Originally Posted by
HamSandwichFace
This is a good post. Varda, I wonder, what would happen if Rapture was just a passive which gave you a free PW:S every 10 seconds instead? At the moment Disc has 4 ways of regenerating mana compared to Shaman (3), Paladins (2), Druids (2), Monks (2) and Holy Priests (3). Does Disc really need 4 ways of regenerating mana or is it time for a complete redesign on Rapture to allow the Priest to use PW:S, for free, every 10 seconds (and for PVP purposes lets say it ignores Weakened Soul) and have Disc with 3 ways of regenerating mana.
I don't buy the Shaman regen scaling via crit because it scales very poorly compared to say Mistweaver regen via crit: generally (outside of Riptide) a Shaman will have 2 or 3 spare globals every 12-15 seconds. This isn't enough to make crit a valuable secondary worth pursuing, but it's only taken because with AS/5% raid buff the next haste breakpoint (after 3.8k~) is unreachable and mastery starts to go downhill after 50% due to the negative implications on the Shaman's own healing and what is actually possible to heal in a raiding scene (in whichever context you take: LFR, Normal, HC). Where as Mistweaver regen via crit is a flat rate to gain more mana tea stacks equal to your crit chance (so for example mine is 22%~ or something) which helps a lot more than the Shaman methods. Resurgence is of course a nice bonus.
A worry I have is that Disc excels in high levels of gear mostly due to the nature of skills. I guess one could argue Disc has always been balanced around knowing the fight but I do think DA is too powerful at 50% on skills, and I (I'm levelling a Disc-ee at the moment, at least continuing after New Years) feel that a much better balance could be derived if all spells generated the DA but it started at 20% or 25%, it would at least make up for the fact Disc's heals are notably weaker. I agree with many posters that Disc is in a bad spot currently via tank healing, and I think making DA just a passive shield bonus would go some ways to help this (on top of the free PW:S too, I guess) though this of course has the issue of forcing the best secondary stat to be mastery (it already is, and this would make it stronger).
I think scaling also needs to account the way PoH and DA synergise. I'm sorry to repeat myself but I think a DA at 50%, on every single PoH, is just going to be ridiculous (it already is) in upcoming tiers. So much so that it'll dwarf every other healer. Illumination will suffer from the same problems I suspect. Blizzard probably shouldn't balance around a raid setup that uses 2 Pallies/2 Discs on every fight because that would essentially force guilds into taking that setup for stuff, however I think Blizzard needs to be more acutely aware of how the scaling of absorption effects (most notably PoH + DA + mastery scaling) in a raid scenario.
While we have little to go on, I do think Blizzard is trying to actively address this in the next tier though: normally we see raid damage tick every 1 (or 2) second(s), however in the next tier (judging by the 'leaked' journal) raid damage is going to tick every .25 (.5) sec for 25% (50%) of the amount which would make healers stronger scaled around HoTs and 'passive healing' (Sanctuary, Efflo, SCK, Healing Rain etc) stronger (on the meters at least) while the hard-casting classes (PoH as a perfect example, Holy Radiance as another) will be possibly weaker, but the absorption part would still remain powerful.
I actually think doing the above is a better solution that totally gutting absorbs, they're fun (although my SO dislikes the fact (on a Paladin) that the absorbs aren't counted as green numbers in the Blizzard interface) but I think something does need to be done.
I have a question (this is serious):
Does DA's value derive from the base heal value of a spell or the effective healing done?