Say WHAT?Follow

Ghostcrawler sez:



Source.

Huh?

The entire spec is built around "pre-healing." WTF is the point of a Disc priest who uses Shield as an emergency button? Holy has stronger direct heals, so if both specs are going to be built around direct heals, why would you stay Disc? For the Smite talents? Are they setting it up to be some sort of hybrid damage-healing spec? Mitigation healing was a fabulous innovation to healing. I have no idea why they would backpedal on it now.

I really wouldn't mind as much as I should as long as we keep Rapture as it is now.

And get a few encounters where it's still viable through perfect shield timing, sort of like the Lich King.

I sort of figured the whole idea about Disc was doing just that. I know that we can do fairly well in most situations just spamming shields almost mindlessly right now and if we do get into mana trouble we've got Hymn and Fiend and potentially druid friends to innervate us (they always innervate the shaman, though!) and I honestly think we're better off without that. Smart shield spamming is awesome, though, and makes me happy, so I never ever want to lose that.


I have an idea!

They could make Rapture so that it only procs when our shields are broken in a really short time (say, 2-3 seconds) but remove the cooldown. Disc right now (apart from the mindless faceroll easy encounters) is too much about thinking far ahead rather than reaction closer to the time something is actually happening.

I don't know.

I'm not happy about this. I seriously hope they do something to make Disc more interesting without losing its flair, and I'm just brainstorming here.

It's actually quite rare to see Shield be 80% of what we do, honestly. It rarely goes over 60%, from what I've seen.

I'm nitpicking here and it's still a huge part of what Disc is at the moment, but you're still exaggerating. :P



I really want to see them balance spells the way they're talking, though. I really don't think it'll be easy. We'll end up with 2-3 main spells again, probably.


Also note that GC didn't say that we won't use it much at all anymore. Just not as much. I do hope they expand on stuff like avoiding to shield tanks. It's such a brilliant, complex spell and I wouldn't want that to change.



Plus, with the base mana cost decreasing, if they don't make the level 85 gear very light on mana efficiency stats, it might not be as bad as we fear.

I'd be happier with the first. We already have emergency spells. I don't need another one - especially not one that soaks up a huge portion of my talent points.

But he also said
"PW:Shield will probably go back to being more of an emergency button and less of the survivability buff it gets treated as today. "

Which leaves us with basically nothing. Which brings me back to the statement of my previous post - it depends on how far they take it. I'm not one to hang on words, but if they nerf PW:S down to holy-level as disc it's going to be outright awful and everything Teacake just said applies. That much I do know for certain.

I think the point some of you are missing is that shield spamming in progression raiding isn't the same as shield spamming in the rest of the game.

Basically if you shield the wrong person, or the right person at the wrong time, you lose. At least if you do it often enough. That's where it gets interesting again and that's what I'd like to see more.


Simple way of accomplishing this would be to make mana an issue and therefore Rapture more important. This is currently only important in very long fights. I'd like to see it gain more importance.
Shield spamming while trying to optimise Rapture procs also means we have fairly long periods where we need to not cast PW:S, making more room for other spells without actually changing PW:S for the worse.

What he's talking about is a practice that (in my opinion) mostly applies to 'farm' fights in raids - fights that you get down in, say, 6 minutes or less, give or take. You can spam PW:S in mediocre gear for that amount of time.

In longer fights, it isn't feasible anymore like that.

If you look at the Lich King encounter, there is a raidwide AoE he casts periodically (Infest). It also adds a DoT that only falls off if the target is above 90% health. In ICC25 and on Heroic Mode especially, the AoE hits for enough to instantly break any shields, allowing for Rapture to proc on all of them at once, giving a huge mana return. You want to avoid proccing Rapture less than 12 seconds before the next Infest. Pre-shielding the raid also prevents people from getting the DoT, so it's win in every imaginable way.
The thing is, the fight is so long that you can run OOM quite easily work if you don't strategically proc Rapture like that. So you wouldn't shield tanks if there's a chance their shield breaks when Rapture is off cooldown and the next Infest is happening soon.

I just found an addon that tracks my Rapture ICD, going to try it out tomorrow, it should make the whole deal much easier.

To clarify further, at my current gear, this strategy still works on 25man Normal Mode, but can get tricky if too many people resist and have talents like Spell Warding (other classes have them, right?). For 25man heroic mode, you will find that many Disc priests regem pure Spell Power (down to the meta) because at that level, a priest should be able to proc Rapture efficiently enough to not need other kinds of Mana Regeneration, and the Infest damage is high enough.


So basically, I would love to see more Lich King encounter style shield spamming, but the "normal" farm content kind is overpowered and boring.



I've also heard that 'fixing Rapture' is impossible due to server lag, so I'm hopeful that they won't remove it completely and will make it as central a part of our shielding strategy as possible. I think it's an amazingly interesting and fun mechanic.

Are you shielding the tanks, as well?
Not actually having done the fight yet, I was preparing for something like pre-shielding non-tank raid members before Infest and spending a good part of the rest of the time tossing other high HPET spells on the tanks or people who need it for other reasons (high HPET spells being Penance, ProM and Renew, mainly). With shields on the tanks only if it can't proc Rapture or can't be avoided.

Another GC quote to helpfully alleviate some of the panic-



http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/25626107959/save-power-word-shield/

Although I don't know if I should after your line about priests vs druids... consider yourselves lucky you have the best cookies