The preliminary peek at skills and talents for MoP have been revealed. And I just had to get this out before the weekend. (Happy Turkey Day tomorrow!)
Of course, I looked at the mage stuff first.
Polymorph turkey?!?!?!
That might, just might, break my code of being a polymorph sheep purist. Maybe. I think it will amuse me.
For the most part, the mage stuff didn’t strike me as odd. There are a couple OICWUTUDIDTHAR points, but for the most part nothing struck me as weird or crazy. Maybe I’m not looking close enough. Not quite sure how Arcane Missiles will work, but I probably just need to look closer and I’ll beat the mage portion of this topic to death another day. I think I may be holding out to pay more attention after the devs have been yelled at for doing it wrong and have had a chance to tighten up the design a bit.
Now the priesty stuff… there were some items that caught my eye. (You can check out the priest trees here.)
If you’re not familiar with the new model going forward in Mists of Panderia (anyone else keep wanting to spell it as Mysts?), is that you get certain things just for being your class. These are basic abilities that, when offered low enough in the talents trees of today, everyone took. Then you get spiffy stuff based on your spec selection. And then you get a talent choice every 15 levels. These are more utility-oriented and are not supposed to have a significant impact on output. These are the things you take because they look cool and fit your playstyle.
Yes, there will be optimal talent selections for different encounters, but they’ve mentioned that we should be able to shift talents as easily as we shift glyphs today.
There’s a lot of babble about the talents, but not too many people are paying attention to the core skills.
So let’s start with what we get as a leveling disc priest:
Level 1
Weapon skills for daggers, 1-H maces, staves, and wands (remember that they are doing away with the shoot/relic slot and wands are becoming a mainhand weapon)
Armor skill for cloth (duh)
Dark Thoughts – Passive ability that reduces pushback from damage by 70% for shadow spells
Holy Focus – Same as Dark Thoughts but for Holy and Discipline spells
Smite – Damage
Level 3
SW: Pain – DoT
Level 5
PW: Shield – Absorption
Level 7
Flash Heal – WTF? Priests can’t heal until level 7? With the way the “cradle” (starting areas) have been nerfed to the ground, this actually makes sense. No sooner than you leave combat, you’re back up to full anyways. If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll be fine by the time you pick a fight with the next neutral mob.
Level 9
Inner Fire – Self buff to increase armor and spell power
Level 10
Disc: Penance – I heal you in the face!
Level 15
Join the Dungeon Finder!
Pick a talent! (Crowd control stuff)
Level 18
Resurrection – Hold the fucking phone. So I can join a dungeon at level 15 but I can’t res a fallen party member until level 18? Please tell me this is an oversight and will be corrected.
Disc: Holy Fire – Damage with a DoT
Level 22
PW: Fortitude – Stamina buff
Level 26
Dispel Magic – Removes 2 harmful spells from yourself or 1 beneficial spell from an enemy. I believe there is a passive when you select Holy or Disc that allows you to dispel other friendly targets.
Level 30
Talent – Movement speed stuff
Level 32
SW: Death – Damage spell that just might kill you if you’re not careful.
Disc: Rapture – Passive mana regen when your bubble is popped.
Level 34
Levitate – Yay!
Disc: Greater Heal – The bomb heal to use when Penance is on cooldown. At this point you only have 3 heals and I doubt Flash Heal will ever be mana efficient.
Level 36
Disc: Inner Focus – Reduces mana cost and increases crit chance of Flash Heal, Greater Heal, and Prayer of Healing. I’m sorry. I must have missed something. WHERE THE FUCK IS MY PRAYER OF HEALING?
Level 38
Mind Control – No Mind Soothe to go with this. But that’s OK, no one has used it since Instructor Razuvious anyway. (OK, every now and again you find someone that will play with it, but since it’s so rare, the rest of the party flips out and can’t cope.)
Level 42
Mind Vision – 50,000 yard range. Whoopdedo.
Level 44
Disc: Evangelism – Passive ability to get stacks of Evangelism that reduces mana cost of Smite, Holy Fire, and Penance. (Of course, you can’t spend those stacks until level 45, and then only if you pick up the Archangel talent, which has lost its mana return component. Booo. And it’s competing with the Healing Boomerang. Guess which I’m picking? Wings or another I HEAL YOU IN THE FACE!)
Level 45
Talent, go! Healing tweaks
Disc: Grace – Passive ability to increase the healing to a target after receiving heals from your Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Spirit Shell, and Penance. Spirit Shell? What is this? I am intrigued.
Level 50
Mysticism – Passive 5% Intellect boost. With the proposed change to Int no longer increasing mana pool size, I wonder if this will eventually also incorporate some sort of mana regen or increase to Spirit.
Level 58
Disc: Pain Suppression – Don’t taze me bro! (OK, so that might not be totally appropriate for the description, but I wanted to say it anyway.)
Level 60
Talent for self preservation/healing
Level 64
Shadowfiend – Finally a mana regen tool that isn’t spec-dependent.
Level 66
Disc: Hymn of Hope – I got yer manas right here.
Level 68
Disc: Prayer of Mending – Heals go PING!!!
Level 70
Disc: PW: Barrier – Get in the bubble before I chop your balls off. Pretty please? *bats eyelashes*
Level 75
Talents for odd stuff
Level 76
Mind Sear – AoE
Level 78
Disc: Train of Thought – Finally the synergy between heals and Inner Focus. Only took 42 levels.
Level 80
Inner Will – Self buff to increase movement speed and decrease cost of instant spells.
Disc: Mastery: Shield Focus – Yay for bigger shields. Too bad we don’t see Divine Aegis ANYWHERE…
Level 84
Leap of Faith – Lifegrip!
Level 90
Most interesting talent tier of them all. Each one has different applications and will probably get swapped around a bit depending on the fight. Also, how many times will we kill our tanks with Void Shift? On accident of course! *wink*
Wow.
So what are we missing, ability-wise?
Renew. OK, as a disc priest, I don’t use it very often. As a leveling ability though, it can be crazy powerful. And if you know you’re going to be out of range of your heal target for a bit (or be silenced or otherwise incapacitated) this little baby does come in handy.
Heal. No big deal. I hated having Heal on my bars and never touched it. When I had a set bonus that used it I cried bitterly and still refused to cast it.
Binding Heal. BIG deal. I use this puppy all the time.
Divine Hymn. OK, I don’t use it as often as I should, but it still comes in handy.
Prayer of Healing. I think this one may show up when you select your spec as either Holy or Disc. It’s not listed in either spell list and it’s not found on the talent trees, but I have a skill that mentions it. If PoH somehow gets removed from disc, we will have NO group healing capability. (Prayer of Mending doesn’t count.)
Divine Aegis. A core part of the absorb mechanic and it’s gone. Hopefully baked in.
Mass Dispel. Gone? Hope not, it’s pretty fucking handy, even after the cast time increase.
Shackle Undead. Perhaps replaced by the Void Tendrils talent. Since using it always goes roughly like, “OK, priest shackle star, and OMG what is the ret pally doing?!!?” “NOMNOMNOM I KILL ALL UNDEAD! PEWPEWPEW” I probably won’t miss it much.
Fade. Have a talent to buff it, but no actual skill. Oops?
Holy Nova. I want my little yellow asplodey. It makes me feel like I’m contributing in clusterfuck AoEs.
Fear Ward. Very situational, but not having it when you need it sucks.
Shadow Protection. Were protection auras also removed from pallies? This seems a bit odd to take away.
And the big one for me, WHERE IN THE HELL IS MY ATONEMENT!!!1!!!111 I’m hoping this gets baked directly into selecting discipline as my talent spec. There is the talent in the level 90 bracket, Vampiric Dominance, But I think that’s more of an extension for Vampiric Touch. Not to mention, if it’s only available at level 90, that would destroy the fun of disc leveling with Atonement. If they took away atonement because they want to incorporate something similar with the new monk class I shall be quite vexed.
Shadow Protection. Were protection auras also removed from pallies? This seems a bit odd to take away.
Yep. Paladins don’t have auras anymore.
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Well that’s a bummer. I guess they are doing it to even further remove the things that make us special snowflakes so we are one step closer to bringing a 25-man druid raid without sacrificing any utility.
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From a PvP perspective I’d like mind spike and mind blast back, even if it’s just for the annoying noise mind spike makes. I think losing Binding Heal as Disc is a really nasty surprise as well.
Prayer of Healing is still in the tooltips for Chakra too, so fingers crossed it’s just an oversight.
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There are some odd gaps where we don’t have anything going on, like 24, 28, most of the 50s so there is definitely plenty of room for them to slip some of those abilities back in.
I don’t know if I’ve ever cast Mind Spike… if it makes an annoying noise I probably should get right on that.
(I miss squawking at people on my hawkstriders. /sad)
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Oh, and your chart looks much better than my stream of consciousness drivel here.
Direct link: http://harpysnest.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/holy-and-disc-priest-spells-in-mop-by-spec/
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Mind spike is definitely annoying, almost as bad as the nails down the blackboard sound of Inner Focus.
Can’t believe I hadn’t noticed Polymorph: Turkey though. Can’t wait for that combined with a /chicken macro.
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Can’t edit :(
Think it’s a bit of a shame that all the polymorphs are from the trainer though. I liked having to quest/farm them.
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Even though I never used them, I did take great pleasure/pride in knowing that they were all in my spellbook, that I had gone out of my way to collect them.
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I did just have a sudden thought.
There has not been much mention of glyphs in MoP. Perhaps my beloved Atonement will be available through a glyph?
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Seems like a pretty big mechanic to leave to a glyph. It’s the sort of thing I’d have expected to see as a talent, actually, but it probably wouldn’t fit in the thematic framework that they’re trying to build here. Vampiric dominance isn’t nearly good enough to replace Atonement.
Given that there’s a talent that specifically modifies Fade – and only Fade – I’m guessing its exclusion was an oversight.
No Divine Aegis…? What is this I don’t
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Just FYI, Blizzard has already said there are several spells they neglected to add to these trees but that will still be around in MoP, and I’m pretty sure I saw prayer of healing on that list.
I’m pretty happy with the talent trees so far, especially mage and warlock. Rogue is kinda sucky, but there’s time for them to fix it. I still don’t like the idea of waiting until level 90 for the coolest toys, though.
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