Spiritual Guidance: 3.0.8 for Priests
by Matt Low 
Jan 11th 2009 at 8:00PM
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. Today Matticus looks at the upcoming 3.08 patch.
I thought we'd be getting the 3.0.8 patch last week. I guess I need a new magic 8 ball. Hopefully it will come out this week instead. In any case, here's several of the big changes you can expect along with a list of bug fixes. Mind you, most of these aren't game or class breaking type changes.At least, not to me. You may feel otherwise.
Holy
- Circle of Healing has a 6 second cooldown
Yep. I've wrote about this at length. We shouldn't be surprised at that.
Discipline
- Silent Resolve now reduces the chance your helpful spells and damage over time effects will be dispelled by 10/20/30%. (Old - Affected all spells)
You can more in detail about the Silent Resolve changes in Daniel's post regarding Dispel resistances and their changes. But in a nutshell, Fear will not be protected with Silent Resolve whereas Renew or Shadow Word: Pain will continue to be.
Shadow
- You can now cast Cure Disease and Abolish Disease while in Shadowform.
This will help out on certain cleanse happy fights. A great example of this would be on Heigan. Raid leaders can now task Paladins, Shamans, and Priests of both specs to help cleanse, if necessary.
- Shadowform: You can now shift into Shadowform while mounted or sitting.
- Vampiric Embrace: Mana cost of this spell has been removed.
Glyphs
- Glyph of Spirit Redemption - Increases the duration of Spirit of Redemption by 6 seconds. (Old - All heals cast while Spirit of Redemption is active have a 20% chance to increase the remaining duration of Spirit of Redemption by 4sec.
Heh, this might make a few Priests feel all sad panda like. There's an interesting PvP spec for Priests that involves stretching down to Spirit of Redemption. The theory is that if the Priest dies, there is a chance that the Priest can continue to heal non-stop with this glyph active and keep their partners alive.
With this change, that strategy will no longer be possible.
Bug Fixes
This patch introduces some bug fixes for Priests.
- Dispersion: This ability can no longer be cast while affected by Cyclone; doing so consumed the cooldown to no effect.
- Guardian Spirit: It is no longer possible for simultaneous killing blows to trigger the heal from this ability multiple times.
- Improved Holy Concentration: The tooltip has been rewritten to indicate that this talent reduces cast time rather than providing haste.
- Mind Flay - Fixed a bug with targeting where you would not deal damage if not facing the target while channeling. Also corrected an issue where the damage from this ability was slightly delayed.
- Prayer of Mending: Will now only benefit from the healing talents of the priest who cast the original spell.
- Rapture: This talent will now correctly return mana for Power Word: Shield based on the caster's mana poll instead of the target's mana pool.
- Shadow Weaving: Shadow Word: Death: Will now only apply one copy of this buff per cast.
- Shadow Word: Pain now will gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
- Surge of Light: Prayer of Mending will no longer sometimes cause Surge of Light to trigger on Priests who do not have that talent.
That last bug was an interesting one. I wondered why I'd get a Surge of Light proc when I was full Discipline. I guess that's going the way of the dodo.
The fix to Rapture will help us a lot. When shielding Warriors or Feral Druids, it was disappointing to see minor gains in mana until I read about this bug. Nice to see that's been fixed!
So when I was asked on Twitter if this patch will change Priests to become worth playing again, there wasn't much I could add. If Wrath wasn't enough to make you play a Priest, then this patch isn't going to change your mind much. We will still be renowned for our versatility and ability to adapt.
Source: The fine folks at MMO-Champion
Want to find more great tips for carrying out your Priestly duties? Spiritual Guidance has you covered with all there is to know! And don't forget to check out our other Leveling Guides as well as our Wrath Guides and Galleries!Filed under: (Priest) Spiritual Guidance, Priest, Raiding
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
otaka Jan 11th 2009 8:13PM
im still thinking the coh nerf is a big deal,and am wondering why so many columnists are just ignoring
Can we get some views from other holy priests
i just dont like disipline, i dont fell like a proper healer and hate throwing out shields etc, especially as it gets the tanks a bit moody
Tom Jan 11th 2009 9:31PM
If the tanks you roll with get moody, you should roll with new tanks. Rage generation is calculated before the shield absorbs the damage. IIRC it goes something along the lines of:
(check damage reduction)
-(calculate rage)
--(absorbtion from shield)
---(apply damage)
I believe paladins are the only tanks who have a basis to complain, seeing as no damage received means they get less mana from heals, but most paladins have reported it as a non-issue when they have a disc priest as their main healer.
Stephen Jan 12th 2009 12:23AM
Columnists are not focusing on it anymore because it's been talked to death already. Every time it gets brought up again, it just draws pages and pages of QQ comments from COH spammers.
venomslife Jan 12th 2009 12:56AM
i couldn't agree more with the original poster
Helore Jan 11th 2009 8:25PM
CoH isn't that big of a deal. Sure I did get used to casting it so much in BC in T5 and above.
CoH isn't a big nerf in a 5 or 10-man instance wise, but for 25-man I was usually the main AoE healer. We are short on Resto Shamans so I and another Priest were the AoE heals.
I still think 6 second CD is too much. Maybe 3 seconds would be fine, it would somewhat be in line with Chain Heal, since that's what they are basing it on. They indeed said they intended Resto Shamans to be the main AoE healer.
This does cause problems, it sorta forces you to recruit resto shamans. As I said, my guild was low on resto shamans but we had 2 CoH Priests deal with it, we can no longer deal with heavy AoE.
~H
Faar Jan 12th 2009 5:00AM
In all fairness, chain heal only hits 5 targets at most. Or is it 3? And it diminishes in strength also per "hit", doesn't it? Sorry, I don't actually play a shaman so the details are a little fuzzy to me. :P However, circle of healing can hit the entire raid for the full amount, so it's undisputably a way more powerful heal all-round.
soonerwolf Jan 12th 2009 10:40AM
The CoH nerf only affects priests who spam CoH nonstop. Priests who have a good rotation and don't rely on CoH as their main heal will be relatively unaffected. I've seen one priest in our guild outheal many other priests (and other healers) more than 2:1 and her CoH is under 40% of her healing. The other priests? 70% or more.
agnoster Jan 12th 2009 1:42PM
Faar - CoH does not heal the entire raid. Please refrain from using a word like "undisputably" (sic) unless you know what you are talking about, kthxbai.
Manatank Jan 11th 2009 8:26PM
"Priests of both specs"
You know there are three right? Or did you mean both DPS and Healing priests?
Stephen Jan 12th 2009 12:26AM
I would assume so, since healing specced priests could cast it, but dps specced couldn't.
Shikozu Jan 11th 2009 8:28PM
The CoH nerf is terrible. There is such a shortage of AoE heals in raids, and now this just makes it worse.
Oh, and CoH + Sprit of Redemption glyph was awesome.
I am a sad panda.
Helore Jan 11th 2009 8:28PM
One more thing, they have yet to fix the Mind Flay bug. I'm sure they are well aware of it. It would increase our dps if they fixed it.
Eisengel Jan 12th 2009 4:33PM
Quote:
"Mind Flay - Fixed a bug with targeting where you would not deal damage if not facing the target while channeling. Also corrected an issue where the damage from this ability was slightly delayed."
Endquote.
... ?
Sayas Jan 11th 2009 8:28PM
I keep wondering why I keep hearing about shielding tanks. I shield others and heal tanks only shielding them as a last resort.
Anhkhell Jan 11th 2009 9:12PM
you shield the tank cause you might be disc, then you got to do it, if not spec holy
Sayas Jan 11th 2009 11:04PM
Still can't see impeding a warrior tank from building rage but to each his own. /shrug
Hoggersbud Jan 11th 2009 11:41PM
That'd be a valid objection, except the shield doesn't impede the warrior.
At all.
Rage generation is not diminished by shields.
Matt Jan 12th 2009 11:07AM
Vanilla WoW called, they want their urban legend back.
Chris Anthony Jan 13th 2009 10:07AM
See, Matt, this is exactly why I want you to do that "history of priests" seminar. It'd be like Mass Dispel for myths and outdated information. :)
Sayas Jan 13th 2009 9:48PM
OK so from researching around now, it might be that there was a change with 3.02 where shield either doesn't inhibit rage or perhaps inhibits it less. If so, I stand corrected but I'm seeing the POSSIBILITY of 3.02 so the guy with the "vanilla WoW" comment can still stick it in his pipe and smoke it. Even if it is now OK to shield rage builders a quick perusal of recent stuff out there shows that it is still a question of much heated discussion. It really would be nice to see something definitive on it. Think I'll try to corral a guildie warrior or druid to do some experimenting...