We're a little miffed about recent priest changes here at WoW Insider. Both Holy and Shadow were worked over pretty well with the nerf bat in build 8926. Fortunately, Koraa (class designer) has announced some upcoming changes that are, for the most part, buffs, and that show that they're definitely thinking about the class. Let's see what's behind the curtain.

• Holy:
  • Holy Concentration will "scale with spell crit instead of just a flat %." I read this as meaning that instead of being a 6% chance to gain HC, the chance will be some fraction of your Holy crit chance. But why not just make it a 50% (or whatever) chance on heal crit?
  • Divine Hymn now has an HoT in addition to the CC. This makes it more obviously a clutch spell, and I think it will be handy.
  • Blessed Recovery is getting buffed to "roll" like Ignites do used to: each new crit will add to the HoT and refresh the duration.
  • Lightwell is gaining the ability to show how many charges are left on it by clicking it. OMG, finally! This spell is now totally worth taking. Please scrap Lightwell already, people.

• Discipline: -Grace is getting its +healing effect back. It will now give 2% increased healing, stacking up to three times, but only for the priest who casts it. Much better than it is now; I'd say this makes it pretty well balanced.
  • Twin Disciplines will now work with Mind Flay and Penance as well (currently only works on instants, previously worked on all spells). I'm still hugely confused as to why this doesn't work with all spells anymore, especially given Ghostcrawler's statement that +1% DPS per talent point is the goal. A good way to achieve +1% DPS per talent point is to make each point in a talent increase all spells by 1%.
• Shadow:
  • Shadow Resilience reworked, now called Mind Melt: raises the crit chance of Mind Flay, Mind Sear, and Mind Blast by 2/4%.
  • Shadow Power reworked to be the +20/40/60/80/100% crit bonus damage that seemingly every other caster class has; works on MF as well.
  • Improved Shadowform once again gives a chance to break movement impairing effects on Fade.
  • Psychic Horror redesigned. Now puts a debuff on targets hit by Psychic Scream that reduces damage put out by them by 15/30% for 6 seconds.
  • Dispersion buffed back up to 90% reduced damage.
  • Misery now raises spell damage for MF, Mind Sear and Mind Blast by 5/10/15%. This poor talent has been through so much.

Additionally, there's some great conversation in the thread with Koraa about the design goals for the different Priest specs. Discipline, apparently, is meant to be for "mitigation, utility, and single-target HPS;" the Disc priest is supposed to be a good MT healer. Holy is a good single-target healer, but has tons of healing utility, and is meant to be the AoE healer, and the "healer than can react to any situation." Shadow is meant to be strong single-target DPS (obviously), but now "should be one of the strongest AOE classes" with Mind Sear.

Tags: beta, disc, discipline, holy, koraa, lk, one-tough-cookie, priest, shadow, wotlk, wrath, wrath-beta

Filed under: Priest, Wrath of the Lich King