Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

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!

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