Spiritual Guidance: Understanding the recent priest changes
by Dawn Moore 
Feb 21st 2011 at 4:00PM
The last week has been a bit of an adventure for priests of the healing variety. Hotfix nerfs and buffs were implemented to address the overuse of Power Word: Shield in the aftermath of patch 4.0.6, and before long, everything was upside down. Discipline priests quickly found their mana pools drained for using multiple shields, even at ideal times, and in a weird twist of fate, holy priests were able to pick up the mantle as shield spammers. The community writhed and waited for new hotfixes to come. But would they be the last?
Given these events, I thought it would be appropriate to explain exactly what happened this past week before moving back to our weekly boss strategies.
The first of the hotfixes
As you know from last week, after patch 4.0.6 went live, shield spamming quickly resurfaced from the icy depths of Wrath of the Lich King. Though shield spam during certain parts of a fight has always been part of a discipline priest's playstyle, the almost tripling of the absorption amount of Power Word: Shield encouraged many priests to abandon their entire toolbox in favor of using just Power Word: Shield and nothing else. Discipline priests quickly rode to the top of the effective healing charts on their one spell, and the entire healing community screamed bloody murder. Nerfs were not just anticipated, they were demanded, and eventually Blizzard answered with the following hotfixes.
- Power Word: Shield now costs roughly 34% of base mana, up from 25%. This is not reflected in the tooltip, but is reflected in the amount of mana used when the spell is cast. The tooltip update will require a client-side patch.
- In addition to its current effects, the Body and Soul talent now grants 12.5%/25% reduction to the base mana cost of Power Word: Shield. This is not reflected in the tooltip, but is reflected in the amount of mana used when Power Word: Shield is cast by Holy priests who have this talent. The tooltip update will require a client-side patch.
Incoming Healer Changes -- NethaeraSince the release of patch 4.0.6, we've been keeping an eye on healers and how they are performing and are currently in the process of making some additional adjustments.
Priests
The cost of Power Word: Shield is being increased by 33%. While we wanted Discipline priests to be able to utilize this spell more often and with better results, we also did not want it to be the main spell (and often the only spell) used while in groups. We don't find this to be a particularly compelling playstyle and have found that it encourages players to avoid using other spells such as Penance. We believe that using a shield in a tight moment is totally appropriate, but we don't want it to be incredibly efficient to do so with more frequency than that.
We realize that by making Power Word: Shield slightly more expensive for Discipline priests to cast that it might cause Holy priests to avoid using it. To that end, we are adding mana savings into the Body and Soul talent. The tooltip will not reflect this change until a future patch, however. Ideally, Holy priests should not notice much of a change to the Power Word: Shield costs..
Priests
The cost of Power Word: Shield is being increased by 33%. While we wanted Discipline priests to be able to utilize this spell more often and with better results, we also did not want it to be the main spell (and often the only spell) used while in groups. We don't find this to be a particularly compelling playstyle and have found that it encourages players to avoid using other spells such as Penance. We believe that using a shield in a tight moment is totally appropriate, but we don't want it to be incredibly efficient to do so with more frequency than that.
We realize that by making Power Word: Shield slightly more expensive for Discipline priests to cast that it might cause Holy priests to avoid using it. To that end, we are adding mana savings into the Body and Soul talent. The tooltip will not reflect this change until a future patch, however. Ideally, Holy priests should not notice much of a change to the Power Word: Shield costs..
Incoming Healer Changes -- NethaeraGenerally speaking (and more to the PvE end), the Discipline tree has talents that play off of Penance, Flash Heal, Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing. It wouldn't be strange for these priests to leverage Power Word:Barrier to help mitigate damage either should the occasion present itself. There's a solid variety of available spells to be used, and we want you to use them. Moreover we think healing as a priest will be more fun if you have to think about which spell to use rather than robotically answering each damage event with PW: Shield. Overall, we're not reducing the power of Power Word: Shield at all, just increasing its cost and making the more efficient heals more attractive to use.
Power Word: Shield will still have its time and place and as always. We want it to be used often, we just don't want it used to the exclusion of all other abilities. We'll keep an eye on how things play out once the change is applied too.
Power Word: Shield will still have its time and place and as always. We want it to be used often, we just don't want it used to the exclusion of all other abilities. We'll keep an eye on how things play out once the change is applied too.
Incoming Healer Changes -- NethaeraWe want people using Power Word: Shield. As others have pointed out, it's something Discipline priests do well (Damage Mitigation) and it took awhile before more people began to believe that (remember those days?). Damage Mitigation will still happen and is still important even with this change, it's just not going to be the ONLY thing that the Discipline spec is going to be using to keep their groups and Raids up. There will be heals as well. Also, in Raids, there will be more than a Discipline priest supporting the raid. So knowing the best use of your abilities in that situation is key and playing off of the strengths of other healers will be as essential as it has always been.
Overall, the changes seemed to be appropriate, and were already in effect by raid time.
The aftermath of the changes
I went into my Wednesday raid expecting very little impact from the hotfix on my playstyle. Surely a shield on the tanks and other players who needed saving or were taking incoming raid damage was appropriate play, but I was shocked to see it wasn't. Any attempt I made to blanket shields for upcoming bursts of damage was crippling to my mana pool, even after I readjusted the timing on my cooldown usage and negotiated an Innervate. After two pulls on heroic Maloriak, I had to completely abandon the strategy of shielding melee throughout the black phase. Though I'd been using this strategy since before the patch, using it now left my mana resources exhausted halfway through the fight, and with only one Innervate in the raid, I knew this wasn't going to work. Dejectedly, I abandoned using shields for any sort of raid healing and settled on Prayer of Healing with lacking results.
Meanwhile, in other raids, friends of mine reported that they were still shield spamming to their hearts' content, but that their shield usage was still being supported with multiple Innervates. The hotfix had made no difference on their one-button wonder play. I looked westward to Blizzard HQ and thought to myself, "What the hell?" Was it my lack of heroic gear and spirit trinkets, or was it possible to completely ignore the nerf if you had an entire raid team backing you up? Was this going on in multiple guilds? Would Blizzard take further action to prevent it?
Before I considered it further, I caught word that some holy priests had been clever enough to respec immediately after the hotfix and get Soul Warding from the discipline tree. The talent, which effectively removes the cooldown of Power Word: Shield, suddenly allowed holy priests to start shield spamming with amazing effectiveness. Even though the shields were smaller by 10,000 to 20,000 absorption, once combined with the Glyph of Power Word: Shield and holy's Echo of Light mastery, holy priests were looking at a filler spell comparable to Renew in cost and HPS, but instant cast and better for preemptive healing than a HoT could ever hope to be. We were sure Blizzard had overlooked this; everyone waited with bated breath for its next move.
But there was nothing but silence the first day. Nervous with anticipation, I went to talk to Kinaesthesia, my priesty cohort for all things healing. I asked him what he thought of the changes. He admitted he hadn't tried it out himself yet, so I gave him a rundown of it all. He asked me what I thought could be done to fix everything.
"Move Soul Warding, first of all. Perhaps switch it with Atonement so holy can get a bit more incentive to use Chakra: Chastise in PvE. Then another shield or something to fix the raid healing problem. My mobility is terrible, and if shaman or druids get a raid cooldown like Power Word: Barrier, disc is going to look a lot less appealing when every other healer can single-target and AoE heal well, but disc can only single-target well."
"How would this new spell work?" he asked.
"Probably just a second shield, a mini-Power Word: Shield you could spam for 8,000 to 10,000."
We spent the rest of the night designing spells, everything from a Penance with an Inner Focus-inspired modifier, which split the spell into a raid heal, to a Wild Growth clone with individual shields that use the absorption mechanic Power Word: Barrier had during beta. After that, we explored ways to fix the lessened appeal of Smite healing by working Holy Fire into Atonement healing. Then we dropped the designs into a pneumatic capsule and sent it through our direct pipeline to Ghostcrawler's office. It was around that time we remembered it wasn't 1995 and that we were daydreaming.
A hotfix reverted
Finally, after two long days, another hotfix was announced. This change addressed the insanity of the previous two days.
- Body and Soul no longer reduces the mana cost of Power Word: Shield (the hotfix made on Feb. 16 to provide this additional benefit has been reverted).
- Rapture now returns 2/5/7% of maximum mana when Power Word: Shield is consumed, up from 2/4/6%.
The tiny buff to Rapture seemed like it might answer my new issues with mana as well, but I would need another week to test it in action. And what about the shield spamming in my friends' guilds? I guess there was no doing away with it entirely, not with the sanction of a whole raid team. I decided to consult with two other trusted priest friends to get their thoughts on the nerfs. I heard back from Derevka at Tales of a Priest first.
Raegx of the guild <Blood Legion> (previously <Vigil>) also got back to me with his thoughts."I think we all saw this coming -- and if you didn't shame on you! I don't think anyone wanted an entire expansion of heroic Lich King over and over. Having a single spell, be it Power Word: Shield, Prayer of Healing, or (thinking back to Sunwell) Circle of Healing as 70% of our healing done is not how any class should be healing. I think the mana change is a bit of a Band-Aid or knee jerk fix; but something that had to be done. Personally, I think I would have rather seen a change to the way mastery scales, but that would have taken a lot more number crunching and would have affected more than just Power Word: Shield. For now, this is a solid 'fix,' but only for now. I think we'll see more tuning; the mana change is just an instant way to stop the madness. You could, of course, keep on spamming and leeching Innervates and chained Man Tide Totems, but it really isn't the best use of time.
"People did cry out that disc needs to maintain viability, and it really has. The Rapture change makes using Power Word: Shield a bit less punitive and shines light on the way it seems the developers really want us using Power Word: Shield. Power Word: Shield is, an will continue to be, a major player in the Disc arsenal -- we just needed to adjust the manner in which we were using it. Yes, we can spam it on multiple targets, but not non-stop. I will continue to use it on multiple targets before I know a major boss ability is going to hit (Rohash's Hurricane, or Maloriak's Scorching Breath), just not non-stop the whole fight. We have a ton of other spells in our toolbox and talents that improve those spells: we should use them."
"Right now discipline numbers are pretty par for the course. In some situations we can be very powerful healers ... In some situations you can feed a priest for shield spamming, but it isn't maintainable for any length of time. Fights that showcase Prayer of Healing seem to be a strength, but disc is in a weird place now.
"Our mastery is not really that great anymore and it would seem haste for Prayer of Healing is our best alternative. We also don't have any kind of AoE healing outside of Prayer of Healing, Prayer of Mending, and Holy Nova. Holy Nova has not proved very useful to me and Prayer of Healing is still group based -- we really don't have anything to fill that random AoE damage situation. Previously, we used to shield a decent number of probable targets to simulate the AoE effect that holy has with Circle of Healing, but now shielding that much is too costly on mana. It would seem group based healing is bust for discipline in terms of AoE, unless groups are specifically setup to support Prayer of Healing. Single-target healing seems to be fine, maybe a little too mana costly, but nothing big. The buffs to Rapture are welcomed and justly deserved.
"As far as raid strategies go now, we are back to do what we did pre-changes. We aren't bringing less healers or more disc priests at this point in time. I suppose that means Blizzard did what they intended; buff survivability in PvP. However, I feel that discipline is now limited in our healing repertoire in relation to our holy priest friends. I'd like to see some kind of smart AoE shield similar to Circle of Healing that would fill the hole -- maybe something that sends out a lot of shields. I think that it would be fun to shield a few people in a random area from damage. Maybe put a glowing dome over their heads and absorb some damage. It would reward raid awareness and bring some of that AoE pop back to discipline without it being too 'spammy' or overpowered. Right now it seems like it's Prayer of Healing or bust in terms of raid healing."
What will happen to priests in the long run?
With the last change coming just before a long holiday weekend, I can't help but think there is a sort of finality to it. Will this be the last of the changes until patch 4.1? My thoughts stick on the looming likelihood that another Power Word: Barrier will be introduced in the coming months. I wasn't bothered by the idea of another class getting the ability, but rather, I'm worried about what will become of disc if another class has it. Discipline is the only healing spec that didn't receive additional AoE healing like Healing Rain or Holy Word: Sanctuary, and without a spammable shield, there are few ways to stay competitive with other healers when they can all effectively single-target and AoE heal.
Would Blizzard developers even consider giving discipline priests a new spell if such a thing were to happen? Is it Blizzard's intention to limit the versatility of discipline in order to keep it unique from holy? And what about Smite healing? Only time would tell.
Did you heal this past week after either of the hotfixes? Let me know your personal account of the nerfs and buffs in the comments, and tell me if and how your playstyle has been affected. How was your mana affected, and were you able to recover from it with adjustments? Be sure to mention your gear level, raid size, and composition.
Want more tips for carrying out your priestly duties as a disc or holy priest? Check out Spiritual Guidance: Discipline and Spiritual Guidance: Holy. Newcomers to the priest class will want to look into Discipline Priest 101 and Holy Priest 101. For getting your healing priests geared, check out the pre-raid gear guide and the Valor point and raid gear guide.Filed under: Priest, (Priest) Spiritual Guidance
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Shrikesnest Feb 21st 2011 4:16PM
A little off-topic, but the prospect of switching Soul Warding with Atonement makes my holy priest salivate. Getting all the synergy with Evangelism > Archangel would make me happy to wear those shiny cliche wings on my back.
Akrie Feb 21st 2011 4:24PM
I tried to heal as disco this week. And even if I wasn't shield-spamming I could still very well feel the impact of the raised mana cost of PW:S. Had to beg my friend Mr Owl for an innervate. If they want to reduce the use of PW:S, I think they should limit amount of PW:S that can be active at the same time. But I'm not sure if it would help much. since then I guess people would just bring more disc to raid. (>.
alieria Feb 21st 2011 4:26PM
I'm a priest who rarely respecs (holy/disc) but did so 3 times in the past week to try and stay ahead of the curve. Honestly, the holy build with shield spam might have been the most overpowered PVE healer in the history of this game - we were getting 2/3rds the strength of shields of disc for half the mana cost (my personal #s - with 19 mastery, ~29k raid buffed bubbles as disc, ~18-20k as holy specced 8/31/2), while still having extremely powerful raid healing tools (lightwell, COH, AOE stance chakra). The fixes were necessary, I think, but you're correct Dawn - disc is headed for a bad place soon if AOE cds go out to other healers .
Right now, disc priests are useful for exactly four things: heavy tank damage requiring non-healing mitigation (absorbs, etc - think H mal., though even this is questionable); situations where PW:B is useful (too numerous to count); gimmicks where raid absorbs are useful (H chim burn phase); and gimmicks where boss debuffs allow atonement to go nuts (H Halfus, even post nerf). Take away #2, and its tough to find a reason to take a disc priest over another healer, given the current situation
As an aside, holy also doesn't really have an AOE heal like effo./rain/holy rad. - Sanctuary is so thoroughly awful that it has exactly one use - Chim. feuds - and maybe not even then. Ticks from it are ~20-30% those of healing rain/holy radiance, and the mana cost + cd is prohibitive enough that I practically never cast it. POH is almost universally a better expenditure of the gcd/mana.
dwebster3 Feb 21st 2011 4:36PM
Very curious as to where this is heading.. Sad that i lost my "cheap" holy speed bubbles
Saphieria Feb 21st 2011 4:39PM
As holy I never really used shields much (even from cata release) unless there was an AoE going on.
I found my casted heals and AoE heals more than adequate. I suppose I gravitated toward that play-style because I never healed in wotlk where shields were awesome and had heard shields were nerfed in Cata, so I avoided them. If that makes sense.
Perhaps I'm doing it wrong but I do just fine on keeping people alive in raids. Only going oom when AoE healing.
Eberron Feb 22nd 2011 3:31AM
It wasn't that you weren't doing it right it was just that for a couple of days after the PW: Shield changes went in to effect there were bubble-spamming holy priests who were 10 points in to disc to pick up the bulk of the bubble/instant-casts talents.
Between their OP bubbles and Glyph of PW: Shield they were doing like 60%-70% of their effective healing via spamming bubbles. Heh.
You're actually doing it 'right' ;)
DancePuppets Feb 21st 2011 4:42PM
I was really unimpressed at the mana change and have been raiding Holy sinc,e as looking at the numbers I just couldn't see a way to raid Disc and maintain any sort of longevity. The extra bonus to spirit that Holy gets for mana regen was off-set by Disc's ability for a large mana return from rapture which the initial hotfix killed, completely destroying my "spell-weaving" playstyle, that focused almost entirely on providing baseline healing for the raid throughout the encounter and picking up the slack with Power Infusion while other healers topped themselves back up, effectively rendering my Disc spec utterly worthless. With Rapture buffed enough to make a difference again, that longevity isn't completely gone, it's just slightly dimmed; however I've been able to adjust to it now, but I can see me using Holy for even more encounters than I already was, which is a pity. I've never enjoyed shield-spamming, and almost certainly never will, but normal raids don't appear to require the kind of "AoE healing" that it can provide so when in Disc I can still comfortably match the other healers I'm playing with through the correct choice of spells purely by having a much greater uptime than they do.
Sjalt Feb 22nd 2011 1:51PM
Certain raid makeups make the large intellect pools of disc priests preferable to spirit. Specifically replenishment and other "% mana" generation buffs. The changes in the mana tide totems now applying spirit based soley on the casters spirit, and other minor changes have given me, as Desc, all I need to continue in a fight. There are a few gimmicks that really help with getting the most out of your mana regen, and your abilities have to be timed as opposed to the passive regeneration from spirit. For example, timing the release of your shadowfiend to pop right before heroism and while he is out using hymn of hope to increase your mana pool creates a very effective combo restoring most of your sizable mana pool
Parrin Feb 21st 2011 4:42PM
"Let me know your personal account of the nerfs and buffs in the comments, and tell me if and how your playstyle has been affected."
I stopped playing my priest, and went back to sitting in queues as a DK. As long as I'm willing to log off when I need to, regardless of whether my toon actually sees a dungeon, I can still enjoy the game.
Terence Feb 28th 2011 12:04PM
Yeah, that's what I was thinking of doing until 4.1 patch notes started leaking out: more DK and priest nerf! >.
Innocente Feb 21st 2011 4:48PM
Quite frankly, the whole design change to healing (I played Holy Priest), caused me to give up on WoW. I had played since pre-launch stress tests.
When I hit Heroics (i347), I found a complete mess for healers. Yes, it could be done. Given a guild of dedicated, geared, top-of-the-game players. But an average joe? Forget it. Even at the best of times, some of the fights were pure RNG wins or losses. The Forgemaster in GB being a perfect example.
WoW is just not much fun anymore. Way to much work. Way to much drama. Way to much RNG.
I guess I must be one of the 'Bads'.
Oh well.
I'm out.
My Garona Feb 21st 2011 5:09PM
Well said- same for me and most of our healers. Activision/Blizzard has screwed this up royally and in ways that never happened pre Activision. Bad news fanboys - the truth you don't like is still the truth, and usually the one you need to hear.
DED Feb 21st 2011 5:27PM
I really don't understand this position. I'm not a top-of-the-game player. But, I've managed to complete every heroic in well below ilvl 347 gear. And I've had a lot more fun doing it than in Wrath. Heroics are certainly more difficult, but they are not BC hard.
Some of this can be attributed to guild runs, certainly. I have a group of players that I play with regularly, but again, none of us are top-end players. We're all average and enjoying the challenge in Cataclysm content.
TinyLittleRobot Feb 21st 2011 5:42PM
Later, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Radiophonic Feb 21st 2011 9:22PM
Indeed. I raid healed for the first time in about 8 moths on my disc priest yesterday. Nothing too crazy, just BH and well, even being careful where and what I cast I went oom at %50. Being geared up to par for the instance, I was very disappointed. While the pally healer in our group who just hit 85 3 days prior still had a huge chunk of mana available. What gives? Suffice to say, I started playing shadow a couple months back and rather than go to the next OP healing class and level, I'll just let my time card expire and call it a game.
WoW has become a slow grind for mats and points. Nothing else. Over-hyped and just plain boring. Feels like the end of Burning Crusade all over again.
Penitence Feb 22nd 2011 4:39AM
Agreed. It's just not fun to heal as holy priest any more. Hotfix, patch, hotfix, hotfix, several abilities whose tooltips don't match what they actually do, encounters that cannot be healed through if even one player puts a foot wrong for a half a second, or if you didn't bring the exact group composition...tedious.
My Garona Feb 22nd 2011 8:38AM
My guildies and I are tired of this "change for change's sake" mentality. Relearning your class and skills over and over is simply not fun. All the balance hotfixes clearly show how poorly run things are atm. New content and skills are great. Making priests irrelevant is not. Activation/Blizz is going down the SOE path of pissing off players with worthless change. Bad idea then and now.
nitnat79 Feb 22nd 2011 10:17PM
Yes, it is harder than WOTLK.
I have had a HEAP more fun post nerf as Disc healing random heroics with bad pugs than I have in the last 2 years. Not saying that people don't disband and every run is a cakewalk. But I do enjoy a challenge.
Remember running into ramparts the very 1st time at level 60 and getting your arse kicked severely by the dragon at the end?
I see a lot more chain pulling and AoE tanking in cata heroics now than I did at the "start" of BC heroics.
I think they are finally getting closer to a decent balance. Now as I am pretty badly geared, I just need to convince some tanks that putting up a CC mark or two is probably going to be faster than me drinking between each pull
Minstrel Feb 21st 2011 4:55PM
I was a little put off by Nethaera's explanation of how power word: shield should be used. To wit: "We believe that using a shield in a tight moment is totally appropriate, but we don't want it to be incredibly efficient to do so with more frequency than that."
Used in a tight situation, but not more frequently than that? That sounds like the description of a cooldown. That is, it sounds like how power word: barrier should be used. It's more powerful than power word: shield and has a cooldown time to match. Power word: shield shouldn't be just a "tight situation" spell, it should be the main spell for disc as, IMO, it's the signature spell. Shamans aren't cautioned to use chain heal only in a tight situation, for example. They're supposed to use it when they expect it to be efficient. It should be the same for power word: shield and there are plenty of "non-tight" situations where it is efficient (that is, where it can be expected to be consumed fairly swiftly).
I think Blizzard is confused about what they want power word: shield to be. I can understand the difficulty in balancing it: on the one hand, it should be used a lot. On the other hand, it shouldn't be spammed blindly. How you prevent it from being spammed but still open it up for frequent use is probably difficult.
The most viable solutions I've seen/heard are limiting the total number of shields up at a time (sub-optimal, it just feels arbitrary) or giving disc priests an "absorption amount" that can be out at any given time that scales with a stat or somesuch. So if you throw out 10 shields, they'll all be weak, but if you only have two shields, both will be very large (there would need to be a cap on how large an individual shield could be). This would in essence create a second resource for disc priests. That may or may not be too complicated, but at least conceptually it seems viable and interesting.
Cheb Feb 21st 2011 7:00PM
I don't understand what Neth was going on about either - Disc priests have 18 talents that interact with PW:S, and it should only be used in a tight spot? Does not make sense.