Attonement Nerfs

[Storm 426]

Has anyone else noticed the attonement nerfs hitting priests much harder than just what was listed in the patch notes?

They claim the only changes were:

- Penance's damage is 90% of it's healing.

- Attonement was reduced to 90%

However I have noticed that all of my attonement healing is now hitting for a base healing amount on every spell. Unless I'm terribly mistaken, it used to be that if you crit on a damaging spell like smite, the attonement heal would also crit. and on bosses like Jin'rokh and Horridon when there is bonus damage, you would also get bonus healing out of it.

My attonement healing on both fights has gone from 80-100k down to barely 40k.

[aztekxero 1]

I haven't looked at specific numbers, but personally I really like the atonement change. It rewards priests who use the full toolkit available to them rather than the ones who just stack dps stats and only use damaging spells during a fight.

I actually didn't even really notice the nerf that much as atonement heals rarely account for over 30% of my healing.

[Krazyito 521]

I haven't looked at specific numbers, but personally I really like the atonement change. It rewards priests who use the full toolkit available to them rather than the ones who just stack dps stats and only use damaging spells during a fight.

I actually didn't even really notice the nerf that much as atonement heals rarely account for over 30% of my healing.

I don't want to be rude, but if atonement was that low on your healing before 5.3, you quite frankly were doing it wrong. Atonement is so strong for very low damage phases when there is no big damage going out on any particular target or the raid in general

I haven't played my disc yet since the patch so I don't have input as of yet.

[aztekxero 1]

I just started my priest recently and it was rare that atonement made up over 30-40% of my heals. Was this the "wrong" way to do it? Perhaps, but I noticed that I was able to consistently outheal other disc priests who had 60%+ atonement heals. But, maybe they were doing it wrong also, I don't know.

[Nemo 27]

"Doing it wrong" is so situational when healing that it's really very hard to point out.

When people die because of unavoidable damage the healers are doing it wrong.

More than anything else in this game healing is a team effort. Don't bother with right or wrong; just find out how to get a kill.

I haven't raided on my disc since the patch either, but I'd be very interesting to hear if anyone have had similar experiences as the OP.

If so my druid might be able to get to a decent hps on Horridon :P

[Krazyito 521]

Well. I suppose I was a bit to rash. Atonement was always my top heal, but I also wasn't dumb a just spammed it the entire fight. I used the other spells in my toolkit for when the damage called for it and atonement was the filler.

[Storm 426]

I typically use prayer of mending on cd on a tank, and shield on cooldown on both tanks. then I attonement heal (Pennance, Holy fire, Smite x4). if there's a large aoe phase I use cascade and spam prayer of healing. If the aoe is predictable then I'll start loading eveyrone up with spirit shell + prayer of healing about 5-10 seconds before the damage starts.

the place I'm noticing the the biggest difference is on Horridon and Jin'rokh. I can understand the horridon nerf, before 5.3 I could smite horridon for 200k by the 4th door, and then I would get a 200k heal on a random raid member. now I'll still smite the boss for 200k, but the attonement portion of the heal is a baseline 45k+/-

I'm not complaining that I want to do 200k hps on horridon, It was fun, but I understand it was way too OP. However I've noticed the same thing on all of the other fights. even if I get a crit smite for 100k without other damage bonuses from the fight, the attonement heal is still only 45k.

On some fights like say council or Megaera my attonement healing has only dropped by 15-20%. but on a fight like Horridon or Jin'rock I'm doing easily 50% less attonement healing than I was before.

Edited May 26, 2013 by Storm

[Krazyito 521]

I raided with my priest today for the first time since the nerfs, and my healing was consistently about 30% with atonement with normal rotation. Iron Qon I did a lot less eiht it because of the nature of the final phase.

I had and avg hit of about 33k and a 52k max hit for almost all fights.

[lozzer 0]

If it is not aware, they did change the way crit heals work for disc. Divine Aegis now causes critical heals to apply an absorb shield on the target for 100% of the amount healed instead of healing for twice as much.

[Krazyito 521]

If it is not aware, they did change the way crit heals work for disc. Divine Aegis now causes critical heals to apply an absorb shield on the target for 100% of the amount healed instead of healing for twice as much.

Yea, that change came in 5.2, but critical heals ALWAYS applied DA on the targets before. The difference now is that PoH does not blanket DA on the raid. and that atonement got a nerf in 5.3

[Keristrasza 0]

The atonement nerf was even harder then before due to the glyph change carryover, causing extra damage from smite on Holy fire-solace targets to no longer transfer into the extra healing,

Overall, it effectively nerfed atonement by about 30%, as you should be rotating the penance between tanks to keep stacks of grace on them and spot healing with it, rarely used on bosses, (not saying don't use on boss, penance should be used on CD)

And the 2nd major change that hit it, was (and very stealthy by blizz) that on fights where you had phases of extra damage done to boss, (horridon as a prime example) your higher hits would deal higher healing, (they nerfed it awhile back capping the bonus to a smaller amount, but never put that in patch notes, but now they completely did away with it, first few weeks of TOT, the 200% bonus on horridon was also doing a 200% heal, from atonement)