A Better Power Word: Shield?

[skyrider55]

Thoughts?

Alright clearly there are, and have been, issues revolving around Power Word: Shield for quite some time. It's either too efficient, or not efficient enough. This toggles between it costing to much or too little mana, or the value that it absorbs is either too high or too low.

In previous blizzard posts they've stated that they want to ensure that while playing a discipline priest you still feel inclined to heal opposed to just shielding.

I agree with that, but I DO NOT feel that making shields unsustainable through the use of resource limitation is a good way to do this.

Personally, I love rolling shields on as many people as possible. It's an act of predictive damage prevention rather than the conventional means of reactive damage correction.

Example: Pre-shielding stacked raid members on Maloriak during his Red Vial phase due to incoming AOE damage, Chimaeron's Fued phase, etc.

While direct healing (Hots, Aoe, Single target heals) is rewarding as you're healing someone for straight health which is both fun and rewarding, it's also rewarding to know that your effectively assisting someone in mitigating damage and increasing their survivability.

There have been many valid and good suggestions about changes to Power Word: Shield such as changing how weakened soul works.

In my mind the Discipline Priest acts as much as a damage preventer, as they do a damage corrector (healing). My suggestion to keep discipline fun is to require discipline priests to both shield, and heal, in parallel with each other.

How?

Right now, our shields absorb quite a substantial amount of damage. When a target is shielded, based on the rate of change of their health, you effectively know they are "safe" for up to 30 seconds with your shield on them as it absorbs all damage taken up to a limit.

To counteract this, I think power word shield should be mechanically reworked to "Reduce damage taken by x% for a specific time duration" - Much like Pain Suppression works right now, where x is affected by our mastery rating, and the time duration is lower than that of the current implementation. This methodology was used to correct issues surrounding Power Word: Barrier in Wrath.

At medium to low health, priests are forced to heal their targets prior to rolling shields, due to the fact that damage will not be mitigated by 100%, and their target is still susceptible to damage and death.

At medium to high health, the priest can safely use encounter triggers and knowledge to ensure shields are up at times of high incoming damage, to reduce the amount taken, rather than to absorb it completely. It provides the monitoring of shield durations, and timing with event mechanics and should play as an interesting "rotation".

Changing the mechanic in this way will than also cause abilities such as Prayer of Mending to trigger when shielded targets take damage, and thus encourage use and glyphing of POM which is a known concern.

Ok, but what about Pain Suppression?

This is a cooldown, and I believe it should be a powerful spell. Can it switch to absorb 100% damage for a time duration? Of course not, we might as well call it "Divine Shield" if that were the case.

My suggestions in this thread are primarily to address concerns surrounding Power Word: Shield opposed to Pain Suppression. But now that I'm on the topic, my suggestions would either be to simply increase the damage absorption percent on pain suppression (don't forget PS still has other mechanics associated with it), or make pain suppression act as a synergy to the priests shields effectively increasing the effectiveness (absorption %) of the next pw:s cast by the priest, while mimicking the already existing mechanics within Pain Suppression.

TL;DR
I like rolling shields, preventing damage should be baseline for a discipline priest.
Power Word: Shield needs not an increase in mana cost, but mechanic change to absorb a % of damage rather than 100% of a fixed number.
Pain Suppression should be adjusted to account for this change causing 2 similar abilities.

[Direshadow]

Personally, I think that Shadow needs it's own "power word shield"

It seems that as they raise the cost of this disc spell, shadow priests are hit hard in PVP... and the spell doesn't last that long in the first place...

None the less, shadow priests would be gimped without it.

I say, give us a talent that gives us a "Shadow Shield" mechanic which has the same effect as "power Word shield" does. Maybe have the bonus 4P disc PVP thing built into it as well.

[RabbitPrime]

Blizzard made the wrong decision here. Managing shields should be about, as stated by OP, predicting incoming damage. In that regard, the retooling of how Disc Priests manage PW: Shield should come from changes to Rapture as well as to PW: Shield itself. Take the current PW: Shield and remove the Rapture effect. Disc Priests would in no way be able to spam this spell or keep it rolling and not OOM within a minute.

If the desired effect is to punish mindless PW: Shield spam, then raising the mana cost of PW: Shield was the right first step. The proper second step needs to be raising the mana return from Rapture to compensate for the increased price of PW: Shield. This would further encourage smart PW: Shield management while discouraging thoughtless spamming.

As for the PvP implications, it's nice to see PvE changes wreaking PvP for a change.

[Nece]

I like your idea as I read like this: It is basically a Anti Magic Shell(DK) but for all dmg?

Dire- Yes this is gonna hit my spriest in balls. As far as I see in PvP Spriest run oom fast. SWD hit doesnt return enough mana in a arena sometimes bg setting. Well tbh I dont run oom unless someone is spam dispelling. I only go into a bg with my frriend who is tada..a lock. Protection there

[LimeSudz]

Example: Pre-shielding stacked raid members on Maloriak during his Red Vial phase due to incoming AOE damage, Chimaeron's Fued phase, etc.

wouldn't PW:B work better in situations like this?

I'm actually somewhat pleased with these changes. While I don't feel great about my brother priests who roll Disc I wasn't excited about Shield Spamming becoming as powerful as it was becoming. (and thus possibly forcing me to start having to worry about shields).

I think the increased cost was tough but fair.

[skyrider55]

wouldn't PW:B work better in situations like this?

I'm actually somewhat pleased with these changes. While I don't feel great about my brother priests who roll Disc I wasn't excited about Shield Spamming becoming as powerful as it was becoming. (and thus possibly forcing me to start having to worry about shields).

I think the increased cost was tough but fair.

Omnitron Defense System, Electron + Magmatron?

PW:B is appropriate for some scenarios most certainly, but it's also a 2 minute cooldown. I personally like the concept of being able to both heal, and shield, without mitigating 100% of the incoming damage (making druids overhealing go through the roof for example).

[Deleted]

Blizzard made the wrong decision here. Managing shields should be about, as stated by OP, predicting incoming damage. In that regard, the retooling of how Disc Priests manage PW: Shield should come from changes to Rapture as well as to PW: Shield itself. Take the current PW: Shield and remove the Rapture effect. Disc Priests would in no way be able to spam this spell or keep it rolling and not OOM within a minute.

Removing rapture has no effect on spamability since rapture has a 12 CD - from a rapture POV there's no point spamming shields at all. All that would do is gimp disc priests (or have no effect if the mana return was put somewhere else).

[Azelric]

Removing rapture has no effect on spamability since rapture has a 12 CD - from a rapture POV there's no point spamming shields at all. All that would do is gimp disc priests (or have no effect if the mana return was put somewhere else).

I hardly use sheilds except for the rapture proc other than keeping them on tanks depending on the fight. Due to my healer make up it doesn't make a ton of sense to just to roll bubbles out. As someone who's not currently shield spamming all this change is to me and my play style is a nerf to my mana regen. Move rapture to pentance and make pentance a slightly longer cooldown and be done with it. I like my mana! :'(

Edit: clarity

[Sparkiee]

Overall its a terrible change, yes PW:S did need a nerf, the problem was how to do it without gimping over pvp.

Increasing the mana cost, not only nerfs disc in pvp but shadow aswell.

I assumed with the lengh of time it was taking for such an obvious nerf Blizzard where thinking up a half decent soloution, i guess not.

[Pozz]

Efficiency wasn't really the problem previous to the PW:S buff, the absorb damage was, when a PW:S is not even worth the gcd you've got a problem. Now you just have to think more about when to use PW:S instead of spamming it.

As for the shadow issues I guess they could add a talent changing it into something better.

[Deleted]

Efficiency wasn't really the problem previous to the PW:S buff, the absorb damage was, when a PW:S is not even worth the gcd you've got a problem. Now you just have to think more about when to use PW:S instead of spamming it.

As for the shadow issues I guess they could add a talent changing it into something better.

Of course we are back to being PURE tank healers with the new nerf, since PoH was nerfed and WILL be our ONLY way to aeo heal now.

[Deleted]

I assumed with the lengh of time it was taking for such an obvious nerf Blizzard where thinking up a half decent soloution, i guess not.

Was hoping the exact same. It was to be expected that Blizzard would take action, however this feels like an extremely poor thought-through change. What is being suggested at EJ is so much more elegant: lower the duration of the shields to 12-15 sec.