Thanks for these posts. We just fought the spine tonight, and your comments definitely made it easier to face it for the first time.

I know that you refrained from making comments about the MoP talent calculator before due to lack of information, but now that more information is up I wondered what your thoughts were. Unfortunately so far I mostly feel negative as you can see in the QQ below.

I'm a bit sad that disco is losing binding heal, while holy is losing Prayer of Mending they're both excellent spells. While that decision fits the flavor of the specs it feels like it will be a nerf to both specs. And it feels is part of a bigger thing they seem to be doing i.e distinguisihing the two specs by restricting each of them. It seems that one of the fun things about priests which is their range of spells. In fact, for every healing class, isn't the process of quickly deciding and using the right spell for that moment one of the things that makes healing so much fun?

Spirit Shell replacing heal for disco mystifies me - the only use of them I can think of is to use on a tank who has had a power word shield cast on them in the last 15 seconds.

Since they're casted you can't use them like an instant cast shield on a low health target to keep them alive for a few more moments, whilst someone gets an actual heal in. Why use a a cast time shield on a low health target when you could just use a heal instead?

Maybe the idea is that that since shields/shells and hots have good synergy you could pop a few over the raid before a high damage phase whilst other healers blanket the raid with hots - but given the duration is 8 seconds and it's casted you can't blanket the raid with them.

The fact that it heals for nothing when it expries if the shell has taken any damage, rather than healing for a percentage of what was left of the shell also seems really strange. Because it replaces heal for discipline it seems that it's supposed to be discipline's slow small efficient heal the trinity of slow-small-efficient/big-slow-efficient/big-fast-inefficient. But if the target takes a tiny amount of damage within the 8-sec duration then the hpm of it would be terrible.

Also rereading the tooltips there's no mention of weakened soul, and I can't see strength of soul anywhere. Which makes it seem like they plan to remove the two disco builds and force all disc priests to be smite healers.

Holy nova replacing PoH for disco ... I've only properly been been playing WoW for this expansion, but I know you've said that holy nova used to be a good spell (but don't quite remember why you said it was). But to me, the spell just seems like a joke - only useful for killing lots of low level mobs, and not even as good as mind sear.

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