World of Warcraft Patch 3.2 Priest Guide

WoW.com has covered patch 3.2 extensively. Everything from the surprising changes to flying mounts, to the latest and greatest loot, and all the changes in between. In our patch 3.2 class, raiding, and PvP guides we take a look at exactly what changes and how the changes will affect your playing.
Here's a quick recap of what is known in the upcoming Priest changes for the 3.2 patch. There has not been a whole lot of changes to the Priest talent trees or to the talents themselves. But let's go over what we know:
Healing
The signature group heal for Priests (Prayer of Healing) has been nerfed significantly. The spell power percentage has been lowered from 80.7% to 52.6%. Ouch. That's a pretty strong blow. Prayer of Healing has helped me when I was participating in several of the Ulduar hard modes.
Discipline Priests are going to be annoyed since the cooldown of Penance has increased from 10 seconds to 12 seconds (thereby making the Glyph of Penance almost mandatory).
Lastly a change to Inspiration has it set so that when the buff is active, physical damage taken by targets is reduced by 3/7/10% instead of simply increasing the target's armor. That may not be a lot, but at least it's something positive.
Glyph of Power Word: Shield gains a minor change. It now has the ability to activate Divine Aegis.
Shadow
A cool change is that the cooldown on Dispersion has been reduced to 2 minutes (from 3 minutes). That should help Shadow Priests survive a little more whether they are raiding or hitting up battlegrounds.
The Improved Mind Blast talent has been redone and now adds a healing debuff component to it. It will continue to reduce the cooldown of Mind Blast by 2.5 seconds (fully talented). However, if you are in Shadowform, your Mind Blast has a 100% chance (fully talented) to reduce all healing done to the target by 20% for 10 seconds. Any heals your target gains while the debuff is active will be slightly negated.
Lastly, Vampiric Touch gains a buff. Damage dealt when the spell is dispelled is being doubled. That's a little over 1300 base damage at max level.
It seems like our shadowy brothers and sisters have gained improvements.
Mana regeneration
We're being hit with mana changes. In case you haven't read about it before, Replenishment now grants 1% of a target's maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second.
On the other hand, MP5 items are getting buffed. All items that provide MP5 are having their numbers increased by 25%.
Potential Priest Upgrades
Here's some cool stuff for Priests coming out of the Crusader's Coliseum and the vendors. Don't forget to check out the previous post on tier 9 healing bonuses.
Solace of the Defeated – Really nice looking trinket here. At full power, it can mean an additional 128 MP5 on top of what your Priest is sporting!
Misery's End – This mace does not have any MP5 or Spirit stats on it. By all rights, it favours DPS players. Should you find yourself with surplus maces, consider picking one up to play with.
Argent Resolve – On the other hand, here's a mana regen mace. This one comes out of 10-man.
That covers all the relevant stuff for Priests for the time being! A bit lackluster overall, I know. I'm really hoping they slightly increase that Prayer of Healing coefficient. I still feel that 50 something percent's a bit low.
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WoW's Patch 3.2 ushers in the Crusaders' Coliseum, the Isle of Conquest, flying mounts at 60, and much more. WoW.com has all the patch information your Worgen obsessed mind can handle in WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2! |







Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
jorncae Aug 4th 2009 7:08PM
The devouring plague change didn't appear on the patch notes but it is in the game.
Craig R Aug 4th 2009 7:17PM
thanks for reminding me of this!
I totally forgot until you mentioned it!
ACTUAL REASON TO BE ENTHUSIASTIC YAYYYY
threesixteen Aug 4th 2009 7:17PM
does "mp5 buff" also include spirit. i'm still so confused. does a holy priest stack spirit or not.
>.
Emma Marie Aug 4th 2009 7:29PM
Yep, we do indeed stack spirit. :) The mp5 buff will help with any piece of gear that specifically grants mp5. Such as the Skirt of the Old Kingdom for instance.
itstuesday Aug 4th 2009 7:26PM
serious.
shadow buffs are bogus.
if you care at all for shadow, do not talent dispersion. wtb living bomb, a dps increasing curse, a nuke (chaos bolt much?). SOMETHING at 51 points that isn't a defensive spell.
oh. GC. it's working as intended. sure. it's okay as we still get lawlstomped in pvp, that we're still topping out at around 5.3k dps with other pure dps, and some hybrid classes topping out 6k+... and we're completely utterly useless in burst.
our heals get nerfed in both corners of thoroughput via disc AND holy. oh yeah. this is major QQ drippage. both corners. all three corners...
jediking001 Aug 6th 2009 9:29AM
i agree. Shadow Priest last spell should be offensive, wow has never really cared about S priest survivability till now? y? i dont wanna be a mage n pop ice block i just wanna blow ppl wit damage. we should have a move called Shadow Fire- have it do exactly what holy fire does exept it can onli be used in shadowform or sumin.or give us a nuke spell like pyroblast or even give us another DOT! shadow talent tree is already based around out DOTS so give us 1 more!
thetrimdj Aug 4th 2009 7:31PM
When you say that: "It seems like our shadowy brothers and sisters have gained improvements." Please make sure to specify that it's PVP SPriests who are getting buffed. PVE STILL has lackluster DPS relative to other classes and lets be honest here, the dispersion change isn't really gonna affect anyone outside of PVP and if it DOES play a significant role in PVE (Not counting Algalon Big Bang sponging) well then you or someone in your raid is doing something wrong...
Grendalsh Aug 4th 2009 7:33PM
I guess when Blizz said they wanted to make healing 'more fun' what they really meant was we want to make healers funnier. Cause after the Priest Q&A, I'm pretty much feeling like a clown for still playing priest.
Jon Do Aug 5th 2009 9:07AM
Yeah. I try not to complain, but I wish they would have just said:
"We reviewed Priests back in 3.1, nothing new to see here, move along."
Instead it seems like they threw out a shallow Q&A to beat patch day, in which they didn't even bother to address the most serious questions of any of the three specs --
Shadow: Damage scaling, esp. haste on DOTs - how did GC not even address this at all?!
Disc: Penance nerf
Holy: PoH nerf
I mean, as a Holy Priest, I see something like this quote from GC:
“Furthermore, the priest has strong heal-over-time spells (HoTs), ...”
Um, we don’t have “HOTs”, we have *one* HOT, Renew.
As a former Shadow Priest, how about this from GC on Shadow:
“... while also retaining some of its unique utility which made it cool during The Burning Crusade”
Um, no. You gave that “unique” utility to other classes. Remember?
I didn’t like the look of this from GC:
“we’d like to improve the Holy tree’s PvP niche”
Please, no. If I wanted to be a PvP healer I would spec Disc or reroll.
PS - I’m speccing out of Dispersion in my shadow off-spec.
Wyred Aug 5th 2009 9:32AM
"I didn’t like the look of this from GC:
“we’d like to improve the Holy tree’s PvP niche”
Please, no. If I wanted to be a PvP healer I would spec Disc or reroll."
I noticed that. Unbelievable, do they have any conception of how much revision it would take to make holy viable in arena? Meanwhile, those who want to shadow pvp (a much more legitimate idea) are left with fuck-all.
Player: "Dispersion is a crap talent that solves none of our problems in pve or pvp"
Blizz: "Here, now it can be crap ever so slightly more often"
Player: "..."
None of the class reviews were stellar, but I think this priest one ranks near the bottom along with the rogue's. And my pet hate, charges on inner fire got an answer indicating that they're not gonna change it for a reason so much less important than the game mechanic. Great.
Eisengel Aug 4th 2009 7:46PM
Priest patch note summary:
Close your eyes & open your mouth...
Gulliver Foyle Aug 4th 2009 7:48PM
"(...) (thereby making the Glyph of Penance almost mandatory)."
It's mandatory, without "simple"... and it was even before this nerf by the way, fellow disc brothers, correct me if I'm wrong.
Gulliver Foyle Aug 4th 2009 7:49PM
EDIT: i meant to emphasize "almost", not "simple", I don't even know from where i got that word, but nvm.:)
theRaptor Aug 4th 2009 8:08PM
The penance change pisses me off. No serious disc priest didn't have penance glyphed so why didn't they just remove the stupid glyph instead of effectively negating the effect of the glyph (for those not in the the know the glyph reduced the CD on penance by 2 seconds)? It is a double kick in the balls. "here your main spell is on a longer CD, oh and we are taking one of your glyph slots away".
And sorry WoWInsider but dispersal is a useless survival talent in raiding. Nearly all "oh crap" boss abilities in Ulduar GO RIGHT THROUGH IT! Its only use is on incidental damage effects that you shouldn't have been standing in in the first place, and I have found that if I need to disperse to survive them my raid is about to die anyway. I use it maybe 2-3 times a week for mana regen, and that is normally only because my raid has screwed up requiring me to Divine Hymn or left me as the sole AoEr alive.
cmiller1776 Aug 4th 2009 8:02PM
As a healing priest I have to "Do What?" Greater heal is obsolete except if you are using it on a Pally. Flash heal has much more bang for the buck. Lightwell???? all that is good for is taking your DPS out of the raid and setting them up for a 1 shot. Please, keep the analysis realistic.
theRaptor Aug 4th 2009 8:28PM
I almost forgot to whine about the replenishment changes!
Now an already weak and forgettable ability* is even more weak and forgettable, and shadow priests get kicked in the nuts again! What is with blizzes "DPS don't have to worry about mana BS"? Why even give them mana bars if you don't want them to have resource issues? Why is it that the only people in this game who are expected to need to think and not just blindly follow a rotation are tanks and healers?
So there healers, replenishment gets nerfed because you are supposed to go OOM. How rude of you for stacking regen stats, playing well, and not wanting to be the weak link in the raid chain. How terribly rude!
* Generally if I shadowfiend twice a fight it beats replenishment for mana regen. If I used shadowfiend on CD like I probably should (only really just got good enough gear to not need to maximise mana regen) it would be several times that. And now they want to slash the regen of replenishment by a quarter.
Nightbringer Aug 4th 2009 9:49PM
You forgot about 1) Replenishment nerfs, 2) Devouring Plague buffs, 3) Glyph of Shadow Proccing on DoT Crits (100% uptime of the glyph buff is now possible) and 4) Silence acting as an interrupt on PVE targets. Very minor buffs and one slight nerf, but they're all important changes.
Evelinda Aug 4th 2009 10:17PM
bahaha... i'm so glad my glyph of power word:shield crits can now proc a divine aegis... lol
John Aug 5th 2009 12:08AM
Nerfs to (priest/pally/shaman/druid) healing are idiotic.
Healing is already the most disliked task in a raid / in the game except by the nutty few.
I am one of those nuts, but I find when I take my dps/tank alts for a spin, getting healers is astoundingly difficult.
Greater Heals are crap compared to a holy light bombing pally (my priest has over 3100 spell pwr in raid with totem and after proccing the 4 pc T8 bonus, my pally alt has 1860 spell power and his holy light already compares with the priest's GHeal). Pallies can't do that anymore with their mana regen nerf. More fights will now end prematurely due to MT death as pallies try to conserve mana (and no, our disc priest's bubbles and druid's HoT's don't "mitigate" the incoming damage from hardmode Ulduar bosses nearly enough to compensate). I don't have a shaman to compare healing wave or a druid to compare healing touch.
The T8 4 pc bonus is situational and borderline bogus for holy spec, so I'll probably dump it for 2 pc T8 and 2 pc T9 also. Too bad we can't get 2 pc T7, 8 & 9 at once.
The nerf to prayer of healing is all about making new gear desired by priests. What about the fresh L80 priest trying to go heal a heroic or Naxx? Oh - wait - no one's dumb enough to level new healers now...
Sokzernkal Aug 5th 2009 12:48AM
Oh yay!...Disc got buggered again?
why do I even stand up...this Permanent bent-over posistion seems to suit blizzard just fine
"PW:Sheild can now proc Divine Aegis"
-.-....My little preist with her 1900sp in 10naxx gear PWSheild glyph crit heals for ....about 2k....so a Divine Aegis for? what 500? 200?
and they remove one of my glpyh slots....when I was thinking of dropping that current glyph for favor of the PoH one >.< because Disc is bogus for AoE (damn you XT Tantrums)
I mean in higher teir gear my PWSheild would crit for what? 3k? 3.5? so once again Aegis-ing for.....800? 600?
Woop di frickin doo -.-