From my experience Priests are powerful in 5v5 because they can effortlessly switch between defense and offense. A Priest can burst point heal, slow heal, CC and dispel defensively. But if the pressure on the healing eases then a Priest can swap to Mana Burning, offensive dispelling and CC. Other healing classes can't do that. A Paladin can do a bit of CC, a Shaman can do some decent but inefficient burst damage. Druids get closest to Priests because of Cyclone and Feral Charge, but that's pretty much all they got offensively.

Usually, however, a Priest is NOT the main healer in 5v5. The Priest keeps the other healer(s) alive and free from CC while being protected by team mates. Against a Melee train with purge/dispel backup Priests are quite vulnerable. They stand no chance in a 4 dps combo and I haven't seen any successful 2 Disc Priest combos either.

In 2v2 and 3v3 (except 2 healer turtle) Priests can't rely on the other healer though, which changes the playstyle and puts more pressure on the Priest's partner.

The offensive capabilities come at a cost though:
It is hard for a Priest to escape. Against competent dps they have to tank.
Priests are inefficient. Except for PW:S (against healing debuffs) all Priest spells are more mana consuming than the other classes's equivalents.
Priests can't dispel poisons. That's a non-trivial problem. It means that a solo Priest healer in 2v2 or 3v3 has serious problems with Hunters and Rogues.

For Wrath it looks like these things will be partially addressed. I hear that Priests will get the ability to dispel Poisons. There will also be more mana. It will get even harder though for Disc Priests to escape because the tools of the enemies are improving. Overall we seem to stand to gain. Unfortunately the playstyle doesn't look like it will change a lot. That's the main reason why I'll probably go shadow. I'm bored with being a LoS kiting, mana burning, dispel bot with instant heals tacked on.

Let's see what they come up with for the next revision.

We're not getting a cure poison and our new escape skills are all deep shadow, unfortunately.

I don't think Lightwell will be required, but I'm sure almost every holy priest will think really hard about skipping it. With the new changes it works really freaking well in instances. Especially on boss fights. 30% of maximum health is a *big* hit.

When you're soloing/grinding you can keep your LW near you and tap it as needed. Most of the time the LW Renew will tick while the mobs are beating as you.

I was in The Nexus getting Scorched by the Archmage boss (direct nuke on me for ~1800 if I recall) and my LW kept ticking right through it. It's that good. =)

Imp. Renew seems to not be applied to the Glyph: 959 + 959/1.15*0.4 = 959 + 834*0.4 = 959 + 333 = 1292.
So calculating for R=Basic Renew Heal and S=Spell Power with the Glyph and 3/3 Imp. Renew seems to be:
Tick = ((R+1.88*S)*1.15 + (R+1.88*S)*0.4) / 5 = ((R+1.88*S)*1.55) / 5
I think it is still a bug since Blizzard eliminated (nearly?) all additive effects and converted them into multiplicative effects.

In some early Alpha notes I read that Abolish Disease would also from now remove Poison effects. Could someone with Beta access perhaps clarify this?

No, it definitly doesn't remove Poison effects.

I can't help you with the math but here are some numbers I just took.

Level 79 priest with divine fury and imp. holy concentration
with 0 haste rating: greater heal 2.5 -> 1.0 sec, flash heal 1.5 -> 0.6 sec
with 144 haste rating(4%): greater heal 2.39 -> 0.955 sec, flash heal 1.43 -> 0.573

RE: Healing in 5s:

You're absolutely right. I have no complaints on the subject, either.

Since the Talent Description says "60% faster" and not "60% less casting time" it would rather be 2.5/1.6 = 1.56 seconds for Greater Heal and 1.5/1.6 = 0.94 seconds for Flash Heal. Another talent that is still bugged. I don't have the exact numbers here (don't have the Beta Client installed on my Laptop), but with ~120-140 spellhaste i remember my Greater Heal casting time with improved Holy Concentration is somewhere around 0.90-0.95 seconds.

To clarify, I took those numbers in game 10 minutes ago, I wasn't calculating them.

So this is telling me that Imp. Holy Concentration severely gimps haste... Am I seeing this right?

Given the overheal efficiencies we'll be seeing with Serendipity, it should be to our advantage spam cast (down-rank if it doesn't get completely nerf'd) until we get a Concentration proc, wait in ooFSR until our tank goes to < 50% health and blast them back to full in 3 seconds (with extra help from Test of Faith). I guess that's a little risky... but if it's viable, we're talking about some huge healing efficiency. Plus, there's always Guardian Spirit if things go horribly wrong.


I'm really looking forward to being a healer again...

I'm not sure what you think is so messed up about priests atm. I'm not happy about a few things (namely that DS is still not trainable and they have no good reason to not make it so and that Divine Hymn is a piece of crap spell for level 80 and yet Koraa is trying to act like its cc). But if you look at our class more broadly Holy is still very strong for pve healing and Disc is very strong for pvp healing. I don't think it's in the best interests of any class to be worthy of "stacking." That just gets raids into situations like Sunwell with shaman or lvl 60 Naxx where every time you turned around you need priests for CC and MC. We should be ensuring out class is strong for all healing situations and if we take that perspective priests are better off then shaman and paladins at this point in Beta.

I don't think we need an overhaul unless you expect Disc to be more then what it is. I'm frankly not confident that they are capable of deciding a focus for Disc at this point. They are sort of hamstrung by its success in PvP. If they truly wanted to overhaul the tree they'd probably have to ditch a lot of the PvP talents that force it in a direction controlled largely by damage mitigation and cd's. Damage mitigation controlled by cd's works great in shorter fights and pvp (5mans, solo, and pvp for example) but not so great in longer pve centered fights. Which is fine, imo. As long as we are honest about what disc is and it's purpose. My irritation has been their insistence that disc is so strong for pve and they have to leave talents in there like DS and pre-nerf grace in order to "force" raids to take disc spec priests. Hasn't this whole buff change been to remove that sentiment? Koraa in general and the whole DS thing get me too pissed off so I'm not even going to rant on that again. We all know the issue well enough.

Koraa was feeling talkative today and answered some questions in true Koraa style. I won't post all of it here as it is a lot of post splitting but you can see it all here. A quick summary follows. Basically they have most of the current broken talents working internally so hopefully we will see them soon. They are committed to charges on IF and don't want to budge on it. He says that he found shields were not rage starving a tank in a 10 man but personally I remain concerned for 5 man content with warriors. He found guardian spirit useful on the Heigan dance which suggests that failure to dance may not be as instantly lethal as in the past. He's mellowing on Spirit post buff realignment but at this stage thinks it will stay a talent for Wrath. Maybe we need to post some really compelling arguments and try to change his mind. He also feels that there may be some room for work in the holy Nova department but they sound very unsure about how to do that. There are other points in the post relating to shadow/PvP talents that arn't specifically disc/holy issues I suggest you have a look at the thread for more on those.

Personally I think that holy priests are looking fairly solid now with a lot of flexibility and power. Disc probably needs some work but I think the mechanics are sound and just need some numbers adjusting to make it keep up. The glaring exception to this is grace. Currently this talent bites, Low power and duration. As an experiment to see how it felt trying to keep a short duration buff while interleaving slower spells I specced my druid resto and tried to keep 2 lifebloom stacks going at once while landing slow heals as well. It was not pretty! This is a very very different playstyle compared to previous priest healing and I think it will take a lot of getting used to and may not be very appealing to a lot of currently healing priests.

Hm. Next question: does this affect GCD time (so you can actually cast 3 Greater Heals in 3 seconds)? I assume not, which sort of diminishes the value of having 0.6s flash heals in the first place, but I guess I could be wrong.

If the GCD is affected, and you're just chaincasting, Imp Holy Concentration is actually a net negative for mana consumption, amusingly enough, although it's an absurdly large increase in HPS (uptime is 1 - 0.84^3 = 41%, times 60% haste = 24.6% average haste).

Actually I have a slightly different question regarding gearing around disc.

What on earth do you stack for?

As a PvE healer obviously you want +heal
DA means you want +crit
Losing Spiritual Guidance means lower levels of spirit maybe?
Haste.. ermm
Mp5 (probably not)

I'd say it's really hard to decide what to gear and gem for atm... ideas welcome (I might be writing my FAQ atm :p )

GCD is capped at 1 second, it never goes lower, I checked with both borrowed time and imp. holy concentration.

As for gearing disc, in 5 mans at the moment I have so much mana with rapture that I've been focusing on spell power and haste to boost my throughput. With the new talents I think crit goes from "awful" to "not so bad" but I still wouldn't gear for it. This is just based on first impressions though, some more in depth analysis would certainly be interesting.

So for PvP healing Disc Priests get exactly one thing for Wrath: More mana.
That's nice, but boring. Shadow PvP is looking more appealing by the minute.

Add: significantly better shields and more spell-power on talents we have to get anyway.

Well just been trying Disc healing out, some encounters make me wish for CoH tbh, but overall I'm really positive about it and just need to practice more with it.

However I'm really interested in peoples thoughts on itemisation

As a discipline priest I would like gear with Crit (DA), +healing (PW:S), Int (more crit) and Spirit (meditation) and stamina of course.

Since mage gear is going to be like that, hopefully will be plenty of gear with those stats, could even get a little bit of +hit on our gear for if Dispel/manaburn/shackle is required.

Some posts already mentioned changes for Discipline PVP/Arena viability in the expansion, but no discussion about the whole tree yet.

At the moment, most priest specs are either 41+x/5+x/13 (2on2 mostly) or 41+x/18+x/0 (3s and 5s), the greatest differences are having the Greater Heal or the imp. Psychic Scream talents. Running a typical 42/19 spec one already has to choose between having Reflective Shield or not (running Priest+Druid+X in 3s or a triheal variant in 5s normally speccing for it). The five points in Reflective Shield mean you have to sacrifice points elsewhere, like in Mental Agility or Imp. PWS.

This situation of not getting all pvp-relevant talents only gets worse with 80, the Discipline tree becoming a huge bloated tree with many more new 5/5 talents. Rapture and Twin Disciplines alone could use up all 10 new talent points, but old stuff like imp. Inner Fire or Enlightenment gets buffed and looks worth speccing now. You could arguably free up the eight Greater Heal talents and switch to Penance (why this has a cooldown I will never get) / Flash Heal, but even with 55+ points into the tree you could not get everything.

The tree gets interesting with the Rapture and PWS/Divine Aegis mechanics (shields ignoring MS effects, mana returns etc), but the new sets Blizzard designed for priest healing are either lacking the crit to make Divine Aegis good (http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...iesthealer.jpg) or any MP5/Spirit at all (http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...riestnuker.jpg).

Purgespam will kill the priest as quickly in WotLK as it does now. Maybe Rapture could get buffed to return the mana not only with absorbed damage but also when the shields are getting dispelled, or else I fear the disc priest will stay the most mana inefficent arena healer.

My suspicion is that Spirit will become a much less worthwhile stat in WotLK due to the way mana regeneration abilities function in raids - as a percentage of mana, rather than a fixed sum. Since your Intellect adds to your mana regeneration (albeit not as much as Spirit) and then you get an enormous feedback every time a Survival Hunter/Retribution Paladin/Shadow Priest tags you with his buff, it seems likely that +1 Intellect will return more mana than +1 Spirit in most PvE raiding scenarios.

Given the various changes to Warlock, my suspicion is that the only place you'll find cloth Stamina gear is PvP and green gear - Stamina is pretty much worthless for cloth casters in PvE.