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Spiritual Guidance: Patch 4.3 holy priest buffs and more tier 13 set bonuses
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. You'd really think after all this time Blizzard would have done the obvious and invented some sort of healing hand grenade for holy priests. It could be the little brother of Lightwell or perhaps some sort of talent upgrade to Holy Nova -- toss the grenade to a specific location on the dungeon floor and in 10, 15, or whatever seconds, an explosion of AOE healing would nuke the area. Wouldn't that be fun? Naturally there'd have to be some witty flavor text on the tooltip, but -- wait, what day is this? Dawn looks at her calendar. Oh! Uh ... Never mind what I just said. Today, we've got to get caught up on patch 4.3 news. We've been up to our necks in priest news from patch 4.3 recently. Last week, we got a first look at our two-piece and four-piece set bonuses for priest tier 13; this week, we got a look at the gear model itself and a hefty list of mostly positive changes. We also (shock and awe) already received a few tweaks to our tier 13 set bonuses, so there is quite a lot to tackle today. First, let's talk fashion.
The Light and How to Swing It: Synergizing with druids and shaman
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome. When I asked my favorite restoration shaman (David the shaman) what the resto spec's weaknesses were, he had listed off several areas he'd like to see improved. I posed the same question to a restoration druid, and he replied back with an emphatic "There isn't one!" Restoration druids are currently the most powerful healers in the game, and by a large margin. Every other healing class might pale in comparison to a druid's massive HPS capabilities, but resto druids aren't the indomitable healers that they might think themselves to be. Holy paladins have a diverse and robust toolkit of spells that allows us to complement restoration druids and shaman. We can focus on each class' strengths and weaknesses to choose our healing spells and strategies effectively. We learned how the two priest healing specs vary and how to work with each, and now we'll cover the two restoration healers.
Raid Rx: How to combine Spirit Link Totem and Power Word: Barrier
Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI-, macro- and addon-related. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading on the Matticast. I envy shaman. A latest look at the front page of World of Logs shows that the new shaman totem of awesomeness (Spirit Link Totem) has a rather intriguing property to it. We've had it for a while now, ever since patch 4.1, and this totem is the new shaman defensive mechanic. Anyone standing within 10 yards of it reduces incoming damage by 10%. Cool. What else? Every second, the health of all the players standing within it also gets redistributed. The interesting part is that the health can be increased to count as healing. However, that sword swings both ways. It'll also adjust health downward, which counts as damage. Even better? This damage can be both resisted and mitigated.
Totem Talk: Shaman healing Q&A
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the Raid Warning podcast), shows you how. Last week, we talked a little bit about our incoming cooldown, Spirit Link Totem. The spell has been something we have been looking for since the days of early Wrath of the Lich King. The new cooldown offers us some very nice flexibility and a new ability to deal with certain mechanics we either couldn't deal with or had a rather difficult time dealing with before. In the last couple of weeks, I've received quite a few questions regarding shaman healing in heroics, PvP, and even overall class design. I thought today I would take a few moments and answer some reader email before the big patch, 4.1, is released and reaches live servers.
Totem Talk: Restoration shaman, say hello to Spirit Link Totem
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restoration shaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticus and co-host of the Raid Warning podcast), shows you how. Last week, we talked about the upcoming changes for restoration shaman in patch 4.1. The update contains a couple of significant things for restoration shaman. First was the change that mastery will now have an impact on all of our healing spells. While last week I said that mastery did not affect Healing Rain, I'd like to thank everyone who commented and lended a hand. On live, mastery does affect Healing Rain, but my math was just off. On my first pass, it appeared as if the bonus to HR was due to crit, not mastery, and I am happily corrected there. The second change and the one I'm most excited about is the re-introduction of the much sought-after Spirit Link. This mythical restoration shaman cooldown has been talked about for the better part of three years now; it has been promised to us many times over, only to be taken away. It has recently been added to the latest build of the PTR, and I'd like to talk a little bit about my experiences with it so far with the new Spirit Link Totem.
