Hm, I'm certain I saw both Rapture and Holy Concentration, but that may have been on Blizzard's slightly dated calculator. I also recall seeing Telluric Currents as a glyph, but my memory's rather hazy. As for my opinion (as holy PvE priest) on the talents,

Tier 1:
I'm seeing Void Tendrils as the preferred choice, but Psyfiend might outshine it in a few encounters. Dominate Mind doesn't seem like a good choice for PvE (or even PvP to be honest, but then again I rarely go there, so I can't say), but if we ever get encounters where we may have to use it - and I very much hope we do - a handful will probably take it. So far, my choice is Tendrils, but I'm really hoping they change Dominate Mind to something more useful.

Tier 2:
Phantasm could be very interested for dodging some ranged attacks, but it's very much situational. Perhaps dodging something on the lines of Feludius's Lance. As I mentioned before, Path of the Devout can also prove useful in particular situations, but the fact that it's a self buff only hinders its usefulness. Body and Soul will likely be the preferred talent here, with the possible usage of Phantasm here and there.

Tier 3:
So far, I'm not really liking any of these, and I'm hoping they add Inner Focus here, and somewhat improve it (allowing us to cast spells while using it, etc.). Archangel is obviously useless as holy, so unless they add a 'good' third option, From Darkness Comes Light will end up as a go-to talent (on the bright side, it has a great name), which really disappoints me, since Crit has of lately been a (imho) bottom-, dare I say garbage-tier stat.

Tier 4:
Desperate Prayer is something I've always been against, so I'm kinda bummed that they're still keeping it (I see a lot of love for it, but it'd be long gone if it were up to me). I reckon we can still see it as a cheap heal even when not particularly low on HP, despite what I believe to be its original design - a panic button. Angelic Bulwark is exactly that though. While the shield is only 20% (compared to 30% heal from Desperate Prayer), it does have a shorter cooldown, and the HP it requires isn't particularly low either, I can see it proccing very often, but at the same time, not when you want it to. A 20% total HP increase is never really bad, but the high cooldown (and let's not kid ourselves, 1.5m is a long cooldown) can keep it from popping up when you need it. edit: Can't believe I didn't even mention Void Swap here. It's going to be the talent of this tier, especially if they allow us to use it on tanks.

Tier 5:
Everything is rather tempting here. My personal favourite is Twist of Faith (which is much like the old Test of Faith), but PI as a mini-bloodlust has always been an amazing buff, which sadly, rarely sees the light of day. Not a very big fan of Insight, but I imagine we'll be seeing a lot of it, since people do enjoy quick PoHs.

Tier 6:
Divine Star is, right now, the only choice here. Positioning can be very difficult if Blizzard keeps rolling out Firefighter type encounters, but in an average fight, walking up to the melee and tossing one will be a breeze. As for Vow of Unity, I'm honestly not sure what to think of it. We will definitely have to see how it plays out, but I don't see it as being competitive. While the third talent won't make or break this tier, unless its exceptional, Divine Star is going to be the preferred choice for many of us.

I love the smell of new spells in the morning. Divine Star now deals Divine damage, whatever that means. My best guess is something unresistable that penetrates shields, but what do I know. Halo is absolutely mindblowing. I'm so glad we finally get a new AoE spell other than PoH. As for Cascade I'm tempted to say that it's much like an AoE Prayer of Mending. Jumping will be rather unpredictable however, so its usefulness may be rather limited. Haven't got much time to analyse everything right now, but I'll leave my opinions regarding this some other time.

Even so, I'm not quite sure how it would fit in, as we'd have to glyph for Atonement, so some math would probably be necessary here to see how everything would work. Either way, I'm not fond at all of using Atonement, but that's just me.Oh, I didn't even notice it was dropped to 20%, I just scrolled through it. Still, it'll probably be buffed quite a bit, possibly up to how it used to be, considering there's no real competition here.

Divine is Holy+Arcane just like Mind Spike's Shadowfrost damage is Shadow+Frost.
It implies that you will still be able to cast it even if spell locked in the Holy School and that it might be castable fine in Shadowform.

I'll add my own quick thoughts from playing about half way to 86 on beta as Shadow tonight:

1) This patch really nerfed base mana regen. In the previous beta build the base Combat Regen was 5000mp5 but it is now 1250mp5. It's definitely noticeable while leveling and with the loss of Masochism and Replenishment I can't imagine it being too nice while raiding.

2) Shadowy Apparitions as Shadow's primary sink for Shadow Orbs are currently a bit anaemic. Quite aside from the issues one will face with them on flying targets or in PvP at present on an ilvl 400 geared Priest 3 Shadowy Apparitions does pretty much the same damage as half a Mind Flay. The advantage of the Apparitions are that they cost 0 mana but at the same time Mind Flay only costs 1000 mana at level 85 making it our cheapest mana costing attack spell and our filler. What's more, Mind Flay still scales directly with Mastery, so while more Mastery increases the chances of being able to cast back-to-back 3 Orb Apparitions, the damage they do will still be outstripped by casting Mind Flay. What's more, Mind Flay crits still reduce the cooldown on your Shadowfiend while the Apparitions don't have any procs or side-benefits of their own. My opinion is that the relative power of our Apparitions and Mind Flay need to change in favour of the Apparitions.

3) By a similar token, Mind Spike does less damage per cast time than Mind Flay. Now it does of course have the advantage of buffing your next Mind Blast but the non-procced version of Mind Spike does have the significant disadvantage of removing all of your DoTs on the target. It also costs a lot more than Mind Flay. The procced version of Mind Spike doesn't remove DoTs and yes, it can still buff your next Mind Blast, but with the damage it itself does being less than Mind Flay, it's a curious situation.

4) Phantasm's "can't be hit by ranged attacks" includes spells. Basically it's like a personal-only Smoke Bomb effect. I imagine it has the same mechanics as Smoke Bomb so if Hour of Twilight pierces Smoke Bomb then it would pierce Phantasm as well.

5) The Tier 13 2pc bonus: The backlash reduction portion of this does not work at all which will be rather annoying in pre-MoP 5.0 on Madness of Deathwing unless fixed. The +55% extra damage part does work on the damage your Shadow Word: Death does, but doesn't also boost the backlash damage you take. With the talent that procs a free "sub-20%" Shadow Word: Death from a Mind Blast this set bonus is incredibly good. The 4pc was changed to +15% Shadow Word: Pain damage which will likely math out to a decent sized nerf compared to Live.

6) New food and water are in. The level 85 versions are 100k mana and 100k health over *10* seconds.

I checked spirit shell a number of times and at the moment it appears to add a fixed amount of absorption and it does not stack but rather it overwrites. With my values (~10k spellpower and ~40% bonus from mastery) it absorbs 35k, not affected by grace or archangel. The values are based on the buff tooltip and on the combat log.

If I spam it on myself the buff is always 35k. If I let some of it get used up and cast a new one it just takes it back up to 35k.

As it stands spirit shell is pretty useless.

I am not particularly happy about the Absorb to heal conversion and the short buff timer. Coupled with a 3s cast time they really make the spell worse.

Cascade based on the description will hit ppl heal or damage them and immediately bounce off until it hits/heals 4 times or every available target is hit/healed. Thus cascade is best used on a many targets that are spread out. It seems like a really interesting spell. The targets which it will hit are actually perfecltly predictable. It will hit each target only once so if there are 25ppl in the raid it will hit pretty much everyone once --> bounces 4 times so 1+2+4+8+16 = 35 targets. Also cascade has the very interesting property of ramping HPS.

A big question is whether halo is a fire and forget stationary spell or whether it moves with the healer.

Divine star is probably going to be powerfull for stacked healing. The travelling time is also potentially valuable. You can customise the delay between the forward and backward heal.

Some updates on the Healer Issues.

- Spirit Shell is supposed to apply Grace but it does not. It can not stack and in my tests can be overwritten with a lower value. The Spirit Shell heal is not affected by grace as well. It can however proc "From Darkness Comes Light".
- Psyfiend and Void Tendrils share a CD with Psychic Scream. Could not test Dominate Mind yet.
- Feathers From heaven can be placed three at a time, they seem to last a couple of minutes and while they are on the ground the cooldown resets. You can only have 3 up at a time but this would allow you to lay down three at the beginning of a fight and right after they are used 3 more. Perfectly placed this could lead to at least 7 in a row from a single priest.
- From Darkness Comes Light can proc from procs at the moment.
- Penance cast on a hostile unit will stack Evangalism and (if glyphed) heal via Atonement
- Divne Hymn seems to have been removed from Disc Spec entirely
- If Renew is glyphed a direct heal in Chakra Serenity will extend it to the full 12 second duration but the ticks stay increased (though I assume this is highly likely going to be patched rather quickly)
- (might have been true before - I never played holy) Binding Heal in Chakra: Serenity will extend Renew on the target and the priest, which is very powerful combined with Void Shift
- Divine Fury (15% Hit with Smite, HF and Penance) does not work at the moment (at least not on Dummies, could not yet test on a boss).

Feathers from heaven: They refresh timer for the feathers is extremely fast just (10seconds). You can place 5-6 in a row without any CD pretty much.

No, this was an old beta build. It's gone now.

Greater Heal removed

New spirit shell is now 2.5sec cast, heals for more and it will stack to a certain maximum instead of overwriting. I did a few tests and it looks like the stack caps at 40% of the caster's max health:

Constant mastery (28%)

base: 60691 - maxstack: 71852 -- sp 11866 -- HP179k

base: 57918 - maxstack: 71852 -- sp 10787 -- HP179k

base: 59878 - maxstack: 69003 -- sp 11482 -- HP 172 (-194 spirit, -338int -0.77%crit)

base: 49836 - maxstack: 69784 -- sp 7921 -- HP 174k (removed hc madness mace -249 int -3324sp)
I cast on other targets and the stack is always based on my max health not theirs.

The scaling is over 200% but something is odd:

removing inner fire: -1079sp --> -2773 absorb --> Scaling: 2.57
removing a ring with 338 int, 194 spirit and 284 crit rating: -384sp --> -813 absorb --> scaling 2.1171875
No inner focus compared with ring removed: -695 sp --> -1960 absorb --> scaling 2.820143885
Removing my mace loses 3945 sp and 10855 absorb --> Scaling 2.75

Does not scale with grace so I presume it also does not scale with archangel.

The anomalous scaling is probably related to Inner Fire. I will do a few experiments later to verify

I am not sure what the raid encounters will be like, but right now spirit shell is not very good. It costs more than gheal did and it absorbs less. On the other hand it is an absorb and you can spam it hard on the tank, since it does not quite overwrite anymore. On top of that you are pretty much guaranteed to have a PWS available every 7.5s with the new PWS talent. Being an absorb it won't really matter how many healers are spamming the tank, since the majority of the healing from disc will be absorbs that will be used up first before the tank takes any damage. Thus discipline will be pretty damn good for tank healing and will work very well with other healers, since it the other healers can better tailor their output to the visible deficits and reduce their overheal.

If throuput is even close to other tank healers disc will be quite strong, at least for as long as we have mana. The divine insight talent is going to be quite necessary for tank healing since it means we can use PWS every 12s to maximum rapture return.

The prio would be PWS every 12s, penance/holy fire on CD and spirit shell/smite as filler. The archangel talent is worthless for tank healing, since it wont buff spirit shell and PWS, which will be the majority of our output. Holy fire will be used to keep evangelism up and we will be using smite whenever there is a lull in tank damage so that chain casting spirit shell between penance/pws will overcap the spirit shell stack.

IMO the new spirit shell is again failed design. Spirit shell is only useful for tank healing and nothing else. It also costs a shedload of mana, while not actually having a very high throughput. The scaling with spellpower might mean that it will improve fast with gear though.

Sadly beta is broken for me ATM. I crash every few minutes with a #132 error, so I need to wait until blizzard fixes it before doing anymore testing.

The heal component benefits from Archangel, though. It did stack before, too - but was capped at 20% priest HP, so usually less then the initial absorb. Since the first SpS had no cap this resulted in a second one reducing the overall absorb.

At the moment a couple of things don't work. First and foremost the proc does not allow to cast PW:S on a target affected by weakened soul. Secondly it does not stack Grace, though the tooltip says it should and thirdly SpS does not benefit from Grace.

A major problem (at least with level 86 HP values) is the fairly low cap amount, limiting the SpS spam heavily. One simple dodge and you're overwriting the majority of the shield.

Actually we don't need Holy Fire for Evangelism and using Penance on a hostile target will (assuming the tank has Grace) result in a higher troughput than casting Penance on the tank directly. Plus Penance Atonement ticks are distributed seperately.

Is Inner Focus still in the game? And what about Train of Thought. The synergy of ToT, FDCL and Serendipity was just insane. Wonder if those talents got redesigned but the game crashes for me, too at the moment.

//Edit - I could log in long enough to check: Inner Focus is still in the game, ToT, too and ToT still states that GH reduces the IF cooldown by 5 sec per cast. //

P.S. from my testing Penance Glyph does not work...

Void tendrils appear to work very differently from what is advertised. I was going from mob to mob in westfall and was able to grasp one after another without triggering any CD. If I stood next to a mob and cast tendrils multiple times I got the mob grasped by multiple tendrils, but still on CD was triggered. I wonder if its a bug or if its by design.

The mobs are attacking the void tendrils now, but since you can spam it you can pretty much root them forever