Duct Tape and a Prayer

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Blizzard has updated the Tier 10 set bonuses for healing priests – and, oddly, both of them actually sport different mechanics than the original versions. (This is especially odd in light of a comment made by Ghostcrawler last week that they’d generally worked out the mechanics and were fine-tuning specific numbers.)

The updated set bonuses:

• 2-piece: Your Flash Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.
• 4-piece: Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

The 2-piece bonus continues a pattern Blizzard’s created of giving small heals HOT components and giving HOTs immediate-heal components, and as such, while it’s interesting to see priests’ utility heal get a HOT, it seems to largely be a rehash of Flash of Light.

The 4-piece bonus is a reworking of the original bonus (you may remember it from my last post); this version is, in my opinion, vastly preferable, both because it allows synergy between two heavily-used spells (which, as @Greth22 points out, feels elegant, even if we haven’t seen it in action) and because it doesn’t encourage Penance/COH-FH-FH-FH spam like the previous bonus did.

I continue to find it interesting that Blizzard is functionally equating the Discipline 51-point talent with the Holy 41-point talent with this talent, especially since they have much different cooldowns. Penance’s untalented, unglyphed cooldown is officially twice as long as Circle of Healing’s, although the channel time lowers the effective cooldown somewhat. To equate the strength of the 4-piece bonus on a Holy priest to its strength on a Discipline priest implies, I think, that Blizzard considers both Aspiration and Glyph of Penance to be mandatory, which seems kind of silly. Blizzard, you clearly want us to make the cooldown 8 seconds; just make the cooldown 8 seconds!

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