#0 - July 4, 2010, 7:22 p.m.
Q u o t e:
Pre-shielding is what disc excels at and what it's known for. It'd be like asking a resto shaman not to cast chain heal or a paladin not to use beacon. PW:S is a powerful tool, but disc priests pay a penalty for it in low healing output.
Q u o t e:
We have a talent, Improved Flash Heal, that does nothing else except buff flash heal. - a spell we won't likely use - Are you going to keep that talent?
Q u o t e:
I do not see why "emergency button" necessarily means that it cannot be used preemptively. People are reading their fears into what GC said. The sky is not falling.
I think the idea is that you are not going to be able to spam PW:S with reckless abandon, both to the exclusion of others spells, and without consideration as to whether your targets are actually going to benefit from the shield (though I realize in today's raid environment that isn't much of a gamble; my suspicion is that will change).
By the nature of its mechanic, PW:S is a proactive (or preemptive) heal — you are preventing future damage. His comments are about using PW:S in the same way that it's possible to simply spam heals, GCD-capped, without much strategic consideration (read: mana consideration).
The fact that disc priests' horrible healing output is balanced against their shield-spamming strategy is a valid observation, and whether or not there will be rebalancing of their healing is a valid concern. But the game is leaving the current paradigm of healing — disc priests don't get stay behind.
Q u o t e:
wow so disc is going back to being garbage for pve and being a pvp spec like in BC
Q u o t e:
Blue post specifically intend Cataclysm to be a slower paced and more stragetic healing scenario. (As in people do not die in 2-3 hits)
THEN you back them up on PW:S being OK as an emergency in that people might die if you dont get another heal out in time?
Do you not understand how much fallacy those two statements go with each other? PW:S as an emergency will have very little place in cataclysm unless its damage that you know is coming. The rest of the time your spamming effecient heal 101.
Q u o t e:
Discipline Priests use their Shield as an emergency/instant heal, as a target-by-target buffer against incoming raid damage, and as a "well, so much raid damage is happening that this can't be a bad decision"-button. They want to scratch out that last one, I think.
Q u o t e:
If your definition of a spell worth casting is: 'it needs to be the only spell I ever want to cast in any situation,' then I'm afraid that every healing class is going in a direction you're not going to like. ;)
Discipline Priests will most likely continue to use PW:S to mitigate chunky/bursty raidwide AOE, because of how Rapture works. In other situations, though, deciding whether to cast PW:S on a target will involve more than "Does the target have Weakened Soul, Y/N?"
Q u o t e:
I guess my question is what exactly are we supposed to do during 90% of the battle when people are still getting hit and taking damage considering the following info I post. I am gonna go ahead and pre-guess not cast smite even though 1/5 of the spec is now based on it.
FH = now considered emergency heal, not to be spammed to keep people up so no big reason to improve the spell for disc, after all we have penance and Shield for that role you said. This means it will not get any better and it alone does not do the job.
Shield, penance, POM = 10 second+ cds. Plus as you stated earlier, shield is supposed to be used seldomly, not every time someone takes any damage at all. POM for as great as it is, is not as smart as it claims to be since quite often it tends to get stuck on someone taking no damage and we have to wait for cd to come back.
GH = Still not a good spell for us since we have always scaled worse then any other healer and lack a single talent in the disc spec to even try to shrinken the gap (which is made bigger the second everyone else takes talent to improve their own powerful heals). Our big heal was not good enough to use to keep people up before cata due to long cast time and low heal numbers compared to every other healer's version, neither version is going to be great now. One is going to be too mana intensive to spam (intentional on new healer design and the other has the same long cd and medium numbers that it always has which are actually lower than Pally's second to last version of their best heal and they are getting an even better version to overshadow the disc preist when it comes to healing tanks.
Binding heal = Awesome power, but costly in mana and not a good option if lots of people are getting hurt since unlike the better version of it Beacon, we can only heal ourselves and one other target for medium heath.
Renew = Although no one has said anything direct about it yet, but if you consider shield spam ais considered boring and you are moving away from Druids constantly rolling HoTs on everyone, I am also guessing this is also not meant to be used during the 10-12 seconds we stand there continually looking at cds.
Q u o t e:
Any hints on the direction you're thinking of taking on this? Standard "No promises" Disclaimer here, naturally, but obviously we're pretty curious.