I used to play a Priest in a rather successful WoW raid guild. The inadequacies of that class were one of the reasons why I quit the game. Being a gimp who can’t heal a lick better than other healing classes while being stuck with cloth armor and very little utility makes monitoring 40 health bars for hours even less appealing than it already is. Getting assraped within seconds in PvP doesn’t help, either.
The Priest class has two major issues: First, the Priest lacks a clear superiority in healing when compared to other classes that offer tremendously more utility and versatility. Second, the Priest has severe survivability issues, especially in PvP. Priests only heal marginally better than classes that can take a whole hell of a lot more punishment and offer great utility to boot. There are also ability scaling issues. But hey, at least we can “melt faces”, right?
Fact is that the Holy talent tree is seriously lacking and the Discipline talent tree could do with a major revamp as well. And that’s what we’ll be getting with patch 1.10. About damn time.
I have to say that the Priest changes are absolutely fucking amazing, far better than what I could have hoped for in my wildest, wettest dreams. Right now, I’m sitting in front of a pile of soiled hankies as I am writing this up. I don’t even know where to start. Virtually all my gripes with the class have been addressed to some degree, well, except for the 40 health bars whack-a-mole gameplay. Can’t change that, I guess.
There are a number of new talents that improve Priest survivability:
All in all, Priest survivability will get a decent boost. Good stuff. Most of it probably isn’t extremely useful to a raid Priest but IPW:S and SW are nice. Oh, and the old IPW:S is now part of the core ability. What’s bugging me though is that PW:S still doesn’t scale with +heal items. Ok, so the new talent gives PW:S a +140 absorbtion buff. That will alleviate some of the PW:S suckiness in the short run but given the item progression we will very soon be back to square one. Blizzard should rethink that one, unless it’s already in the patch and Blizzard simply haven’t announced it yet.
Holy/Disc-Spec Priests will also get a nice DPS boost. They won’t be DPS gods but at least they won’t suck as hard as they do right now.
Take note that I’m talking about Holy/Disc builds here. All that stuff will be virtually useless to Shadow Priests. In fact, moving Wand Specialization to the first tier constitutes a slight Shadow Priest nerf because they will have to trade Mental Strength for Meditiation and Inner Focus. Meditation is rather useless to Shadow Priests because high-end +dmg gear has very little spirit and the free cast of Inner Focus saves less mana than Mental Strength would have given them.
Most important of all, healing has been improved tremendously:
The casting time reduction on Greather Heal is the big one here. With 4s casting time our signature spell that was supposed to make Priests the best healers (in exchange for being cloth wearer with little utility) used to be mostly unusable.
There will be more changes:
In addition to that, many talents have changed position within the trees, making non-cookie-cutter builds much more viable. Shadow hasn’t changed all that much but Shadow Priests will have two additional talent points at their disposal to place anywhere within the Shadow tree.
Power Infusion (a 20% spell damage buff lasting 15 second on a 3 minute cooldown) sounds nice but I’m not sure it’s useful enough to warrant putting 31 points into the Discipline tree for it. Lightwell, the 31 point Holy talent sounds rather limited in its usefulness. It some sort of bandaging station with 5 charges on a 10 minute cooldown timer. It heals less than bandages but is just as interruptable. I guess it’s a nice option if you invest 30 points into Holy anyway.
We’ll have to see how the changes will affect game balance. Blizzard might end up changing some of that stuff before the patch goes live. There may be potential issues. I can see how 3 Holy-Nova-spamming Priests bumrushing an Alterac Valley grave yard zerg could be unbalanced, especially since they can continue to heal for 10 more seconds after they die.
I think talents like Spell Warding and Blessed Recovery would have made more sense in the Discipline tree but that’s just nitpicking. All in all, I am pretty excited about these changes and I don’t even play anymore. Maybe it will help to keep Priests from burning out so fast so guilds won’t have a gear up a new batch of Priests every few weeks.
I don’t think it’s enough to make me reactivate my Priest since being a gimp wasn’t the only reason I quit. There was also the tedium of being a healer in WoW, some guild drama as well as real-life time constraints.