Penance Priest

Penance

The extra time between casts is indeed an eternity. It seems that we all have to adjust to a new rhythm, and that should take probably another week or so. I've had to rearrange my UI so that the Penance cooldown is shout-in-your-face loud. Otherwise, like many of us, I'm just clicking a dead button while I could have been doing something useful.

So meanwhile, what to do with that extra time? I've applied to the Camp of Greater Heal, and I've been accepted as an Initiate. I've redone my spec, complete with 5/5 Divine Fury and 2/3 Improved Healing. Improved Flash Heal has made its triumphant return, and Focused Will is now the casualty of spec adjustments. Other disc priests would move one point from Grace to fill out Improved Healing, but I can't quite bring myself to do that just yet.

Greater Heal vs. Flash Heal

I won't go into this minefield just now, except to say that I'm happy we have hard decisions again! Our spec is no longer fully-formed out of the box. Spell usage is now very much in debate. I'm not happy at how hard it is to keep tanks up, but I am indeed happy that things have moved past the right/wrong answers that we've gotten used to.

That said, if the nerf to Penance were 1 second instead of 2, I think we could all adjust and not feel like we just got our left arms chopped off...

Prayer of Healing

The nerf scales with your spellpower. I got hit hard. I don't cast PoH as much as my holy priest friends, and this will have me casting it even less. It's a real loss. Which brings me to...

Glyphs

Ok, Penance was always essential. Shield is a no-brainer as well, though some disc priests will tell you the healing is often overheal. But I have no intention of removing this from my glyph pane anytime soon.

I switched to the PoH glyph a while back, but now this is ridiculous. The glyph took a nerf in direct proportion to the spell it augments. Plus now that I'm casting PoH less, the glyph becomes even more of a waste. So back to Flash Heal for me. Some priests are using Holy Nova these days, which is very nice for tightly-grouped hard-mode fights (like Mimiron).

Trial of the Champion

Comparisons to Magister's Terrace were greatly exaggerated. As in, LOL. Long after I got the trinket from Priestess, even after I had enough badge gear to last me into my retirement years, I still did MgT almost every day. The instance was just that well designed, that much fun, day in & day out. The new 5-man...is not.

Comparisons to Ring of Blood, however, were relatively accurate. Fast, simple, and kind of fun. However, Ring of Blood was not repeatable, except to help out guildies or run alts. The new instance is a daily event, because it drops unreasonably good 219 gear.

My level-200-geared friends are now farming the place, and I'm helping as much as I can. We even do non-heroic, because even the level 200 stuff is so nicely itemized. This is silly. I realize it represents a gear-reset patch, almost as generous as 3.0 was before LK dropped. But at least farming ZA was fun. The new 5-man...is not.

Loot pinata? Yes. Magister's Terrace? Ho-ho-ho.

Trial of the Crusader

I hope it gets better.

Tier 9

I hope I never get a tier token. That shit is ugly. And anyway, how can a disc priest ever break their 4-piece T8 bonus? Tell me!!

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EDIT: The nerf to the glyph of Penance, which was the spark that initiated the post below, has been repealed. Yay! I'm leaving this post up, however, because I remain amazed at how quickly so many priests started QQing in a way that seemed quite over the top. No doubt other nerfs are coming our way, sooner or later, so this is fundamentally a plea to remain calm :)

This is our moment, fellow discipline priests.  The nerf bat has arrived, and will be sharing its sting with us soon. The devs giveth, and the devs taketh away. How will we deal with it? This will be a rite of passage for us all. It’s initiation time for discipline. Call it our bar mitzvah.

Disc Priest 3.0

All was fresh and new. The world alight with possibilities. Undiscovered treasures built into our very nature. Slowly we found the Way to Be. We had dynamism, creativity, fluidity. Like the blossoming of flowers in spring, the endless joy of the New washed over us. And yea we sang.

Our singing was multilayered, complex, spontaneous. Bouncing between the perfectly timed Penance, a shield now and again, Flashes, Mending, a touch of Renew…plus the joy of giving (Power Infusing our mages) and of saving (Pain Suppressing our tanks). So much to do! And what fun doing it!

Disc Priest 3.1

The changes were few but significant. Spammable shields. Targetable Prayer of Healing. A lower cooldown on Penance.  Our rotations changed; how we responded to situations was altered more significantly that we might have thought.  Rapture was nerfed, of course, but that was a passive change, and did not affect play style significantly. There were plenty of other changes, including the way Grace and Renewed Hope work, but these were the big ones.

Now our play, while even more powerful, lost some of its pizzazz. All shields and Penance. More shields. And Penance. Oh, and some uber AoE heals…Prayer of Healing getting its due, and Divine Hymn saving the day more than once. But for the most part, what had been a challenging and creative interweaving of multiple cooldowns became a spamfest.

Our PvP viability shot through the roof. Self-castable Penance, and of course the lower cooldown. Glyph of Pain Suppression let us survive the loving attention we got from rogues.  Before anyone realized quite what had happened, discipline priests were on top of PvP healing once more. Interest in arenas surged.

Disc Priest 3.1.2

Our beloved Glyph of Penance…gone. Poof. Back to the original 8-second cooldown. A veritable eternity between casts! Plus the mana cost of shield is going up. Woe is us!

Like it or not – and I think I know which side we all fall on – this is the nerf bat. The touch that stings.

This is our initiation. Every other class & spec has been on the Blizzard rollercoaster, up and down, back up, back down. The discipline priest is a new creation, and this is our first significant nerf. (No, the nerf to Rapture does not count. Sorry.) And from the way I hear disc priests talking about it, you’d think the game was just about over.

The 2-second Glyph of Penance was, let’s all agree, a total win. How much did you pay for yours? 50g? 200g? 300g? We all wanted it desperately because we knew how over-the-top awesome it was. And guess what…Blizzard figured that out too.

Buck up, people. It’s not that bad. We healed just fine with the 8-second cooldown on Penance.  No, more than fine. We did so damn well that people started blogging (!) and writing web sites all about the joy and strength of our spec. In fact, it was (in my opinion) a much more satisfying challenge, having to bob and weave through cooldowns, rather than spamming two spells with a few extras tossed in for good measure.

You could say that this is a nerf designed to bring PvP priests back down to earth, with PvE priests the innocent casualties. This is how [mages/warlocks/ret pallies, heck you name it] sound when they are given a cookie that then gets taken away. Yes, we had a bite out of a tasty cookie. Mmmm, good. Now it’s back to business, and we will thrive once more. Not barely, but magnanimously.

Let me remind you: discipline priests rock.

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