Are they making smite part of a holy/disc priests rotation?
It appears though it is, but if you also take a look at what they've done with tree form in the druid talents, it appears as though damage will slightly benefit a resto druid also. In the Shaman tree there is a talent that increase healing after shocking something, this either suggests a healing shock or damage too becoming part of the healing arsenal of shamans. I think it's pretty interesting and definitely a way to put a little more fun into what healing is now which is spamming heals and watching boxes or bars for change.
All things are subject to change, of course, but provisional end-game PvE Shadow
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I like the changes :)At the current state of gear in ICC i use smite and penance on the boss when ever i can due to the shields being buffed and i dont have mana problems while doing it. So i like the smite heal part and stacking so eventually when u consume the stacks u get up to 15% mana back and heal effect on top of that a movable penance cast. But it also seems holy priests are able to get Power Word: Barrier.I love the changes so far but shadow seems a bit lacking in the changes. But the "Nibilung proc" like talent sounds nice.
I'm a little confused. They said only healers and Boomkins will be using spirit. If that is the case, why is there still spirit in the shadow tree? And only in 2 places at that. Either you should keep us similar to how we are now and have some spirit on our gear that is necessary for our dps or you should get rid of it completely. They've already tried the lets just add a little of everything, even if they don't gear for it approach and it didn't work. Especially when you look at warlocks.
What's up with all the new damage-boosting talents for holy spells in the Disc tree? Is this the mighty return of the lolsmite priest? Could be interesting!PW:B is expensive and has a long cooldown; I suppose it's necessary to keep it from being overpowered, but that's a bit lame. And oh ho! return of the 10-second cooldown on CoH.It looks alright otherwise, I would've loved to see them either get rid of the stupid Lightwell or drastically change it, but I'm not surprised it hasn't been touched, they've been pretty stubborn about that for years.
It seems like while they are getting rid of the passive talents, they are increasing the cost of ones they are keeping. I thought the idea was that having less passive talents would "let us choose the more fun talents" to let us "play with our own style rather than by the latest/greater cookie cutter spec". How is increasing the cost of other talents getting us there?I expected to see more things like the DK's 20% mount speed increase. Fun things that aren't acceptable in group play now, but in cata will be allowed/tolerated.
So I guess disc priests are supposed to cast Smite (x5) then hit Archangel and we get mana back and 15% bonus healing? This is a bit unclear, do we get 3% of our total mana back per stack or just a flat 3%? Either way, while we're casting Smite we're basically casting little smart-heals on the group/raid via Atonement, which should make up for the time that we're not casting actual heals.Looks like a rotation might be as follows:Power Word: Shield -> Penance -> (BT) Smite -> Smite x4 -> Archangel -> Penance (+15%) -> FH (+15%) spamAlso I noticed Soul Warding now only reduces the cooldown on Power Word: Shield by 3 seconds, but I guess that still leaves a 1 second cooldown on it. Not sure why they'd change it.
Talent calculator is borked, or I'd link a few disc specs.One thing to note is that shadow doesn't get options. Sinespe's spec includes every single possible talent point in shadow except one. Disc and holy get all sorts of quirky toys, from Improved Holy Nova (want!) to the playstyle-wrecking Archangel-Smite healer to the Barrier (easily obtainable by holy priests).Also, the two new shadow toys (orbs & apparitions) are basically passive. There are a bunch of new buttons to push and playstyles to toy around with in holy & disc; shadow play remains basically as it currently is, with the addition of Mind Spike.