Blizzard
The talent row balancing comments are something we'll probably look at in a little more detail slightly later, though there is a simple buff in the pipeline for
Luminous Barrier.
On the base rotation: while we don't want it to be as burst-oriented as it was in Legion due to
Light's Wrath, we are looking to add a little more texture back as far as moments of higher damage/healing. In the next build, we're trying out
Power of the Dark Side as a baseline part of the spec.
On
Power Word: Shield (based on various comments in a lot of different places):
Power Word: Shield will definitely be used a lot more than it was in Legion (obviously, due to not having a cooldown). But, we neither expect nor want it to be like the
Power Word: Shield spam of Mists or Warlords. In those days, a rotation based almost entirely on
Power Word: Shield did sufficient healing to make a Disc using that rotation into a top healer. Therefore it was doing roughly an entire healer's worth of healing in the form of absorbs.
Disc in BFA should not be able to put out that level of absorption, even if it uses a higher portion of casts on
Power Word: Shield. Using
Power Word: Shield, and absorbs generally, is still a core part of Disc's identity, but reaching full healing potential still requires a significant contribution of other mechanics like
Atonement. We don't see it as a problem if
Power Word: Shield is a major workhorse spell of the rotation in all contexts, but the opportunities to apply very high amounts of shielding are cooldown-limited (
Rapture and
Luminous Barrier), and current talents that buff PW:S generally do so without adding absorption (
Lenience and
Orison).