5.2 Priest Summary

[Venaliter]

The release of the 5.2 PTR is pretty close now, and I thought I'd take a moment and list Priest issues and flaws in both aspects of the game. Since it has been known for Blizzard to read, and introduce, feedback from sites like these, maybe some good with come of it.

Discipline

In PvE is very strong, bordering on being the "best" healer. It probably could use a slight nerfs in a couple places. Temporary spirit procs, such as tailoring, trinkets, and Mana tide are boosting regen levels far past other healers when combined with Rapture. GC has already hinted this is going to be removed in 5.2. It is also possible DA(or Spirit Shell) will be lowered to help bring the healers into line.

In PvP, Discipline is struggling. Mana continues to be a considerable problem for both healing priest classes. Mass Dispel is prohibitively expensive to use. Lack of CC, except for Fear (which some classes can negate even without the use of their trinkets) is probably the most severe problem. Survivability is also questionable; Spectral Guise is now nerfed into the ground, Inner Will is a paltry 2% movement speed at the expense of a ton of mitigation. Blizzard has acknowledged Discipline needs intervention in PvP, but no words on what they will do, except they will try some things on the 5.2 PTR. It has been widely suggested Glyph of Desperation will become baseline.

Holy

Holy has a variety of issues preventing it from being a competitive spec. Throughput is very low, especially when compared to Discipline. Mana regen is also noticeably worse then other healers. It is possible Holy Concentration will be reintroduced soon. Going forward, GC has noted Chakra's passives will be removed (probably no earlier then next expansion) and stances will be purely mechanical differences, such as the behavior of Chastise and things like Renew refreshing.

In PvP, Holy is a complete write off. It suffers from the exact same things as Discipline, as well as missing things like Focused Will (which will likely be extended to Holy) and glyph of Inner Focus.

Shadow

In PvE, Shadow is doing okay. While DPS right now is fine, the scaling problems that has plagued the spec for years are starting to re-appear. DoT's, such as Vampiric Touch, Shadow Word: Pain and Mindflay are scaling nicely. Resource generation is mostly the problem here. Mindblast/SW:Death doesn't scale with Mastery, and scales very little with Haste. Devouring Plague also suffers from questionable scaling. These issues will continue to become more severe as gear progresses.

Shadow in PvP is doing well, and is one of the more powerful specs although not nearly as powerful as it was. Although Shadow's healing potential was lessened considerably, no one really disagrees with the need for the change. The spec still suffers from being pressured; to the point it's damage is almost negated entirely. Personally, I'd like to see Mind Spike not remove DoTs so at least something may be cast.

[Danner]

Danner's wishlist of things that would be cool to do in 5.2:
--------------------------------------------------------

* Fix that annoying bug that makes my holypriest get a spell notification to cast Mind Blast whenever I cast SWP.
* Fix that annoying bug that makes PWS stick to my mouse cursor if the target has Weakened Soul
* Add the +healing% bonus from sanctuary / serendipity to both stances. Adjust as needed. Keep the mechanics as-is (also: long term goal, kill chakra)
* Give Disc Holy's version of Divine Insight
* Add some new glyphs. Replace the Levitate Glyph due to being craptastic. How about something that hides the chakra "imma-healer-please-kill-me"-effect?
* Adjust Disc priests power levels in PVE so that Holy isn't a redundant spec.
* PVP: I find it ever more annoying to face warriors and DKs that one or twoshot me while I am wearing ilvl 490 PVE gear. Sure I should lose, but not that fast.
* Healing priests should get Holy Nova instead of Mind Sear. For thematic reasons.
* Prayer of Mending should stack.
* Power Word: Shield should stack.
* Merge Fade and Phantasm; the two spells serve the same role and it's stupid to have a PVP and a PVE version of the same spell.
* There are some tooltip bugs on the talent panel for the talents we didn't take. Cleanup!

Danner's wishlist of things that would be cool to do later:
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* Mana and healers just aren't working out, and mana is too much of a deal for a healer. Tried the D3 wizard model?
* Kill the chakra healing bonuses. Kill grace. Kill Divine Aegis. Make those healing spells more powerful baseline, and get out of a lot of headache.
* Seriously. More glyphs. It's no cool when a spec has two interesting choices.
* Disc doesn't need Heal, we have Smite/Holy Fire and atonement that does the same, only better. Trim it away.
* Disc could use a smite cost reduction to be honest.... No fun to be able to run OOM killing regular mobs. Only good thing about chakra is the chastise bonuses.
* The three heal model isn't working out. Heal is more useful than in cata, but still isn't a heal we actually need. Make it more gimmicky: No manacost or something.
* Solace and Smite are way too similar. How many weak attack spells do we need? (and yes, I realize smite just turned awesome for Holy)
* Why does healing priests conjure etheral squidmonsterrs anyway? At the shasquid makes some sense...
* Hymn of Hope is a bad spell to be balanced around.
* Completely random: The pet battle system really need laser beam touting sharks.

[blargh312]

* Prayer of Mending should stack.
* Power Word: Shield should stack.

Agree on PoM, disagree on PW:S. PoM getting knocked off is annoying because it's wasted mana and a wasted GCD, where as Weaked Soul just means you can't cast PW:S at all and there's no real waste. The other problem is that PW:S is a lot more powerful than PoM and stacking shields on people would probably become an issue.

PvE-wise, I think Disc is in a good position as far as spell mechanics go, but some number tweaking is needed here and there. Rapture scaling definitely needs a nerf, but the problem with nerfing SS and especially DA is that Disc's actual healing throughput is pretty weak. I could live with a DA nerf if they raised the base healing or SP coefficient on PoH a bit as compensation.

Speaking of PoH, I would really love it if the range was 40yds instead of 30. It's pretty annoying trying to get SS out and having to click on 8 different names only for the damage to go out and find that a few people barely got anything.

Holy and Chakras are terrible. The entire system needs to be redone, which means Holy will probably be broken for the entire expansion (either terrible or OP depending on how the devs feel). It's a shame too because I find holy a lot more fun to play.

[Maleric]

Agree on PoM, disagree on PW:S. PoM getting knocked off is annoying because it's wasted mana and a wasted GCD, where as Weaked Soul just means you can't cast PW:S at all and there's no real waste. The other problem is that PW:S is a lot more powerful than PoM and stacking shields on people would probably become an issue.

It's annoying as hell to get grouped in lfr and random bgs with holy and shadow priests who try to "help out" with shielding, nevermind the obnoxious four disc priest Warsong Gulch teams that the random bg tool seems strangely fond of making. And maybe allowing weakened soul to stack would have created balance issues two expansions ago, but I'm having trouble thinking of any mechanics that would be trivialized or negated now. There are a lot more absorbs and mitigation effects than there used to be.

[KaPe]

You don't think having multiple >100k shields every 15 seconds would be OP? Forget any tank damaging mechanics in 25 mans, you can easily shave off 200k from each of those - more, if you include Shadow shields. Hell, doesn't even have to be tank, any mechanics that target X specific people on known timer and allows preshielding or even just shielding when it happens. Not to mention you remove one of (very few) Disc weaknesses, making it much easier to get Rapture from the tanks and kill the only reason you can't really stack too many Disc Priests.

If that happens, PW:S will get nerfed to the ground.

[Venaliter]

Agree on PoM, disagree on PW:S. PoM getting knocked off is annoying because it's wasted mana and a wasted GCD, where as Weaked Soul just means you can't cast PW:S at all and there's no real waste. The other problem is that PW:S is a lot more powerful than PoM and stacking shields on people would probably become an issue.

Yes. It would break the healing model if you could have Multiple Pw:S's on one target.

Holy and Chakras are terrible. The entire system needs to be redone, which means Holy will probably be broken for the entire expansion

They said they will do it probably do it next expansion. Best we can hope for.

[on stacking PW:S] I'm having trouble thinking of any mechanics that would be trivialized or negated now.

Can you imagine four or five shields on a tank, every 15 seconds? That tank would literally almost never need a heal. It would COMPLETELY break healing and push encounter mechanics to one-shotting tanks.

If that happens, PW:S will get nerfed to the ground.

Yes. If it happened, Pw:S would have to heal approximately the same as Holy Shock.

On Twitter:

@Ghostcrawler @Glacialrule I think you could safely remove Temp spirit buffs from Rapture perhaps lower DA to 40-45% without breaking things

Greg Street ‏@Ghostcrawler

@Venaliter Agree on Rapture - that's the problem. Not sure yet if DA or SS is the other problem. SS works very well with lots of mastery.

He may be right on this.

On the original post: I tried to refrain from making suggestions. I tried to list the problems as neutrally as possible. If I could make changes for 5.2, I'd do the following:

*Inner Will now stacks with Movement speed on Boots.
*Psychic Horror is now Baseline (or talented) for all priests
*Holy can now train Focused Will
*Glyph of Desperation is now baseline
*Insanity/Solace redesigned to be less useless.
*Holy Concentration re-added: Increase your spirit by 20% on critical hit for x seconds. Or something.
*Rapture no longer included temporary spirit buffs
*Mind Blast now correctly scales with Haste
*Shadowy Recall now also increases Mind Blast damage

I'd also increase the base resilience for all classes by 10% to tone down some of the damage.

Add some new glyphs. Replace the Levitate Glyph due to being craptastic. How about something that hides the chakra "imma-healer-please-kill-me"-effect?

Yes. Definitely. Our glyphs were designed terribly and sucked. anyone surprised? Not I.

[Maleric]

Can you imagine four or five shields on a tank, every 15 seconds? That tank would literally almost never need a heal. It would COMPLETELY break healing and push encounter mechanics to one-shotting tanks.

Four or five shields would absorb a few normal hits, so what? One healer focusing on tank healing achieves the same effect. Anyway, do I really need to point out that four or five shields equals four or five disc priests? So yea, if your entire healing team is disc priests and they're synchronized shielding the tank, congratulations you don't need a dedicated tank healer for the average fight.

I mean shit, forget shields, why not just have your four disc priest healing team chain Spirit Shell CDs to make your tank totally invulnerable on all the Patchwerk-style encounters in MoP!?

[Venaliter]

Anyway, do I really need to point out that four or five shields equals four or five disc priests? So yea, if your entire healing team is disc priests and they're synchronized shielding the tank, congratulations you don't need a dedicated tank healer

This is wrong on many levels, Maleric. Power Word: Shield is baseline, so Holy, disc AND shadow can be throwing shields. You wouldn't need to stack Disc priests specifically. Nor would you need to synchronize; you'd simply cast a shield when it came off cooldown. The tank would basically never drop low with multiple casts of Shield.

It would quite literally break healing.

[Saphyron]

My wishful list of stuff to change

Holy
Chakra Dancing is fun but lower the CD to 15-20sec makes it slightly easier to time for big stuff.
Even with sanctuary holy's prayer of healing heals less than disc. Should not happen.
Mana issues big time compared to other healing classes.
Make holy nova baseline skill. Miss it and I am not going to waste a glyph slot to get it back.

Disc
God I miss divine hyhm as disc.
Disc is in a really good spot. if used wisely will be the superior healing spec in most fights.
See no changes to it

Shadow
Shadow is in a good spot but could use a bit of push in the right direction.
We are crap in medium to heavy movement fights almost all other spec/classes will do this job far better
Fix is to be able to cast mind flay while moving.

[Drogoh]

Shadow is really really suffering on movement heavy fights and the scaling is becoming a big problem already. Everyone elses DPS is getting much higher while ours tends to stay very static. Not to mention we are so proc happy it is skewing our numbers. On one fight we can top the meters if we get lucky with Procs, on others we can drag at the bottom by getting unlucky. Easiest fixes would be allowing mind flay to cast while moving and i dunno honestly how to fix the scaling issues. But the proc issues? Try replacing one of our procs be it the FDL or DI with a talent that extends the length of our SW:P to 24 and VT to 21 seconds and make PI a static shadow CD. That will give us a little more burst with a cd as well as allowing our haste to scale better by giving us a couple extra ticks and not having to refresh our spells quite as often. Or if that talent seems too OP then simply increase them naturally and reduce the FDL to 5% instead of 15% to balance it out.

EDIT: Just remember these are just ideas... obviously tweaking on numbers etc would have to happen just throwing them out there!

[Deleted]

First off PI needs to work with BL. Warlocks have their Dark Soul scaling with BL and have huge dots, we do not.
Make Mind blast cd scale with haste, or something. Delete DI and make it so it does not procs and resets MB cd but instead Mind blast is now a 2 charges spell(like hand of guldan).

Delete SWI, this spell is of no use in any given situation.
We need some sort of buff on the move, atm SWP spamming is not a good enough compensation when you have casters that will never be hindered by moving(locks and hunts).

And last give us some real cd, adding a baseline cd that would scale only on singlet target fights is currently a massive need of the spec. Something that would buff MF/MB.

I would propose a total re-design of SP ressource system. Instead of MB generating an orb, every tics of dot would generate a Shadow Fragment, upon reaching a number of fragments, you gain one orb.
This is just an example, you would need 20 fragments to gain an orb, mind blast would generate 10 fragments and each dot tics would generate one fragment, if a dot crits or has a mastery proc you gain 2 fragments. This a lot similar to embers on destro, but it would make so much more sense that SP would have this system, giving the nature of our mastery.

This would give SP a much smoother scaling with gear than the current sytem does(which is basically 0 (except if you are taking DI, but in no fights were we pick DI are we currently top tier, only fights were we can manage a high uptime on ToF are we any good).

[Bunzato]

Off the top of my head.

Shadow - Because I don't heal.

Talents
Still not happy with the 15 tier in PvE, they are all fairly useless.
30 tier is fine.
Mindbender and FDCL are fine in the 45 tier, just SW:I needs to be removed or changed so that it isn't a straight DPS loss.
The level 60 tier I am more than happy with, kinda wish it was more... interesting.
75 talents are ok. ToF is pretty good and DI is alright on multi target fights. PI just seems kinda bleh and overshadowed by other the other choices.
90 tier is great... ish. I would like cascade to be able to bounce between enemies and allies once it can't find any more of the targeted type (enemy/ally)

Mechanic wise, I still feel clunky. Double procs are an issue at times and can skew our DPS in all the bad ways. Our DPS while moving is terrible, mindflay while moving would be a great change. I would love to see the CD reduction on MF crits for shadowfiend return, it would put us right where we need to be for DPS on single target fights.

On that note, our single target is pretty bad right now. If we can't multi dot, we hardly get FDCL or DI procs, which is a big blow to our DPS.

Suggestions to fix our single target dps:

MF Crit CD reduc on shadowfiend/Mindbender
Stacking buff on MF to make our next MB stronger
Out of combat shadow orb generator (Our ramp up time sucks)
Some sort of debuff that is can only be applied to a single target that amplifies our DoT damage, akin to hunter's mark.

In terms of PvP - I don't care about PvP .

[Lundmark]

Disc
Add another 30s to the cd of SS to fix the "ready for everything"-situation... the throughput is at a ok level.
Make Power Infusion work with Hero/BL/TW already! Hurts to use it then just a sec later Hero get called for...
Regen: I still think rapture should allow trinkets... not any other sources though... keeps it interesting to track something to be your best.
Another tool: Cleave Penance! Glyph/Inner Focus-toggle/Standing in PW:Barrier makes it a 5-cleave smart heal! (ok ok bit too much)

[Whicker]

I would like movement during penance to be baseline and change the penance glyph to make it hit 3 people or something, higher mana cost or w.e

MTT and rapture is op but trinkets should still work.

Something to make us good tank healers again. Maybe bring back the 10% crit on grace and ws targets or bring back the abs only heal with a 2sec cast time to replace heal.

Id also like to see poh become 40yrd-40yrd range.

Merge inner will and inner fire. Stance dancing is stupid.

[blargh312]

It's annoying as hell to get grouped in lfr and random bgs with holy and shadow priests who try to "help out" with shielding, nevermind the obnoxious four disc priest Warsong Gulch teams that the random bg tool seems strangely fond of making. And maybe allowing weakened soul to stack would have created balance issues two expansions ago, but I'm having trouble thinking of any mechanics that would be trivialized or negated now. There are a lot more absorbs and mitigation effects than there used to be.

Your two examples are LFR and random BGs, something blizz never has and never will balance around.

[Halda]

Dear santa (or blizzard) i've been a good priest this year, didn't killed too much Allies, saved my hometown from flames and even Saved the world and a Freaking Dragon ! and i hope that i've deserved somethings from that list.
General :

-Like my comrades mentioned earlier, Make PI worth it. At least it should be usable during BL, and i would love to see it buffed enough to avoid feeling "wrong" when i spec into it.

Disc :
-I really like the idea of rapture taking temporary buffs into account, it adds a lot of gameplay to it ! I think it will be more fun if base rapture regen is simply nerfed.

-Spirit shell is really fun that way to make your raid almost completely immune to an attack. But when you compare spirit shell with others CD la Power Word Barrier, it seems even more powerfull yet it has a shorter CD.

Holy :
-Make chakra a bit less punishing. If you're in the wrong one, you're almost useless until you can change back to what you need to be in.
So either reduce the CD from changing chakra (maybe something like 15 sec ?) Or make the passive bonus less gamebreaking if you don't have them.

-Probably need some love throughput Wise, we're almost at the same level as disc with less raid utility (except GS) and less mana regen.

Shadow :
-Make Shadow word death more responsive. It's a pure QoL improvement, because when you see some add under 20%, they usually dies before you can even use your SWD (even if you're out of gcd and stomping on it like crazy). We really needs that Shadow orb / Twist of Fate uptime and it's too punishing when we can't get it despite having done the right thing.

btw Twist of Fate is Really a fun talent when you can have adds to get a good uptime on it, simply hope we're not balanced around having 50% uptime on it to be competitive with others classes.

-I really don't like SWI, We already have mind spike if we want some greater damage at the expense of DoT uptime.
I Wish we could replace it with something that interact with our dots giving us an option of going proc heave (FDCL) or Neutral(Mindbender) or DoT heavy.
Something that would give us longer DoT (and maybe with HoTs for healing spec, not sure about that), a way to apply both our dots in one GCD, or a proc that increase the duration of ours dots on the target. Ideally in a way the would make us less abysmally low on single target fights.

-a little something to our mastery would be great.Atm it's almost worthless, the less you have the better you get. If we're still heading in the proc heavy dot spec gameplay, buffing the scaling a bit seems fine, mechanically it fits well with this design plan. But if we're meant to be a DoT spec with some gameplay i between, make it affect our others spells too (mind blast and mind spike account for around 30-40% of our damage)

-I would really like to get a cooldown of some sort, but seeing the huge burst we bring in PvP i honestly don't think this is a good idea.

[Darkener]

Having PWS ignore other Priests' Weakened Soul effect would not necessarily allow PWS stacking, or at least it doesn't have to. I'm already using Divine Insight with 2 Disc Priests in our 10man, and I suppose if you wanted to you could have 5 Disc Priests do this in 25man today. It either doesn't break healing or people haven't discovered it yet. But Divine Insight has an interesting behavior where you still can't cast PWS on someone if someone else's PWS still has absorb left (can't say for sure as I can't independently test it). When you try you get something similar to the "a more powerful spell already exists" error (though I'm not sure if that is the exact error). Once the other Priest's PWS falls off due to damage I can then PWS the player ignoring the other Priest's Weakened Soul effect. I'm not sure if this is exactly what is causing the PWS that I try to cast to fail (with Divine Insight active) but it seems to be a mechanism already built into DI to prevent PWS stacking (though I can still cast a PWS over my own PWS and it just refreshes it back to full strength).

So perhaps just make Divine Insight baseline for Disc ( and have it work 100% of the time on other player's Weakened Soul but only 40% on the caster's own weakened Soul) and turn the Holy version of Divine Imsight into the Healing version of Divine Insight.

[Maleric]

This is wrong on many levels, Maleric. Power Word: Shield is baseline, so Holy, disc AND shadow can be throwing shields. You wouldn't need to stack Disc priests specifically. Nor would you need to synchronize; you'd simply cast a shield when it came off cooldown. The tank would basically never drop low with multiple casts of Shield.

It would quite literally break healing.

You keep saying that it would "quite literally break healing," but you haven't backed that up. You just keeping repeating that 4-5 shields would take care of tank healing for fifteen seconds, as if that's proof of something. All being able to stack 4-5 shields on tanks like that would do is allow tanks to get 400-500k absorbs - and a lot less if you, uh, make your shadow and holy priests waste GCDs on PW:S - every fifteen seconds. That would go a long way toward tank healing for that fifteen seconds. But you can get the same functional effect - 400-500k tank healing every fifteen seconds, at the cost of 4-5 GCDs - in plenty of other ways.

The only difference between 400-500k absorbs and 400-500k tank healing is that the absorbs can prevent a tank gib that the healing wouldn't. Which doesn't matter because there aren't that many effects out there anymore that gib tanks, and for the ones that are out there there tanks have plenty of ways to mitigate them already. The game isn't balanced around big tank damage anymore.

[KaPe]

You're basically saying that several hundred thousands worth of absorbs on a single person every 15 seconds isn't overpowered. And yet, this is Monks 3 minute tank cooldown. It doesn't matter if you need several people use 1 gcd, it would completely trivialize any tank killing mechanic that doesn't outright ignore absorbs.

[Deleted]

I really like your ideas guys you have really nice thoughts can help the class. i am not so good healer and i play shadow but if we want to see some day shadow doing something good we must be no.2 affliction lock.All the system must re-design.all classes feel fresh and updated,we feel like we was in 2007.And my opinion is that in 5.2 will NOT NOT change anything.chostcrawler must take care his sad mages,locks,paladins and monks.