Posts with tag icc-buff

Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music.

Last week, Blizzard activated the first stage of the scaling raid buffs in Icecrown Citadel. When entering ICC now, you'll see either Varian Wrynn's hair (and the rest of him, attached) or the conglomeration of cliches we refer to as Garrosh Hellscream. Each NPC grants a faction specific buff to your raid party which increases your health, healing done, and damage done by 5%. Periodically, the strength of these buffs will be raised a notch by Blizzard, thus allowing guilds of various commitment levels to see all of Icecrown Citadel.

So, what does this little news item have to do with priests any more than the next other class? Well, if you're a discipline priest and your lip gloss be poppin' bubbles be poppin', you'll notice that they are not poppin' with any more oomph than they did the week before. That's because, for whatever intended or unintended reason, the buff does not apply to Power Word: Shield.

Don't have a panic attack, disco priests. In this article I will be addressing the issue, particularly for non-priests who might have misconceptions about the validity of a disc priest. I'll also be rehashing some older arguments. That's right folks: it's that time again! When all of Azeroth asks! *Cue game show music* What good is a disc priest?

Update: Blizz has announced in the notes for patch 3.3.3 that Power Word: Shield will now benefit from the ICC zone buff. While that makes portions of this article obsolete, keep reading to learn more about the benefits of bringing a discipline priest to your raid.

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Yesterday's hot discussion topic around the web was news of Cataclysm's upcoming stat changes. And today? There's still a lot of chatter, so let's toss out a few more links:

• Killing 'em Slowly reviews warlock changes.
• Flame Shock looks at the changes from an enhancement shaman perspective.
• The Hunter's Mark is here to give us a hunter's perspective.
• Gray Matter -- as always! -- talks Moonkins.

But there's a new hot topic for today: during this morning's maintenance, Blizzard rolled out buffs for players attempting Icecrown Citadel. Everyone loves buffs, right? Wrong.

• Herding Cats thinks it's too soon.
• Cannot be Tamed wonders how many guilds will make use of it.
• BobTurkey thinks that future ICC kills will leave raiders asking "did we push ourselves enough to do it, or did they just nerf it down to our level?"