With 4.3 comes a substantial buff to Divine Hymn– baseline. With this improvement, we probably should spend some time to discuss how to work  both of our Hymns to our advantage. First let’s take a look at this Divine Hymn buff — In 4.2, DH was actually a HPS loss (For both Disc and Holy) when compared to YAWNPOH(POH/COH) spam. Once 4.3 drops, we’ll be turning that completely on its head. 4.2 Live Hymn: “Heals 3 nearby lowest health friendly party or raid targets within 40 yards for 4009 every 2 sec for 8 sec, and increases healing done to them by 10% for 8 sec. ” 4.3 PTR Hymn (Build 14976 – Release): “Heals 5 nearby lowest health friendly party or raid targets within 40 yards for 4009 every 2 sec for 8 sec, and increases …

God damn Casuals, ruining the game once again. I bet that’s what you were expecting to read when you came here. Your blood is already pumping, preparing to blast us for for subscribing to the “only 25 man raiders should get exclusive loot” school, and and tell us to tuck our pathetic virtual e-peens away and quit the game. Man, are you going to be disappointed when you read this. So take a deep breath and let me explain what us “elitist pricks” have to say about all this.

“Ain’t nobody… heal you better. Makes you happy, gets you healed this way. Ain’t nobody heals you better than me…. Ava did a great post last week recapping the Priest preview for Cataclysm – I agree with most of what she said. While, personally, I hate the current design of Leap of Faith. I sincerely hope the current incarnation isn’t implemented as described – where’s the throughput? Threat dump? Healing Bonus? Anything? It needs just a little SOMETHING else to it. Or the fact that the level 85 spells are supposed to be our ‘shiny new toy’… I don’t want to get too distracted by it. Aaaaanyway… One of the more interesting changes is the concept of Chakras. I really have mixed emotions about this proposed ability. One one hand …

As many of you know, a preview of the proposed priest changes for the Cataclysm expansion have been released. And of course, with any change announcements, the forums and players erupt in a glorious amount of QQing. I’m not sure what I enjoy more – the prospect of what we do being shaken up a bit, or watching a community of idiots & baddies make knee jerk reactions to something none of us can understand fully at this point. Every expansion, one can assume there will be class mechanic changes, especially when new content & levels are being added. It would be a rather boring expansion if NOTHING about our classes changed, don’t you think? And LOTS is being changed – stats are being ‘simplified’ & how we receive benefits …

Rarely has a change aggravated me as much as this one does. I’ve seen other classes get all worked up when a desirable set bonus gets ‘reworked’ into something less desirable, but I’ve always viewed that frustration from a distance. Unfortunately, not this time. To review, the current T10 4 pc set bonus looks like this: Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells. According to the latest patch notes, it’s being changed to this: Priest Tier-10 4-Piece Healing Set Bonus: Redesigned. This bonus now increases the effectiveness of the caster’s Power Word: Shield and Renew spells by 5%. (source)

With 3.3 arrived a new Looking for Group tool, and the ability to group with random people from other servers. To entice the skeptics and Pug-o-phobes into trying this new system, they offered a pretty tasty carrot on a stick –a title of “The Patient” for grouping with 50 random people, and the perky pug pet for grouping with 100. Oh, and two emblems of Frost for your first random dungeon of the day, but does that really compare to a pug pet in a spike harness that drags its ass across the floor?

Well, it is finally here! Icecrown – Tuesday we all marched towards that taunting little sonofa… *cough* The Lich King. (by the way, doesn’t the 3.3 Logo look like it says Fail of the Lich King to anyone else?). I must admit I really was looking forward to 3.3 – for more than the fact that I have been really tired of TOC. But, 3.3 is not just all sunshine and smiles, it certainly has its flaws in my eyes. So I do want to take some time to discuss both the thumbs up and the thumbs down features. Lag and Server Stability at Launch – This baffles me every patch. Back in Vanilla WOW, patch days were pretty smooth and had minimal issues. Ever since TBC, every single patch …

The PTR notes have been posted, and I am sure they will change at least once, twice, several times. So let’s approach these changes with the perspective that, in all likelihood, we’ll be seeing several changes in these notes before they actually go live. With the flurry of posts, forum topics, and guild chat discussions about 3.2 I figured it was about time I put my 2 copper in on this topic. I’ll be doing analysis over the next few days putting attention on each of the major changes. Today I want to focus on the changes made to Prayer of Healing. Prayer of Healing: The percentage of spell power this spell gains in healing (per target) has been reduced from 80.7% to 52.6%. The Prayer of Healing change screams …

First, a BIG Thank you to WoW Insider for the two links to my blog. One for Auctioneer and the other on my Val’anyr posts! Seeing my traffic jump and my RSS subscription numbers rise is a bit stressful… it means I really need to write better for you guys! With 3.1 officially released, tonight will be a big night for many End-Game Raiding Guilds who are aching for new content. Download it! Find a mirror if you haven’t already pre-downloaded it using the Blizzard downloader.Wowwiki has a great list of mirrors located here. Update Your Essential ModsNotice how I said essential… your non-essential mods you likely can live without on release day, and you can configure the updated (if applicable) versions later in the week. (That is, of course, …

Well, it seems that 3.1 is imminent. Coupling the fact that the PTR realms are slowing down, the patches on the PTR are getting smaller and smaller (the last patch was teeny) with the fact that the downloader seems to be finished, we may will have it as early as next week (4/14). However with the move of Noblegarden, it does confuse me. My bet is 4/21. All classes will have their Talent Points refunded, which means its time to respect. And for most of us: Dual Specs. While some of us will be going Healing/Shadow as our specs, I do think a good many priests will be going Holy/Disc, giving them the ability to swap specs mid raid to adapt to whatever healing assignment they are given. Derevka’s 3.1 …