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Spiritual Guidance: Shadow priest mailbag for Cataclysm and 4.0.1
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Your host for the shadow-flavored Wednesday edition is, as always, Fox Van Allen -- an indestructible specimen of draenei might. In fact, there are only three things that can even dent his armor: saccharin hugs from his holy counterpart Dawn Moore, caramel corn and that stupid bug that kills you every time you try to enter the Maelstrom in the Cataclysm beta. I've noticed that an awful lot of people seem to be playing shadow priests these days. Way more, it seems, than back in the days of Ulduar. Now, that can mean one of two things: Either Blizzard has gone the distance and finally made shadow priests competitive enough and fun enough to draw in large numbers of new endgame raiders, or -- and I'm going out on a limb here -- my columns here have been just so popular that record numbers of priests are forsaking the light just to be more like Fox Van Allen. You can probably make a stronger argument for the "Blizzard fixed our class" reason, but that doesn't really do much for my ego or make a good segue into today's article. So, for the purposes of today's Spiritual Guidance, I shall be the shadowy beacon that made a spec popular through naught but the raw power of his own charisma. As you can imagine, such a shadowy beacon gets asked an awful lot of questions. Occasionally, in between all the people asking, "Can I buy you a drink?" and "Can I have your babies?", a shadow priesting question gets asked. They're seldom involved enough to write a full article about, but I feel like I have a responsibility to shadow priesting kind to answer them, regardless. And so today, I'm taking on a few questions about patch 4.0.1 and Cataclysm. Let's jump right in. Now that patch 4.0.1 is live, what's going on in the Cataclysm beta for shadow priests?
More Cataclysm details for priests
Okay, I admit it, I don't understand you priests at all. You wear cloth, you sometimes heal people and even when you hurt people, you do so in a profoundly confusing way to me. At no point do you seem to actually hit anything with those staves, maces, daggers and so on that you collect. This baffles me. However, out of residual affection for the healing spells you cast and grudging (I mean it, seriously grudging) respect for your DPS, I take it upon myself to present to you the follow-up blue posts on the priest Cataclysm preview. (And every time I see Mind Spike I can't help but think "Mind bullets! That's telekinesis, Kyle!") I mean, you're a two-role hybrid, I'm a two-role hybrid ... we should stick together. So here comes some blue posts explaining Inner Fire, Mind Spike, Chakra, what happened to Misery, and if Lightwell is getting any love.
Cataclysm Class Changes: Discipline and holy priest analysis
By now I'm sure you have read the priest class preview for Cataclysm and, assuming that you have any feelings toward the priest class, felt a multitude of emotions toward it. Whether you stayed up late with the rest of us last night or swallowed it all this morning, the announcements are certainly shocking. I don't think anyone expected us to be cloth-wearing death knights in the next expansion. I will get to that later, though. If you didn't already guess from the title above, I will be providing a full assessment of the class preview for healing priests. Having already browsed at reactions on the forums, I want to assure you that I am going to stay mostly level-headed with my review. I of course do this because I'm in no way bitter about waiting 15 hours for Blizzard to give me a winky-face at 2:58 a.m. EST, saying it's still the 7th of April in Anaheim, California. Anyway, whatever your feelings on the preview have been so far, hit the jump and I promise I won't spare you any variety of perspective.
Priest Q & A: Healers remain indifferent
The Q & A for Priests just came out. The first section had Ghostcrawler cover a brief history and the Blizzard perspective of Priests. We used to be the absolute top of the line healer many years ago. At the present, we have been balanced to become on par with the other healing classes (Druids, Paladins, and Shamans). The crustacean one is bang on when he states that Priests have a wide variety of spells to respond to nearly any situation. Let's get straight to it then. What do healing Priests have to look forward to?
Spiritual Guidance: Shadow as a secondary spec in 3.1
Every week, Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host today is Alex Ziebart who doesn't have as many cool links to plug up here as Matticus does but will try anyway. This week we get our Shadowform on.. Dual specs are coming, probably only a week away, and I suspect that many Holy and/or Discipline Priests out there will be picking up a Shadow build as their second spec. Priests, like most classes, can have many little build variations to fit your playstyle: Raiding, soloing, doing Battlegrounds, doing arenas, all of that. I'm going to look at a couple of good PvE specs to use in patch 3.1, but unfortunately avoiding the PvP specs for you arena junkies in our audience. Trust me, you don't want to take my advice there. Discipline PvP maybe, but not Shadow.PvE Shadow - RaidingMMO-Champion has a great tool for setting up talent specs, because you can include your glyphs as well, so we're going to be using that. This spec (14/0/57) will be a fairly cookie-cutter raiding build in patch 3.1, with only very minor variations from person to person. The Shadow tree isn't a very complicated one. Either a talent boosts your DPS, or it does something else. For a raiding spec, you want all of the DPS talents and you can skip all of the 'something else' talents unless they're mandatory for a DPS talent. It's pretty straightforward. Even in the Discipline tree the ultimate goal is to pick up the DPS talents, Twin Disciplines and Improved Inner Fire. Meditation isn't a direct DPS talent, but having no mana is certainly a DPS hit.
Inner Fire less annoying in patch 3.0.9
I've been out of the office more than I've been in this week due to moving into a new place, so I haven't had a chance to gush about this yet: Holy crap, they actually made Inner Fire unable to be dispelled. Moreover, it has a 30 minute duration! That's just beautiful, even if it still has the Charges mechanic.Inner Fire is pretty great, and it does its job well. Usually. The big issue with the spell was that it had so many hooks and drawbacks. Short duration, limited charges, and able to be dispelled. That's about two hooks too many. I don't mind keeping the Charges around because the spell supplies a massive amount of armor (for a cloth class.) I'm okay with making a Priest be careful about keeping it up at all times in PvP. In PvE, the 10 minute duration is just a nuisance and in PvP some random melee will burn away the charges in less than its full duration anyway. It was just an annoyance all around and a very unnecessary hook.Inner Fire probably should have been unable to be dispelled right from the point they did it for Mages and Warlocks, but better late than never. That Enhancement Shaman will just need to swing his weapons a little longer to get rid of your Inner Fire, instead of just spam Purge to shut you down. To me, this is a good thing. To the Shaman... perhaps not so good.
The Queue: I like fire
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Yesterday we had a question about the little fiery looking thumbnail I use at the end of almost every edition of The Queue. What the heck is it? Well, it's pretty hard to make out the details as a little thumbnail, but it's a picture of Volkhan from Halls of Lightning. The big red flare is a fireburst that comes up when he wangs his anvil with his hammer. I thought the bigger version looked pretty cool, so I kept using the thumbnail.alpha5099 asked... I keep seeing references to EU-Magtheridon, and I'm absolutely fascinated by a server with such a ridiculously unbalanced player ratio. Does anyone know how that happened? Is there some reason an insane number of Horde players are there? Did the Horde just start getting the edge and the Alliance players left for less ganky pastures, and it's gone out of control since then?
Priest changes and glyphs in Wrath beta patch 9014
Last night's Wrath beta patch wasn't a very large one, but it did bring a few changes for just about everyone. Priests had some of the more boring changes, but let's take a look regardless. Holy Nova's mana cost is now 25% of base mana, originally 33% of base mana. Decent enough change. Holy Nova's mana cost has always been a bit absurd considering how small the numbers it puts out are. Improved Inner Fire has been moved from Tier 3 to Tier 2. Improved Power Word: Fortitude has been moved from Tier 2 to Tier 3. This is another good change, meant to make Imp Inner Fire more accesible to Shadow Priests. Originally, Improved Inner Fire was pitched to swap with Improved Power Word: Shield, but that would cause talent allocation issues for PvP Shadow Priests while fixing it for PvE Shadow Priests. Losing Improved Fortitude in PvE is pretty lame, but probably the better swap in the end.
Select Priest glyphs changed in latest beta push
Do you remember when the Shadow Priest glyphs made their rounds, and then we all complained a lot and made suggestions as to how they should be fixed? Guess what, guys. They aren't terrible anymore! I know, it's a shock! The updated Shadow Priest glyphs are all pretty much straight buffs, while some of the Holy ones are buffs, and some are fixed balancing issues. Let's take a look, shall we?Glyph of Lightwell - Increases the amount healed by your Lightwell by 20%.I've played around with Lightwell on the beta quite a bit, actually, and its current incarnation is fantastic. The HoT rarely breaks, and my guildies are generally intelligent enough to know when to use it. At level 77 in full level 70 gear, each tick of LIghtwell currently heals for around 2,200. Each tick healing for 2600-2700 with this glyph is pretty amazing, considering it's a "set it and forget it" heal.Glyph of Renew - Reduces the duration of your Renew by 3 sec. but increases the amount healed per tick by 40%.Sounds good to me. It will be a little more mana intensive to keep the HoT on a tank, but strong HoTs are priceless.
Wrath Beta patch notes: Priest
My main is a Priest. A Shadow Priest, to be precise. While I started out Holy, my Priest has always been my main and probably always will be. The only thing that could possibly draw me away is my Protection Paladin, should my raid ever need another. Obviously, the very first thing I looked at in the Wrath Beta patch notes were the Priest notes. I've talked about what we saw in Alpha, and I was cautiously optimistic at the time. After seeing these notes... well... yeah, I'm still optimistic. I am (dare I say it?)... excited, even!I'll tuck my analysis behind the cut, but here are my three favorite notes out of the Priest notes: New Talent: Improved Spirit Tap (Shadow) - Gives you a 50/100% chance to gain a 50% bonus to your Spirit after gaining a critical effect chance from your Mind Blast or Shadow Word: Death spells. For the duration, your mana will regenreate at a 25% rate while casting. Lasts 8 sec. Lightwell (Holy): Cast time reduced to .5 sec, down from 1.5 sec. Charges increased to 10, up from 5. Now breaks from any attack that hits you for 30% or more of your total health. Cooldown reduced to 3 minutes, down from 5. Shadowform (Shadow): Now has an innate 30% threat reduction. Now has a shapeshift UI.
Revised Inner Fire: Better or Worse?
In the upcoming patch, the priest's inner fire skill has been revamped, and not everyone thinks it's for the best. The attack power bonus has been removed, the armor bonus has been increased, and the duration has increased from 3 minutes to 10 minutes. However, there's an added caveat to that new duration - inner fire now has 20 charges, and each time the priest is hit, a charge is used. This means that when a priest is taking hits in combat, inner fire isn't going to last 10 minutes, or even 3 minutes - numbers being thrown around on the priest forums suggest that a rogue could go through all charges in 10 seconds while a hunter pet would take 15 seconds. But despite public outcry, community manager Eyonix has said that they're pleased with the improvements. While I'm not one of the people claiming they're going to be removing inner fire from their hotbar, I'm certainly disappointed that, when confronted with complaints about the skill's short duration, Blizzard decided to significantly reduce the duration.
