#1 - May 1, 2012, 5:38 p.m.
Grace Nerf - I know you will say that Grace has been buffed from 8% healing to 10% increased healing per stack which it true, but when are we suppose to HEAL the tank? Without Greater Heal we don't really have a heal that we can cast as needed on the tank and our absorbs aren't affected by grace. So yeah this is a nerf for tank healing. We need to be able to cast heals on the tank in order to benefit from Grace.
Divine Aegis Nerf - Same problem as with Grace. It only procs off of heals and now we don't have a tank heal. On live I can get a good amount of tank healing going from Greater Heal / Grace / Divine Aegis combo now that's just gone. Sure we have Spirit Shell which is suppose to absorb as much as a Greater Heal but we are still missing the side benefits of Grace and Divine Aegis which did a good amount to buff Greater Heal. Spirit Shell gets none of these buffs so in reality it comes nowhere close to providing the amount of "healing" that Greater Heal did.
Renewed Hope - On live, increased crit chance by 10% on targets affected with Grace or Weakened soul. There was nice synergy with this talent between Grace / Divine Aegis / and Greater Heal and really provide a nice boast and made crit actually useful as a secondary stat. Just adding this talent back on its own doesn't do much without the restoration of Greater Heal or something similar but it works really nicely on live.
Strength of Soul Nerf - on live reduces the Weakened Soul effect when heals are cast on the target. In Beta this effect is just gone and that's big. Being able to get another shield up sooner during heavy damage was a significant talent.
Power Word Shield Nerf - does less overall due to loss of the glyph and the 6 second cd makes it so it cant be used on the off tank for crossing healing purposes.
The problems above are issues with single target / tank healing as I don't think the changes effect aoe healing. On live aoe healing is a lot of POH spam and not much else. If you don't believe me, check out some logs. Personally I never found this style of healing to be much fun, and in the past have always enjoyed Disc for the tank healing aspect. On live you can tank heal as Disc - there aren't many fights where tank healing will put you at the top of any logs but someone needs to do it and Disc is pretty solid in this role. Currently Disc priests are effective tank healers and can help with a few shields here and there on the raid or even POH during low tank damage but, on Beta, Disc has been gutted for single target throughput. This leaves the only option for Disc priests POH spam, which is extremely boring. Please, make sure your changes don't ruin the synergy between spells and talents that Disc currently have for single target healing - we aren't nearly as effective without this synergy and it's not nearly as fun to be stuck spamming POH as our only viable option.
