Cataclysm beta priest thread Follow

I think they should just leave Inner Fire how it is now and make Inner Will exactly Tuskarr's: movement speed and stamina. More spellpower and armor vs. more speed and health, or basically, two survivability buffs essentially canceling each other out and the choice really being between a bit more power and a bit more speed, like the fast boxer versus the one who hits really hard.

Because as Moz notes, I'm rarely going to choose anything over Inner Fire as it stands now. Movement speed and mana are nice perks, but they're almost never going to be better than both more power and more survivability.

I did two instances as disc. I'm gonna get me a snack and write up my experiences; this is gonna be a long one, even by my standards, as there's a LOT to report. Note that this is disc-only for now. Holy will be similar, but I'm not trying that yet until I'm more comfortable with the whole Cata way of healing, as literally EVERYTHING has changed. But anyway...



Alright, lets start off with a small explanation of where I'm currently at. My priest is level 83, and has 48K hit points (54K with Fortitude) and a mana pool of 54K unbuffed - in one of the groups we had a mage and druid, who'se buffs put me up to 60K. I'm using this spec with the normal WOTLK disc glyphs (Flash Heal, PW:S and Penance). I'm on roughly 4500 spellpower unbuffed, 4850 with Inner Fire. I've got 10 mastery which increases the potency of all my absorbs by 25%.

First of all... Holy spaghetti meatsauce, healing has changed. I hope you guys remember the Vanilla times, because that's what this is closest too. I'm not ashamed to say we had at least two or three wipes in my first dungeon that were entirely my fault due to me running OOM or not keeping up with healing. I will take a little bit of the blame away though - I was using the standard Blizzard interface, which, when scaled down, makes it impossible to keep track of health bars. I flipped it over to the standard Blizzard raiding interface, which is basically a pretty, drag-able version of grid, somewhere during the first instance, and that improved a big lot of my healing.

Imagine every spell a disc priest has in his ******** and then imagine that they would all suddenly have a COMPLETELY different function and application. That's how I felt. I did two instances and it indeed took me both of them to get fully acquinted with the class again. To start with, mana is HUGE. I found myself drinking after every pull. And I should have relatively good gear, too (IcC25 heroic to a level 82 instance).

Because mana is so huge, your go-to spell is Heal. If you can use Heal, you WILL use Heal, or you will be OOM within the next twenty odd seconds. When I say everything has changed, I mean it. You no longer cast PW:S on everyone. ProM constantly on cooldown? Forget it. Renew on the tank? You don't have the mana for it. Flash Heal to quickly heal up a DPS? LOL. Get this: Heal is 623 mana. Penance is 1476, Flash heal THREE THOUSAND, Prayer of mending about 1.9K, PW:S 2K, Renew 2.2K, Prayer of healing nearly 4K, Greater 3.4K and Binding Heal 3K. I'll say it again: Heal is the backbone of your ******** If you can use Heal, you WILL use Heal. You will also use all your cooldowns on any given boss fight, and be extremely happy Inner Focus' CD went down to 45 seconds. You'll hate that it no longer affects anything but your three "Heals" (Flash/Greater/Normal) and PoH, though.


Because of all this, the roles of every spell in your ******* have changed, and you really need to think wisely about when to apply them. Prayer of Mending is simply no longer worth it unless there's consistant AOE damage going around. Power Word: Shield, even as disc, is more of an emergency or pre-pull thing. No worries Teacake, there's still plenty of it around (especially with the new Strenght of Soul talent), but rather than it being 80% of all your casts, it'll be more like 10%, with Heal taking the 80% spot.

And heck, even Penance doesn't live up to Heal's obscene mana efficiency - its instant first tick is golden now, and because of the longer cooldown, Penance really is more of an emergency heal than anything else. A kind of "There's a big blow coming and I need to fill the tank up" spell. Flash Heal has become a spell you never use outside of real "This guy NEEDS to be healed NOW or he's dead" emergencies, though it is partially replaced by Penance as it is now.

Not even Renew escapes the "Efficient spell? SOD THAT, YOU USE HEAL NOW!" wrath Blizzard has unleashed. With it having a 2.2K mana cost it's something you use to either top DPS off if you can't spare more than a GCD off the tank, or to help out on the tank when you know a tank-healing intensive phase is coming up. Note though, that phases that require "intensive tank healing" aren't even comparable to how they are in wrath. Intensive tank healing means that the tank "will slowly start dying over a period of about 10 seconds, and that you need to be prepared to chain cast Heal on him to keep him alive". If you're not, and you won't be, since your entire party will hang around 50% hp for the larger part of most fights, you need to Penance to buy yourself some time and get some Shields or Renews up on those DPS.

Greater Heal is something you use ocassionaly, but it has largely the same role as Heal - there's a really thin line between when you use which one. I myself tend to use Greater Heal if I'm spamming Heal and the tank's health isn't going up or down. Binding Heal sees more use, though I think it's a shame not even that spell is mana-efficient, as it fits right in with the whole "you need to use the most efficient heal possible" theme that's been going on - it doesn't feel rewarding when you get off the full effect from a critting Binding Heal and you still lose half your mana pool. Prayer of Healing is still your go-to group heal, but only if you know you will actually heal all five people with it for the full amount. It's not spammable though, and not really reliable on getting your entire group topped off.

I also just want to take a moment to say that PW:B is now officially the worst cooldown I have ever seen. At one point in a boss fight, there were a lot of adds involved, so I threw it down on our (fairly) clumped up group to lessen some of the damage coming in. I lost 7K mana of the 10K I had left, we killed the adds within about 2 seconds, moved out of the bubble, and that was basically it. It needs to be twice as large, and even then it'll probably still suck. Even if I throw it on the tank and get full mileage (50K absorb) out of it, it's not even near as effective as 50K heals worth of... Heals (the spell) would be. As it is now, it's situational beyond belief. You'll save it for the same situations where you use Holy Nova in WOTLK. Except Holy Nova doesn't have a 3 minute cooldown.

Last but not least, there's the whole Smite/Atonement/Archangel thing. I've not yet *really* found a place to fit this in, as you generally spend the whole fight trying to fill up everybody who'se at 50%, but I have seen some opportunities where it could be used. The thing is that Archangel's mana regeneration cancels out the Smite cost, which basically means that if you have ~7 seconds just before an intensive phase, you could do the Smite Trick and earn yourself so more efficient healing for the phase to come.


All in all, like I said at the start of my wall of text, healing as it is now mostly resembles the way it was in Vanilla. It's just that cancelcasting has been replaced by chain-casting Heal, as you suddenly have one sickly efficient spell in your ******** To note; chain casting Heal basically breaks you even in mana - it's mana cost is virtually the same as you regenerate.

I will also mention that as it is now, definitely in raids, survivability WILL be a huge factor for DPS classes, and I might or might not expect my rogues to keep up Recuperate. I will also mention that in this environment, Lightwell should be kickass if summoned at the right spot. But more about that once I get to give Holy a whirl.

You seem to get most of it, but I need to emphasize it again; if you can use Heal, you WILL use heal. I'll probably make that rule #1 in the new healing priest sticky I'll be writing =P. The reason 10% seems low is because... you use Heal so much. You literally spend most fights trying to get by with using nothing but Heal - you barely use anything else if all is going well. If you use anything else, it's mostly PW:S and then some other stuff.

I do agree with you though, I wouldn't be surprised if they shuffled with the numbers a bit more to bring the whole "cast Heal" idea down to "cast Heal about 40-50% of the time", as right now it's somewhat ridiculous.

On another note; I played my rogue all through TBC and never really healed, but afaik, TBC and Vanilla healing are pretty close together. TBC is just a little bit more WOTLK like, where you still run OOM but can basically just cast what suits you.

Can you find out something for me when you test Holy? I’d like to know when the cooldown timer for Chakra begins. Is it when you enter the Chakra state, or when you leave one?

I ask because I wonder if it’s possible to get additional power out of the system by popping into the HoT chakra and getting extra-strong renews rolling, then switching to the direct heal chakra and get the benefit of more powerful heals while keeping the renews rolling at no additional cost.

I was under the impression that a spell's various coefficients would be modified dynamically as opposed to the current model of them being static based on your various stats when a spell is cast.

This struck me as odd when I saw it in the notes. I had the sense that heal was too efficient and should've been nerfed. But I'd think they'd bring something else forward to compensate at the same time, because I also have the sense that everything else is just too expensive to cast regularly.

DEV A: The priests are relying on heal too much. We're trying to get away from spamming one button, right?
DEV B: Right. Should we make a couple of the other spells more efficient?
DEV A: Nah, just nerf the one that works so they can't use that one as much either.
DEV B: But then they won't be casting heal or anything else.
DEV A: Let them eat cake.
DEV B: Mmmm... cake.

I kid. I'm sure they'll tweak the numbers to something doable. But the clock is ticking and what I'm hearing is making me nervous.

This is kinda making me think that the "heal is your best spell" is an attempt to get people used to relying on it and then blizz will bring other heals to be more useful to get people into the mentality to think of using heal rather than staying with their Wrath habits.

I mostly reminds me of how I needed to heal as a shadow priest (on leveling dungeons. ...And emergency healing Onyxia).

P.S. How is shadow looking?

Edited, Sep 22nd 2010 10:57am by BakaShinobi

You can always tell the red-headed stepchild talent tree when even the people who play the spec consider this a complete answer. (though compared to healing I can throughly see the need for less discussion)


Edited, Sep 22nd 2010 12:32pm by BakaShinobi

Oh, yeah - you mistunderstood me. I don't think Shadow is 'unaltered' or 'bad'. In fact, the tree got some changes that seem pretty nifty to me. The change of the first two tiers allow healers to sub-spec in Shadow, which is pretty cool. Fade is easily talentable and a good spell to use for shadow. Shadow orbs work pretty well. Masochism looks like a good way to keep mana going. Paralysis adds some much-needed PvP utility and Shadow Apparition, even though it looks extremely silly, is a pretty interesting way to make shadow priests more useful.

It's just that I don't play shadow and never have or will. I've no idea where they're actually at.

Long story short: I'm good at misinterpreting.

Anywho, on with the thread!

Since the mid-range heal nerfs, are priests still casting as many Heals? Or are they just not casting period, trying to conserve their mana when everything is overly expensive?

The mastery for Shadow, Shadow Orbs, is a mess. Other than that, the class is in great shape and looks to be more fun than ever.