Spiritual Guidance: Priest tier 10 examined
by Matt Low 
Oct 12th 2009 at 8:00PM
Every week (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 No Stock UI, a UI and addons blog for WoW. Tier 10 stuff is here!
Okay, that shot above is tier 9. But we don't know what the tier 10 stuff looks like yet so I had to pick something! The tier 10 bonuses for healing Priests have recently been updated. We'll compare the before and after versions. They're expected to only be obtainable in Icecrown in patch 3.3.
Previous and old bonuses
- 2 piece bonus - After your Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit talents expire on your target, they grant your target 10% increased healing received for 10 sec.
- 4 piece bonus - Your Flash Heal spell has a 15% chance to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance Spells.
The original 2 piece is mediocre at best. Healing Priests use their defensive cooldowns once or twice a fight. If the abilities are used, you're looking at 20 seconds of bonus healing received on a player (which is usually the tank).
Worded that way, it just doesn't seem as impressive does it? If you have the Glyph of Guardian Spirit, you might be able to get more use out of it since it drops the Guardian Spirit cooldown to a minute. But even that is stretching it a bit much.
Let's move on to the 4-piece now. It offers a chance to cause a cooldown reset on Circle of Healing or Penance. We're not exactly going to go back to the days of Black Temple or Sunwell when Circle of Healing spam reigned supreme. Personally, i miss those days, but the era of the 1 button healer is gone.
Blizzard heard the discontent that Priests had with the set and revamped them accordingly. This is what they look like now:
- 2 piece bonus - Your Flash Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec.
- 4 piece bonus - Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.
The updated 2 piece is hands down better than what they had before. In terms of gearing, there might be a slight shift towards crit based gear. Most of the caster items have either crit or haste (some have both). Most healing priests favor haste just so they can get their spells off faster.
This is an effect reminiscent of a Paladin's Flash of Light interaction with Sacred Shield. A Paladin who Flash of Lights a target with Sacred Shield will squeeze an additional 100% of the heal over 12 seconds.
Shadow Priest bonuses
- 2 Pieces (Damage): The critical strike chance of your Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch spells is increased by 5%.
- 4 Pieces (Damage): Reduces the channel duration and period of your Mind Flay spell by 0.5 seconds.
The 2 piece appears marginal at best, but more crit is more crit and everyone loves to have more crit. Now the 4 piece seems to be much stronger. It's basically the same Mind Flay spell, but it will channeled quicker in half a second which allows for more Mind Flay casts during an encounter.
Translation: Yes, it's a decent sized advantage for Shadow Priests.
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: Items, Analysis / Opinion, Raiding, (Priest) Spiritual Guidance, Priest
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Mike Oct 12th 2009 8:03PM
Finally, Priest is credit to team!
soul Oct 12th 2009 8:17PM
Anyone knows if 2-piece healing set stack on multiple applications?
Sanguinefrozenboy Oct 12th 2009 8:32PM
I would assume that it doesn't, but if it does, it would do so additively like piercing shots.
stuart_loki Oct 12th 2009 8:41PM
Now these are tier bonus's that I can live with. With the ones originally announced, I was planning on holding onto 2 of my T9's as long as possible.
Aralo Oct 12th 2009 9:11PM
As a healer and shadow priest I am happy with the shadow set. As dps we want crit so we can chuck as much as possible on the charts. The 4 peice though, ladies and gentalmen we have to not only rethink rotations. On the shadow priest web site, the suggested max dps build says to use a mf2 which means cutting your mindflay for mins blast as soon as it is off cd which cuts the last tick which also happened to be our biggest tick. Now not only to we get our addtional tick for more dps, but every ones favorite, but most under used spell shadow word: death can be squezzed in which will not only push our dps more, but it will
make sure that we can ultize all of spells.
On that note with GC saying that the glpyh of the mind flay is being worked into our spell we can glpyh SW:D. Does this mean we will become op, nope. What it does mean is that we finally scale to some reasonable lvl with other classes.
jellyphish Oct 13th 2009 1:03AM
I may be off somewhere, but I feel when I'm spamming as hard as I can, I get two full mind flays off just as the cooldown for mind blast is up. With the 4-piece, I would then get like two and a half before casting mind blast? I don't know for sure (i only pvp in shadow), but I wonder how much of a dps boost one tick on mindflay would be versus both the mana cost and the constant clipping of the spell? Just a thought, but maybe a real raiding spriest can better explain the actual numbers...
Eisengel Oct 13th 2009 9:25PM
I think what this means is that we're going to be seeing a lot more haste on gear, so Blizz needs to speed up MF to fit another full one in the MB CD window. If not, without running any numbers, I think a SW:D will do you a bit better than a single MF tick (and you wouldn't have to wait for the channel time to spool up for the 1st tick).
furriusmurrius Oct 20th 2009 12:08PM
Yeah...with 400 haste its already more than feasible to squeeze in two full duration MFs before MB is off CD.
Swingline Oct 12th 2009 9:14PM
Disc priests should be happy about these bonuses. I'd still give it a "meh" for holy though.
Nibbit Oct 13th 2009 1:34AM
Better than it was? Well yes slightly but better than complete shit is still not very good.
I’m of the opinion that blizzard has no one that actually plays a priest on their design team.
brittwilson Oct 12th 2009 9:20PM
"The updated 2 piece is hands down better than what they had before. In terms of gearing, there might be a slight shift towards crit based gear."
Not if your Holy.
Surge of Light will render this set bonus practically useless. Is it better than the other bonus? Yes. Is it a good bonus? Only if your Disc tank healing.
SixTwoSixFour Oct 13th 2009 12:43AM
I disagree. Sure, Flash Heal is not Holy's main heal, but it IS our way of stacking Serendity, so we do still cast it with frequency even without Surge of Light. Not as good for Holy as it is for Disc? I'll agree there. Still a great set bonus. What I would like, though, would be this... "Your Flash Heal and Binding Heal critical strikes cause the target to heal for 25% of the healed amount over 9 sec." That would be SEXY.
existant0o0 Oct 12th 2009 10:16PM
This isn't the perfect discussion to bring up the topic, but since Blizz has said they want another form of burst damage for shadow priests, wouldn't it be interesting to see a spell that caused all the priest's DoTs on the target to tick at once, maybe on a 10 second CD?
prisa Oct 12th 2009 10:20PM
Matt - No comment on the updated healing 4pc? It's still garbage, putting an extra 5% on a bad bonus doesn't make it any good. I guess that just means healing priests will have more options for gearing off of drops. That is if we can take them over Locks, Mages, Trees, Boomkins, Shadow Priests, etc....
Qot Oct 12th 2009 11:09PM
It's not an increase on the chance, it's actually a lot worse. Previously you could get off 3 flash heals, each with a 15% chance to reset the cooldown:
CoH-FH(15%)-FH(15%)-FH(15%)-CoH
Now, the first flash heal gets a 20% chance to reset the cooldown and the next get none:
CoH-FH(20%)-FH-FH-CoH
That means that instead of a 38.5% chance to get a shorter cooldown on CoH, you have a 20% chance. It's even worse with penance, where previously you could get 6 FH off (62% chance to reset the cooldown). Of course, that assumes FH spam, but it's a nerf even if you only use FH twice in that 10 second cooldown window.
Theyas Oct 12th 2009 11:14PM
You missed what the change is going to bring forth, I think.
What they're doing is allowing Circle of Healing and Penance to give your next Flash Heal a 6 second buff/proc.
This buff/proc will reset the CD on Penance and CoH the next time you cast Flash Heal.
This will make both specs much more effective, if you use it correctly!
Qot Oct 13th 2009 12:12AM
That is confusing wording and a very confusing mechanic: your CoH buffs your Flash Heal to reset your CoH.
It still works out to be a net nerf (you still have fewer chances to lower the cooldown with Flash Heal), but gives a more controllable style, since CoH to Flash Heal will cause an instant CoH availability rather than having to watch if CoH is off cooldown after every Flash Heal. Both of these mechanisms are probably better for Disc priests overall.
Theyas Oct 13th 2009 12:41AM
It could work wonderfully. Think about it:
A Circle of Healing procs the 4pc, AND gives you a Surge of Light proc.
You use your free Flash Heal to heal someone AND to reset the cooldown on CoH, so you use CoH again (if the extra heals are needed, ie Tantrum or Frozen Blows, or even an Acidmaw Acidic Spew on heroic).
THAT second CoH could AGAIN proc a Surge of Light and ALSO possibly trigger another 4PC proc.
It's theoretical, but if the stars align for you, you could dish out a LOT of AoE healing in a VERY short time. Personally, I'm excited for this bonus. :)
Tom Oct 13th 2009 6:02AM
Read it carefully.
"Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells."
So you cast a Penance or a Circle of Healing. This has a 20% chance to proc a buff.
If the buff procs then your next Flash Heal has a 100% chance to reset the cooldown on your CoH or Penance.
So it's a much much better bonus. The proc occurs on the Penance or the CoH so you know before you even cast that Flash heal that you will get the cooldown reset. This means:
1. No spamming Flash Heal instead of casting more powerful spells in the vain hope it will reset your cooldown. You KNOW if it will or not before you cast it.
2. You can reset the cooldown immediately and gain the maximum 3-6 seconds of extra cooldown reset rather than spamming Flash Heal and being unlucky to see your third Flash Heal reset the cooldown when there was only 0.x seconds left anyway.
As an aside: Did you run out of time Matt? The article sort of stops abruptly without covering any of this.
Blau Oct 13th 2009 8:46AM
Even though people are "reading it carefully" I think they are still missing the way the mechanic works.
On a Circle of Healing CAST -- there is a 20% chance to proc your next Flash Heal to reset the cooldown. This is a seriously bad bonus! With a 6 sec cooldown on CoH on average it will only proc every 30 seconds! (Proccing once out of 5 casts with a 6 second cooldown)
Qot is on target with what this actually means but it seems like everyone thinks that if you cast a FHeal after CoH then it will always reset the cooldown. At a 20% chance you could theoretically wait an ETERNITY sometimes to see your cooldown reset to "save" you 6 seconds minus a global and minus your hasted FHeal cast time? So what you save yourself 2.5 seconds modified by haste? It certainly is no spam!
What i am saying is that on average once every 30 seconds instead of:
CoH-FH-FH-FH-CoH-FH-FH-FH-CoH
you get to do:
CoH-FH-CoH-FH-FH-FH-CoH...30 seconds later on average...CoH-FH-CoH
This is terrible! how can you guys say it is good?!