Un-nerfing for priests and paladins

Paladins rejoice, because Blizzard has decided to reverse the two changes that were planned to be implemented in 2.0.10. Eyonix informs us that they felt "the adjustments were too imposing on the class' ability to tank in dungeons." So Avenging Wrath won't be sharing a cooldown with Divine Shield (but will invoke Forbearance) and Forbearance won't give the player a -15% damage debuff. This should mean that paladins will be unchanged in patch 2.0.10.

While it's not clear if this is the mystery buff Nethaera was telling us about, Eyonix let us in on some interesting changes. In addition to looking at improving Lightwell and analyzing priest survivability in PvP and PvE, Blizzard is planning on making the following concrete changes:

• The cooldown on Prayer of Mending has been reduced to 10 seconds (instead of the planned 20 second cooldown).

• The damage mitigation of Power Word: Shield is being improved by increasing the bonus it gains from +healing gear by 10% (to 20%).

• Circle of Healing will now cost 30% less mana.

And while these are certainly improvements, I can't say that they excite me terribly much. The lessened cooldown for PoM is certainly better, but still worse than it is on live. And while PW:S will scale better than it does now, it still won't scale very well. And I'm not sure I'll want to spec for Circle of Healing regardless of how much mana it costs. So, yes, these are buffs -- but not particularly strong buffs and not buffs that seem to address priests' primary concerns. However, if they're still looking at priest survivability, we may yet have good news coming.