World of Warcraft™

I think discipline priest mechanics looks amazing on paper and they truly are, however on practice it is very hard to use them and most players only use what gives them an advantage over other classes, which renders those new mechanics that looks amazing on paper useless and not worth using.

Here is a down to the ground view on how priests use mechanics in competitive arenas/duel on P.T.R at the moment:
This is what a good disc priest spec is on P.T.R at the moment, below explains why:
http://www.wowhead.com/talent#bfhcMosbforoMur

Arcangel/atonement and glyph of smite/Glyph of divine accuracy
I love arcangel, I like how it increase our healing and our smite damage with the very glowy and amazing graphics when you use it.

The thing is good priests knows that using smite exposes your holy school to be interupted, this making you unable to cast any benificial spells to you and your allies. In a world where mana is rare and healing is weak versus the huge health bars, it truly matter. This is why most priests resort to use mind spike instead, it cost less mana, the cast time is faster and it deals damage just about the same than smite and doesn't expose your holy school. I think it's a lot of smart concepts put forth as why you should not use smite.

Arcangel mana return is also not enough to justify risking yourself getting locket out of your school or not healing your teamates, this brings me to the next point;

Atonement healing is a smart idea and I truly love it, I can see why blizzard dev. team created atonement since wile smiting you loose time for healing and atonement was a way to account for that. The sad thing is that it is not reliable for all the above reasons about smite.

Glyph does make smite hit harder, but holy fire doesn't give you any arcangel stacks and glyph of divine accuracy doesn't increase your chance to hit with holy fire.

In a nutshell
- Smiting in arenas is very tedious and dangerous to get your healing school locket
- Arcangel stacks are too hard to get for the same reason
- Arcangel mana returns is subpar for the amount of risk we have to out
- Smiting dps is not as good as mind spike, priests use mind spike instead
- Smiting is not mana efficient
- Loosing time healing to go offensive is useless in regards of mana efficiency and heal throughput we have

P.T.R changes
Honestly the Strengh of soul buff was a bit too much and I like the fact that they have (or might) move it to inner will, I love this talent and use it a lot in PvP now in cataclysm. However I would still keep a 4 seconds immune to dispels as you put sheild on, because in all honesty even with dispells getting nerfed it still gets instantly dispelled since people is now aware that it absorbs so much.

Focused will stacking to 40% with crits and 10%+ hits is awesome, we needed that much.

Prayed of mending giving 60% more health is nice, but I'm not sure it is being enough.

Desperate prayer change was so NEEDED!

Power word barrier is amazing in raids, however in arenas it's not mobile and if you want to use it you have to stay rooted in one place not to loose your cooldown...

Still waiting on smite/penance throughtput/damage increased... like if Surge of light could also let you use smite instantly would be great + other changes.

You are clueless.

Priests aren't anywhere near viable even post patch in PvP. We simply can't get a cast off or get something off us.

We have a fear, which they are apparently trying to make better, but it's still too easy to break.

We have a couple instants which are easy to dispel or just don't heal for enough and can be ignored.

Any melee can sit on us till we die, and there's almost nothing we can do.

We're *#%%ed.

My solution is to simply not play a gimped class.

I'll go back to disc when it stops sucking. In the meantime, I'm living it up with shadow. Hell, I probably still won't go back.

01/14/2011 2:13 AMPosted by Venaliter

You are clueless.

Priests aren't anywhere near viable even post patch in PvP. We simply can't get a cast off or get something off us.

We have a fear, which they are apparently trying to make better, but it's still too easy to break.

We have a couple instants which are easy to dispel or just don't heal for enough and can be ignored.

Any melee can sit on us till we die, and there's almost nothing we can do.

We're *#%%ed.

I think YOU are clueless since you never broke 1,500 in arenas and you don't know what happens in higher end arenas,

Disc priest crave offensive abilities and a way to peel right now, we don't want interupt immunes and everything being focused on one ability which is PW:S.

Priests lost their trademark of being offensive and this is what made them wanted in arenas, go on arena junkies and you'll see every glad saying the same.