[Priest] 5.2 PTR notes

[Yvaelle]

I think that kind of a playstyle would *heavily* favor Solace and Insanity because you wouldn't have to worry about DoT refreshes while MFIing, and, that much Mastery would make MFI do a ton more damage.

That being said, I still see this getting nerfed.

Insanity seems especcially favourable with the synergy for Divine Insight too - with more Pain ticks and more DI procs and mastery stacking, DI procs would be very very common - so DP uptime would be much higher than in 5.1 - so combined with far fewer DoT reapplications, Insanity uptime would be amazing.

All that said, ya - without seeing what the full potential of all of the above is yet - I very much suspect this is going to get nerfed. Then again, it's all based on a trinket - a trinket which is probably almost as overpowered for Destro Locks and Fire Mages - so the most logical nerf would be to just nerf the trinket, rather than to presume we are all managing to line up 100% crit for 4 seconds with 30% haste for 10 seconds procs, and re-apply out dots for the rest of the fight during that small window (and, have that small window randomly occur near the start of the fight).

Since it's all predicated on synergies between stacking proc effects they are adding - it could go live (probably through negligence, or the risk of it occuring is so small they don't consider it an issue). If it does go live, it could have adverse effects for Shadow actually - since the randomness of our DPS would suddenly be colossal (if all this lines up on the pull, then that Spriests parse is going to be hilarious).

The top end parses on Raidbots (which players often point to as a measure of balance) could show Shadow as being the 'best spec', but in reality, it would be because of a huge delta from top end parses to average: based on who has all the right items to pull it off, has BiS gear, thoroughly knows Shadow and how to exploit this, and then has crazy luck in lining it up on the pull.

[Aleaa]

- where your damage?
- sorry, no right procs

[Harukaa]

True enough! Well, Insanity was redesigned, and Mind Blast got a buff but that's really about it for Shadow (Angelic Bulwark is now undispellable, and Phantasm no longer blocks ranged attacks)[/size].

Discipline is where most of the changes are this patch. Oh, and apparently Chakra is now a resource for Holy, instead of a stance system. Somehow. But not. I don't know.

Wait a second. Didn't you intend to say that Phantasm doesn't make you "untargatable" anymore?

[Yvaelle]

Wait a second. Didn't you intend to say that Phantasm doesn't make you "untargatable" anymore?

That's what she meant yes

[Harukaa]

That's what she meant yes

Ah ok, that scared the hell out of me. =)

[Maticko]

Has anyone tested Unerring Vision of Lei-Shen? Do sw: p and VT have a 100% crit chance for full duration of dots, or only for those 4 seconds?

[nobodysbaby]

Keep banging your heads, cause without Chakra we would be merely Molten Core healers. True story.

[Falsified]

Currently we have like 35% chance of crit on SWP, so having 100% crit chance on SWP would nearly triple the amount of SA that will spawn. Currently SA represents 3-5% of our dps, that would be a nice 8% dps boost with the crit trinket(+ the dmg gain from SWP always criting). Taking into account the MB buff(around 3% dps increase), and we have SP above the current median of dps.
This is a really good buff overall on single target, but the spec that will most likely causes this trinket to be nerf is not us but affliction locks, having dots that currently crit at 15-17% chance go up to 100% in most single target fight will most likely make them godly.

I really hope that this won't be nerf, we really need a buff and having gear that goes very well with our mechanics is probably part of the fix.

[lolalola]

@ Maticko Full duration because dots take a snapshot of your stats including crit.

I suppose if you respond quickly to the proc you can have VT, SWP, and DP up from it.

All that said, ya - without seeing what the full potential of all of the above is yet - I very much suspect this is going to get nerfed. Then again, it's all based on a trinket - a trinket which is probably almost as overpowered for Destro Locks and Fire Mages

Anything about the ICD? What is the proc chance? Will it proc quicker if more DoTs up?

(Disclaimer: I don't know anything about T15 set bonuses for any class or spec except shadow...)

For fire mages it is an insane quality of life knowing you crit for 100%. I suppose if they can line it up with combustion that'll be the difference between rank and not. But I am not sure if 4 sec time is enough for fire mage. They need to build up their ignite and in the short time frame of 4 sec also get the combustion up (with 100% critting dot ticks). I imagine if you are already casting your fireball when trinket procs, you can inferno blast, pyroblast and then the third GCD combustion but there really isn't much room here for human error or lag.

For destro locks crit is their best stat AFAIK, allows for better ember regen, and yes chaos bolt should do a lot more damage when this procs but it has a high cast time.

Don't forget boomkin lining it up with eclipse or ele shaman lining it up with their (insane) burst CDs. Demonology allows more flexibility in this regard. Demonology warlocks can easily time their demo form around the ICD with little effort. If this trinket procs easily then it would proc at start of fight with pot and hero and CDs on. Classes with good burst on start such as elemental would benefit from it there.

All in all, and my point with this post being, I wouldn't be so quick to discount other casters. Players will need to do their own theorycrafting and for which class it is best is very interesting (like Elegon trinket was ace for shadow because of its boost to get to our haste cap) and won't be easily simmed. Also because of the related player skill.

Regarding ranks you'll see a lot of spikes in the ranks thanks to this trinket with the player abusing the ICD (or, some players just being lucky). So that's one more reason to not take Raidbots top100 ranks too serious in 5.2.

I also wonder how good this trinket will be in PvP. If it is OP there it will certainly be nerfed somehow...

[Maticko]

I think they'll nerf it. fire mage's dps will be insane with this, and boomkins' starsurge proc rate.. I doubt it'll go live in this state.

[Blachshma]

The latest GC tweets are downright hilarious.

@ZionHai Holy without Chakra is just a generic healer, a Molten Core priest. If you don't like Chakra, probably not a good spec for you.

Looks like Chakra is here to stay, for as long as WoW will live.

[nobodysbaby]

The latest GC tweets are downright hilarious.

@ZionHai Holy without Chakra is just a generic healer, a Molten Core priest. If you don't like Chakra, probably not a good spec for you.

Looks like Chakra is here to stay, for as long as WoW will live.

Looks to me GC havent been playing holy priest since Vanilla!? We were perfectly fine without it in BC and WotLK, in fact, IMO better and more fun.

[zito]

The latest GC tweets are downright hilarious.

@ZionHai Holy without Chakra is just a generic healer, a Molten Core priest. If you don't like Chakra, probably not a good spec for you.

Looks like Chakra is here to stay, for as long as WoW will live.

Chakra doesn't even do anything interesting. It's a flat out percentage buff and you get one new skill depending on the stance. You can just make it baseline so we would be on par with other healers 24/7 instead of being restricted by a stance CD.

We are well aware GC doesn't play a priest.

---------- Post added 2013-02-13 at 01:11 PM ----------

@Suzushiiro We agree it would be more fun with more different spells per stance. Making swapping super easy just makes swapping not a thing.

https://twitter.com/Ghostcrawler

GC 2 days ago you tweeted that chakra is a resource.

So now it's a stance again?

At least you got your head out of the clouds now.

---------- Post added 2013-02-13 at 01:12 PM ----------

LOL at kel

<3 your tweet

[Pietrzyk]

(...) or ele shaman lining it up with their (insane) burst CDs.

This trinket is useless with Ascendance, since LvB is 100% crit, if cast on the target with FlS (which should be).

[Yvaelle]

Currently we have like 35% chance of crit on SWP, so having 100% crit chance on SWP would nearly triple the amount of SA that will spawn. Currently SA represents 3-5% of our dps, that would be a nice 8% dps boost with the crit trinket(+ the dmg gain from SWP always criting). Taking into account the MB buff(around 3% dps increase), and we have SP above the current median of dps.
This is a really good buff overall on single target, but the spec that will most likely causes this trinket to be nerf is not us but affliction locks, having dots that currently crit at 15-17% chance go up to 100% in most single target fight will most likely make them godly.

I really hope that this won't be nerf, we really need a buff and having gear that goes very well with our mechanics is probably part of the fix.

Not sure how you have 35% crit chance on Pain? I think I have like 12-15% o.O


@lolalola

For all specs who intend to make good use of a 100% crit chance for 4 second trinket, they NEED a good Weakauras/Power Aura for it - something big and obnoxious with sound IMO. For Destro locks, they just need to float Burning Embers and spend from the top rather than the bottom - if they build up 3, spend 1, if the trinket procs - they still will always have 2 so they can get auto-crits. They only need to stopcasting and land the first one during the trinket (~2-2.5s cast), then just start casting the second one before the proc ends to get the benefit of it. Even with a 1 second reaction time / bad global cooldown - they should still have plenty of time to get that second cast started. While crit is very good for Destro right now - if they had this trinket and assuming the ICD isn't horrendous (burning embers solves this though) - they can reforge fully to mastery (which actually increases the size of their Chaos Bolts better than Crit does) - knowing that they will land most if not all of their Chaos Bolts during the proc.

If any spec breaks this trinket for everybody, it will be Destro locks stacking mastery and landing 100% crit chance CBs - or it will be Shadow's insane synergy with the tier set bonuses / DI / head enchant. Fire Mages of course could do very impressive things with Combustion and this, but like Shadow they will be hard pressed to pull it all off in 4 seconds (where as Destro should be able to do it consistently every proc).

Ele probably will gain the least from this trinket actually, because as mentioned - LvB auto-crits and doesn't scale with crit % like Chaos Bolt does - that makes it terrible during Ascendance, and even during most of their rotation where they average like one LvB every 4 seconds as a high spell priority - so they will always be wanting to cast it during that proc (or are likely to be casting it when it goes off).

Boomkins could share some strong synergy with this trinket - I don't know Boomkins well enough to predict it all though, but I think crits do have some proc synergy for them. My understanding is that Boomkin DoTs don't snapshot crit at the start though (was broken in WotLK I believe because of something exploitative?) - so they can't do what we can do certainly.

I don't think it would be nearly as beneficial to Affliction as it is to Shadow or Destro or Fire.

[Falsified]

Well 2p is 10% crit, and I have around 23% crit raid buffed. So yeah most of the time my swp has 35% crit chance:X

It is true they(affli locks) would not gain as much as we would with the trinket, but considering the already big gap between our specs, the fact that they could reach 100% crit on dots is awfully strong. But i do agree, SP and destro will be the classes that will take the most out of this trinket. Thought I don't see destro doing really well with it, they can't exactly pre cast a CB for this trinket, and a chaos bolt takes 3sec to cast(with no haste) at best they coud manage two CB under this trinket, considering they would loose quite a bit of embers for not being crit oriented. And there is the Icd part too, for us, on single target fight, that will be a non issue, because we just need to apply SWP/VT once and hope it extends for a long time, destro will need an ICD < 45 sec or they will have to dump some embers w/o it. I really don't see destro making a come back with just that.

[Yvaelle]

Well 2p is 10% crit, and I have around 23% crit raid buffed. So yeah most of the time my swp has 35% crit chance:X

Oohhh that's what it is - I wasn't counting 2p and we didn't have Windwalker in raid tonight so no crit buff I'd still be like 28% though, well below yours o.O

[Falsified]

Gear difference maybe? I have 508 ilvl atm.

[Saphiramoon]

Keep banging your heads, cause without Chakra we would be merely Molten Core healers. True story.

That statement was just sad O.o. So..now the difference between priests 7 years ago and now is a 30 sec cd that gives me either a shitty ground aoe spell (and some static bonuses) or a single target/renew refresh thing? Sounds like they admit they didn't work much on holy priests since vanilla times.

Well, good thing druids have pretty much both of them and they dont need to choose from them. Heck, their shitty aoe ground spell comes attached to the single target cd-ed mini-bomb heal.

[ramennoodleking]

Chakra was blizzards attempt to differentiate holy from other healers. It worked, but at the expense of a relatively clunky mechanic that pigeon holes you into a certain role while gimping your performance in other roles.

Is it a bad idea? I don't know, but I do believe that it was more interesting when you initiated chakra and then cast a spell as opposed to just keybinding the different chakra stances.

If they want to keep chakra, what I believe they need to do is turn it into an activated buff, a cooldown, really. For x seconds your single target heals/AoE heals/dps is increased by x% and you recieve a new ability (serenity, sanctuary, chakra). Then they would need to bring all of heals in line with nearly what they are already in the various chakra states.

However, while I enjoyed the run and fun style of holy in WotLk, casting primarily instants, I believe Cata really did add a ton of depth to the spec. I just think they veered off in the wrong direction.