Recent Divine Star/Halo Changes

Hey guys, wanted to give some clarification on the latest Priest changes, since we’ve been seeing some confusion:

• Divine Star now has diminishing returns at 6 targets, like any other AoE heal.
• Halo has always had diminishing returns. However, we fixed a bug where it was not counting full health players towards its diminishing returns. In a situation where most targets are damaged, it will be unchanged. However, if you’re testing Halo on PTR by casting it in an area with a bunch of full health targets around (such as your faction’s shrine), it will appear significantly nerfed.
• We understand that Holy tends to benefit more from the level 90 talents than Discipline (because of the effect of Chakra: Sanctuary), and we don’t want these fixes to nerf Holy unnecessarily, so we’re buffing the healing on Halo and Divine Star by 20% and Cascade by 10%.

Hope that helps clear things up!

All three specs should be affected by these changes, yes.

Divine star heals the caster initially and then once again on its return. Is the heal accounting for the caster as a target? Also is development taking into consideration the star hits targets on the way back for heals as well? There is a lot of movement going on at times so if Divine star hits 7 players on its way out, it could be hitting 8 or 5 players on the way back. Please clarify or add more details.

Diminishing Returns for Divine Star are actually calculated on a per-target basis. What that means is, when someone is healed, it checks to see how many other targets were in a close enough range (at cast time) to also be healed, and reduces the amount accordingly. This way, it doesn't actually matter how many other players have been healed already or not -- only the number of other players that are being healed at (roughly) the same time.

So, if someone moves into or out Divine Star's area while it's in motion, any heals that happen as it continues to path will only diminish based on the number of other eligible players that were close to the healed target at cast time.

EDIT: Reworded a couple things, for clarity. Apologies for any extra confusion :)

09/09/2013 11:25 AMPosted by Amabella

Oh hey prayer of mending lost a bounce too (both unglyphed and glyphed) from live.

This should be fixed now.

I am still only seeing 5 total PoM heals unglyphed and 4 glyphed (unless you were not implying it was hotfixed on PTR?).

There was a hotfix applied to the PTR, but it may require a restart... which may not actually happen before the patch goes live :P

Regardless, when it does go live, Prayer of Mending should once again heal 6 times in total.

After some additional discussion, we've decided to revert the changes I had posted about originally and instead allow Halo and Divine Star to ignore diminishing returns. That does mean that the 20% buffs to Halo and Divine star and the 10% buff to Cascade will be reverted as well, but we'll be adding an extra bounce to Cascade (bringing it up to 4).

There is a possibility that this could make Priests too powerful, and so we'll be keeping a very close eye on things. We're prepared to make further changes if that turns out to be the case.