Yesterday, I was, as usual, being a total noob. Here’s how the conversation went:
Laral (our disc priest): Hey they’re lowering the cooldown for Dhymn for holy priests.
Me: [expletives and exclamations of glee] Where?
Laral: Patch notes (OMG UR A NOOB)
Yep, I completely missed the patch notes. Bad blogger, bad!
Well, let’s see what this patch holds for Healing Priests.
Discipline
Atonement has been limited by range until now, but discipline priests cannot be contaaaained.
Atonement will now account for the target enemy’s combat reach when calculating proper range, enabling it to be used on large creatures such as Ragnaros and Ala’kir.
So, they get MORE buffed… yay? Stupid smitejerks. Grumble.
Divine Aegis has a new spell effect.
Translation: Previously Divine Aegis had its own spell effect that looked like a cool soap bubble. We made Divine Aegis look exactly like Power Word: Shield as part of an insidious and cruel psychological experiment to see if we could get discipline priests to totally lose it. We’re sorry. Please don’t flog us. We’re fixing it.
I suspect the “new” spell effect may well look exactly like the old spell effect before they screwed with it.
Holy
But Discipline priests are boring, overpowered, and usually have fleas. Now we get to the good part:
State of Mind has been redesigned and is now called Heavenly Voice. Heavenly Voice increases the healing done by Divine Hymn by 50/100%, and reduces the cooldown of Divine Hymn by 2.5/5 minutes.
This, my holy friends, is bad-ass. We get rid of a shitty and useless talent and get a 3-minute cooldown on Dhymn, same as Tranquility, basically giving those cheater resto druids the finger.
The only bad thing about this, and I do mean ONLY, is that we’re going to have to move 2 talent points around, and it might be at the expense of other things you like. I’m probably going to take the 2 points out of Veiled Shadows (my reduced cooldown on shadowfiend), since my mana issues are resolving themselves.
But, you say, Dhymn sucks? Well it won’t anymore! First, the aforementioned talent doubles the healing thoroughput. And the base spell itself is getting a buff:
Divine Hymn now affects 5 targets, up from 3.
This change is technically for all priests, but come on, it’s really a buff for Holy. The rest of you have had your own buffs already. Shoo.
Glyph of Circle of Healing now also increases the mana cost of Circle of Healing by 20%.
I hate “tradeoff” glyphs. Whether you take this glyph will depend on whether you’re doing 10′s or 25′s, and how your mana holds up. Since I usually do 10′s, it’s pretty likely that I’m not getting 6 targets anyway, so I’ll unglyph that sucker. And instead use one of the other highly attractive major glyphs for holy priests. /sarcasm
And finally, the awesomest change ever:
Spirit of Redemption has been rebuilt to address a few functionality issues and make it more responsive. Spirit of Redemption otherwise remains unchanged.
Ok, I lied. Failangel is always lame, buffed or not. It’s like multiplying zero by a million. It’s still zero.
Before I realized what was happening every time our Priest did the Spirit of Retribution thing, I made the innocent comment in party chat, “I don’t know if you should do that any more, every time you use that angel, you die.”
My response was a small, sad, “inorite
“
My feeling on the angel is that if the group LET me die, they don’t deserve any heals after my death. Of course, I will likely die to my own stupidity but shhh.
- I thought the exact same thing when I read the Divine Aegis change…although not as eloquently.
- with all the buffs, Divine Hymn seems a bit too good for Holy now. It’s nice to see them try, though. And a buff (albeit probably tweak-nerfed by the end of the PTR) is a buff.
- My new major glyph: Holy Nova. Just to eff with our DPS on trash (and because I’m easily bored).
- Also, the change to the transgender-in-death-for-male-characters Ghosthealer is bad. Maybe I won’t be able to rez everyone after a wipe now (what with the wonky timing of getting out of combat anyway). YOUR RUINNIG TEH GAEM, BLIZ!1
Honestly, there’s no such thing as “TOO GOOD” when compared to that damn disco bubble. While Dhymn might be on par with the disco bubble on 10′s, it will be fail compared to the bubble on 25′s. All 25 can jump under the bubble. Dhymn still only affects 5 targets.
Well, I never called you a noob. At least I don’t think that I did…
And it is AWESOME that holy priests are finally getting buffs handed to them. I’m honestly not even bitter about holy getting all the truly useful improvements to Divine Hymn. Us silly discos already have the awesomeness that is the giant sparkly bubble. It’s about damn time that holy priests get a useful 3 min cooldown ability.
And that range thing? Yeah, that was a broken mechanic; it’s not another disco buff, it’s a bugfix. Totally a bugfix.
Can I complain about glyphs? Because druids are getting screwed there too. Wild Growth’s glyph currently hits one more target, now it’s going to also increase the cooldown. Bleah. Insert puking smileyface here.
Are priests in the same position where if you ditch Glyph of CoH you’re going to get a lovely…. empty glyph slot? Cuz Blizzard’s making this noise about wanting resto druids to have to make glpyh choices and then only give us three for that slot. What’s up with that, Blizz?
I will probably glyph Prayer of Mending, Fade, and Mass Dispel. Fade and Mass Dispel are situational so I usually swap them out as needed. Now they’ll just have perma-spots for lack of better options.
The Atonement change actually breaks some great uses. When the range was restricted it was very useful for jobs like healing the Spark tank on Rhyolith or during cat phases on Majordomo. With an unrestricted range there is no control over eligibility for the heal, which leads to less output on the tank in those particular situations.
We’ll need to see how it actually performs, but I don’t read the current PTR notes as removing the range restrictions on Atonement heals. Instead, I think they’re just fixing things to account for ridiculously large hitbox sizes, such as Ragnaros.
Currently, there are a few bosses like that where the hitbox has a radius larger than the 15m Atonement range, and Atonement is targeted from the center of the boss’s hitbox. So, using it on those bosses is guaranteed to never proc the heal except on someone standing well inside the hitbox radius.
If they just completely get rid of the Atonement range, then yes, I agree that it will make it far more awkward and less useful for tank healing. Hopefully, that’s not what this change is.
I posted based on the original note I read listing an increased range from 15 yards to 100 for Atonement. If the actual range of the heal doesn’t change and they just adjust for the size of the boss hitbox then nothing I wrote applies. Great.
These are exciting Holy changes!
I just respecced my Shadow spec to Holy because I never (EVER) Shadow DPS (except for BH runs if I NEED to) so this will give me even more motivation to learn/use it. Good times ahead!
Have to admit I’m worried about the Divine Hymn changes. I remember getting really excited when it was originally introduced and then seeing it get nerf after nerf. Fingers crossed it makes it out of the PTR awesome though. I need an excuse to respec my Disc Priest (as oppposed to the non-Disc one with 2 Holy specs) Holy.
As along as Failangel no longer stops you getting achievements should you die at the same time as the boss, I’ll be happy with that change. Now we just need a buff to Holy Nova (to make it usable for a bit more than killing snake traps and some Lightwell love.
Yes and no.
The way I understand it is that Divine Hymn will assess who the 5 people in the raid with the lowest amount of health are and then heal them, with each tick. If there are 4 ticks of Divine Hymn, for the maximum 20 heals, you could stand to heal much more than 5 people with Divine Hymn.
Yes, you can only 5 people at a time, per tick. But depending on how much healing is going out, more people could stand to benefit from that.
True, it’s 5 at a time. However, the maximum amount of healing, overall, is capped. If I recall correctly, dome is not subject to diminishing returns no matter HOW many people are under it.
You are correct.
There are people who are going to want their Barrier and will not settle for anything less than that. However, I feel that DH offers something in comparison, that comes much closer to keeping up with Barrier than anything else that came before it.
Rather than having someone outright make the call that they may not want a holy priest, this should hopefully give people pause to consider that decision a bit more, whereas before they probably wouldn’t have.
Will Dhymn still also buff the other healers during its usage time? I dont see the chnage to its actual healing out put as being OP, just closer to being on par, which is more than fine by me. The ability to shorten the CD timer is a good one, again its not OP, just a leveling of the playing field. I was hoping the buff to other healers stays in game as the healing output to Dhymn is still capped regardless of how many ppl it heals, so the buff to others I think is still needed. Anyone know?
Spirit of Redemption has a bug where it’d autocast a spell between the split second of removal of SoR buff and (final) death. An AI would take over and cast e.g. Divine Hymn, and RSA would bravely announce that you’d be casting this spell (bonus points if you are among the last to die during wipe). It is like being mind controlled, and with Divine Hymn being an 8 min CD this wasn’t very cool. I’ve experienced this bug at Nefarian 25m. After it occurred I respecced and got rid of SoR.
See e.g. http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/1874670451
Hope this is fixed in 4.3.
SoR is a situational talent. Often, it will be worthless because it is a wipe. Yet, it can save a corpserun with Mass Res. On an enrage/burn phase like Beth HC/Rhyo HC it can also save the day. Our first Beth HC kill was with the tank and me (shadow priest MS) alive because I used dispersion. If I was healing it instead and I’d have SoR I could’ve kept the tank alive long enough to get the remaining DoTs to kill him.