Posts with tag power-word-solace

WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Matticus is now a panda. He wields shadowy powers as well as his chopsticks but continues to play supportive healing roles in challenge modes. Stop by the World of Matticus for more!

Greetings my brothers and sisters!

It has been too long since I've donned my healing robes. I've been predominantly shadow this whole expansion. I will be spiritually guiding you this week at Dawn's request and we are getting ever closer to a patch 5.2 drop. With the PvP season ending soon, you can bet your trinkets that a release is imminent. The final stages of patch development are winding down. Most of the new abilities or talent changes have been overhauled. Now it's all about tuning and numbers. There's been some fundamental patch changes recently since the last time the PTR changes were reviewed.

To summarize:

• Divine Aegis reworked
• Mastery: Shield Discipline reworked
• Power Word: Solace updates
• Shadow buffs

WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore is a discipline priest by reputation, but still enjoys melting faces as shadow and bugging her raid to click the Lightwell as holy.

Looks like there are some big changes in store for priests on the patch 5.2 PTR. Blizzard released a PTR patch note preview late last week and I'm honestly a bit baffled by some of the changes. Keep in mind, I am not often baffled.

The biggest change is that Power Word: Solace is being redesigned. The talent will now replace Holy Fire in the player's spellbook, but interact with other priest spells and abilities just as Holy Fire does. The new version of Power Word: Solace will be instant cast, cost no mana, and restore 1% of your maximum mana on cast. Surprisingly, the patch note preview makes no mention of redesigning Shadow Word: Insanity, the shadow portion of the talent.

Now it's no shock that Blizzard decided to redesign this talent. A quick glance at WoW Popular will tell you that almost no priests are taking it (in fact, it looks like more of us are taking Dominate Mind than Power Word: Solace). Shadow priests certainly aren't taking the talent, and most healers will tell you it returns too little mana per cast to be worth it.

WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore is a discipline priest by reputation, but still enjoys melting faces as shadow and bugging her raid to click the Lightwell as holy.

Last time on Spiritual Guidance we began a thorough look at level 15 and level 30 priest talents and considered when and why you would take one talent over the other. This week we're continuing that discussion with level 45 and level 60 talents.

From Darkness, Comes Light For healers, this talent serves as a regen talent by saving players mana instead of returning it. The performance of it is very dependent on your spell usage, which means the regen cannot be easily quantified down to a simple number.

From Darkness, Comes Light can only be triggered by a handful of spells (Heal, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal, and Smite) making the talent practically useless to some players. For example, a holy priest who spends most of her time raid healing her 25-man raid (that always stands in fire) could go a whole fight without seeing a single proc from this talent. On the other hand, a 10-man disc priest who spends most of his time swapping between healing the paladin tank and spamming Smite heals could expect several procs during a fight.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers healing for discipline and holy priests, while her archenemy Fox Van Allen dabbles in shadow.

Since its introduction, the new level 45 priest talent, Power Word: Solace, has undergone several changes. First, it had the percentage of mana it returned per cast reduced from 2% to 1.5%. A little over a week after that, the percentage was buffed back up to 2% while the cast time was simultaneously nerfed from 1.5 seconds to 2 seconds. Then just last week, the cast time was lowered back to 1.5 seconds, while the amount of mana returned was lowered to a mere .7% per cast. Pretty crazy for one little spell, right?

As you'd expect, a lot of discussion has come up over the changes, with one thread on the official forums leading it all. In it, the original poster asks for an explanation behind the nerfs, saying that even though he hated using Power Word: Solace with a fiery passion, the talent was necessary for healing priests. Ghostcrawler (Lead Systems Developer Greg Street) responded soon after, explaining that the developers don't want Power Word: Solace to feel like the only option healing priests have, and they will nerf it until priests consider Mindbender and From Darkness, Comes Light viable alternatives.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast.

I've decided that playing a healing priest is a lot like being a pregnant woman. No, really, let me explain! OK, so admittedly I don't know what it's like to be pregnant, but I've observed enough friends and family going through the process to have come up with this analogy. Here it goes ...

So you know how when a woman is pregnant, people will start inviting themselves into awkward and personal conversations with her, or they'll randomly put their hands all over her stomach as though it had been declared a national park? Well, that's what it's like to play a healing priest. Here's how it happens.

You'll be healing away in a raid or a 5-man, minding your own business, when someone will invite themselves into a one-sided conversation with you where they tell you what spec you should be playing and why. If you're disc, they'll tell you to go holy; if you're holy, well, you get the idea. In these conversations, your reasoning and expertise will always be deemed irrelevant because you're clearly in the wrong spec to begin with and because this random person has a really, really good reason for suggesting you change specs. (Never mind that it's almost always based on some broad generalization or the performance of the spec five tiers ago.)

Try to tell them no, and you'll get accusations of being selfish or stubborn. Don't you know that if you change specs, every single problem the group is having (including the fact that everyone is standing in fire) will cease to happen and the boss will immediately drop dead and explode in a shower of epics?

Anyway, the reason for telling you all that is because I want to start talking about how disc and holy have been playing in the Mists of Pandaria beta right now. I've had a lot of outstanding thoughts about both specs during the past month and a half, and it's time we discussed them. There's a lot to talk about, though, so I'm going to break it up over two parts. This week, we'll talk about discipline, then holy in two weeks. Holy priests shouldn't feel completely left out, though, as I also have some news items to go over for them.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore covers the healing side of things for discipline and holy priests. She also writes for LearnToRaid.com and produces the Circle of Healing Podcast.

It's just my luck that two days after I wrote my last installment of Spiritual Guidance, a brand new level 45 priest talent appeared on the Mists of Pandaria beta. The new talent, called Power Word: Solace, is a damage-for-mana ability that players can cast on enemy targets to receive 6,000 mana in return. It has a 1.5-second cast time, costs no mana to cast, doesn't have a cooldown, and always returns mana, even if the damage portion of the spell misses its target.

The arrival of a new talent like this always raises a lot of questions. How does Power Word: Solace stand up to the other level 45 talents, Mindbender and From Darkness, Comes Light? Is it better or worse than either of those two talents? As a healing priest, what talent will I want to choose?

Well, first off, it's important to remember that the new talent system is specifically designed to put an end to cookie-cutter talent specs. Talents will now be balanced with one another in such a way that no one talent is better than the others overall. One talent might end up being better than another in a specific scenario where the mechanics of the situation complement it or just clash with the other two options. In that sense, Blizzard is right on mark with Power Word: Solace. Let's compare it to Mindbender so you can see how.