Adventures of a Dwarf Priest

Cataclysm, the 3rd Word of Warcraft expansion is on its way.  When it will be here exactly no one can say, but most accounts put it early second quarter of next year.  There is a lot of exciting things in this expansion.  Most information we know came out of Blizzcon, and very little of it was class specific.  We know there will be great changes to the old world as the cataclysm causes widespread destruction in Azeroth.  We know that they are getting rid of some stats, like Spellpower (now based off int), Defense, Armor Penetration and MP5 (regen from spirit only).  We know they are redoing the talent system, removing percent based talents, and adding in talent mastery which has a new stat attributed to it.  Finally we know they are adding a new character customization system called Path of the Titans, which will be sort of like AA’s in EQ but not grindy, more on a time based progression.

Above here you will see my current spec.  I’d like to go over a few of my hopes for Discipline in Cataclysm and what changes we might expect.  First, I love Discipline as you all know.  After floundering for years on Disc, they finally settled on it being a Healing tree, with a focus on damage prevention/mitigation instead of more healing.  Holy does fine on the healing end, and to have two trees for healing, they really need to be different ways of doing the same job.  I think they hit the nail on the head with 3.0.  We have had what you might say a few setbacks in some of the changes, but none of them have been devastating to me, I still enjoy the spec.  So for Cataclysm I hope we can progress even more forward with the prevention/mitigation with the spec.

There are two new mechanics to the redesign of the talent system.  One is the removal of percentage based talents, which will be something you get automatically as you add points in a tree.  The other is the idea of Mastery, which is something your spec is meant to be good at.  They are adding a stat that allows your Mastery ability to increase.  This stat will be cool because you could have a piece of gear that might be good for a healer or DPS, that has this stat and it will do something different for whomever is wearing it.  They also said they were going to split up talents that too many things stacked together, an example of this right now is probably Renewed Hope, it is both a talent that gives extra crit to spells on people with weakened soul, and makes it so your raid gets 3% less damage for 20 seconds when you cast PW:Shield.  I imagine those will be split.

Of the talents that will be removed or altered in Disc I imagine it will be Twin Discipline, Meditation, Improved PW:Shield, Mental Agility, Mental Strength, Enlightenment, and Focused Power.  I’m curious about Twin Discipline and Mental Agility, because while they are straight percentage talents, they are very specific to Instant spells.  I’m hoping that Disc maintains its larger mana pool over Holy with Mental Strength which would be built into the tree.  The changes to spell power and Mental Strength would finally make Disc scale a bit better which is the main complaint of the Disc haters.

Now as they remove talents and they said they wanted to add more fun, interesting talents to replace them.  Also the splitting of the talents up will help as well.  This should let you create more interesting custom builds.  One of the ideas that came from Blizzard that got a lot of people excited was Power Word: Barrier.   I know a lot of people want this idea to just go away, but given the upcoming changes I think this is the perfect time to add a new iconic, deep Disc spell.  I think the original idea for PW:Barrier was was a spell that through a PW:Shield on everyone.  I wanted something different, then eventually we got Soul Warding which made that moot anyways.  Now what I wanted from PW:Barrier was some giant bubble shield.  What I later settled on the best idea was to have a huge bubble you placed on the ground that would dampen AOE effects.  After finally experiencing EoE pictured in the above screenshot is similar to something I’d like for Disc.  So the spell would have a radical similar to Mass dispel that let you place the shield, it would remain in that location for a fixed time and say reduce all AOE effects to everyone in the bubble by 75%.  You could even have the bubble shrink out of existence like it does in EoE.  Put an appropriate cooldown, and mana cost on it and we would have a fun interesting spell that would give a new mechanic for raid leaders to play with

If I could have them rethink any existing talent in Disc I would go with Grace.  My main problem with Grace is that it is not controllable at all by me.  If I am tank healing but need to save someone quick with Penance, which is awesome for that I have to remove grace from my tank and then get it back on when I can again. I would prefer Grace to be just a single target buff that we can place on one person of our choosing.  Plus I always had a problem with the duration, so having a longer duration on that buff would be great as well.  The reason being is it only gets applied with a few spells, I like to use all my spells not just the they put on Grace. That simple change would please me greatly.

I have a lot more to add about Disc in Cataclysm, but I believe I will save it for another post.  I think for me it is just key that they continue to stick with the current themes of Disc.  I want to keep my larger mana pool, extra speed (haste,pi,fast heals), and damage absorption/mitigation.

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