I am not sure why everyone's talking about a buff to Disc and a nerf to Holy. At least in PvE terms, I sort of worried. Nowadays you pretty much either spec Holy or you can't heal efficiently in raids. Maybe in 25mans there's one token slot available for Disc, but in 10mans, I've seen every single Disc priest who tried it respec eventually because they couldn't do their job otherwise. Yes, even AFTER the CoH nerf.

And now? With Divine Spirit baseline, there's one less reason to spec Disc, and one more reason to spec Holy. Circle of Healing heals more, another reason to spec Holy. PoH has greater utility, another reason to spec Holy (who can improve PoH while Disc cannot), with the same counting for Holy Nova.

Penance being self-targetable is a fully PvP centric change. I'll admit it's nice though!

So far it seems that for PvE, the worse tree got worse and the better tree got better. The question now remains is, how much is this tendency affected by the ominous Serendipity change, and the new Disc talent. The first thing that immediately jumps out is the fact that Disc and Holy are now massively separated by mana economy. Disc spells efficiently employed refund a ton of mana due to the returns from Rapture, while Holy loses its big mana saver. It remains to be seen how long a Holy priest can keep it up in a spam-situation after the patch. Though from personal experience, where I've seen a single 10man-geared Holy priest solo-heal an entire 10man Gluth encounter for over 5 minutes without running out of mana (no innervate, no replenishment), I think they'll be fine still.

Then there's Power Word: Barrier. I am really ambivalent about this. As mentioned before, it completely ruins synergy effects via Borrowed Time in case it procs Weakened Soul (admittedly, we don't know that, but it seems logical). Also, does it work with Rapture? Does it gain the same absorption bonuses from talents as PW:S does? If yes, does it proc Borrowed Time after all? How much damage absorption does it even have, how much does it scale, and how much does it cost - especially in comparison with the newly buffed Holy Nova? If it does proc Weakened Soul, does that mean you can only cast this spell once every 15 seconds, because Weakened Soul will prevent another shield from applying for that long? If yes, is it even worth it to ruin your chance to single-target shield any person at all for that long?

These are all questions that need to be answered before I am willing to like this change.

(Yes, I have a Disc Priest, and I won't respec it no matter what... but I can still be happy or unhappy about changes :p)

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