Awesome, thanks.

And you got in before my ninja caps edit. Didn't want another infraction.

Also as far as crits go alot of dps classes upon the patch found themselves with huge crit jumps (rogue I was playing with went from 33% to almost 50% from pre patch sub to post patch Assass) I believe that accounts for the decline in resil, because against a well geared rogue or Lawladin your still facing upwards of 25-30% crit change at cap.

Sort of a random question, but after playing around with deep discipline, I wonder, was there any reason given by Blizzard for not being able to use Penance to self heal? Was a balance issue or just their idea of how implementation should work (ie the shooting of a beam like arcane missiles from point A to point B where B =/= A). This thought popped into my head because I've been doing a lot of running away from things recently in BGs.

They have not given any response about this, nor even any acknowledgment about it at all.

Since it currently says "target is not in front of you" when you attempt to do so, this may be relevant.

I do not know if the target facing has been fixed for healing others, I'll have to test this in beta to see if it's already been addressed which would void this entirely.

Let's talk a bit more about current survivability. Many classes have very hit crit chances now. Warriors, Paladins and Rogues come to mind, but also Mages, Shamans, Hunters and Druids. While crit-chance has gone up resilience has stayed constant. So it reduces our chance to be crit by a smaller relative number.

At the same time the Disc on crit survival talent (Focused Will) has been reduced in effectiveness. Shadow has lost physical damage reduction (and damage hasn't scaled as well as other classes). Therefore I would expect them both to perform worse than before relative to other classes.

Due to pre-3.0 Priest gearing nobody has any reasonable crit chance on their PvP gear. I for example had 7.5% total crit. Now with the new cloak I'm at 8.5% with 505 resilience. That leaves abilities like Divine Aegis and the shadow crit talents underutilised for the time being. I also expect Holy concentration to be less good now than it will be at 80 with the appropriate stats.

So what can we do?
The inflation of crit has greatly increased the value of one talent Priests have, but don't commonly use anymore: Blessed Resilience.

Let's assume an enemy had 30% crit chance before 3.0 and 50% after.
Let's also assume the enemy does double damage on a crit.
Resilience reduces the chance to be crit by around 12.5% and the crit damage by a further 25%.
That leaves crits at 150% normal hit damage.

Pre 3.0 the enemy would have a 17.5% chance to crit the Rogue for 150% damage. If all abilities can crit (for the sake of argument) that's an increase of 8.75% damage over not being able to crit. So resilience reduced that enemy's dps by about 16.3%.
Permanently having Blessed Resilience up (due to being constantly hit) would reduce the enemy's damage by a further 6.7% for 3 talent points, or 2.24% per point.

After 3.0 the enemy suddenly has a 37.5% chance to crit the ~495 resilience Priest for 150% damage. Now resilience reduces the enemy's damage by 21%. Enemy damage went up 15%, resilience effectiveness only 4.7%. A clear miss-match.
But now Blessed Resilience steps on. The uptime should if anything be greater now, so let's assume still permanent. Suddenly it reduces the enemy dps by 12.3% (4.1% per talent point) and sets it back to closer where it was pre-3.0.

Conclusion:
I'll respec holy tonight.

Holy is very good, but runs out of mana incredibly fast. Playing with absolution/mental agility/meditation/inner focus is agonizing.

I read somewhere (may have been these very forums) that Borrowed time 5/5 only gives 8% bonus to Shield and 1/5 gives the full 40%, is this true? I would test it with Glygh and see for myself with the difference in amount healed, but cannot log on for a few days.

Due to recent 3.0 changes I have recently given up on my original tank build with 13k HP and over 500 Resilience in favor of a 2/2/4 build with the focus being high burst.

I was planning on the change to critical strike values and as such I have about 17% critical strike chance on my Priest in my current gear set. Of course this means that I have below 400 Resilience and just above 10k HP now.

With the new kill or be killed talents survival is a moot point and with the Priest class so abysmally far behind the other classes in terms of talent power you might as well focus on being as "bursty" as possible in order to win. I cannot comment on arena post 3.0 as Mal'ganis is so much laggier than the rest of the Battlegroup that I've given up playing in any bracket on my Priest.

Also Resilience still works but, most of you would not notice because the majority of stress in Battlegrounds even now (Yes I am aware of the hotfix) has been Ret Paladins and due to the nature of their talents having capped Resilience means very little in terms of surviving the one Hammer of Justice burst of Wonder.

Good luck surviving in 3.0 fellow Priests. It's simply not a good time to be one of us.

I can confirm this to be true as of two days ago.

So I did respec to Holy and I have to say being crit immune having Lightwell, fully talented and glyphed Renew, Guardian Spirit and generally bigger heals is pretty awesome. I put out more healing than ever before.

Ultimately I die less now than I used to because Hunters and Warriors have almost stopped using healing debuffs. Viper Sting and Mana Burn have gone out of fashion too. Another good thing that 3.0 brought is that nobody ever tries to dispel in BGs anymore. Consequently I dropped Silent Resolve and haven't regretted it yet.

While many classes have scary raw output now most players are blindly trying to burst me down without thinking. They usually realise too late that it doesn't work against crit immune targets.

But right now there's no money on the table, so to speak. How long can you expect the idiocy to continue once performance becomes important again?

Well, I imagine most priests will be with you on this front, because the word from the beta players is that mana burn got it in the shorts.

I have a question then, I am Discipline and love being that tree but I am PVP spec what I was going to use for levelling.

Reading this thread am I thinking I wont really need to be PVP spec (I am Raider anyways the PVP was just for levelling).

I would prefer to be a PVE spec as I will be doing mainly quests/instances anyway.

So my question basically is should I drop the PVP talents Improved Mana Burn, Focused Power etc and get myself Imp divine spirit and Imp fortitude?

There's never any point to be PvP spec for levelling. I made that mistake myself in the past. If you engage in PvP while levelling then the winner is usually determined by their level, gear and who gets the jump. Not by their talents.

I would really recommended to pick the highest damage spec you can find along with some regen capabilities. The more damage you do the quicker you will level. The quicker you level the earlier you can engage in real PvP.

If you're solo-levelling then you should probably go Shadow. Healing dungeons below max level is easily possible as shadow, particularly with the spell power consolidation and more mana stats on gear.

I will level with a friend, so I will sacrifice a bit of personal damage for being able to do group quests and dungeons and dungeons more safely. Despite that I'll try to pick up all the holy damage stuff I can get my hands on, like Searing Light. Sadly there aren't any dps talents in either deep Holy or deep Disc so I'll probably go with a Power Infusion/holy hybrid.

As an exampe I levelled to 58 as Shadow alone. Then I respecced to a Smite build with a few healing talents and did TBC levelling with my Warrior friend. We were able to do all 3-man quests with the two of us (except that big red guy in Achindoun) and easily find groups for dungeons. We had virtually no down-time and were fairly safe from ganking.

I checked this on the current beta build and it seems to be fixed.

On the topic of soloing, a build like this: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft is actually quite good if you want to level as holy. Once spirit tap procs you have massive regen and a significant damage boost through spiritual guidance as well. When I leveled in beta it was faster than shadow, although shadow has got several dps buffs since then so things have probably changed.

Mana burn and Drain Mana may have gone out of fashion - both because they no longer stack up to the sheer draining power of viper sting (at 80) and because the classes that cast them can frequently not be able to afford to do so without dying. I don't understand how viper sting gone out of fashion at all - it's only gained power as a drain in more ways than one.

I had an idea to help disc a bit with dispel issues without implimenting more rng -
What if imp pw:s was moved deeper into the tree (switched with focused power, for instance) and in addition to increasing the amount absorbed, made it so upon being dispelled you have a 33/66/100% chance of inflicting a percentage of the remaining absorption in damage (could either be an aoe around you or an aoe around the dispeller)?

This would seem complimentary to the concept of reflective shield, and given how much disc revolves around pw:s I think most people would agree that it needs some sort of protection.

edit: Another possibility would be to refund a percentage of the remaining absorption as a heal - of course this would be preferable due to the poor survivability of priests currently, I just don't know if this would be a little much considering the pw:s glyph. However if the glyph was changed I feel that this would be a very appropriate change.

Yeah I would totally agree with you here.

I have experienced less dispel and purge spam in bgs but that may totally be the result of everyone in a burst first mindset. Rather then dispelling you the enemy priest is spamming you with holy fire and smite while some random melee/caster class is on you. The 30% resist may or may not be a factor, like tainter said we'll just have to wait and see.

Can anyone give me some tips on reading telegraphed damage? I've been trying to get used to it, but I'm getting overwhelmed by the "heat of the moment", stop reading and wind up reacting instead of pre-acting. The result is a lot of 10% health Pain Suppressions, and getting behind in healing far too early.

Just have to get in practice really. For instance every arms warrior I've ever seen will bladestorm if they land an Imp hamstring on you. You're pretty much boned at that point unless you have PS up. Overall I think you'll get better at that sort of thing the more often you see it.

Good point.

I just found Healing in Arena - How to live forever by Sky - Elitist Jerks, which is definitely helping. Should be a fun S5.

How are all the other priests fairing in wotlk pvp?

I did a few battle grounds, albeit very under geared, and did not enjoy myself too much. Every game I went into I was up against a horde team that had at least 50% death knights. A few wsg matches had 8/10. They don't seem be too favorable of a match up for priests. On the plus side it seems ret has come down to earth.

Should I be worried about this? any other sentiments? I saw a blue post saying death knights were a work in progress type deal.

I did a couple of battlegrounds as deep holy spec (for heroics/10 man naxx). I didn't expect to live very long with only 15K health and wearing zero resilience, but I was pleasantly surprised. Maybe it was the competition (little reason for extended battlegrounding at the moment, so most people in there are probably just testing specs, gear, etc.), but I found that staying alive wasn't too difficult and obviously with the PvE set up my heals felt considerably stronger than they did in TBC (I was pure PvP back then).

As for death knights, they can be formidable but still aren't as annoying as rogues and to an extent warriors (again, as holy spec... I'm drooling over the possibilities of Disc spec against warriors).

And speaking of Disc, I don't know about other priests, but currently I'm having a tough time finding abilities in deep Disc that I can skip. They all seem useful and seem to have great synergy with each other that it's tough to fit everything in to a cohesive spec with a cohesive build. Any thoughts on which Disc talents we can do without, noting that you will probably need about 14 points in Holy?