That's the first thing I tested yesterday when the ptr was updated and it is not proccing on normal hits. I already reported it, lets hope it gets fixed before release.

So... discipline specs? I made one on the fly yesterday and it came out something like 10 holy 51 disc :P Maybe something like 18/43 might have more sense though. I've never played with it so far so I don't know if reflective shield is any use or a waste of points.

A hybrid dps spec is also less of a gimmick with the new spell damage on healing items, something like 20/41 with searing light and force of will.

Yeah I tested this just now to double check. Had about 20 troggs beating on me for around 5 minutes (in the neighborhood of 3000 hits) and it never proc'd once. Focused casting was practically chain procing.

Reflective shield is pretty good for 2v2 and 3v3, I'm skeptical of its usefulness in 5v5. Thats the real problem with discipline. It's always been pretty good for the smaller brackets, it just sucks for 5v5.

As was posted in Big changes for season 3... the new talent can only contribute crit reduction up to the 25% crit mitigation cap. This means that if you have 493 resilience, you gain zero benefit from that portion of the talent. It really just seems like an oversight (why would it be 30% if the cap is 25%? especially when you have 20-25% from gear to start with) and hopefully this gets fixed as well before it goes live. The talent is pretty bad and the spec is still not viable over blessed resil for 5v5 the way it is right now.

As far as specs go, 42/19 or a slight variation is good Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft (pretend the 3 points in force of will are in the new talent). With reflective shield, it's nice to have 3/3 imp PW:S also, so you could juggle things around to get that too. As with most priest specs, you always have about 5 points you can put in different talents that don't make a huge difference and depend on your composition or personal preference.

I'd prefer it to be stacked with the Critical mitigation we already have before even considering, I mean it is most likely a bug that it isn't, but you never know with Blizzard. However, it's still stupid that our PVP Talents are spread across both Holy and Disc, when they should just be in Disc :/

As far as a holy dps spec goes, I'd still place it in the gimmick category, but you might be able to make it work. I see issues with longevity if you try to do any real healing, but maybe you could play on a gib team or basically any setup that an elemental shaman is good in currently, with a very similar playstyle. On a related note, using my PvE dps gear to screw around with a smite build in AV is fairly entertaining.

It would be interesting to see without a doubt, but I'm pretty sure the Holy Nuke spec would fall under the Holy Priest raiding clause, they don't bring enough to choose them over the likes of a Shaman

Well, druids have a similar talent in the restoration tree. Passive 15% crit reduction on melee and ranged. This talented never worked above the cap, and from what I've gathrered people agree this is intended.

I agree it seems weird that your talent would give 30% when 25% is max, but if they change how your talent works, they should change the druid one too.

I hate when they penalize people with good PVP gear. I hate when they penalize people who don't understand how a great sounding talent can suck. Look a talent that does both! hehe

In 5vs5 with a two healer setup the new talent seems quite nice though, especially for a priest with some high stam pve gear and not a lot of resilience.

The crazy thing is priests (and warlocks) have the highest resilience totals out of all the classes. We just... don't need a talent to reduce crit damage unless it takes us over the cap.

I'm finding that no matter how much they buff Disc, I just can't spec it because the healing power lost from not going deeper in Holy feels very gimped up. Maybe i've been playing my druid for too long..

About the choice of the necklace I'm still wondering what's the best choice for me...

I'm only playing in 2v2 (Dual maces rogue/HolyPriest) and 3v3 (Icemage/AffliLock/HolyPriest) brackets, and I focus mainly my 2v2 team (rating around 1.9k). My template is a classical 27/34, with 11.7k hp buffed and 213 resi. As I started arenas and farming honor only lately (in the middle of the season 2), my pvp gear is still incomplete (3/5 merciless gear [head/shoulder/chest], BG's Ring&Waist, imp. pvp trinket), but I've enough honor points and arena saved to complete my stuff as soon the 2.3 starts.

I'm farming for the moment [Talisman of the Breaker] but my guild is also working Morogrim so I would probably have soon access to [Pendant of the Lost Ages]. In the other hand I have honor points aside to buy [Vindicator's Pendant of Salvation] as soon the 2.3 starts.
(And for the moment I've a not so crappy but still not wonderfull [Living Ruby Pendant].)

So should I wait for the S3 pvp necklace or still farming/waiting for [Talisman of the Breaker] / [Pendant of the Lost Ages] ? Considering that with my actual rating, my worse nigthmares are ArmsWar (MS+pummel/intercept) but also generally all the silencing effects (like the combos kick/CS from a mage/rogue team) , the choice is not so easy : The amount of stamina and resi from the pvp necklace are good (especially considering my lack of resiliance) but in the other hand the diminushing of silencing effects would probably have saved my life many many times ...

I know this may sound bad, but having both available is absolutely huge if you're not playing with a Paladin, especially if you know who you're going to be playing against by doing the /ignore X- method.

Juli, does reflective shield still cause spell pushback on the caster of DoTs? Also, when you cast PW:Shield on someone else, does that shield reflect damage? Or only shields you throw up on yourself? (The only deep Disc spec I tried did not pick up this talent.)

I don't think it causes pushback, but never tested that (I've only played against one other priest with the talent and I didn't cast any dots). I'm my PvE shadow spec atm so I can't test unless I do it on the PTR. It does reflect when you cast it on other people, thats why it's worth taking. Spamming PW:S for 750 free damage per PW:S + rage starving the warrior that your rogue partner is dueling in a warrior+healer 2v2 is pretty nice. The damage is done by the person it was cast on.

In fact it doesn't sound so bad, but I don't know what do you mean concerning the /ignore X-method ??

I'm not sure which wow build it was but I distinctly remember getting insanely annoying pushback from something when fighting a priest after I used dots.

I've been having Refl. Shield ever since I started arena-ing with my priest. I play smaller brackets 2v2 and 3v3 around 1900s. I chose Disc because I love it. I know the 28/33 might be better, but like I said, I'm in love with Disc and the addition of FW and the new PS makes me happy in my pants. Reflected damage from shield behaves like any other damage done to the person being reflected, meaning it causes spell pushback if the shielded person is dotted. It's holy damage and it can crit. I've seen it crit for 1k on a happy pom pyro mage

Thanks Sniddie.

But considering my own rating (1900) this kind of macro isn't very usefull ! And I prefer not using this kind of trick... Perhaps it's a must for top ranking pgm, but not for an average player who just want to enjoy the game .............

And so at the end, as I can't really switch between [Pendant of the Lost Ages] and [Vindicator's Pendant of Salvation], I still don't know what's the best average choice...

Jury is still out for how effective this is going to be, but there's one thing I like a lot about this talent: it stacks up to five times. This means that if you're getting focused fired you have a much larger buffer of things to dispel/purge, assuming that's how it works.

I'm not sold, because I'm concerned about how long it'll take to stack. Assuming your attacker has 17.5% crit rate after resilience, and 12.5% chance to trigger it on hits (assuming that's fixed), you're looking at taking, on average, 17 hits in 24 seconds to get a 5 stack. So in order to actually get 5 stacks, you need either a 5v5 team or two very fast-attacking DPS classes (hunter, rogue, comedy option scorch mage) focusing on you. In that scenario, I'd argue that Blessed Resilience offers more value because it only requires that you be crit once to get the full damage reduction effect, and certainly in 2v2/3v3 it'll be very uncommon for you to actually see a 5 stack.

edit: The same argument, but stated better by someone with better PvP experience.

To paraphrase the post I made on page 17 of that WoW forums thread: This implementation heavily favors being beaten on by a rogue or hunter+pet versus a warrior. Hopefully they try to balance this out somehow, making it more effective against warriors with slow 2handers (or less against rogues/hunters).

It seems kind of backwards to make it more effective against classes that are under-represented in arena and getting buffs to bring them in line, and less effective against an over-represented class.

I agree with Juli, it is ass-backwards. Having it remove mortal strike instead of the plus healing component would be cooler.


But it seems like a very nice talent for 5s with a two healer setup. Other than that, I think blessed resilience is still the way to go. But, as all things, I'd have to see it in action and see how fast the stack does come up (and how often it gets purged).

Focused Will has been modified again:
WoW Forums -> Focused Will: The Saga Continues

Eynoix has done a pretty good job dialoguing with the community on this in the priest forum, although the thread ended up degenerating into him arguing with wow-forums-'tards about whether he's responding to the right things and doing his job properly. I'm glad to see this interaction (and the feedback's effect is actually tangible in this case) and hope to see more of it on other issues. Hopefully next time he'll take the high road and not argue about inane crap and stick to the issue at hand, but this is turning into a derail so I'll leave it there.

The new version is an improvement, but still doesn't fix the issue of slow vs. fast hitters maintaining it. They just buffed it's overall power by making it stack faster. I'll have to play with it to know for sure, but my feeling is that this version will placate me, but still leaves something to be desired.