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Just when i was thinking about trying out disk,the QQers won once again. it is like blizzard is always trying to say they don't listen to these qqers, but from my experience buffs and nerfs have always followed who cried the most on the forum.

Anything about disc being the least mana efficient healer?

So when 1/3 rd of the Talents in Disc tree are tied in some fashion to Power Word Shield, you don't want Disc Priests to use it as much? You don't want it to be their "Go To" spell?

Do you plan on completely overhauling Mastery for Disc? Disc is a mana conservation/shield spec, with less powerful thoroughput than Holy, always has been. So now Holy will cast a spell in the Discipline tree, not feel any different than what it was for them previously? You are going to punish Disc Priests for casting the spell thier spec is built around?

How about reducing the cost of Flash heal by 33% at the same time you increase PW:S by 33% for Disc only? You will get what you want, priests casting more heals, less shields.

how can you possibly not see the difference between PW:S being a powerful part of your arsenal and it being the only spell you cast for the duration of a 5 minute encounter, to the tune of 30% more output than any other healer?

So... basically you turned Disc priests back into inefficient holy priests again.... FAIL MOVE!!!!!

Disc priests using PW:S and thus having a fundamentally different approach to healing MAKES SENSE otherwise if they use the same spells WHY BOTHER HAVING ANOTHER SPEC!?!?!!?!!!!!

I can't answer that for you just yet (as far as a specific patch), thus why we tend to stick with "a future content patch". ;) Sorry!

Is this something that will actually happen, or is it the standard "future content patch" that shaman have been hearing since 2.0.

Buffing purification to fix resto shaman, will still not solve the self healing issues the other two trees have. Its pretty bad when pure DPS can out instant cast heal a caster/healer hybrid. Any ideas on when this will be resolved?

So its just down to the holy tree now for priests?

Thank you for the feedback!

Its good to see that the healing disparity is being looked at and that Blizz is working on solutions sooner rather than later.

This is the wrong change to the wrong problem. The problem is shield spamming, simply reduce the duration of shield or cap the number of simultaneous shields allowed. By increasing the mana cost all you are doing is hurting non-25man situations more while ultimately only pushing back the 25man spam problems till the next tier of content.

As usual butcher's knife where you need a scalpel.

PW:Shield mana cost increase isn't really going to stop any decked out Disc Priest from keeping their spam in raids. 33% increase on an already low cost spell isn't going to hit anyone hard. The HPM ratio on this is absurdly good even post-nerf.

Just keep Inner Will up instead of Inner Fire. You're gonna be just fine.

Neth thank you on finally looking into the resto shaman issue.

Have all of you at Blizzard ever thought about trying to get the Spirit Linking that was in the Resto tree I believe Beta Wrath working again?

Spirit Link (restoration, 1/1) – You link the friendly target with up to two nearby friendly targets, causing 50% of any damage taken to be distributed to the linked targets. If any target takes a blow greater than 30% of their health, or shared damage would reduce a target’s health below 20%, the link is broken. You can only have one link active at a time. (Instant cast, 12% of base mana, 40 yd range)

Would love for that to be one of the new Resto CD's brought back.

1) Mana Costs / Regen Adjustments:
Tide nerf in 4.0.6 has the side effect of hitting Shaman regen harder than other healers because everyone else has inherent self-only regen tools. We've been relying heavily on Telluric Currents and Elem subspecs - a talent that devs admitted isn't intended for legit regen use - to make up the difference in any fight that has healing lulls and gimmick damage bonuses.

Perhaps IWS proc rates, or mana costs themselves should be adjusted to account for the lack of any self-only regen tools.

shaman mana is fine, and if you aren't smart enough to realize how an output buff is also a mana regen buff, then you're an idiot.

2) Healing Rain Mobility:
This spell needs to be instant cast. There's just no way around it. It already has a cooldown and the effect area cannot move. It doesn't need to be any more immobile than it already is. Lets take the cast time out and allow us to cast it ahead of a raid during mobile fights.

the most powerful group heal in the game doesn't need any more buffs than the 15% it just got.

3) Chain Heal Design:
Riptide consumption is archaic and not useful.

It'd be a bit ridiculous looking for the jump range to be any higher than it already is, but it's not cutting it with the current encounter design. It feels like we're back in Ulduar with an 8 yard jump range. I can't really think of how to address this without having absurd 100 yard long strands of light in a boss room.

the jump range is absolutely fine if your raid is not a bunch of mouthbreathers. Boss abilities are 6-8 yard ranges, CH has a 12 yard range. there is plenty of happy medium space there.

i'd agree that CH shouldn't consume riptide, but you shouldn't be looking for more on a day like today. Celebrate the fact that we're finally competitive.

This is absolutely ridiculous. I completely agree that discipline is casting Power Word: Shield way too much in PvE. But the whole reason you buffed Power Word: Shield was for PvP. By hotfixing it in this manner, you are exacerbating the PvP situation.

Over the course of WotLK and Cata, the developers have widened the gap in playstyle between PvE and PvP discipline considerably. Nethaera, you and the other designers seem to have completely forgotten that in order for PvP priests to keep up with incoming damage, we have to use PW:S every time a target lacks weakened soul. So while this change prevents PvErs from spamming it, it will also run PvPers out of mana.

Not only that, but in everything but 25 mans, a disc priest spamming shield will already oom himself very quickly. It is not sustainable without innervates and tides, and I can link numerous logs of my own that show me casting at least as many other heals. The real problem is that it absorbs too much to be spammed ON 25 PEOPLE, but when it is kept up on 3-5, it is a reasonable absorb amount, given the large mana costs.

The galling thing is that we pointed these imbalances out ourselves in the hopes of getting a sensible fix. But this proposed change is not only knee-jerk and based on misleading information; it is downright lazy. We disc priests have been offering several alternatives to a flat mana cost increase that wouldn't decimate the PvP spec:

An Arcane Blast-like debuff (mana cost increases as more shields are thrown out per 15s)
A hard cap on the amount of shields that can be up at one time (a la lifebloom)
A cap on total absorption amount
Diminishing returns on absorption amount

Nethaera, I want you (or whoever thought this change would solve anything) to take a really good look at the mana expenditures of priests like Tiduz who are tainting this discussion with numbers that aren't possible for even well-geared priests without a huge amount of help.

I'm tired of riding this roller-coaster. Get some feedback from players who actually excel at rated battlegrounds or high end arena before you jerk us around.

02/16/2011 10:56 AMPosted by Sensuals

Just when i was thinking about trying out disk,the QQers won once again. it is like blizzard is always trying to say they don't listen to these qqers, but from my experience buffs and nerfs have always followed who cried the most on the forum.

Eheheheh a Priest complaining about Shaman healing :3

I think as far as nerfs go, we got off easy. I'd gladly accept a 33% mana increase on pw:s. I was expecting the amount it absorbed to go down, and I'm glad it didn't. PW:S isn't meant to be spammed so this is probably the least harmful nerf we coulda gotten.

Thank you so much Nethaera for the good news. For months now I've been telling people on these forums and in the shaman forum that they shouldn't worry, that you guys had the data, you had the community feedback, and you had the raiding trends in order to see that our healing was too low and that we needed a cooldown. I told them to wait and see, that you guys were just being methodical and careful not to upset balance, and that fixes would come.

Thank you for proving me right, and thank you so much for telling us about the cooldowns: even if they don't come anytime soon whatsoever, it's extremely comforting to know the problem's been acknowledged. For some time our community has been in a state of panicked neglect, wanting feedback of just about any sort, but this.. this solves everything.

What kind of cooldowns are you referring to in the 2nd part of that post?

Are you referring to cooldowns like Holy Radiance or cooldowns like AW or Pw:I... or cooldowns like Pain Suppression and Aura Mastery.

I assume she means something like Pain Suppression or Aura Mastery. ie: something that can help a tank or raid member survive a short period of intense burst damage.

They have been increasingly designing PvE encounters that strongly encourage the coordinated use of this kind of emergency cooldown, even though only priests and paladins have had the ability to do it. It's like half the healing classes have been shut out from one of the technical aspects of PvE healing. (Of course, those abilities are really useful in PvP too, but shaman and druids have other tools to make them viable in a PvP environment.)

The easiest fix for druids would just be to put a talent deep in Restoration that allows them to cast Barkskin on any ally. I'm sure a change like that would be easy to implement.

Shaman will probably need something either completely new, or a radical redesign to one of our existing skills.

So what you guys did is stick it to casual players who play disc priests. The change will be meaningless to priests who raid 5 days a week and can quickly obtain the next set of gear while the casual player will be left struggling with mana. What will you do when the next tier of gear is introduce? Raise mana cost again and leave the casual players further behind? Instead of doing something like increasing the length of weakened soul you guys chose the path of dividing disc priests into 2 sub-classes; 1 which gets invited to groups and 1 which doesn't. Just a matter of time. The whole Ilvl thing has gotten out of hand and this will only make groups scrutinize disc priest gear even more. I read that thing about 'dungeons are hard', apparently development ISN'T hard because you guys have taken the easy way out on this issue.

You guys really need to figure out which side your bread is buttered on because somewhere along the line you forgot that most of your subscriber base are casual players.

I like it, and I don't mind saying so.