World of Warcraft Patch 3.2 Priest Guide

WoW.com has covered patch 3.2 extensively. Everything from the surprising changes to flying mounts, to the latest and greatest loot, and all the changes in between. In our patch 3.2 class, raiding, and PvP guides we take a look at exactly what changes and how the changes will affect your playing.

Here's a quick recap of what is known in the upcoming Priest changes for the 3.2 patch. There has not been a whole lot of changes to the Priest talent trees or to the talents themselves. But let's go over what we know:

Healing

The signature group heal for Priests (Prayer of Healing) has been nerfed significantly. The spell power percentage has been lowered from 80.7% to 52.6%. Ouch. That's a pretty strong blow. Prayer of Healing has helped me when I was participating in several of the Ulduar hard modes.

Discipline Priests are going to be annoyed since the cooldown of Penance has increased from 10 seconds to 12 seconds (thereby making the Glyph of Penance almost mandatory).

Lastly a change to Inspiration has it set so that when the buff is active, physical damage taken by targets is reduced by 3/7/10% instead of simply increasing the target's armor. That may not be a lot, but at least it's something positive.

Glyph of Power Word: Shield gains a minor change. It now has the ability to activate Divine Aegis.

Shadow

A cool change is that the cooldown on Dispersion has been reduced to 2 minutes (from 3 minutes). That should help Shadow Priests survive a little more whether they are raiding or hitting up battlegrounds.

The Improved Mind Blast talent has been redone and now adds a healing debuff component to it. It will continue to reduce the cooldown of Mind Blast by 2.5 seconds (fully talented). However, if you are in Shadowform, your Mind Blast has a 100% chance (fully talented) to reduce all healing done to the target by 20% for 10 seconds. Any heals your target gains while the debuff is active will be slightly negated.

Lastly, Vampiric Touch gains a buff. Damage dealt when the spell is dispelled is being doubled. That's a little over 1300 base damage at max level.

It seems like our shadowy brothers and sisters have gained improvements.

Mana regeneration

We're being hit with mana changes. In case you haven't read about it before, Replenishment now grants 1% of a target's maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second.

On the other hand, MP5 items are getting buffed. All items that provide MP5 are having their numbers increased by 25%.

Potential Priest Upgrades

Here's some cool stuff for Priests coming out of the Crusader's Coliseum and the vendors. Don't forget to check out the previous post on tier 9 healing bonuses.

Solace of the Defeated – Really nice looking trinket here. At full power, it can mean an additional 128 MP5 on top of what your Priest is sporting!

Misery's End – This mace does not have any MP5 or Spirit stats on it. By all rights, it favours DPS players. Should you find yourself with surplus maces, consider picking one up to play with.

Argent Resolve – On the other hand, here's a mana regen mace. This one comes out of 10-man.

That covers all the relevant stuff for Priests for the time being! A bit lackluster overall, I know. I'm really hoping they slightly increase that Prayer of Healing coefficient. I still feel that 50 something percent's a bit low.

WoW's Patch 3.2 ushers in the Crusaders' Coliseum, the Isle of Conquest, flying mounts at 60, and much more. WoW.com has all the patch information your Worgen obsessed mind can handle in WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2!