Firstly, a little note about the Battered Hilt drop rate change.

First, Battered Hilt drop rate was very high. Then they changes it so it was very low. It has been changed again to be a little bit of a higher drop, but accordingto Zarhym:

In light of this change, we are also removing the chance for the Battered Hilt or any other epic item to drop from the Skeletal Slaves in the Pit of Saron. The need to “farm” these creatures for the Battered Hilt should be reduced by our first in-game fix and will no longer result in a chance for epic loot or Battered Hilts.

Now, on to Disc Priest stuff.

Ghostcrawler says:

If a group is getting on to you for using PW:Shield as a Discipline priest (or jeez even a Holy priest), you have my permission to say "GC says you're doing it wrong."

*points indignantly* SO THERE

I am trying to better understand the mechanics of Power Word: Shield for Disc priests. I intend to make a post on the PlusHeal forums about it I suppose, but I decided that first I would ask my readers, because I am lucky to have obscenely (and almost offensively) smart readers who correct me every time I screw things up, so I have no shame in asking them for answers. Gimme.

• When a character is bubbled (be it through Power Word: Shield or Divine Aegis), what is the priority of damage mitigation? For example, say I bubble up my PallyTankMate Fuubaar. Will the bubble absorb damage BEFORE she blocks, dodges, resists, dances, etc, or will her mitigation go into effect first, and the bubble absorbs the remaining damage she would have taken? This may seem like a no brainer to most I guess, but I find myself wondering sometimes, and wanting confirmation.

• Is there any record (aside from Recount Guessed Absorbs, which is truly an educated guess) of exactly how "big" my shields are each time I cast them? It's frustrating to not know exactly how much more damage my shield will prevent before it dissolves.

• Assuming all my buffs are the same, will all my shields be the same size, unlike my heals?

• Can shields crit (yes, I know the glyphed heal can, but I mean the size of the shield)? Since bubbles are related to spellpower for Disc priests, I am curious about all these things that normally affect heal size.

• If a target has both Divine Aegis and Power Word:Shield on them, which will absorb the damage first? Does Divine Aegis absorb damage in exactly the same way as Power Word: Shield (see first question)?

• Bonus question (Becky asked this in a comment, and it's a question I have as well that I forgot to ask) - On occasion, even once Weakened Soul has dropped off a target, I am restricted from rebubbling the target, and get an error message that says the target has a stronger spell currently in effect - this is not from another priest, because I get it even when there are no other priests around. It is possible that this is caused by me bubbling someone when a trinket or something else procs that boosts my spellpower, and therefore when I go to bubble the target again, my spellpower is lower, and it will not allow me to do put a smaller bubble on the target? Also, when I get this error message, does this mean that the ORIGINAL bubble was stronger, and still has enough absorbtion left that it is bigger than if I were to cast a new, or is it simply that the original bubble was stronger, regardless of whether or not most of it has been used up?
  

These are the questions I ponder as I slowly move from novice Disc Priest to a more experienced one... and I'd like to know better what all I'm doing before I move into ICC10 this Thursday!

A post over at Healing Way , and a response from twenty-five boxes (one of my new favorite blogs!) got me thinking. If one of the Developer goals for Cataclysm is to make healing more fun, what can they do to make this happen?

First off, it takes a certain type of personality to truly *enjoy* healing. You don't usually get the e-peen rewards as a healer that many dps can get, so if that is the source of your fun and your pride, healing is likely not for you. However, healing is also one of those strange roles where, if everyone is doing their job properly, healing can suddenly become very boring. Sometimes I get so bored I furtively try to nudge that little gnome mage next to me into the NooBSauce, just so I have something to do. No really - when I'm dropping F-bombs left and right in my basement, I'm actually having *fun*.

That having been said, I can think of a few things that would improve the overall healing experience in WoW.

Change the stupid UI
More than any other role out there, healers have to use all kinds of add-ons to do their job to the best of their ability. Though there are macros you can use to tweak the UI without getting an add-on, the fundamental basic way to heal in WoW is to target the person you want to heal, and then cast a spell on them. It just takes too damn long. We need a way to have Clique like effects without putting in an add-on or trying to figure out how to write a macro (my most complex macro is /e pulls out her Snark-o-Meter.)

Situational Awareness
We rarely get to actually SEE the fights. No, I do not have a solution to these UI problems. That's why you're paid the big bucks and have iphones and yachts. I'm looking at you, Ghostcrawler! My biggest hope is that Cataclysm will bring with it some solid UI changes that will benefit healers, and actually allow us to stop glaring at healing bars every now and then!

NPC Healing
Sometimes, when running CoS, I like to heal Arthas. Of course, I don't need to, but it offers up a new challenge for me. I always liked the escort quests where I could just keep the NPC healed up (as few as those are, since the NPCs rarely do any real damage). I'd kinda like to see this in raids too. Wouldn't it be neat if instead of needing to stand near the NPCs in the Hodir fight to get the benefit, you could send some heals their way, and they buff you in gratitude?

Fight Mechanics
So far, one of my favorite fight mechanics is the Incinerate Flesh ability of Jaraxxus in ten man TOC. I'd love to see more of these kinds of challenges that require us to take a step away from the tank and use our healing abilities to essentially dispel something.

Less Priest, Moar Cleric
One of the things I'm enjoying most about 4th edition D&D with my friends is this entire other world of healing. I spend less time healing as a Cleric in 4e, and more time finding ways to keep others from taking damage. All my abilities are still based on hitting the foe though. It reminds me a lot of some of the Pally abilities... between all their many hands (which I have yet to figure out), and then different judgements, they may not be doing a lot of damage, but in addition to the healing they do, they also have other bonus abilities to help out their allies. I suppose Resto Shammies are similar, with their totems. Priests don't have much other than bubbles, and Power Infusion if you're disc - until you move over to the Shadow side, which is truly intriguing. No matter what spec of Priest you are, there are ways to do some healing. Druids have Innervate, but that's actually more helpful to other healers more than anything else. I'd like to see healers brought not only for their ability to heal, but for some of the other abilities they can provide. I realize this is not an easy thing for Blizz to do, however, as then we get back into the era of raiding in which you feel required to bring certain classes.

~~~~~

I see this happen a lot, and I'm quite guilty of it myself, but we all also need to get out of the mindset that the only thing that matters is raiding. The problem with being a healer is that it is very raiding focused, or perhaps group pvp focused. Despite all my insisting that Holy DPS is a very effective leveling build, after level 40 it is difficult to compete with Shadow. With the exception of a few things such as Glyph of Smite, Blizz seems to have little interest in giving healing specs viability for leveling or questing - I will say, however, that the Holy Healers have it better than the Nature Healers. Penance and Holy Shock both do damage OR healing, and Surge of Light for Holy priests allows for benefit to dps or healing.

There are some things that I don't *want* to see change, however. The healing community, unlike the tanking or DPSing community, has a much warmer and closer bond - mainly because it is stupid for us to try and compete with one another. Sure, some people still do it, but those of us who "get it" usually just roll our eyes at them. When I hear about "heal sniping", I roll my eyes. The REAL healers are usually trying to work TOGETHER to keep everyone alive. If I see that the pally is running low on mana, I immediately start throwing some heals on the tank to help out the pally healer, and the group as a whole.

I would hate to see that change. I don't want to compete with other healers; I want us to all help one another be better healers.

And have world peace and stuff. Awww let's all have a group hug!

Better late than never, right?

Part of the delay on this is that after reading the Q&A I had no thoughts, because for healers it seemed to have very little relevant information, relatively speaking. We've sorta been put on the back burner while other classes are given more tweaks, and while I'm not opposed to that in principle or for any particular reason, it makes for a pretty boring Q&A. But regardless, let's get to it - I'll try to keep my comments limited mostly to the topics relevant to disc or holy.

For the full Q&A, instead of the tidbits I'll be quoting here, please visit the source.

"In World of Warcraft, the priest isn’t a stronger healer than the other classes, but does have unmatched versatility. At its core the priest has two unique talent trees for healing, while the others only have one. Furthermore, the priest has strong heal-over-time spells (HoTs), direct heals, and area-of-effect (AoE) heals."

Strong heal-over-time spells? Where? There is ONE official HoT, and that is Renew. Don't get me wrong, I love my renew spell, particularly coupled with the Empowered Renew talent for Holy. And yes, we have the option of more HoTs with the Glyph of Prayer of Healing, but I think GC is overestimating our HoT abilities here. In spite of that, I do agree with his underlying message - Priests really are incredibly versatile healers, with lots of tools in their toolbox. This also means that contrary to popular belief, they are not easy healers to play well. Sure, you can spam a couple of spells and probably do okay in most 5 mans and the like... but there are so many different healing spells to choose from that it can create quite the headache (not that I'm actually complaining!). That's one of the reasons I chose to level holy instead of shadow - by the time I hit level cap, I finally understood all my different healing spells. You can have a 25 man raid with only priests for your healers, and you will be okay, though it is certainly not ideal. This is generally not the case with Pally healers or Resto Druids, though it might apply for Resto Shammies. Our versatility is our strength.

"Overall, we feel the priest is one of the most versatile classes in the game, and can be the most enjoyable of the healer classes in the game because of its feature of having two different unique talent specs providing two different types of play styles."

The idea that priests are "one of the most versatile classes in the game" is so completely laughable that I can't even laugh. That's definitely a feel-good phrase if I ever heard one - did GC say that for every class Q&A? If you want true "versatility", roll a shammy, a druid, or a pally - not a priest. However, if you are into healing in a big way, a priest is the way to go, because with one class you can try two different types of healing due to the uniqueness of priests being the only class with two healing talent trees.

"When we go to improve Holy, things we want to improve are mana efficiency and burst healing."

I suppose with this statement I am left wondering how, exactly, the developers go about improving "burst healing" for any class. I say this because it seems that over the past year or so, they have done a couple of things that have already improved "burst" healing for Holy priests. The change in focus from haste/regen to crit in and of itself fosters and encourages priests to stack crit, which gives burst (if unpredictable) healing. Also, the changes to Serendipity give another source of burst healing, depending on how you look at it. A large amount of healing in a much shorter amount of time = burst healing in my book. Now, if you wanted to add a talent that granted more healing bonus on someone with some other type of healing buff on them, and define that as burst healing, I would like that too. Otherwise, I think we're okay without needing too much more burst healing, though I suppose this may not be the case in PvP. In response to mana efficiency - YES PLEASE. Holy priests are at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of mana efficiency.

"Flash Heal is big, so Greater Heal is just overkill. Combine this with the fact that there are other spells that are doing a lot of the healing that Greater Heal used to do -- Penance for example. I don’t think many players look at Greater Heal as being too expensive from a mana-per-healing standpoint. They often aren’t in danger of running out of mana. It’s also worth pointing out that max rank Greater Heal has always healed too much. The difference is that priests used to be able to cast down-ranked Greater Heals. We have considered offering say Lesser Heal as a literal 50% mana, 50% healing version of Greater Heal."

To be honest, I never used downranked heals. Part of that is that I started raiding only a short time before downranking was removed as a viable option, but the other part is that I just always found it stupid, and much more effort than it was worth. Priests have so many heals in our aresenal that quadrupling those split-second decisions with downranked additions was jsut too much for my tiny brain to handle. Greater Heal is a bit of an issue, because it does heal for too much, and too slow. Unless I have several stacks of Serendipity, I just don't use it, it's just not viable in Ulduar when we need to be on the ball and quick. GC does address this later, and I'll get to that in a second, but lastly I wanted to add that I've always thought it was a pity that after a certain level, Lesser Heal is completely abandoned. You get your highest rank of Lesser Heal at level 10, and if you compare it to Greater Heal, you'll see what I mean. What is the point of having a spell that is essentially abandoned 1/4 of the way through your leveling career? I encourage any efforts by developers to bring back this spell in a raiding environment.

"In a raid in which healers don’t coordinate well it’s easy for other healers to stomp on your big, slow heals. While you are casting, someone heals your target for you [...] Or else everyone has their targets and won’t heal someone else unless something unpredictable happens. Other raids just heal anyone who is injured and don’t have a lot of assigned targets, except for probably the tanks."

There is a lot of truth in this, and I do applaud GC for pointing that out. It can be very difficult to coordinate heals, and in fact, from my experience, even when you give healers specific healing assignments, a lot of them just can't resist healing others. Sometimes this is fine, and other times while they're healing someone else's target because they are bored and think they will "help out", and their targets are fine, some big whammy comes along and makes sausage out of one of their responsibilities. In a 25 man raid, chatting over vent and saying "I'm healing Jimmy!" "Big heal incoming on Pat!" just doesn't work very well. Too many healers, and too much healing going around. We've trained ourselves to heal essentially one of two ways - either via mitigation, in which we prep our targets for incoming damage and try to reduce what the consequences of the hits they take, or even more commonly, reflexively. It's reflex for us to respond to someone getting a big hit, and even if it's not one of our main targets, we can't seem to resist clicking on that shrinking green bar. It's hard to focus our attention on only a select few targets, even though in theory it should be easier. I can give all kinds of healing assignments, but it doesn't stop people from ignoring them.

"Q: Have you considered reducing the 10-minute cooldown on Divine Hymn?
Ghostcrawler: It was balanced like Tranquility. We basically want these to be once-an-encounter spells. "

Hey look! I spell I never remember to use, and have therefore never established a good justification for it. See, that's the problem with having such a large toolbox. >.>

"Pain Suppression is more or less targeted Shield Wall. It’s really good. "

I beg to differ. The problem with Pain Suppression is that it reduces the amount of threat on the target. This may seem like a good thing, but it is a deep Discipline talent, and the strength of Discipline healing is in single-target healing. Single-target healers usually focus on tanks. Therefore, reducing the threat of the tank is rarely, if ever, a good thing. I'm never quite sure just how much threat the tank can afford to use, so I avoid using Pain Suppression on the tank, and therefore rarely get any use out of this spell, sadly - which is too bad, because it is an awesome spell. I have no doubt that personally I'm far too conservative with it.

"Q: Do you have any plans to improve [Lightwell's] functionality?
Ghostcrawler: [...] The basic root of the problem is that most dps classes seem unwilling to have to take the time or spatial awareness to make use of the Lightwell, even if it provides great healing. [...] We don’t like that dps characters focus on dps at the exclusion of even their own survival and just assume that’s the healer’s job [...]. Lightwell heals for a lot. The problem is just getting players to use it. Encounters currently are very fast-paced, in terms of both dps and healing required so you have trouble finding room to use it. "

GC hit the nail on the head with this one. This has always always ALWAYS been the major problem with Lightwell. They keep improving it and making it even more awesome, but it does nothing to fix the problem with people not remembering, or taking the time, to use it. It is also a situational spell - some fights it's just pointless because everyone is moving around too much. But consider the benefits - you can precast it before a fight, players can use it whenever, it lasts for a long time, has plenty of hits available, and heals for a helluva lot. The tanks I run with are usually pretty good at hitting it here and there, but it seems to be more of a struggle for dps. I also understand that it's not always easy to target with so many visual effects going on in fights now. One way they could change it would be to make it a stationary AoE heal - standing near it will give a HoT to the lowest health players near it. This would make it way OP, and it would undoubtedly need to be nerfed, but it would get a lot more utility. However, it's not really the fault of the developers if people just can't be bothered to make use of something, no matter how awesome they make it. That's why you'll often hear holy priests calling out over vent "Lightwell up! Use it or die." I make frequent reminders to people to use it, and I hope that helps.

After the Lightwell discussion, there is a short discussion about the technical difficulties of showing absorption mechanics in combat logs, which is an important issue for Disc priests. They have made some changes to make it easier for 3rd party add-ons to pick up on it, and I hope it helps. A few uninteresting comments on dispel mechanics (yawn) and then we touch upon Inner Fire.

"Q: Would you consider increasing or removing altogether the charges of Inner Fire?
Ghostcrawler: At that point it just becomes a passive buff and we might as well just say that priests have the armor of a leather-wearer while wearing cloth. It works a little better for mages and warlocks who are at least making a decision about which armor spell to cast. If we go ahead and add alternatives to Inner Fire ("Outer Fire"! "Inner Shadow!") then we might take off the charges. Certainly the spell requires a lot less micromanagement now than it used to. "

I agree completely with GC here. If everyone is doing their part, we don't really need the extra armor provided by Inner Fire - the main benefit is the added spellpower buff that came a few patches ago. Inner Fire used to only have 10 charges, lasted 10 minutes, and it was a pain in the ass. Now it lasts a half hour and has a lot more charges along with the spellpower buff, and I'm quite pleased with it - most of the time the buff wears off long before the charges are all used up. However, it would be really awesome to have a few options for armor spells, like locks or mages. It would be much more useful to have spell resistance than an armor buff, or to reduce any damage taken, that sort of thing. I'd love to see a decision change like that made.

All in all, I was supremely disappointed in the Priest Q&A, unlike the pally one. Though I certainly found plenty to say about it, the Q&A itself just seemed rushed, and it didn't even look like GC put much thought into his responses. It seems like Blizz thinks that priests are fine just as they are, and while I can't say I necessarily disagree, it's kinda a bummer to see so little creativity going on with regards to priests from developers.