A Little Confused about Emp. Healing (Beta)

I think, as far as the new talent tree design for holy priests, Blizzard has done a pretty good job of meeting its stated design goals. Having said that, Empowered Healing is one of said flat bonuses that were supposed to be erased.

It's also placed in the first tier of the holy tree. Now, I assume that's so Discipline can pick it up. But Blizzard has also stated they don't really want to make any "wrong" talents for players to pick up; and if you're a new level 11? Empowered Healing would be very, very wrong.

So I'm puzzled by its continued existence, going against not one but two stated design goals.

Other random impressions:

Desperate Prayer:

Really made me unhappy at first, but once I found out it has been revamped, it didn't seem so bad. Not tremendously useful maybe, but useful. (Useful even at 80/85, depending on how much it will heal for and its mana cost.) We tend to look at it from the perspective of a max level priest: We have CoH, CoH proc'd Surge of Light, we have PW:S, we have Binding Heal, PoM, DH, and if worse comes to worse, PoH/Holy Nova. Instant cast heals? We have that. Healing two people at once? Pft, we can heal the raid.

But at level ten? Unless I misremember, this will make Desperate Prayer the first heal we get that can 1) instantly heal (discounting PW:S) and 2) heal more than one person at a time. Is it tree defining at level 80? No. But when you really think about what they've given a level ten that they didn't have before? Not so bad.

Borrowed time: Going to miss the old, higher amount of extra haste.

Divine Fury: Why .3? Seems like a - literally - odd number.

Power Infusion: Will be sorely missed. Great for emergency situations, and fun to throw on a friend.

Power Word Barrier: Yay!

PvP: Most of the talents that let us live longer than 3 seconds have disappeared, but Blizzard has said they're looking into all PvP talents so... maybe. I feel historically the designers have been a lot better balancing around PvE than PvP. (Which, to be fair, is the significantly larger portion of the game.)

Overall, everyone talks about sweeping changes, but we didn't seem to lose many abilities.Everything just got... compacted. We didn't really loose many healing related talents that actually changed or added to the spell. We even gained a few. True, I can't see taking most of them so far, but the way they have constructed the tree builds, we're not forced into taking them either. Didn't really get anything new that's shiny, (in specific reference to healing) but that's what the new lvl 80-85 spells are for.

If LoF is as incredibly situational as it seems, though, I admit I'd probably like a different one. Holding off judgment til I can try it.