Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Priest T10 4pc bonus... Redux

I did a post on how mediocre I felt the Priest T10 4pc bonus was a while back... well, I'm going to revisit that topic.

/Begin Rant.

Part of the 3.3.3 PTR patch notes informed us today of a possible new change to the Priest Tier 10 set bonus.

I will be the first to admit that our current 4pc bonus is less than awe-inspiring. Some priests may like it, but many feel it to be mediocre at best.

The current Priest T10 set bonus is:
Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.
Now, the idea for this set bonus is, in my opinion, pretty cool. The devs are trying to make things interesting by resetting a cooldown for one spell, by using another, thereby giving the player the option to utilize a spell they wouldn't normally be able to use because of a cooldown.

Awesome. Sounds like fun, and would be fun (as well as much more useful)... if they had opted to use a different spell other than Flash to trigger that cooldown-resetting proc.

Flash Heal, while I do use it, is not the most used "filler" spell I use between Penance or CoH cooldowns. As Disc, the "filler" spell I use between CD's is PW:S probably 70% of the time. This should not come as any surprise, since bubbling is one of the major strengths of the class. As Holy, I utilize Renew most of the time as a "filler."

Like I said, I do use Flash Heal in both specs, but it isn't usually my first choice. In my opinion, the current T10 bonus could be easily fixed by simply changing it to something along the lines of:
Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Renew cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing spell, and your next Power Word: Shield cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Penance spell.
This change, although I have no idea how difficult something like that would be to pull off on a technical programming side of things, would make the the T10 bonus great (although still not on par with Druids and Shaman).

It would keep the set bonus "fun" and continue to make it reactive by giving the player a chance to use a spell they normally wouldn't be able to... and it would keep it useful by allowing it to proc off spells we actually use most often.

I don't get why this is such a foreign concept for the Devs. They do it with Druid and Shaman sets. The Druid 4pc bonus procs off Rejuv, probably their most used spell, and the Shaman 4pc procs off Chain Heal... which is by far their most used spell.

I simply don't understand why this concept is so hard to grasp for the Devs when it comes to Priests.

Instead of addressing the public outcry about the Priest 4pc bonus in some fun or creative way, they are now testing this change:
Increases the effect of your Renew and Power Word: Shield spells by 5%.
Wow... while making Renew and PW:S 5% stronger is nice (and probably more useful to many Priests than the current bonus)... what an incredibly boring and uncreative way to put a band-aid on the original problem.

I'm an artist, not a math guy... so I don't enjoy running numbers, but 5% on either of those spells seems a little anti-climatic for being the 4pc bonus to the Top Tier set in this expansion.

Seriously... a static 5% increase? Druids get a chance for their Rejuv (many druids' most used spell) to jump to a nearby target for full duration. Shaman get to have their Chain Heal crits heal for 25% more over time... and we get a static 5% boost?

This stacked on top of the fact that due to being Disc probably 90% of the time in raids, I'm incredibly anti-Spirit, probably more than most priests (until they make it worth my while... aka Cata). Due to the amount of Spirit (aka wasted stats) on the T10, the bonus will have to be pretty nice in order for me to even consider picking it up.

This potential change on the PTR irks me. Not because I feel the bonus is sub-par. I already spent emblems on other gear so there is no real loss for me there. I'm irked because this change just seems incredibly lazy, and so drastically un-creative in comparison to other classes.

/end rant.

5 comments:

  1. Our druid healer hates his T10 bonus because he doesn't like relying on procs, and crit is enough for him. He'd love a scalable stat increase.

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  2. Set bonuses should never be "relied" upon to get your job done regardless. Fights aren't balanced around them, meaning that they can be healed/dps'ed/tanked with or without the set bonuses.

    They are added *bonuses* that you get in addition to your current abilities. They help, but if a set bonus never proc'ed during an encounter, you should still be able to do it. Procs and set bonuses just make things easier.

    My point isn't that a scalable stat increase is *bad* per say, but that it is incredibly uncreative in comparison to other classes for the top Tier of an expansion... or even in comparison to the *current* set bonus.

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  3. Not that it would be any great win, but more interestingly would be to change T10 4 piece to "Your Penance spell has a 4% chance to cause all active Power Word: Shields to absorb an additional 1920 damage."

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  4. The current 4p bonus is great for 10 mans, but it's meaningless for 25 mans.

    If they increase pws by 5%, that would amount to a bonus of 2% to my total healing done on my last LK25 kill.

    Im not sure whether all the BIS gear can beat that, assuming you had all heroic level T10.

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  5. Then again, Im happy with the spirit on it.

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