Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

I logged on to see if things had settled down a little later in the evening.  There was a queue so I assumed that enough people were able to stay logged in to not have a problem.

My first order of business was to get on my new favorite alt Laneir to play with the changes to Arcane, and oh to do my inscription research.  Sure enough the changes to Arcane was quite fun!  I almost couldn’t stop but really wanted to get something done on Laneer.

I got into a fairly ok group for Heroic Azjol-Nerub.  I had the daily from the other day and I liked the idea of it better over a Heroic Oculus   We had some trouble with the first boss, mostly our Mage DPS was a little lacked and our Deathknight a little slow in the head.  We ran into some trouble with the Spider boss, he was a bit bugged (no pun intended).  He wouldn’t seal the door off and you had endless adds and he kept resetting.  We tried a few times and eventually got the script to go properly. Inien was having script issues over in Heroic Utgarde Pinnacle with the boss on the proto dragon despawning and the even resetting.

Surprisingly, to my absolute amazement given the group I was with we did not wipe on the last boss.  He went down fairly easy and first try.  He even dropped a nifty crit belt the Sash of the Servant which I snatched up.  I can’t decide now that they fixed Rapture if I’d be better off with the crit or mana regen.  I’m going to have to test it out.

I’m not sure how it possible considering the amount of time 3.08 was on the PTR but I’d say the patch has not gone well onto live.  I read early on they extended the maintenance, which isn’t entirely unusual when doing a patch.  I get home and patch, am greeted by a new launcher which was much cooler looking.

I get in and celebrate by casting Penance on someone behind me!  Very excited I notice things are a bit laggy.  I noticed  I had a bunch of Frostweave in my inventory I had yet to turn into bolts and go to do so.  I open tailoring only maybe a quarter of my recipes were there.  I notice I have mail and go check it, two are from the AH, they are blank.  I try my tailoring a few more times eventually it loads.

No sooner do I turn around and I find I get booted to the logon screen.  Yes the world server has crashed.  Again it seems crazy there can be any problems given the amount of time on the PTR.  Oh well at least all my mods worked   Things will work themselves out eventually I’m sure.

If you look at the patch notes you will not find too many exciting things done for the Priests.  For me though this patch was a significant improvement!  Several Discipline related bugs have finally been addressed, my long championed directionless Penance, and the much needed fix to Rapture returning mana properly from the Shields.  Both of these things make this patch VERY exciting for me anyways

I’m not going to pretend I have all the answers or that I know what is really balanced.  I think I’ve been a Priest long enough though to have some good ideas on the direction the class can go.

I’m talking specifically at the Discipline tree here now.  I think the latest overhaul of Disc with 3.0 was good.  I was glad to be a part of beta to provide my feedback and testing.  In the mad rush to launch date though I believe some much needed tweaking was still necessary.

Even more so now that we have had some significant time to test it on the live servers it is clear that some more work needs to be done and I think Blizzard sees this.  Again this isn’t a QQ just some ideas to toss out as Blizzard is working on 3.1.  People like to do lists so here is mine.

1. Limitations! If you look at the talents in Discipline you’ll notice a few things, for one there are a lot of them, and two there are a lot of limitations.  A common one is limited to “Flash Heal, Greater Heal, and Penance”.  I think this is entirely unecessary and completely discourages the use of our other healing spells. Perhaps it is a balancing thing but it seems that it is believed the over all Disc is weak, so perhaps something could be done about this?
2. Crit! Holy Priests will also note the issue with this but given the itemization as such we still need to have some haste, mana regen, and crit.  Getting crit has been really hard so far in gear, and since a Priests needs several things it is hard to stack.  A good idea which I have heard before is to give us crit for Spirit.  Whether this is added onto an existing talent or a new one is created I don’t know.
3. CoolDowns! PW:Shield has always had two cooldowns essentially.  One is a spell cooldown and the other is a target cooldown.  You can only cast the shield once every 4 seconds, and only once every 15 seconds on a particular target.  I continue to believe as I always have that both of those are not necessary.  I would prefer to see the spell cooldown removed so that the spell is more available for others.  I also like the idea of turning the “negative” of weakened soul into a positive such as the attempt with Renewed Hope.

If I was to go into specifics I would like to say I think Renewed Hope is in need of some love.  I thought it was probably mediocre when it was 6% in beta, but then nerfed to 4% it isn’t great at all.  It isn’t really that fun of a talent either, but because crit is hard to come by for me I have it.  I kept thinking oh man you must be able to get some high crit and that is why they nerfed it but we can come no where near a Paladin, and crit on Priestly gear hard to come by.

Much talk has been made over the Hymns.  I like the idea of the Hymn of Hope but I believe it is poorly executed.  My suggestion would be to have it return mana to the group based on a meaningful percentage of the Priests mana, AND I would like to see it effected by spell haste.  As far as Divine Hymn I’m not sure how much of the spell is salvagable, but I find it not useful to me at all.  What would I like to see in it’s place?  Some fabulously unique and interesting heal of some sort for this expansion

Given this era of Hope and Change we have just entered.  I am hopeful we will see some meaningful change for the Priest in 3.1.  I like the idea of Discipline being our single target tree.  I think to be useful though we still need some AOE tools, I think we have them with PoH, Holy Nova and PoM.  Please keep them in mind of the Disc talents too!

Ok I don’t want to really bring politics into this blog, one time only historical event!

HAPPY INAUGURATION DAY!!!!!!!!

OMG Thank god and all that is good and right in the world George Bush is FINALLY gone.  Ok there I feel better

I have great hope like most of America that Obama can actually do something.  I believe this not just because I think he is a good man with good ideas, but because he and his party control everything   Hopefully we get our country back on target!

On a side note, sorry for the armory plugin, apparently it doesn’t fail nicely when it is down   Time to email the author and plead for that!

HOPE!                      CHANGE!