Desperate Prayer is also on a 2min CD now, not sure if thats how it always was or not.

Test of Faith increases healing by 6%.

Holy Conc only procs from critical heals, and Imp Holy Conc was buffed on its own.


Also had a quick browse through skills and it appears Divine Hymn is now an Incapacitate instead of a sleep, and reduces damage the Incapacitated targets take for a short time. Hymn of Hope is also channelled, 2% of mana (doesnt say whether its base or total) every sec for 8secs.

Rapture also gained "Increasing the amount healed or absorbed increases the mana gained." at the end of the tooltip, no idea if that means it was changed at all or if they were trying to clarify the mechanic.

That was always there, actually.

The Holy Concentration change is slightly vexing because it breaks even at 20% crit from the previous version (which was generally agreed to be weak), but it's a decent idea.

edit: Reconsidering, I'm less sold on this. Especially if you have Inspiration, the few seconds after a crit heal are generally not the few seconds where you really need haste, because you've generally just topped off the tank, and he's taking less damage. The RNG isn't much better, but it has the capability to proc when you actually need the haste to catch up. Couple that with the fact that it breaks even at 20% compared to the last build (and compared to live HC), I'm pretty sure it needs some help still. (Does anyone know what crit chance the premades at 80 have? How about an 80 in Naxxramas gear?)

Once the servers come up and I can play with the numbers a bit, I'm probably going to offer the following suggestions:
1. Give it a chance to proc equal to the crit chance times some percentage, but don't restrict it to procs on critical heals. Same scaling behavior, but doesn't ALWAYS proc right when Inspiration and a giant heal bomb have just gone off.
2. Increase the crit chance conversion rate. 20% breakpoint strikes me as too high; 15% (which would imply a 60% chance on crit, or by #1 a chance equal to 60% of your crit rate) seems more reasonable. I need to go check what crit rate the level 80 premades have, though.

very late edit: posted thread on beta forums with idea #1, since I'm fairly sure #2 will take care of itself: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Make Holy Concentration a separate roll

VT: Causes 450 Shadow damage over 15 sec to your target and causes up to 10 party or raid members to gain 0.25% of their maximum mana per second when you deal damage from Mind Blast.

Surge of light works on flash heal now (as well as smite)

Blessed recovery down to 15% from 25

Flourish got crushed by the nurf hammer.

This is interesting as it looks like this is the start of cross class balancing.

*edit* surge of light giving flash heals is very nice and makes it a viable talent to pick up in a holy build. This talent would now fit my definition of "Good Bloat" where you have to make tough calls between non-essential but nice to have talents.

Someone said above that Grace was 3/3 -- at the moment, it's set to only 2 talent points, for a maximum of 4%. Not sure if this is intended; if so, it's extremely extremely weak for its position in the tree.

I'm interested re: IHC, since there's so much crit on our gear. Additionally, raid buffs look to be shaping up into a situation where we may end up running over 20% crit by the end of Naxx(25). In that world, 18% of my spells overall will be hasted by 30%, and 9% of them free. That's reasonable, and interesting.

(numbers obtained by assuming 20% spell crit, 45% chance on crit giving 9% of spells triggering IHC. It then applies to the next two spells, so 18% of all casts, averaged out, will be hasted by 30%)

Currently Serendipity has been changed to be 8/16/25% instead of the old version; I think it ends up being the same net result, unless I'm missing something. Not sure why they reworded it.

IDS is now worth taking for a little while, at least under the assumption that Flametongue Totem won't be around. For me, with more spirit than most people, IDS was granting ~ 66 spellpower in the old iteration; a jump to 80 isn't huge, but it's a small increase that helps out, especially as a buff for casters (5-mans, for example) where we don't get FtT.

[e] It used to be 3/3 for Grace, when it was 6%. They've tweaked it so many times, it's hard to keep track anymore.

[e2] I know this is completely aside, but the shadow tree is looking up. I'm impressed that they're continuing to tweak and give shadow more of a "normal" dps setup by emphasizing crit a lot more. Hopefully they hit their dps tuning benchmarks so shadow can be competitive with ret paladins and survival hunters.

Glyph of renew down to 25% from 40%.

Glyph of inner fire adds 20 charges now (used to be doubled duration, i think)

Prayer of Fortitude:
Power infuses all party and raid members, increasing their Stamina by 165 for 1 hr.

Nice change to speed up raid buffing (same for Gift of the Wild (Druid), but not for Prayer of Spirit and Prayer of Shadow Protection, I hope they will change this as well).

The Human Spirit:
Spirit increased by 3%.

Wow... Retail: 5%, TBC: 10%, WotLK: 3%. They really don't know what they want

Devouring Plague is 32% base mana. Coupled with Desperate Prayer being on a 2 minute cooldown and costing 19% base mana...

Well, I'm rescinding my comments over the last few pages that Desperate Prayer and Devouring Plague were great changes to Priest PvP Survivability.

Instead--fuck it. Desperate Prayer is still 'ok' for Arena. But it's no longer must-have, and as it's now awesomely expensive, only great for shorter games. It's about 2k more healing than Flash Heal (3719-4384 vs 1887-2193) and about the same mana (19% vs 18% base). On the plus side, Desperate Prayer benefits from Twin Disciplines (not that I expect any PvP priest to have that talent max'd) and Mental Agility (same). Overall, a Depressing Change.

Borrowed Time's 25% haste is a nice change, at least. Time will tell whether they fixed the "40% of 80.x%" scaling issue or if that's intentional.

As a side note: Flourish (the Druid Talent) got absolutely *destroyed* this build. Renamed Wild Growth, heals for 1085 over 7 seconds (25% of what it used to). Still 35% base mana. Circle of Healing now wins. <Shrug>


Edit: I noticed that Improved Divine Spirit was changed: "Your Divine Spirit and Prayer of Spirit spells also increase the target's spell power by an amount equal to 50/100% of the Spirit Gained". 80 Spirit and 80 spellpower at top rank? Flametongue Totem is 144!

It's sad that the most exciting thing about this patch for me is PI+PW:S hasted rezzes, what would that be, somewhere around 5 seconds? Oh man I am going to upset some people in 5v5 with hilarious comebacks.

Yeah, desperate prayer is a bit 'meh' now. Mana cost and the cooldown is too much, it feels like it should be one or the other. Anyone know if penance is self castable? Like I said earlier in the thread, I'd take a self cast penance over the prospective version of DP.

"Hymn of Hope - You recite a Holy hymn of Hope, restoring 2% mana every 2 sec to all party members within 40 yards. Lasts 8 sec. The Priest must channel to keep the hymn active."

Does that mean it's no longer based on base mana? so 8% total mana back per person in the group.

I wasn't sold on going 51+ on Holy and was going to just keep 5/5 mental agi until I could prove to my healing leads that priests won't be CoH bots anymore, until the new Surge of Light change was just announced. Being able to dump those extra points in Holy means a lot more flexibility for both single-target and AoE healing talents, and I'm delighted. And more crit too, sweet sweet crit! I'm thinking something a little like this:

14/57/0

The more I look at Test of Faith, the more I think it's one of the smarter new talents. Great for saving a single tank with a clutch big single-target heal, but also great for saving a large group of people with quick CoHs. Still very happy they decided to un-nerf Imp Holy Conc too.

Guessing so, but it also means that it went from something that I'd hit when it was avalible for some mana gain to completly utterly worthless. Mana gain wasnt really dramaticaly increased, from 772 to a bit under 1500ish, but channeled for eight seconds kills the thing. Glimmering Naaru Silver was a bad idea, so is this. Standing around doing nothing for eight seconds is rarely an option. Remove the channeling part and I'll be okay with it, as it is now I just feel robbed of the original mana free desperate prayer.

Regarding the changes to holy concentration and surge of light I feel the numbers look quite alright, but they need to reduce the amount of talent points we spend to get it. We're essentially spending eight talent points for roughly the same benefit paladins get from five, and dps casters get for a single one. And its much further up the tree.

I see the IHC Haste buff more as a way to secure the mana gain of HC : as of today, when HC proc, you should transform your downranked GH spam to cast-canceling max rank, in order to get more out-of-5-sec-regen. With IHC, it seems like you could wait for the tank to get hit, and use your haste do effective reactive heal with GH. This means critical heals open a mana regen sequence.

As a side note, the procs on critical heal give Binding heal an advantage, because you have two chances to proc on a single cast. Add the change on Surge of light, and you get good mana returns from crit.

A 20% Breakpoint seems ok, you need only 10% from base+equip, 5% talented, 5% Moonkin aura or Elemental oath. I quite like the idea to make crit valuable for every spec.

You guys do understand how good the new holy conc is I hope? With the CoH glyph you have 6 chances to crit per cast... that's alot of hasted and free heals, or did I miss something?

Edit: Don't listen to me, I'm too tired to read it appears. However binding heal does actually give you two chances to crit, and that's going to make that spell even more powerful.

I'm curious as to what happens when you get a SoL proc AND a iHC proc.

On the new SoL, I like how it will break up a GH rotation but don't like how it will still trigger the full GCD. I'd prefer an instant/freebie PoH if they're on offer - could be very nice being able to crank out 3k instant healing - but removal of part of the GCD would be nice.

But right now, the tree is feeling pretty bloated at the top end - which is good and bad. It's a bit of deja vu, but I'd very much like them to move Empowered Healing from tier 8 to tier 10, swapping with Divine Providence, with the latter talent reduced to 2 or 3 points.

Or they could free up some talent points by reducing Unbreakable Will to a 3pter, dropping imp Fort to tier 1 and slotting Meditation in at tier 2. Though still would like to have some trainable "Stance Mastery" style passive for spirit in combat because I can see a lot of shadowpriest build without it, which kind of sucks for them since their gear is loaded with it and that "10% spirit = +shadow" talent doesn't go anywhere near justifying it, though imp Spirit Tap goes some way.

Actually, why not just make every class get 15% spirit regen whilst casting as a passive?

"Twin Disciplines (Tier 1) Increases your spell power on instant spells by 1%. (Previously increased spell damage and healing)"

I always think of tier 1 talents as being those that are useful for levelling (hence why I tolerated Wand Spec) and am pretty confused by this now underwhelming talent. Your lvl 10 priests will not have much +spell power so will barely benefit from this talent. Such a shame, Discipline could have been an interesting levelling path.

That said, it's the only talent in 2 expansions that actually effects Renew. /golfclap.

I like the idea of giving the 51 pt talents a passive effect that indicates you've specced them, even if that passive effect is only visual.

1) They say its there so its going to be there so I included it.

2) Sorry but my estimate is perfectly accurate. Discipline has 4% more crit defacto from renewed hope and they also have a whole 15% more intellect and will stack more int than spirit than holy. They are also going to fully spec into divine specialisation, while holy priests need to take 1-3 points away from there. Instead holy priests will have to take more spirit. Anything less than 25% crit for discipline is a non issue. I can raise the holy crit to 18% if that will make you feel better but its not going to make a big dent to the difference. The reason is that disc has effectively double scaling due to aegis, which in real terms is much higher beacuse aegis has no overheal. If disc and holy have roughly the same max HPS, disc blows holy out of the water for tank healing due to PWS and aegis, which have effectively zero overheal. Holy needs 10-20% more HPS and the old test of faith to be better.

I am afraid you misunderstood the calcuation. I did indeed take into account the 5% haste, but I did so in a more accurate way. If you add up the spell cast times of all spells in the disc sequence you will find that its more than 30 seconds and applying the 5% factor reduces that time to below 30 seconds. Thus I have taken enlightenment into account in the number of spells included in the 30 second sequence.

Please refer to the calculations in my post. I already take divine aegis fully into account with 100% accuracy in calculating max HPS. The formula giving the average value of a disc heal excluding overheal is

(Base + spellpower*3/3.5*1.88)*(1 + 0.5*crit + crit*0.45)

The value of a the average divine aegis sheild is (Base + spellpower*3/3.5*1.88)*0.45, and the average increase per heal by divine aegis is (Base + spellpower*3/3.5*1.88)*0.45*crit

To take overhealing into account:
(Base + spellpower*3/3.5*1.88)*[(1-crit)*NonCritEffective% + 1.5*crit*CritEffective%


(Base + spellpower*3/3.5*1.88)*(1*NonCritEffective% + crit*(1.5*CritEffective%-NonCritEffective%) + crit*0.45)

NonCritEffective% = 1 - %overheal on non crit heals

CritEffective% = 1- %overheal on crit heals

This formula can be simplfied by assuming %overheal on crits and non crits is the same is the same:

(Base + spellpower*3/3.5*1.88)*( (1+0.5crit)*NonCritEffective% + crit*0.45)

I have posted more about how divine aegis affects HPS in a previous post.


=================================

New holy changes. I am surprised no one spotted it

Lets say you have surge of light and holy concentration. You score a crit with gheal. You proc both holy concentration and surge of light. What happens when you press the flash heal button. Does the free instant FH consume the holy concentration buff and one of the hasted charges? If it does I would rather cut off my finger than spend a single point in SoL.

Even so, surge of light clashes with nearly every other talent. The free instant FH, will ignore the crit boost from test of faith and will reduce the overall number of crits you get, which also means less holy concentration. Also when spamming FH, every crit produces an instant spell which is not faster in any way than a normal flash heal and it cant crit to boot.

So SoL in a raid senario only gains the priest mana, but it actually nerfs HPS by reducing flash heal crits.

Sure a combo of Gheal crit + 2xgheal+instant FH provides extremely high burst HPS, but overall HPS gets reduced as a result.

The main value of this talent is PvP, as free instant heals are lifesavers no matter how you look at it, but PvP viability for holy does not look very good right now. The only real benefit of SoL now is procs from PoM while you are moving for a free FH along the way. I am going to give the new SoL 2 thumbs down. I would much rather we got an increase in clearcasting proc chance. I think this is a patently stupid change.

Seriously if you are trying to catch up to AoE damage by spamming say CoH, would you be crazy enough to blow 1.5 seconds on a free flash heal? Nope what you gonna do is finish your CoH spamming then use the FH on a single target. All it does is saves you some mana, but it also means you are going to lose a possible imp IHC proc or a possible test of faith crit. That is 2 talent points spent very badly. I can't help wondering if this is a joke. Look we give you an instant FH, after you crit which is in no way faster than a normal FH and which cant crit right after we make clearcasting proc of crits. I am going to go to my room and cry now

The new improved holy concentration is nice, as its now 2xhasted spells which doubles the haste output.

Overall we are looking a 0.45% chance of entering holy concentration per crit point. Its still very low.

Anyone on beta tested Martyrdom with the new pushback mechanism ? I just noticed the 20% interrupt resist effect was changed to 20% interrupt time reduction (Wich is good. Bad RNG, bad!). But from the wording it's only up when the clearcasting effect is up on you -> not good enough.

Holy Con + Imp Holy Con seem a little expensive in talent points for only 45% proc, especially when you compare it to the new Surge of Light which costs only 2 points for a half-weaker effect (procs more often with CoH but can't crit). Also if you have both Holy Con and Surge procing together, you probably can't use your instant flash heal right away because it would waste the Holy Conc.
Besides, I don't like being pushed toward Holy Spec, considering the ever-bad scaling of crit for healing throughput. (Yes I'm jealous of resto shamans' Ancestral Awakening).
edit : disregard the last sentence. Dumb me. Still too many RNG.
edit 2 : from reading Havoc's edit I assume Surge's proc ought to be off the gcd for efficient functionning. 6 points for Holy Conc still too much imho.

It seems PVP Discipline priests will have to balance crit vs spirit pieces of gear. More theorycrafting fun :p.

I'm a little bit confused about CoH-CoolDown. In PTR-Patchnotes they tell us there is a 6sec CD. On Beta-Server there is no CD. What's right? Will there be a CD or not?

I'm almost certain that the free Flash Heal will consume the clearcasting proc (it will be one of the first things I test on beta when I get home).

However, I do like the new synergy with Inner Focus- where I no longer have to wait for Clearcasting to pop before going into an earring, inner focus to get some 5sr ticks. Now I can pop inner focus and an earring (or the equivalent +spirit/regen trinket in wotlk), which is likely to cause SoL and Holy Concentration Procs, creating a likely free heal chain and likely incurring a nice period out of the 5sr.

I like most of what I'm seeing, but I'm disappointed yet not surprised to see Unbreakable Will still sitting at a useless 15% reduction in stun/silence/fear.

Is that even noticeable at all on anything besides a lengthy Warlock fear?

The 30% it *should* be would drop all sorts of stuns by about 1 second - the 15% is not even relevant :/