Following on from the Shaman class preview, here’s the priest version. I decided not to split Holy and Discipline out, it only overcomplicated things.

Priest

Spells and Abilities

Heal (available at level 16): Introduced at a low level, the “new” Heal spell will functionally work much like a down-ranked Greater Heal did in the past, adding more granularity to your direct-healing arsenal. If you need to heal someone a moderate amount and efficiency is an issue (making Flash Heal the incorrect spell for the job), then Heal is what you want to use. Heal is intended to be the priest’s go-to direct-healing spell unless they need something bigger (Greater Heal) or faster (Flash Heal).

Swap “Heal” for “Healing Wave” and this could be a copy of the Shaman change. Again, it’s a way of providing a standardised basic toolkit with a range of spells to select from, and allowing the extra class-specific abilities to be more fun and diverse.
While it looks like homogenisation, and it sort of is, it allows the class-specific abilities to be less homogenised since the basic bread-and-butter healing can be covered by any class.

Inner Will (level 83): Increases movement speed by 12% and reduces the mana cost of instant-cast spells by 10%. This buff will be exclusive with Inner Fire, meaning you can’t have both up at once. Inner Fire provides a spell power and Armor buff; Inner Will should be useful on a more situational basis.

I played a Warlock for a while, and this looks just like the Demon Armor/Fel Armor mechanic, especially since the “charges” mechanic is being removed as well. I imagine Inner Fire will be standard as now, and when Bonestorm or some other effect requires you to run around for a while you switch to Inner Will.

Given that Inner Fire had turned mostly into a passive spellpower buff in WotLK, this is a nice step in the direction of giving abilities a bit more flavour. Note that

Leap of Faith (level 85): Pull a party or raid member to your location. Leap of Faith (or “Life Grip”) is intended to give priests a tool to help rescue fellow players who have pulled aggro, are being focused on in PvP, or just can’t seem to get out of the fire in time. Instant. 30-yard range. 45-second cooldown.

This is the biggie, and there’s been lots of reaction to it.
The gut reaction of a healer to being given something like this, especially given the way it was described in the class preview, is “so now DPS standing in fire is my problem too?”. It was mine too. Tanks and healers already often bear (or feel they’re bearing) the majority of the responsibility in dungeons and raids, and this does sound like ratcheting up the responsibility one more notch.
I’ve talked about this before: while DPS do need to perform well to meet soft or hard enrage timers, and there are unhealable situations where DPS can kill themselves, generally the responsibility for a wipe to Berserk falls collectively on the DPS group, and only after the fact, while the responsibility for a tank death or mob not being picked up is often attributable to one player, immediately.

I can agree to some extent, although it shouldn’t be forgotten that Hand of Protection and Hand of Salvation already exist and are often used to help less aware players. Perhaps these are also lamented, but I don’t hear much about them.

I’d prefer to look at the positive sides.

Firstly, this is another good example of getting healing eyes off Grid/Vuhdo and onto the game world: to use this tool effectively, you’ll need to know who’s in trouble, or who’s going to be in trouble soon.

Secondly, there’s a 45-second cooldown on the ability. You won’t be able to rescue every DPS from every flame patch, so I don’t think there’ll be a massive dependency developing. But if someone does happen to make a mistake, you have the ability to save them, once. I’d love the ability to save a Sindragosa wipe by yoinking out the one person who hasn’t spotted the out-of-position Frost Beacon near to them in the confusion, or to stand off and extract the Defile target from the pack on Lich King Phase 2.

Finally, although it’s not totally clear it’s possible this will be able to break roots/snares, effectively spreading part of the Hand of Freedom buff out into the raid. Not every DPS in fire is oblivious, and not every snare is a benign annoyance.

I don’t PvP much, so I won’t comment on the probably legitimate concerns about losing control of your character to a random party member. For PvE though, I can see that it would introduce a moment of confusion, and probably disrupt your rotation so it will need to be used carefully, but if I’m using a 45-second cooldown on you then a small break is probably the lesser of two evils.

All HoTs and DoTs will benefit from Haste and Crit innately. Hasted HoTs and DoTs will not have a shorter duration, just a shorter period in between ticks (meaning they will gain extra ticks to fill in the duration as appropriate).

This is a huge change, and one which I am very pleased to see. Allowing HoTs to scale with gear as well as direct heals do is a massive boost to them, and the extra ticks mechanic as opposed to just shortening the duration is a beautiful counter to the problem with effects like the Glyph of Renew or Glyph of Rapid Rejuvenation.

This may introduce another soft-cap for haste though, where you want to reach a certain level of haste to get an extra tick. For example, if Renew currently ticks after 3, 6,9,12 and 15 seconds, then in order to get an extra tick you need the tick time to be 2.5s, which means 20% haste. This gives Renew ticks at 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5 and 15 seconds.
However, extra tick or no, the throughput of the spell will scale smoothly, the extra tick just provides extra mana-efficiency. And 20% haste isn’t an unreasonable goal anyway.

While we want to keep the priest’s role as a well-rounded healer, we also want to make sure the class is a viable tank healer, which is something priests moved away from a little in Wrath of the Lich King. Greater Heal will probably be the tank-healing spell of choice, though we’ve also discussed giving Discipline a second shield so that they have a small shield to cast on lots of different targets, and a big, more expensive shield to cast on a tank or anyone else taking a ton of damage.

I’ll agree with the sentiment in the first half of this statement. Discipline is generally seen as the “tank healer” spec, but try swapping your Holy Paladin for a Disc Priest in heroic ICC (or heroic Northrend Beasts when it was new) and then tell me about “bring the player, not the class”. I’d be happy to see a bit more love given to Priests’ tank healing arsenal.

As for the differentiated shields, I actually like that idea as well. 10k shields are nice and all, but they’re also expensive. Bubble-blanketing WotLK-style simply wouldn’t be viable in a significantly more mana-restricted environment. But being able to pre-shield with lighter bubbles during quiet moment, while keeping the big guns for the tanks or people with specific debuffs, that appeals a lot.
This is all under the assumption that DPS will be taking hits more on the 40% than the 80% level in Cataclysm. Otherwise we’ll need the big guns anyway.

Divine Spirit and Prayer of Spirit will be removed from the game. As Spirit will be the primary mana-regeneration stat, we don’t want it to vary as much between solo, small group, and raid play. Blessing of Kings and Mark of the Wild will not boost Spirit either.

Not a surprise at all. Matticus predicted this a while ago, and the logic given here is pretty sound. Even now the difference in regeneration between a 10-man and 25-man raid can be quite surprising, I’m all for making the experience more consistent.

Mana will be a bigger consideration for all healers. We aren’t trying to make healing more painful; we’re trying to make it more fun. When the cost of a spell isn’t an issue, then casting the right spell for the job is less of an issue because you might as well just use your most powerful spell all of the time.
We are, however, getting rid of the five-second rule, because we don’t want to encourage standing around doing nothing. We’re also going to cut back on the benefits of buffs such as Replenishment so priests (and all healers) don’t feel as penalized when those buffs aren’t available.

(My bold for emphasis)

The first part of this is not news. We have known for a while that we will be more mana-restricted in Cataclysm, and I don’t think many people would argue against this change. The other two points are more interesting.
Skipping to the end, cutting back on the benefits of Replenishment is long, long overdue. Replenishment is so powerful now that Intellect is the only sensible regeneration stat and has been pretty much since T8. The trouble with stacking Intellect for regeneration is that it leaves you in such a poor state if for whatever reason your raid doesn’t have any, or enough, Replenishment to go around. As with the removal of Spirit buffs, this should go a long way towards a more consistent experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the value of buffs and synergy, especially in an MMORPG, but no one buff should be quite so dominant.

The removal of the five-second rule is something that has been rumbling along for a while. I’m a little nostalgic for the days of using clearcasting procs and Inner Focus to buy Oo5SR time, because reacting to those things was one way to differentiate yourself as a healer and demonstrate your skill. I take issue with characterising that sort of play as “standing around doing nothing” when in fact you were constantly evaluating to decide when to jump back in and when to stay out and regen. But with the boost to Meditation in 3.1 and the high relative value of Replenishment compared to Spirit-based regeneration the five-second-rule has felt increasingly redundant.
Perhaps the harm in leaving it in is the potential for some players to obtain big gains from gaming the 5SR. If the design philosophy is to return to OOM rather than Berserk timers as the factor which ends attempts, you might want that time to be fairly controllable.

Talents

We want to improve Discipline’s single-target healing capacity. One key is to make sure shielding isn’t always a more attractive option than healing.

I’m not totally sure what this one is driving at. Is this talking about pushing Disc back onto tanks and away from bubble-blanketing? If so, bring it on, it can’t come soon enough. The Lich King on 25-man is a bit of a snooze-fest.
If we’re talking about spot-healing then that statement is true as long as 1) a second hit will kill the player without an intervention, and 2) a bubble is instant while a heal takes time. In WotLK this is generally the case, so we shield then heal.

How will this be implemented? You can eliminate condition 2 by giving us an effective instant heal, but I don’t think that’s likely, or you can eliminate condition 1 by giving players more survivability in general, which is probably the way things will go.

Discipline will finally be getting Power Word: Barrier as a talented ability. Think of it like a group Power Word: Shield.

The closest analogue to PW:B is the DK Anti-Magic Zone, but it has some important differences, such as a way to counter it in PvP (since it absorbs all damage, not just magical damage).

What can I say? This has been on the table for a long time, and I’m extremely excited by it. It will take pride of place on my bars, and Mass Dispel will have to shuffle down a place!

More seriously though, this is a very nice ability to have available, and more importantly it will help to keep our heads of Vuhdo from time to time. This is a recurring theme in the healer changes so far, and one which I’m very much in favour of.

We want to make Holy a little bit more interesting to play. One new talent will push the Holy priest into an improved healing state when he or she casts Prayer of Healing, Heal, or Renew three times in a row. The empowered state varies depending on the heals cast.

The idea behind the Holy “cast three in a row” talent (it’s called “Chakra”) is that we’ve always positioned Holy as a versatile healer. This talent lets you shift into different modes. If you need to be a tank healer, cast three single target heals and your single-target healing is now better. Cast three area heals, and you can be a temporarily specialized group healer. We’re going to try to play this mechanic up with a cool UI to try to get that “I’m almost in the zone” feel. We’ll let it apply to as many types of spells as we can, perhaps even Smite for those times when nobody’s taking damage.

There’s been some rather mixed reaction to this one, but it certainly sounds interesting and I’m keen to see where they take it during Beta. I do wish they’d change the name though, I’m a Priest, not a Guru.

The mechanism sounds interesting though. I imagine you might have an aura one way or the other, and a buff which stacks like Serendipity does as you cast the other type of spell until it changes your aura.

I’m not sure why Holy needed such a new and different dynamic though, but maybe that’s the Disc in me looking jealous.

Masteries

Discipline
Healing
Meditation
Absorption

Holy
Healing
Meditation
Radiance

Absorption: Improves the strength of shields such as Power Word: Shield, Divine Aegis, and Power Word: Barrier.

Radiance: Your direct heals add a small heal-over-time component to the target.

The Discipline mastery is hardly a bolt from the blue, although very valuable, but the Holy one is really nice-looking. This should be a nice boost to throughput, or help with topping off the raid when a large heal would be wasted.

Conclusions

On the whole there’s some exciting stuff in store for Priests in Cataclysm. I’m really looking forward to playing with Power Word: Barrier and Life Grip, and I’m intrigued by how Chakra (grating already…) is going to turn out.

I do wonder if I’ll find myself feeling the pull of Holy again in Cataclysm. Holy already has more “toys” than Discipline, and it looks like getting more come Cataclysm. Let’s just say I’m glad I have dual-spec and can try out both.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The First Cataclysm Raid
• Disciplining the Lich King
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Paladin

Blizzard has begun posting the current state of their thinking regarding how our classes will be evolving into Cataclysm, as a series of Class Previews. These are preliminary and should in no way be construed as a promise, but they do show the directions in which they see the class moving which is valuable insight.

I’ll take them class by class, picking out the more important or interesting bits, and there will be a summary post looking at the big picture once the dust has settled.

Shaman

Spells and Abilities

Healing Wave (level 4): While the shaman already has an ability called Healing Wave, we’re adding another spell to the class’s direct-healing arsenal and giving it a familiar name. The current Healing Wave will be renamed Greater Healing Wave, and the intent is for the ‘new” Healing Wave to be the shaman’s go-to heal. Lesser Healing Wave and Greater Healing Wave will be used on a more situational basis.

In line with previous statements on the subject, this is a step closer to giving every class a more standardised toolkit with the class-specific things being the “fun” extras. I expect a little bit of concern to arise about increasing homogenisation, but on the whole making sure every class has a decent set of basic tools is a positive, especially given the increased prominence of 10-man raiding and heroics over time.
I’m not convinced Shaman needed a middle-of-the-road direct heal, but I’ve not raided on mine for a while so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.

Unleash Weapon (level 81): Unleashes the power of your weapon enchants for additional effects (see below). A dual-wielding Enhancement shaman will activate the effects of both of their weapon enchants. Instant cast. 30-yard range. 15-second cooldown. Undispellable.

Here are a few examples of effects we’re considering for this ability:

– Windfury Weapon – Hurls a spectral version of your weapon at a target, dealing 50% weapon damage and increasing the shaman’s Haste for the next five swings.
– Flametongue Weapon – Deals instant Fire damage and buffs the shaman’s next Fire attack by 20%.
– Earthliving Weapon – Heals the target slightly and buffs the shaman’s next healing spell by 20%.

Interesting. For Restoration at least it seems like a good way to add another dynamic element to a spec which can drift into a rotation mindset at times. I suspect the size of the heal will be comparable to a Flash Heal or Lesser Healing Wave, similar to the way Surge of Light works for a Priest currently. One more to add to PowerAuras, anyway.

Healing Rain (level 83): An area-effect heal-over-time (HoT) spell that calls down rain in a selected area, healing all players within it. There is no limit to the number of players who can potentially be affected; however, there are diminishing returns when healing a large number of targets, much like the diminishing returns associated with AoE damage spells. This should give Restoration shaman another healing tool that improves their group-healing and heal-over-time capabilities. 2-second cast time. 30-yard range. 10-second duration. 10-second cooldown.

I’ve been wondering when this sort of effect would turn up, since we have plenty of ground-targeted AoE damage spells, but no similar heals. Good examples of times I wish I had access to something like this would be Pact of the Darkfallen (aim it at the central point), Lich King Phases 1+2 (great for clearing up Infest when we’re all grouped up) and Sindragosa (on the melee throughout or on the ranged in P3).
The best bit is that (currently) it doesn’t seem to be channeled, which means that in theory it won’t be a terrible inconvenience to maintain a “healing well” for the bulk of a fight, either over the melee or for players to run to if they take random damage. This will be highly dependent on the mana cost and the AoE cap, of course.
I’m slightly jealous that Lightwell didn’t get the same fire-and-forget treatment.

Rohan at Blessing of Kings made the excellent point that this is a departure for most healers in that it requires you to target the game world, not a coloured box. Having played the Mass Dispel bot on heroic Faction Champions, I know how different the fight looks from that perspective and know too well the tunnel-vision you get when Vuhdo becomes your world.

I’m also curious to see the animation they go for. I picture falling leaves, like the flutter you get from some heals already. I really hope we don’t end up with a sickly green Blizzard…

Anyway, more of this type of thing please!

Spiritwalker’s Grace (level 85): When this self-targeted buff is active, your spells are no longer interrupted by movement and possibly even by your own attacks. This will give shaman of all three specs another way to heal or do damage when it’s necessary to move in both PvE and PvP. Instant cast. 10-second duration. 2-minute cooldown.

Healing Rain has the “wow!” factor, but this one has so much potential too. Shaman in particular have been hamstrung in the past by great difficulty healing on the move, so this is a nice acknowledgement. Putting it on a moderate cooldown says, to me anyway, that while the developers recognise this as a shortcoming of the class, they would rather you work around it where possible, rather than just giving the class more Instants or HoTs.

Matticus expressed doubts about the cooldown being a bit long. I can see where he’s coming from, since most boss abilities are on shorter timers than 2 minutes, but I think this is meant to be used more selectively. Compare it to Divine Hymn: I’d love to use it on every Bloodbolt Whirl on Blood Queen Lana’thel but the cooldown prevents me, so I either use it when I feel the raid is in most danger, or coordinate with a fellow priest to use one per phase. More coordination gets my vote every time.

My wonder is if the 10-second duration will come down for PvP reasons once beta testing gets properly underway. Only time will tell.

Restoration shaman and other healing classes will need to pay attention to mana more than they’ve had to during Wrath of the Lich King. Spirit will be the Restoration shaman’s primary mana-regeneration stat.

I doubt this is news to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock for the past six months, but yes, every healing spec will now use Spirit and the Meditation mastery (see below) to regenerate mana. This is essentially a non-issue, really just a change of name for the regen stat.

We’re making changes to which classes and specs are able to dispel magic, diseases, curses, and poison, largely for PvP purposes. Shaman will have Cleanse Spirit as a baseline ability, but it will only remove curses. Restoration shaman will have a talent that will improve Cleanse Spirit so that it also removes magic. Shaman will no longer be able to remove poison.
Cleansing Totem will be removed from the game, as we want dispels to be a decision for players, not something done mindlessly. To that end, all dispels will cost slightly more mana, and you will waste the spell if you cast it when there is nothing to remove. (Currently, the dispel is only cast when there is something to remove, which encourages spamming ‘just in case.”) We will balance PvE dispelling with this new model in mind.

Oh boy, the dispels change. I might get round to dedicating a post to this, but the short version is that of the five types of dispel in the game (offensive magic, defensive magic, curse, disease, poison) each healing class will be able to dispel three, one of which will be a defensive magic dispel.
Shaman will keep Purge (offensive magic), all specs will be able to remove curses with Cleanse Spirit, and Restoration Shaman will be able to remove defensive magic with a talented Cleanse Spirit.

Along with this normalisation, all “dispel-over-time” abilities such as Cleansing Totem, Abolish Poison and Abolish Disease will be going away. Personally I’m neutral on this change: there’s only rare times when this mechanic is valuable, and as long as content is balanced around single dispels I don’t see a problem.

Talents

Spirit Link will likely be worked back into deep Restoration in some form. The idea is that you will be able to link targets together so they share damage. When we had previously tried to implement Spirit Link, it was hard to balance and a little confusing. However, we really liked the concept — and so did players — so we are trying to bring it back.

I never got to play with the old Spirit Link so I can’t comment on how awesome it was (or wasn’t) but this sounds like it would be quite handy. Something like a Hand of Sacrifice but with both ends targetable, so you could have a vulnerable player linked to an off-tank, for example.
I can see how it might be hard to balance though. If you have a situation where a random ranged DPS can become a tough tank by sharing damage, what do you do if your raid doesn’t have a Restoration shaman? HoS is balanceable, but would Spirit Link still be as amazing as it sounds with a short duration or low transfer percentage?

Ancestral Knowledge will boost mana pool size, not Intellect.

With the Mastery system, we’re also considering removing a number of talents that grant passive bonuses, such as Mental Quickness, Improved Windfury Totem, Mental Dexterity, Call of Thunder, Tidal Mastery, Purification, Nature’s Blessing, and others, to allow players more freedom to choose more interesting talents.

Not much to say on these, but they’re here anyway, for completeness.

Masteries

Restoration
Healing
Meditation
Deep Healing

Deep Healing: Your direct heals will do more healing when the target’s health is lower. This will scale to damage (e.g. someone at 29% health would receive more healing than someone at 30%) rather than have arbitrary break points.

I never really got into Test of Faith on my Priest, so at first glance I wasn’t especially taken with this Mastery bonus. On the other hand, part of the reason I never got into ToF is that players tended to go 100% –> 20% –> 100% in a couple of GCDs, so you may or may not actually realise the benefit of the extra healing. With players staying at lower health for longer, this could turn out to be much more valuable.

I’m also intrigued by the lack of break points. Does this mean that you get a (tiny) increase in healing even comparing 98% with 99% as well, or is there an upper limit? The way it’s worded suggests the former. Combined with Chain Heal’s “smart heal” nature, this could easily work out to be a significant buff for Shaman throughput.

Note also the appearance of Meditation, to convert a proportion of your Spirit-based, Oo5SR regeneration into Io5SR regeneration.

Conclusions

Looking at the list, it looks like being a good time to be a Shaman. Healing Rain is a great new toy, and the big bugbear of mobility has been addressed to some extent with Spiritwalker’s Grace.

On the negative side, RIP Sentry Totem.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Cataclysm Class Previews – Summary
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Paladin
• Cataclysm Class Previews – Druid