In reading this it seems that you feel that the 4% is great "when you need it". But 4% crit is a 1 in 25 chance... If you are using it on Sarth breaths for example lets say pre-breath you PW:S, after the the breath you always penance->flash or greater heal... On average in that scenario you gain the DA/crit healing only 1 in every ~6 breaths more than without it. Crit at best can be factored as "on-average" because there is no way to predict or cause it to happen when you want.

By not maintaining WS on the tank all the time you are reducing hps and mana efficiency overall. Consider your WS uptime during the fight and multiply that by 4% and that is your net effect. Additionally, you seem to comment that the 4% necessarily leads to overhealing which isn't true. If you look at two simultaneous events occuring in two different realities one where WS isn't present and one where it is and that 4% being the differentiator for the crit occuring. Well in either case if it was going to overheal it will and the worst case scenario is the crit overheals for 50% of the healing more than the non-crit. Though the crit leaves a DA for 30% of the total that the non-crit didn't and will regen mana from rapture. Excluding the cases of DA overwriting for a tank mid fight there is no scenario where the non-crit is functionally better than the crit. In the absolute worst case scenario where both are totally overheal... Well then only the WS case did the heal have any redeeming qualities at all. Thereby excluding cases where additional crit = loss of DA value due to overwrites there is no reason to not have WS up.

Keeping WS up on the tank (which is usually our primary target) is like getting a neck enchant for 4% crit. It is free, it doesn't come from an item budget and there is no point in not having it.

What is the point of "rather consistent beating"? In order to make PW:S valuable on any target all you need is knowledge that said individual will take ~6500 dmg in the next 30 seconds, 15 seconds if you plan to recast, to make it absolutely effective. Trash pulls, bosses, or whatever the tanks at a minimum will fall into the ~6500dmg category. Using it on non-tanks is a considerably tougher to discuss situation but it has value there as well...

If you choose to not use PW:S very often that is your choice. The numbers show it's value and that was my goal.

I have to agree with Alv!ra here that there is no "more than enough" that is blanketly true... Switching gear per encounter etc is quite valuable. Though I don't agree with 30% crit unbuffed for any current situation.

"PW:S+Penance+Flash heal a serious spike recovery rotation" ... PW:S needs to be used prior to a large spike such as a Sarth 3d buffed breath if at all possible, the point would be to limit the spike there and not require significant healing. If used first you cut the breaths damage down by a sizeable portion and then can heal back the remaining damage very quickly, rather than using the PW:S post breath to prevent death and buy time. If you use it the later way you would actually be better off bringing up the tanks health doing Penance->PW:S-> Flash or Greater. As Penance even without BT is going to be better throughput than PW:S.

In other situations or encounters that do not have such unproportionally large hits using PW:S does not lose any value as you seem to believe and comment towards.

Nice post, there is a calculation error with regard to Penance however, which I think arises because you multiply by 3 ticks twice. The per cast rapture return on spellpower must logically be identical for Penance and GH, because the amount healed scales with spellpower at the same rate for both (3/3.5*1.88*SP). The MP5 conversion will be 1.25 times better for Penance because of the shorter cast time.

Nice catch thank you. I updated the previous post so there is no confusion for anyone reading the thread. Must have hastily typed that one out.

3.1 talents are up - MMO Champion has a calculator available.

I'm feeling like this is absolutely crippling. I know a lot of people feel that Disc runs with infinite mana, but I certainly have issues in 3D-10 and other demanding encounters even when I have very little OH.

Other than that, there are a fair number of interesting changes. Improved Flash Heal and Soul Warding are neat talents, and the new Focused Will adds an interesting choice for those last few talent points. No mention of the group shield though, which is interesting.

i don't get to do the hard stuff due to my schedule and being in a casual guild, but i'm not the only one that had seemingly unlimited mana. my regen felt about on par with a holy paladin while everything else felt quite a bit weaker. i think a rapture nerf was expected, but i don't think anyone saw anything like this coming. hopefully blizz will clear up what's actually going on even though i'm fairly certain that multiple shields that get fully absorbed won't return mana.

improved flash heal looks really nice, especially if it stacks with the glyph and should end the "what should i be casting" questions. reflective shield is still showing up on the talent calculator and i can see pw:b taking its place if and when it gets implemented.

I am missing Power Word: Barrier, I sure hope they get that into the game. I was rather curious to its mechanics.
With a bit of luck its just been left out of the patch notes by mistake and I will find it on a trainer on the PTR.

cannot happen more than once every 12 seconds.

nobody is sure if this applies to the mana return, the effect on the shielded target or both. you also only get mana back if the shield is fully used. looks like a massive nerf.

A lot of changes right out the gates... They noted that they will be updating the PTR with more changes. PW:Barrier is hopefully going to be in that set.

Some things are definitely going to change for us though now. Rapture is a huge hit to our mana pool, though it was quite out of control in its current form. There were times were Rapture was 3-4 times the Replenishment returns I was receiving.

I find the wording of the new Rapture a little off. It has two effects first it when fully consumed/dispelled regens 2.5% of our mana and has a 100% chance to energize the shielded target with mana/rage/runic power/energy. This effect cannot occur more than once every 12 seconds. I am figuring the italics is the intention.... What I wonder is if that 12 seconds is per individual. Meaning 2 shields on 2 tanks, is it possible for both to trigger the effect they each get the rage and I only get the mana from one. Or is only the first shield capable and all others are not for 12 seconds.

If my math is right this late at night it would seem that a consumed PW:S is mana free at 22390 mana and at my current 25k raid buffed would regen ~65 mana. At best that means if you got it every 12 seconds it yields ~260.5 mp5. Which isn't bad but it also isn't anything close to the amount of mp5 I have seen from the current rapture.

Grace nerf I feel like is a punishment. It penalizes us for healing anyone other than our primary target. This one should get reverted. BoS is the same damage reduction and doesn't need to be maintained.

More after I have slept.

If shield barrier is implemented I don't know if there will be a enough points to get Focused Will.

illumination was still better than rapture from pretty much everything i've seen. it doesn't appear to be getting touched.

the wording sounds weird, but it definitely looks like you can only get the actual effect once every 12 seconds. it's not like you can shield someone more than once every 15 seconds anyway.

bah Fknlo beat me to it.

I concur it is a massive nerf to rapture, holy now has the HPS advantage as well as the regen.

Disc feels lacking.

i don't think disc would have succeeded in harder content without quite a few positive changes. if it were to go live with what they have planned now it would pretty much be a dead spec. there's going to be months of testing ahead, but that really isn't that comforting with blizz's record on this kind of stuff.

as it was, holy had a single target healing advantage even with shielding included. disc isn't even going to be an option without a ton of changes.

Ghost Crawler has said a few times that they want to bump Discipline healing to be closer to that of a Holy Paladin, however these changes do not seem to reflect that desire.

Disc needs some form of scaling via talents to allow it to keep up, if anything just call it quits and make Discipline a hardcore PVP tree and quit trying to prop it up with mediocre talents for PVE.

I have been healing as Discipline for most of Wrath so far and I do enjoy it, the talent additions/changes are quite disheartening. I don't want to have to be holy to not suck.

Blizzard will hopefully see the error in there ways in the weeks to come, holy is just looking too damn sexy at the moment XD

Rapture was rewarding the player for efficient healing, now Rapture is no more rewarding at all.

I'm a very sad panda.

Well yes, the rapture change quite definitly is a nerf, however I've been arguing in the BB in the past that Rapture is a bit too good and probably will need a nerf. Maybe this one overshoots a bit but we have to actually test it and provide feedback before declaring all gloom and doom.

Remember, right now an equipped Discipline priest basically does not drop below 85% mana on everything except Sarth+3 and Malygos. And we're supposed to get gear upgrades in Ulduar. So something had to happen. Actually, these changes to the shielding mechanics and interactions for discipline look like perfectly matched to a fight like Malygos. That's the fight were mana might still be a problem but if we can now cast a shield every GCD and receive a bit of mana if the shields are used up, guess what we will be doing during Vortex which right now is a huge mana sink but won't be anymore.

And we haven't yet seen PW:Barrier which is still upcoming.

Right now, I don't use my shadowfiend and mana potions because I don't need to. I don't really mind if I have to use them again, but of course I do mind if I just run oom easily and can't do my job. Blizzard however is certainly not going to butcher this new tree and healing style and if it's too harsh, they will change it again. After all, it's all up there for testing.

Here's the link as the MMO-Champion front-page is always a little less than "stable".

As for builds, I have no idea how to fit the new Disc talents along with Inspiration/DP.

I don't see how it's hard to fit the talents. You just skip 2 points of Mental Agility and still spec 57/14. As for the changes that's a major disappointment. So far we got a massive regen nerf with zero throughput or scaling changes. And yes Disc was rarely dropping below 80% but that was mainly because of rapture returning 40 and 50 thousands of mana per fight. They could just nerf it to 1.5%. Rewarding players on effective healing was a unique and smart mechanic now not only it's dumbed down but also nerfed to the ground. Of course it's too early for now and we should wait for blue posts and new PTR builds in case they have changes in mind.

I really read the instantly charges you as happening always and only the charging up on the target to be once every 12 second. Notice the ", and" separator between the two things. In all other tooltips that have these, it often means that there are two effects and limitations on the second do not apply to the first and vice versa. Besides, the tooltip has a typo anyway : "This effect cannot occur once every 12 seconds" instead of "This effect cannot occur more than once every 12 seconds"

I am really certain that the "this effect" refers only to the rage,mana,energy,rp generating effect and not to the self-replenishment. Otherwise taking away the cooldown on PW:S in general and reintroduce another limiter with cooldown right again makes no sense at all. The fact they are removing the cooldown on PW:S and reducing mana cost on Flash Heal really show they want us to use these two spells primarily. It just doesn't make any sense if shielding on GCD when all shields are used up (heavy AOE) will kill our mana and runs us dry. But well, we need to see how it plays out and what the new Rapture really is doing.

if you look at how pw:s works with weakened soul then the "cannot occur more than once every 12 seconds" makes absolutely no sense in the context of the secondary benefit on the person it's cast on. they can only get a pw:s on them once every 15 seconds as is so it looks like that little blip of text would be referring almost exclusively to the mana regen part of the talent. hopefully blizz will clear this up fairly quickly.

The "cannot occur more than once every 12 seconds" has to apply to the 2.5% mana back to the priest because it would be redundant if it referred to the target getting shielded - Weakend Soul already guarantees that the target wont get the effect more than once over 15 seconds.

Unless weakend soul was removed or diminished or it's meant as a limiter to the secondary effect once we start PW:Barrier many targets in one cast.

The point is if it's really reduced to once every 12 second it becomes an extremely weak talent and depending how the mana reductions in general on Shield and Flash Heal turn out, one you might not even put full points into it. And this on one of the two hallmark talents that disc got.

If rapture returns power to the target when the shield is fully absorbed, then it's perfectly possible for the shield to become absorbed near the end of or after weakened soul has worn off, and then a fresh shield absorbed within 12 seconds. On a pull, for example.