Why was Archangel removed as a talent?

[Lathander04]

IMO, archangel was a better fit as a talent because it makes for a particular playstyle choice - not all disc priests are going to/want to dps to heal through attonement. Take live talents: currently priests can choose to talent evangelism/archangel/atonement or they can talent Twin Disciplines/Mental Agility/Train of Thought... But if it remains in MoP as a baseline disc spec ability then it will 'feel' like a waste not to use it.

I understand that Holy was at a disadvantage because it doesn't have atonement and it didn't because of the bonus to damage via Chakra: chastise. My proposal is why not just remove the holy damage component of Chakra: Chastise so that damage is similar to disc with evangelism only and revert atonement to a major glyph so that both Disc & Holy can glyph it and talent archangel to make use of this playstyle in either spec?

I recognize that it doesn't fit in the mana regen theme - so why not keep the mana component of it that it currently has live?

The reason that i'm bringing this up is because i honestly don't feel that priests need yet another damage spell in the form of PW: Solace/Mind Siphon when there are already spells you'd be better off casting ie smite healing/evangelism stacks, healing spells, shadow damage spells, dispelling etc. Why talent PW: Solace/Mind Siphon when you can talent Mindbender/FDCL and maintain your spells 'rotation' while still getting mana back?

You could even ramp up Dark Archangel to be less straightforward by making it consume shadow orbs to activate with more orbs to increase the duration. Then if an spriest player 'decides' that they'd rather the damage boost in this form rather than another Devouring Plague then they can make that choice.

Another thing, the tooltip for Atonement in disc specialisation says:

"When you deal damage with Smite, Holy Fire, and Penance, you instantly heal a nearby low health friendly target within 15 yards from the enemy target for 100% of the damage dealt.

If the Priest is healed through Atonement, the effect is reduced by 50%."

Why is Penance also included - this makes it so that it is pointless to ever directly cast penance on a friendly target (other than yourself) because you could cast it on an enemy and also heal a friendly for 100% of the damage. This is given that the MoP Penance tooltip currently uses the same value for damage or healing.

[Obsidian9]

Archangel remaining in the talent tier then meant that they had a throughput cd in the "mana-regen" tier. Even if they added in the mana return component it would either have to return less or have its bonus reduced. If you don't want to use solace then just use one of the other talents in the tier which will hopefully be relatively close in terms of effectiveness once live hits.

As to Penance it still has single target purpose, multiple in fact. Atonement despite its smart heal does not always hit the person you want it to. I don't think Penance Atonement stacks grace. Unless they changed the range on it ranged groups still would be out of range.

Note: Take everything I say with a grain of salt as I am a relatively new main switched priest .

[Kelesti]

IMO, archangel was a better fit as a talent because it makes for a particular playstyle choice - not all disc priests are going to/want to dps to heal through attonement. Take live talents: currently priests can choose to talent evangelism/archangel/atonement or they can talent Twin Disciplines/Mental Agility/Train of Thought... But if it remains in MoP as a baseline disc spec ability then it will 'feel' like a waste not to use it.

Strength of Soul is now baseline Discipline. And why would any Priest give up Twin Disciplines?

I understand that Holy was at a disadvantage because it doesn't have atonement and it didn't because of the bonus to damage via Chakra: chastise. My proposal is why not just remove the holy damage component of Chakra: Chastise so that damage is similar to disc with evangelism only and revert atonement to a major glyph so that both Disc & Holy can glyph it and talent archangel to make use of this playstyle in either spec?

Because they wanted the two to have playstyle differences. This is one way of actually pulling that off. Besides, it's Discipline's niche thing it had all last expansion, and thankfully it got it away from "But I want to do nothing but cast bubbles!". Now if only Druids could take a lesson and shut the frak up...

I recognize that it doesn't fit in the mana regen theme - so why not keep the mana component of it that it currently has live?

Gross imbalance to the specs, plain and simple. Shadow uses it as a mana/output cooldown. But the 5% it restores to Discipline is less mana than you spent casting the smites in the first place, and it's actually cheaper to cast 1 more 5-stack Evangelism smite than it is to have to rebuild it again later. Outside of Yor'sahj, it was never a mana cooldown, it was only an output cooldown. With Discipline getting Atonement, having Archangel here was terrible design in the first place.

The reason that i'm bringing this up is because i honestly don't feel that priests need yet another damage spell in the form of PW: Solace/Mind Siphon when there are already spells you'd be better off casting ie smite healing/evangelism stacks, healing spells, shadow damage spells, dispelling etc. Why talent PW: Solace/Mind Siphon when you can talent Mindbender/FDCL and maintain your spells 'rotation' while still getting mana back?

This right here is the reason why. No, seriously. If you have room on your spellbars (some of us stretch our fingers pretty far) for another hotkey to weave in occasionally, Solace may be right for you. If you don't like it, grab Mindbender or FD;CL, and suddenly you don't have to worry about it. Mindbender's actually fairly decent at this point in time, and FD;CL is great for Holy.

You could even ramp up Dark Archangel to be less straightforward by making it consume shadow orbs to activate with more orbs to increase the duration. Then if an spriest player 'decides' that they'd rather the damage boost in this form rather than another Devouring Plague then they can make that choice.

They tried the Consuming Shadow Orbs thing. It felt like worse wind-up than Shadow had in BC and most of Wrath. Tell a Paladin that they can have Avenging Wrath, but only if it costs 3 Holy Power. That's just gross.

Keeping Orbs to Plague (and Horror for PvP) keeps Shadow in its DoT focus. Plague hurts, it really does. It feels awesome to push again, rather than "just another DoT". Shadow never feels like it should be throwing shadow bolts as a heavy direct-damage caster.

Another thing, the tooltip for Atonement in disc specialisation says:
"When you deal damage with Smite, Holy Fire, and Penance, you instantly heal a nearby low health friendly target within 15 yards from the enemy target for 100% of the damage dealt.

If the Priest is healed through Atonement, the effect is reduced by 50%."

Why is Penance also included - this makes it so that it is pointless to ever directly cast penance on a friendly target (other than yourself) because you could cast it on an enemy and also heal a friendly for 100% of the damage. This is given that the MoP Penance tooltip currently uses the same value for damage or healing.

No Atonement spell stacks Grace, Penance included. A single tick of Penance-Cleave from Atonement is weak. It's not a triage spell, and if you need splash healing you should probably be looking to either cast a Prayer, or one of your level 90 talent abilities.

But giving up Grace is huge. As is knowing exactly who's eating all three ticks of Penance to actually get a bump up on their health bar.

[Lathander04]

Because they wanted the two to have playstyle differences. This is one way of actually pulling that off. Besides, it's Discipline's niche thing it had all last expansion, and thankfully it got it away from "But I want to do nothing but cast bubbles!". Now if only Druids could take a lesson and shut the frak up...

It's not really a different playstyle tho, it's just a passive ability (atonement) that makes it viable - holy can still smite/holy fire just as disc can.

Gross imbalance to the specs, plain and simple. Shadow uses it as a mana/output cooldown. But the 5% it restores to Discipline is less mana than you spent casting the smites in the first place, and it's actually cheaper to cast 1 more 5-stack Evangelism smite than it is to have to rebuild it again later. Outside of Yor'sahj, it was never a mana cooldown, it was only an output cooldown. With Discipline getting Atonement, having Archangel here was terrible design in the first place.

Well a better option might be to swap Archangel (with no mana bonus) with Power Infusion (which reduces mana costs) in tier 5 - Archangel could fit nicely in the raw dps/healing output tier.

This right here is the reason why. No, seriously. If you have room on your spellbars (some of us stretch our fingers pretty far) for another hotkey to weave in occasionally, Solace may be right for you. If you don't like it, grab Mindbender or FD;CL, and suddenly you don't have to worry about it. Mindbender's actually fairly decent at this point in time, and FD;CL is great for Holy.

Ok well i guess it depends on the player but i look at it like this: Mindbender has a net mana increase of 16% mana over 3 minutes with 2 added global cooldowns (3 sec). Solace or Mind Siphon would then need to be cast at least 8 times (2% mana per cast x8 = 16%) over the 3 minutes to equal mindbender. That's 9 seconds more spent hardcasting to get the same mana back as mindbender (and i dunno what the figures would be with FDCL). Now i know 9 seconds over 3 minutes doesn't seem like alot (ignoring haste) but given spriests complain about desperate prayer costing them an extra global cooldown due to shadowform it's definitely significant - times matters when you're under pressure to keep people alive/kill as quick as possible.

[Felade]

Now if only Druids could take a lesson and shut the frak up...

aw, she said frak....where's starbuck?

Well a better option might be to swap Archangel (with no mana bonus) with Power Infusion (which reduces mana costs) in tier 5 - Archangel could fit nicely in the raw dps/healing output tier.

I think it could go back into the tier next to PI - just remove the whole evangelism stack mechanic and let it give back a chunk of mana (and dump twist of fate) so the choice becomes 1) a 2 min throughput CD that gives back a chunk of mana or 2) a haste CD that reduces the cost of your spells for awhile or 3) Divine Insight (you'd probably have to make the procced heals free or reduced cost somehow to balance it with the other two). That does make it a bit more boring because you won't be maintaining a stack of evangelism like you do now. I do think there's a place for it in Holy though - Holy doesn't really have much in the way of short throughput CDs unless Blizzard caves and turns Chakra into the CD Derevka's been talking about. Disc has Inner Focus, and now Archangel.

FD;CL is great for Holy.

I still feel with Chakra there is a real disincentive to cast single target heals as Holy, even moreso with the de facto 15% nerf to Heal/Flash Heal/Greater Heal. Divine Insight has this same problem - why am I going to pick up talents to improve spells I *really, really* want to avoid casting if at all possible?

[Kirse]

I don't know how I feel about archangel as baseline vs talent but I'm thrilled to get the angel wings of course . I have only SoS healed so I feel a little out of my depth at the moment; change is always a little unsettling. I'm hoping that I'll enjoy the style, since it sounds like it will be mandatory in order maximize healing.

I have no attachment to building Evangelism since that wasn't my style before, so I like the idea of removing that requirement.

[Chimaera]

I don't know how I feel about archangel as baseline vs talent but I'm thrilled to get the angel wings of course . I have only SoS healed so I feel a little out of my depth at the moment; change is always a little unsettling. I'm hoping that I'll enjoy the style, since it sounds like it will be mandatory in order maximize healing.

I have no attachment to building Evangelism since that wasn't my style before, so I like the idea of removing that requirement.

If they were to remove the evangelism requirement from Archangel they would have to vastly retune the numbers because a 25% healing boost for 18s every 30s is far too strong on its face value.

Or discipline is going to have to be completely tuned around the potential uptime of this which means while it is active you will heal for about 10% more, and while it is not active 15% less than the overall average we are tuned for.

[Kelesti]

It's not really a different playstyle tho, it's just a passive ability (atonement) that makes it viable - holy can still smite/holy fire just as disc can.

Well a better option might be to swap Archangel (with no mana bonus) with Power Infusion (which reduces mana costs) in tier 5 - Archangel could fit nicely in the raw dps/healing output tier.

Is this with Archangel as a one-button push, or still tied to Evangelism for +healing? Because either way is not good. With Evangelism, Holy is still screwed out of its extreme inefficiency to build it (time and mana spent casting 0 healing spells, in the hopes of having a boost perfectly timed later when you need it). Without Evangelism, as Chimaera pointed out, it becomes a "You're balanced around this being up X% of the time, so whenever it's not up you're doing weaker healing". We don't need power cycles like Balance Druids have, especially when it comes down to healing output which is "is it enough to keep people alive, or not".

but given spriests complain about desperate prayer costing them an extra global cooldown due to shadowform it's definitely significant

Those Shadow Priests are morons. Desperate Prayer no longer (on beta, not true for live) breaks Shadowform. But it's funny that you treat this one GCD as a problem for Shadow, but not for Holy when it's several for Archangel. But this is me getting sidetracked. There are fights where Solace would outweigh Mindbender simply because of their damage patterns, and fights where Mindbender is easier with its 1 GCD/minute. Thanks to the new talent system, we can actually switch on the fly (hurray! ^_^) for what we need, and what we don't.

aw, she said frak....where's starbuck?

I'm liking my Mesmer too much to switch back right now. August 28th can't come fast enough..

I think it could go back into the tier next to PI - just remove the whole evangelism stack mechanic and let it give back a chunk of mana (and dump twist of fate) so the choice becomes 1) a 2 min throughput CD that gives back a chunk of mana or 2) a haste CD that reduces the cost of your spells for awhile or 3) Divine Insight (you'd probably have to make the procced heals free or reduced cost somehow to balance it with the other two). That does make it a bit more boring because you won't be maintaining a stack of evangelism like you do now. I do think there's a place for it in Holy though - Holy doesn't really have much in the way of short throughput CDs unless Blizzard caves and turns Chakra into the CD Derevka's been talking about. Disc has Inner Focus, and now Archangel.

I wouldn't really call Inner Focus a "short cooldown". That implies that Shadow actually had one for how many years >.> And yes, Holy lacking a real cooldown is something that a few of us here have been kind of preaching for years now. We don't need UltraHymnTranqOfOrgasmicHealing to carry us. We like cooldowns like Power Infusion, Archangel, Paladin cooldowns, Tree of Life... All of these still put the usage of them still within the hands of the player casting, not just "you pushed a button once and your team survived, congrats" that Barrier/Tranq/Hymn and everything else are (cooldown arms race, gg blizz). Holy needs a cooldown, but I'd rather that come from a Chakra angle than change how Archangel works and rob Discipline of output/style because of it.

I still feel with Chakra there is a real disincentive to cast single target heals as Holy, even moreso with the de facto 15% nerf to Heal/Flash Heal/Greater Heal. Divine Insight has this same problem - why am I going to pick up talents to improve spells I *really, really* want to avoid casting if at all possible?

The new Chakra makes it worse than it was before, but in 10s as long as I'm Holy, I'm still going to be cross-healing, doing a fair portion of underpowered STDH's regardless. In 25s, you're absolutely right, but damage patterns don't play out the same with smaller groups.

I'll agree with you in hating Divine Insight's direction for the spec. But with loltriage I can see myself shifting between Power Infusion and actually using Twist of Fate, with ToF having a significant carried uptime.

[Felade]

I'm liking my Mesmer too much to switch back right now. August 28th can't come fast enough..

That's cool. Maybe I'll break out some Apollo or Adama or something. Or Baltar, he'd be a good Shadow Priest, yes? :P

Holy needs a cooldown, but I'd rather that come from a Chakra angle than change how Archangel works and rob Discipline of output/style because of it.

The more I think about it, turning Chakra into a Avenging Wrath-style CD with a focus on either ST or AOE healing (player's choice, shares the CD) solves a lot of Holy's problems - takes away the yucky feeling of triage in 10s, gives Holy the throughput CD it certainly could use, and still lets Blizzard feel good for making us think about our heal choices a bit more from a meta-raid point of view.

The new Chakra makes it worse than it was before, but in 10s as long as I'm Holy, I'm still going to be cross-healing, doing a fair portion of underpowered STDH's regardless. In 25s, you're absolutely right, but damage patterns don't play out the same with smaller groups.

Its more a continuation of my beef with Chakra. I don't like being forced to make my Gheal feel yucky, especially since Holy is supposed to be the "flexible" healer. It feels like the whole spec got turned on its (admittedly already quite confused) head at the start of Cata, is in a straightjacket blubbering nonsense, and spamming POH nonstop. Any talent that focuses on ST heals is probably there so Blizz can say "here, this talent will make you feel better" but all I see is "when am I going to use this? I'm going to spam Renew (now Heal I guess) on the raid, never touch my GHeal if I can possibly avoid it, and take talents that buff my AOE healing when I actually get to use it".

I do end up healing progression, but not often since my main spec is Shadow, which means a couple of things. I'm often significantly undergeared for the encounter on the healing side, and it means I don't get tons of practice on the specific fights. Put those two together and the issues with the spec become quite...glaring. Hoo boy, there were some pulls of 5% nerf Hagara 10 man after our Disc Priest was tired and checked out for the night...and we do the little strat where the ranged stand in the middle for frost phase...we got her but...ugh.

I always look at my Druid and am surprised. I think "I just did that? And with that crap gear I'm wearing?" I used to feel that with my Holy Priest too - I think I healed up to Halion (whatever that ruby sanctum dragon was called) in 2pc t9. Not anymore - man that first day of raiding after 4.0 came out and we were in ICC and I was really wondering where my mana went (I've always been really stingy with my mana even in Wrath) - of course the Disc Priest had no trouble whatsoever.

/end tangent.

My point is out-of-Chakra Greater Heal is a real drain on mana and it is often better to just leave it be and let someone else with a better designed spec take care of it.

But with loltriage I can see myself shifting between Power Infusion and actually using Twist of Fate, with ToF having a significant carried uptime.

I go back and forth on Twist of Fate and its big sister, Test of Faith. I like getting the boost obviously, but it means you are leaving throughput on the table the rest of the time and the better the raid gets at avoiding or mitigating damage, your healing goes down more than the other healers. Healing is a little like that always obviously, but the ToF's and similar abilities accentuate the effect. I suppose since its a talent in the new system we can at least opt out of it during farm fights. PI as Holy is going to be *hot* and won't have those farm-fight issues.