1 May 2009

My silent tear for discipline

I paid 50g for the glyph of penance on patch day and it was worth every copper. Two seconds off the cooldown is awesome. Apprently too awesome, because it's getting buggered to five per cent crit instead.

There are other nerfs in the pipeline too, for holy too. I feel sad and it's not even my main spec. Spare a thought today for the discipline die-hards, will you?

Edit: panic over, the glyph nerf was all a bad dream.

9 comments:

Leigh said...

Bit of a meh change. Due to lack of healers i have been healing Ulda 25 the last 2 weeks as Disc (full Naxx 25 offspec, 35% holy crit raid buffed) and i found myself using penance pretty much when i thought of it, certainly wasn't spamming it. Penance (to stack grace), PW:S, POM, flash heal an the occasional Gheal for predictive damage. That extra crit will be nice (40% on penance for me) but the 2 seconds lost ain't much.

What does concern me though is the PVP changes to Mana Burn, can see that knocking a lot of Disc priests back. Back in S2/3 it was the sole reason any priest (particularly shadow) got near a 2K rating.

Merlot said...

Hmm, I guess if you don't use penance it won't matter, but I don't think you're making the most of the spec if you don't. If you're in a situation where you don't 'need' to use it every cooldown, maybe you're overstocked with healers or maybe you'd be better off holy.

Bottom line is that this glyph massively lowers the maximum 'potential' throughput of penance. For tank healing (a disc priest's optimum assignment), that's a huge blow.

Chris at Duct Tape and a Prayer (http://ducttape.etherjammer.com — an excellent blog btw)) thinks maybe glyph of prayer of healing is now a better option. It definitely will be if you aren't using penance all that much.

Leigh said...

By my own admission i am a horrible healer, have been shadow 1-80 but with dual specs and the fact i have a better offspec gear then most main specced priests i gets roped into the odd healing night when people are missing.

Reason i am not spamming Penance on every possible CD is the fact my MT has superb gear and the only fight so far i was spamming it on was Ignis because of the constant 25K hits :P It is a pro spell and I probably should be spamming it when it's off CD but most of my recount shows a lot of overhealing from it. I find myself using it to combat predictive damage, constant damage (patchwerk, ignis) and emergency damage. I don't think you can have a healing cycle akin to a DPS cycle cause each situation is different. 3rd glyph choice will be interesting now, prayer of healing would certainly be the better option over dispel for example.

Anonymous said...

"We're going to remove the Pennance glyph change from patch 3.1.2. We feel that particular change shouldn't be necessary anymore."

This was just announced earlier today. I was a bit pissed as well but thankfully they're recalling it =)

crysana said...

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=16903632427&postId=169020616985&sid=1#0


tell me what you think!

Leigh said...

Nice post on the realm forums.
Might be good to add in points regarding the last 30% of a bosses health. Things like execute spam, drain soul etc. etc. leave us in the dark for the last vital part of a boss fight. It has been mentioned in a post or two but it's a vital part, even having a push ability that activates when the boss is sub 30% would be cool and a compromise.

I would post my thoughts but i'm an EU account.

Merlot said...

Interesting post on the US forums. He's absolutely right, and he still misses half the argument - cooldowns are one thing, executes are another. Paladins, warlocks and mages can (or do) do more damage to mobs below a certain level of health. I don't demand both of these things, just one would be nice. I feel for boomkins too, but without knowing how our damage compares. And they're getting a juicy boost to spirit which makes me very jealous :P

Crysana said...

Unfortunatley that post kind turned in a war on how i don't know how rogues work... which i dont.

It all came about as I went to http://www.wowmeteronline.com/rank/classrank/dps/7/0/3/310 to see how spriests are doing in ulduar, and unfortunately we are down the bottom still... Though it does look like Blizzard has got the separation between pure dps and hybrids right where they want it. On just about every fight, pures at the top then followed by the hybrids, though the difference is a lot more than the so called 5% they claimed.

(I think the whole separation thing is dumb anyway. dps is dps! And obviously those rules dont apply to DKs!)

So im not holding much hope of things changing anytime soon but it was nice to dream... :)

Merlot said...

Oh, I didn't register it was your post! Yes, shame it got derailed but that's par for the course with forums, sadly.

Interesting figures. With the proliferation of replenishment and less need for misery at higher gear levels, shadow priests are really not that useful to raids anymore. If content gets tougher, raid leaders may get more picky about who they take. So whether I see Arthas or not may depend on Blizzard pulling their finger out and buffing us in a near patch, but that's something they've already hinted won't happen.

I agree it's a long shot, but as you say, nice to dream :)