Huge changes to Twirling Light, Atonement, and Inner Sanctum’s Spell Damage mitigation.

Inner Sanctum all the way for me – 15% less damage is 15% less mana I spend on myself.

First a Thank You to Derevka and Ava for their time on this great site

I have been following the changes somewhat and one thing I have been wondering about it “Hit” (or is that gone and I missed it?). As it looks like we need to weave a few Smites in at times and seems that if we have no hit, and cast a couple times and see “miss”"miss”, would that not be a total waste of mana, which sounds like we might have to start to manage agin (a good thing), to keep the buff up, and a couple of globals?

Unless i have missed something of course….

cheers

I swear – I'm still here. You all should know how NUTS things get for me around Halloween – that's my Christmas. I'm hosting the Chicago HorrorFilm fest, helping produce Days of the Living Dead (watch the trailer! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqJATiYqVjw&feature=related), Helping at Statesville Haunted Prison, and I also write for Bloody Good Horror…so yeah – things are nuts. Oh, and work, but that's boring.

Anyho – I'll be looking at disc in depth this weekend. So far I'm…….meh. I'm hoping there's something shiny they haven't unveiled yet.

And personally, I blame Derevka for my lack of posts. It's his poor manager skills that allow me to miss deadlines.

I’ll comment on a few of these, but will probably do a follow up post to this one.

1. Attonement is very lackluster… mainly b/c Smite hits for so little. Don’t count on it doing much healing. BUt Ava will cover that in her Discipline analysis.

2. Darkness- 3/3 haste is great, how exactly haste will fit in outside of gearing I’m not sure. Haste and Mindflay and the 3 other SP dots, however make it their ‘go to’ stat of choice. Holy…. Im not so convinced since we wont be renew blanketing anymore. I think as holy, you’ll see a Balance of Crit and Haste being important, but Spellpower, Spirit, and Mastery as our ‘go to’ stats. A Mastery buffed Echo of LIght is nothing to scoff at when Holy Tank Healing.

3. Inner Sanctum – maybe I am old school in my obsession with ‘spell warding’ and 15% spell damage reduction in a PVE raid enviornment. Not to mention the movement speed buff on heavy movement fights. That being said, I’m strongly considering Holy/Archangel Specs as my ‘main’ spec in Cata… overlooking Inner Sanctum… for now. Especially with Twirling Light to ‘make up’ for my smiting. (I still feel dirty about smiting!).

4. Ava will be back… she’s just been on blogging hiatus for a short bit. She’ll be doing Disc stuff next week!

Lightwell – This spell badly needed a redesign, and all it got was a tweak. Although the tweak is a long time coming, it still remains a spell that I think few dps will actually use unless the raid environment is indeed survivability over damage.

Spirit of Redemption – You nailed this one right on. It isn’t worth a point, because if we are dying, the fight is usually over anyway. This has been the argument for a long time, and it’s only saving grace was that it gave 5% spirit. Without a redesign, this talent will gather dust.

Chakra/Revelations – I cannot tell you how excited I am for these spells. This puts priests in the realm of “I can do anything the other healers can, and put up their numbers.” This was so critical for this class. These two talents alone make the blizzard priest definition true again “Masters of healing!” Now I am not saying that priests need more spells, we already have a ton and a half, but the way these spells play within the general healing playstyle that is coming is really something to marvel at.

Desp. Prayer – Well, for a talent point this guy seems weak. However, I have always liked Desp. Prayer as it is an extra oh shit button, costs 0 mana, and has a modest cooldown. Yes it’s opportunity cost went up with the reduction of overall talent points, but as I’ll discuss a little later, we don’t have a ton of options.

CoH CD to 10 sec. – Well, at first I really hated hearing this, but now I am ok with it. We have so many spells to throw into the mix that a 10 second cooldown doesn’t seem long anymore. I think it is actually necessary to allow us to maintain a chakra state, but that is up to debate.

Chakra states:
Renew – This is going to be a powerful state. This state obviously is the easiest to maintain when raid healing, and give us that ever so awesome second hot.

Heal – A pretty darn good state. Gives us what is absolutely essential to single target or 2 target heal very effectively, with an o shit button thrown in for effect.

PoH – Quite possibly the best for raid healing in widespread damage situations, but the hardest to upkeep. Having to cast PoH to extend it by 4 seconds is brutal, but the raid environments are not known yet. It may be that in some encounters, PoH is a really attractive heal. I also love HW:Sanc. as a cooldown AE heal.

Holy tree overall –

Well, I love what they have done with the tree, I just wish there were a few more choices. To get down to 31 points you pick up almost everything in the tree PVE related. This is either bad, because you have less choice, or good, that you can get all you need and then dip into disc with the rest. I’m still not sure on that.

Disc. Dipping – Although you had reservations about Archangel and Evangelism, I do not share these. To me the bonus provided by Inner Sanctum are minimal and situational (possibly needed for certain progression) so the only way to go is a Archangel build. I would like a bit longer duration on Evangelism, but 15 seconds seems to be sufficient. When you pair this with twirling light, it’s cost is minimal. You may burn an extra GCD, but often times in fights there is at least one spare GCD floating around every 15 seconds. The bonus to our healing is also a nice benefit when you do pop Archangel.

Overall, I’m impressed with the Holy tree, and really unimpressed with the Disc. tree. I can’t see many priests going Disc. in Cata unless something changes.

I’m also pretty uninspired by Evangelism/Archangel. It might be the preference when we overgear content, but right now it just doesn’t look like the way to go immediately when they throw the “mana matters” ball back at us. But then again, combat is supposed to be slowed down a bit more in Cata so maybe we will have time to toss some Smites around and take advantage of Archangel to catch back up.

At the start though, I’m definitely going with the Inner Sanctum build you linked first. It’s a solid, reliable throughput build and we can drop two points (probably SoR and ToF) to gain some extra haste from Darkness if we need it (though initially I don’t think it’ll be necessary since its a % boost and I don’t imagine we’ll gain very much at the start).

I know Disc is still pretty rough, but I’m looking forward to the evaluation once we get the next build, which I trust will have the Disc changes that we’ve all been dreaming about for so long!