Priest Changes Coming!

[MongoJerry]

I gave the priest talent calculator a good shakedown today to create a new "battle healer" build that would be designed to be a healer for group PvP. This is what I came up with:

Neriad's battle healer build

It's designed for maximum survivability combined with maximum healing power.

The benefits are:

• It allows for maximum survivability with talents to mitigate damage -- Improved Inner Fire, Spell Warding, Blessed Recovery, and to some extent Inspiration. It also allows for survivability with methods to avoid spell cast interruptions with Healing Focus, Silent Resolve, and one point in Martyrdom.<>
  
• It fully maximizes the power of all healing spells, so it allows for the maximum amount of healing to be dealt in the shortest amount of time.<>
  
• It has Holy Nova, which should be awesome to prevent flag taps in PvP and might even work decently well as a secondary way to heal teammates in a crowded fight.<>
  
• The new Spirit of Redemption will rock in PvP.<>
  [st]The downsides are:
  • Mana could be an issue. Inner Focus and Meditation will help, but the lack of any talents that reduce the mana cost of spells will hurt.<>
    
  • The build doesn't take advantage of the talents that improve the new and improved Greater Heal. Basically, the assumption here is that the primary method of healing in PvP will still be Flash Heal. This could be a dinosaur philosophy. In addition, if raids switch to using Greater Heals in PvE, then this build will be at a disadvantage in this situation. However, this build does have Inspiration combined with Holy Specialization (+5% crit chance to holy spells), so a player specialized this way could take the role of casting low rank Flash Heals constantly on the main tank to keep Inspiration up, while other priests, druids, paladins, and shamans do the bulk of the healing.<>
    
  • I would love to have Holy Reach to extend the range of Holy Nova and Prayer of Healing. Plus, I'd like to have Improved Prayer of Healing, since PoH is one of my favorite spells. However, I just couldn't find the points to spend in those talents. I'm tempted to take points away from Improved Renew to spend in those talents, though.<>
    
  • I'll miss a lot of the talents in the shadow tree. In particular, Silence and Shadow Focus (which to me might as well have been named "Improved Mind Control," because it extends the length of Mind Control so much).<>
    
  • Some people are drooling over the idea of throwing Power Infusion onto mages in PvP. However, other than temporary bragging rights, I can't justify giving up so many of the talents in the holy tree to get it. In particuar, I just can't imagine going into a group PvP setting without Spirit of Redemption. That talent is just going to rock.<>
    [st]All in all, I'm really happy about the priest talent changes. I would have liked to have seen a crowd control or an escape spell added (e.g. making Fade give four seconds of invisibility in PvP). However, these new talents are quite amazing. It's a good sign when I find myself looking at the talent trees and saying, "Oh, I want this. Oh, no! In order to get this, I'd have to give up that!" At one point, I was willing to throw up my hands and throw all 51 points into the Holy tree. At the same time, I could also see why someone would want to put 31+ points into the Discipline tree. And, oh yes, the Shadow Tree is still quite good. I'm very happy with these talent changes, and it'll be fun to see the different kinds of priest builds that people come up in the next few weeks.
    
    Late addition: Here's a stab at a Power Infusion (Discipline) PvP build that also lowers the casting time on Greater Heal. It has a lot of the survivability benefits of the above build (without Inspiration). Mana should definitely not be a problem for this build. The main problem it misses out on some of the later talents that provide extra healing power. And, of course, it doesn't have Spirit of Redemption.
    
    Even later addition: Another Power Infusion Build. I like this build more. It gives up the Greater Heal improvements for Inspiration.