[MoP Beta]Trick: Penance Atonement is a Smart AoE Heal That Can Be Cast While Moving

[Kelesti]

Proc means "chance on hit" atonement heals when you do damage with certain abilities, its not a chance to heal, it heals.

And if you don't like the tool blizzard is giving you, then you don't have to use it. Its there if you want it, but you don't have to.

Atonement is a passive effect that is triggered by the game mechanics. Not quite a Programmed Random OCcurrance, but it is "a chance to heal" the right person. And let's be real here, Holy Fire does this already, but each tick is less than a 0 mastery Shaman's Healing Rain. It doesn't count as an AoE splash, it's just residual. Penance, you're giving up... your strongest single target heal for a mini cleave that may or may not spread (you can't force it to cast on three separate people), and each tick heals less than Grace.

Sure, I can see it potentially pretending to be useful on fights with damage buffs (Zon'ozz, Staghelm, Halfus), but a cleave won't do as much as a Prayer ever could in a PvE situation (And a Penance on a person hit harder not only triages them back up, but makes the Prayer actually do more as well).

[Prod]

I see Penance being useful in 5-mans more than anything. Early Cata, Priests had to be full-time healers in 5-mans, but after a while, we could afford to even going full-time Smite-Atonement healers to speed up the dungeon, even out dpsing people with entry 5-man ilvl. As people start to outgear content, I'd imagine Penance-Atonement seeing more use since healing should be more manageable.

Then there's the Challenges. I'm not sure how that would work, but a little extra dps to speed things up should come in handy.

[scandore8472]

Excuse me for not using open ended terms to your liking.

And I have read the thread, I just do not see the benefits outweighing cons.

In case you forgot, smite lowers your Penance CD through ToT, and people using penance in this fashion are probably smiting and HFing as well, so your argument about wasting a penance CD looses a lot of weight.

It's situational I'm not saying you should be using on the boss every time it's off CD. Just like you don't want to blindly spam smite healing, you don't want to blindly Penance the boss and risk it being on CD when you need it for a single target heal.

1) The biggest benefit is mana efficiency. If only two people are injured, it's a waste of mana to use to use PoH.

2) Mobility, Unless we're throwing out PW:S like candy, which isn't very viable at this point in the game, our ability to heal while moving is fairly weak. Glyph of Penance, gives us another option.

[Myzou]

To the people saying this isn't AoE:

Then I guess Holy Nova, Wild Growth, or any other AoE spell isn't actually AoE either, because well, it has the possibility of only affecting one person.

Yes, it is an AoE. No, it's not a very decent AoE, but it is an AoE nonetheless.

[scandore8472]

http://www.wowwiki.com/Area_of_Effect

Area of Effect, or AoE, are spells which affect more than one target within a pre-determined radius set by the game's mechanics.

Can we end stupid debate over the definition of AoE. Penance atonement is a single spell, that can affect more than one target in a 15 yard radius.

[Tsplodey]

http://www.wowwiki.com/Area_of_Effect
Can we end stupid debate over the definition of AoE. Penance atonement is a single spell, that can affect more than one target in a 15 yard radius.

While youre at linking partial descriptions (noone uses WoWwiki anymore btw, use WoWpedia.org) "all targets in the area suffer the full effect. "

http://www.wowpedia.org/Aoe

[Kelesti]

While we're on copy/paste definitions:

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I think this thread's outlived its purpose, arguing semantics rather than the actual pros/cons of this effective (or inneffective) utility at this point.