Ghostcrawler
Khendra, we have no objection to using
Prayer of Healing when you need to heal a bunch of people. That's what it's for. But when you're using
Prayer of Healing in preparation for future damage because
Divine Aegis and
Spirit Shell make your AE heal better at shielding than actual
Power Word: Shield, then that even further reduces your options. (In 10s, Disc tends to use
Atonement more, so they're doing something more than just
Prayer of Healing spam. In 25s, we see some
Atonement use, but it's fit in when possible and healers in 25s are just always going to be able to specialize more.)
We might in the future add another AE heal for Disc (I think you can make a compelling argument that in this day and age, healers need a variety of interesting AE heals and maybe only a couple of ST heals, while healer design for years went in the opposite direction) but that's not the sort of thing we want to drop on you in the middle of an expansion. In the meantime, if Disc uses
Penance and
Power Word: Shield some more (and
Flash Heal in PvP) and doesn't trounce all the other healers, we will be satisfied and hopefully so will priests.
Priest
- The problem with
Spirit Shell benefiting from mastery is that it changes
Spirit Shell from "I want to bubble because we'll be hit by a lot of damage soon" to "I want to use
Spirit Shell because my PoHs will be bigger." Once it is a throughput increase, then
Spirit Shell loses some of its identity as a tool and it just becomes a cooldown. Now, we could just nerf Spirit Shell in some way ("you make a bubble weaker than a heal would have been") and then let mastery increase it back to base level again, but we would have to nerf it.
- On the topic of
Power Word: Shield, back in say LK, the Disc play style was to tab through every target and
Power Word: Shield them. It was effective, and boring. We wanted to move away from that and we were successful. However,
Power Word: Shield is still supposed to be a core spell for Disc and we're seeing very little use of it on live. There should be room in the rotation for Spirit Shell,
Prayer of Healing and
Power Word: Shield and there isn't right now. This isn't a change in philosophy -- any time you see a spec using one spell or ability to the exclusion of others, you can assume we're probably not happy with that. As I said before, if you need to heal damage on a lot of players at once -- use
Prayer of Healing. But if a lot of incoming damage is coming, you should probably
Power Word: Shield several people and not use Prayer of Healing. On live, you'd still just use PoH because it's your best AE heal and your best AE absorb.