3.1 Rapture Question

[karthaege]

I know the tooltip states that this effect cannot occur more than once every 12 seconds. What I am curious about is does this effect mean the mana return to the priest or the mana / rage / energy / runic power part? Anyone on the ptr that can tell me from experience? I haven't been able to tell from some of the posts. Thanks in advance.

[adalet]

It returns mana to you and mana/runic/rage/energy to your target.

Let's say for a mana pool of ~20k that means it returns to you ~500 mp.

[karthaege]

It returns mana to you and mana/runic/rage/energy to your target.

I understand that. What I'm wondering is does it return mana to you only once every 12 seconds or does that qualifier only count toward the receiver of the shield?

So like, you cast pw:s on 3 tanks, they all take enough damage to remove the shield, will you only get the mana back once every 12 seconds or would all 3 proc it and only 1 out of them get the mana/rage/rp?

[adalet]

I understand that. What I'm wondering is does it return mana to you only once every 12 seconds or does that qualifier only count toward the receiver of the shield?

So like, you cast pw:s on 3 tanks, they all take enough damage to remove the shield, will you only get the mana back once every 12 seconds or would all 3 proc it and only 1 out of them get the mana/rage/rp?

Once every 12 seconds. If you have a fight like patchwerk (10 man), that means if you cast a shield on the HT tank that shield will be absorbed and you have to have to wait another 12 seconds to cast it on the other tank. All the thingy reduces to timing and predicting when damage spikes will gonna occure.

[Pistonlol]

Once every 12 seconds. If you have a fight like patchwerk (10 man), that means if you cast a shield on the HT tank that shield will be absorbed and you have to have to wait another 12 seconds to cast it on the other tank. All the thingy reduces to timing and predicting when damage spikes will gonna occure.

Well I don't think you have to wait another 12 seconds to cast it (as long as they don't have weakened soul), but if another bubble pops within that 12 sec cooldown, you will not get the mana.

[adalet]

Well I don't think you have to wait another 12 seconds to cast it (as long as they don't have weakened soul), but if another bubble pops within that 12 sec cooldown, you will not get the mana.

Idd you don't have to wait, but i needed a simple logic/answer. Ideea is, no matter the number of targets, you and your target will benefit from that once every 12 seconds.

[Nesco]

I've been only for a few minutes on the PTR to check things out and now they're down, but here are my findings.

I shielded myself and gained 2.5% mana back after I removed it manually.
I shielded myself and gained 2.5% mana back after the buff faded.
I shielded myself and gained 2.5% mana back after the shield broke.
I shielded myself and gained 2.5% mana back, but when I re-shielded myself after 3 seconds, I didn't get 2% mana.

So it seems that they're on the same timer of 12 seconds on the same player at the least. But I don't know if you can give away 2% mana on every caster that you shield. But I haven't had a group @ PTR yet.

More tests to come soon.

Did some more testing. You actually have to read it very litterally. Both effects, the 2.5% mana for the priest that cast PW:Shield AND the Rapture effect (2% mana, 8 rage, 16 runic power and 20 energy) will happen at the same time the moment a shield breaks. So you will give away some mana regen, but at the maximum of only once every 12 seconds.

So you shield a target, lets say the warrior MT. He gets hit and the Shield gets removed, you gain 2.5% mana and the warrior MT gains 8 rage at that exact moment.

[Casavir]

Rapture, in my opinion, is going to be a very sorry talent for mana regen unless 1 of 2 things happen.

1) Blizzard rewrites the talent back to being we gain mana when healing with spells, PWS or DA as before.

-or-

2) Give us back the mana gain from Divine Aegis procs instead of awarding the shielded target mana/rage/energy/runic power.

I consider those to be compromises and not really good solutions.

Currently
On the Live servers, a good raiding disc priest will have a large mana pool (20k+), high holy crit chance (25%+), high spell power (2.2k+) and high intellect (1.2k+). These should be unbuffed or self-buffed type stats. Now we have to dig into the mechanics of why. Well, as read Rapture returns up to 2.5% of your maximum mana each time you heal with FL, GH, Penance or damage is aborbed by PW: Shield or Divine Aegis. So as you can see, during a full raid with all associated buffs, a disc priest could potentially get mana back from many things when critical heals happen (think Prayer of Mending causing DA procs as well). I will admit it does somewhat seem a little OP in that I never oom on any boss fight.

On the PTR
As you are aware, Rapture has been completely rewritten to basically state that we get 2.5% of max mana upon the disappearance of PW: Shield from target which cannot happen more than 1x every 12sec. The fact that it returns rage/mana/runic power/energy is irrelevant to us in that it's just a perk to the shielded target. IMHO, it was added to keep the crybaby warriors and bears at bay but really... did you seriously have a rage problem in raids? So from my testing here's what I find, with a 20k mana pool I get a little over 500mana back upon the disappearance of a shield (the shield could have disappeared for any reason including timer expired). This is concerning because the shield costs 536 mana to cast (assuming you have Soul Warding). This is the only way for us to get mana back through this talent and as you can see, when 3.1 goes live most disc priests will not really be gaining any mana back but rather getting a refunded shield cost. With the addition of Soul Warding, the normal 4sec cd on casting PW:Shield has been removed so we are essentially free to continually spam that button. However, keep in mind that you will not gain mana back more than 1x every 12sec when that shield breaks.

So let's say you cast 3 shields out on some tanks. As expected all 3 are used up within just a few sec you will get mana returned on just the first one depleted and nothing for the other two. So a net gain of -1108 mana (3x shields @ -536mana each + 500mana returned). Therefore, unless raid members are in dire straits it would not seem logical to spam shield.

So what are our options? I would suppose that if you've really been paying attention to the numbers you would have noticed one very changeable variable, the mana pool. A higher mana pool will obviously result in more mana returned. So theoretically a high enough pool will not only refund the cost of a shield but also give you a little mana back. Let's look at that one real quick.

Similar to above but with a 24k mana pool:
2.5% of 24k mana = 600 mana returned after the expiration of a PWS. The spell will still cost 536 so you get a net gain of 64 mana. It's by no means a great deal but it is a gain. Surely we can do better.

If you really looked over all your new changes, you see that shadow fiend has been changed. Unfortunately I don't have any hard numbers on that one other than what the new spell reads. In testing, however, it is a significant amount of mana regen. The only sad fact is that it is still on a 5min CD.

What else? If a disc priest is willing to do, you could give up a few talents in the disc tree to spec far enough into the holy tree for improved healing. This would reduce the mana cost of your LH, H, GH, DH and Penance up to 15% if fully talented. Personally I would see this only as a benefit in the Penance department because the other spells are rarely used in our spec. With the new Glyph of Penance (reduces Penance CD by 2sec) this could really be a good option.

And? As some of you may have noticed, Meditation was also rewritten to increase our casting MP5 (50% up from 30%). This should help out some but there is one little catch. Overall MP5 is down. I can't explain what Blizz did to change that but I do know it has happened and as a side note, not just to us but to druids as well. 700MP5 on Live to 492MP5 on PTR. So looking at those numbers...

Live MP5 while casting: 700*30% = 210MP5 casting
PTR MP5 while casting: 492*50% = 246MP5 casting

So the good news is that you could potentially have more MP5 while casting now than before and that's not a bad thing.

Is that all? Nope. I'm you all have seen the new addition of Improved Flash Heal in our talent tree. This is excellent news because on Live servers where penance has a much longer CD, Flash Heal is your gap filler and unfortunately for us it was kind of mana expensive compared to Holy Priest or Paladins Flash Heal. That will save us a little mana there.

Ok so what else is there?

Honestly, not much but there are two things.

1) As mentioned above I would expect the majority of us built our gear with a high amount of crit (also noted you can get 3% higher crit with the new Focused Will talent) so if you want more MP5 due to Rapture's drastic change you will have to rebuild your gear set to be more that of a Holy Priest (possibly stacking on the spirit or MP5 gems). I am not an expert in that area of healing, however, so don't quote me on it :P

2) It seems to be that Blizz felt healers in general were overpowered and so nerfed them all a bit across the board. So it looks like we will have to rely on the group or raid members we are with to make up our missing pieces. I am thinking Replenishment will become a very important factor in raids unless you have a really high dps type group.

At any rate, I have rambled on long enough. I encourage all of you to go out to the PTR and try out several talent, gear and group makeup options to what kind of results you get and post in this forum. With luck we can find a good solution to our changing talents.

[adalet]

You don't need imp healing to cover up the "nerf" of rapture. Go heal Patch in Ulduar and you will see there's no mana issues. And if you start thinking already about mana issues that means there's a dps problem in your raid.