Priest Changes 5.2 (19 February 2013)

Alright, when I saw the changes to priests in the patch notes yesterday, I was really confused and wondered how could these changes have actually been acceptable to the game developers and thought to myself, “WHY?!” However, after playing on the PTR for a while and duelling a decent Warlock, these changes do seem very reasonable, but I am still a bit sceptical until I actually do some arenas.

I haven’t put here much number crunches, but will work on it as soon as I can.

Power Word: Solace

Solace is now meant to heal anyone after being cast for the damage dealt (50% to the Priest). A decent change which makes it more viable for Holy and Shadow, as this was initially possible only through atonement heals as a discipline priest.

Power Infusion

A 10% increase in damage is pretty decent which, may allow priests of all specs to set up their 1 shot macro. As a discipline priest, I believe you can do some serious burst with Power Infusion, Mindbender, On Use DPS Trinket. I did try this out yesterday on the PTR, and on a test dummy, each penance tick hit for 46k non critical strikes. Add your mind bender and instant Holy Fire into the mix with Shadow Word: Pain in the background. This is some serious DPS guys.

Mastery change

So, a mastery change…. which basically means the class is being redesigned (somewhat). So shields reduced in effectiveness and healing increased by a small percentage. On PTR, my tooltip showed shield effectiveness of 20% and healing increase by 10%. I accept this change…. Personally, I have always been complaining to myself that priests need a healing buff and less interested in bigger shields. Reason being, we are always healing which makes the healing increase useful and can only casts shields once every 10 – 15 seconds or even less if specced into Divine Insight. Therefore, this change in mastery is quite acceptable to me.

Power Word: Shield can also critical absorb now, this is great … considering it should have been like that a long time ago. Really great when coupled with Divine Insight with the ability to generate 180k shields, which brings in great survivability.

Penance range increased for enemies

Another buff or balance fix …very self explanatory. But I would also like to point out, that in patch 5.2, in certain situations, it is more beneficial to actually damage your target with penance rather than healing your partner, as you would heal more by dealing damage rather than actually directly healing. For example, if you already have 3 stacks of grace on your partner, its more beneficial to damage your opponent on your next penance, as atonement would heal for a bit more and you are damaging at the same time. This of course, does depend upon the target having any absorption shield on him/her, in which case you should rather heal your partner.

Divine Aegis

So its been buffs all the way until here. What the patch notes actually mean is that initially you are able to critical heal for 100k now and get another Divine Aegis shield of around 50k+. Instead, you will now heal for 50k and the other 50k heal will be modified by mastery and create a shield on your heal target. So basically, no more huge critical heals. This is a nerf, however …. if you consider everything in context, this is a good balance as Discipline priests have received numerous buffs and fixes (good damage, more healing, less dependant on critical heals). Honestly, the critical heals before this change on PTR did seem a bit OP, and I did get that unsatisfactory feeling of winning without any skill during my arena games on the PTR. So this change is acceptable to me. Penance heals for 40k per tick in PVP zones now in addition to other things, so there is compensation for this nerf since mastery increases healing.

I’ve been reading some mixed views upon the Mastery change for Discipline priests in the forums. It is my opinion that Discipline priests  are being redesigned, and their PVP and PVE issue being addressed to through the complains by everyone. As of now, I do not see priests being weak in anyway, and discipline and holy should be great to play, come patch 5.2. The changes to discipline priests will always keep us on our feet, making split second decisions to heal, damage, stealth, or CC, which is great for having fun in PVP. I guess we have to wait for things to go live for us to see what discipline priests are capable of.

Edit 21st February 2013: Ok, so I tried out some arenas today on the PTR. Not sure if it was me being rusty or the changes taking its toll on me, but I got owned at the start, and gradually got better in games. Another noticeable difference in PTR which I observed was that the population of discipline priests have suddenly dropped. Played around 50 games and not a single discipline priest. I guess discs are in a good position, but its the other classes that need to be nerfed, or their CC reduced a bit. For me, 5.2 doesn’t look too good for discipline priests. On the bright side, we have to play our best and can’t afford a single mistake. This raises our skill, for those who seek it.

Tips (Infinite CC combo possibility) – 2v2 Disc or Holy/Feral

So I was doing some 2s on the PTR with a Feral druid last night. It wasn’t going too good at start because I haven’t really been in a 2s arena with a Feral, but eventually things got better …. a lot better. It got to the point where we were beating 2k MMR teams, but considering this is PTR our opponents MMR could be misleading.

Anyways, I thought about writing a few tips and pointers regarding what combos are available for discipline priests and feral druids, in a 2s environment. The buffs obtained are pretty decent, those being stamina, stats and critical strike (critical strike being super effective as always for discipline priests).

I have written this in a very lazy manner so I do apologise if I am not clear. Email me for any clarifications. Cheers.

Crowd Control Combo

Cyclone healer > Feral Stun > Psychic Scream > Cyclone on the killing target > Cyclone healer

6 seconds + 4 seconds + 8 seconds + 6 seconds + 6 seconds = 30 seconds

This is how we did it ….

1. I lay low lining behind pillars healing my partner (Feral) while the feral builds up combo points for an instant cyclone.

2. Feral cyclones the opponents healer. It is vital that the feral is at full health here.

3. My partner and myself begin damaging the target for 4 to 5 seconds, until my partner stuns the healer for 4 seconds immediately after cyclone comes off.

4. The stun gives me the opportunity to throw the healer into a fear, locking him out for 8 seconds.

5. Immediately when fear is about to break, cast a cyclone on the target to be killed to prevent any healing on him for 6 seconds. Important: you as a priest must cyclone through symbiosis, as the feral needs to use his instant cyclone on the healer.

6. The feral’s instant cyclone should be up by now, which should be cast on the healer. Keep rotating this …. or you can follow up with a psyfiend/another cyclone (priest)/dominate mind, if you are on the verge of getting a kill and you know the enemy has no defences.

Chances are, that you will force the opponent teams to use their trinkets, and defensive cool downs and eventually kill them. Try mixing things up so that the enemy doesn’t expect it and this will work out to be even more effective. If you keep rotating this too much and the game is prolonged the enemy will predict your moves and will be able to counter (I think). Your team may get countered as you or the druid may get cced by the kill target. You can work around this:

1. When going for a fear, use spectral guise to avoid being cced by the kill target.

2. When the feral is going for a stun (I think its bash or pounce), dominate mind the kill target to avoid your feral being cced by him.

This does take some time and practice to perfect. Ideally you can lock out healing for atleast 25 seconds in a single go. I am not sure what how often Ferals can stun, but to me it seemed like we were allowing a healer about 5 – 6 seconds to heal (during which they have to negotiate their positioning).

I believe ferals can also interrupt and silence as well, so I haven’t considered this out here, but my partner was using these as well. And I haven’t even considered using Dominate mind on the healer. So this can be expanded much more. Perhaps towards and infinite cc chain.

Changes to Priests – Discipline Point of View: 5.2 (13 February 2013)

So I’ve read the updated patch notes published today, and have around 90 minutes to write something while sitting in my University Library … a few minor changes and adjustments here and there, so I’ll just do this in one go.

Body and Soul change reverted. 

Body and soul is now back at 4 seconds 60% speed buff, which is fair in my opinion. However, I have considered this to be weaker with the new Angelic Feather talent. But this is debatable, since you have to give and take a few things. The feathers can allow you to permanently live inside a 60% speed buff, but this would take some effort and practise in implementing effectively.

I have not properly tried out Angelic Feathers really, to see how viable it is. In theory, however it seems extremely powerful considering priests can roam around 60% faster, permanently. Phantasm is equally powerful considering the fact that the cool down on Fade is at 5 seconds. I am still unsure if this is a mistake on Blizzard’s end or they have intentionally reduced Fade’s cool down to 5 seconds (initially 30 seconds), since this is not mentioned in the Patch Notes.

I have read a couple of forum posts where priests complain about mobility, which I agree with … and if these changes actually do go live, priests will probably be better in the mobility department.

Holy Fire is now instant

This change is simply perfect. Another silent change not mentioned in the patch notes, but working on the PTR, is that atonement heals ignore resilience. This means if you hit an opponent with Penance, then each healing effect will work exactly like in a PVE environment (but the 30% healing PVP debuff). I was doing 2s yesterday with a hunter and healed him with atonement for at least 20k heal hit on Penance, Smite and Holy Fire.

This greatly encourages all Disc Priests to go offensive, dealing moderate damage and healing even higher, I can really go on and on about this, but I guess I’ll wait for it to go live.

The instant Holy Fire, would help us to be even more offensive, making us work around Evangelism, and possibly Archangel. This personally makes me think of a priest entering into different forms: Normal, Evangelism and Archangel. From my experience on the PTR, the only way to beat a team with a disc priest is to control and lock the priest out or not allow him to cast. Discipline priests are nearly impossible to kill. But this story may be different on live since many players on PTR are just experimenting with classes they never play with at all.

Mind Blast damage increased by 20%.

I do not play shadow, and really bad at it. But my opinion on this change is that Shadow Priests can somewhat burst with a Mind Blast and Devouring Plague in one global. This puts the shadow priest in a good position, I would assume, and a combination with Power Word: Insanity would actually allow the Priest to burst every 15 – 30 seconds. So we healing priests need to be aware of this.

I believe Patch 5.2 is definitely an improvement for discipline priest gameplay in PVP, and allows us to do so much more then just healing and cc. We have to make decisions such as: when to DPS or heal, whether healing or damage with penance is better, to damage an opponent to heal our partner if he is out of our line of sight, and so much more.

How to CC chain as a Holy Priest in 5.2

I would consider discipline and holy priests to be the worst classes to help out in cc chains by themselves. All we have is our Psychic Scream, and a choice between a root, another fear and dominate mind. Normally in patch 5.1, I would run comps in 2s with a hunter, wait for his scatter trap, spectral guise in and fear the opponent, and try to get a good position for Dominate Mind. But there were many flaws to this approach: warriors, druids and even rogues would eat the traps if we were trying to cc their healer, or even a shaman would use grounding totem on the freezing trap. Dominate mind could easily be lined using the pillars or interrupted, due to its long 2.5 seconds casting time. We could counter by stunning or snaring the DPS and then scatter trapping, but this was still hard to accomplish.

So what is the scenario for 5.2?

Apparently, casting a CC chain as a disc priest may be much easier since the casting time for dominate mind is lower. Just cast fear into a Dominate Mind, but be sure to keep your partner healed up before casting dominate mind. Another fact is, that glyph of Pain Suppression and Inner Focus are all base line. So this would free up some glyph space to allow for other glyphs. I have my sights set on Glyph of Psychic Scream, which plants your feared opponents in place. This would assist us for some easy positioning. Simply fear, line the opponent DPS behind a pillar and cast fear. The uncertainty of where your feared target will run will be eliminated, allowing us to pre-plan our Dominate Mind with much more precision.

So that was Discipline Priest. What about Holy Priest?

Apparently it seems Holy priests can be even better at locking someone down than Disc. The rotation involves a spell called Holy Word: Chastise, which is a 3 second disorient. The 3 second disorient would allow for enough time to land in another Dominate Mind locking out your opponent for another 4 seconds (diminishing returns with the first Dominate mind).

So the chain for Holy Priests would go something like this:

Fear > Dominate Mind > Holy Word: Chastise > Dominate Mind

8 seconds + 8 seconds + 3 seconds + 4 seconds = 23 seconds

Off course you cannot possibly get a full 23 seconds chain, and the chances are that you will be interrupted by another opponent while casting or channelling Dominate mind. But this falls to our advantage as well. If interrupted, we are locked out of our shadow spells, leaving us one form of interrupt, less to worry about. Positioning will be very important as we would want to Dominate Mind just behind a pillar. A full rotation along with your partners cc will be frustrating for your opponents.

The best part about 5.2 is that Chakra stances for Holy priests have a 5 second cool down now, thanks to the pvp set bonuses. So it is possible to switch to Chastise and change back to Serenity within 5 seconds, allowing for this chain in CC. Just make sure you make full use of macros as changing stances does not trigger GCD.

Therefore, this may actually put us on par with other healers of locking an opponent out. However, when we use Dominate Mind, we are in a way, locked out as well. So that’s the only drawback of using this strategy.

So come next patch give this a shot. It is even possible to try it out in 5.1. However, you will probably not survive as a Holy priest since you will have mana issues, no survivability, 30 seconds Chakra CD and 2.5 seconds casting time for Dominate Mind.

Hope this article has given some helpful insight into improving your gameplay in the next patch.

Priest changes Patch 5.2 5th February 2013

Hi guys,

I always wanted to make a place for discipline priest discussions and also holy priest discussions, mainly for pvp … since that is what i do. So this is my first, out of hopefully many more blogs to come, and hope this information will be useful for all those discipline/holy priests out there. I am not a pro, and my mmr is at around 1700, but I do have great insight into discipline and holy priest gameplay.

So the changes came out on the 5th, a couple of buffs for healing priests. The first change is:

“Spiritual Healing is a new passive ability obtained by Discipline and Holy Priests at level 10. This ability increases the amount of healing done by Flash Heal, Binding Heal, Renew, and Prayer of Mending by 25%. The amount of healing done by those four spells have been reduced by 20%. For Holy and Discipline Priests, there is no change to the amount of healing done by those four spells.”

So this change basically does not affect discipline or holy priests, but is meant to nerf shadow priest healing, which is also unaffected since they get healing gains from pvp power.

The next change is:

“Evangelism’s stacking effect now also increases the healing of Penance.”

This is a significant buff to discipline priests really, considering penance is also getting a 20% addition to healing and damage. I did some testing on this on the PTR. The 5 stacks of evangelism give 20% bonus healing to penance. So when we stack all buffs up we can get some really big heals in pvp zones. For example, on the PTR a simple penance without any buff heals around 24k. After grace, a full archangel and full 5 stacks of evangelism which equates to 30% x 25% x 20% more healing, I healed for 54k penance per hit. So, we can see where blizzard is going with this in trying to accomplish the offensive healer, which looks very interesting and fun for me. 150k heals with penance…. of course we would have to consider the 30% healing debuff in pvp, but when compared with 5.1, this is huge. The thought now arises that perhaps, Power Word: Solace can be viable to obtain the Evangelism stacks.

Next change:

“Phantasm no longer makes the Priest untargetable by ranged attacks, and the movement impairing immunity effect is now 5 seconds (was 3 seconds).”

Well for me this change seems like a nerf.  With the previous untargetable for 3 seconds, priests were allowed to pull off 1 greater heal or 2 flash heals against ranged while staying in the open. Combine that with Archangel, Inner Focus and Holy Spark and you can heal more than 75% of your targets health, not to mention the shield that is created after that. Yes, we priests cannot do that anymore in 5.2, and so it may seems as a nerf. However its quite the opposite. I have noticed on PTR that the cool down on fade has silently changed to 5 seconds! This means that all priests can be permanently immune to all movement impairing effects. Thats pretty advantageous from a whole new perspective. Infact, I think this is too OP and the cool down on fade will probably be changed.   The reason it is OP is because fade DOES NOT TRIGGER the GCD, and therefore all priests can easily macro all their key binds with fade, and therefore be immune to any movement impairing effects, much like druids.

Lastly:

“Spirit Shell can no longer be dispelled.”

I would consider this a buff, but hard to pull off. Spirit shell can be stacked up to 60% of the targets HP, and considering that the cost is now half if you have your pvp gear on, the enemy has no choice but to either wait or eat through the shield. Spirit shell does not scale with mastery. So if you normally heal for 60k using flash heal, you would create a 60k shield on yourself when spirit shell is active. So in times of facing dispellers, hunters, shamans, priests, etc … you can allow your team to tank a burst if you have been able to plant in some spirit shells. Think rbi situations. Casting always leaves you vulnerable to being locked out, but this is saving you 50% mana on flash heals every minute, so it is a bit of a give and take scenario.

In my opinion, discipline and holy seems extremely viable in patch 5.2, and probably on par with other healers. We do fall short in the CC department compared to other healers, but the best way to find out viability is when the patch goes live.