Oh hay, there’s a change to the 4.3 patch notes. For priests. And both items pertain to Holy Priests:
Guardian Spirit’s healing bonus has been increased to 60%, up from 40%.
I felt like the BEST use of this spell is when a tank is plummeting to death, and you just hit it, wait for it to proc, THEN heal. Now, it seems more robust. I noticed that similar heal-enhancing abilities were not increased in this same patch (i.e. Vampiric Blood).
Holy Word: Serenity now has a cooldown of 10 seconds, down from 15 seconds.
10 sec cooldown is appropriate. This brings it in line with Penance (glyphed), disc’s main single-target heal-bomb. Suck it, bubbleslingers.
That pretty much sums up what I’ve been thinking ever since news about Holy priesting have started pouring from the PTR.
*super happy*
YAY FINALLY.
*happy dance*
The Guardian Spirit change doesn’t really affect the way we use the spell. It’s still Holy’s OH S@#T button. I’ll take the buff, but I don’t really understand the reasoning behind it.
The Serenity buff was needed. Holy was lacking in single target throughput and this change was necessary. I’m also happy they fixed the Serenity bug for 4.3. Holy can have near 100% uptime of the 25% critical heal effect that it provides.
Will Holy be superior to Discipline for tank healing? I highly doubt it, but with this change I would say Holy Priests will be better tank healers than Druids and Shaman since they have access to a tank cd and mitigation abilities.
Well… true, it is an OH SHIT button, but now it’s viable as a cooldown to be used when you don’t expect the tank to die and proc it. A 60% boost to healing taken would be very nice in conjunction with any other class healing the tank.