• Heal: I’ve never really understood why Blizzard has chosen to make healing spells progress like this. We start with Lesser Heal, get Heal at 16, and get Greater Heal around 40 if I’m remembering correctly. Every time we go up a step, the previous step becomes useless (less healed for the same amount of mana). Mages don’t have Lesser Fireball, Fireball, and Greater Fireball; why are healing spells stacked this way? Regardless, it’s nice to see some more granularity in the healing spells available to level-capped priests.
• Mind Spike: You might remember a variant on this ability used by various voidwalkers and similarly-aspected creatures in Outland. (I’m thinking in particular about the voidwalkers around Oshu’gun in Nagrand.) This is useful for Shadow priests who – as they said – don’t have time to set up a rotation or who are locked out of Shadow spells (since it’s Shadowfrost, it won’t be stymied by school-lock mechanics). But as a baseline spell (it shows up at level 81 and they’ve said they’re not extending the talent trees beyond 51 points), it’ll also be useful to Disc and Holy priests in similar situations – it has a faster cast time than Mind Blast (and no cooldown) and no self-damage component like Shadow Word: Death, so we’ll be able to use it to DPS when we’ve been school-locked.
• Inner Will: This is going to be fabulous for raiding Disc priests. We’ll be much more mobile and we’ll have mana reductions on many of our key mitigation spells (PW:S and Pain Suppression, I’m looking at you). Based on this, I suspect that we’ll be seeing more talents and glyphs that remove the cast time of some our healing spells as well. (“When your Penance critically heals a friendly target, your next Heal has a chance to become instant-cast.”)
• Leap of Faith: It’s like Death Grip for friendlies. Here is where I’m going to deviate from the general healing population: if you are outright refusing to heal someone because they’re standing in a ground effect, you are a bad healer. Placing them lower on the priority list? Sure. It’s their responsibility to get out. But it’s your responsibility to heal the group. If you won’t do that, you shouldn’t be healing. We’ve come to a point in WOW where a lot of healers are saying “I’m just healing the tank, the DPS are on their own”, which is patently ridiculous. (Yes, I know I’ve been guilty of saying this myself sometimes. Shame on me.) Leap of Faith is a mitigation tool when someone’s standing in the fire; it’s like Power Word: Shield, except that it won’t run out. Added bonus: Leap of Faith + Inner Will = nobody ever has to do Frogger again.
• HOTs and DOTs will now benefit from haste and crit by default. This is cause for celebration, but I wonder: is this limited to priests, or is it a general change? And will Shadowform get a different bonus since it’s losing the haste/crit bonus?
• The changes to Spirit buffs – removing Divine Spirit, and making Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild not affect spirit – feel kludgy to me. Why not just drop Spirit entirely and go to straight MP5/HP5?
• “We want to improve Discipline’s single-target healing capacity.” Um. What does Blizzard know that I don’t about Disc priests’ ability to heal a single target well? “You’re awesome, and we want to make you totally awesome.”
• Power Word: Barrier: Finally. I’ve been waiting for this since the Wrath beta!
• Shadow Orbs (part of Shadow mastery): this looks like a cool mechanic. Wait for the minor Glyph to turn the orbs into ravens.

What are your thoughts? Leave me a note in the comments!

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

© Noëlle for Duct Tape and a Prayer, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Cataclysm, Discipline, Holy, Patch, Priest, Shadow, Talents

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

• Power Word: Shield: This spell can now be cast on non-raid/party friendly targets.

It’s nice for Blizzard to finally acknowledge that Discipline priests exist outside of parties and raids, but here are two questions I want to see answered:

• When I shield someone who’s not in my party or raid, who gets Renewed Hope?
• Does this mean I can shield NPCs?

Shadow priests

Shadow priests have also seen some sweeping changes:

• Glyph of Mind Flay now Increases the damage done by your Mind Flay spell by 10% when your target is afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.
• Glyph of Shadow Word: Pain changed to – The periodic damage ticks of your Shadow Word: Pain spell restore 1% of your base mana.
• Glyph of Shadow now increases your spell power by 30% of your spirit for 10 sec. (Up from 10%) (Here’s the current version.)
• Improved Devouring Plague: This spell now deals 10/20/30% of its total periodic effect instantly, up from 5/10/15%.
• Shadowform: This talent also now causes Devouring Plague, Shadow Word: Pain, and Vampiric Touch to benefit from haste. Both the period length and the duration of these spells will be reduced by haste. In addition, the mana cost has been reduced from 32% to 13% of base mana.
• Vampiric Embrace: This ability is now provides a 30-minute buff that cannot be dispelled, instead of a target debuff.

Read that last one again. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

In its current incarnation, VE is frustrating because it’s a debuff that doesn’t actually do anything to the target. By changing it to a 30-minute buff – which I assume is self-only, like Inner Fire; otherwise it would be completely overpowered (imagine tossing VE on a warlock) – Blizzard has saved Shadow priests a GCD per target and removed a major concern about their AOE damage. Since VE will be a self-buff rather than a target debuff, using Mind Sear in a multiple-target environment will be much more attractive; likewise, I can easily see a Shadow priest cycle being to tab-cycle around the adds dropping SW:P (since it restores mana with each tick), debuff the main target, and then alternate Mind Sear and Mind Flay, with Mind Blasts woven in to keep Replenishment up. (Keep in mind that I don’t know the Official Community Shadow Priest Raid Tactics – it just seems to me like that would work really well.) Likewise, I can see 21/0/50 being a very effective Shadow build.

Thoughts? Questions? Something I missed?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

© Noëlle for Duct Tape and a Prayer, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Patch, Priest, Shadow

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh

Nice job breaking it, “hero”.

First off: guys? All nerdrage does is make you look like a f%^&ing moron. Seriously, it would be difficult to find a better way to make yourself look like a batshit-crazy imbecile than to shout seething, frothing invective over a video game. I am not generally one to say “it’s just a game”; I think it’s dismissive and patronizing. But when you’re getting so angry about a game that you’re risking an aneurysm? Chill the f%^k out.

That said: the big issue these days, at least among Shadow priests who like to bitch about how their class is underpowered, is that (some) Shadow priests feel that they are underpowered at 80. The systems development team, led by Ghostcrawler, disagree with this sentiment; they think Shadow priests are in a good place. I am being kind to the forum posters here, because what they are actually saying are things like “I have this WOL parse that shows that I do less damage” or “I have anecdotal evidence that shows that I do less damage” or “categorically, Shadow priests do less damage, it’s a known fact”, all of which are pretty damn stupid.

• “I have this WOL parse that shows that I do less damage”: Time for a lesson in basic statistical analysis. One data point is not enough. Two data points are not enough. Even if you have 50 data points, if they’re all about the same person, that doesn’t tell you about Shadow priests, that tells you about that Shadow priest. “But Chris,” you say, “a lot of people are showing WOL parses!” Yes, but this brings in bias: you’re seeing a lot of data from priests who are doing “subpar” damage, and not a lot of data from priests who aren’t, and it’s entirely possible that that’s because the priests who are doing okay on the meters don’t feel the need to come bitch on the forums. Meanwhile, Ghostcrawler and his team really do have access to the raw data from all the fights. I have no idea how long they keep fight data but it’s certainly more than 24 hours. They can actually see how all the Shadow priests are doing. And no, they’re not obliged in any sense to show it to you.
• “I have anecdotal evidence that shows that I do less damage”: You know that old joke, “the plural of anecdote is data”? That was a joke. The plural of “anecdote” is “anecdotes”. There is no reliable data present. It’s incredibly easy to generalize your own experiences; we do it every day, because we love having things in common with other members of society so much that we falsify commonalities based on nothing more than speculation: “if I experienced this, surely everyone else did too”. But there is no such thing as “anecdotal evidence” because nobody who knows what they’re doing is going to take an anecdote at face value. If you don’t understand why, I invite you to read up on observer bias, the fragility of eyewitness memory, cherry picking, and fiction.
• “categorically, Shadow priests do less damage, it’s a known fact”: man, do I even have to go here? This isn’t an argument, it’s whipping your dick out and expecting people to ooh and ahh over it. (And frankly, fella, there ain’t much there to ooh and ahh over.) Let’s restate that in a way that makes plain the absurdity of the statement: “It’s self-evident that I’m right, because I’m right.” You don’t offer evidence, or even argument. You just state your preferred conclusion and then go off to be self-satisfied. A word of advice: generally, when you use this tactic, you’re wrong. Just so we’re clear.

When you can get past the paucity of data – when you figure out that your own experience isn’t necessarily everyone else’s – when you stop trying to win arguments with your penis size – maybe, maybe you’ll get that pony – or figure out that you already have the damn thing and just had to shovel your own manure out of the way enough to see it.

(Apologies to Emily Dickinson for that last paragraph.)

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

© Noëlle for Duct Tape and a Prayer, 2009. | Permalink | 2 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Community, Priest, Shadow

Feed enhanced by Better Feed from Ozh