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Spiritual Guidance: From Power Word: Solace to Power Infusion, the latest on holy and discipline priests
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow. Since its introduction, the new level 45 priest talent, Power Word: Solace, has undergone several changes. First, it had the percentage of mana it returned per cast reduced from 2% to 1.5%. A little over a week after that, the percentage was buffed back up to 2% while the cast time was simultaneously nerfed from 1.5 seconds to 2 seconds. Then just last week, the cast time was lowered back to 1.5 seconds, while the amount of mana returned was lowered to a mere .7% per cast. Pretty crazy for one little spell, right? As you'd expect, a lot of discussion has come up over the changes, with one thread on the official forums leading it all. In it, the original poster asks for an explanation behind the nerfs, saying that even though he hated using Power Word: Solace with a fiery passion, the talent was necessary for healing priests. Ghostcrawler (Lead Systems Developer Greg Street) responded soon after, explaining that the developers don't want Power Word: Solace to feel like the only option healing priests have, and they will nerf it until priests consider Mindbender and From Darkness, Comes Light viable alternatives.
Spiritual Guidance: First impressions of the Mists of Pandaria beta from a healing priest
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast. This past week, I finally got access to the Mists of Pandaria beta, which means I've had lots of shiny new stuff to play with recently. As a healing priest, I gave a thorough look at both holy and discipline priests and found a lot of things I felt I should report back. First, let's start with Chakra. Before I even finished downloading the beta client, I heard complaints from other priests saying that Chakra states had turned into stances (think warrior stances). The concept of this intrigued me, but when I finally got around to toying around with it, I didn't really know why anyone would think too much of it. The stances simplify Chakra, so rather than having to press two buttons to change to Chakra: Sanctuary, all you have to do is hit one. If you want to switch again, there is a 30-second cooldown before you can swap.
Spiritual Guidance: Do's and don't's of priest healing
Another Sunday is upon us, and while a certain priest who shall remain nameless (his name might start with a "F" and end with an "ox Van Allen") lies about in a post-Warlock-soiree-stupor somewhere, Spiritual Guidance and Dawn Moore are here to cater to all your priest and healing needs. Dawn Moore won't forget to pick you up from the airport, and she definitely doesn't watch Jersey Shore. I have this notebook; it's nothing special in design, just a composition book, but after using it for several months it has become quite an impressive little catalog of messy handwriting (though, I was recently told I make a nice lowercase "G.") What makes this notebook worth mentioning today is that I've used this notebook every week since I started writing for WoW.com six months ago. In it are all my thoughts, notes, questions and more about playing a priest and healer in the World of Warcraft. There are also some random drawings where I illustrate my raid leader's unusual commentary. As each week passes I tend to cross out things that I've covered in articles, and make a notation of the date on which I published it. Many articles are born in this little book. Unfortunately, there are a lot of stray notes in it as well. What I mean by that are there are lots of scribbles of ideas that don't quite constitute a full feature article, but still make for a worthwhile discussion. Today, I've decided to compile those stray thoughts into a list of "do's and don't's" for my fellow healing priests.
Breakfast Topic: I suck at playing mage
This is the story of a girl named Una. Una was a promising young woman who hailed from the forests of Elwynn. She had many friends who loved her humor, wit, and engaged conversation. She baked a delicious peach and berry cobbler, and was known to take joy in simple things, like brightly colored boot socks. In apprentice mage school, Una was frequently complimented by her teachers for her brilliance. Her loving parents supported her choice to pursue magic, and with her gifts it was no surprise when she graduated top of her class. Not long after Una began her service to the Stormwind guard, she was tasked to journey to the Redridge Mountains to help stabilize an encroaching force of Blackrock orcs. When Una arrived she learned that the orcs had taken refuge in a former human stronghold known as Stonewatch Keep. With a determined heart, Una set out to recapture the keep. Una died. Okay, so, what am I babbling about? Let me explain: Una is my level 29 mage. She was the second character I ever made, back in 2005 when vanilla WoW was in full swing. I had high hopes for her, but ended up abandoning her quite quickly in favor of priest. Why? Because I absolutely suck at playing mage. I'm an awful, terrible, baddie mage who can't even get to level cap! *cries* I don't really know what it is either; I have tried to go back and play Una many times over the years, and despite becoming quite savvy with priest (including shadow!), rogue, and feral druid, I still die to the same level 24 orcs in Redridge.
Spiritual Guidance: Macros for priests
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. /target reader /wave /use The Mischief Maker There. I love a captive audience. This week I'll be writing about macros for priests. I will touch on why and how to use them, then provide a few useful ones that readers sent in during the past week. This article will not be an introductory guide for the use of macros because... WoW.com already had one of those. Hit the jump for the link.
Spiritual Guidance: 12 Reasons why you don't want to play a Priest
You know, I'm normally a huge proponent of my class. Don't get me wrong, I love my Dwarf Priest. There's all these great healing spells we have at our disposal. No one's ever going to turn down a Priest from joining a raid or a guild. I have to admit, we have it pretty easy. I'm used to giving newer players advice about Priests and reasons for selecting that class. Every once in a while, I get extremely bitter about being a Priest. For those of you that want to roll a Priest, let me introduce some second thoughts.
The role of today's Priest
Yesterday, Ghostcrawler got into a discussion with some Priests on the Healing forum. It's in a thread that started out pretty negative, but unfortunately reflected an opinion rippling its way through the Priest 'community.' Many (not all, not nearly) Priest players are getting sort of grumpy about their Healing role, and that's not actually a new sentiment. It's been sort of an everpresent issue since well before Wrath. Priests don't feel they have a role. They sort of exist, without any clear purpose.The issue that came up is that a number of Priests think Blizzard is down on them, they're subpar, the devs don't care, blah blah blah. Ghostcrawler is of the opinion that Priests are actually pretty great (not said in those words) and I gotta be honest, I agree with him on that. On all things? No. On that? Yes. Priests are very, very capable Healers. But capability is not actually the issue at all! It's an issue much harder to pinpoint. Priests, when you look at their spells as a whole product and don't get hung up on any one ability in particular, work great. It's a well rounded class, and operates very well on its own. Holy Priests are great healers, and there's really no situation where they're completely helpless. I am not sure what the phrase "healing dynamo" means exactly, but for some reason that pops into my head when I think of Holy Priests, so it's probably a good thing.
Spiritual Guidance: What each type of Priest can do and arena musings
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. This week, Matticus looks at what a Priest can do and reflects on his experience so far in arena. I managed to get myself into a pickup heroic Naxx group the other day. No, it wasn't on my Priest. The Priest is my baby and I can't lock him into such raids while we're still raiding. It was my Shaman that I took into heroic Naxx. After Flame Shocking and Lava Bursting my way through both Spider and Plague Wings and the first two bosses of the Military Quarter, we came across the Four Horsemen. (Yes, there is a point to this, keep reading!)
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.
A close look at the new changes to Bloodlust and Heroism
Tharfor (I can hear him purr, can you?) tells us today of two changes that we'll see on the PTR soon (Drysc announced this earlier): Bloodlust/Heroism will, again, stack with Icy Veins. Bloodlust/Heroism will not stack with [the new] Power Infusion, however. He tells us the reasoning behind this is "...two spells increasing haste by a percentage will not stack if both can be cast on a target other than the caster..." So this appears to continue the trend we've seen of modifying haste based abilities, both in their power and stacking abilities.For those that don't know about Shamans, Bloodlust and Heroism are Shaman abilities (Bloodlust is the name of the spell for the Horde, Heroism is the name of the spell for the Alliance) that decrease casting time by 30% for 40 seconds. It is often used in raids to get that extra "umpf" necessary to get a boss down quickly.Icy Veins is a Mage talent based spell that decreases casting time by 20% for 20 seconds (and increase the chance the target will freeze by 20%). The combination of Bloodlust/Heroism and Icy Veins is a very potent combination.Power Infusion is a Priest talent that will have some changes come patch 2.4. It will now decrease casting time by 20% as well as decrease the mana cost by 20%. It's interesting that Blizzard decided to allow the stacking with Mages, but not with priests. The difference in the two spells is that Power Infusion can be cast on other targets, while Icy Veins can only be cast on yourself. Indeed, this follows with what Tharfor said in his post (which Drysc left out).What do you think of these changes? Any major issue with them?
Is Blizzard properly separating PvP and PvE nerfs?
The promised class changes just keep on coming, some of them well received, some of them not so well received. Certainly the dust has far from settled, with Kalgan himself promising that more is to come only this evening, but there's already questions to ask. One that springs to mind seems especially pertinent in light of the upcoming 3v3 Tournament and Rob Pardo's talk about changing PvP into an E-sport: Are the recent class changes focusing on PvP at the cost of PvE? Druids and Shamans seem to be asking this especially, and we'll look at some of their changes after the break.
Answers for Those Nagging Priest Questions
This charmingly titled FAQ provides a nice compilation of answers to questions that are posted in the forums ten times a day by priests. From what enchant to put on your Benediction to whether spirit gear is better than mana per 5 gear, this guide isn't covering the basics - for basic information for a starting priest you might try this FAQ instead - but it does hit on all the hot topics. If you're a priest looking for answers, this is a very good starting place. Hopefully it will also slow the constant inquires over the best enchant for the Benediction, but I'm probably just being optimistic...
