Talents to AvoidFollow

Saw the same topic on warlock forum and rly thought that priests need 1 too.

Discipline

Wand Specialization
Well, this talent is only good when you are lvl 10-15, then you will need to get rid of it.

Improved Inner Fire
Low bonus and 3 points wasted

Force of Will
Never seen anyone use it, even if it is not such a bad talent

Holy

Lightwell
Not usefull as noone uses it lol

Shadow

Improved Fade
Very bad talent, it's just no use.

please comment and add your thought and if neede I will edit this post and make it much better(I know there are many things to add as I am newb priest:P )

Edited, Dec 25th 2007 9:14pm by Chosenorc

First off, this thread is an awesome idea. Every job forum should have it.

Second, I recently rerolled a priest and who is currently lvl 15, wand spec seems very helpful since solo'ing priest isn't the easiest and wands are decent damage.
Also, I don't have the insight of a lvl 70 but how is improved inner fire a waste? At level 70 it would grant almost 500 additional armor on the caster, is it because priests are rarely confronted?

Lastly, as a holy priest would it be worth having both Healing focus and Martyrdom, or might that be overkill?

Edited, Dec 25th 2007 3:29pm by SixthAcolyte

Wand Specialization is really really handy.

Force of Will is a PvP offensive disc priest talent. However, people make Disc priests as PvP healers, so they skip Force of Will.

Martyrdom is PvP only, it's terrible in PvE, as mobs generally have only a 5% crit chance and will not proc if you absorb the crit with your Power Word: Shield, which should almost always be up while soloing.

Improved Inner Fire is not worth 3 talent points that can be better spent elsewhere.

"Improved Mind Blast" would be my addition to the Shadow tree. 5 points just to get one 1.5 seconds off the cool-down? I would sooner run away to save myself that time, if it meant I can put those points into something more useful.

I want to disagree about Improved Inner Fire. Anything that builds defenses, and therefor the usefulness of Power Word: Shield, can be a good thing.
If the spell's benefits were only in the triple digts, I might agree, but at Rank 7 we get 1580 (0.3 x 1580 = 2054). For a class that can only use cloth armor, Inner Fire can nearly double our armor at 70.

TALENTS EVERYONE SHOULD AVOID:
--> Lightwell.
Proper employment requires that OTHER people take responsibility for their healing, and other people suck at this. There are lots of other demerits against Lightwell, but this is the real problem.

--> Improved Fade.
Fade is not something you should be using on every cooldown. If it IS something you're using on every cooldown, find a better tank.

--> Holy Reach.
It increases the range of your Holy nukes. But who cares? It makes negligible difference while leveling, and Smitelol is not an endgame spec. Increasing the radius of Holy Nova and Circle of Healing is not good, either.

--> Mental Strength.
Increasing your base mana is less useful than it sounds. For a shadow priest, most of your mana comes from Spirit Tap (while leveling) or Vampiric Touch (while raiding). For a non-shadow priest, regeneration (between and during heals) is where you get your mana. And while leveling, the extra capacity of your pool spends most of the time being empty. There are two reasons to get this talent: to satisfy the prereqs for PI, and for PvP. And even for PvP, you really ought to get PI to make it worth it.

TALENTS TO AVOID FOR LEVELING
--> Any talent that works with crits, namely Blessed Resilience, Blessed Recovery, Shadow Resilience, Focused Will, and Martyrdom.
Mobs don't crit nearly often enough for them to be useful. Also avoid for end-game PvE specs, as mob crits will usually fold you in half.

--> Empowered Healing.
I say this merely because it's possible to pick up this talent before you have any real amount of +healing. Deep Holy is not a leveling spec, but that's beside the point; if you DO go deep Holy for leveling, hold off on EH until you get significant +healing.

--> Absolution.
Dispelling isn't a common enough mechanic while leveling, or even in low-level instances, to make this worth it, particularly since you don't have Mass Dispel yet. Mental Agility is far superior at such levels.

TALENTS TO AVOID AT END-GAME
--> Wand Spec.
This is invaluable for leveling, given that wand damage is very significant while questing and grinding. At end-game, it's peanuts.

--> Smitelol talents, namely Searing Light and Focused Will.
Smitelol just isn't an end-game build; there's too much working against it. Surging Light is still alright because it procs off of heals and is only two points, but the other two just aren't justifiable.

Improved Mind Blast gives 2.5 seconds off cooldown. And it is extremely useful, if you use MB whenever it is up. With my experience, MB only having a 1.5 sec casting time makes it useable basically everytime it's up, even in raids when there is splash damage. I'd say get 2/5 or 4/5, don't bother with anything other than that, that way it fits nicely into a rotation.

Also, Imp. IF, is USELESS. In raids, if you get hit, you're dead. Not half dead, not "health low" but dead. In PvP, using 3 talent points that could be put into infinitely more useful talents just to get ~3% damage reduction, is quite simply, one of the dumbest things you could do.

And I'm almost positive martyrdom procs on absorbed crits, just like Zip said. I know this because I can recall times when I've had my shield up and martyrdom procs. I may be wrong though.

Right, it is useless and I do agree that martyrdom is not a very good talent, but I could have sworn that I've had it proc while my shield is up. But, I've only played with martyrdom for maybe 2 weeks, so you'd know better.

First off, he said in raids, meaning PVE. IIF will not stop a Kara boss from one-shotting you.

Second, Improved Inner Fire doesn't come *close* to doubling your armor at level 70. Max rank Inner Fire gives you 1580 armor; putting 3 points in IIF adds just 474 armor to that. My priest has 1122 armor at level 67. Assuming he had the same gear at level 70--and who will?--IIF would give him about 17.5% more armor.

Which leads to the most important flaw of IIF: it doesn't scale. A T6 priest gearing up for the Sunwell gets the same amount of armor from it as does a fresh 70 stepping into normal Mechanar for the first time. That extra 474 armor is worth little enough for the latter priest--for the former, it's pathetic. Heck, you get that about much armor on a single piece of S3 gear.

IIF just isn't worth putting 3 points into it considering it's mid lvl in the disc tree. If it was a tier 1 or even tier 2 then I could see people being able to justify it on their way to IF and Meditation, but really, there is no reason to go any higher than those two talents for a little bit of armor.

After browsing PVP builds of Priests in the upper ranks of Arena 3v3, etc... I noticed that none of them choose to put points into Reflective Shield or Improved Divine spirit. Can someone explain how these abilities would fail in pvp compared to other talent possibilities

Great explanation, thanks for the clarity

Replies first:
- Force of Will, Holy Reach, Surge of Light, Searing Light: Holy damage talents. They should be avoided if you're serious about either healing or damaging, but they make an excellent choice for some bg whoring or 5-man fun for the bored holy raider, especially if they start getting the good caster drops that the main casters don't need. Holy Reach is semi-useful for a raiding CoH priest, but that's it for raiding.
- Lightwell: Pretty much useless. Whether going IDS or CoH, there's better places to put it. The most use it has is throwing it near a couple locks on fights where AoE is predictable. In other words, not worth the talent.
- Improved Inner Fire: PvP only, and a waste of points even there. Take an undergeared (honor only) priest, 1439 armor with gear + base agility. Inner Fire brings that up to 3019, or 22.24% mitigation. Three points in IIF bring this up to 3493, or 24.86%. That's best-case - the %reduction goes down as the priest gets S3 gear because of the way armor scales (more around 2.2% with most of the best gear). Three talent points for an extra ~2.62% mitigation? I don't think so, there's better places to spend those points on.
- Martyrdom: Good for PvP, bad everywhere else. It does provide extra protection beyond shield, though, because a shield can be broken through (painfully easily at 70).
- Improved Mind Blast: Staple of every raiding shadow priest. Getting 4/5 post-Kara and 5/5 with T6 means noticeable increases in your DPS, but this is one of the talents that's most up tot he individual. Best place to test it is respec, have no points in IMB, and go at Dr. Boom until you run oom. Then keep putting points into it IMB one at a time, mana up, and try again. Stick with the number that seems to fit best for you (generally 1/5 or 4/5). Also taken 2/5 by arena spriests just to get deeper in the tree.

My own additions:
- Absolution and Healing Prayers: Unless your build somehow prevents you from getting it, it's better to spend points in Mental Agility instead of either of these two.
- Silent Resolve: Situational. The dispel protection is useful for PvP, but at a large talent cost. The threat reduction becomes mostly useless by the time you're in Outland (though can be useful in PuGs), and in raids it does little more than determine which healer dies first during a wipe.
- Shadow Resilience: Waste of talent points on par with Improved Fade.

And general rules that some people violate (though admittedly some people have fun doing the following, but it's generally a bad idea):
- 23+ points in Disc: Not for serious PvE. Goofing off with friends, smitespec, or soloing sure, but not in heroics and certainly not in raids.
- Holy/Shadow: No. Don't do it. Pick one, stick with it. Shadow heals fine until 70, and splitting the points means you're giving up solo ability for something you already do well. If you're determined to do both, go with a smite-based spec.
- Mind Flay + Non-shadow: NO. Flay is near-worthless without the huge %dmg increases deeper in the tree. A deep shadow's flay will be doing as much as 46% more damage than one that stops at Flay.

It's not so much that priests ignore Discipline; it's that non-priests ignore Discipline. All that they've heard is Shadow does massive damage, Holy is great at healing. Discipline is endurance- how cool could that sound?

Shadow: "I unload a ******** of damage. I melt faces."
Holy: "That last heal just crit for over nine thousaaaaaaaaand!"
Discipline: "Uh... I pee mana?"

I love my Discipline priest. But people are simply ignorant of its mana conservation and survivability, ignorant of the lack of downtime and impressive buffer against error.