Pretty good changes.  I'm glad to see most of them, especially the reduction in healing potential for Salvation.

Can you please please please address the uselessness of Sigmar's Shield.

No one, and I mean NO ONE, takes that ability. Please bring it on par with its counterpart - Devour Essence. 

Healing Potential in salvation only goes down if the WP opts for STR as primary stat instead of Willpower. Otherwise the healing potentiall will be the same or greater then it was before.

The biggest diffrence here is you can't have as high DPS coupled with High Healing simultaneously.

I will pass along the Sigmar's shield feedback as well

-Adam

I made a warrior priest with the hope of melee healing. Although it's tough now I usually go wrath, but go healing now and then. When in healing I still go the the front lines and hit things with my hammer. With this patch hopefully this will be more viable.

I like all of the changes except the increased cast time for our group heal. I understand it is a problem with people sitting in the back just using this but with the requirement to be on the front lines with less RF regen, a 2.5 second cast heal will be near impossible. I figured ours was 1s so that it could be castable on the front lines and less likely to be set back or interrupted. Maybe an increase in cooldown would be more effective so it is still castable on the front lines. I believe the other changes are good and much needed.

As for the future buff to the wrath tree I am very excited for this and looking forward to some good changes.

Also as Voe stated please do something about sigmar's shield it is a useless ability right now, and sigmar's grace has lost a lot of usefullness due to the liniments. Maybe it would be a good idea to look at the grace and wrath together for next patch, or this one.

Thanks and keep up the good work.

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AdamG wrote:

 

Warrior Priests will see adjustments to the following items in order to bring them more in-line with other healers. The Warrior Priest will still excel as front-line healers, but will require the full use of all of their AoE healing abilities to do so.

 

• Touch of The Divine will have its cast time increased, and cooldown removed, to match the standard AoE heals that other healing careers receive.
• Mastery -line AoE heals (Pious Restoration, Martyr's Blessing, etc.) have had their healing values improved.

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I think you've gone the wrong way on this.

If I'm interpreting correctly, you'd like to see more WP in the front lines hitting things with hammers.  Cool beans.  However, if we want Salvation priests to get hammering too - that change I've highlighted is backward. 

Other healing careers are backline fighters - so their spells should have a long wind-up (to allow enemy interupts / positioning / etc) with short cooldowns.

Conversely - a melee healer is in the thick of things, getting hit by all manner of stuff.  A longer cast time means more set-backs from AOE and focused damage as well as flat out interruptions from CC.  It will actually be harder to get Touch of the Divine off, which should be the melee healer's fire-and-forget heal spell while they're juggling their defensive target for melee healing. 

Due to the different dynamics and situation - the melee healer actually needs to have short cast times with long cooldowns for it to work at all well.

Thank you for your vigilance, Adam. Your fast response is much appreciated.

My comment was concerning the offhand book changes and the increase on cast times for WPs. In combat it will be much easier to interrupt resulting in less burst healing from a Warrior Priest. Also, since there won't be a 1.5 second window to cast other spells, like Heals over Time, the overall healing of a WP, when under pressure, will reduce. Also the TotD spam will be much less effective due to the reduction in RF regen from tomes. Please correct me if I am wrong about this. 

I am not complaining about these changes, but embracing them as a much needed fix to bring warrior priests (and DoKs) toward the frontline and back to melee healing. I am troubled that melee WPs still suffer from low survivability in the front lines though, due to the rampant CC. I am happy to see the much needed reduction in the effectiveness of AoE, which will undoubtedly help melee centered WPs. 

One more thing. The crowning glory of the Grace mastery line - Sigmar's Grace  - is no longer seen as such since it does not stack with other wounds buffs, namely the various liniments introduced in the last patch. Same goes for Sigmar's Fist coupled with the Greave of Sigmar tactic, but to a lesser extent. Because liniments are so cheap to make, since they cannot be removed by abilities such as sever blessing, do not require to spec high into one mastery tree to obtain, AND give a higher bonus than Sigmar's Grace they are seen as a much better choice by many a Warrior Priest, including myself.

My question is, are there any thoughts among the developers about making class buffs stack with potions/liniments? 

If this is not the case, please give some thought to changing Sigmar's Grace to a high damage attack similar to its DoK mastery counterpart - Pillage Essence. 

Thank you. 

Salvation Rank 4 for WP: Gift of Life - Your entire group regains 1440 health over 9 seconds.

Dark Rites Rank 4 for DoK: Thousand and One Dark - For 30 seconds your entire groups Armor is increased by 1320, Block, Parry, Dodge and Disrupt by 25, and all Resists by 504.  

Thousand and One Dark is prob 700% better then Gift of Life.  Gift of Life is the biggest garbage rank 4 in the game.  There rank 3 Bubble is better then this.....

Please explain why this has not been changed or even looked at?

Only way Gift of Life could even be good is if you boosted the heal by 300%...5760

Just noticed Zealots get this:

Tzeentch's Shielding - Your group is granted 250 Action Points, and for 20 seconds, everyone will absorb up to 5400 damage.

EDIT: A group with 2 DoK's can have Thousand and One Dark up at all times... Just thought I would let you know how over powered that is....

Very interesting changes.  I think this is definitely moving the class in a positive direction.  That said however, there was no mention of improvements to the Grace line in these notes. 

Have you considered allowing Grace's buffs to stack with liniments?  For example, Sigmar's Grace is completely inferior to all hybrid pots with wounds, yet it is one of Grace's defining skills at 13 points deep in the tree.  At the moment it is rendered fairly obsolete.  If buff stacking isn't an option, could we see that replaced with something more useful (a mirror to the DoK Pillage Essence perhaps).

Also Sigmar's Shield has been a consistently underperforming skill.  The healing it provides just doesn't justify the RF cost.  It recieved a minor buff in 1.2.1, but is currently non-functional (it doesn't heal at all, as reported in other threads). 

Still, assuming it worked as the tool tip now indicates (187 physical dmg, 112heal per hit with 15 points in grace), neither it's damage nor healing potential match the DoK mirror, Devour Essence (150 spirit dmg AE pulse every second for 5 seconds with half of all damage returned as health), and yet S.Shield has a much higher overall cost.  I would like to see these abilities more closely mirrored considering DE is a staple skill for melee DoKs, while Sigmar's Shield is one of our least utilized.  Barring that, a revamp of the skill overall would be welcome if it resulted in more utility.  I feel this and Absence of Faith are two of our melee abilities which need the most attention.

Thanks for posting.

Hey mythic, how about you fix our broken tactics, some examples:

 Restorative Burst: Restores AP.....we don't use AP.

Sigmar's Favor: 135 healing? really? worthless

Refreshing Radiance: If another healer uses this, we get NOTHING.

And all our rank 4 moral's are also worthless.

FYI for all those people who hate WP healers, touch of the divine is really our ONLY healing spell.

Only thing I do not like is the increased cast time on TotD.  That effectively makes it uselss in melee range, and I know the one thing 95% of WPs/DoKs want is to be a valuable melee healer.

I don't know how you would be able to balance this because in melee range a 2.5 second cast time is severly gimped, and in backline healing range a 1 second cast time is OP.

Would also love to know the 'break even' point for willpower, where heals today = heals tomorrow.

All things considered, mostly needed and completely valid changes.

Adam,

I'd like to throw in a word of behalf of Disciples, as the same issues affect us as our Order counterparts and we have not yet been specifically addressed. These changes are absolutely a step in the right direction, but I hope more definitive, class-defining alterations are coming as well. 

The Warrior Priest and Disciple are melee healers. Our strongest, most effective healing abilities should be in our melee healing trees. Ranged healing should be an afterthought. 

The only way the melee healer classes will be true to their name and official class description, is if our melee healing abilities are far, far stronger than our ranged healing potential. If they're equal, we will be forced to healbot since no one will want us to take the additional risk of getting close to the enemy. Don't let us become whack-a-mole backline casters. That wasn't the plan. That isn't our role.

So, while I appreciate the mastery line healing improvements, the real major changes must come in the form of our melee healing abilities. That must be our bread and butter - not cast-heals. 

Read the incredible, innovative, original vision described in the Armies of War section for these two classes. Please, make this vision reality. 

FYI for all those people who hate WP healers, touch of the divine is really our ONLY healing spell.

 

 

 

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you actually have  quite a few healing spells.. the fact that TotD is the only spell you use is a shame.

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AdamG wrote:

Healing Potential in salvation only goes down if the WP opts for STR as primary stat instead of Willpower. Otherwise the healing potentiall will be the same or greater then it was before.

 

The biggest diffrence here is you can't have as high DPS coupled with High Healing simultaneously.

 

I will pass along the Sigmar's shield feedback as well

 

-Adam

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I feel I have an awesome suggestion to fix sigmar's shield, make it comparable to devour essence while more defensive to be more inline with WP design.

simply turn it into a life tap. it will heal for 50% of the dmg done by the initial attack. so for example if you hit a squishy for 1k then whenever your struck you'll be healed for 500 at the cost of 20 RF. however if you hit a tank and only do 400 dmg then the heals will only be 200 for the same RF.

if used properly it would have the potential to be a great healing ability but not consistently awesome. and it wouldn't be good for salvation unless they were willing to sacrifice there ranged healing for more dmg.

(IMO salv needs no improved healing)

someone also suggested making it spirit dmg so that its not utter crap against tanks but I don't know if thats really necessary.

looking forward to the mirror notes for DoKs. much needed fixes, but i'd like to see how (at least try it out on the test server) how making KE/TOTD instant cast with a 3sec cooldown would go. OR make it castable on the move (and keep the cast time). Melee requires a very dynamic mindset, and being locked down with longer cast times would be crippling if we are to fulfil our role as melee healers.

Thanks for the work though Andy!

If the backline healing ability is going to be decreased by reducing TotD and Book functionality, then the melee healing abilities need to be increased rather than decreased.

Specificly, Divine Strike needs to see its radius grow, heals from all melee heals need to be based off pre-mitigated damage, and possibly remove the setback from Divine Assault. This helps not only in boss fights in dungeons, but if you get stuck on a tank class in rvr.

And please do something about our ridiculous M4's.

They relize  the book change doesn't mean crap to us?

They basically just nerfed a destro healer by cuting down off hand regen lol.

 O well, glad to see they keep nerfing us every patch, ninja nerf to our dps over the last 6 months has been pretty funny. Someone explain why I did more damage with less STR 6 months ago, and now with the best dps gear I I can get i do about 1/2 the damage.

"The biggest diffrence here is you can't have as high DPS coupled with High Healing simultaneously."

high dps requires divine fury, which reduces healing by 20%...i am very confused about this comment.

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Joxer wrote:

"The biggest diffrence here is you can't have as high DPS coupled with High Healing simultaneously."

 

high dps requires divine fury, which reduces healing by 20%...i am very confused about this comment.

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