A (power) word about Power Word: Barrier, prompted by the latest Beta build (13277).

The latest change is:

Power Word: Barrier – duration reduced to 10 sec, down from 25 sec. No longer absorbs a given amount of damage, now reduces all damage done to friendly targets by 30%. While within the barrier, spellcasting will not be interrupted by damage.

Source

A brief history

If you want to explore the history of PW:B properly, you need to go back to February 2009, before Ulduar was released, when Wryxian posted a list of upcoming Priest changes for the 3.1.0 patch, including:

Discipline has access to a new talent, Power Word: Barrier. (Think of it as Power Word: Shield for your whole group).

Unfortunately the spell never made it into the game at the time, much to the disappointment of Disc Priests the world over.

Over the following year it seems Blizzard hadn’t given up on the spell, and PW:B made a reappearance in the Cataclysm class previews in April:

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).

Early versions on the Beta were buggy, absorbing the wrong amount of damage or disappearing almost instantly. Finally though, the spell evolved into a working version and hit the Live servers with patch 4.0.1.

The version which made it to Live in 4.0.1 has the following functionality:

Power Word: Barrier          Level 80
30% of base mana            40 yd range
Instant cast                 3 min cooldown
Summons a holy barrier on the target location that absorbs ((19005 + (6 * $SP)) * .20) damage done to friendly targets within it each time they take damage. While within the barrier, spellcasting will not be interrupted by damage. The barrier lasts for 25 sec or until it absorbs (19005 + (6 * $SP)) damage.

Put simply, the barrier absorbs around 45000 damage in total, with an individual cap of around 8500 per person within the barrier, then it will disappear.

The new Beta build changes the function pretty fundamantally:

• The mechanic is no longer an absorb, just a flat 30% damage reduction
• The duration is fixed at 10s, rather than being variable anywhere up to 25 seconds depending on how much damage is absorbed
• The cooldown is down to 2 minutes, instead of 3

The problem

So why this big change to PW:B?

I think the underlying problem is the way the absorb cap works, which changes how the spell behaves in different raid sizes.

Suppose you cast PW:B on the melee DPS group (since they’re grouped up already); in a 10-man raid that might only be 2 people, while in a 25-man you’re probably looking at 8 people. Since the overall absorb cap is the same in each mode, your PW:B is used up a lot sooner that you expect in the 25-man situation (it’s ‘balanced’ around 5 people benefiting).

Raise the absorb cap so that it lasts a reasonable amount of time in 25-man and you end up being theoretically able to cover the whole raid for several seconds in a 10-man, which is a little overpowered. A flat 30% reduction on the other hand works in a predictable way, regardless of the raid size.

What this does, in effect, is give us a Priestly twist on Divine Sacrifice. Plunk it down and get people to run under it, and they all get a 30% cooldown. Or, to quote Matticus, we’ve been given “Power Word: Suppression”!

My thoughts

I’m slightly disappointed that the new PW:B is a bit less exciting and unique than the old one was, but I do understand why the change was made and I think it’ll be better for us in the long run.

It was very frustrating to put a PW:B down in a 25-man raid and have it disappear in seconds, and it has the side benefit of making the otherwise tempting Glyph of Power Word: Barrier a more practical choice again. And it’s still in keeping with the Discipline position as a damage absorber/preventer.

I do wonder, in the light of this change, if there’ll be changes made to Pain Suppression, since there’s a lot of overlap now. My worst fear is a shared cooldown (two damage reduction cooldowns means one every 1 minute 12 seconds on average, which is quite a lot) and my brightest hope is a stronger damage reduction on PS to better differentiate it from PW:B. We’ll have to wait and see.

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Yes, still here, although I’m aware that there’s been quite a long gap between posts in the last few weeks, which was a product of a few circumstances and projects that have squeezed my time quite a bit.

Such as?

One of those things is that I’ve recently become an Officer and co-Raid Leader in my current guild, which is an honour but also a lot of work!

As anyone who’s been part of guild leadership will testify, the run up to patches of any kind and expansions in particular are some of the busiest times behind the scenes: you tend to have a lot of roster changes and main swaps needing discussion and attention, your guild’s policies need reviewing and maybe rewriting in preparation for the new content, and that’s on top of the general flood of new information that you’ll be expected to get to grips with. Plus, you know, raiding as well!

It’s not my first rodeo, as they say, but the last time I was involved in guild leadership was around a year ago so there’s a lot to relearn.
Fortunately, a new site launched a couple of weeks ago called MMOLeader, run by some of the big names in MMO leadership. I’ve been keeping an eye on it, although I’m mostly absorbing rather than contributing so far.

Anyway, the upshot is that you might spot a few more leadership-related posts turning up here from time to time. They’ll have their own category as always, so you can avoid them if you like.

So what else is new?

Well, now that Beta raiding seems to be hitting its stride I’m beginning to tap into the flow of information to put together strategy guides for the upcoming Tier 11 raids. I’ve got the menu sorted out but I’ve not got any of the strategies ready to post yet; they’ll start appearing over the next few weeks though, as and when I get time.

There probably won’t be many actual posts until Cataclysm itself, since I’ll be spending my time on strategies and guild stuff. I’ll be back with a vengeance in December though.

I also wanted to say that I’m not raiding on the Beta, and this is a conscious decision.
I’m quite happy to help beta test the solo content and some dungeons, but I want to march into the new raids for the first time with my guildmates lined up by my side, so I’m not doing any Beta raiding.

Will there be a Cataclysm Disc guide?

Yes. I’m working on that in the background as well. I don’t know if it’ll get posted much before Cataclysm gets released, but it will arrive at some point!

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Having raided a couple of times now and seen how 4.0.1 has played out, I went back to rehash my 4.0.1 guide. I’m still getting quite a lot of hits for it, so I figure it’s a useful exercise.

All I can say is Wow! I really missed just how little use there was for Heal in 4.0.1. That unfortunate misjudgement had ended up tainting my talent spec suggestions (Strength of Soul rather loses its shine when you never cast Heal) as well as cropping up a couple more times throughout the guide.
I’ve remedied that embarrassing little problem now, thankfully, and the guide should now correspond a lot better to the actual 4.0.1 experience.

With retrospect I realise that a slow-and-small-but-cheap spell would have been tricky to shoe-horn into the existing content, but I can’t help feeling an opportunity has been missed to practise using it in a raid situation where we’re not also trying to contend with new fight mechanics at the same time.
As it is, with almost infinite mana in ICC gear you can just do what you always did, spamming Flash Heal on tanks and bubbles on the raid.

Ah well, this just postpones the learning phase, I suppose.

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Having made a post with tips and tricks for healing with Atonement, it appears to be bugged at the moment and isn’t healing at all.

It was working last night in ToC, but not this morning. It appears that it was bugged in the first version of 4.0.1 so that it was healing every target within 8 yards rather than just one. As a result it’s been hotfixed, and that hotfix appears to have removed all the healing from Atonement.
Hopefully it’ll be back to normal soon!

Reference: PlusHeal

Update: Atonement seems to be fixed as of the evening of the 15th of October, at least for me on the EU servers.

Also, Penance seems not to be gaining extra ticks from haste, although other HoTs are working as expected. This is different behaviour to beta, so I suspect it’s a bug that will be fixed in due course. Hopefully!

Reference: A comment by Kirke on my 4.0.1 guide, and my own in-game testing. Thanks for the report.

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I’m not going to go into the whys and wherefores in this post of using Smite and Atonement as part of your healing toolkit, but there are a couple of tricks that I wanted to share that might help the potential Smite user, based on some playing last night.

Macros

First up is a macro suggested by Andy in a comment on the 4.0.1 guide.

#showtooltip Smite
/cast [@targettarget, harm] Smite; Smite

It’s a more failsafe version of just having Smite on your bars. If you have a hostile target selected, it’ll just cast Smite. If you have a friendly targeted, e.g. a tank, this will cast Smite at their target instead.

If you want absolute control over your Smite target, you could use a focus macro. This one’s borrowed from our trusty CC macros:

#showtooltip
/clearfocus [modifier:alt]
/focus [@focus,noexists]; [@focus,dead]
/stopcasting
/cast [@focus,exists,harm] Smite;Smite

If you don’t have a focus already, this macro will set your target to your focus and then Smite it (assuming it’s an enemy). If you do have a focus, the macro will Smite it. And if you hold down Alt, the macro will change your focus to your current target, and then Smite it.

I’d assume you’d probably have the boss as your focus, and just hit this button whenever you want to cast Smite.

This next macro is good for when you want to Smite something, but don’t want to use your focus for it. This is probably a better choice for soloing because it’s not as controlled as the first.

#showtooltip
/targetenemy [noexists][dead][help]
/cast Smite

If you don’t have a target, this macro will act as if you’d hit Tab, and then cast Smite on that target. It’ll work up to 40 yards, exactly the same as Tab. While you have a target, this macro will continue to Smite it without any target switching.
If you have a dead target (or your target is friendly), the macro will then pick a new target and Smite that.

[This is a slight update on the one I posted on PlusHeal, with the conditionals linked more efficiently]

The three previous macros are really actionbar macros, just taking the targeting out of the equation to some extent. The following macro can help you integrate Smite with a click-healing setup:

/cast [@mouseovertarget] Smite

You can add this to your click-bindings, so you can click on a tank and the macro will cast Smite on their target (hopefully the boss). I chose not to go this route, because I ran out of mouse button bindings (I need a tidy-up!), so I’m using VuhDo directly, as I’ll explain below.

UI

Here’s how I have VuhDo set up (using the auto-generated test names, since I didn’t get any screenshots in last night’s ToC):

The raid is in the middle panel, pets in the right, and main tanks and my focus in the left panel. Next to the main tanks are small red squares, which are target-of-target frames showing what the tanks are targeting. Instead of using up a regular click binding for a dedicated macro, I used VuhDo’s facility to bind separate spells for hostile targets and I have Smite set up for a hostile target.
So I click on the target frame to Smite it, and move my mouse across a little to cast a direct healing spell on the tank himself when I need to.

I don’t know if you can do a similar trick with Grid or Healbot, but I would imagine it’s possible (Grid can do everything, after all!). Perhaps someone else knows of a suitable guide.

The other thing addons can help with is watching for a 5-stack of Evangelism so you know when to cast Archangel to get that mana back. I’m using PowerAuras for this:

The top icon will pop up when I have 5 stacks of Evangelism, I’m below 85% mana, and Archangel is castable, and the number over the icon is the time remaining, so I can refresh the stack up or consume it if it looks like falling off.

This PowerAura is a linked set of three, which I’ve included below in case you want to adapt something to your own needs:

Archangel Castable:

Version:3.0.0W; icon:ability_priest_archangel; buffname:Archangel; x:-244; bufftype:7; owntex:true; mine:true; combat:true; size:0.2; y:5; texmode:2; timer.h:1.56; timer.Texture:WhiteRabbit; timer.enabled:true; timer.cents:false; timer.y:5; timer.x:-247

Mana below 85%:

Version:3.0.0W; bufftype:9; threshold:85; off:true; combat:true; texmode:2

Evangelism at 5 stacks:

Version:3.0.0W; icon:Spell_Holy_DivineIllumination; buffname:Evangelism; x:-244; customname:Archangel; stacks:5; texture:54; mine:true; customtex:true; combat:true; size:0.2; y:62; timer.h:1.54; timer.Texture:WhiteRabbit; timer.enabled:true; timer.cents:false; timer.Relative:CENTER

I use the Evangelism one as the main Aura, and require the previous two to be matched as well for it to be displayed.

Glyphs

Finally, this is a bit of a repeat, but if you want to use Smite much, make sure you’re using the Glyph of Divine Accuracy to make sure they land!

Also, if Smite is something you use a lot, the Glyph of Smite will be a big boost. If you Smite infrequently, then a 20% boost for 12s is probably a waste of the time you spend putting HF up, but if you’re tank healing it will probably be a good way to go.

Thanks to Sytax in the comments for his input. Glyph of Smite isn’t actually a dramatically good choice, as I’d first thought, primarily because of the newly reduced 7s duration of Holy Fire (which I hadn’t noticed when I wrote the post), meaning you can only get 4-5 improved Smites in that time, depending on your haste (assuming the last cast gets buffed by when you start casting rather than when you complete the cast). However, it’s not by any means useless either.

Below 22% total haste, even if all you do is Smite, you will see little difference between the two, with a tiny, tiny increase from the glyph. Between 22% and 50% haste, which is where we’ll all probably live, you’ll see a small increase in throughput from the glyph, and another small increase above 50% haste.

Here’s a graph, showing the effect of increasing total Haste %:

This assumes you Holy Fire, cast Smite until HF is off cooldown again, and the cycle starts over. I normalised the numbers it so that a “normal” Smite is worth 1 Healing point, and so a Smite improved by the glyph is worth 1.2, and I simulated over 300s, which is probably overkill, but at least averages things out nicely.

Good luck with the Smiting!

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