Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

The Rapture nerf is the end of all Disc priests!  Yes I’ve been checking the forums for reactions to 3.1.  Yes it is a HUGE nerf, but they intended to nerf all mana regen apparently.  I personally thought they would leave Rapture alone because it was consistent, and controllable.  However I apparently was wrong…

I’m not as freaked out about it as most people.  For one this is the 1st day of the PTR and things are not set in stone. And Two there were several changes that increased our efficiency such as the 30% reduction in the cost of PW:Shield, 15% reduction in the cost of Flash Heal, and the freeing of enough points to get Improved Healing for a 15% reduction in the cost of Penance.  I don’t know if all these things together will make up for the mana loss from Rapture but they certainly lessen the blow.

It isn’t as if Rapture doesn’t give mana anymore at all, they changed Serendipity to have a completely different purpose now.  I think the biggest fault with Rapture is that it requires the entire shield to be absorbed in order to give mana, which means most likely only the one you cast on the tank will ever give you mana AND it can only happen every 12 seconds.  Of course the 12 seconds doesn’t matter much because you still have weakened soul to worry about.

I still like Disc and won’t change over just that.  I am sure there are more changes to come on the PTR.  I’m still wondering where my PW:Barrier is.  Surely they wouldn’t specifically tell us about a new spell then decide not to put it in a week or two later.

Well it looks like things came out after I went to bed with the new patch 3.1 and as of this morning the PTR seems to be up but a little unstable.  I logged in after it patched looked at my talents for about 1 minute then the world server crashed   You can read all the notes over on MMO-Champion.

Looks like they messed with a lot of things in Disc, some I’m not happy with.  First of which there was no AOE Shield!   I dunno if they scrapped the idea or just haven’t got it on yet.  Second was they messed with Rapture.  It now only gives mana from the shield and nothing else, not even divine aegis.

Some good things though, Divine Aegis now stacks and can be up to 10k on a level 80 character.  When your shield breaks and gives you mana back from Rapture it also gives the person you shield mana/rage/runic power.  They put in a talent that removes the 4 second cool down on PW:Shield FINALLY and as a bonus decreases the mana cost.  They also put in a new talent for flash heal that reduces its cost by 15% and increases it chance to crit on targets below 50% by 10%.

With all the reductions in talent costs and the removal of a few I can get everything I had been getting, plus the new talents and manage to get Improved Healing to make Penance even more efficient

It is time to go to work, so I’ll be following up later with some testing   Oh and the mana changes?  My out of FSR mana regen is about HALFED, my in FSR regen is about the same.