NOTE: This post is in partially in response to Idedjer's priest post, located at http://www.gameriot.com/blogs/WoWs-Balance-Blogs/W
oW-Class-Balance-Priest/.

Non-talent related (i.e. skills and abilities)

First, Idedjer and all his responders miss the fundamental problem with priests, one that's been around forever, which is we do not scale well as we progress in gear. We're always good at the "beginning" of an "expansion", i.e. early in original WoW or early in TBC, and get worse and worse relatively speaking as the game progresses.

This perverse result has two causes: (1) that several fundamental priest spells don't scale as the priest gears up, meaning that priests start out pretty good early in "expansions" or when people have relatively "bad" gear, (2) that the concept of requiring priests to stack stamina and resilience more than any other class means that priests end up having worse stats anyway.

(1) Priests spells and abilities don't scale

Our spells suck at scaling, and none of you guys are pointing it out. Sure, Noktyn says "let's make shield scale at 43% instead of 20%" (and upping this to 20% was a recent change!!!), and that's definitely a start, but look at how many priest ablities scale in horrible ways.

- shield
- mana burn
- inner fire
- circle of healing
- dispel
- blessed resilience

I'm not arguing that dispel scales any worse than purge or cleanse, I'm saying that dispel is a more fundamental part of "who priests are" than purge is to a shaman or cleanse is to paladins. Dispel is a spell that is never going to really "scale" and because it's the core priest ability it hurts our scaling in general.

Blessed Resilience will be a sore subject for most of you, and I would never argue that it's underpowered, but think about it ... at the rate resilience is scaling, will BR really even matter in a year if we have 1000-1500 resilience? Resilience is already scaling faster than crit %. Crit itself will become irrelevent soon enough. I am certainly nitpicking, but also just pointing out that no real thought has gone into this on Blizzard's end...

The other spells are all obviously bad scalers. Mana burn? Same thing as in original WoW. Wicked spell when we start an "expansion", mediocre spell once everyone gears up in regen and maximum mana pools. Remember how good mana burn was once vs. paladins and shaman in original WoW? Then remember what happened when they geared up and were regening faster than you could keep them oom anyway? Same thing is going to happen in TBC.

(2) Priest PVP gear forces priests to gain less in +healing, int, and regen than other classes

This a difficult one to swallow, but it's also a fundamental design problem for priests -- we're basically forced to wear highly defensive gear to PVP since we have no "get away from me" abilities. Every class has the same problem to some extent, but other classes all have more active defensive abilities than priests and therefore have to rely less on gear to survive. Priests rely on gear and dispellable buffs ... meaning mostly on gear when there's a shaman or another priest in town.

Let's compare a couple of high-end druids, paladins, and priests, base stats:

Brazetina - Tichondrius Priest (#1 5s)
10691 HP
9060 Mana
1246 +healing
178 mp5
413 resilience

Secretive - Tichondrius Druid (multiple highly ranked teams):
9764 HP
8660 Mana
1469 +healing
188 mp5
391 Resilience

Sck - Tichondrius Paladin (multiple highly ranked teams)
9500 HP
10098 Mana
1729 +healing
188 mp5
299 resilience

Now obviously we have a progression from priest to paladin. Priests sacrifice mana, +healing, and regen for armor, resilience, and hps. Druids do too to some extent, but still manage to end up with more healing than priests. Paladins, finally, rely on DS, blessed life, and wearing plate, and so can afford to wear gear that enhances their main abilities.

Is this fair? I don't know, it's just one factor to be considered in game balance, I'm just pointing out that it's there and it's a perverse problem because all priests do when they gear up for PVP is gimp themselves in other ways, relatively speaking. Keep in mind that this is much better now than it was even a few months ago because of the release of healing oriented cloth PVP items.

Ultimately, it's my belief that the best way to balance priests is to have our spells scale better. Shield is a start, mana burn is a start (even if that means a reduction in power when we have crappy gear -- this seems fair!). But one of the things that makes druids and paladins such great healers is the existence of a low mana, normal scaling, quick heal. For druids this is lifebloom and swiftmend, for paladins this is FoL. For priests it's ProM, but that requires 2 talent points to even be in the same league, and is still substantially less efficient than swiftmend, lifebloom, or FoL. Why is this so important? Because it means that as we gear up, we still use relatively MORE MANA per cast than druids or paladins.

Look at how that panned out pre-TBC, for example. Flash of light -- crappy spell early on in WoW. By the time we had all been 60 for awhile? AMAZING. Because it costs 70% less mana than flash heal, but scales at the same rate, 43% of healing. This means that flash heal will always heal for, say, 700 more than flash heal given the same amount of +healing on a priest and paladin (keeping in mind that it's much likelier for the paladin to have a lot more +healing!), but this 700 matters much more when it's 700 vs. 1400 than when it's 2100 vs. 2800! This is a PVE and PVP problem, but it has gotten somewhat better with ProM, though it's still an issue (especially given the cooldown on ProM).

Speaking of that cooldown on ProM ... wouldn't it be better to implement the cooldown as something like a weakened soul debuff? Is it overpowered to be able to ProM spam different people, wasting the whole efficiency of the spell?

Talent Related Issues

I think the fundamental problem with the non-Shadow priest trees right now is that priests require blessed resilience to PVP. You can't have a talent that good that deep in ANY tree and not expect every priest to take it, and I don't think the answer is to move it to disc. I think this is ESPECIALLY true given how mediocre priest healing is without holy talents.

To me the answer is not to move a massive survivability skill into disc where it can meld with the other somewhat mediocre survivability skills to make a giant ball of crap"survivability, but no one is gonna be attacking you anyway because your healing sucks ass" tree. As a disc priest you'd never get attacked so you'd have 3 things to do: (1) heal craptastically, (2) mana burn, (3) dispel. You'd never get used in anything but a 2 healer team. This just further solidifies the "priests require paladins and paladins require a secondary healer" problem, though at least it's symbiotic.

To be more clear, I don't think you can make either disc or holy lack survivability talents. Both should be viable PVP specs, just with different focuses. To that end, I think disc should become a utility spec to a much greater extent than it already is.

Just to throw out some ideas for additional utility (all for very high tiers so they can't be taken by BR priests):

- enhanced improved mana burn -- 5 pts additional 0.1s/pt cast time reduction, 14% knockback avoidance. If you're going to give up BR, you deserve to have a pretty sick MB.

- undispellable aura -- makes the last used buff cast on everyone in the group undispellable for 30s (makes priests grouped with shaman a huge +)

- some sort of good short duration AP and +dmg buff

I also like Idedjer's targetable pain suppression. I don't think this is overpowered when you think about how much a 41-pt disc priest is giving up in terms of efficiency and throughput.

I don't really want to go into specifics in terms of ways to improve the existing talent trees, primarily because I hate the existing trees.

But is there a more screwed up PVP spec than shadow? Sure it's not bad on dots teams where reliance on the unbelievably overpowered UA makes shadow priests allright, but is there a class/spec with lower survivability in the game?