Duct Tape and a Prayer

According to Ghostcrawler, the Tier 8 healing priest set bonuses are as follows:

• 2-piece: Increases the critical strike chance of your Prayer of Healing by 10%.
• 4-piece: Increases your spell power by ~250 when you cast Power Word: Shield; lasts until cancelled.

The 2-piece bonus is good, especially now that Prayer of Healing will be targetable. The additional crit will be a pleasant perk for Holy priests, and I can already hear the Discipline priests in the crowd squealing with joy at the thought of Divine Aegis proccing on an entire raid group at once.

The 4-piece bonus, on the other hand, is going to be a source of some contention. In fact, Holy priests are already starting to whine about it (read one post down in the thread linked above), since they seem to be under the impression that as Holy priests, the use of Power Word: Shield is absolutely inconceivable. In their defense, Discipline priests use the spell a lot more thanks to all the talents we have that improve it, and Disc priests will complain if Holy priests throw up a shield in a situation where it would have benefitted a Disc priest to do so. That said, relax, Holies! Get the staff out of your ass and realize – as GC rightly points out – that just because you don’t think if it as a Holy spell doesn’t mean you can’t use it!

For Discipline priests, on the other hand, this bonus is the bee’s knees. I’ve already talked about using Power Word: Shield regularly in fights, because of Borrowed Time, and the 250 additional spell power we’ll be getting with every PW:S cast makes the spell even more vital to a well-worked Discipline rotation. Now I just have to figure out the optimal balance of Haste and other stats (Schmigz did a pretty good job of convincing me that Intellect was a better investment than MP5, but I’m still not sure what I want the weights to be).

One thought: at the moment, the buff on the 4-piece bonus is “until cancelled”. Expect the devs to “clarify” that soon, either by replacing it with a duration or by making the next spellcast cancel the buff. (I’ve seen some people read it as “until PW:S is cancelled”, but the Shadow T8 4-piece bonus has the same “until cancelled” duration, and it triggers off Mind Blast, a spell that doesn’t have a duration, so I find that unlikely.)

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