Personally I considered downranking a bit of an exploit in most cases. I always thought it was kind of lame to read strategies and see something like "use rank 1 roots since you only care about the crowd control effect", " "spam rank 1 shadow word: pain to stack shadow embrace", "spam rank 1 arcane explosion to find a stealthed rogue", "you never need to use more than rank 1 drain soul" and of course the notorious rank 1 frostbolt spam on a warrior. These are all exploits of the basic functionality of spells or talents that affect them in hopes of procing an effect that happens regardless of rank without spending the full mana cost.

Yeah there's less thinking involved with always using the max rank, but downranking Greater Heal somewhat defeats the purpose of flash heal, except as an emergency heal. Personally I welcome the change. The new overheal talents are a much better way to address the issue of overhealing than downranking.

You don't see rogue or warrior strategies that suggest spamming rank 1 of an ability because it's more energy/rage efficient. That doesn't mean it takes less skill to play those classes just cause you can't downrank.

Now they can implement interesting new talents without having to worry about it being abused by downranking.

I welcome the fact that they are fixing a tactic that is used to abuse mana efficiency. Now I just hope that they get rid of all the lower ranks of spells in the spellbook like they did with warriors/rogues so that I don't have to flip through 2 pages of the same spell.

Already done. At the top of the spellbook is a check box that you can use to show/hide the non max-rank spell levels.

Changes to Priest glyphs on WoR:

* Glyph of Lightwell - Increases the amount healed by your Lightwell by 20%.
* Glyph of Renew - Reduces the duration of your Renew by 3 sec. but increases the amount healed per time by 40%. (old version: Increases the duration of your Renew by 3 sec)
* Glyph of Dispel Magic - Your Dispel Magic also heals your target for 6% (was 3%) of maximum health if it removes a damaging effect.
* Glyph of Flash Heal - Reduces the mana cost of your Flash Heal by 10%.
* Glyph of Prayer of Healing - Your Prayer of Healing spell also heals an additional 20% of its initial heal over 6 sec.
* Glyph of Mind Flay - Increases the range of your Mind Flay spell by 10 yards, but it no longer reduces the target's movement speed.
* Glyph of Holy Nova - Your Holy Nova spell heals for an additional 40%, but deals 40% less damage.
* Glyph of Fade - Increases the effect of your Fade spell by 100%.
* Glyph of Spirit of Redemption - All heals cast while Spirit of Redemption is active have a 20% chance to increase the remaining duration of Spirit of Redemption by 20 sec.
* Glyph of Inner Fire - Increases the duration of Inner Fire by 100%.
* Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain - Reduces the mana cost of your Shadow Word: Pain spell by 20%.
* Glyph of Mind Soothe - Increases the duration of your Mind Soothe spell by 5 sec. and reduces the range at which the victim will attack by an additional 100%.

Definitely a huge improvement. Flash heal and Dispel one are very nice now.

Holy Nova glyph is still disappointing, if it was 40% more damage and 40% less healing then I think it would be useful, but Priests don't need another AoE healing spell especially one that is much worse than Prayer of Healing, especially with the Prayer of Healing glyph.

Seems like the Spirit of Redemption glyph is even more over the top now, do they really want us to die at the start and spam free heals while dead?

What does 100% mean? And does anyone know what the current range reduction of Mind Soothe is? If Mind Soothe does anything like 50% range reduction, then a 100% effectiveness increase could allow priests to join rogues and druids (as well as their group members) in stealth runs. This opens up all sorts of possibilities, both good and exploitative, if that were the case.

You're not serious... are you? In Sunwell there is no room to wait for 2k health to be healed slowly by lifebloom, renew, or other HoT's. Chain heal bounces are not always in range, CoH is not always in range, so how are these people patched up?

In our raid, with the excess of Holy Priests/Paladins, usually a flash heal or a flash of light, and for me it is a downranked flash heal. Not being able to do that will be absolutely awful.

Kalecgos people have to be kept above 6500 HP, or they will / can die to portals. And if you transition to the Inner Veil with under 4500 HP, a shadowbolt can 1-shot you.

We definitely need mid-range efficient heals. And I'm going to keep pushing for it until they explain either why we can't have them, or give them to us.

On the Glyphs: Shadow Priests -- rejoice. Mind Flay range finally fixed after 4 billion requests. Hopefully it's effected by talents so it's a true 36 yard cast. That'd be perfect. Yes, the scaling still sucks ... at least it's got range. No more inside-30-yard crap.

I don't understand why you think it would be "absolutely awful." Again, you cannot take the downrank change by itself in a vacuum, because it is not the only change that you are going to see in WotLK.

If you're holy, hit with max flash heal, get 50% overheal, and return 60% mana. That mana efficiency is as good as, if not better than, downranking, and probably affords extra HPS buffer to boot.

If you're disc, slap a shield and renew/penance him. The shield gives back all the mana that was used to cast it, and by the time the shield falls off the smaller ticks from renew/penance have done their job with less overheal.

Seriously, the downranking change isn't all doom and gloom. It's time to think outside the TBC box, and start looking at all those other heal buttons that are on your spell toolbar.

Right, and if it is non-repeating then why HoT it? If it was repeating sure, then go ahead and renew. But if it is a single 2000 damage attack to one person, a 2000 health heal is the best way to deal with it. In my experience, it is of utmost importance to keep people topped off on Kalec (exactly for the reason's Nidaba described).

Alici, I do agree that serendipity is a great talent but part of me hates the reward of overhealing by 50%+, and why would I slap a shield then renew, why not just flash heal if it is damage once.

The other heal buttons on my bar are all used, infact the 20+ heal buttons on my bar are all used, and I like that. I consider myself a skillful player because I'm able to quickly discern how much health a player is needed (have my raid frames setup to tell me exactly how much health they are missing), then I heal them for the appropriate amount. Having that taken away from me, I suppose, is why I am upset with the change.

Neth is asking for players to test and provide feedback in Beta.

So if you have beta access lets try to offer some solutions.

Well the solutions are pretty simple, and the priest forums have already covered them. It's not that we need downranking so much as that the gap between flash heal and greater heal is monster huge. We need some middle range heal to cover the gap. Some people have suggested new ranks of heal or lesser heal, which I think is a good option, especially if blizz rolled them all into our existing fheal and gheal talents (empowered healing, test of faith, serendipity etc).

Since this is a change that effects mainly raiding and by definition requires lots of end game gearing, I don't see how this is being "at a point still where we can evaluate what is happening" and how those in beta are expected to offer the feedback Neth is asking for.

Possibly Blizzard's argument is that GH9 is both a big heal when the tank needs 10k and a mid sized efficient heal when someone needs <50% of a GH9 and so you get a Serendipity proc, sort of a 2-for-1 heal deal. But overall, unless there are other mechanics we have yet to see, it's hard not to think that this just makes priest a less fun class to play by reducing the wide range of spells we use in a raid which has always seemed to me the best thing about our current design.

So, no one was really crazy about the first iteration of the Renew glyph (renew gets an extra tick). Even if it's a decent glyph, it's somewhat boring. Now there's a new version: one less tick, but each tick heals 40% more. Hmm. Better, or worse? (Following numbers are without talents and gear.)

Rank 14 Renew: 710 mana, 1400 healing (5 ticks, 280 each).

Old glyph: 6 ticks at 280, for 1680 total healing.

New glyph: 4 ticks at 392, for 1568 total healing.


Well, you get slightly less healing; the new glyph is about a 7% healing loss versus the old glyph. On the other hand, that healing gets to the target faster. This is hard to put a value on, given the situations you use HoT spells for- if you really need that HP to get to the target now, you should probably be using a different spell anyway. Whichever of the two glyphs goes live would make a decent addition to your Renew spell, right? But there's something else to consider.

HoT's benefit from your spellpower at different rates based on their durations. Renew, at a base 15-second duration, gets 100%. If it gets another tick, that takes it to 18 seconds- and it gets 120% worth of spellpower. But if it gets one less tick (12 seconds), that drops it down to 80% spellpower. Right? Considering that the first version of the glyph did more healing before spellpower, the new version of the glyph looks very bad.

Now, maybe the glyph doesn't affect the duration for purposes of calculating the spellpower coefficient, and Renew is counted as a 15-second spell no matter how many times it actually ticks; this makes the differences in the two quite a bit smaller. I'm pretty sure that this isn't something that can be determined until glyphs are implemented, but maybe I'm missing something obvious. Thoughts?

[e] Elly, since you posted while I was typing this: we seem to be looking at things a bit differently? I agree the new glyph raises HPS while the old one didn't, but the HPM was better with the old glyph, and obviously the total healing was more. I honestly think I prefer the first iteration, even if the coefficient thing matters not at all.

The only spell you really downgrade is greater heal anyway (maybe Flash heal and PoM as well, but I doubt alot of people downgrade those). You might have split this into 2-3 different ranks depending on incoming damage and player receiving it. Getting x buttons freed up for the new spells being introduced in WotLK doesn't sound so bad to me tbh.
But yeah, most of these changes will require raid environments to fully test, guess we'll just have to see what happens.

I think you're undervaluing the increased throughput that the new iteration offers. The previous one was aimed at efficiency, which is nice, but I think the higher throughput offers more increased function than the longer duration.

edit to avoid double-post: Blizz could easily add new ranks of Heal to become the middle of the ground heal, bridging FH and GH.

I doubt that the glyph will change how renew benefits from spellpower, after all none of the cast time reduction talents on cast spells don't.

EDIT: If what you said was right the unglyphed version would beat the glyphed version for throughput at a little bit under 1000 spellpower.

Umm... I got beaten on my edit by two posts below.

Say we use a character with 1350 spellpower. At that level, Renew will tick for 890, so getting a free "tick" puts 6 ticks for 5340 total healing. With the new Glyph, we get 4 ticks @ 1.4 factor, or 4 * 4984 total healing, each tick 1246.

So the higher you go in spellpower (we'll be well over 2000 in Wrath), the more the differential is, but more importantly, the higher the burst is on the Glyph'd renew.

We could conceivably use this as our fire-and-forget 4k heal. I'm imagining ticks over 1600; if someone is down 2-3k HP, just toss a Renew on them and move on. If your raid trains itself not to overwrite HoTs, it could be very effective.

In general, the power of a HoT in a raid setting depends largely on how your raid handles healing assignments, the encounter specific gimmicks and your raid composition. The steadier the incoming raid damage is, the easier it is to get a higher benefit from a HoT when raid healing (I'm excluding tank healing for obvious reasons): if your raid takes 1000DPS from raid AoE in a consistent manner, then a HoT will be very powerful because you can expect it to do a lot more effective healing than in a fight where the damage is more erratic and where there is more burst - mostly because the burst potential would force healers to put out more HPS on the raid and if you don't heal *NOW* there's a good chance your targets will die.

Secondly, increasing the HPS of a HoT goes a long way towards making the HoT more effective for tank healing: you get a whole lot bang for your buck with the glyph active - 890 renew VS. 1246 renew is a no brainer if you want to renew a tank.
The problem, however, is this: if the Renew glyph is a greater glyph, will it be worth taking over the other greater glyphs? It's a big increase, but it's not that big compared to infinite ghost form or the PoH glyph.

Glyphs are much improved, but some of the new ones are still not worth a glyph slot:

Glyph of Fade - Increases the effect of your Fade spell by 100%.
Mildly useful but certainly not deserving a Glyph slot. If it was a minor glyph that took Fade off the global cooldown, I'd find it interesting and probably take it, depending on the usefulness of other minor glyphs.

Glyph of Inner Fire - Increases the duration of Inner Fire by 100%.
Too weak, and improved duration is last on my wishlist for this spell. If it was "chance on spellcast to refresh Inner Fire to maximum duration and charges" it would have a place in arena.

Glyph of Mind Soothe - Increases the duration of your Mind Soothe spell by 5 sec. and reduces the range at which the victim will attack by an additional 100%.
Mind Soothe is a gimmick spell and deserves at most a minor glyph.

Also some of the old ones could use an improvement.

Well, when I said non-repeating, I meant that the person wasn't under the effect of some dastardly 2000/tick or 2000/sec DoT but was hit by some random cleave or splash or <fill-in-the-blank> damage. The kind of damage that you want a fire-and-forget spell to deal with because it might happen again or it might not. So a renew is a great response. If someone is only going to take 2000 damage once over the course of the fight, let em bandage. If they take 2000 every 20 seconds, let the chain heals get them. In the span of 20 seconds, they are bound to get hit by some kind of area or smart heal.

I'm not going to discount the usefulness of a mid-range heals for mid-range situations but there are 4 other healing classes in the game. The diminishing bounce of chain heal, smart CoH and the more useful lightwell are all existing tools we have for the "nickel and dime" healing you're talking about.

The issue is that everyone is getting hit by the nerfbat with mid-range heals in the current implementation. The only class with a viable mid-range heal is paladins with FoL (max). LHW and Flash Heal are both inordinately expensive in relation to their healing done due to the fast cast time.

Which, if it remains in current state, either means paladins or (to a lesser extent) druids are the only real raid healers available for a RSTS 5-target fight like Kil'Jaeden.

Imagine a 20,000 point DoT that ticks 10 times @ 2000 each, every 2 seconds. How do you heal that? That's the fundamental raid-based question we want answered. Assume you can't clump for AE heals. How do you deal with damage like that? Right now, priests downrank GH, paladins mix/match HL/FoL, druids use LB/Rejuv in moderation, and shamans use LHW / CH4.

[and you can't let it tick 3x, because there's additional random damage flying around that, if it hits someone at half health, will instantly gib them. People need to stay mostly topped up]

And in the current push, there's nothing available to use.

I actually like the new renew glyph a lot more. Mostly because it reduces the amount of the hot that is likely to get overhealed and wasted. I almost wish they would push it just a tiny bit more. Perhaps make it something like the druids flourish where the healing is all front loaded and the strength of the hot decreases over it's duration. That to me would be a more interesting glyph because it would change how we use renew if we chose to get that glyph.