David Greig's Blog

Hopefully 3.1 will be hitting the PTR’s quite soon and will give me the chance to look at the talent changes affecting Holy priests along with the changes to OOFSR mana regen to see how big a nerf this is. It may not be an issue in current content but I worry this could cause serious problems for healers (except Paly healers) in the new content.

Blizzard are rolling out testing of the new Ulduar instance in stages so it will be interesting to take the opportunity to test out some of these bosses in advance of the live rollout of 3.1. Ulduar looks to be pretty epic instance with lots of replayability. 11 of the 14 encounters have “hard” modes which make the encounters more challenging for those guilds that can cope with them providing better loot. Sounds like a lot of fun!!!

NeverEnders continues to progress well, were now at the point where we are clearing all 25 man content (Naxx, Malygos, VOA, with Sarth currently @ 2 drakes alive) in a day or 2 after the reset leaving us pretty bored for the rest of the raiding week. As a result of this NeverEnders are really looking forward to the release of Ulduar into the game.

We don’t feel we need to be in competition with any other guild on Bladefist but who knows we may even get a realm first on the realm which would be sweet.

My own personal loot progress is a bit disappointin I’ve not been raiding a lot recently due to personal issues and when I am on nothing drops that I can use! Still sitting at only 1 piece of T7.5 while others in NeverEnders are at 5/5 T7.5. Very frustrating. Hopefully I can rectify this and get full T7.5 along with other BiS items in the other slots before Ulduar hits.

This is a provisional list of changes coming to priests in 3.1

• Divine Spirit – this spell is now a core ability available to all priests.
• Discipline has access to a new talent, Power Word: Barrier. (Think of it as Power Word: Shield for your whole group).
• Several area of effect (AOE) heal spells have been improved: Prayer of Healing can be cast on any groups in your raid party. Holy Nova’s mana cost has been reduced. Circle of Healing now heals for more.
• Shadow priest PvP survivability has been improved: Shadow Form now reduces magic as well as physical damage. Dispersion now removes snares.
• Penance – this spell can now be targeted on the priest.
• Serendipity – this talent now reduces the cast time of Greater Heal and Prayer of Healing when Binding Heal or Flash Heal are cast.
• We are also working to give Holy additional PvP utility.

Interestingly there is a big change coming to the way mana regen works in WOTLK Blizzard currently feels this is trivial in some cases. I can’t say I’ve really noticed this as some fights I still have trouble with and need an inervate thrown my way. This change looks to effect mana regen accross the board but will especially impact healers.

GM Bornakk wrote:

As we have suggested, we have become concerned that mana regeneration is currently too powerful, especially for healers. We want players to have to keep an eye on mana. We don’t want you to go out of mana every fight, but running out of mana should be a very real risk for sloppy playing or attempting content that you aren’t yet ready for. When mana regeneration is trivial then certain parts of the game break down – classes that offer Replenishment are devalued, stats that offer mana regeneration are devalued, and spells that are efficient are neglected in preference to spells with high throughput.

Here are a list of changes you are likely to see in 3.1. They will be available to try out on the PTR. Mana regeneration is somewhat technical, so please bear with us.

• Regeneration while not casting (outside of the “five second rule”) will be decreased. We think that (1) the ability to cast heal over time spells and then sit back and (2) benefitting from a clearcasting proc that also gets you out of the five second rule both provide too much mana regeneration, even over short time periods.
• To make this change, we are reducing mana regeneration granted by Spirit across the board. However we are also boosting the effects of talents such as Meditation that increase regeneration while casting. The net result should be that your regeneration while casting will stay about the same, but your not-casting regeneration will be reduced. This change will have little impact on dps casters, since they are basically always casting.
• The specific talents and abilities being boosted are: Arcane Meditation, Improved Spirit Tap, Intensity, Mage Armor, Meditation, Pyromaniac and Spirit Tap. Yes this makes these “mandatory” talents even more mandatory, if such a thing is possible.
• Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
• In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.
• We are also taking a close look at clearcasting procs themselves. One likely outcome is to change them to an Innervate-like surge of mana so that the net benefit is the same, but healers won’t shift to out-of-casting regeneration so often.
• We balance around the assumption that even 10-player groups have someone offering Replenishment. To make this even easier on players we are likely to offer this ability to additional classes, as well as make sure that existing sources of Replenishment are more equitable.
• These changes are ultimately being done to bring the different healing classes more in line with each other as well as to give the encounter team more leeway when designing encounters, who can balance with these new mana regeneration numbers in mind. In a world with infinite healer mana, the only way to challenge healers is with increasingly insane amount of raid damage, so that global cooldowns become the limiting factor since mana fails to be. An example is the Eredar Twins in late Sunwell. We weren’t necessarily happy with that model, and this change hopefully allows us to move towards giving healing a more deliberate and thoughtful pace rather than frenetic spam.

Well there you have it….lots of big changes incoming!