Ten Days Out - Priests

Mists of Pandaria is ten days away, and with it we will be introduced to a new class, the Monk, following the Death Knight, which was added in 2008 with Wrath of the Lich King.

Given that, until ten days from now, we will be getting an eleventh class in the form of the Monk, I thought it would be a fun little way to deal with the eager anticipation for Mists to do a daily article on various classes.

And, seeing as I've got this little introduction to do, I figured I would start out with the class I play the least of, the Priest.

As a non-healer, I can't really tell you much about Holy or Discipline. One thing that healers all around must now deal with is the fact that you can no longer increase the size of your mana pool with Intellect, or really at all. Intellect, for those of you who don't remember, originally granted you only increased Mana and Spell Crit chance. Back in those days, you would have to find pieces of gear that said either "increases healing done by up to x" or "increases spell damage and healing done by up to x (usually a lower value.)" Wrath of the Lich King introduced the idea of Spellpower, but it still meant that until you saw that stuff on your gear, (basically until Outland) you would not see your spells do any more damage, except when you got a new rank (which used to be a thing.) Of course, we're also talking about times when DOTs did not crit, and other fun crazinesses.

Healers will now have to seek out Spirit to keep themselves afloat, and not simply rely on huge mana pools and things like replenishment to keep them up. So you now have a choice - get Intellect to power up your spells, meaning you can get by with casting fewer of them, or get Spirit to keep you regenerating mana, so you can cast many spells. Obviously, you'll be going for a combination of the two, but it really makes Intellect a throughput stat and Spirit a regeneration stat.

Now, I did finally get my Shadow Priest up to 85 (I am the Alt-master!) so I can talk somewhat briefly about how Shadow Priests are looking. The big change is that Shadow Orbs, Mind Blast, and Devouring Plague interact differently. DP now requires Shadow Orbs to cast it, meaning you will not simply be keeping it up on the target at all times (that's what Vampiric Touch and SW:P are for,) instead using it when you can do a full 3-orb Plague. Mind Blast no longer consumes Orbs, instead generating them.

Now, I might be missing a Glyph or something, but Mind Spike is a bit different now too. It still extinguishes your DOTs (unless there's a proc from one of the talents) but it no longer super-powers the crit and cast speed of your Mind Blasts.

Discipline Smite healing is still a thing, supported by the Glyph of Atonement, and indeed, it looks like the Windwalker Monk was built around the idea of a damage-dealing healer (there seems to be some glyph that I hope is meant to let Holy Paladins do the same. If anyone should be a damage-dealing healer, it's a Paladin.) I have yet to run with a Disc Priest who is healing through Atonement, but I did run with a Disc Priest running as DPS, and while they were not topping the meter, they were still doing an acceptable amount of dps for Hour of Twilight.

Now, this notion of role-strattling: It appears that this is something Blizzard is playing with a bit. Demonology has its Glyph of Dark Ascension that lets you sort of tank as a demon, and of course there's also Glyph of the Battle Healer and Glyph of Atonement. While I would not get too overly excited about these "alternate methods," we should all keep an eye on Windwalkers and the inherent bonus to Stance of the Wise Serpent.

I don't have a schedule per se for which classes will come when, but I will try to keep this up until the 25th (no Monk article. I'm going to be too busy kicking Sha ass.)