As I'm sure you know, late on Friday Blizz released a fresh PTR build, along with the PTR notes to go with it. Normally I would copy and paste all the notes for you folks at work, but I'm going to assume you've already read them, since you had the whole weekend! You can find the forum post by Zarhym here:

The major things addressed in the PTR notes themselves are:

• Massive PvP and Battleground changes.
• Death Knight tanking improvements.
• Changes that allow some DoTs to crit.
• Modifications to how some buffs proc and their duration.
• UI changes for the AH.
• Dungeon Finder tweaks.
• Quest tracking tweaks.
• Frost orbs become a form of currency!
• Removal of some profession cooldowns.

There's a lot of things covered in these notes, but I'm going to focus on the issues that affect PvE healers.

First off, I'm crossing my fingers that the buffs for Death Knight Tanks will make it a lot easier to keep them alive. In addition to buffing some of their threat generation abilities, Will of the Necropolis may be losing its cooldown and the limitation on the size of damage that can trigger it. Why is this important to healers? Because I can tell you from experience that healing DK tanks can be really stressful due to the amount of spiky damage they take. Anything that helps some of their damage mitigation cooldowns is a good thing for healers. I don't play a Death Knight, so I don't know how much of a buff it really is... but if the changes help DKs maintain control of mobs, that will hopefully also be a help for healers.

A lot of buffs are being changed in ways that may seem pointless. For instance, let's look at the change for Disc Priests:

"Renewed Hope: Now has a 60-second duration, up from 20 seconds, but a 20-second cooldown."

For most of you, that may seem like a silly change that won't actually make any difference. In practice, it won't - however the goal is to make these proc based buffs have 100% uptime, and hopefully to make a small improvement in performance, with less combat log repetition.

From GC:

Basically, they are balanced around more-or-less 100% uptime now. We think talents of the variety when X crits, now you can do Y are cool, but these auras really weren't in that category anymore. They were just cute ways of getting a passive buff up. Nobody tended to think Leader of the Pack was boring because it was just on all the time.

Removing the constant application and removal of these buffs (through both the passive aura and the range increase) might improve performance a tiny bit, will clean out your combat logs (which actually improves performance too), and reduce the UI and in some cases spell effect spam, which might make combat a little more easier to understand.

We'll see if it really makes any difference.

I'm pretty pumped about the Renewed Hope change, because if you are a tank healer, as a Disc Priest, and you aren't spamming shields, it's not uncommon to forget a shield here and there, and not have 100% uptime on Renewed Hope.

Actually, Dawn pointed something out that I completely didn't know... something about Mages getting a spellpower boost when they have a shield on that absorbs damage? And how that's getting changed? I didn't even know Mages got a boost in the first place. I'm a bad priest to my arcane mage :( Havoca, why didn't you TELL ME?

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Pssst... it's very, very early for this, but...

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

Not that I'm stalking it or anything. Looks like Blizz intends to make mana regen issues for low level players much less of a problem in 3.3. Mmmmmm <3

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