Number-Crunching on Beta WotLK ShieldsFollow

Rank 14 Power Word: Shield on the beta servers currently absorbs 2230 damage at the cost of 960 mana. That's an efficiency of about 232% of mana as absorbion, slightly better than the current max rank, 12, which has 210% efficiency (600 mana for 1265 absorbed). On top of that the spell has a coefficient of 30% of the priest's spell healing. Compared to Greater Heal, pretty inefficient.

Let's see what happens to those numbers with full discipline talents.

Take 3/3 Improved Power Word: Shield and max absorbion bumps up to 2564. Take 5/5 Mental Agility and cost dips to 864. Now the efficiency's up to 297%, still not all that good. That's about the efficiency of talented shields currently.

Now check out a WotLK talent that's on the beta realms, Rapture. At 5/5 points invested, this talent returns 25% of the damage absorbed by a priest's shield as mana. So assuming a shield is destroyed by damage in its 30 seconds of life rather than being dispelled or wasted, it will refund 641(!) points of mana. That brings the effective cost of the spell down to 223, an efficiency of 1,149%.

Not bad.

But it gets better.

PW:S adds 30% of spell healing to absorbion, which with Rapture also means an additional 7.5% of spell healing refunded. PW:S becomes *free* at around 2974 +healing, assuming it absorbs the full 3456 damage. That number sounds easily acheivable in the expansion. Then another talent changes *those* numbers. 5/5 Borrowed Time gives 20% more of your spell healing to absorbsion: 50% total, which is 12.5% refunded as mana with Rapture.

That means, that if you stack all those talents, PW:S becomes free at around 1784 +healing, and for every 8 points of +healing beyond that, you'll have a net gain of 1 mana.

Of course, in PVP you'll often lose that shield to the dispel effects of shamans, hunters, warlocks and your fellow priests before you get the full refund effect, even despite the dispel resistance of Pain Suppression and the newly boosted Silent Resolve. Still, druids, paladins, death knights and rogues will hate your free shields, as will mages (who can't afford to Spell Steal constantly) and warriors (who face the sad dilemma of spending rage to Shield Slam or starving on rage).

In PVE, constantly shielding your tank will win you the "worst healer evah!" award. But your free shields start to look pretty sweet for raid healing--raid protection, really, since shields offer certain advantages over heals, such as preventing pushback and bypassing healing-reducing effects. You can toss up a free shield every four seconds on the people who are going to take splash damage, buffering them and damaging the foe. In the 3 seconds between PW:S casts (its global cooldown is reduced to 1 sec thanks to Borrowed Time), you can toss around Renew and Prayer of Mending, or stack Grace on your tank via Penance, or slap down a Greater Heal, or whatever. Imagine how useful this could be in long fights with lots of AOE, especially if you're also doing DPS via Reflective Shield.

This is all theorycraft, I'm afraid. I don't have a beta key, and I don't know how it compares to the boosts the holy tree or the other healing classes are getting. And since it's all beta numbers, they might all change before they go live.

But from where I'm sitting now, this sure seems like a powerful new option for priests.


Edited, Aug 1st 2008 6:18pm by emmitsvenson

I was actually just plain wrong on the 10% coefficient...it's been 30% for a while now. (I corrected my original post.)

But as you say, yeah, in WotLK all healing spells with work off of spell power, plus an additional +88% built in to healing spells. That adjusted number is what I call "spell healing" in my original post. Divide by 1.88 to get the spell power equivalent. Thus, you'd need about 949 spell power for free shields at 70 with Rapture, Borrowed Time, Improved PW:S and Mental Agility.

pray for paly tanks.

Thing with Holy Nova is that it's still very mana inefficient though. I calculated it once, iirc it needs to heal at least 4 members in your party and damage 3 enemies before it's healing(+damage)/mana equals that of a greater heal.

With the advent of patch 3.0, the WotLK talent trees will go live, meaning we'll be able to try out the synergy between all the Priest shield talents. I'm hoping season 4 will continue so I can test a shield-heavy build in the arenas. Looks darn good on paper:

Shield Rank 12: 602 mana (23% of level 70 base mana), 1265 absorpion.

Talented: 542 mana (10% discount from Mental Agility), 1455 absorpion (15% bonus from Improved PWS)

Mana Recovered = (.14375 * spell healing) - 177, assuming max Rapture and Borrowed time.

That means talented level 70 shields are free at 1232 spell healing, and return about 1 point of mana per 7 points of spell healing above 1232.

Now, I realize that having them dispelled will suck. No problem: My arena partner(s) are good at lockdown...they'll target enemy Shaman and Priests first, slaughter Felhunters, and Arcane Shot is so not a problem.

I suspect these new talents will make a huge difference against the team I currently lose the endurance matches to: druid/war, druid/rogue, druid/hunter. I'll report back!

(Edited to correct my numbers, some bad math there)

Edited, Sep 2nd 2008 4:38pm by emmitsvenson

Okay, clearly the WotLK developers are determined to make me
put all my eggs in one bubble. From the latest inscription leakage:

Glyph of Power Word: Sheild - Your Power Word: Sheild also heals the target for 20% of the absorption amount.

That's 253 + 10% of your spell healing instantly healed with each cast at level 70, making the spell even more efficient and making dispels slightly less of an issue.

Rapture's been nerfed substantially. Now it returns up to 2.5% of max mana, or around 250 at level 70 for a 10k mana priest. That's only about half the cost of a level 70 shield, talented.

Oh well, still not bad.