Infraction for Kortar: General Idiocy

Kaubel · 07/05/08, 11:11 AM

Post: [Priest] Discipline WotLK Talent Preview and discussion.
User: Kortar
Infraction: General Idiocy
Points: 1

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Your excessive quote-splitting is dumb.

Just thought I'd let you know.

Original Post:

NEW Persecution: 3/3 Gives your Holy damage spells 4/7/10% chance to Incapacitate the target for 3 sec.
Seems like a PvP talent if I've ever seen one, helps ease the PvE grind in a very minor way.

This is obviously identical to a host of similar talents in other trees/classes. However, it's the only talent of this type that applies to:

1. A spell that can hit more than every 1.5s (Penance).
2. An AE (Holy Nova).

I suspect that's why it's an incapacitate rather than a stun.

CHANGED Improved Divine Spirit: Changed from 5/10% to 3/6%. Well I guess that the new Spell Power required this nerf or else things could have gotten a wee bit nasty. A nerf, but still no reason not to take it if you are going deep Discipline.

It appears they're also emphasizing Spirit for Warlocks/Mages in WotLK, so you can expect Divine Spirit to provide more than a trivial buff for non-Priests/Druids. Also, IDS seems much more viable for a Holy Priest to take in WotLK, since the top two talents in the the WotLK Holy tree are relatively weak.

WORDING ISSUE Force of Will: Well, the thing is I am currently unsure how this talent will reflect into WotLK. It currently says "Increases spell damage by 5%" however, I do not know if spell damage will even exist in WotLK, due to Spell Power changes. Should it happen to increase overall Spell Power this will be worth taking even though it will not increase your healing critical by 5%( only offensive holy spells).

I don't believe this is actually an issue. They're not talking about bonus spell damage - they're talking about raw spell damage. Spells will still deal damage in WotLK, so you'll still get 5% more total damage out of them.

NEW Aspiration: 2/2 Reduces the cooldown of your Inner Focus, Power Infusion and Pain Suppression spells by 10/20%.
Overall a nice little talent, a Discipline version of the Mage talent Ice Floes. It might just be worth taking, depends on how mana issues go in WotLK.

Assuming you use your Inner Focus on Greater Heal, you save 1290 mana every 3 minutes from Inner Focus (35.83 mp5). With 2/2 Aspiration, you gain another 7.16 mp5 in saved mana consumption. The only spell more expensive would be Prayer of Healing, and very few Priest spells actually cost the listed mana due to talents.
So if you're concerned primarily about PvE (where Power Infusion and Pain Suppression are fairly mediocre abilities), this talent isn't all that great.

NEW Divine Aegis: 3/3 Critical Heals create a protective shield on the target, absorbing 10/20/30% of the amount healed, lasts 12 sec.

AMAZING! This talent alone makes Discipline a raid viable healer! Now, don't get me wrong, we are still to see how critical % develops in WotLK, but judging by what I've seen so far in the Discipline Talents you might just benefit some more from Critical Rating and Intellect then normal. Also I would not be surprised if we see Force of Will changed to 5% critical for all holy spells.

1. So you've just healed someone for 9k. And put a 25% armor buff on them. It seems layering on a bonus PW:S is gilding the lily at this point.

2. Critical based healing has always been terrible for raiding because it's not about raw throughput - it's about precision. Healing for 9k when you're throwing a 6k heal tends to just mean 3k overheal. With this talent, it really just means 6k overheal - except that 3k of that overheal is a shield that is covering damage Lifeblooms would have healed anyway.

3. Both Shaman and Druids get a version of this talent - and their versions are a lot better. Druids get a 30% reactive heal - but they also have +50% critical with Regrowth, so their talent is fairly reliable. Shaman get a 60% chain heal-type jump, and have more critical from talents.

NEW Grace: 3/3 Your Flash Heal, Greater Heal and Penance spells bless the target with Grace, reducing damage done to the target by 1/2/3% and increasing healing done to the target by 1/2/3%. This effect stacks up to 3 times.

AMAZING! This talent is so overpowering in TBC rules... However it seems as if blizzard intends for tanks to take crushing blows rather avoid them. Should this happen, 1 full Discipline priest would be a MUST for every 25man raid! Alas, all is not as great as it seems, we do not currently know the duration of the buff which may pose a serious threat to your OO5SR time, I predict using Inner Focus to keep the buff alive while also trying to regenerate as much mana while OO5SR as possible. Need more information on future tanking issues.

This talent goes a long way towards bridging the solo-healing performance gap between Discipline and Holy Priests. However, I'm not so sure it's a vital raid buff. Consider that what you're getting is about equivalent to putting a Resto Druid and an Affliction Warlock in your main tank group - but that people don't really do this now.

So if such effects aren't worth a minor rearrangement of raid members you're already bringing, it probably doesn't justify bringing someone you ordinarily wouldn't.

NEW Rapture: 5/5 Causes your party members to gain mana equal to 0.5/1/1.5/2/2.5% of the healing done by your Flash Heal, Greater Heal and Penance spells.

AMAZING! Rapture will regenerate much more mana per cast of a spell then Vampiric Touch, so much is obvious... However, the Unspammable nature of Priest Healing spells, and the mana cost of the same makes this generate less Mp5 then Vampiric Touch( Even though Vampiric Touch has been nerfed). Should we be able to downrank enough to keep spamming Flash Heals/Greater Heals/Penances and regenerating just enough mana to stay in the positive this would become insanely good!

600 effective hps is about the maximum anyone can sustain with single target heals in BC raiding right now. At 600 hps, this translates into 75 mp5 - not bad, but more in line with BoW/Mana Spring Totem than Vampiric Touch. Even in WotLK raiding, the value of this talent is severely compromised by the nature of Priest healing. Not only do you have to wait for damage to be taken, but that damage has to be usefully healable with Flash/Greater Heal or Penance, and you have to worry about mana consumption with the Spirit Regen model Priests have.

Also bear in mind that WotLK is aiming for a much less mana-flush environment. They're nerfing downranking and doing away with chain-potting. Vampiric Touch has its percentage reduced, it's likely that current mana regen talents will not scale up at nearly the leevl of mana costs.

The wording is more similar to Arcane Missiles then Mind Flay, which is why I suspect each tick of the spell to be able to crit, also this would indicate that EACH tick would return mana from Rapture...

I see no reason why each tick wouldn't return mana. Each tick of Mind Flay returns mana after all. However, this isn't really all that impressive when you consider that the total healing of the spell is only about 1800 or so. Also, the spell would need to have over triple the mana efficiency of the best single target direct heals currently in game to provide more mana back than it consumes.

Unsure if we get more ranks of the spell, because if we downrank it we might just be seeing a positive mana feedback from casting one of these

If there aren't more ranks, Penance is almost unuseably bad compared to Greater/Flash Heal in throughput/efficiency:
Greater Heal (Rank 9): 3.31 hpm/1705 hps.
Flash Heal (Rank 11): 2.86 hpm/1480 hps.
Penance: 2.81 hpm/670 hps.

Additionally, this is also a buff to Discipline Priests in Arena PvP where this could provide just that dps boost you sometimes need to make your target drop.

It's the highest dps Holy spell (barring multi-target Holy Nova), and almost at the level of the Shadow spells. However, it probably scales a lot better than Mind Blast does (since it's a 3 second spell).

If there wasn't a cooldown, you could probably build a dps Priest based around Holy damage rather than Shadow damage.

Second of all, Penance seems to be THE tank healing spell! At first glimpse a channeled spell may not seem useful, but you have to remember: over 90% of tank deaths in high end content are because tank didn't get any heals during a certain window of time (example: some sunwell mobs can take tank down from 23k hp to 0 in less than 2 seconds). Biggest flaw with greater heal here is that it lasts way too long. Assuming Penance has DECENT amount of healing done, for tank healing the channelled effect is actually much better than "big punch" apporoach of greater heal.

1. It has a 10s cooldown.

2. It does the same job as Lifebloom, except slower, less efficiently, and while consuming more casting time. Oh, and it almost certainly scales worse.

It really looks like they're trying to make Discipline Priests into an effective 'secondary' healer. The major talents all work a lot better in solo-healing environments where criticals can make a difference and you're rapidly casting heals throughout short fights that generally land for near-full.