Question about Priests on the Cataclysm PTR.

[Micquel]

Hello everyone, I've played an end game healing priest for a very long time since BC so I am a little informed about my class.

I've been looking at the new talent system and tree's in Cataclysm, as well as reading other peoples posts and reviews on them. Now one thing I always have to remember is i seriously out gear a lot of these people that are posting these comments and even currently in Lich King if your in poor gear your going to burn though your mana as holy. This how ever isn't the case for me as my gear allows me to roll as either disc or holy for very long battles without ever having to wonder if i'm going to make the entire fight before i go OOM.

Now my question is can someone currently in at least in full ICC 25 epic's in the Cataclysm beta tell me since we all have two spec's and do not need to have a single versatile spec where disc stands in a PVE environment.

From looking at the tree's it would seem that Holy absolutely dominates for healing, and Shadow will absolutely dominate for dps. But where does that leave disc?

Currently the main benefit I find with disc comes in 25 man raids, when you have 4 to 5 other healers using direct heals or hots its nice to have a bubble out their for the preemptive damage, I however never use disc in 5 man dungeons though.

I cannot see myself using disc as my leveling spec because shadow seems so much better, and if i decide to do a 5 man dungeon i'll just switch my spec to holy if i get chosen as a healer. On top of that shadow will convert my spirit into hit, and disc will not which will be a little aggravating as i grind with the occasional spell miss.

So to recap can someone clue me in on the hidden benefit to using disc as either the ideal healing spec / dps spec when grinding/dungeons ?

[Deleted]

there's a "ask a beta player" thread in the stickies ;-)

I'm at Lv 82 at the moment. Shadow is of cause the dominating dps spec, simply because you...can hurt someone. The mobs in Mount Hyjal / Vashj'ir have about 31k (thirty-one) Health, but your dps also got buffed. I kill those guys in about 10-15 secs and can easyly handle 2 or 3 at the same time. I dont have any downtimes. Mana is no issue as a shadow priest, go for it. You can also heal pretty well, if the healer of you 5 man group is ...distracted.

My main spec is holy, but the other priests i met are discs. In 5 mans there's mainly tankdamage. As a disc it's pretty easy for you to prevent him from dying a painful death. If you prefer healing as a disc priest it should be no problem to keep it in cataclysm

[frott]

shields are currently the equivalent of adding 10k+ hps to each member of your raid. That's really all anyone cares about for disc.

The implications of this are very quick response time to people pulling aggro, but traditionally not good for tanks that needed to be healed directly for gains or needed extra damage taken for rage. They've tweaked it and added things like energy returns from shields but nothing beats just letting tanks take damage and being able to respond to it in 5 mans

In a raid settings shield spam + some tank healing is great.

You'll be able to level just fine as any spec due to smite changes and how all 3 specs will take arcangel (so much for non-required talents).

Shadow DPS is basically overkill when levelling. Its all slow boil dps compared to real dps classes, so you end up cutting out abilities like DOTs and etc whereas non dot classes can press whatever cooldowns are up for immediate damage.


Holy is also getting tons of improvements with cata that make it the most refined, "op" spec of any class. tons of new abilities and gimmicks and tons of versatility.

Disc has less versatility but the unique ability to create preventative healing.

[Bigslick]

I encourage you to read and participate in the holy and disc cata discussion threads stickied at the top of this forum. Your current gearing even if you are in full 277+ is essentially irrelevant at 85 where, while not having what is currently optimal stat allocation, basic blue gear replaces it (and in many cases green gear). As such, the information discussed there by participants playing at peak level should be relevant to any questions you might have, making them better places for your questions.

As for your leveling spec of choice, Blizzard hasn't made final passes (and likely not even semi-final passes) over the coefficients and costs of different abilities, and it seems highly likely we'll see some additional substantial changes in tree design before live hits (though we may likely see some very imbalanced performance at the launch of 4.0 pre-cata). As such, my advice would be to be patient and see what will be.