Infraction for Brinas: General Idiocy

• Aldriana · 07/30/08, 2:53 PM

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

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

http://elitistjerks.com/f31/announcements.html, last post, #3.

Original Post:

Originally Posted by Kortar

What "tricks" are you talking about?

Seems to me that Guardian Spirit, Circle of Healing and Lightwell are enormously better "tricks" to have than Pain Suppression and Penance in PvE healing.

By tricks I mean abilities that have cooldowns longer than the GCD. Things that you can't chain cast, like a holy priest can with G Heal. PS, PI, Penance, Aegis, more reliance on PWS. All of these are not things that can be just be calculated as HPS. Granted you can cast them as soon as the cooldon is up, and calculate it that way. But it's not always ideal to do this.

Originally Posted by Kortar

2. Aegis procs whenever you crit, and it doesn't overwrite itself.

I believe a beta tester already posted that currently lower values overwrite higher values, like Blessed Recovery. So if the shield isn't used, it overwrites itself. Hence, it's hard to judge the value of this talent without hard data.

Originally Posted by Kortar

3. The buffs to PW:S appear to be incredibly useful in PvP, but not all that great in PvE. The cooldown reduction, for example, is a really buff to everything else you cast rather than PW:S. Disc does make PW:S free (or actually restore mana), though.

I'd say if they wanted to make it better for PVP they would have reduced the weakened soul, or give it some "on dispell effect". As it stands Borrowed time is better when you have 25 targets, than it is in 5s where one person gets FF. Granted this doesn't apply to main tank healing.

Originally Posted by Kortar

5. Mental Agility isn't really all that important, since the major savings came from Circle of Healing (which Disc Priests won't have). Rapture is certainly useful - and difficult to model - but it is within the same realm as Holy talents if you presume very large amounts of spell critical. With downranking nerfs, it would likely mean that a Holy Priest couldn't effectively downrank to match healing volume at a much lower mana consumption, but the Holy Priests hpm would likely be better. Again, it's tough to judge without parsed data on the various talents.

Mental agility is much more useful for a disc priest since they use more instant cast spells than a holy priest (other than CoH spam). It's not gamebreaking, but still useful. I agree with your comments on rapture.

Originally Posted by Kortar

But as to your overall point, no one - except you - is saying that Holy is 20% better. What people are saying is that the gap in healing capability for PvE 25-man raiding purposes is even larger than it is now. And since people don't bring Discipline Priests now, a larger gap in performance does not suggest they'll bring them in the future.

No, we don't have every possible bit of evidence. But the evidence we do have points to the conclusion that Discipline, as currently constituted, will not be a competitive healing spec for 25-man raids. If you don't want to discuss this evidence, I'm curious why you'd post on a thread speculating about the various changes to healing Priests in WotLK.

I have no problem discussing these differences. We just can't make the assumption that healing capabillity is worse than it is now because Disc has new key abilities that aren't traditional healing spells. Holy got talents that are easy to calculate, other than guardian spirit, disc got talents that I would consider to be tricks or indirect benefits to the raid. Grace, Borrowed Time, and Divine Aegis are all more situationally dependent talents.

My point was that you posted calculations based solely on a disc priest and holy priest using G Heal, and stated that "Holy is substantially higher throughput on Greater Heal spam than Discipline is under any set of reasonable assumptions." Ok... that's fine. I was just pointing out that this should not lead people to assume that holy will be a 20% better healer than Disc while main tank healing because disc won't be G Heal spamming in the first place. Just like Holy won't be using PWS every 15 seconds on a tank.

There's a difference between discussing usefulness of talents and assuming viability of a whole talent spec based on a few calculations without seeing the spec in action.