Priest Changes Coming!

[Professor Frink]

Going from left to right, I'll start the discussion off with the Discipline tree. You'll immediately notice that Wand Specialization has been made a first tier talent. I feel that this is great for two reasons. First, previously neither available tier 1 Discipline talents felt very exciting or rewarding when investing your points into them at early levels. I feel this is no longer the case.

Are there a lot of level 11 characters running around wanding? If you're soloing you tend to be at melee range anyway, and I don't think i've ever had a wand that did more DPS than my melee weapon...

The new focused casting effect of Martyrdom increases resistance to Interrupt effects by 20%, in addition to preventing the caster from losing casting time when taking damage. Inner Focus as you can see is no longer a 21-point talent, and now available by investing only a mere ten points into the tree. Also, the cooldown has been reduced to three minutes. Competing with the ability is Meditation, also previously a 21-point talent. This still offers an increase to mana regeneration while casting by 15%, however, now only costs three points.

Some very nice toys for the disc side of shadow/disc in particular. I rarely do big-number damage like a mage, so seeing more mind blast crits in PvP will be fun. Also a way to finish off a hunter that's mana-burn-shotted you down to nothing.

Moving onto the 15-point talents, you can see that Improved Inner Fire remains the same. What we changed is the core ability. Next patch Inner Fire will provide 50% more armor than before. The duration will also be increased to ten minutes but now the effect will be removed when the caster endures twenty successful damaging melee or ranged hits. We've also increased the mana cost and removed the melee attack power boost from the ability as such offers the priest very little benefit.

Big giant nerf.

I already have 2072 armor with the 1.9 improved inner fire. The current inner fire costs almost nothing but remembering to cast it every three minutes, which I do religiously. An extra 700 or so armor would be handy, but only working for 20 hits... wtf? Right now the only class that can remove my armor buff and cares how much armor i have is shammies, and being dispelled in PvE generally doesn't happen, right? Now any class that i get an inner fire benefit against, and every physical damage mob try to solo, has the ability to remove said buff for no extra effort in the process of killing me, and the increased mana cost will prevent me from re-applying it like I do after being purged. The increased duration is a cruel joke--with the 20-hit rule, it won't last 3 minutes, let alone 10. Now I'll probably spend most of my time with 644 armor, and having made a lot of enemies on the horde's rogue squad, i see a lot of being jumped and killed before getting out of stunlock in my future.

Finally, the new 31-point talent for the Discipline tree is called Power Infusion. This ability infuses the target with power, increasing spell damage and healing by 20% for 15 seconds, and can be used every three minutes. This spell is very similar to Arcane Power, however it can be cast on other players, enhances healing as well as damage, and doesn't increase the mana cost of spells cast while under its effect.

Attention raid leader: I am holding the power infusion hostage. I will recieve an innervate and a healthstone in the next 30 seconds or so help me I'm going to infuse the paladin.

At final rank, friendly targets can click the lightwell to restore 1600 health over a period of ten seconds. The lightwell has five charges, meaning, up to five players can use the lightwell before it expires. Our testing has shown that this ability works great in both smaller dungeons and raids, often times allowing the lower maintenance party members to take advantage of the healing properties of this well, while the priest and other healing classes focused on the main tank or whomever was taking heavy damage.

Wait, I was supposed to be healing those people?

One other thing I'd like to mention before moving on to the Shadow tree is the fact that Focus Casting has been removed completely. Essentially, with the improvements to Martyrdom and the new talent Healing Focus, it wasn't as valuable a talent as before.

I'd just discovered how incredibly useful this spell is about a week ago. I mostly use it with damage spells, so the improvements to martyrdom/uninterupted healing don't mean much to me.

Shadow Weaving is available for 16-points.

Since the current consensus seems to be that in raids a fully-shadow specced priest wearing a reasonably nice set of int/sta/+shadow gear should be applying weaving, then acting as a gimped healer, this will permit a half-shadowpriest/inferior healer spec to match the playstyle.

--frink