PW:S nerf = lazy fix

[timmyotoole]

Fact 1: Hotfixes are limited in scope.

Fact 2: The next major content patch is already in development. It will include class changes along with the next tier of content.

Why anyone thinks they could have done much more than they did when hotfixes can’t even change bloody tooltips is beyond me. All they had to do was discourage bubble spam until the end of this tier, and they succeeded.

Honestly I’m not really sure why everyone is crying. Disc is still an amazing single target healer and moderately capable of AoE heals, if a bit weak in 25 man now. Rapture is still great, bubbles are still far better than they were before the 4.0.6 buff, and we can go back to treating PW:S as one of our tools rather than the tool that makes all others obsolete. As for the AoE.. well.. I always liked that one spec was better at single heals and the other better at AoE, but I guess everyone else just wanted a single high HPS and high HPM spammable heal to bind to every key so we could go back to hitting the keyboard with out face like we did at the end of WoTLK.

For the people who cannot read: PW:S isn’t as good as it was before the nerf, but its still a damn good tool and you’d be a fool not to use it. The only thing that changed is that it is no longer the best button to press in any situation.

[KieraDK]

It seems Blizzard reverted the Body & Soul hotifx. At least they have some sense.
Although this means that I'll only use it pre-pull on the tank again...

Glad Rapture is buffed too. At least they're not completely screwing over fresh 85 Priests...

[Loriginalediscipline]

im really tired of all those hotfixes/nerf. they had enough time to figured out that kind of stuff. cmon, 1 months ago i was already thinking of speccing in the holy bubble thingy, and im not even a top player. my priest is my main and i wont stop playing him because of hotfixes, but im getting angry at the situation. WTB good tester on beta?

[G l o w y r m]

My issue with this is that it has simply left discipline priests with weaker alternatives. It's fine to bring PW:Shield down a bit, but in return another part of their healing should be increased (perhaps via buffs to DA, perhaps some focus on holy nova or some more interesting single-target mechanics) because as it stands, discipline will now once again be playing like a poor person's holy priest (raid-healing wise).

At least this doesn't really affect their tank healing capabilities, which is something - but right now discipline turns to shields because it's other tools are relatively mediocre with very few talents dedicated to their improvement.

100% correct.

Holy has a stronger PoH, stronger PoM, stronger Renew (which they can spam), and CoH.

Disc used to have shields but now can't afford it and...Penance. DA on PoH sounds nice but it's not always actually used.

PW:S cost needs to go down significantly and a cap put on how many can be out, mastery needs more than just absorbs or some other change, and/or we need a new AE healing / absorption tool. As of now the only reason for a Disc Priest is PW:Barrier.

[Maxpowr]

I think the best solution that the community here came up with was to have PW:S work like arcane blast; with each new application, have the mana cost of the shield increase until the priest casts a new spell. That way, it keeps the effectiveness of the shield but prevents overusing it and doesn't really interfere with holy using it for B&S. Sure Blizz will have to work out the scaling of it but that is probably the best solution.

[Lucapa]

Sooner or later they'll have to find a solution to PW: Shield, Renew and Rejuvenation spam. Guess some kind of mechanic like only 4-5 Renews can be active at the same time. If you have 4 renews or shields around and you cast another the first one disappears. Something like that.

[Mahagony]

Alright, i actually reactivated my ancient MMO-Account to post this.

I play in pretty decent guild (8/13 down) and just reactivated my Priest. Got him to 85, pumped Epics and Cash into him, started some raiding, twinks from our guild.
I tried both, Diszipline and Holy. And although it was "only" a few days, i am perfectly certain that Diszipline is still an absolutely valid specc in raids. Apart from very few bosses i actually was able to heal way more flexible, do nice hps without ever going oom. When we tried nef (got him to 10%, not too bad for a bunch of twinks in 1 hour) it was horrible to heal as a holy priest and i had no problems whatsoever after speccing diszi.

So, why Diszipline?
Well, first thing is really penance. Quick ~40k heal for low mana cost. Noone has a spell like that so that kinda fills a gap. You keep on Blabbing about how awesome holy poh and coh is? Well guess what: You dont NEED those spells, because all classes can do the aoe-heal-thing, many of them even a lot better.
Then, grace. Allows single target heal where holy just blows.
And ofc: The bubble. Oh and PS, so much more useful then Guardian Spirit.
Not to forget: Shield-safer. Apart from the fact that you can actually safe a life with a shield you may then - knowing that he is safe - heal a target slowly (and with low manacost) where other classes need to pump fast heals into them. The shield itself wont go to waste probably, but even if it does: better safe than sorry.

You guys always only seem to see heroic25 Magmaw-Situation, where people can pull off 18k Hps. Well, guess what, that is not the only content in the game. And aside from the fact that there are other even other 25man Heroics where diszi is still very viable: as far as i am concerned it is waaaay easier for a "new" priest to play diszi, for a 10man grp to raid with diszi and so on. Oh and btw, as long as there are Progress-Guilds (top 1% world) that play with a diszipline priest in EVERY encounter, i say, the specc is fine.

Quit your whining about shielding. Dont like it? Dont shield.

[Maxpowr]

@Mahagony

Nobody is saying discipline is now an invalid spec (at least from what I read). We are mostly bitching about how many hotfixes Blizz is doing to "fix" a class. It comes off as lazy and shows how little research is being done on the developer end. They can try and sugarcoat it any which way they want but you don't release a patch that is buggy or has several flaws.

[Noradin]

Have you ever cast Penance before? Please explain to me how you could possible get an avarage healing of ~40k per cast.

[Mahagony]

@Mahagony

Nobody is saying discipline is now an invalid spec (at least from what I read). We are mostly bitching about how many hotfixes Blizz is doing to "fix" a class. It comes off as lazy and shows how little research is being done on the developer end. They can try and sugarcoat it any which way they want but you don't release a patch that is buggy or has several flaws.

Well, i agree with the fact that it is pretty stupid not see how op the shield was on ptr and fix it there.
But the Hotfix is not necessarily lazy. It may just as well be "the right thing to do". I dont get why you need complicated mechanics to nerf a class when u can just achieve the same result by changing some manacosts. Thats what they did, and i think that now, afterwords, diszi is in a nice place. With some weaknesses, but with some strengths, too.
They should have done it before, yeah, but i dont get all the whining that is done.

Oh yeah and maybe 40k was a a slight exxageration, that is with 3 grace and min 2 crits ofc.

[Deleted]

Well, i agree with the fact that it is pretty stupid not see how op the shield was on ptr and fix it there.
But the Hotfix is not necessarily lazy. It may just as well be "the right thing to do". I dont get why you need complicated mechanics to nerf a class when u can just achieve the same result by changing some manacosts. Thats what they did, and i think that now, afterwords, diszi is in a nice place. With some weaknesses, but with some strengths, too.
They should have done it before, yeah, but i dont get all the whining that is done.

Oh yeah and maybe 40k was a a slight exxageration, that is with 3 grace and min 2 crits ofc.

The problem is that we need to put out a lot of shields to be efficient as group healers.
DA can be very good when tank healing where it is fully utilized but often the group damage only have one tick, or two fast ticks so the DA component of group heals is not utilized.
It also falls off too fast to help with random damage.

So we need some tool that lets us absorb damage on a lot of people at certain key points. And no, PoH is not an option since it is way too inefficient for that purpose.

[Sordel]

Blizzard should have expected a Discipline Priest to Shield spam when they tie 80% of our talents and mastery to a single spell, while Holy Priests have their talents spread evenly amongst all of the Holy spells. Discipline Priests' full spell book is one spell and that's Power Word: Shield, because our talents do not buff any of the other healing spells directly.

I agree. atm Disci priests have three key spells (PW:S, Penance and Smite) but PW:S demands most improvement in terms of talents. As many as 14TP can be spent on this one spell (I'm including Reflective Shield and Mental Agility in that count) which makes it probably the most TP-costly ability for any build of any class. Then Blizzard complains that it gets used too much!

There were lots of ways to limit use of PW:S, by reducing the number of targets that it can be used on (like Earth Shield) or increasing its cooldown. Increasing the mana cost will not, in itself, change the way that the spell is used: if it's really that o/p, then a raid will find ways to get its uptime increased by innervating the disci priest or otherwise compensating for the mana drain. Mana management doesn't stop people casting the spell; it just pushes casters to focus on mana pool and high gearing, neither of which are actually good for the Warcraft community overall.

The real problem here isn't with the disci priests, though. It's with the devs, whose big plan (to push healers towards low power/low cost spells) seemed to be dead on arrival.

[TheTrueM4gg0t]

Its a problem of itemisation...
Pws is a very powerfull cast. Its a over 30k heal ans that insant! And no cooldown.
I think they buffed it to much, and the manacost increase was the logical consequence.
Butt thats a temporary fix. Think of the manapool and reg you gain every item tier an the good scaling with mastery, and we will soon se a pws spamm again in t12 or 13.
With the amount of stats gained on every itemlevel i see end of wotlk coming all over again... Only max hps casts used (pws, poh, fh) because reggen shoots in the air...

They also dont quite seem to get the 10/25 man balancing right. I play holy/disci, and disci played very well since .6 very good assisting tank and raidhealer. But i never spamm pws the raid, cause u just dont have the mana in 10man. (no innervate no other hymn)
Just nerfing pws because some 25man hm geared priest can spamm it is not fair.
And as mentioned above, its only a temprary help and no solution to the problem.

Rupture is actually very good mechanic to support tank shielding but trying to prevent bubblebotting.
But its not perfect.
It should have its return nerfed to 4% (just an example) but get rid of its internal cd. But let it only return mana once (or max 5 times) if multiple shields break simultaniously. (making it a manaefficient tankheal ability but not an effective raidheal)

To compensate raidheal i would firstly let holy nova also prog divine aegis like poh, and letting every spell (also AE heals) prog grace. And increase grace duration to 30sec (and smite stacks aswell whem we're at it)

Pws spamm could also be countered partly by decreasing its duration to 10-15 sec

Oh, B&S manacost could be reduced (without making holy bubblebotter) by adding this idea to the talent: a target affected by b&s regenerates 1% of the priests mana when it moves (every sec).
So if you use pws for the utility and the target actually needs it and moves, it only costs a fraction of 7k. 7k just for the sprint abity is whay over the top...
Or put soul warding higher in the disc tree and revert the manareduce hotfix.

I still think it would have been better to nerf pws by the amount they increased the manacost cause pws is a bit to powerfull for an instant with no cooldown (sure ws but still)

Nice day to you all

Edit: to b&s: regenerate 20% of pws mana cost if target moves every sec would be better to make it not scale with hiGher itemlevels

[Deleted]

Use Levitate, it has been buffed.
10 min. Levitate fixed priests, you still complaining?

Don't troll. - Simca

[Mahagony]

The problem is that we need to put out a lot of shields to be efficient as group healers.
DA can be very good when tank healing where it is fully utilized but often the group damage only have one tick, or two fast ticks so the DA component of group heals is not utilized.
It also falls off too fast to help with random damage.

So we need some tool that lets us absorb damage on a lot of people at certain key points. And no, PoH is not an option since it is way too inefficient for that purpose.

As far as i am concerned, there are very few Bosses where you actually need to top the grp asap and there is no incoming raiddmg. That would be Chimaeron, for example (not even, really, just first half of feud) and he is argueably one of the easiest bosses at all. Nef-Crackle, for example is super-easy to outheal because there is little to no time-pressure on the healers here; if the time between crackles is low due to bloodlust/whatever you can diszibubble. Easily.
If you raidheal as diszi in a boss like Al'akir, Omnotron, Magmaw, Conklave, Chogall or even Council you´re king. Because every poh-Aegis will be consumed. Dont get the problem, seriously.

[dalliah1]

Alright, i actually reactivated my ancient MMO-Account to post this.


So, why Diszipline?
Well, first thing is really penance. Quick ~40k heal for low mana cost.

I think we don't have the same penance because mine doesn't heal for 40k

[[-Spiritus-]]

I think we don't have the same penance because mine doesn't heal for 40k

Penance can reach 40k if you have mid-heroic gear, all three ticks crit on a x3 grace target, and you add in the applied DA. However, this will be a rare case and shouldn't be used as a normative example.

[Noradin]

Penance can reach 40k if you have mid-heroic gear, all three ticks crit on a x3 grace target, and you add in the applied DA. However, this will be a rare case and shouldn't be used as a normative example.

Indeed. Most of the time you see it healing for more like 18k.
Right now you use it because of Grace and saving mana, not because of the huge heal.

[Deleted]

Penance can reach 40k if you have mid-heroic gear, all three ticks crit on a x3 grace target, and you add in the applied DA. However, this will be a rare case and shouldn't be used as a normative example.

Not that rare - I have no heroic pieces and managed a 3x12k crit penance on sunday (raid buffed, stacked grace). That's 50k with DA.

EDIT: Quick browse of my log turned up

[21:21:46.246] Ferin Penance Tib +*12806*
[21:21:46.855] Ferin Penance Tib +*13322*
[21:21:47.791] Ferin Penance Tib +*14115*

That's 40k right there, before DA.

[scarryterry25]

Not that rare - I have no heroic pieces and managed a 3x12k crit penance on sunday (raid buffed, stacked grace). That's 50k with DA.

That and with PI and BT I can 7 ticks from a renew for 35K.