I do like the overall idea for baseline changes to the spec that they’re going for, but looking at the 11.1 tree, it is still a mess that I sincerely hope they work on before 11.1 goes live.
There are still a number of 2-point talents that should be 1-point or arguably even baseline to the spec and I have a feeling that this is going to severely impact build options.
Going to list specifics below:
- The 11.1 talent tree does remove 1 capstone talent, but in its place we have 5 2-point talents in the third tier. The only other priest spec that has more than this is Holy, but that is being adjusted in 11.1 and there’s the fact that Holy’s capstones all have multiple different paths that u can take to access them for every single capstone. Holy gets pruned down to have 4 2-point talents in the entire final tier of talents and all of their capstones still maintain the multiple path option.
- Uppies is still a mess. It received 0 throughput buffing, the cd reduction talent which might have made it viable since it shaved off ~1 minute on average (guessing) of a 4 min base cooldown (which has not been adjusted). The only throughput change that it might interact with is if the new baseline Contrition will benefit from friendly penance bolts from uppies, but there’s reason to doubt (and also no telling if Twinsight will benefit from it, either).
- There’s also the talent location issue with Uppies, here. U either take Uppies because it’s the only 1 point talent in that specific row in order to gain access to both Lenience and Castigation, u need to blow 4 talent points to have access to both (which are standard per most currently used builds and very likely will continue to be), especially since both will also give access to Harsh Discipline (which is still 2-point, for some reason).
I believe that the following current 2-point talents in the 11.1 tree should be 1-point or otherwise baseline, a couple of which I mentioned above. Not saying that all of them should be changed in the following, but at the minimum at least 2 or 3 to allow for a larger variety of builds.
- Castigation: 1→ Spec baseline at level xx under name “Improved Penance” or something like that
- Harsh Discipline: 2→ 1
- Abyssal Reverie: 2→ 1
- Blaze of Light: 2→ 1 with a slight nerf to the end result (maybe like 15% dmg to 10% and 50% slow to 40%)
- Expiation: Rework. I honestly don’t have an idea of what a rework should look like for this ability. It’s currently unused and I did not note any changes to the duration of SW:P which is currently 16 seconds on Live.
I also noticed that Resto druid is getting Improved Nature’s Cure at level 10, which means they’re cleanse will now be 3 types baseline (magic, poison, curse). Meanwhile priest, the classic healer spec, can only do magic and disease if they take a talent to do so. I know it was partially done to help prune druid class tree, but it still feels like we’re once again getting shafted. Ideally, they should make that type of change baseline across all heal specs. not just druid.
Lastly, also wanted to mention that despite with the buffs to SW:P (+25% to baseline), even if u take Throes of Pain (2 points from class tree which give +5% damage) and the buffed Pain and Suffering (one of the 2-point talents for 30% increased damage), it still barely does more damage than a current UNBUFFED PTW (and it gets easily overtaken by current PTW even if it’s just the current 15% Pain and Suffering).
If they actually want to have “Shadow Word: Pain should be an important part of Discipline’s healing on Atonement targets to provide a steady stream of healing over time. Its damage has been weaker than we would like, especially compared to other spells in the kit like Entropic Rift, so we’re bringing it up,” then they need to buff it’s damage more than just 25% baseline. Ofc, this is just numbers from the PTR so should be taken with a grain of salt and (hopefully) will be buffed.
(This turned out way longer than I expected but there was a decent amount of checking I was having to do as well, feel free to lmk thoughts)