Der Priester – Now and then

Da die Priestercommunity doch ein wenig aggressiv auf den CoH-Nerf in den Foren reagiert hat, gab es ein paar interessante Blue Postings mit einem Ausblick auf den Patch 3.1:

Exciting changes for priests in 3.1
We have some exciting changes planned for priests. Many of them will make it in 3.1 (Ulduar). We hope to have them finalized enough to be able to announce some in the next couple of weeks, but that date might not work out for a number of reasons. The community has a way of overlooking all those caveats such as “at this time” or “assuming nothing changes” and suddenly we are “breaking promises.”

Rapture and Power Word: Shield hotfixes
We are hotfixing these — the fix may be out already. We are looking into the PoM issue. Just after a patch we get a ton of reports that other players can’t always reproduce. There are several „Hey, did my damage / healing go down from a stealth nerf?“ posts. It’s the Onyxia Deep Breathing phenomenon.

Healers rotations
When I say we want healers to have rotations, that doesn’t necessarily mean you always press 112311231123 forever and install cooldown timers so that you don’t go insane. Some dps classes are closer to that, but dps classes in general don’t have to be as reactive to situations as do healers, so they can handle it.

What I am really getting at are things like Swiftmend and Riptide. Swiftmend is a very fun spell — IMO one of the best ones in the game. But you can’t spam Swiftmend. In fact, you have to be pretty smart about when you set it up and when you use it. And yes it has a cooldown. Riptide has a similar mechanic where you want to X when Y happens and you can come up with a lot of other examples. Riptide is fun. Swiftmend is fun. Greater Heal… eh, it does the job. But it’s not a particularly fun button to use.

Disc gets this vibe with some of their shield mechanics, Grace and Penance. I do think that Holy could use a lot more of it though. The main „interesting thing“ that happens with Holy is Holy Concentration and its Improved version. That’s not bad, but we’re not sure it’s enough. I don’t think we would actually use this specific example, but imagine a talent that sped up Greater Heal’s cast time when you cast enough Flash Heals. Now you have a reason to „weave.“ You have a mechanic that rewards you (but doesn’t require you) to switch from one thing to another. Another idea (off the top of my head) is that CoH healed more on targets with Renew on them (this steals too much from the Resto playbooks IMO). These don’t necessarily have to be random procs or cooldowns, though sometimes these systems end up using those specific mechanics.

This is the kind of thing we’d like to do to Holy.

Discipline Tree
Disc is a really strong spec in PvP and PvE. We talked about it a lot today, and we are convinced that if healing meters showed absorbs and damage negated that Disc would be up there with everyone else. It’s just hard to really get a handle on how much damage you are preventing.

I asked everyone around the table if they would feel comfortable having a Disc priest on main tank duty even with no paladin. Every one of them said yes.

(I know the tree still has some bugs and a couple of awkward areas in the tree. I was reacting more to the thought that having Holy and Disc as separate healing trees was doomed to failure.)

Da bin ich ja dann mal wirklich gespannt, was da in den nächsten Wochen und spätestens mit Patch 3.1 und Ulduar auf uns zu kommen wird. Wie ich schon mehrfach gesagt habe, die Heilleistung des Priester für sich betrachtet ist keinesfalls als schlecht zu beurteilen, nur im Vergleich mit den anderen Heilern hinkt sie nun ein wenig hinterher.

Zumindest wurde der Spell Penance aka Sühne bereits im Patch 3.0.8 gefixt, so das man nun auch nach hinten heilen kann, bzw. sein zu heilendes Ziel nicht mehr vor einem stehen muss, was den Spell nochmal gehörig aufwertet.

Zu den angesprochenen Spellroationen werde ich separat nochmal was schreiben, da ich der Meinung bin, das man als Holy mittlerweile doch eine ganz sinnvolle Rotation fahren kann.