New beta patchFollow

Smite healing was fun while it lasted.

At 5 talent points the Smite suite of talents will be very expensive and will make Atonement not worth the investment at the very least. The whole suite was worth it because you could heal with it, now its only worth Smiting to keep up stacks for AA. Especially for 10 man raiding.

At the same time holy can use AA as well. Heck holy can grab every PW:S talent except SoS. So Disc losses PW:S as a signature spell. The change also lowers the value of ToT as Smite can't be used as reliably as the healing will be too weak when it is just you and one other person healing.

The changes will push me out of the Smite suite all together. Something like this.

Disc is starting to resemble a ship floating in the ocean without a sail or engine.

I don't think Blizz does either.

How is Smite free? It has twice the cost of Heal and roughly half that of FH last I checked.

The main issue I have is the confusing part as you said. The whole AA deal works better with higher Smite usage given the talent investment. The change pushes Smite usage down. At that point I'd simply move into Heal based disc with PW:S on the tank and for spikes. More of a shift to tank based healing setup than raid/smart healing with Smite.

The tree just doesn't know what is doing with itself is my only beef. I still wont leave Penance.

If smite doesn't heal enough, it is going to become simply another shadow fiend. As far as I am concerned, I am much more excited about "smite healing" than "smite healing too little"

Exactly. AKA: your Smites are free. They even give mana once you hit a certain amount of intellect.


Ohh, but you're argueing preference? I'm just trying to find out which one of the two is best, and I haven't discarded Smite yet. A nerf is always bad there, obviously, but I'm just trying to point out that it's not as bad as it seems. Even with Atonement's heals cut in half, it should still pump out roughly as much healing as spamming heal, making it a tempting choice due to all other benefits it gives you.

Apparently what's up with Atonement is that mmo-champion messed up.

If you're into Atonement for 2/2 it's just like it was.

After being wrong all day, their notes state:



Which only makes me want to rant about how many times they can be wrong about something and still maintain any credibility. I know, I know. They get a lot of stuff right. Still, it's extremely annoying.

Only because I feel I must, the changes to Shadow Mastery look pretty good. Definitely an improvement over what was before. For those who don't know the 0% is a placeholder as is 'until canceled'. It appears as if once you consume your orbs with MB/MSp there's a buff called "Empowered Shadow' or something similar that runs 15 seconds and increases periodic damage on just about all damage spells except for Shadowfiend and SW:D. There's a lot more about Shadow Orbs being a passive talent you get at level 10 as well as what's in the description above.

At least that's how I understand it at midnight while barely able to hold my eyes open. I'll be the first to admit I may have this incomplete or wrong in some way. In any case, spriests are gleefully testing things out on the beta tonight (bastards) and there will be a lot more information tomorrow.

Night :)




Edited, Nov 4th 2010 3:04am by Moanique

It is good news, but I still think it's worth noting that when people (not just us, we weren't the only ones talking about this) think there's going to be a nerf to Smite, they seriously consider dropping the spec. Would there be a similar reaction wrt speccing Holy if there was a nerf to any one single spell? Probably not on the same scale.

Point being, whether it's Shield or Smite, they need to stop making the tree revolve around one spell, then suddenly remembering that they don't want us spamming just one spell, so nerfing that one spell and thereby throwing the tree into chaos.

I try not to put too much stock in specifics at this early stage and look at overall theme. They moved from absorption healer to damage healer. It would probably fit their model if they just balanced the two, so Disc became the absorptiondamage healer. Which may actually be their intent, since the mastery still points at absorption. Maybe it's a matter of tweaking both Shield and Smite until they're equally useful for different things. Right now I think they're actually competing with each other more than complementing each other.

Shield your target then go DPS for a bit, hmmm, sounds familiar. It's what I've been doing in PVP for months (before the patch). Extend that model to PVE and work it out so the Disc priest isn't over-reliant on Shield, but must also choose when and for how long to Smite (with consequences for choosing poorly). Throw in the other buttons particular to the spec(Penance, PI, PS, PW:B if it didn't suck) and you'd have something going there.

Well, they said they don't want us spamming just one spell - we didn't anyway.

All healers now have access to talents that allow them to dps without loosing much/any mana (see below). In Cata, as far as I understand it, we won't be able to sustain constant healing without going oom, but healers can dps between heals if they spec into these talents. Our talents grant us the additional benefit of background healing, in theory that's a good thing, in practice we're not sure how much we should be using it. I think come Cata, it'll all be about finding a balance that works.


Druids:
Fury of Stormrage - Reduces the mana cost of your Wrath spell by 50/100%, and when you deal damage with your Wrath spell you have a 6/12% chance to cause your next Starfire to be instant cast within 8 sec

Shamans:
Telluric Currents - Your attunement to natural energies causes your Lightning Bolt spell to restore mana equal to 40% of damage dealt

Palas:
Denounce - Reduces the mana cost of Exorcism by 38/75%. In addition, you have a 25/50% chance when casting Holy Shock to make your next Exorcism spell instant and cost no mana


Edited, Nov 4th 2010 12:27pm by Callu

Yeah, I still hear you here. I remember the last time I popped PW:B, on the melee on the Saurfang fight. The shield literally disappeared before it had grown to full size. I literally did not even notice it being up. I just lost 2K mana and I had something on CD.

I guess the idea will work better in Cata, but really, it currently is worse than Light Well used to be. As we're all priests here, I guess I don't have to explain the magnitude of this comparison.

We don't speak of that god-awful thing here.

Edited, Nov 4th 2010 10:12pm by IDrownFish