#0 - Nov. 18, 2008, 2:02 p.m.
I do not mean to be insulting, nor is this a flame in any way what so ever. My concern is that there doesn't seem to be a unifying theme here in how the players see the class. Perhaps before you begin to ask things and say Disc should be this and Disc should be that, you should sit down and decide what the main focus of Disc should be.
The way I see it (and I could be wrong) but the main train of thoughts fall into three categories.
The first category is that Disc should be a damage mitigator. If this is the direction that the tree should be going then you have to accept that your pure healing spells would receive very litle or no boosts to baseline abilities. Your focus will be on reducing damage so that other healers can pick up the slack and bring health back up. In this scenerio you would not appear very high on the healing charts at all. In fact you would probably be at the bottom of the pure healing charts. However, your presence would be invaluble to a raid. Also in this scenerio the "fixes" to the tree should focus on mitigating abilities. The most obvious one would be the mechanics of PW:S. Many tanks do not want shield on them as it prevents them from generating rage, or trigging passive agro abilities. That would definatly be something that the devs would need to look into. As well you would need to examine other mitigating abilites (even some new ones) to make this spec and idea extremly viable.
The second category is MT healer. If this is the direction you want the class to go into then spells that focus on single target healing would need to be the focus with perhaps detriments to aoe healing come into play. Efficiency in mana and HPS is always the focus for single target healers, thus you would need skills to reduce mana cost on spells such as renew, greater heal and flash heal with enhancements to their healing capabilities to a degree. Spells such as PoH and mass dispels should have increased mana cost or HPS deficiencies that are tied to the same talents that buff the single target spells. The idea here is that you sacrifice your ability to heal a large group to focus that extra energy into a single target. In this case you would would probably lose some of your shield talents (as they are mitigators and not healing talents) in order to accomidate the increase in the healing talents. A MT healer would be a healer not a mitigator and thus their talents should refelct that.
The last category would be a jack of all trades with an extra focus on buffing. This idea is the one I like least. The idea here would be to have a little bit of the first two categories mixed with a little bit of extra aoe healing. This is essentially a tree that would evelope most of the priests wide array of talents while introducing a heavy focus on the buffing ability of the priest to the raid. You would probably need to add another buff or two (even if it is ability triggered and a short duration) to fill in some of the holes in the tree. This scenerio would make the priest a utility aspect to a raid and not a true healer as their healing output would probably have to be lower to reflect the jack of all trades idea.
