with the upcoming expansion they are making many changes to the healing classes to ensure healers are casting a variety of spells. it seems the only exception to this rule is disc priests. currently disc is as boring as a resto druid. spam shields, prom on cooldown, pennance for a spike. instead of pw:s going the way of its cousin rejuv , its actually going to remain exactly as effective, but be cheaper. this only encourages more shield spam. in order to fix this we must either put a cast time on power word shield or decrease it's effectiveness and increase its mana cost. it looks like rejuv is going from 18->25% base mana, pw:s is going from 23%->19% base mana. if there are no changes disc will be the same boring shield spammer that they are today. please don't let this happen.

Discipline will still use PW:Shield a lot, but you will probably see less "pre-healing" across the board, because it won't be mana efficient. PW:Shield will probably go back to being more of an emergency button and less of the survivability buff it gets treated as today.

In addition to shielding, Disc will continue to cast Penance a lot, and will probably use Heal and Greater Heal. Flash Heal overlaps in niche a lot with both PW:Shield and Penance, so it may be the least used.

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Q u o t e:
Pre-shielding is what disc excels at and what it's known for. It'd be like asking a resto shaman not to cast chain heal or a paladin not to use beacon. PW:S is a powerful tool, but disc priests pay a penalty for it in low healing output.

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Pre-shielding when you know big damage is on the way for select targets is fine. Trying to keep shields up on the entire raid is a strategy that we think A) is too good, and B) isn't fun. I think a lot of the players who think it is fun feel that way because it's overpowered, not because it's a really engaging activity. When your decision making consists of cycling through targets and casting PW:S on any target without Weakened Soul, then you aren't really responding to the encounter -- you're acting like a glorified macro. Now maybe some of you will argue that you take a lot more into consideration before executing a pre-heal, but the fact is that Disc priests can be unbelievably effective without doing so.

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Q u o t e:
We have a talent, Improved Flash Heal, that does nothing else except buff flash heal. - a spell we won't likely use - Are you going to keep that talent?

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I would suspect not. We tried to pump up Flash Heal for Disc before because it was the only cast-time heal that really mattered. In Cataclysm, it is basically an emergency heal, which is something PW:S and Penance already do well.

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Q u o t e:
I do not see why "emergency button" necessarily means that it cannot be used preemptively. People are reading their fears into what GC said. The sky is not falling.

I think the idea is that you are not going to be able to spam PW:S with reckless abandon, both to the exclusion of others spells, and without consideration as to whether your targets are actually going to benefit from the shield (though I realize in today's raid environment that isn't much of a gamble; my suspicion is that will change).

By the nature of its mechanic, PW:S is a proactive (or preemptive) heal — you are preventing future damage. His comments are about using PW:S in the same way that it's possible to simply spam heals, GCD-capped, without much strategic consideration (read: mana consideration).

The fact that disc priests' horrible healing output is balanced against their shield-spamming strategy is a valid observation, and whether or not there will be rebalancing of their healing is a valid concern. But the game is leaving the current paradigm of healing — disc priests don't get stay behind.

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Right. This is a good post. In LK at times, we ran into problems when say a set bonus buffed Penance, and Disc priests told us "I don't care about Penance. I only want to use Power Word: Shield." Designing an entire talent tree around a single spell, or even a couple of spells with very similar mechanics, isn't going to work. When 90% of your eggs are in one basket, then you only care about that basket and nothing else. It gives us a very narrow space in which to design things. To use just one example, haste isn't an attractive stat when you are never casting.

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Q u o t e:
wow so disc is going back to being garbage for pve and being a pvp spec like in BC

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Posts like this make it difficult for me to try and carry on a conversation with players. Let's try to keep the discussion a little less hyperbolic, shall we?

An Icecrown parse for a Disc priest might have PW: Shield (including its glyph) and Divine Aegis at 80% of healing done. Imagine that is more like 50 or 60% of healing done. That's still a lot of power for shields. The remainder would be filled in by spells like Penance, PoM, Heal and Greater Heal.

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Q u o t e:
Blue post specifically intend Cataclysm to be a slower paced and more stragetic healing scenario. (As in people do not die in 2-3 hits)

THEN you back them up on PW:S being OK as an emergency in that people might die if you dont get another heal out in time?

Do you not understand how much fallacy those two statements go with each other? PW:S as an emergency will have very little place in cataclysm unless its damage that you know is coming. The rest of the time your spamming effecient heal 101.

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We're not pruning emergency heals. That is a good niche for a lot of spells. I fully predict you will still face plenty of emergencies while healing in Cataclysm, even if the pace overall is a little less frenetic.

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Q u o t e:
Discipline Priests use their Shield as an emergency/instant heal, as a target-by-target buffer against incoming raid damage, and as a "well, so much raid damage is happening that this can't be a bad decision"-button. They want to scratch out that last one, I think.

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Well said. Though even then, there might be times when you know big AE damage is coming that it might make sense to shield a lot of people. But we want the "this can't be a bad decision" moments to be less frequent.

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Q u o t e:
If your definition of a spell worth casting is: 'it needs to be the only spell I ever want to cast in any situation,' then I'm afraid that every healing class is going in a direction you're not going to like. ;)

Discipline Priests will most likely continue to use PW:S to mitigate chunky/bursty raidwide AOE, because of how Rapture works. In other situations, though, deciding whether to cast PW:S on a target will involve more than "Does the target have Weakened Soul, Y/N?"

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Yep. Believe gets our intention.

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Q u o t e:
I guess my question is what exactly are we supposed to do during 90% of the battle when people are still getting hit and taking damage considering the following info I post. I am gonna go ahead and pre-guess not cast smite even though 1/5 of the spec is now based on it.

FH = now considered emergency heal, not to be spammed to keep people up so no big reason to improve the spell for disc, after all we have penance and Shield for that role you said. This means it will not get any better and it alone does not do the job.

Shield, penance, POM = 10 second+ cds. Plus as you stated earlier, shield is supposed to be used seldomly, not every time someone takes any damage at all. POM for as great as it is, is not as smart as it claims to be since quite often it tends to get stuck on someone taking no damage and we have to wait for cd to come back.

GH = Still not a good spell for us since we have always scaled worse then any other healer and lack a single talent in the disc spec to even try to shrinken the gap (which is made bigger the second everyone else takes talent to improve their own powerful heals). Our big heal was not good enough to use to keep people up before cata due to long cast time and low heal numbers compared to every other healer's version, neither version is going to be great now. One is going to be too mana intensive to spam (intentional on new healer design and the other has the same long cd and medium numbers that it always has which are actually lower than Pally's second to last version of their best heal and they are getting an even better version to overshadow the disc preist when it comes to healing tanks.

Binding heal = Awesome power, but costly in mana and not a good option if lots of people are getting hurt since unlike the better version of it Beacon, we can only heal ourselves and one other target for medium heath.

Renew = Although no one has said anything direct about it yet, but if you consider shield spam ais considered boring and you are moving away from Druids constantly rolling HoTs on everyone, I am also guessing this is also not meant to be used during the 10-12 seconds we stand there continually looking at cds.

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No, not Smite. :) Flash Heal overlaps a lot with PW:S and Penance. Blinding Heal, while a spell I personally adore, is always going to be situational. We're building up Renew to be more of a Holy thing, so I would say Heal and Greater Heal are the ones that need to be buffed for Disc.

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Q u o t e:
Any hints on the direction you're thinking of taking on this? Standard "No promises" Disclaimer here, naturally, but obviously we're pretty curious.

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For the trees I am looking at right now, the talents that affect Heal and Flash Heal are so high in Holy that they are easily accessible to Discipline, while there isn't much deeper in Holy that would put Heal / Gheal much farther ahead -- talents like Chakra, Serendipity and Test of Faith are the big ones.