I see the Priest forums are flaming about the nerfs to Penance and Prayer of Healing.
Have you noticed any big differences Joseph (Goull)? I haven't been able to get much playtime in this week, and haven't healed anything yet on my priest, but I am hearing the noticeable changes are in 10mans. Priests that were running at the top of the healing charts in 25mans are now down in 4th/5th place.
If that's the case, why would you bother bringing a priest over say, a paladin, druid, shaman?
I hear the new flash of light hot that pallies have now is pretty op. Almost healing for as much as renew and an almost 100% uptime. Nice.
Desterfox sums it up nicely in a post on the Q&A thread (which are my exact thoughts on this as well):
Q u o t e:
"I rolled a Priest to heal. That was the choice I made in 2006, and I find it unforgivable that Ghostcrawler calls us a "hybrid class." Every other healing class can tank or DPS effectively, but we are the class that is singled out as a hybrid class because we have a single perfunctory DPS spec.
We should be the best healers in the game because we have no other viable alternatives. Versatility means nothing if we are mediocre. We have to be mediocre because we have two talent trees for healing, but druids are allowed to match us because they can tank and DPS as well? It makes no logical sense. "
I have noticed a difference, and I'm really not too happy about it. Being Disc, the Penance nerf (Cooldown increased by 2 seconds) is really annoying. I've gotten very used to using Penance every cooldown, so even though it's a few seconds, it has thrown off my healing rotation a bit. As for Prayer of Healer, I don't use that spell as much, but it's still a pretty big blow to have its effectiveness reduced so much. Before, I could use it on the group with a tank since everyone's individual heal was still pretty big. But now, it doesn't seem all that great. It was never a spamming option for me since I don't have any talents to reduce its mana cost.
Overall, I'm pretty unhappy with the changes. The worst part is, the Penance nerf seems to be because of PvP concerns in Arena. For holy priests, I have to imagine the Prayer of Healing nerf is pretty harsh, since that would be such a regular spell in their rotation with Serendipity. I hate to QQ so much, but I just really don't see why these changes had to be made for PvE.
Quote from: Daemus on Thu, 2009-08-06 : 08:52
Every other healing class can tank or DPS effectively. We should be the best healers in the game because we have no other viable alternatives.
Shaman can't tank!
Tank OR DPS. But honestly, you want to take issue with a post from a class forum?
No, he just wants to spam Chain Heal even more now.
That's the reason I got away from Disc and went to Holy back when I first heard about the Penance change. I was already struggling with the Penance cooldown to start (even /w the glyph) due to my playstyle.
They should have reduced the freaking mana cost of PoH when they reduced the throughput that much. Idiots (blizz that is).
+10% armor < 10% damage reduction. fair trade for 2 more seconds on penance, IMO.
I think the damage reduction is only physical. Depending on who you talk to, some thing it's a slight nerf, some don't.
Either way both Disc & Holy Priests both take the talent (you would be selfish not too) when raid healing.
I'm still upset about the PoH nerf - they didn't have drop the coefficient that bad - I was hoping by the time live hit, they would have un-nerfed it to some extent.
Quote from: Daemus on Thu, 2009-08-06 : 15:39
I think the damage reduction is only physical. Depending on who you talk to, some thing it's a slight nerf, some don't.
Even if it is physical, armor only mitigates physical damage. 10% damage reduction is better, and scales better than 10% armor.
The difference between 10% armor and 10% physical is really small from what I have seen. I like this change though, since it will help non-plate wearing classes.
Quote from: Goull on Thu, 2009-08-06 : 21:10
The difference between 10% armor and 10% physical is really small from what I have seen. I like this change though, since it will help non-plate wearing classes.
it scales infinatly better.
Quote from: tulion on Fri, 2009-08-07 : 00:10
it scales infinatly better.
I think that might be overstating it a bit. Check out the graph below showing physical damage taken from 10K hits that shows the difference in the buffs. So the new version really shines for low armor, as you would expect. But in terms of tank healing, the difference doesn't seem to be too huge.