See, I don't get this either.

Right now, the talent is just sitting there without anyone really using it at all. Even in PvP I never see people with the talent, regardless of how viable it is; though I personally believe it not to be very viable, that GCD is much better spent on other things right now.

@Kaphik

Selfless Healer is a Ret talent. Basically, you get a damage bonus for healing someone else with your Word of Glory. There's a few problems in it, though:

-The heal is rather meager, even with the 50% bonus to healing in the talent
-Word of Glory is getting a longer cooldown, making it something you can only use occasionally anyhow
-Using this means you give up using your biggest damage strike (Templar's Verdict). The damage bonus you get in exchange (12%) just doesn't cover the loss, not even close.

All of that together makes Selfless Healer a rather uninspiring talent. Increasing the duration of the damage bonus made it more attractive, but apparently it was not working out as intended.

This wouldn't be that much of an issue if Ret was blazing up the damage meters, but my understanding is that, on the whole, Ret is towards the back of the pack in terms of damage. Giving up DPS to throw out a few spot heals during an encounter, while an excellent utility, is not an especially sought-after feature. Nobody expects the ranged DPS to go off in a corner and bandage themselves during a fight, right?

It was a terrible change, and I'm glad they rescinded it. A 30 second Selfless Healer became as good as, and possibly better than, Inquisition. Which meant that if this had gone live, we would have had a second mandatory buff to maintain, by nonsensically tossing out a random heal every 30 seconds.

It was clearly never intended to be a PvE buff, and Blizzard just hadn't mathed out the consequences of the change. So we are left with an all but useless Selfless Healer after the giant nerf to Word of Glory goes through, but hopefully they will take the time to prepare a fix that makes sense.

If not, retribution is in dire straights for pvp after the patch. We will have almost zero self-healing in combat.

@ Hal,

I take it you don't PvP much. Selfless Healer is currently a *fantastic* pvp talent; it was never designed with PvE in mind. It's great not because of the small damage bonus, but because of the huge healing boost it offers to your teammates. Fully talented (i.e. with eternal glory, etc. as well) and fully glyphed, I can currently toss out consecutive 40k instant heals on someone else (much smaller on myself) if the rng Gods are smiling.

Which is why Word of Glory is getting so savagely nerfed. However, in destroying retribution's role as off-healer, they have also gutted our self-healing completely. In a nutshell, virtually all high-ranked rets feel that unless there are further changes coming, the spec is dead for serious pvp after the patch.