Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
I know this was an idea/plan for Cata, but for MoP is there any plan to give discipline priests different shields such as a shield for tanks.
Spirit Shell is a new cast-time shield spell for Discipline priests coming in 5.0, that does not cause Weakened Soul.
is the priest spell Holy Nova going to be changed to make it useful in mop as there is no need to even have it on you action bars as it is atm
We've talked about it. Its possible we may make Holy Nova Discipline only and interact with Evangelism in some way.
How do you plan on balancing healer mana management in MoP? I for one enjoyed the beginning of Cata when healing was a little more challenging but now Disc and Druids barely have any worries while shamans and Holy priests have a little harder time.
We agree. It's a nearly-unavoidable consequence of gear scaling under our current system. Fresh level 85s in mostly quest gear need to have enough mana and regen to be able to set foot in dungeons and sustain a healing rotation for a couple of minutes in the face of reasonable incoming damage. But then a healer in Heroic Firelands gear now has nearly double the stats of a healer fresh out of Uldum questing, and the mana cost of that healer's spells is unchanged, often resulting in a large mana surplus.
Our current plan for Mists is for Intellect to no longer directly increase the size of player mana pools. We intend for our mana-based DPS and Tank classes to be entirely self-reliant regardless of mana pool, so the gameplay impact for those players will be nil. For healers, Spirit will remain as the pure regen stat, and healers after multiple tiers of raid progression will clearly have far more mana at their disposal, but there will be more of an inherent tradeoff between regen and throughput stats. A healer with amazing regen will have amazing regen because of a choice to focus their stats in that direction.
Currently, Shadow Priests are very RNG dependent for Shadow Orbs. This can affect our dps a lot, especially the beginning rotation when we start dotting up the boss. It usually isn't as much of an issue mid-fight, when we can manage to keep the dots running with ES. Is there going to be any changes to the Orb mechanic in 5.0?
Shadow Orbs are random because otherwise you would always have a full stack when your Mind Blast was off cooldown, and you wouldn't even care about the mechanic. To address that in 5.0, you will never "cap" on Shadow Orbs. Mind Blast will cost 1 Orb, and have no cooldown. So the more orbs you generate "through RNG" the better, whereas currently if you generate more orbs before Mind Blast is off cooldown its kind of a waste.
In regard to healing, specifically holy priests. I love lightwell. Awesome spell. Probably one of the most OP healing spells in the game. Is it possible to give every player a macro for using it ? Kidding, but are there any changes to make it a more viable talent for Holy priests without becoming completely repetitive (click the lightwell, click the lightwell, click it damnit)
We've talked about this issue. We like that you have to look at the gamespace to click it to heal yourself, but creatures getting in the way or its hitbox can be problematic. So its possible we may get a new model for Lightwell that is "taller" and make it less of an issue to see it and click it.
Prayer of Healing only affects people from 1 raid group. So the priest has to make the raid groups accordingly. In your eyes, is this a fun design as it adds a particularism to the Priest class or is there a plan to modify it?
From a pointy-headed designer standpoint, it isn't ideal because the party within the raid doesn't mean anything in the game world (compared to say targeting an area). But we think PoH feels really different from say Holy Nova, CoH etc. and it's a fun spell so we don't think it needs to be changed.