New talent evaluation.Follow

So the new talents are here, and much looks the same-- namely, Shadow is a tight and coherent tree, Holy is strong, and Discipline is a mess.

SHADOW

Shadow got some nice buffs. One of the most noticeable is Improved Spirit Tap. Shadow priests have long complained that raiders get no benefit out of either tier-1 talent; now they do, and all leveling priests have access to a superior talent for the same cost. Both facets of the new talent work well with decent spirit scores, and they also bolster the new talent Twisted Faith. It looks like Blizzard is trying to reemphasize Spirit as the priest class' defining statistic, and these changes go in that direction.

Pain and Suffering looks like a nice talent until you think about one important thing: spell haste. We need to test this, but it looks as the talent could keep Shadow Word: Pain from actually ticking off damage. Even a single point of spell haste would cause back-to-back Mind Flays to refresh Pain before it ticked. More research is required to see if this is actually the case.

Dispersion looks quite nice. Shadowpriests have frequently had mana issues in the long fights; this talent addresses that issue and adds a nice PvP survivability tool in the bargain. Speaking of which, Improved Shadowform and Psychic Horror are both very nice PvP talents, addressing two long-running priest requests (Fade's uselessness in PvP and the proliferation of fear breaks, respectively).

Add in the new reported shadow spell, Mind Sear, which provides AoE capability, and the outlook is bright for shadow priests. Shadow remains one of the best specs of any class for leveling, PvP talents have been added, and both mana and damage buffs are in abundance.

HOLY

Improved Holy Concentration and Serendipity are TREMENDOUS talents. Imp. HC not only provides a larger benefit than the base talent (yielding a whopping 16% proc chance), but the spell haste effect really pushes it over the top. That means one out of every six heals gives you a freebie, and the odds of back-to-back procs (yielding even longer regen periods) are far higher. Wow.

Serendipity is potent, also. The ten second cooldown is mandatory to prevent rampant abuse. In fact, combined with Imp. Holy Conc, the prospect is raised of *gaining* mana by healing. It's absurd.

Test of Faith is nice, though not mandatory. It gives you a high probability to proc Inspiration and be the hero who saved the tank. It's probably far better in raids than in the relatively controlled environment of a five-man.

I'm not thrilled with Divine Providence. For one thing, it seriously pales in comparison with Spiritual Healing back on tier6. Sure, it stacks with Spiritual Healing. But still, not crazy about it, especially considering the reworking of Circle of Healing.

Ah, yes, CoH. This talent was much-decried when introduced, then adopted by the majority of healing priests as nigh-mandatory. Now the talent that was deemed so unworthy has been recognized as deserving a six-second cooldown. My, how things change. History aside, the new CoH is a "smart" heal that heals out-of-group and chooses low-health people first, but it's no longer the spammable easy-mode spell it is now. It requires a bit more thought to use.

And since we're talking about AoE healing, let's revisit Lightwell too, shall we? The new Lightwell has a shorter cast time, a better healing/mana ratio, has more charges, and has changed to break on only direct damage (rather than any damage). All these are welcome changes, but they still do not address the fundamental problem priests have had with Lightwell from day one: It requires other people to take responsibility for their healing, and other people suck at this. Blizzard may be testing the waters to see just how far they have to tweak the numbers to make it acceptable. There may be a point where this is achieved, but... I just don't know.

Finally, Guardian Spirit. It's definitely a spell that demands thoughtful use, due to its ten second duration and 3-minute cooldown, but the potential to allow a tank to survive otherwise catastrophic damage is worthy of consideration. The problem is the same problem Pain Suppression faces in a raid setting-- by the time you realize a tank is about to take huge hits, oftentimes it's too late to salvage. Reactive abilities are very hard. Still, definitely worth trying out; I'm sure some fights will see this used quite a bit.

DISCIPLINE

Tier1 Discipline has been revamped, finally dumping Wand Spec in favor of the new Twin Disciplines. This talent is nice for everyone. Since all priests go to Discipline at least through Meditation, all priests have a satisfactory talent at tier1-- Twin Disciplines for PvE, Unbreakable Will for PvP. Silent Resolve gets buffed (same effect for fewer talent points), as does Mental Strength. Mental Strength's buff is doubly good, since not only is the amount increased, but boosting Intellect increases the priest's regen rates and crit chances.

Enlightenment also got buffed, providing a 5% spell power increase; in effect, you really are now 5% more of a priest when you get the talent. It's also now more accessible, by which I mean it replaces Force of Will. Power Infusion's cooldown is lowered, Pain Suppression's is raised.

Replacing Enlightenment at the 35-point position is Rapture... a talent that requires serious math to evaluate. The principles are this:
--If you overheal a lot, Rapture is useless. If I read this right, only actual healing done returns mana.
--If your gear sucks, so does Rapture. The value of Rapture scales with healing done, which scales with your +healing. If (using level 70 values) I Flash Heal for 2500, I get 50 mana back from Rapture. That's a substantial chunk of the 470 mana cost of Flash. However, if it was a 2000 health Flash, I get 40 mana back. This is a talent that pays for itself only with volume; 10 mana here and there make quite the difference.
--A straight comparison of Imp. Holy Conc. to Rapture is difficult. Imp. Holy Conc.'s major advantages are the 5-second rule time and the allowance for the free heal to be a biggie. However, if we assume you do nothing but Flash Heal constantly, then it takes seven heals for Imp. Holy Conc. to "earn back" 470 mana. For 2500-point Flashes, it requires almost 10 heals to earn back the same... assuming no overhealing.
--Let's rerun that experiment with GHeal. With 5k GHeals at 700 mana each (counting talents), IHC earns you 700 mana after six heals. Rapture will get you 700 mana after... 5.6 heals, under perfect conditions.
--Holy Conc. does not affect Shield, which Rapture does.

Conclusion: Rapture is nice to have if you have good gear and don't overheal much and use PW: Shield a lot. That means single-healer scenarios or PvP. In multi-healer scenarios, if your gear is poor, or Shield is out of your repertoire, Imp. Holy Conc. is FAR superior... but Rapture isn't poor.

I like Aspiration myself, but it's hard to dig up the talent points for it in this part of the tree. 3-minute cooldowns become 2:24, while 2-minutes become 96 seconds. Nice, but hardly mandatory.

Grace is very nice. It seems more PvE oriented, frankly-- with the higher amounts of damage and higher amounts of healing meted out in a raid environment, Grace would be quite noticeable. Plus, keeping it up would be easier, as opposed to a PvP environment, where being able to sit down and toss off three Flash Heals is often in doubt. Early reports are that Penance, consisting of three seperate hits, allows a quick stacking of Grace effects... about which more later.

Divine Aegis is yet another attempt to persuade priests to value spell crit. Good luck with that. I've heard people rave about it but I'm not sold. PvP sure, it drives warriors to distraction and gives a disproportionate benefit at the minimal exposure (i.e. fewest casts). But Shield, Renew, and PoMending are more frequently used, and none of them benefit from crit. For PvE, it screws up your tank's rage generation and its inherent unpredictability is problematic. Penance is also mentioned in conjunction with this talent... about which more later.

The tree's penultimate talent is Borrowed Time, which increases the thickness of your Shield and reduces its GCD. This bothers me. It's *another* five-point talent that revolves around Shield. This means that a huge number of talent points can be tied up in boosting PW: Shield... but 1/3 of the classes in the game can dismiss Shield with a single spell. The other thing is that, even with all of these talents invested in Shield, it still isn't a PvE spell.

Finally, Penance. Penance, Penance... what to make of it? The debate rages on. For a PvP-oriented talent tree, Penance is almost a liability, seeing as it exposes our primary defense (Holy spells) to a crippling lockout. It follows people around pillars, which is nice. Also, because it has three distinct hits, each hit will proc Grace, and each hit will have its own chance to crit and proc stuff. This is nice for Inspiration, but I'm not happy with it for Divine Aegis; the ensuing shields would be pretty small. As a healing spell, it's not as efficient as a GHeal, but the first bit of it comes in earlier than even a Flash. It's usable as a nuke, but to get it you have to give up Spiritual Guidance and Surge of Light. I can't make heads or tails of it... which makes an apt analogy for the Discipline tree as a whole.

In the final analysis, Discipline is still a PvP tree that doesn't know what its PvE focus is supposed to be; a conglomeration of talents that don't compare favorably to either Shadow's damage or Holy's healing. It's not even the tree of mana endurance anymore; while Meditation is still tremendous for healbots and shadowlovers alike, both of those builds have talents that more than trump Disc (Serendipity and IHC in Holy, Dispersion and Imp. Spirit Tap in Shadow). I don't know. It'll be fun to level with, but I can't see myself staying Disc at 80.

Edited, Jul 22nd 2008 11:23pm by ChahDresh

Dispersion gives you 36% of your mana back over 6 seconds. That's a hefty chunk. To make it even better, toss in a potion in the Dreamless Sleep school (since Dispersion means you're not nuking during that time, anyway). The combined effects are potent.

For PvP, I don't see it really as much of a tool for regaining your health, for exactly the reasons you mentioned (healing debuffs). For my money, it's a tempo move... something you do to buy you six seconds while your Shield and Psychic Scream are on cooldown. Also allows you to survive focus-fire in the mode of Pain Suppression. Naturally, if the enemy is not stacking healing debuffs on you, the mana and health regen are good... again, 36% in six seconds is a good chunk.

Anyway, if you're complaining about Shadow's 51-point talent being underwhelming, one word: Penance.

A refresh doesn't stop ticks.


Also Pain and Suffering reduces SW:D damage you receive. Combine that with imp spirit tap and SW:D is even more worthwhile in most rotations.

For shadow, raids:

The first thing to discuss is that VT is not only 2% of damage, not 5%. That's a *huge* drop in mana efficiency; at the 1300dps I can push right now unsupported (no bloodlust/totems), I'm dropping a full 195mp5. That's huge.

To counteract these this nerf, we now get a combination of Improved Spirit Tap, changed Shadow Focus, and Dispersion, in addition to simply having more spirit on gear. Plus simply doing more straight damage, which I'll get to.
- Improved Spirit Tap: Every time you crit with Blast or Death, your spirit gets increased by 50% and you regen 50% of your spirit regen during that. For me, right now at 70, amounts to about 500 extra mana every time I crit, in addition to an extra 15 or do +dmg. Considering how much more intellect and spirit WotLK gear appears to have, this will be an incredible boost in the expansion.
- Shadow Focus: Shadow Focus now reduces mana costs of all shadow spells by 6%. Just spamming Flay that's an extra 20mp5 at level 70, and of course more at 80, and you certainly won't just be spamming Flay.
- Dispersion: 36% of your mana returns over 6 seconds. This is a "oh god I need mana" button, or more usefully, use it during any luls in combat (for example, when other people have the Curator adds under control, when you're waiting to push Mag or Illidan down to 30%, running from Leo the Blind, etc). This gives you a chance to pp one of the new Dreamless Sleep pots, and gives you a tick or two of full spirit regen. Combined, this amounts to a huge chunk of mana we gain back.

Shadow Focus: While improving out mana efficiency, it only gives 3% to hit instead of 10% like it used to. That means it's going to be harder to gear up as a shadow priest than it was, and limits exactly how much we scale versus other classes. Depending on how WotLK gear ends up, this might be good (gear has tons of +hit that would otherwise be wasted) or put us with the mages and destro locks (gemming hit to cap ftl).

Shadow Word: Pain: Improved SWP now gives a straight 10% damage bonus. Not as good for multi-DoT'ing, but that doesn't matter much. However, because of the new Pain and Suffering talent, Mind Flay immediately "resets" your SWP counter. Some people seem to think that this means you may never get a tick off; that's not correct. The way it's supposed to work is that it simple adds enough more time onto your SWP to put it at the full 18 seconds, without interrupting the time to the next tick at all. For example:
0 - SWP Lands
2.9 - Mind Flay hits, refreshes SWP to 18 seconds.
3 - SWP ticks for the first time, with 17.9 seconds remaining until it runs out.
Whether or not it actually works like that on the Beta right now I don't know, but that's how it's supposed to work.

Pushback Resistance: 2 points in Improved Shadowform makes it so that whenever you're in shadowform, your spells get 70% pushback resistance. Rejoice!

Threat: Shadowform now reduces threat by an extra 25%, to make up for the removal/major reworking of Blessing of Salvation (now reduces a single person's threat by 10% of their current total over 10 seconds, on a 2-minute cooldown).

Spell Crits: Shadow Power now only gives 10% crit, rather than 15% crit, except our crits now hit for 175% base damage instead of 150%. Using current, level 70 ratings, that takes dmg:crit from a rough 1:6 to a rough 1:5, or 20% better. Still not worth stacking, but better than it was before. No need to worry yourself about SWD backlash either, as the same talent you use to make Flay refresh Pain reduces SWD backlash by 60%.

Other damage bonuses:
- Twisted Faith: 30% of our spirit gets turned into +dmg; currently in Sunwell gear that's about 10dmg/talent but at 80 it will be significantly more.
- Twisted Faith again: Every DoT you have up increases Blast and Flay damage by 5%. Undead Spriests rejoice for our extra DoT, and the gap between people who have 709-80% DoT uptime and those of us with 90%+ will become more apparent.
- Twin Disciplines: Extra 5% damage from the first point in Disc. Yay for more damage!

PvP Stuff:
- Dispersion: Helps you deal with those incredibly annoying melee trains and such, and when your healer gets majorly CC'd. Mostly damage prevention instead of healing.
- Shadow Resilience: Reduces physcial damage by 4%, rather than the worthless thing it was before.
- Improved Shadowform: Not only do you get pushback resistance, but Fade now removes all movement-impairing effects.
- Psychic Horror: First 2/4 seconds of Scream gets a Horror effect. Should be base of the spell, but whatever, it's better than the lolfest fear sometimes is currently.

Still, fade now has *some* use.

Well I guess you're right after all. I could of sworn it was on use of fade for 50%/100% before, might of been changed. Either way blizzard should really rethink how they word tool tips =\

You know, I had always said that when I hit 70, I would turn from Shadow to Holy...when I finally hit 70, I just couldn't do it, I love my Shadow Priest too much.

Now reading through these new talents (yeah, I know it's not finalised yet) I feel even more strongly about keeping her.

YAY!

*does a happy dance*