8926 a test of faith for Holy priests

If it hadn't already become clear that 8926 was a nerf build, looking at the list of Holy Priest changes would make it pretty obvious. Let's go over some "highlights," shall we?

• Twin Disciplines now only affects instant spells (previously affected all spells). This is utterly ridiculous. Alright, it may have been marginally overpowered before, but now it basically only affects five six spells: Renew, Power Word: Shield, Circle of Healing, Prayer of Mending, Shadow Word: Pain, and Shadow Word: Death. It no longer fulfills its function of being decent filler for people who aren't Disc to get to the next few tiers down.

• Improved Holy Concentration now increases the chance you'll enter Holy Concentration by 1/2/3% (down from 4/7/10%) and also increases your spell haste by 10/20/30% (down from 20/40/60%) on your next (down from "three next") Greater Heal, Flash Heal or Binding Heal spells after you gain Holy Concentration. Lasts 20 sec. So they took a talent that people were already complaining was underwhelming and hard to use, and cut it by two-thirds. Excellent.

• Test of Faith now increases healing by 2/4/6% (down from 5/10/15%) and spell critical effect chance by 2/4/6 (down from 4/7/10%) on friendly targets at or below 50% health. Same story as Imp. Holy Concentration. Why would they do that? I honestly don't understand.

It's not all bad, though; there are a couple of nice buffs in Holy:

• Empowered Healing changed to - Your Greater Heal spell gains an additional 8/16/24/32/40% (up from 2/4/6/8/10%) and your Flash Heal and Binding Heal gain an additional 4/8/12/16/20% (up from 1/2/3/4/5%) of your bonus healing effects. So compared to live, Empowered Healing is now doubled. Awesome, and it should make that talent viable even at lower levels of spell power now.

• Serendipity now refunds 8/17/25% (Down from 20/40/60%) of mana cost on overheal. It doesn't require you to overheal the target for more than 50% anymore. This is huge, in my opinion. Yes, the amount of the refund is down. But the number of times I overheal by less than 50% is masively larger than the number of times I overheal by more than 50%. This way I'll get 25% mana back on many (most?) of my heals, as opposed to 50% on a small number of them.

Although we have been nerfed considerably and some of the nerfs are really incomprehensible to me, I don't think the sky is falling. A lot of classes got nerfed in this build, and at some point the blues said that they're not really at the point of balancing classes against each other yet; they're just trying to make sure the classes are internally balanced. I'm fairly confident that we'll be fine by the time live comes around. Still, it hurts to see changes like this.

[changes via MMO-Champion]