well.