Post by karlusdavius
Ok, this is a very good question and one that is flying round guilds at the moment. It depends on how you play and your spec.
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The Mechanic...The
Atonement mechanic itself is clunky. Blizzard just raised the radius to 15 yards, however its a smart heal. It takes away the triage aspect of the process that they want us to be involved in. Example being
The dps just took an AoE hit, I PW:S and renew him which is enough to get him back up. The tank also took damage but i had PW:S already on him. I stopped the DPS from dropping and made sure he has barriers in place to allow him to survive and start to cast smite. The smite heal hits the DPS and I start to cast another smite. While casting that first smite, the tank took damage which brought him to, lets say 49% health, the dps was at 48%.
The DPS is in no lethal position, the tank is. I'm now half way through casting the next smite and the tank takes damage again. I stop casting and go for either penence/PW:S/Flash Heal.
I jus't don't trust the heal aspect. I would very much like atonement to be like a paladins
beacon. We choose where that heal goes if we cast smite. Regardless of range. Make it controllable. Make it
reliable.
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Now for archangel. As discipline, we can do without. We Have
they are enough to mitigate the damage rather than out heal it.
Holy on the other hand, 15% on AoE heals is a fair amount of healing. I think holy would get far more out of effects than discipline would in terms of the amount of healing we can pump out with CoH, Sanc, PoM, Renew etc. Coupled that with Guardian Spirit in heal chakra and the power words, thats a potent amount of healing a holy priest can pump. Far more than discipline (without the abosrobs)
The mana return aspect is meh. It's designed to return the mana you spent but just doesn't work. Discipline, with it's recent Rapture buff, will probably only need a certain amount of Spirit before we start to shift to Intellect stacking for regen again. I can see the rapture buff being pulled back once were in the next tier and Intellect starts to rise again. Mastery will allow PW:S to absorb a real decent amount of damage while our Crit's will cap DA out faster, which is always nice considering the low amount of crit going round at the moment.
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So, to answer your question. Discipline, you can do without. Holy, you could probably do the same, but it would make a noticeable difference during those tough AoE phases if you had it active.