Borrowed Time is not good.

Borrowed Time is not good.

C'mon people. Think your way through an argument before backing it "just because it's at the bottom of the tree". It's one of the worst final-5-point talents in any tree I've seen. It's a horrible talent.

Let's look at the problems with it:
1) It effects only one spell. Almost all end-tree talents are generic boosts (like Shadow & Flame and Empowered Healing in TBC; Divine Providence, Twisted Faith, Burnout, Chilled to the Bone, etc in WotLK)

2) There is a 4-second cooldown on the one spell it does modify, which the talent does not change

3) There is a 15-second cooldown on the one spell when considered as a single-target HpS increase, which the talent does not change

4) As mentioned above, the overall benefit to the one spell it does modify is fairly pitiful in the long run. It's going to be a ~ 460 point extra absorption every 15 seconds on your tank. That's it. 31 HpS is not a good talent.

The only possible potential gain this talent has is if you are healing a raid and throwing out PW:S every 4 seconds. Even then, all this is really allowing you to do is PW:S -> Penance -> PW:S -> Renew, Renew -> PW:S -> Penance as you tab/click through your party members. And I'm fairly certain if there's that much damage going on, CoH is going to out-perform your efforts fairly easily, assuming it goes live.

Every attempt to make Discipline into the "raid healer spec" is going to fail simply because it's a single-target healing tree. It's like trying to make paladins into raid healers. Yes, they have some cool new talents that potentially heal people around their current target. But it's not true raid healing ... it's really just "heal the tank, top up the melee". When we get a fight like Felmyst, you're not going to have paladins on the raid anymore than you would today. It's just not effective. (Side note: you might put them on Encapsulate, because the shared AE healing would be cool for that)

So please please stop being Blizzard fanbois for long enough to really evaluate this talent. It's crap. If it was 5 points down in T4 or T5, it would be ok. But at 45 points, it's crap ... on a stick. It's one of the worst returns for talent points in the entire tree, and no matter how hard you try, you can't make it better ... even by making up situations where it might be useful.

[e] You cannot assume Borrowed Time increases HpS by 33% simply because it reduces cast time by 33%. It has an internal cooldown. You have to factor that in. In fact, the change to the GCD doesn't increase your HpS by PW:S by a single solitary bit. It's still a 4-second cooldown. The only thing it does is give you an extra 0.5 seconds to use on something else, which doesn't increase your PW:S HpS by anything. It increases your overall HpS, yes ... but you're still limited to 4 seconds.

So instead of saying "well, it reduces my PW:S cast to 1.0 seconds, and I do 4600 healing with it, so that's a really high HpS cast" ... consider that you get to cast one of those every 15 seconds, on a single target. Or once every 4 seconds on different targets. And the talent doesn't change either of those facts.

It's why you don't see paladins crowing about Holy Shock being soooo good. It has a cooldown. No matter how much you boost it, it has a cooldown. It's also why shadow priests still use Mind Flay, even with the new MB/SW: D talents. They have cooldowns, and thus are not the primary focus of your build / spec / gearing choices. They're only ever going to be a percentage of the overall, and the same is certainly true of PW:S.

I just look at it as a PvP talent, like half the talents in the Disc tree are.

Assuming your PW:S's don't get purged off, having them not cost mana is quite nice. Not sure if it's 5 points nice yet but that depends on how other talents work out (will Imp Inner Fire become good due to the IF +healing effect?).

It's hard to know what they were thinking with Borrowed Time and when I first read it I assumed it made some sort of sense for PvP/Arena players as it's a real head scratcher for PvE.

I also think they need to do something more creative than simply altering the cooldown on PW:S or Weakened Soul. Ideally it would offer something to Disc priests that was both raid useful and relatively unique and allowed some sort of different/enhanced gameplay. Say, off the top of my head, make each point in Borrowed Time allow you to cast an extra PW:S on a non-weakend soul target without triggering the 4 second cooldown. So with 5/5 you could shield 5 people but then had to wait 4 (or 4 + n) seconds to use it again and still had the full 15 secs WS on each target.

Yeah, because you just stand around for the half second you gain and don't do anything. That's why it doesn't increase HpS. But really that half second is 20% of a GH, if you must think of it that way.

If you want to talk about overall HPS rather than the HPS increase of your PWS, then 33% isn't quite accurate either. To even begin to talk about overall HPS in a sensible way, you'd need to frame it. How many spells are you casting around PWS and which spells? Because the % increase of HPS that Borrowed Time provides depends wholly on what you're doing with those 0.5s. But I guarantee you that you won't find a single sequence where the increase is 33% or anywhere near it.

The strongest case you can make for this is by assuming you cast a PWS followed by the fastest spell you have - Flash Heal. This means you're cutting off 0.5 out of an otherwise 3s cast sequence. That's at most a 16.66% HPS increase. Once you consider the fact that someone specced with Spiritual Guidance will have a stronger Flash Heal, you get a number much smaller than that.

With that said, I tend to agree with the view that Borrowed Time does increase the HPS of PWS alone by 33% because that's pretty much what it does if you measure it in the isolation of a single cast. In most cases, this is probably irrelevant though, but it might be meaningful to talk about when you're trying to push as much HPS as possible. Just like talking about the DPS of MB and SWD is meaningful for determining your DPS priority queue, talking about the HPS of PWS may be useful for determining what spells you should prioritize when pushing HPS. But, as alluded to above, in situations where you want to be pushing HPS, a Holy Priest spamming GH9 would be far superior anyway, so the point around having a 1s PWS to increase your HPS is pretty much moot.

From a thematic point of view, Borrowed Time seems like an odd name for what it's designed to do. When I hear "Borrowed Time," I think of 1) a person near death has just been given more time to live, or 2) a person has borrowed against the future to greatly increase his opportunities in the present. This current Borrowed Time talent doesn't seem to fit the bill.

PW:S effect increased 20% of spellpower is decent, but uninteresting. And then we have the .5 second reduction. If 0.5 seconds is what Blizzard thinks of when they think of "Borrowed Time," they must seriously be out to lunch. A priest most likely wouldn't even be able to make use of an extra .5 seconds.

I think that when Blizzard concentrates too much on refining the minute details of gameplay, they lose sense of what's fun and what makes sense. They need to reconnect their development and creative teams. There seems to be too many talents that are 1% here, 1% there, and not enough that define the spec choice that the player has made. Borrowed Time is an example. If I were to go back to the drawing board, for example, I would take a look at my points 1) and 2), and brainstorm something like this:


Borrowed Time (5 ranks)
When you or group or raid members are protected by your Power Word: Shield, they gain haste rating equal to 1/2/3/4/5% of the remaining shield amount.

This takes from the concept of time in several ways. First, PW:S essentially increases maximum hit points, meeting point 1). Next, haste is probably the closest combat rating that matches the time concept. Finally, the thought process for the logic would be that the PW:S "borrows" time, but the more the shield gets hit (time lost), the less you gain, until finally you fall back down to normal speed. So for example, a 4k shield would net 200 haste rating in the beginning, but as the shield takes damage, at 2k hp you'd only have 100, and so on to 0.

I think that this idea is much more creative and appealing than their current boring implementation, and actually entices the priest to want to take the talent and use it to it's maximum potential.


(While on the topic of talent names, most of the new talents' names make it seem like the Blizz creative team are running out of ideas. Sword and Board? Cut to the Chase? They are corny enough to induce vomiting. But that's for another discussion)

A plain universal haste gain (2% per point) would probably be better than what Borrowd Time does currently.

If you're Discipline, like I said above, you can fit a single Penance or a pair of Renews into the space between. If you have any haste at all, you'll obviously have dead time, which is actually an argument against stacking haste as a Disc priest, if you want to think about it that way.

It's still a terrible design. Hopefully they revamp it before WotLK goes live.

Maybe not quite the time to ask, or too early to complain, but what do you think about the pvp scene of disc? Will it be gaining as much hps as dps classes gain dps? I mean, look at frost mages and the new fury warriors. If those things go live, we're looking at a very major dps gain, while priests' output change is, well, minimal. I'm not familiar with other classes, but I heard hunters are getting a big boost too. It's 5% from early disc, 5% from deep disc, and that's it. Divine Aegis isn't good in arena, as you rarely get to cast, let alone crit. Rapture you won't be keeping up, definitely not 3 stacks. And Penance is a 3 second holy school cast begging to be interrupted, which I doubt is more hps/hpm than Greater Heal anyway. 10% better shields are ok, yeah. I'm also worried about longevity in the absence of DA/Rapture. Add these healing reduction, and we're at a loss.

Especially mortal strike effect in fury bothers me a lot. Those 2 talents gives more dps to a warrior than the entire wotlk repertoire gives us hps. I'm aware that beta is for testing purposes, but right now it just looks broken to me, even for a beta. Don't you think healing debuffs have become a bit too common? Every popular 3v3 and 5v5 group is designed around the healing debuff. It looks like arena is balanced around healing debuffs too; assuming this, spellpower is worth half its itemization budget as a healing stat.

I believe we need a healing buff skill, like a targettable fel armor, or just an "Ignore %x of healing reduction" stat/talent. Grace doesn't adress this, unless Penance is dirt cheap and you keep faking it at 1 tick, or it triggers from all heals; and it still has a 8 second duration. Grace is actually just a targettable Focused Will, weaker, and this time you have to cast it, multiple times if you want to stack. I'd prefer increasing healing rather than ignoring a healing debuff, as it would have a value in pve too, and help the lacking disc tree. Simply adding a Spiritual Healing like talent on top of disc might also work, it may replace Burrowed time and nobody will complain. Actually, if Penance was shadow, that would help too.

In short, to me it looks like we don't gain as much in the expansion, and that is pushed further down in the presence of healing debuffs. It might just be a scaling issue which can be solved easily by playing with numbers, sorry for the rant if that is so.

Divine Aegis and Grace (which you are mistaking with Rapture) aren't very good for pvp I agree. Anything that buffs PW:S is very good though, as it's the most efficient "heal" when your target has a healing debuff like MS. Rapture makes PW:S give you back a ton of mana so that is definitely quite good.

The spell power change is also pretty nice for pvp, holy fire + SW packs quite a punch even with "healing" gear, although this does nothing to help us keep people alive it's still worth mentioning.

Chimera shot is going to be awful if it goes live as it is, permanent viper sting is death for a priest if he doesn't have someone else on the team that can dispel poisons. Rogues with deadly brew are going to be pretty ugly as well.

Borrowed time might be decent in pvp even in its current form, it needs much better scaling and the cooldown on PW:S needs to be removed to make it worthwhile I think. I'm not really sure if that is enough on the pve side but for pvp I would be happy.

edit:
Another problem is that for a possible pvp build I would need about 15 extra talent points to get all the stuff like Imp. Mana Burn, Absolution, Unbreakable Will, Focused Will, Focused Power, Silent Resolve, possibly Reflective Shield. And besides Grace/Divine Aegis/Aspiration I can't exactly take the points from the other throughput/efficiency talents as they are badly needed.

I really hate the new Twin Disciplines and Enlightenment from this point of view, they are awesome talents but I have to spend 10 more points for them and a pvp build really has to give up too much to get them. Reflective Shield badly needs to be a 2-3 point talent, so does Unbreakable Will and possibly also either Mental Strength or Mental Agility.

edit#2:
I've been thinking this over some more and I think the main reason Grace (which is the cornerstone of Discipline in wrath) is a bad pvp talent is because Penance is a bad pvp spell. If Penance were good then Grace would be good too because then I would be able to quickly stack Grace on whoever the focus target was and reduce their damage by 6%.

There are a lot of problems with Penance: first, it is a 3 second channeled spell which is likely to be counterspelled; second, if I do get interrupted I still pay 1k+ mana for no healing done since the mana cost is payed up front; third, I cannot fake a Penance cast at all, if I start the spell and cancel it I still pay full mana cost and the 10 second cooldown kicks in; fourth, if I get any pushback at all while casting I lose the third tick which is a fairly substantial efficiency nerf and I also don't get the third Grace proc which is a good part of the reason I'm casting Penance in the first place.

And how do "throughput" and HpS differ? Can we please stop getting hung up over Weakened Soul? You GAIN half a second of FREE time you can spend on ANY SPELL you like, whenever you cast a PW:S while having Borrowed Time. If you use cycle PW:S on two tanks you gain 1 second every 15 seconds. That's equivalent of having 6.7% more time available overall. If you cycle on three targets then you're up at 10% more time.

This.

Cooldowns on Power Word: Shield indicate that it's just not meant to be used as a "main heal" to heal single targets. My point is, you use PW:S either proactively or in emergencies reactively. When healing a tank (applies to all single targets, though), TIME is the major factor you fight against. The Hp/second and hp/mana numbers are great, but biggest advantage for PW:S when used reactively is that it's instant: no other (priest) spell heals as much INSTANTLY. A 1 second global cooldown after using PW:S could (in theory!) allow healing someone for a lot of hp in short time window.

Possible combinations:
PW:S + ProM (total time spent: 1 second)
PW:S + Flash Heal (total time spent: 2,5 seconds)
PW:S + Penance (total time spent: 1-2 [not in beta, dunno how fast first tick hits or how spell works exacly] secs for first tick, 2-3secs for 2 ticks).
Heck, maybe even PW:S + Pain Suppression right after.

In emergency ~2,5-3k PW:S + 2k ProM (estimates, at lvl 70) equals to 4,5-5k hp worth healing in 1 second, it's quite powerful.

PW:S glyph thrown into mix could allow some very fast quick-reaction healing, which seems to be the point here. Yeah, it's nice to be a non-beta backseat critic like me but sometimes when theorycrafting only thing people see is hp/sec and hp/mana. Valid points and arguments yeah but long term hp/sec or hp/m don't seem to be the point with PW:S.

Given that your Discipline Priest would need rocks in his head to use it on himself, I think we can safely disregard it.

PS is worthless in PvE raiding. PI isn't much better. Improved Divine Spirit can be buffed outside the instance (and regularly is when people bother to care about it). Rapture is a personal cost reducer that doesn't really compensate for the massive loss in mana efficiency from not spec'ing deep Holy. Grace is nice, but really no different from talents received by Resto Druids and Affliction Warlocks. Divine Aegis is only worthwhile in that it works well with Rapture - the last thing you really want is a healer who depends on random, streaky bursts of healing.

Realistically, if someone told me I had to spec Discipline for a raid, I'd do something like:
Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

As to Borrowed Time, the real issue is that the Discipline tree is essentially two trees in one. On one side, you have the PvP PW:S-centric nature of the tree. On the other hand, you have the 'gimp Holy' nature of the tree. And the two sides simply don't work together at all. You need massive spell critical for the 'gimp Holy' side. You don't want spell critical at all for the PW:S side.

So you're saying that Borrowed Time is a 5 point "oh shit" button? It's not even good at that; the only scenario you give that adds 33% HPS is the PW:S + Prayer of Mending one, and Prayer of Mending has the slight problem that your target needs to take another hit which breaks the shield and survive it (which, given that this is an "oh shit" button, is not necessarily the case). All the other scenarios are 2.5-3 seconds versus 3-3.5 seconds without the talent, which is not much of a gain. So, in other words, you're spending 5 talent points so that you can gain maybe 20% HPS (slightly more with haste) on a panic button. Honestly, I'd rather use Pain Suppression + PW:S (drops tank's threat, but mitigates the equivalent of ~4.2k health in 1.5 seconds using the same numbers you're using), and I don't need Borrowed Time to reduce the GCD (the least important of the spell's 3 cooldowns) for that.

What bothers me the most about Borrowed Time, reducing the GCD is still occuring after you use PWS. If Borrowed Time would just outright remove the GCD on PWS then it would be a very effective Emergency Heal.

And lets not forget Penance here. The first Penance "bolt" hits ~1s after the Shield.

Let's just for arguments sake compare Borrowed Time to Divine Fury.
Divine Fury increases Greater Heal's HpS by 20%. Everybody agrees with that. Everybody agrees that that makes it a good talent. Nobody ever says something along the lines of "But I mainly cast CoH." or "Whenever I use Renew or PoM I don't get anything from that talent." Even though they are valid points. Borrowed Time does MORE for PW:S than Divine Fury for Greater Heal. Not only does it decrease the time PW:S takes, but it also increase the actual amount it absorbs.

Of course someone is gonna jump out of the bush now and scream: "BUT YOU CAN'T SPAM IT!" And that's true. But I would argue that realistically speaking no Priest spams purely Greater Heal either. Perhaps someone could tell us what percentage of their healing spells cast Greater Heal occupies...

So finally, PW:S is probably going to be used less often than Greater Heal, even by a Wrath Priest. However because Borrowed Time does MORE for PW:S than Divine Fury does for Greater Heal it probably works out to be similar. If a Disc Priest would cast one Shield every 4 to 6 seconds with an intermittent Greater Heal and something else then Borrowed Time would do more for the Priest's output than Divine Fury.

I'm lazy, but maybe someone can crunch the numbers.

I have read on wotlkwiki (here) that CoH 6s cooldown is back 2 builds ago.

I cant find any confirm on the net, then prolly it's a fake.

Anyone can confirm it please ?

Definitely no cooldown on CoH in the current beta build.

Regarding raid stacking, posted by Ghostcrawler:
I suppose this means holy priests will get a raid buff in one form or another.

Want a buff for holy priests so that we bring something to raid? Let's see.

Prayer of healing raid-wide:
-20% to PoH/ProM cost
36y range on poh // 18y range on CoH
+10% spiritual healing, +5% twin disciples, +10% to coh/poh/prom from divine providence
+15% crit chance & +12% healing done on targets less than 50%
(+25% of spirit into spellpower)

Smart-targetting Prayer of Healing combined into smart targetting CoH (with no cd) and Prayer of Mending would make priests capable of AoE mass healing that no class may be able to compete with. Change one spell and the whole tree looks different.

Personally, I'd rather be in raid thanks to what I (class) can do rather than "he brings buff x". But, I'm not sure holy priests are the one that need help here, if anything disc should have some extra buff. In my opinion, holy tree looks in very good shape already, and could get 1 spot in raid easily. Priests can already fill the role of "AoE healer" in almost all worst case scenarios: forgot to eat Well Fed, you don't have shaman or spriests for mana, there are aggro sensitive mobs running all around the place and you have to run away from breath/fire/whatEverBossAoESpell all at same time. Oh, and you misclicked the prot potion instead of mana potion.

A priest can *still* heal and live to tell the tale!

*edit* Thing is, priests don't have certain conditions under which they can heal efficiently. We can heal efficiently whenever we want. Thats why you'd take a holy priest, simply because each raid encounter is likely to have different requirements for healers.

Here's the main issue with this argument (aside from the obvious spamming argument that you mentioned): Divine Fury is ... where in the tree? Oh, look ... Tier 2.

Where's Borrowed Time? Tier 10. Comparing the two is silly -- Tier 10 talents should do significantly more for us than Tier 2, or they're weak. And Borrowed Time is weak. Given that we're trying desperately to come up with situations where it is useful, that's an indication it needs to be improved. We shouldn't have to wrack our brains to come up with a reason to take a talent.

As an aside ...

Percentage of GH over the course of a typical Sunwell raid: 28%.
Percentage of GH over the course of a fight that actually requires non-raid healing (i.e. Brutallus, KJ, M'uru): 80%.

I didn't see it mentioned earlier in the thread so I will ask it here and risk the ire if I missed it.

Unbreakable Will - is there any specific reason that this talent hasn't been updated to reflect the sweeping mechanic changes to this type of talent which have long since been implemented for every other class with a similar talent?

UW remains an increase in the chance to resist a stun/silence/fear effect, while every other similar ability has been changed to be a reduction in duration - Iron Will, Nerves of Steel, and Surefooting are prime examples.

The fact that this talent, which is at the top of the Disc tree and easy to locate, has not been changed is indicative of how little attention developers have been devoting to Priests.