HW: Serenity Bug Confirmed and to be Fixed for 4.3; Tome clarification

[[-Spiritus-]]

[...]You should notice a change to Holy Word: Serenity, though. As you know, that ability hasn't always benefited from the 25% crit bonus that it's supposed to get. It was a little tricky to figure out why that was happening, but we've gotten to the bottom of it. Holy Word: Serenity should be fixed for 4.3, so you should notice a change there.

[zakaluka]

thank god, this is excellent news.

If there are any fights in 4.3 that involve both tanks having 100% boss uptime, I will be testing out 2-tank healing as holy. Something I posted a lot about for 4.1, but didn't pan out.

[Mazi]

hooooray. but fail on their part for taking 823 years to catch & fix this. well, they probably didn't catch it, we did >_>

[Deleted]

I haven't played holy in ages so I didn't even know it was supposed to give 25% crit but with it fixed I would love to test holy tank healing with my gear I would have around 50 to 60% crit rating but with that said I have virtually no spirit so my regen in holy would be bad.

[Alenoria]

YAY!!!....
with this fix, tome of light buff, divine hymn buff, and Heavenly voices..... holy is looking GREEEAAAAAAAAATTTT!!!! for 4.3

[Nox165]

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3341764554?page=3#41][/url][...]You should notice a change to Holy Word: Serenity, though. As you know, that ability hasn't always benefited from the 25% crit bonus that it's supposed to get. It was a little tricky to figure out why that was happening, but we've gotten to the bottom of it. Holy Word: Serenity should be fixed for 4.3, so you should notice a change there.

you left out that part were the "tome buff is just a tool tip fix."

[[-Spiritus-]]

you left out that part were the "tome buff is just a tool tip fix."

I did! Thank you for noticing! I did not include it because most were aware already that it wasn't a buff, rather a tooltip fix, and therefore isn't news like recognition of a well known bug & it's upcoming fix.

[Danner]

Excellent news on serenity.

I honestly must admit I haven't noticed that Sanctuary had a 21 sec cooldown with 2/2 ToL. I guess I really DO learn something new every day.

[Kaesebrezen]

I did! Thank you for noticing! I did not include it because most were aware already that it wasn't a buff, rather a tooltip fix, and therefore isn't news like recognition of a well known bug & it's upcoming fix.

The only problem with the "tooltip fix" is that it isn't a tooltip fix.

On live with 2/2 Tomes of Light you get a 30% CD reduction, on PTR you get a 60% reduction. The live tooltip is 30%, the PTR tooltip is 60%.
It is a buff, not a tooltip fix.

[TenDance]

On the PTR you can lay down sanctuary TWICE - for a short moment, of course. But this means you are actually able to cast it back to back, if you want to cover your raid with a bit of AoE-Healing. Viable during long Scorpion-phases on Majo, for example.
Try to do this on live.

On the PTR you are able to cast serenity followed by two greater heals, both pushed by the critbuff. After that, serenity is ready to use again, so on medium damage encounters you're able to cast greater heals buffed by a LOT of crit. During low damage phases you're able to do this with heal. And remember, every crit you're doing will effect your mastery ticks. So you're doubledipping on crit there - to some extent. This negates the "need" for crit on your gear completely. It had it's niche if you didn't like disc but had to heal more or less singletarget, but with the amount of crit your specc grants you, crit won't be desirable at all for nondisciplinepriests.

[[-Spiritus-]]

The clarification on Tome:

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/3341764554?page=4#66]Yes[/url], that's correct. Sorry for the confusion! The bug came in an earlier version of 4.3 and was fixed recently in 4.3. Please recall that, while you guys are just getting your first look at it, internally we have been working on 4.3 for a long time.

However, this fix has introduced another bug. With the priest tier set bonus, the duration of Sanctuary can be longer than its cooldown. This causes a host of technical problems because that spell just isn’t set up right to have multiple copies, nor do we really want Sanctuary to have 100% uptime in the first place. So, we're likely to revert the change to Tome of Light (restoring it back to 15% / 30%) but we'll also lower the base cooldown of Serenity so that it will have a 7 sec cooldown with Tome of Light.

Note: All of this discussion applies to the 4.3 PTR, where some amount of "design churn" is to be expected; we want to avoid making you to feel like your character is under a barrage of constant changes after a patch goes live.

So, in chrono order:

(1) Tome was Buffed in PTR.
(2) PTR tooltip did not reflect it.
(3) New PTR push fixed tooltip to reflect buff.
(4) Having multiple HW:Sancs down at once due to 4pc causes problems.
(5) Tome likely to be reverted to 4.2 status.
(6) HW:Serenity likely to see base CD lowered to 7 sec IOT achieve same effect it would have had under the Tome buff.

[Mazi]

maybe they should just give us a worthwhile 4pc and keep the tome of light at 60% >_>

<_<

[Sikizim]

maybe they should just give us a worthwhile 4pc and keep the tome of light at 60% >_>

<_<

i agree haha. holy felt really good on the PTR. 60% reduction please

[Afflictid]

I'm not sure I completely understand. SO our 4 piece is now bad again for Holy Priests then.

[Deleted]

maybe they should just give us a worthwhile 4pc and keep the tome of light at 60% >_>

<_<

Completely agree. You'd think they would find that easier to do even, than change our talents, but not like I know anything about game design

[nobodysbaby]

It is a bit sad to see people cheering that they will fix a Serenity-bug (of this importance) in next tier, that is over half a year old, and that they will not hot fix it on the spot. Same goes with Sanctuary bug. Weird how they say all bugs are intended ones aswell...

They do not want to "barrage" us with changes I read. Well I say, bring the barrage.

---------- Post added 2011-10-12 at 11:01 AM ----------

I am wondering about the DH being on a 2 min CD aswell. Is this intended to??:P

[Deleted]

YAY!!!....
with this fix, tome of light buff, divine hymn buff, and Heavenly voices..... holy is looking GREEEAAAAAAAAATTTT!!!! for 4.3

Looking forward to all of this! All hail holy priests <3

No but seriously, i'm a bit confused as to why it would take blizzard so long to identify such a major glitch, I was under the impression that they had a department solely for calculating class benefits for balancing - guess I was wrong

[Darkener]

On the PTR you can lay down sanctuary TWICE - for a short moment, of course. But this means you are actually able to cast it back to back, if you want to cover your raid with a bit of AoE-Healing.

Yes, I noticed this as well. However, it appeared that although there were two Sanctuaries down there was still only 1 ticking heals. I didn't pick apart the combat log to verify but it it looks like the new Sanctuary can't start healing until the old one finishes. That may be part of the "host of problems" that Blizzard was referring to with Sanctuary. It was designed to only have one "active". With only a couple of seconds of overlap it was hard to notice, but with the 4-piece it would be very obvious that two Sanctuaries were down but only one of them was "active"-ly healing. That would need fixing before it goes live. It's just a shame that we lose a shorter Chastise cooldown because Sanctuary is broken.

[Benea]

Testing the 5 mans in ptr, holy spec's tank healing capability with serenity at 6 sec CD and working crit buff is a very nice improvement over live.

[zakaluka]

maybe they should just give us a worthwhile 4pc and keep the tome of light at 60% >_>

<_<

Agree Mazi! But they didn't single holy priests out in getting terrible set bonuses. Everyone's are pretty bad. Frankly if I understand it correctly disc and hpally get the best 4p bonus, pretty surprising considering how bad the disc 4p is ><.