prayer-of-mending
Latest
Hotfix incoming for select priest healing spells
While he says he doesn't want to get into the habit of it, everyone's favorite blue crab, Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street made this announcement today: @venaliter It may not be live if you haven't seen it. I don't want to get in the habit of announcing hotfixes on Twitter. +25% PoH and PoM. - Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) October 10, 2012 Now, while he says it "may not be live yet", it seems from follow up posts from Nethaera on the official forums that "yet" is code for "in the next batch of hotfixes". Nethaera says: Nethaera Quote: When will this buff go live. Because it was not there last night. Checked my logs from last week PoH is still the same. I don't have an ETA for you as of yet, but we'll make sure it gets updated in the Hotfix notes when it happens. source Keep an eye on Ghostcrawler's twitter, you never know when he might let another hotfix creep into his feed! And I'm sure priests will welcome the changes to Prayer of Healing and Prayer of Mending. Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.
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: Lightwell vs. Lightspring, plus new priest glyph and talent animations
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. The latest build on the Mists of Pandaria beta allowed players to purchase the newly implemented major and minor glyphs we spoke about two weeks ago. In the video above, you'll find animations for Glyph of Shadowy Friends, Glyph of Lightspring, Glyph of the Heavens, Glyph of Holy Resurrection, and Glyph of the Val'kyr. Is it just me, or does it look like Lightspring is casting mini Penance balls at its target? Perhaps there is a tiny disc priest trapped inside every Lightspring ... Hmm. While we're on the topic of Lightspring, there has been an interesting development since the glyph was first announced. Originally, it looked like Lightspring would heal players for less than Lightwell, a sort of toll for the fact that Lightspring was automated. In the latest beta build, however, it now looks like the HoTs from both Lightwell and Lightspring will heal for the same amount over time. I'm guessing the developers decided there wasn't much reason to reduce the amount of healing Lightspring does per tick since the 5 seconds of downtime between each heal is a limitation in itself. By only allowing the Lightspring to heal once every 5 seconds, the heal isn't any better than a single-target heal from another player, save for the fact that it will work while you're doing other things.
Spiritual Guidance: Ghostcrawler on 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. There was a great priest thread on the official World of Warcraft healing forums late last week. The thread caps at 30 pages, then spills into another thread for further discussion. The original post is from a priest who also heals as a druid, and is currently unhappy with the state of priests in Icecrown Citadel. The poster asks for in-depth feedback from other priests with healing alts who are happy with the priest class in ICC. The thread remains on topic and doesn't get too trolly before Ghostcrawler steps in on page 7 and gives a simple breakdown of how he plays priest. He remains in the thread for quite some time and provides readers with a good insight on how he and Blizzard feel about various aspects of priests at this time. If you missed this thread, I will be summarizing the highlights of what Ghostcrawler said and providing some of my own thoughts and analysis.
Spiritual Guidance: Holy 101
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. There is this priest trial in my guild right now. He applied as a discipline priest but what we were looking for at the time was a holy priest. Unfortunately, he doesn't know how to play holy, so I'm exploiting my veteran status and making him learn it. Coincidentally, the big bosses also want all of us here at WoW.com to work on these 101 columns, so this kills two anything-but-birds with one stone. I really like birds, by the way. The following is meant to be an introductory guide to the priest holy tree. It is not going to tell you what to do step by step (at least not until you get to the enchants section) instead it intends to show you some options from which you can get started. If you're already a veteran holy priest, feel free to add anything I left out in the comments so readers who use this column as a resource can get as much help as possible.
Spiritual Guidance: Can Prayer of Mending be improved?
Every week (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 No Stock UI, a UI and addons blog for WoW. Can the relationship between Prayer of Mending and Power Word: Shield be improved any further? I received an email from a distraught yet dedicated Discipline priest the other day. He's a raiding priest, first of all. So what was he upset over? It's about the interactions between our Power Word: Shield and Prayer of Mending. There are times where a quick PoM hit will land on a shielded player which results in it fading off. Why? Well because the shield has to expire first before the PoM bouncing effect occurs. It's not so bad with Holy priests because the strength of their shields are no match for Discipline shields. It does suck though since the shield just has to wear off before the PoM can shoot off to someone else. Sometimes time just runs out.
Spiritual Guidance: Tier 9 healing bonuses
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 No Stock UI, a new UI and addons blog for WoW. A brief look at the tier 9 sets and the origins of those who it is named after: Velen and Zabra Hexx. We're getting more news as the weeks go by. Last week, tier 9 information was released. As some of you may know, the upcoming Crusader's Coliseum is slated to drop tier 9 items. All classes are getting three levels of the latest tier. I'm assuming one set drops from normal (10-man), heroic (25-man), and heroic hard mode.
Addon Spotlight: PoMTracker
Every weekend (well, almost every weekend), Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we'll cover it here. Before I get started, this addon is useful to one class only: Priests. Not only that, it's only useful to healing priests, since all it does is make it easier for you to keep track of your Prayer of Mending (sorry mages, wrong PoM). Still here? Good. I've tried many different mods to tell me who my PoM is on and how many charges it has left, since it is a lovely spell and I like to use it to its fullest, which means I need to know when the darn Spirit Wolves have snagged it again so I can recast it on somebody useful. I used MendWatch all throughout Burning Crusade, but it had some annoying bugs when Wrath hit and I started hunting around for something more stable and easier to read. I quickly found PoM Tracker, and it's worked like a dream for me ever since.
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 of the Lich King: Priest roundup
Cheer up and be optimistic! Try not to be too worried about the Priest class. True we haven't changed all that much, we are still the most diverse healing class in the game. Even Elizabeth Harper and Phaelia agree that we still remain the best healers (for now). Don't be disheartened! But the challenge starts now. Hitting 80 will be a bit slower for us Holy specced players in comparison to other classes and specs. We can still hold our own against Arthas' minions! So where are we at then? State of the Game For the Priests that have just returned to the game, the biggest change is the fact that Priest racials have been removed. Hymn of Hope, Holy Nova and Devouring Plague are baseline abilities for all Priests . We'll be competing against Mages and Warlocks for gear since the three classes utilize Spirit to an extent. Circle of Healing is now a smart heal which could come with a 6 second cooldown as a penalty. Oh yeah, Prayer of Mending now draws threat for the caster instead of the target. The upside is that you can talent it to reduce the cooldown by 3 seconds with Divine Providence. Talent Trees Desperate Prayer takes up the 11 point talent slot where Holy Nova used to be. Discipline received a near complete overhaul. And guess what? It looks like it could be a raid viable spec! Check out Alex's Shadow Priest overview for a quick refresher. Dispersion: Great talent? Or greatest talent? General Tips A few notable Priest spells were covered in our Skill Mastery columns. Check out Penance and Guardian Spirit. Having fun is the most important thing you can do. If the quest givers or mobs are overloaded, find a few guildies and lock yourselves into Utgarde Keep for a while.
Divine Providence not worthless after all
I would like to take this opportunity to disagree with my own post the other day declaring Divine Providence worthless. I was so moved by all your comments that I specced 14/47/0 and took Circle of Healing for a spin through half of Tempest Keep and all of Zul'Aman, and have changed my mind entirely. Circle of Healing is amazing, and I never want to let it go. If Blizzard wants to give me a talent to buff it and other heals by 10%, and lower the cooldown on Prayer of Mending, they can go right ahead. As you all had predicted out, my estimate of Greater Heal and Flash Heal covering 70% of my healing between them was woefully inaccurate. In fact, in both instances, CoH alone accounted for 70% or more of my healing. The new Divine Providence is +10% to all multi-target heals, and 3 seconds off Prayer of Mending's cooldown (with 5 points in the talent). Even if I ignore the other effects and just look at the boost to CoH, I get (70% * 2%) = 1.4% increase to my healing per talent point, well above the 1%-per-point benchmark.
SK Gaming interview: Kil'jaeden, Sunwell, and why to stack +haste
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/WoW_Insider_interviews_top_World_of_Warcraft_raider'; Recently WoW Insider caught up with Neg, a restoration-specced Orc Shaman who raided with Nihilum before leaving recently for SK Gaming. An experienced player who has seen all of Blizzard's raid content, from Molten Core through Sunwell Plateau, Neg's talked to us previously about high-end raiding and what Sunwell was like on the PTR. As he's become one of a small group of raiders worldwide to finish the whole zone, we've asked him some follow-up questions about guild stability during the transition to Wrath, what Sunwell was like going live, why there are so many Shaman nowadays in high-end raiding, and the best and worst raid content on offer in WoW.If you didn't catch our first interview with Neg, you can find that here, but read on for an inside look at the toughest raiding you'll find in the game:
AddOn Spotlight: MendWatch
Non-Priests (or Priests that don't heal), you might just want to skip over this one. MendWatch is an AddOn that...well, the author explains it best: MendWatch attempts to track the priest spell Prayer of Mending. A timer bar shows the current target of the Prayer of Mending spell with a countdown of how long the spell will last. When the target gets hit the amount the Prayer of Mending healed for will be shown and the bar will slowly fade away. If the Prayer of Mending jumps to a new target a new timer bar will be shown for the new target.This AddOn fixes my one complaint about Prayer of Mending: it can be a bit hard to track who it's on or whether you even have one out there at all, when the battle starts getting thick. Just like Cloak of Shadows brings a Rogue vs. caster duel from "imba" to "insane," MendWatch brings PoM from "awesome" to "incredible."If you're still reading but not familiar with Prayer of Mending, here's the spell's description:390 mana, instant cast, 40 yard rangePlaces a spell on the target that heals them for 800 the next time they take damage. When the heal occurs, Prayer of Mending jumps to a raid member within 20 yards. Jumps up to 5 times and lasts 30 sec after each jump. This spell can only be placed on one target at a time.
