Duct Tape and a Prayer

As of today’s patch notes:

• Divine Hymn: Healing and healing scaling reduced by 30%. Buff on affected players changed from 15% to 10%.
• Renewed Hope: Effect can no longer be dispelled.
• Soul Warding: Mana cost reduction is now 15% down from 30%.
• Glyph of Mass Dispel: Now only decreases Mass Dispel cost by 35%.
• Glyph of Penance: Now increases critical strike chance by 5% instead of its old effect.

One by one:

Divine Hymn: Significant nerf, but Divine Hymn was so completely badass in 3.1 that it kind of needed a nerf.
Renewed Hope: Largely an arena change; doesn’t affect PVE at all.
Soul Warding: This makes Power Word: Shield slightly less mana efficient, but at least the cooldown reduction isn’t going away.
Glyph of Mass Dispel: Does anybody actually have this glyph?
Glyph of Penance: I am redacting my first reaction to this nerf because this is nominally a PG-13 blog. At full usage – using Penance every time the cooldown is up – the previous version of the glyph (reduced cooldown by 2s) effectively provided a 33% increase in Penance’s throughput. The new glyph provides a 2.5% increase in Penance’s throughput (since healing crits heal for 150% of the normal amount). The new glyph, therefore, sacrifices 30.5% throughput for an additional 1/20 chance per tick to proc Divine Aegis.

Honestly, with this change to Glyph of Penance, and now that Prayer of Healing is targetable, I might recommend Glyph of Prayer of Healing over Glyph of Penance for Discipline priests.

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