Priest Masteries... Blizz got it right?!

[Crusoe]

Discipline priests with Spirit of Redemption...gaming turning in arena. Or heck...all priests can have Spirit of Redemption, since you no longer need to spec specifically into the Disc tree for mana regen, Holy might do just fine.

On the other side of the coin, holy priests can now pick up http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=63574. I can see it now, holy priests spaming shields when your Circle of Healing spell is on cooldown. I think one priest moderator's nightmare has come true.

As far as disco getting the mana regen mastery and then taking a few talent points into holy, for things like Inspiration, getting the holy mana regen mastery also, I don't think they will be getting 100% regen from double dipping in the masterys. It will probably be similar regen to what we already have for the 3 "mandator" disco talent points all healing priests take.

[Gemazarus]

with regards to Soul Warding, and Spirit of Redemption. This only applies if the talents stays at it's current position. With 5 new points, this is not likely. Spirit of Redeption and Soul Warding are both tree defining talents. I would think they would move them a bit deeper.

Don't get me wrong. I'd love it if they didn't but they are just going to and ruin our fun!

On topic, I LOVE the new system. If anything like this comes into effect, the priest class may soon really come into it's own. I'm a Disc priest, and I'll never say no to better Shields and Aegis's!

[lilbandit]

i would expect holy and disc to get + damage and healing, rather than just + healing, giving shadow some more utility.

[Danner]

i would expect holy and disc to get + damage and healing, rather than just + healing, giving shadow some more utility.

I'm not sure... ultimately, it can't end up as every talent gives +1% throughput regardless of where you put it. That's pointless. The throughput has to be differentiated somehow.

That said, I'm not even sure +% to healing for all heals is right for disc. Ideally, disc should get +% to intellect (which gives spellpower). After all, a major part of disc is boosting the power of intellect. While holy should get a comparable (or slightly better) +% to healing, wince that's what holy is all about. It's a minor difference to be honest. But it will help shadow out with cross-talenting.

Ultimately, cross-tree talents will have a less value due to the masteries. Blizzard still wanted us to stick to a tree with offtalents put into other trees. I think the masteries will help out on that point. I still think most priests will go into disc, throughput aside. Not because of the masteries. But because the first few talents in disc are kinda great on their own. And that's not just because of meditation. Shadowpriests will still want to go heavy shadow. That's their tree after all. The moment shadow talents aren't looking sweet for a shadowpriest, someone really messed up. What you typically skip is stuff like PVP talents in PVE.

[Abandon]

Well, keep in mind Discipline is a healing tree, not a DPS/Healing one. The only offensive abilities it gains are Reflective Shields and Improved Mana Burn, the rest help you heal. A +intellect or +healing and damage talent would make this mandatory for Shadow, which they want to see less off. The masteries are supposed to cover talents that you would have taken because they are mandatory, and not niche things like if you may want to damage something while you are healing such as PVP, but those are better handled where you can pick them if you want as opposed to the tree bonus overall.

[AetherMcLoud]

Those 2 sets seem rather nice but what I'm more interested in is how they will handle the shadow part.

Seeing as those 2 tree bonuses only benefit healing, it either means shadow won't spec a single point into holy OR disc, or the masteries would change if your main tree is shadow (like possible DKs and feral druids with 2 specs per tree) or shadow would benefit from the +healing through vampiric embrace or somesuch.

[Pagefault]

I'd like to imagine they will move all the tree-defining talents lower in the tree, and all the "funny" and "pvp/pve only" talents to the highest tiers of the trees, in a way that, once you specced till 51 point-talent in your main tree, you can pick "flowers" from the other trees. For instance:

Disc:
something with Prayer of Fortitude
something with inner fire
something with Mana Burn
something with levitate
something with Inner Focus

Holy:
something with Ressurrection
something with Holy nova
something with Smite (reduced casting time + can be cast while in shadowform?)
something with Holy Fire

Shadow:
something with Silence
something with Fear
something with Spirit Tap
something with Mind control
something with Fade
something with ¿blackout?

And somewhere in the middle-but-attainable-if-you-go-51/25/0 tiers there could be good talents which boost all trees, like shadowfiend, power infusion, ... all in a way that you can pick your main talents from your main tree and several funny / situational talents from the other two trees (51/12/13 ?), or you can completely skip one tree in order to get some real power from medium the other tree (51/25/0)

for example, a pve disc should go for disc/holy, but a pvp one should go for disc/shadow (CC tricks + shadowfiend burst) or maybe disc/holy(little)/shadow (for pvp tricks, less damage but more healing). PvE Holy should go holy/disc or holy/shadow for extra regen (imagine a Spirit Tap that procs for anyone killing a mob instead of only you). PvE shadow should go Shadow/disc for extra damage (power infusion), but pvp shadow could go either shadow/disc (damage + survival) or shadow/holy/disc (damage + school lockout + less survival)

</dream>

but, as someone else said before, it all depends of pvp

[Caetlan]

There is a game before endgame, and moving important talents down the trees will have ramifications for leveling. Mainly I'm thinking Mind Flay being further down in the shadow tree--baby priests will have to suffer through wanding for another 10 levels?

[Caetlan]

if you're not viable now you're not gonna be viable later, the problem isn't with the disc spec

most of the guilds who have down HMLK had a disc priest

Oh my. They didn't have a disc priest tank healing though. Ever heard of shield spam?

[Izenhart]

The first two points of both trees are average bonuses that may be added for every class, more %mana regen and more %healing, just like damage classes will have +%damage or +%haste. The important bonus is the third one, just like the 4p bonus of sets or the 61point talent in one tree.

If radiance counts as direct spell CoH and PoH it's optimal, else it sucks.
Disc has another average bonus as third one, +%absorb, but it's still nice considering it's its main spell.

[Abandon]

Keep in mind you will be casting Greater Heal and Flash Heal in the expansion as well. Thye want you using the right heal for the job, not one heal spammed and another whenever the cooldown is up.

[jifjosh]

Allowing Disc to scale better will be fantastic, and I'd like to see them replace the Spiritual Healing-esque talents in Holy with more talents like EmpRenew. Hell I might even pick up BR now :-/ Sounds pretty exciting, though I doubt that the +%Healing/+%Regen would stack from holy and disc if you chose to spec both (if you find soul warding irresistable as holy, not sure why you would..)

If they are doing more with Disc's absorbs, are they going to finally start counting that and let meters calculate them accurately so that Discpriests stop being the scapegoat for raidwipes?

[jifjosh]

Keep in mind you will be casting Greater Heal and Flash Heal in the expansion as well. Thye want you using the right heal for the job, not one heal spammed and another whenever the cooldown is up.

So no "PoM,COH,renew/fhx3,coh,...PoM" intensive GCD-watching they are doing now (see: Heroic Valks/BQL)? It's like whackamole on crack, but I must say it is more interesting using so many buttons (I'm looking at you Rejuvspam)

[jifjosh]

There is a game before endgame, and moving important talents down the trees will have ramifications for leveling. Mainly I'm thinking Mind Flay being further down in the shadow tree--baby priests will have to suffer through wanding for another 10 levels?

MF is garbage until later anyway, Wand spec is dead, get spirit tap then go Holy (or hell even disc)

[crayven]

I like how most ppl herecall me names and say i dunno anythingabout the upcoming expansion....then several posts down start to do exactly what they were blaming in the first place aka posting their own conceptions of the expansion.

Just because YOU think this mastery will be a goodthing doesn't really mean it WILL. Get it out of your head that ALL change is good. It's not and most changes are very painful ( interms of community unrest ). Further more this WILL cause the % of clueless ppl to rise up again since all their ( eventually ) learnt info about wow is gone the drain.

As cataclysm is getting nearer and nearer we'll see who was right and who was wrong about their...predictions.

And to that clown Cyrila - hey pal if u dun like my opinion YOU can get lost - i have the right to express it and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

[harky]

We won't know if this is good or bad until 4.0 at the earliest. Currently the Holy specific bonus looks sub-par, but it may not be. It will really depends on if Renew is still so clearly dominant to Flash Heal as filler. What Blizz is trying to do is bring back Vanilla/TBC style healing and if that's the case then the bonus will simply make Holy a better tank healer. Renew will still be the primary raid heal.

[Zeuq]

I'm excited about these changes and Priests are an excellent example because the Holy tree is full of +% to healing talents that are just boring, and speccing is always a trade off of a boring throughput talent verses an interesting and fun talent that is a throughput loss. It would be a lot more fun to be able to choose talents because they affect the play style and worry a lot less about how much it affects throughput or regen.

As someone else mentioned, I also think it will make class balance a lot easier on the part of Blizzard. Is one tree a little behind another tree? Just tune up or down the masteries a little bit without having to come up with all of these obnoxious band-aid fixes. Thus, we'll probably see better class balance and it will allow them to generally fix talents because they're broken, not because a class needs a nerf or buff.

Also as others mentioned, I do expect there will be some sort of cap for mastery bonus and to only apply from one tree, otherwise, you'll see Druids, for instance, being forced to go 0/0/76 because they'd have to trade a lot of throughput and regen for some utility talent and that mastery will be useless and it will utterly defeat their claimed "...and 10-12 points wherever you want" idea to how they want people speccing. So, I think we'll likely only see mastery bonuses from whatever tree we put the most points in and cap at around 50-55 points so we don't lose anything if we want some utility from another tree.

Obviously, they can still screw it all up, but I'm hopeful this will go a long way to fixing a lot of the problems we see with specs now. I'm sure there will still be "mandatory" talents, there's really no way around that. But if they do it right, discussions will no longer be mathy "this talent is better than that one by X% HPS/DPS/EH" but rather we'll be seeing discussions comparing the utility of talents like Body & Soul and Power Infusion (assuming they adjust the trees enough to perhaps make them both potentially reachable from the same spec) or whether Improved Vampiric Embrace or Silence is a better PVE utility talent. Those will be much more interesting topics.

[Sauveur]

Looks very interesting, can't wait to go live with all this yummy new stuff

[Abandon]

I like how most ppl herecall me names and say i dunno anythingabout the upcoming expansion....then several posts down start to do exactly what they were blaming in the first place aka posting their own conceptions of the expansion.

Just because YOU think this mastery will be a goodthing doesn't really mean it WILL. Get it out of your head that ALL change is good. It's not and most changes are very painful ( interms of community unrest ). Further more this WILL cause the % of clueless ppl to rise up again since all their ( eventually ) learnt info about wow is gone the drain.

As cataclysm is getting nearer and nearer we'll see who was right and who was wrong about their...predictions.

And to that clown Cyrila - hey pal if u dun like my opinion YOU can get lost - i have the right to express it and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

Could you explain how getting rid of talents which give flat bonuses in a dull way and mandatory talents, leaving you free to pick talents that actually interest you, is bad?

If they make a complete mess of the talent trees, you will have all of the talents you have now, with the boring +x% ones thrown in for free, and then more utility ones. Considering how much better the talent trees have gotten in the last few expansions, I doubt that will be happening.

[Scorage]

Expect discrepances among masteries favoring certain classes ( it's blizz we r talking about ).
Also expect people to heavily ABUSE certain specs that benefit from more masteries - probably those from arena..they usually are the ones starting the mess.

Overall sounds good - but so did all things before that were fucked up.
Also expect an humongous insane amount of resources fighting as EVERYONE and his grandmother will want to get their hand on this archeology "resource" - which is i think..mineable, prospectable or w/e-able.
This will result in crazy discrepances between people who have it and those that do NOT.
This will result in more QQ and mastery being tuned down. Also resources that are 'free for all' are subjected to the term ( uknown to wow until now as ) 'embargo camping' where a group takes some nodes for themselves and farms them endlessly for profit or w/e.
Add the bots to this and u get a very bleak picture.


Imo another unwelcome change to WoW, but that again i hate everything about cataclysm so if you love cataclysm dun take my word for it.

Why bring up archeology in mastery discussion without proper transition to it? Beats me.
Everyone will want Arche resource, yes, they will and they should. That forces Blizz to either:
-The resource is everywhere. You'll probably find it in your mail after AFK'ing in IF/ORG.
-The resource is everywhere, like mining nodes. But you need very little amount of it to prevent turf wars and forum whining.

You are comparing Arche to Mining. You should compare it to Fishing or Cooking. It will be a secondary proffesion, granted, it is required for the Path of Titans so everyone will have it, (Might as well, you can start with it when you open a char) but I really doubt it will be the thing to "keep world PVP alive." And, what about PvE servers.

If Blizz leaves a hole in mastery, then people will abuse it. Then the hole will be removed. That's about it. Proper implementation may include "Mastery giving bonus until 51 (or the new Talent Tree highest tier point.) points, then does not improve with other trees having support talents in the first two-three tiers."

I like how most ppl herecall me names and say i dunno anythingabout the upcoming expansion....then several posts down start to do exactly what they were blaming in the first place aka posting their own conceptions of the expansion.

Just because YOU think this mastery will be a goodthing doesn't really mean it WILL. Get it out of your head that ALL change is good. It's not and most changes are very painful ( interms of community unrest ). Further more this WILL cause the % of clueless ppl to rise up again since all their ( eventually ) learnt info about wow is gone the drain.

As cataclysm is getting nearer and nearer we'll see who was right and who was wrong about their...predictions.

And to that clown Cyrila - hey pal if u dun like my opinion YOU can get lost - i have the right to express it and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

And now you are just trollin'.

On the mastery, I guess it will be easier to implement on Pure classes. It could be a pain in the ass for Paladin and Druids, and probably a little smoother for DPS warrs and DK's. (Though "no actual tanking tree" mechanic of DK comes to mind.)

I believe it is too early to form a decision on mastery. Though it does look good, and in my opinion, will be good. (I stopped playing a few months ago. I feel the game is becoming more and more of a math class, with PuG leaders, GS, and "DPS Charts with rotations." Oh how I miss being the retard who likes watching flying frostbolt animations.) The moment they remove the scientific know-how and reimplement the game, I'm back in.