Thank you for sapping my will to play for a multitude of reasons. Here are my main reasons why I’m no longer excited for 3.2, or the new raid, or about your direction for priests. (my thoughts/comments in green, Blizzard Devs in blue of course) All Blizzard quotes can be found from the Q & A unless otherwise stated.

Priest Q & A

The Shadow Priest Edition

in Wrath of the Lich King we increased its damage-dealing potential to make it near that of a primary damage-per-second (dps) caster — such as a mage — while also retaining some of its unique utility which made it cool during The Burning Crusade. (Um, comparing Spriests to Mages in terms of DPS? Granted I don’t play Spriests THAT often unless I’m messing around on my friends toon for research purposes/feedback for her on rotations or gear/weapon options;  I have never seen someone prefer an Spriest for a DPS race fight over a mage or a lock. Most of the time if we need to fill a raid spot and we need caster dps it’s always “see if we can get a mage. or a lock.” not “hey you know what? We should get an spriest!” Unless it’s for 25 Razuvious.)

Are the developers happy with the functionality of Dispersion and is it considered to be an adequately valuable final talent in the Shadow tree?

I think the key word here is “final” talent. Players have developed an expectation that the 51-point talent should be the best one in the tree; and for damage-dealing trees that means it’s expected these final talents do more damage than anything else the player has. (Is it just me or hasn’t blizzard stated before that they want the 51 point talent to be good? Look at the other trees/classes and if their 51-point talents are used often. Penance, Guardian Spirit, Explosive Shot, Chimera Shot, Big Red, Arcane Barrage, Bacon, Divine Storm, Wolves, Riptide, Chaos Bolt, Meta, well you get the point. So how come Spriests shouldn’t be upset about not having a GOOD 51 point talent?)

Would you consider removing the cast time for Mind Blast to make it a more desirable direct-damage spell given that it already has a cooldown?

Obviously if the spell was no cooldown, no cast time then Shadow priests would not ever cast anything else (Um, this would be the case IF THAT WAS WHAT WAS ASKED. The question was would instant cast be possible with the CD IN PLACE. In PvP this is a very risky spell as it gives a big opportunity to expose spriests to school lockouts, crippling them damage wise.)

As for the Mind Flay range (which I think should be extended. It seems odd to have a main source of DPS be such a short range when all the other casters are waaaay in the back dps-ing) SW:D (ok the changes GC brought up would be nice, no backfire in execute range or backfire is not affected by raid buffs would make it more useful in raids without insta-deathing yourself) I didn’t have much hope, and to be honest I don’t think most people were expecting anything great from GC on those.

The Healing Holy Edition:

Furthermore, the priest has strong heal-over-time spells (HoTs), direct heals, and area-of-effect (AoE) heals. (Um, HoTs PLURAL?! Since when? And strong? Not exactly a word I would use to describe Renew. Semi-worthless, maybe. Strong not so much.)

I don’t think many players look at Greater Heal as being too expensive from a mana-per-healing standpoint. They often aren’t in danger of running out of mana. (Dude, GC, what priests are you running around with? Mana is an issue with me and a certain priest I raid with. I use HoH, pots and Shadowbuddy as often as I can and still am occasionally scraping the bottom of the barrel by the end of some fights. And Gheal just sucks. And from reading your spriest stuff your logic is: Talent taken by most = must be good! therefore one would assume spell NEVER USED BY ANYONE = Spell not good. But no! Your logic is: Spell not used by anyone = Spell is fantastic player needs to L2P. /boggle GC, /boggle. btw, I challenge anyone to dispell -> Gheal on an IC Hardmode Fusion Punch and see if your tank is still standing when GHeal lands then tell me it’s effective.)

with the exception of Flash of Light, which is mana-efficient but heals for a very small amount. So my favorite healadin can hit a 10k+ FoL, and I crit 6k FH, but their mana efficient FoL heals for a very small amount while my mana suck FH heals for too much in addition to being slower than their FoL? o.O

The problem is that in the current raid environment, speed is everything while mana isn’t nearly so scary. What I mean is that you are generally at a greater risk of failure through raid members dying than you are for healers going out of mana. The speed of Flash Heal just trumps other issues. …  Second, in a raid in which healers don’t coordinate well it’s easy for other healers to stomp on your big, slow heals. While you are casting, someone heals your target for you. I’m not saying these are bad players — in my experience it’s just the style of raid. Some players are really talkative and coordinated. “Big heal coming.” “I got Jimmy.” Or else everyone has their targets and won’t heal someone else unless something unpredictable happens. Other raids just heal anyone who is injured and don’t have a lot of assigned targets, except for probably the tanks. Again with us apparently being Mana Gods. Ok, we get the Holy Priests are good for raid heals, but what about SINGLE TARGET HEALS? Disc is penalized for raid healing with the mechanics of Grace, but we are being gimped for single target healing with the penance CD and there is no mention of the insta-gibbing of most tanks in ulduar to where GHeal just isn’t viable at all. And what we all need to L2P because we aren’t coordinating enough with other healers? I call BS. GHeal isn’t used because it is slow and speed is everything thanks to YOUR FIGHT MECHANICS and it’s way too big of a mana sink not because I’m not yelling “I got Jimmy!” on vent.  (oh, Dueg, I feel for you… that is so getting macro’d into one of my heals)

On Divine Hymn: It was balanced like Tranquility. We basically want these to be once-an-encounter spells. We have considered a mechanic that allows you to use the spell again in the case of a wipe, sort of the same way Bloodlust / Heroism works. Um, does anyone other than priests know wtf Divine Hymn is? And more importantly, do they care? It’s not like we are being brought to raids because we have Divine Hymn!

On Lightwell: The basic root of the problem is that most dps classes seem unwilling to have to take the time or spatial awareness to make use of the Lightwell, even if it provides great healing. No Shit, Sherlock! Most DPS will DIAF rather than move/bandage/anything else that might mess with their precious DPS. There are, however, some very good ideas on making Lightwell fun and non sucky on the forums.  (7 posts above the blue towards the bottom of the page by Meia of Bloodhoof)

On Absorption in the combat log: The change we made for 3.2 was to show how much damage was left on each absorption effect before and after the damage was done. This should allow third-party addons to figure out which absorb effect goes with which caster and properly credit them for it. The answer, I suspect they will find, is that shields actually prevent a lot of damage. We have seen priests prevent as much damage as they healed.  2 things. 1.) So, someone scripting a 3rd party addon can make it figure out what caster it gets credited to, but you guys can’t manage to figure out how to make it do that? Sounds to me like maybe Blizz should hire some of the addon writers. 2.) I highly doubt that I absorb as much as I heal since I’m usually focusing all my heals on 1 person and there is the Weakened Soul debuff so I can only absorb so much. If I was raid healing bubbling then I could see the Absorption rates being much higher. But we all know about Disc Priests and raid heals.

On Dispel and Abolish Disease being 1 spell: We think that pushes dispels too far into easy mode. But it’s not easy mode for Shaman and Paladins?

On Dispel missing on bosses: This is annoying and we don’t really want healers to have to worry about being hit-capped. Gee, tell us something we didn’t know? I don’t wanna worry about being hit capped either.

On Inner Fire having charges: At that point it just becomes a passive buff and we might as well just say that priests have the armor of a leather-wearer while wearing cloth. It works a little better for mages and warlocks who are at least making a decision about which armor spell to cast. WTF GC is all i’m saying here. So we get penalized because we only have 1 kind of armor boost instead of multiple like Mages and Locks?

Pretty much the Priest Q & A felt like GC telling priests that everything is fine, they are happy with priests and if we aren’t happy we need to L2Priest. And some of the blue responses on the Q & A Forums were harsh and basically made us seem like QQers who have no idea what we are talking about. Not cool. That combined with the Penance CD change (which was calculated on the forums as being a loss of about 160,000 healing over a 5 minute boss fight… but it’s no big deal according to devs. I’m still working on all the numbers myself though.)  the FUCKING JOUSTING (I guess there’s no new dailies for me. I hate jousting, and I refuse to do it, and I’m not going to take a month to get enough seals to be able to do MORE jousting dailies!) and the new raid not seeming very new (Yay I can fight bosses I’ve fought before only now they hit harder? No thanks. And I can see the same room in the 5 man regular, 5 man heroics, 10 man regular, 10 man hard, 25 man regular, 25 man hard? /whee)

All I can say is hopefully 3.3 drops soon, and I GOT JIMMY!!!

<3

Tart