Since according to my search results, you really want to know what I think about this…

3.3.3 changed the 4-piece set bonus for the Sanctified Crimson Acolyte’s Raiment, the healing priest Tier 10 set. Before the change, the set bonus was:

  • (4) Set: 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.

Now it’s:

  • (4) Set: Increases the effect of Power Word: Shield by 5% and Circle of Healing by 10%.

This is a pretty significant change, and one which a lot of priests are bemoaning; where the old version rewarded tactical use of cooldowns and variety of spell use, the new bonus just provides a passive bonus, and rewards spamming.

First, let’s be honest: this is continuing in Blizzard’s current trend of making content accessible to more people. The people who like the old bonus and who are bemoaning the new one are the ones who would have gotten T10 first – but there are a whole lot of players who are going to be getting at least four pieces of T10 who don’t have the tactical skill to make good use of the original bonus. To them, the new version of the bonus is a better bonus, simply because it doesn’t require as much thought; they can put more of their attention toward healing the people who need healing (or shielding the people who need shielding), instead of having to worry about whether their 20% proc rate went off.

What’s curious to me about the bonus is that while Holy priests get a bonus to a spec-defining talent (Circle of Healing), Disc priests get a bonus to a baseline ability. Any priest can benefit from the bonus to Power Word: Shield; only Holy priests will benefit from the 10% COH buff. I suspect that’s why the PW:S buff is only half of the COH buff: it’s more generally usable. It’s also on a shorter cooldown than COH is – in fact, for Discipline priests, it’s on a global cooldown, which means that this buff is just promoting the view of Disc priests as bubble spammers.

Mostly I’m just disappointed in this change. I’ve long believed that tier gear should be the best gear available for a given class and spec (and I’m aware of the argument that “then we’d just have everyone of a given class looking the same”, to which I say: given the prevalence of players relying on Elitist Jerks and Best In Slot lists to tell them what they Have To Equip, we have that anyway). If tier gear were the best gear available, the set bonuses would be icing on the cake – and because they wouldn’t be necessary to entice characters to wear the gear, they could (and should) be interesting. In fact, tier gear used to be that way – check out the Vestments of Transcendence, the priest Tier 2 set, whose set bonuses included “When struck in melee there is a 50% chance you will Fade for 4 seconds”. By changing the T10 set bonus from an interesting bonus to a purely utilitarian bonus, Blizzard is sending a message that they don’t consider tier set bonuses to be icing on the tier-set cake; they’re a necessary part of the gear, and necessary to entice players to get the gear.

A Duct Tape post about gear wouldn’t be complete without some numbers, so here you go.

  • Circle of Healing, without any other modifiers, heals for 958-1058 per target. Its spell power coefficient is 40.29%; I think 2800 spell power is a reasonable number to go with for a priest in T10, so that adds another 1128 (2800 * .4029) to the spell, giving us an average per-target heal of 2136. An additional 10% to that is about 2350 per target, for a gain of about 1068 healing every 6 seconds.
  • Power Word: Shield, without any other modifiers, absorbs 2230 damage. Its coefficient is 80.57%; the aforementioned spell power adds another 2256 absorption, yielding an average per-target shield that absorbs 4486 damage. With the set bonus, that’s 4710 absorption, or an additional 224 every 4 seconds. Discipline priests, however, have not only a 15% bonus to PW:S but a shield that can be cast once per GCD – that is, once per second for a properly-hasted Disc priest. (This is, I admit, a little unfair to Holy priests, since I’m denying them the benefit of Divine Providence and other talents. The problem is that while Circle of Healing doesn’t have a prerequisite – only any other 40 points in Holy – Soul Warding, which gives the cooldown reduction to PW:S, requires Improved PW:S, which gives the +15% bonus. So I have to include Imp PW:S to get the once-per-GCD shield, but strictly speaking, it’s possible to have Circle of Healing without any talents that give it bonuses.) That 4486 damage absorbed becomes 5159 damage with the 15% bonus, and the tier bonus brings it up to 5417, or 258 extra absorption every second. If the priest is bubble spamming, that’s 1547 extra damage absorbed every 6 seconds.

In other words, even though the PW:S bonus is smaller, the actual effect – assuming that all you’re doing is casting PW:S every chance you get – is about 45% larger than the bonus Holy gets. If we assume that Blizzard wants the bonuses to even out, then we can safely guess that they think that Discipline priests are casting Power Word: Shield roughly once every other spell. That seems to match with the popular perception of Discipline priests, and therefore with how (we can assume) most of the non-high-end Discipline priests are playing – which again points to the conclusion that Blizzard is trying to open the tier gear up to less hardcore players.

I’m not really sure how I feel about that, in the end. Yes, I’d like the tier gear to be the best gear available. But since it’s not, there’s a significant part of me that’s pleased that a larger portion of the player base has access to it. After all, tier gear isn’t really a sign of elitism if the elitists are going to be wearing something else.

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