Cataclysm Class Preview: Priest

[Zoros]

And cast levitate on yourself and float safely while you LOL at the poor sucker below.

The spell won't be castable while moving, and yep this includes falling.

[Nitrax]

You don't see paladins casting BoP on tanks do you? Gonna be same with life grip, it's gonna be an ability that you just dont use on tanks/melee unless there is specific fights where it can be good.

[Chell82]

The more i look at inner will the more it seems like total fail ...... tbh what i think we need is a nice dps cooldown ... i mean take a boss fight for example . You get him to 25% and so and RL calls out : Pop BL & Cds ... best case scenario : i haven`t used my wild magic pot as shadow and that`s my cd where as mages have arcane potency , images , locks in demo have metamorphosis , hunters have rapid fire , dks will have hysteria or even Army and so on ... Inner will could be changed to smthing like this ... maybe like a self cast shadow version of power infusion - 20 sec duration with a 3 min cd or smthing like that

[Stixxz]

I don't like Life Grip one bit, I won't train it, use it, or buy Cataclysm if Life Grip goes live.

u mad brah

[Deleted]

Arthas was a Paladin that became corrupted and a DK, that doesn't mean that all DKs used to be paladins. The fact that any race can be a DK but not any race can be a paladin should kind of be a hint...

haha yeah now you said that i feel pretty silly : knew i was thinking something abit obvious i couldn't put my finger on lol woops :P

[Lonehwolf]

My thoughts about the priest changes are the following:

New Abilities
Heal (available at level 16): I guess this is just their way of working efficiency in. Can't really comment much about except I'll guess I'll want to see what's going to happen in the long run. The whole healer concept is being overhauled come Cataclysm, so I'll wait till then to form an opinion, or sooner should more specific details be given.

Mind Spike (level 81): A seemingly situational ability. Provides us functionality when our shadow has been silenced, and kind of jump past the slow ramp up we have to go through on low health mobs, generally trash, while still achieving decent DPS. The concept of this spell I have nothing against, it adds utility. I'm happy with it.

Inner Will (level 83): Another ability which comes by as utility to me. When you need to get the feck outta there as fast as you can, or your mana is working its way down the pipe, it's time to put Fire aside and bring your Will out. No hating here from me. If you know what you're doing, this becomes a useful tool.

Leap of Faith (level 85): Another utility spell... damn. Way too many of these. The concept seems nice. It can save asses, and prove for some fun at the same time. I don't see how people are whining about it being abused. As some have mentioned already giving it a very short cast time fixes the "let's get you broken off a cliff mate! " issue at a halt. And it can be abused just as much as Misdirection would be, which ain't. Will probably have an initial week of 2 priests playing tennis with their friends, but once that short streak of fun fades out the utility will be appreciated and also can get the priests props for possibly saving a wipe, or avoiding losing dps members which would be crucial to skipping just past the berserk timer.

--Overall thoughts about the abilities--
Is that it?!? That's all we get? I hope not. The changes seem nice, but damn I want shit on par with the other classes. Regardless let's move on.

Hasted HoTs and DoTs: Cool. Not much to say here, priests should have a solid footing on all this speech since DoTs is what makes shadow priests who they are. Seeing this change should be interesting.

Shadow Word Death at low health: Doesn't sound too bad, provided they buff the damage a little bit and still keep the double sided touch to it, since it's greatly useful for shadow priests to take damage back from it in pvp.

Weak shield and Strong Shield: Mhmm... now it would be great if this weak shield works something similar to prayer of healing. Aka you shield up multiple targets at once. Be it with a cast or without one, I want to avoid casting 6 shields in succession as discipline essentially making it feel like a waste of a Global cooldown. While talking about shields, I would also like to have blizz give us more accurate results on how discipline priests perform, recount wise if nothing else. Sure recount heals don't mean much, but Discipline tend to be underestimated since most of their activity is not visual. According to recount 67% on average of my healing is proactive.

Spirit Buff Removed: Mkay I guess.

Mana Management, removed OO5SR etc: Well sure, great to see you want players who make the right choices to be rewarded and reckless players to take a good slapping. I'm genuinely happy about the whole idea... ... ... Paladins, Shamans. What about them two f***ers? Hope we ain't the only ones that have a check-me-slap-me-if-i-fail restriction put on us.

--Overall thoughts about the changes--
Ehh, if we're all in the same boat I'm happy with the direction we're headed in, honestly. If not, I'll be heavily disappointed.

New talents and talent changes
"We want to improve Discipline's single-target healing capacity. One key is to make sure shielding isn't always a more attractive option than healing."

Don't like the sound of this. I genuinely consider Disc great because not only I have the highest burst single target healing compared to all the other classes I play with (taking into account shielding, mitigation, heal-upon-damage abilities, which involve a paladin amongst others, but it's not too plain where I just spam one ability like they can do, should their gear allow it. What I'd LIKE to see on the other hand is a little bit more variety, no serious punishment if we don't go your way, but I tend to loop in my own little healing setup that it makes me feel as if I'm running a rotaiton: Shield, PoM, HoT, Anticipate with a Greater, interrupt if no damage taken and retry until they take damage, penance, flash spam when low health < 50%, greater when above till penance/shielding/PoM are once again available. I want more dynamics in healing! <3 wall of text btw.

"# We want to improve Holy for PvP healing. One way to do this is to make sure that Heal's throughput is similar between both specs.
# We want to improve Shadow for short fights and reduce its susceptibility to school lockouts."

No opinion on holy, since I don't play it and WoW PvP ain't really doing it for me, but regarding Shadow that sounds good. Now it comes down to HOW they do it. Wait and see.

"Discipline will finally be getting Power Word: Barrier as a talented ability. Think of it like a group Power Word: Shield."

If this is the Multiple Shielding in one go I mentioned before hand... /hug.

"We want to make Holy a little bit more interesting to play. One new talent will push the Holy priest into an improved healing state when he or she casts Prayer of Healing, Heal, or Renew three times in a row. The empowered state varies depending on the heals cast."

Sounds interesting is all I have to say on that. See how it works out.

"Since the Shadow tree has a lot of passive damage-boosting abilities -- something we're trying to avoid in Cataclysm -- we will need to replace several of the tree's talents. One idea is to play off of the new Shadow Orbs mechanic (see Mastery section below), possibly allowing you to consume an orb to increase damage from Mind Blast or reduce Mind Spike's cast time."

This seems to me Shadow Priests get a taste of warlock's soulstones and DK's runes. I don't hate it, in fact, should the concept be done well enough I'd feel ecstatic the moment i pop one of the orbs knowing "Owwwkey, get ready for this bucket full of pain I'm throwin' at ya buddeh." If they fail at it which is what I'm expecting it's gonna be "Dammit orb, come on, come on! Spriests rely so much on you we'll end up kicked from our guild from not doing enough damage since you bastards don't show up!"

"Misery will no longer affect spell Hit chance. We want players to be able to gear themselves around a Hit cap that isn't variable depending on group composition."

I like this. It's essentially giving us more control without that awkward randomness we'd feel.

--Overall thoughts about the changes--
Nothing that makes my eyes bleed reading here. I ain't hating any of these changes, provided they turn out to be implemented smartly.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses
Not much to say here. Not hating any of those. They seem to help us dig deeper into our roots which is a good thing. Comes down to how it's implemented in practice, really. One thing I'd like to comment about:

"Shadow Orbs: Casting spells grants a chance for Shadow Orbs to be created that fly around you and increase your shadow damage. This will help lower-level characters feel more like "Shadow priests" before they obtain Shadowform."

This leaves me with a bittersweet feeling reading on it. The low-level crap I can't be bothered with to be honest. Yeye, good job now how orb dependent will we become? Will this be a "Orb up, 10 seconds of pain for ya" or a pressuring feeling which make us suck without them? Once again and again, Implementation of all of this is key.

Clarifications
Not much in my head changed. I was mostly thinking that way anyways. So it's all good.

Conclusion
Anybody who can sell me a life? Anybody? Hmm... weird, thought I was the only one. And yeh, that's my conclusion. Take it with a bucket-full of salt. Hope this game keeps going on nicely. I love my priest

[Talenarrus]

Kinda sad they are giving "life grip" to priests, but i guess it'll make priests happier, (or angrier from the looks of the posts about it)

[crsh1976]

I'd much prefer Life Grip if it allowed the priest to pull him/herself away, sort of a priestly Blink; I don't care to pull lazies from a certain death, I already heal them and that should be enough.

[Buffwhite]

Inc rage as people get life-gripped off a cliff by a levitating priest.


Not sure that Inner Fire/Focus change is going to have pvp priests excited about being hamstring/whatever chained; it's only 4% better movement than an enchant.

Also,

All HoTs and DoTs will benefit from Haste and Crit innately. Hasted HoTs and DoTs will not have a shorter duration, just a shorter period in between ticks (meaning they will gain extra ticks to fill in the duration as appropriate).

is much better wording than the notes for warlocks.

Donno if this has been replied to yet, but the move speed bonus from Inner Will will stack with metagem move speed bonus and the boot chant.