Thank you for the article, and the optimistic point of view.

I've been playing exclusively as a discipline priest for the past 3 years, and I love my shield. I've always loved it through good days and the bad, and I will continue to love it after this nerf, too.

My problems with the shield nerf are similar to what people have mentioned before. These worries have nothing to do with raiding; I find the halved duration a very poor solution. It might stop shield spam, but it also creates problems for

a) priests who are leveling and/or soloing
b) priests who are PvPing and
c) priests healing in instances.

First of all, the nerf makes soloing and leveling as a disc priest hard. Currently, PW:S is good enough that anywhere below level 81, I can pull two mobs my level and kill them both while being protected by the Shield. The problem is, killing two mobs without hit rating actually takes 30 seconds. The nerf will mean that I have to cast shield twice as often when leveling, resulting in more mana breaks and generally slower progress. Probably less procs from Rapture, as well.

I don't mind leveling through instances, but the shield nerf makes that harder, too.

With PW:S's current (overpowered?) strength in low level (

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