WoD Update

[Gwenymph 414]

In case you missed it in the wall of text yesterday:

 

Divine Star can now be cast while moving but will keep it's cast time.

 

and

 

Secondary Stat Attunements

A new concept that we’re introducing is each specialization having an attunement to a particular secondary stat. These take the form of a passive ability that grants a 5% increase to the amount of a specific secondary stat gained. This provides a good starting point for where to focus your secondary stats. Usually, it will be your highest throughput stat (not counting Spirit for Healers, and Bonus Armor for Tanks, which is an optimal secondary stat in most cases). There are exceptions, and raw throughput may not even be the biggest concern in some situations. Treat this as a guideline, not a rule, about which secondary stat to favor.

 

• Priest
  • Discipline: Critical Strike
  • Holy: Multistrike
  • Shadow: Haste

[Espiee 161]

Not to mention the removal of SS, IF, ToT, and BT.

[Gwenymph 414]

I really liked lining up SS in SoO.  Wished the 4pc was a little more beneficial interacting with it.  Going to miss this mechanic.

[Gwenymph 414]

Priest

• Binding Heal is now only available to Holy Priests.
• Borrowed Time has been removed.
• Dispersion and Vampiric Touch no longer restores mana.
  • Base mana regeneration rate for Shadow Priest has been increased by 200%, Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch mana costs have been reduced by 50% to compensate.
• Divine Hymn now heals all party or raid members instead of a variable number depending on raid size. Its healing has been adjusted to compensate.
• Evangelism is now available only to Discipline Priests and no longer affects the damage or mana cost of spells. Damage of affected spells have been adjusted to compensate.
• Focused Will now triggers from any damage taken instead of being limited to being the victim of any damage above 5% of total health or being critically hit by non-periodic attacks.
• Inner Focus has been removed.
• Lightwell’s healing effect is no longer canceled if the target takes enough damage.
• Pain Suppression no longer reduces the target’s threat by 5%.
• Shadowform no longer allows any healing spells to be cast but also no longer has a restriction on casting other Holy spells.
• Spirit Shell has been removed.
• Strength of Soul has been removed.
• Train of Thought has been removed.
• Vampiric Embrace now heals all party and raid members for 10% of damage done, and this healing is no longer split between targets (up from 75% of damage done, split between targets).

 

 

Copy and pasted from my phone and it was not happy with me.  Here is an edited version of the rest of the changes.

[Espiee 161]

I posted all the priest changes over on H2P, I'll just copy them over here:

 

Updated patch notes:


Ability Pruning:
 

• Binding Heal is now only available to Holy Priests. no longer available to Shadow Priests.
     
• Borrowed Time has been removed.
     
• Dispersion and Vampiric Touch no longer restores mana.
         
• Base mana regeneration rate for Shadow Priest has been increased by 200%, Shadow Word: Pain and Vampiric Touch mana costs have been reduced by 50% to compensate.
     
• Divine Hymn now heals all party or raid members instead of a variable number depending on raid size. Its healing has been adjusted to compensate.
     
• Evangelism is now available only to Discipline Priests and no longer affects the damage or mana cost of spells. Damage of affected spells have been adjusted to compensate.
     
• Focused Will now triggers from any damage taken instead of being limited to being the victim of any damage above 5% of total health or being critically hit by non-periodic attacks.
     
• Inner Focus has been removed. no longer provides any mana cost reduction.
     
• Inner Will has been removed.
     
• Lightwell’s healing effect is no longer canceled if the target takes enough damage.
     
• Pain Suppression no longer reduces the target’s threat by 5%.
     
• Shadowform no longer allows any healing spells to be cast but also no longer has a restriction on casting other Holy spells.
     
• Spirit Shell has been removed.
     
• Strength of Soul has been removed.
     
• Train of Thought has been removed.
     
• Vampiric Embrace now heals all party and raid members for 10% of damage done, and this healing is no longer split between targets (up from 75% of damage done, split between targets).

 

Active mana regeneration scrapped:
 

Priest

 

• Atonement is no longer triggered by Penance.
     
• Chakra: Chastise in addition to existing effects, now also causes Smite and Holy Fire to restore 0.75% of the Priest's maximum mana each time they are cast instead of costing mana.
     
• Penance now also refunds 1.1% of the Priest’s maximum mana each time it deals damage.

 

Class specifics:
 

Level-90 Talents and Atonement
To get back to a balanced place, we've reapplied the AoE caps to the level-90 Talents, making them consistent with all other AoE heals, and reduced their effectiveness across the board. We’ve compensated for this in the tuning of Priest baseline heals.

Holy Changes

 

• Chakra: Chastise no longer grants a chance for Smite to reset Holy Word: Chastise’s cooldown.

Shadow Changes
The cooldown of Mind Blast has also been adjusted to make Haste more valuable for Shadow, and removes Haste breakpoints.

•   
• Mind Blast’s cooldown is now reduced by haste, but its base cooldown is now 9 seconds (up from 8 seconds).

Talent Revisions
Several talents were split into different versions by specialization. We revised the effectiveness of some of these talents to better balance talent choices on their row. We also swapped the Level-15 and Level-60 talent rows so players are presented with core Priest themed abilities earlier in the leveling process.

• Divine Insight’s effects have been split based on specialization.
     
• From Darkness, Comes Light has been split into Surge of Light for Discipline and Holy, and Surge of Darkness for Shadow for Shadow.
         
• Surge of Darkness now has a maximum of 3 charges (up from 2).
     
• Power Infusion now grants 25% Haste (up from 20%), but no longer increases damage (down from 5%).

Miscellaneous
We removed the Mana generation from Shadowfiend, in order to simplify it to being a burst-damage-cooldown.

• Inner Focus: No longer provides immunity to Dispels, Interrupts, and Silences. This effect will be returning as a Major Glyph.

 

 In addition they sacked our active mana regeneration

[Espiee 161]

I think we're about to see major changes come disc's way and I'm looking forward to see what they are doing with it. From what I've seen and heard alpha players say about disc is that it feels very incomplete compared to holy. Removing defining abilities from disc(Spirit Shell) and neutering others(Atonement), means they are likely to have another direction for the spec.

 

Hopefully it's still absorption centered and not based on the current version of DA.

 

One of the reasons I adore playing holy despite it's gimmicks is that the healing it does it wholly predictable and reliable., the major source of healing for discipline is based on a chance to proc(although you can stack your odds decently high in late expansions), hoping for your heals to crit. That kind of unreliability is not one I like in a healing class. What drawed me to discipline in the first place was frankly spirit shell. A powerful ability you could use to shield your raid team from harm, but still relied on you to know when exactly to use it, that and PWS are still the abilities that I like the most from discipline and what in my opinion makes it unique -- it's ability to reliably and potently shield our allies.

 

DA is the exact opposite of this and it's current power is derived primarily from us having very high crit percentages, unless we're going to see dramatical increases to crit percentages early in the expansion compared to previous expansions, DA is not going to a reliable source to prevent damage from hapenning. It will rather be icing on the cake.

 

Alternatively the developers might have made the realisation that absorbs will still be attractive even if neutered and even in the current healing model. Absorbs will always be beneficial given it's increase to effective health and so they are going to remove most of the absorb mechanics in the game, including Spirit Shell.

 

Either way, we just saw the beginning. They removed the abilities, now the exciting period of watching a spec become reborn is starting! Everyone prepare for the emotional rollercoaster.

[Brutalpriest 60]

Maybe.  I'm pissed though.  Killing off spirit shell?  Penance being severely gimped?  They'd better add some serious buffage or I'm just switching to shadow lol.

[Espiee 161]

From what I can see penance is anything but gimped. It heals for far more than other spells do.

 

Atonement over on MMO-C described it like this:

 

 

Numbers and tuning
I always analyze by healing per second, healing per mana, ratios of spells compared to each other, ratios of healing per health pool.
Penance ratio is way off in the overpowered departement. It's the only spell that does any real recovery when using on single targets or for aoe when used offensively. It's back to being a non-choice (always use offensively or you're a noob) now that it's doing Atonement healing again.
Ratios on penance are that it does friendly target 6000 total,offensive 4800 total; compared to heal&flash heal's 5500 and prayer of mending tick at 1100 (~1700 glyphed) per cast.

Other spells that cause atonement are doing smite 1200, holy fire 2200, pw: solace 2900 per cast minus the holy fire dot.
Holy nova is doing 700 per person (3700 for 5 ppl) and Prayer of Healing is doing 1800 per person (8850 for 5 ppl) per cast.
Archangel is too strong, and you're too weak when it's active. The gap between healing with it on and off should be a smaller margin. 10%-15% additional healing would be more appropriate.

Edited June 16, 2014 by steve

[Brutalpriest 60]

Nah, you're right.  On second thought perhaps it does make sense for it to not be an offensive spell.  I'll still miss it though.

 

I agree with the archangel comment.

 

I'm a little confused about the holy fire / PW:Solace thing though.  He seems to be claiming Solace does a lot more damage than Holy Fire, but I'll have to log in tomorrow to check for myself.  I thought they did the same everything except in regards to mana.

[Espiee 161]

Since they removed active mana regeneration it does interact with atonement again, doesn't it?