Penance Priest

I confess. I am a ninja. Pretty much all the time now. If I get Yaarrr I'll just eat more buff food.

Why, you ask? Sure it's fun to hop into some tight black leather, especially after wearing delicate robes all day long. But there's a more important reason.

Blizzard's outfit designs are more miss than hit. Here are some of the robes I've had the "pleasure" of wearing, and one that is inevitably in my future. I’ll neither explain nor defend my design-level assessment, so don’t try to haggle me on my numbers.

I find Umbral Brute to be particularly hideous. And many cloaks are just plain rotten, but hiding the cloak looks just plain weird. And the T9 shoulders? Halp!!

So to ninja I go, nearly every raid now, all the time. I just despise looking at my toon. And the ninja costume is really really good. So it no longer matters to me what sort of crap designs we get in the future. I've always got a good one to cover it up.

There was a solid stretch of designy goodness, when I was wearing mostly T8, and my priest looked badass in the best, most priesty way. But that was a blip on the design radar; mostly my guy looks like he got dressed by some overeager 19-year old artiste with no sense of restraint, color-matching, or style. Yes, I do really hate Umbral Brute. Looks fine on a lock, just not on a discipline priest.

Accessories

It does give me great pleasure to choose the correct pet to go with my ninja, reflecting both my mood and the encounter. Ninja + errandboy, ninja + arcane elemental, ninja + Chuck, etc. He's an oddball ninja, my priest. But he's not gonna take off his leather for just any old dress.

Postscript: An ulterior motive

I like to heal pug heroics half-naked. Just for the challenge of it. Wearing a ninja suit covers up my prank, so unless I'm inspected, it will go unnoticed, and I’ll be the only one to know that I kept up a noob tank with so much skin exposed. The fact that I often sport Anathema with my leather, however, and that doesn't get mentioned, is more than a bit unnerving.

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This is a post about loot. Hard to believe, since no one cares anyway :)

It’s not a post about how to distribute loot within your guild. There are many systems, and they all have varying degrees of suck. To minimize suck, look into EPGP and move on. Perhaps I’ll expand on that another day. Not now though.

No, this post is about what Blizzard can do about spellpower plate. But wait! Don’t run away! I promise, there’s more to it than that.

The problem

Spellpower plate is just the most obvious and extreme example of bad loot distribution by Blizzard. There are other examples, and it’s only gotten worse with the new “bring the player not the class” philosophy. BTPNTC allows guilds to run with groups that are (from a purely loot-oriented viewpoint) radically imbalanced.

My guild runs with two regular hunters. (Used to be three, but grats on the new baby, Griz!) We have no enhancement shaman. So every piece of mail gear goes straight to them, and they also get a shot at plenty of offset pieces. They’ve both got multiple 232 weapons and are well on their way to building separate gear sets for MM and SV.

Meanwhile, in our cloth-heavy guild, many of us softies are rocking four or five pieces of Ulduar gear. That’s after about 110 boss kills.

So what we have is a question of balance. Your guild might be the opposite, with tons of hunters and few clothies. Or lots of trees & boomkins but no priests. I love the BTPNTC philosophy to death, but this can be a real issue.

The spectrum of gear flexibility

Blizzard has a number of different loot distribution systems in place that attempt to address the balance concern. Here’s a diagram of those systems, arranged from the most specific (boss X drops the Ring of Not Again) to the most general (40 emblems gets you whatever the heck you want):

On the left we have a boss who drops some specific item; you have no choice in the matter. This, of course, is the way almost all raid-boss loot works. On the right we have a boss who drops a token that can be used to purchase any tier piece for any class (like the new T9 system). Emblem gear is similarly flexible, perhaps more so.

Previous tiers (I’m using T7 as an example) used a semi-flexible system, in which the slot was fixed (head piece, for example) but the class was flexible (rogues, death knights, mages, druids). There are also offset options within that (e.g., different types of druid headpieces for different specs), so there was an interesting balance of flexibility and specificity.

Blizzard has been clear that they don’t want bosses to drop only flexi-tokens. The badge system was designed to fill in gaps, to allow you to buy gear after the RNG clobbered you week in and week out. But bosses will not be dropping “Buy Any Loot Token #1” any time soon. The gambler’s thrill of hitting the jackpot is a key part of the game, which means losing rolls is going to happen until darkness descends over Azeroth.

(By the way, I’m glad they didn’t implement boss-kill statistics until 3.0. Otherwise I’d know exactly how many times I killed Prince and did not get my T4 helm. Even with the flexibility in the tier-gear system, the RNG is a huge factor, and is one reason I visited that dark castle so many times.)

Quest rewards

Probably didn’t see that coming, did you? Well. Think about it. Quest rewards give you options, but they aren’t innumerable. You get about 4 pieces of gear to choose from, and Blizzard has done its darndest to ensure that all specs and armor classes are accounted for during the leveling process. (Tanks will tell you differently.) Even if there are quests that have no rewards that interest you, over time you will certainly be able to build up a set of gear that tracks your leveling progress and power.

The proposal

Have raid-level bosses drop quest-reward tokens. (“This item begins a quest.”) For Ulduar, the quest turn-in might be in the foyer, so you can easily port around to receive your quest rewards.

The quest rewards would be tightly defined. Take Ignis, for example.

Ignis Weapon Token: quest rewards would be the three 232 weapons on his loot table (Worldcarver, Intensity, Scepter of Creation).

Ignis Accessory Token: quest rewards would the rings & neckpieces on his loot table (Cindershard, Pyrelight, and perhaps the Totem of Dancing Flame)

I haven’t thought through how all the tokens would be organized, except to realize it is a non-trivial but very solvable problem. You would have to combine things that don’t fit very easily (like that totem or a trinket). You could ensure that no token gave more than two rewards, as a way of keeping this system closer to the left side of my chart. (More options in the quest reward pushes it closer to the right, of course.) I’ll leave the subtleties of the quest-reward organization to the smart people. But the general idea should be clear.

I find this system very appealing: it still leaves a lot of randomness, while allowing a bit more control over gearing up your raid. And it leaves Blizzard plenty of control over how much or how little they want the RNG to affect your winnings.

And with that, there’s no need to change any fundamental mechanics of the game. No ridiculous strength-to-spellpower conversion talents in the paladins’ holy tree. No “everyone can wear plate” silliness. We’re just taking the edge off the randomness of boss drops, while still keeping the thrill of the rare drop and the thrill of a good roll as motivating factors.

By the way, has anyone seen Guiding Star? Fifteen Razorscale kills and no drops. And ten folks who would roll on it for their main spec. WTB better boss-drop mechanics. Even slightly better would be enough.

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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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Healing as Discipline in 3.1, in Ulduar, is nothing like healing in T7 content. With spammable shields, and fewer “omg tanks-gonna-die!” boss fights, my normal rotation looks very different than it used to:

Shield tank
Penance tank
PoM tank
Shield dps
Shield dps
(Beat)
Penance tank
Shield dps
(Two beats)
Shield dps
…repeat

That’s the basics, or something like that anyway. That doesn’t include the tanks-gonna-die phases, or AoE phases, and there is of course plenty of variation on that basic theme. But what’s missing from the rotation above? Why, Flash Heal, of course.

One more note on the rotation: I’ve always been able to do raid-heal support, even in T7. Even as a tank healer, I have plenty of GCDs available to help on raid heals. In the past, that usually meant tossing Flash Heals out on the raid when I could, to ensure that I had my PW:Shield cooldown up when I needed it. With the changes to Grace in 3.1, tossing out Flash Heals on the raid is a Very Bad Thing™, as it reassigns Grace to the FH target. So any raid-heal support comes in the form of bubbles. (And Prayer of Healing, but that’s another story.)

Flash Heal now makes up about 6% of my overall healing. So it is with excitement and trepidation that I have abandoned a traditional 57/14 spec for a 55/16 spec. (Am I late to the party?)

Here is my shiny new spec.

By the way, the points in Holy remain a somewhat unresolved issue, open to playstyle preference. Since Greater Heal makes up 0.0% of my heals, Divine Fury is a capital waste, and I’ve been spec’d into Spell Warding for a while now. The extra 2 points that I removed from Improved Flash Heal have gone into Healing Focus, which is more than welcome in the AoE world of Ulduar. Healing Focus has become a viable throughput talent in Ulduar.

I’ve kept one point in Improved Flash Heal until I can find a better use for it. The crit bonus is ok, but my raid-buffed crit is about 40% nowadays, so it’s no longer that exciting. And mana cost reduction? Also a non-issue. I finally removed my Flash Heal glyph, which had been glued to my glyph pane since day one. (That slot now hosts Prayer of Healing, as that spell now makes up an embarrassingly high proportion of my healing output.)

Is anyone else moving away from this “cookie-cutter” talent?

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I know you’re not a voyeur. Or competitive at all. That’s ok, I won’t judge you for it.

But you still probably check people out. Hey, someone’s gear says a lot about them, doesn’t it? It’s just a little, well, embarrassing to get caught inspecting someone. Or as soon as you click on them, you see that they’ve been targeting you. I’d prefer to just inspect people on the D/L. It requires just one mod and one macro, and no one will ever know you’re looking.

The Mod

Examiner is a replacement window for the inspection pane. It has lots of super features, including a cache (so you can see how someone looked last time you inspected them, even when they’re not nearby), a stat summary (it will add up all the hit rating, crit rating, etc, just from gear, not talents), and can retrieve achievements (though I keep this turned off…too much information for my tastes).

Those are all great features, but the real reason we need this mod for stealth inspection is because its window persists. I’ll explain in a moment.

The Macro

Here’s a simple macro that will open the inspection window on your mouseover target. No need to target them, just hover over their toon or raid frame. This is the core of our stealth operation. Ready?

/script InspectUnit("mouseover")

That’s all. A one-line macro to open up an inspection window on your mouseover target. The only problem is that as soon as you wiggle your mouse away from the target, the inspection window will disappear. So you can’t mouse over their gear…very frustrating.

This is why we need Examiner. Its window persists. Which means the window will stay open even if you move your mouse off the target -- it won’t disappear until you specifically close it. Voila!

Summing Up

Installing your stealth inspector is a simple two-step process. First, install Examiner. Second, bind the macro above to any key. That’s it. It’s almost too easy.

Bonus Addons

The first bonus addon is called oGlow. It’s the reason you see colored rings around everything in the Examiner window. It will put these rings (indicating item quality, of course) on every item in your bags as well, or in loot windows…basically anywhere you see an item icon. Makes it very easy to quickly see if someone’s epic’d out, or in mixed greens & blues.

The second addon is TipTac. It’s a tooltip replacement window, and it’s not directly related to our stealth inspection operation. It has a lot of great features that I won’t detail here. The one relevant feature is that if you hover over a toon, it will show you who that toon is targeting. So it’s a bit of stealth…you can tell if someone is targeting you without needing to target them.

Voyeur? Me? Never!

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Unless you've been hiding under a fragment of Val'anyr for the last month, you'll know that disc priests are the all the rage in arenas right now. FotM even. We got some huge buffs in 3.1 that increased our survivability in PvP tremendously. If you have enough resilience, it's actually fun to PvP as a priest nowadays.

I've done a ton of BGs, but until recently I didn't have good enough gear (or skills, I'll admit it) to even consider venturing into arenas. And now that I do, I found it very difficult to find out the right way to get started. How do you gear up? What sort of talents? Trinkets? Comps? Should I focus on crit or regen? In order to figure out how to best spend my honor points, I decided to consult the experts. The winning priests. And instead of trying to convince you that I actually know what I'm doing, I'm going to show you what they are doing.

I looked at 10 of the top priests in the 2s bracket (as listed on Arena Junkies). I looked at what gear choices they made, what talent choices, gems, professions, enchants. It's called a meta-analysis — instead of doing my own field research, I collated the results of the research that others did. You won't find me saying "here's the perfect/correct PvP build," because there is none. But you will find out what the pros are doing, what they find works.

YMMV, of course. What works in the 2700 bracket of 2s may be irrelevant in the entry-level 5s team you just started. And what works for someone with years of experience in arenas might not work for someone who's never PvP'd before. So everything here comes with a ton of salt. In fact, this is just a snapshot of what are certainly 10 works in progress. Some of these folks have probably already changed their builds or gems to adjust to changing circumstances.

Just to emphasize, this is not my opinion. My opinion doesn't count, since I don't have enough experience to act as any sort of authority. So unfortunately, I'm not the right person to ask "why?".

(By the way, I started this research for a thread on Wowhead. There's a lively discussion happening over there; check it out.)

I hope this sets you off on the right foot! Enjoy arenas, fellow priests, 'cause this is our time.

The Priests

I've linked talent specs here as well. A summary of specific talent points is below.

Bilian (Talents)
Shatoria (Talents)
Arterian (Talents)
Tkizze (Talents)
Felyn (Talents)
Ychytakaseto (Talents)
Sketched (Talents)
Butteslol (Talents)
Evleh (Talents)
Quuz (Talents)

The Comps

Seven partner with rogues. Two with ret pallies. One with a feral druid.

The Gear

Ok, here's where things get interesting! I haven't tallied every single piece of gear. But I was particularly interested in several gear choices:

• Main hand weapon
• Trinkets
• Gems (especially meta gems)
• Set pieces

Main hand weapon

Eight are using Torch of Holy Fire, one is using Deadly Gladiator's Gavel, one is using the Soulblade.

Trinkets

9 Medallions (one human, of course)

For the second trinket, interesting choices were made between defense, offense, or regen.

Defense: 4 Battlemaster's Bravery
Offense: 1 Platinum Disks of Sorcery, 1 Forethought Talisman
Pure Regen: 1 Spark of Hope, 1 Spirit World Glass
Hybrid Regen: 2 Living Ice Crystals, 1 Je'tze's Bell

Gems

Meta gems leaned heavily towards regen.

6 Insightful Earthsiege
2 Tireless Skyflare
2 Powerful Earthsiege

For other gems, here is the total number of points allocated to each stat:

+834 Resilience
+603 Stamina
+317 Spell power
+120 Hit rating
+40 Spell penetration
+18 MP5
+16 Haste

Set pieces

Every priest had 5 set pieces, mostly Deadly of course. I did not consider offset pieces (cloak, rings, etc) for this analysis.

Of the 50 total pieces, 48 were Mooncloth (spirit), 2 were Satin (crit). The satin pieces were on two different priests, so all 10 of them had the 4-piece set bonus.

Enchants

For now, I just looked at the enchant choices on chest and bracers:

Chest
7 Resilience
2 Health
1 Stats

Bracers
7 Spellpower
3 Stamina

Professions

Of the relevant professions, 6 were engineers (for nitro boosts and hyperspeed accelerators), 4 were enchanters (for rings), and 3 were jewelcrafters (for uber-gems).

Talents

All 10 priests were disc/holy, anything from 57/14 to 60/11. Rather than list every single talent, what I've decided to do was present only those talents which are confusing or debatable, and see what our experts chose. You won't see Penance listed below; that's a given. But Absolution? Here you'll see that 16 points out of a total of 30 were chosen. Since it's a 3-point talent, if every priest took it in full you'd see 30/30. The 16 points means that it was not universally considered required. Some took 2 points, some 3 points, and some zero. I haven't correlated anything here, so this just gives you a sense of how essential each talent is considered, nothing more.

If you wanted to look at a "template" build, look at Shator. It's a good place to start.

Discipline Silent Resolve - 30/30 Improved Fort - 11/20 Martyrdom - 6/20 Meditation - 30/30 Inner Focus - 10/10 Absolution - 16/30 Mental Agility - 30/30 Improved Mana Burn - 20/20 Reflective Shield - 18/20 Focused Power - 20/20 Enlightenment - 20/30 Focused Will - 30/30 Power Infusion - 10/10 Improved Flash Heal - 3/30 Renewed Hope - 16/20 Divine Aegis - 15/30 Grace - 19/20

Holy Healing Focus - 19/20 Improved Renew - 21/30 Holy Specialization - 20/50 Spell Warding - 8/40 Divine Fury - 40/40 Desperate Prayer - 10/10 Blessed Recovery - 2/30

Glyphs

10 Penance
6 Inner Fire
5 Pain Suppression
3 Shield
3 Renew
2 Dispel Magic
1 Smite

Base Stats

Stam
Median: 1362
Range: 1312 - 1493 (wide)
Notes: Median health was 20480, which includes (for some folks) a +hp chest enchant that doesn't show in the stamina value.

Int
Median: 737
Range: 729 - 762 (narrow)
Notes: Median mana pool was 14638. Other than one person who stacked int, all priests had int values within about 15 of each other.

Spirit
Median: 624
Range: 561 - 742 (wide)
Notes: Median regen (out of 5sr) was 315.

Bonus Heals
Median: 1891
Range: 1799 - 2069 (moderate)
Notes: The priest who stacked int also stacked heals; she is the high value in both stats, and the lowest value in regen and stam.

Hit Rating
Median: 118
Range: 90 - 122 (narrow)

Haste
Median: 48
Range: 0 - 110 (moderate)
Notes: Turns out the Torch of Holy Fire, the best weapon in the game (pre-Ulduar), has exactly 48 haste. Hmm. Only two priests had other haste pieces or gems above the amount on the Torch, so this stat was definitely not a priority for our panel.

Crit
Median: 58
Range: 0 - 109 (moderate)
Notes: If you consider how much crit a PvE disc priest will stack (in the neighborhood of 700 crit rating), the numbers here are so close to zero we might as well just call them a wash. Another non-priority stat.

Resilience (did you think I forgot?)
Median: 919
Range: 802 - 1115 (wide)
Notes: The lowest and highest values are both extreme outliers. If we remove those two from consideration, the range is actually very narrow: 905 - 928 for all the remaining priests.

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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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