For Priests (Nice and Positive Feedback Please)

[Telitzp]

First and foremost, I would like everyone to know that: Yes, this is Beta, and yes there will be changes. We do not have to post on the Beta forums to be heard.

Source
Ghostcrawler
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...=2000&pageNo=2

"Believe it or not, we read a lot of outside forums too. We just don't post there."

Now that we have this out of the way. Let's create a mind-blowing thread, where there is the off chance that he or someone else may be reading it.

For me, personally I think that Discipline is a good preemptive damage build.

However, our Power Word: Shields get eaten up in one hit. (This is why I didn't like the rework of Rapture; it works on how many times it absorbs damage instead of a flat percentage. Of course, against low-hitting mobs, it could turn out really good.) Of course, it's rather puzzling at the end of the talent statement: "Increasing the amount Healed or Absorbed will increase the amount of mana gained".

The question is, do we get 2.5% of our total mana, and what is this increased mana gained? Also is there a hidden cooldown on this? If not, that would be pretty good.

Priest Base Mana @ 70: 2340
Priest Base Mana @ 80: ~2674 (unless Blizzard decided to increase the amount gained, which could have easily been done.)

Flash Heal
Rank 11 - Heals a friendly target for 1887 to 2193.
18% of base mana, 40 yd range, 1.5 sec cast

Using our 2674 base number, we can derive at how much a Rank 11 Flash Heal will cost.

2674 / 18% = 481.32
The amount of mana we get back from Rapture on a 15000 total mana pool: 375
End Cost of Flash Heal, Rank 11: 106 mana

Greater Heal
Rank 9 - A slow casting spell that heals a single target for 3950 to 4590.
32% of base mana, 40 yd range, 3 sec cast

2674 / 32% = 855.68
The amount of mana we get back from Rapture on a 15000 total mana pool: 375
End Cost of Greater Heal, Rank 9: 480

However, say we get the talent Improved Healing (-15% to Greater Heal)
855.68 / 15% = 727.328
For an end cost of Greater Heal, Rank 9: 352

On a 15000 mana pool you will be able to cast
42.61 Greater Heals with 0Mp5
141.50 Flash Heals with 0Mp5

* Reminder *
These numbers are based off a base mana amount of 2674. If this number is incorrect, these numbers will be incorrect.

As you can see, our Flash Heals have become very very mana efficient. We might be able to spam Flash Heal, but it's still not going to be as strong as a Holy flash heal.

I believe that if Grace was put back to its original state, Discipline Priests would be able to to raid a lot more confidently. Another great additional to our arsenal would be to give us some more base critical rating. (Perhaps changing Renewed Hope to just being base - Could also give it a 5% added healing from one of our stats)

** Hopeful Readers and Posters **
I would like to keep this thread to a minimal of flames, and plain foolishness. Please just post constructive thoughts (feedback) for possible Blue / Dev readers to read. Again, thank you for your understanding.

[kartu3]

My major complain is: they don't explain us what they are doing. Unlike other class designers do. It's not only that we aren't getting anything exiting, nobody even bothers talking to us. >

P.S.
And I find Koraa's comments regarding Inner Fire and PWS insulting.

[Mandible]

Having grace back to its state before the buff "nerf" would make it fit with its position in the tree, also it would give it a reason to be stackable and only last 8 seconds compared to Blessing of Sanctuary. Tanks would still want to have BoSanc due to its secondary effect, and since you can basicly only keep Grace up on a single target at a time it wouldn't be a "must" to have a disc priest in the raid just because the grace effect is abit more powerfull. Also having it be 100% added to match the blessing in that area. All in all the issue I see there is grace being far enferiour as a 41 2 point talent to a 21 1 point talent which doesn't need to be stacked.

While not in the beta to try it out from what I have read the main "issue" with discipline healing besides being overall weak in healing is that you have too many cooldowns, and placing talents that lower these won't help since you miss out on too many other usefull tools. Its allready not possible to make a spec that takes needed holy talents for penance since to be efficient with shield "healing" you need ALL the talents that add to this, and not just some.

Removing int from enlightenment - while I somewhat can understand this is to limit the rapture effect I don't see why it was removed (almost faster than it was added). Discipline have been a tree most of the time based on staying power - keeping alot of mana, so removing this seems out of touch even if it meant there was two talents with added int. We wouldn't be the only class with two talents like that.

Divine Spirit - I know it won't be made trainable, or that Divine Spirit and Imp DS will be merged due to it being too helpfull then, but would be nice to have imp being one talent point instead of two to match up other similar buffs.

[Telitzp]

My major complain is: they don't explain us what they are doing. Unlike other class designers do. It's not only that we aren't getting anything exiting, nobody even bothers talking to us. >

P.S.
And I find Koraa's comments regarding Inner Fire and PWS insulting.

I think a great idea for Inner Fire and Power Word: Shield could be as follows:

If your Power Word: Shield gets dispelled it unleashes an area of effect stun, stunning 3 nearby enemies (7 yard range).

And for Inner Fire something like:

If your Inner Fire gets dispelled it restores 8 Mana for each charge still remaining.
(Improved Inner Fire = 32 charges)
32 x 8 = 256
Inner Fire Cost = 374

I think this would help out a bunch.

[Telitzp]

Having grace back to its state before the buff "nerf" would make it fit with its position in the tree, also it would give it a reason to be stackable and only last 8 seconds compared to Blessing of Sanctuary. Tanks would still want to have BoSanc due to its secondary effect, and since you can basicly only keep Grace up on a single target at a time it wouldn't be a "must" to have a disc priest in the raid just because the grace effect is abit more powerfull. Also having it be 100% added to match the blessing in that area. All in all the issue I see there is grace being far enferiour as a 41 2 point talent to a 21 1 point talent which doesn't need to be stacked.

While not in the beta to try it out from what I have read the main "issue" with discipline healing besides being overall weak in healing is that you have too many cooldowns, and placing talents that lower these won't help since you miss out on too many other usefull tools. Its allready not possible to make a spec that takes needed holy talents for penance since to be efficient with shield "healing" you need ALL the talents that add to this, and not just some.

Removing int from enlightenment - while I somewhat can understand this is to limit the rapture effect I don't see why it was removed (almost faster than it was added). Discipline have been a tree most of the time based on staying power - keeping alot of mana, so removing this seems out of touch even if it meant there was two talents with added int. We wouldn't be the only class with two talents like that.

Divine Spirit - I know it won't be made trainable, or that Divine Spirit and Imp DS will be merged due to it being too helpfull then, but would be nice to have imp being one talent point instead of two to match up other similar buffs.

I totally agree with you. Which is why I think Grace should be reverted back and maybe just made into a 'self buff' if it was too powerful with other classes.

It would increase our personal healing to that target by the 9-12% needed, and would keep the 3-6% less damage. This would fit in with Blessing of Sanc still and both would have synergy (one giving rage, mana, etc) and the other reducing a little more damage.

The main problem I see so far with Discipline is the lack of healing power as you have mentioned. However, with the new Rapture, (15k mana total is not that hard to get), I believe that our healing spells have become VERY efficient.

The only things that need work to make it PvE viable is the healing power (which Grace could fix), and a few tweaked talents.

[Mandible]

Not sure if this would help anything, but possibly making power infusion a trained spell and changing it to self cast only. Then moving Pain sup. to its place and creating a new 41 point talent that in basis was a mass shielding spell on a middle cd (so you couldn't spam it). Having pi as trained self only would also help shadow priests some with their damage output, and you wouldn't be able to use it on others (making it easier to use overall since you didn't need to target others). Having PS further down would make it more available to other specs, so you wouldn't "need" to spec deep disc for pvp.

[Terror]

While I may be changing the topic a bit over what has been discussed thus far, I believe the latest changes to the Shadow Priest talent tree leave it with a very weak Deep Shadow PvP build.

With Misery and Fade reduced to PvE abilities, Shadow Resilience reduced to spell crit instead of physical damage, the dispersion damage nerf, and the Twisted Faith spellpower nerf, the deep Shadow tree is simply not that inviting. The change to fade was an awesome new mechanic as was dispersion.

As it stands, dispersion is now on of the crappiest 51 point talents. One of the main things hindering SP viability in PvP was the lack of escape mechanics versus melee classes and now neither dispersion nor fade provides this to us.

Reimplementing the old abilities or adding new talents in that direction seem appropriate.

[Rushuna]

Rapture now reads:

Causes you to gain up to 2.5% of your maximum mana each time you heal with Greater Heal, Flash Heal or Penance, or damage is absorbed by your Power Word: Shield or Divine Aegis. Increasing the amount healed or absorbed increases the mana gained.

I'm thinking for all we know, this MAY only change the mana CAP for the amount, and we still gain 2.5% of the amount healed and 25% of the amount absorbed. Cause if you think about it, say our PW:Shields absorb 4k damage (I think that's kinda generous ATM, but I'm not in Beta so I don't know if that number is too high or low) we would gain 1k mana, but with a 15k mana pool, that's exactly 375 mana that we can actually gain in a single hit, BUT if we bring the amount the attack hit to 1k (say on a trash mob or something due to a warrior's Shield Block or something) then we would gain 250 mana, which is UNDER the 375 cap for having 15k mana, thus we gain the full amount for that absorb, and if the next swing goes thru and hits the warrior for a full 3k, we would attempt to gain 750 mana, but it be capped at 375. So in a way, until we get the actual numbers from beta tester about the % gained from healing/absorbing, all we truly know at the moment is the CAP of how much mana we CAN gain.

If a beta tester could get back to me about some number crunching maybe we can figure out what the percentage is for healing-to-mana and absorbing-to-mana.

[meowmeow]

i would like to see a holy talent that is similar to living seed (resto tree - druid) or ancestral awakening (rest tree - shaman):
both are on the same base: your X heal causes plant a living seed/spawn a spirit that heals YY for Zz% of the amount healed.
there is a paladin glyph that is close to it.

i would also like to see priests get replenish effect on their renew (like druids on their rejub): same a 15% chance, i believe it will go nice combined with improved renew, or improved power word sheild, in a way every healer priest should get it.

i would like to see a small change in the 51 talent pointers, maybe a small reveiw on each 51 pointer in every tree, seeing if it fits.

i would also like to get shadow more PvE talents/abilities, or to improve exsisting ones, for my veiw the dmg hasn't been buffed enough to compare it with and other dps class (if returning mana to the group/raid isn't a priest special ability i expect the shadow priest to be able to preform same dps as any other caster).

[Vallos]

I was really looking forward to playing a PVP shadow priest, but that's not looking so good currently. I agree that Dispersion is extremely lackluster. The idea from conception was to give shadow priests some kind of utility to survive, right? They can't really heal themselves effectively, so they got a means to regenerate life very quickly while being hard to damage. From what I've seen now, it's a gimped evocation that prevents half of the damage done to you. My first thought was ...that's a 51 point talent? I thought that'd be trainable at level 30.

[Worshaka]

Well done Telitzp, you actually posted something worth reading and presented a balanced point of view and created a constructive discussion. Perhaps last week was the wrong time of the month for you or something...

Shock Horror, I actually agree with some of your sentiments... I personally like the idea of making the disc tree about damage prevention and single target HPS throughput vs the holy tree which is more of a strong utility healing tree specialising in AoE/Raid healing. I'm glad to see you've changed your tune about relentlessly bagging the disc tree and now giving it some proper consideration.

Grace is being changed to incorporate a 6% increased self healing buff, I think this change provides a decent incentive to take the talent and not simply rely on BoSanc. I still believe that the actual raid buff component needs to be equal to its alternative so adding in a self buff mechanism is a clever way to make priests think twice about the talent.

I don't think there is anything to worry about the new working of rapture. It's pretty hard to post numbers and to get an understanding if the power of the talent has remained similar to what it was or whether it's been severly nerfed. Until some information comes out about how the mana is returned upto the 2.5% max mana cap we are purely speculating. My guess is that there will be some form of coefficent tied to the amount of healing provided to stop situations such as a PW:S being beat on 10 times to restore more mana than it costed. I'd speculate that the mechanic will ensure that if you were to cast a PW:S worth 4000 healing (absorption) that the same mana will be returned to you whether it takes 10 hits to rip it off or 1 hit. Ie. if you get 1000 mana back for a 4000dmg shield then 10 hits would give 100 mana each and 1 hit would give you 1000 mana.

I'd like to know what effect raputre has on overhealing... if you overheal a target for 100% of the heal, do you get any mana return. The fact that the amount of mana increases according to the amount of healing you provide perhaps overhealing will result in a reduced amount of mana gain. I think this would be a fair mechanic, you still want players to try to use their heals efficently rather than having the knoweldge than can mash a button regardless of the situation. My guess is that if you heal a target for 100% of the heals effect or close to you'll get 2.5% of your max mana back but if you overheal for all or a significant portion that you'll receive a reduced mana refund.

As for the disc tree in general and this even applies somewhat to the holy tree... i'm finding it very difficult to spec deep disc and feel comfortable getting all the holy talents i'd like. I agree that players should be presented with choices and have to sacrafice abilities in order to get other abilities but more so than other class trees or other specs I feel that the talents deep in the disc tree are absolute must haves and 18 points of the holy tree is a must have... of course we dont have enough points to accomdate that sort of talent point distribution.

I think i'd like to see Penance get an 8 sec cooldown instead of 10 sec, that would free players to choose between some holy talents and aspiration coz as it stands I think u have to take aspiriation to lower penance to it's best possible cooldown.

Lastly i'd like to know if Divine Aegis places a shield on a target if you critically overheall for 100% or does it only provide a shield if you healed the target for X amount? IN other words does the Aegis only place a shield of 40% of health restored instead of the strength of the incomming healing spell? If so perhaps borrowed time should apply to Aegis shields for the increase in damage prevented?