Yes, it's early. But here's 3.1 notes so far.Follow

Priests

Abolish Disease: Now cleanses a disease every 3 sec, down from 5. Duration reduced from 20 seconds, down to 12 sec.
Devouring Plague: This spell now has a new icon.
Divine Spirit is now trainable at level 31.
Holy Nova: Mana cost reduced approximately 20%.
Hymn of Hope: This spell has been removed.
Improved Holy Concentration removed.
Prayer of Healing: This spell now heals the target's party, rather than being limited to just your direct party.
Shadowfiend: Health scaling increased. Now receives 30% of the master's spell power. Mana return increased to 5%, up from 4%. The Shadowfiend now returns mana when its melee attacks land, rather than when it deals damage. Movement speed normalized to player movement speed. Tooltip revised.

Talents:

Discipline
Divine Aegis: Divine Aegis effects will now stack, however the amount absorbed cannot exceed 125*level (of the target). It will also now take into account total healing including overhealing.
Grace: Duration increased to 15 seconds, but now is only limited to one target.
Improved Power: Word Fortitude - Now also increases your total Stamina by 2/4%.
Meditation and Improved Power: Word shield have changed locations with each other.
Meditation: Now grants 17/33/50% of mana regeneration while casting
New Talent: Soul Warding: Reduces the cooldown of your Power Word: Shield ability by 4 sec., and reduces the mana cost of your Power Word: Shield by 30%.
Penance: Damage increased approximately 30%.This spell can now be cast on yourself.
Power Infusion: This effect now has a new spell effect and sound.
Reflective Shield:This talent has been removed.
Unbreakable Will:Increased from 3/6/9/12/15% to 6/12/18/24/30%.

Holy:
Circle of Healing: Healing increased by approximately 40%.
Holy Concentration re-designed: Mana regeneration is increased by 16/32/50% for 8 sec after you critically heal with Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal or Renew.
New Talent: Empowered Renew: Your Renew spell gains an additional 5/10/15% of your bonus healing effects, and your Renew will instantly heal the target for 5/10/15% of the total periodic effect.
Serendipity re-designed: When you heal with Binding Heal or Flash Heal, the cast time of your next Greater Heal or Prayer of Healing spell is reduced by 6/12/20%. Stacks up to 3 times. Lasts 20 sec.
Test of Faith: No longer increases critical effect chance of your heals, but healing done on targets lower than 50% health is increased from 2/4/6 to 4/8/12%.

Shadow:
Blackout: This talent has been removed.
Darkness: This talent is now in tier-1, moved up from tier-6.
Dispersion: Now clears all snare and movement impairing effects and makes you immune to them while dispersed.
New Talent: Improved Devouring Plague (Shadow): Increases the periodic damage done by your Devouring Plague by 5/10/15%, and when you cast Devouring Plague you instantly deal damage equal to 5/10/15% of its total periodic effect.
Improved Spirit Tap: Now grants 17/33% of mana regeneration while casting.
Shadowform: Now reduces all damage taken by 15%, not just physical damage. Bonus damage from critical strike chance removed and replaced by the ability of those periodic damage spells to generate critical strikes.
Silence: Range increased to 30 yards.
Spirit Tap: Now grants 83% of mana regeneration while casting.
Vampiric Embrace duration increased to 5 minutes, up from 1 minute. PvP duration is now 60 seconds. Cooldown removed.

Source

While I think im gonna like the new serendipity, I'm sure as hell gonna miss the old version.

Don't forget the glyphs, as some things just don't make any sense at all without them:



That some of the changes are in fact through Glyphs rather than talents is pretty sad, especially the Pain Suppression one. Making a compromise between a PvE Disc build and PvP Disc like it is currently possible won't really be an option anymore. You'd be nuts to go into a BG or arena without glyphed Pain Suppression, a glyph though that's utterly useless in PvE.

Quite similar, it would be idiotic NOT to use the Penance glyph, being that it is the most important spell a Disc priest has, regardless of whether interest lies in PvE or PvP.

So you end up with Shield, Penance, and Flash Heal in PvE, and Shield, Penance, and Pain Suppression in PvP.

That's all good and great if you want a PvE/PvP setup for your dual-spec. But it does keep you from having a DPS spec along with your usual healing setup if you want to do some PvP as well.

This is where I wish Blizzard would give those classes who can fill 2 or more completely different roles a THIRD spec to switch to. Otherwise - even if you make compromises in your build - you'll still be paying through the nose, this time for glyph switches rather than respec costs.

Introducing mandatory glyphs rather than tweaking the base talents seems wrong, and makes the developers look like hypocrites. It's them who keep talking about variety and options but who seem to deliver quite the opposite time and time again.

My main spec will naturally remain shadow. One thing to note on that is that the dot changes are theoretically a nerf (to be confirmed in testing). My offspec I think will be a deep discipline pve spec. The changes are looking really interesting to me, especially now that DA stacks up to 10k hp on level 80 targets.

I said it in the general forum, and I'll repeat it here.

They are adding a new glyph (Hymn of Hope) for a spell that is being removed. Makes perfect sense to me. /sarcasm

Even the description of the glyph is worded funny in my eyes.



"But it's duration is 50% shorter", they are saying that like it's a bad thing. Having to channel a spell for 8 seconds vs 4 seconds, hmmm give me 4 seconds thank you. 2% every 2 seconds for 8 seconds is an 8% return on mana, 6% every two seconds for 4 seconds is a return of 12%. So in my eyes it should say probably say "and" instead of "but", since "but" implies that there is a negative to go along with the positive, but both of those 3 times more mana return and 50% shorter channeling time are both positives in my eyes.

But since the spell is removed, well yeah...

Overall, interesting changes, can't wait for them.

I don't even know if I want to dual spec though, to be honest. I love holy. I have no intentions of PvP, so really no need to go Disc. I don't solo, and when I did, holy was fine, and in all my 80 levels, there was only 1 time where I've run into a case of "Well we have 2 healers, so either of you want to DPS instead" for there to be a need for me to go shadow. The option is there, which is great(I'll use it on my shaman for sure), but on my priest, I don't think I will be spending the 1k gold.

I will be going PVE Holy and Shadow... unless I am mistaken about discipline (I dont pvp)

I've been PVE Disc since 3.0 hit. Its a great spec, a little lacking in the throughput department but I've never felt underpowered in any raid i've done so far (up to 3 drakes... havent got that down yet)

But in the PTR notes they are removing rapture, which accounts for about 70% of my total mana regeneration (replenihsment is roughly 15%, rest is passive regen and other sources) I dont see disc recovering from this, since we dont have any way of gaining mana besides replenishment. We cannot stack int/spirit without lowering our already low throughput even more

And I figured shadow as my duel spec, since they are lowering OOC regen by 40% which, while it wont affect raiding at all, will make soloing anything much worse

I'll be going PvE holy and PvE shadow. Mainly because my guild wants me to be shadow for the moment, since dps are more needed than healers.

One of our guys got his character copy through today. Apparently dps is up by about 400-500 with no buffs. The shadowform talent is currently bugged though as we are getting both the crittable dots and the crit% damage bonus on dots effect that should have been removed. Needs a fixed version before we can test it properly.



This is most likely where they will be placing the Power Word:Barricade talent

Edited, Feb 26th 2009 4:47am by thegreatmothra

how about this:

Discipline

* Renewed Hope now also give you a 100% chance to reduce all damage taken by 3% for 20 sec to all friendly party and raid targets when you Power Word: Shield a friendly target.

That looks like ... OP!

I hadn't seen either of these last two in the original thread as not following all changes but all I can say is...

Bring on the OP then I can actually compete with my Shaman friend!

Eh?

And where is my PW: Barrier. I want it now. :-)

Bah, you go on a holiday for just a week and you miss all the exciting news. Well, I can't really form an idea of the talent tree yet so I guess I'll have to make one on a fansite. Unless somebody has seen one around?

Edit: Ah, never mind. I need to read all threads around here before posting. I'll come back to read all this after I finish my hotdogs.

Edited, Feb 28th 2009 7:31pm by Mozared