Last WotLK dungeon I ran, I used Lightwell on every boss fight. Even when I was taking *direct fire* from one the bosses, the LW Renew effect was not broken. The new meme should be "Fire doesn't heal, the Lightwell does."

Lightwell is amazingly effective and you will use it on every boss. I'll reserve final judgement until I get into Naxx 10 or 25 but for every instance so far and while soloing/questing, it a great tool.

Nice to see I'm still getting the "you're just too stupid to use it correctly" type of response.

My point that from an useability point of view it's horrible hasn't been adressed. I'll reiterate:

- It can't be hotkeyed. This coupled with the fact that it does it's healing over time makes it largely worthless to counter spike damage which is the only thing I'm concerned about. Everything else I can deal with.

- People need to be near it, or move towards it. In case of the latter this is a net dps loss. Unless the healers are severely mana starved it is not a good idea to take the dps loss. Furthermore I expect that future fights will continue to be dps races because they represent a step forward in encounter design.

- Lightwell is not the answer to the raid taking heavy aoe damage. Sure it helps a bit but you can't rely on it because it will run out of charges in no time, and if you can't deal with the AOE damage when Lightwell isn't up then you'll need to bring more healers with AOE heals anyway.


- Given all the above, the main point of Lightwell becomes saving some mana. Wouldn't it be easier to just give us a mana restoration talent instead? Yes it would of course. But do we really need more mana? We're about to get Holy Concentration that scales. Coupled with our already scaling mana regeneration I do not expect mana to be an issue at all later on in progression. According to Koraa his priest (in real lvl 80 epics instead of the PvP, T6 or worse most people have) couldn't really run out of mana in Naxx.


Now there are also personal factors here, I'm simply not interested in anything remotely resembling Lightwell. I want something that expands my character, not something which is "put up and forget". How boring is that, seriously. I can't believe anyone is not advocating in favor of actually getting a fun and interesting talent instead of Lightwell.

Also remember that Lightwell was designed to have as little impact as possible in a raid, because it was introduced at a time where priests were dominating the raid healing scene. We deserve real innovation instead of this relic.

Wasn't everyone complaining about lack of innovation, yet many people here seem to cling onto Lightwell as if we could not ever get anything more interesting.

It really could benefit from being somehow hotkeyable if they want it to catch up healthstones in terms of convenience.

Perhaps being near it can give you a 'lightwell aura' buff or something that you can click off (macro into a cancelaura) to activate the heal.

An idea I had was a new ability somewhere between the current Lightwell and the Vial of the Sunwell. The main motive for this was to put the healing aspect into the hand of the priest (where it belongs) and to overcome the clicking/moving issues while preserving the advantages of the current Lightwell version.

This ability would work like this
- Casting healing spells gives a "charge of holy energy" to the priest. This won't occur more often than every 20 seconds.
- Stacks up to 10 charges
- Activating the ability would release the charges, healing one raid member per charge over 6 seconds. Amount healed is the same as current Lightwell.
- Mana cost would be low, and it shouldn't trigger the Gcd to simulate the fact that clicking the LW doesn't trigger it either.

Oh yes, sorry for posting a "spell suggestion" thread, but I just wanted to show that it's easy to come up with Lightwell replacements that don't suck and fulfill the exact same purpose. Not saying this idea is perfect or even great, but it would solve a lot of issues, and is certainly different than any other healing spell.

Having a dozen HoTs running in the background doesn't help to smooth out damage spikes? Honestly, if that is the one thing you are looking for a solution for, the answer for damage spikes is one tree over.

That it does not heal instantly but over time, and that clicking means inevitably a longer deay than having it hotkeyed makes it bad for countering damage spikes with.

For me spike damage mean any life threatening source of damage that can't be foreseen and requires immediate response. So if you already have HoT's running, it means you knew it was coming, and shouldn't have issues dealing with it.

Doesn't matter, you can't build your raid around lightwell so you need enough healing to keep people alive even without lightwell. Then it becomes a matter of lightwell being purely a convenience for saving mana.

No... it becomes a convenience for saving time. Time that can then be spent healing other targets. Where did I ever say you need to build your raid around lightwell? What are you even talking about? If you are looking for a 31 point talent that people are going to design their raid around then you are probably never going to be satisfied with it.

Convenience for saving time also, true. I'm talking about the cooldown and how Lightwell is not reliable and can't be built upon. If the whole raid takes heavy damage twice a minute, that Lightwell should be gone after the second time damage occurs, or even the first.

If your raid does not have the capabilities to keep people alive after that then you need to keep adding healers or adjust other things untill you can. At that point Lightwell isn't needed but merely a convenience for saving some mana and time occasionally.

Point is there are much easier and better ways to help priests "save mana and time" than the clumsy lightwell.

...and no I'm not looking for power. I'm looking for well designed talents. Good game design first, everything else comes later. Lightwell already fails at being well designed so it doesn't matter how powerful the rest of it is.

I see what you're saying here and I agree that it is one of the limitations of the talent. The cooldown that is. They could perhaps make it cost more mana and reduce the cooldown again. Still, the greatest benefit of lightwell is allowing someone other than the healer to heal themself rather than needing the attention and time from that healer to accomplish that task. Unfortunately it's a spell that requires your entire raid to know it's function and to actively want to reap the benefits for it to actually be useful. There needs to be quite a bit of awareness by everyone to maximize the effectiveness.

Attention isn't an issue really. For me at least.

Time can be an issue, but I pointed out that Lightwell is quite a poor way of dealing with overwhelming raid damage, or unexpected spike damage. The clicking and that it's a HoT are too punishing. I can't immagine LW being effective the M'uru soft enrage for example.

This is also a good example of the "convenience" aspect. In phase 1 M'uru, LW is easily usable (the WotLK version at least) but it's simply not needed as you will have enough healing to cover everything anyway. It becomes a "help me save a bit of mana" deal, which could be solved much better by giving us a real mana restoration talent.

Or I could cancel the Gheal and cast Binding Heal before the first tick of Lightwell even occurs. It becomes a "helps me save a bit of mana" deal once again.

Can't comment on the PvP part, but I suppose everything helps.

Frankly, I think they should introduce real darkness to dungeon settings, and the lightwell does nothing but provide light so players can see.

It also needs to be made much, much larger - then we can just hide within it's protective light in PVP.

Cancelling a spell invokes the GCD. If you've already lain down a Lightwell beforehand, you're better off finishing that GHeal and clicking the charge.

It's pretty evident that you find the implimentation of the spell awkward. I don't entirely disagree, but for me I still think it's worth the single point. You could have a free point to spend elsewhere. I also understand that you'd like a 31 point talent that's useful to you. I find the new version useful, and as long as there are enough players that do, they're unlikely to revamp the talent to something else completely.

No, it doesn't.

My biggest issue with Lightwell has always been its cooldown. I didn't even mind the "break on damage" part so much. The cooldown (in combination with its duration, i.e. cooldown longer than duration) was what really killed its usefulness for even the situations where the break on damage portion wasn't as big of an impediment.

I can't tell if you're being entirely facetious or not, but nameplates would defeat that.

I agree with you on the cooldown, it's about twice what it needs to be, in my opinion, although the break on damage part made it essentially useless for BT and Sunwell, with the heavy raid damage flying around.

And thanks for the mechanics correction. You are indeed correct, I was confusing cancelling just after the start of the cast while the GCD was already running with a separate GCD that doesn't actually exist.

My understanding is that the GCD does occur at the start of a cast, but canceling a spell cast within the first 1.5s will also cancel the GCD. For example, you may cancel a GHeal within the first 1.5s and still start casting your next spell immediately, but you may not cast a spell immediately following a 0.5s Mass Dispel.

If it is that close to useless, why would you need it?

Can't you make the same argument for ANY heal? Take away any heal in the game, and the raid will adapt.

Something that everyone could be happy with. Good luck with that.

...you've made your point. You hate Lightwell, it has certain limitations, you don't think it adds anything appealing to the priest class, and you hate it. So don't take it, and if you have suggestions, feel free to suggest them, but be open to the possibility that Lightwell is not as worthless as you keep arguing.

I did not say useless. I was saying that I did not want it to become part of the spells that my character is balanced around, because that would mean that I have to take it or suffer severely from not having it.

And no, you can't make this argument for any heal. Lightwell has a cooldown. Please read and understand my points, thank you.

I'm not saying it's worthless either, what I'm repeating here that it's useability is really bad and that it's flawed from the ground up. Your only point seems to be that it's not useless, which I'm not disputing, but that doesn't make it good. If you're happy with it that's fine.

Also was that sarcastic comment really necessary? There are plenty of talents that are widely accepted and regarded as fine by most people.

All this complaining and fighting about the use of lightwell (and I'm part of the problem here) is just diverting us from the larger issues coming from the recent patch.

Rapture was, I think, probably too strong before (in PvE, especially). I can imagine that they needed to tone it down to prevent priests from having infinite mana--it scaled too well, essentially. However, Rapture was bitchslapped into uselessness, and no one on the WotLK beta forums seems to have noticed.

My first thought was that, like some of the changes they've attempted recently (see Aspect of the Viper), the intent was for Rapture to be good for poorly-geared players as well as amazingly-geared players. In my view, that failed completely with Rapture (as it did with the latest version of Aspect of the Viper, by the way). That doesn't mean it's not a good goal to have, it just needs a different implementation.

If the stated goal is for Disc to have very high through-put on a single target, Grace certainly helps that, but I'm still concerned about the nerf to the crit chance on Weakened Soul targets, and the change to Borrowed Time is positively confounding.

I suppose the question is this: is Rapture intended to be one of the key "spec-defining" talents, or are Grace/Borrowed Time / Divine Aegis intended to fill that role?

I hate to break it to you, but the current iteration of Rapture is still very very strong. I'm running over 17,000 mana at the moment with full raid buffs (and assuming 5/5 Mental Strength) [at level 76 ... I'll be close to 18,000 when I finish leveling and get the last of the raid buffs that I haven't had in any content so far]. That's over 425 mana back every single time I heal. That's fairly incredible, especially since it "scales" (still unsure as to the exact mechanic).

So don't bash Rapture. It's very very strong. That, combined with perma-Revitalize (0.5% per second = 425 Mp5, btw) means you should never, ever go out of mana. Accordingly, you can stack haste and spellpower, along with crit, and basically ignore Mp5 and be less gung-ho about spirit.

The testing on the previous page indicates that the scaling is based on a static value (~9k, although that value may be your maximum HP or your maximum GHeal or something silly like that), and that it only works on effective healing. So I wouldn't say it's 425 mana every time you heal... not even 425 mana every time you cast GHeal.