In this in-depth look at the World of Warcraft Priest Talents for Wrath of the Lich King we’ll be looking at the newer talents added for Priests along with a few of the talents that have been changed a little. We’ll analyze them and see how they’ll affect your class and how much impact they’ll have in the overall game.

As of writing this the talents are in no way finalized so things may (and probably will) change as Blizzard continues the balance the game before launch.

Discipline

It’s time for every Priest out there to raise their hands (and not their robes) as the talent that has plagued them from what seems like centuries is gone. That’s right folks! The nefarious Wand Specialization, aka one of the most useless talents in the game, is gone. In its place is “Twin Disciplines” which increases spell damage and healing by 1% per rank (for five ranks). This is going to be a major boon to many Priests since Unbreakable Will is a great talent but nowhere near as good as 5% spell damage and healing.

Another positive change is that Force of Will is gone. It’s a great talent… for Shadow Priests. In its place is Enlightenment which is beefed up by now increasing your total Stamina, Intellect, and Spirit by 1% per rank and increases spell damage and healing by 1% per rank. So at rank 5 you’d have 5% Stamina, Intellect, Spirit, Healing, and Spell Damage.

In Enlightenment’s old place is Rapture. It causes you to gain mana equal to 0.5% of the healing done by your Greater Heal/Flash Heal/Penance and 5% of the damage absorbed by Power Word: Shield is returned as mana. At max rank that’s 25% damage returned on shield and 2.5% of the healing returned as mana. Call me crazy but that’s insane. It’ll be high on the list of viable talents for disc priests.

Aspiration joins the party as a 2 rank talent that reduces the cooldown of Inner Focus, Power Infusion and Pain Suppression by 10/20%. That’s pretty useful, especially if you pick up the talents for the abilities. It’s not super useful since 20% of 3 minutes is only 23 seconds. That’s a good bit of time (making it nearly 2 and a half minutes to return) but may not be worth the full talent point unless you find those skills key to your strategy.

Joining Pain Suppression is Divine Aegis. Divine Aegis will place a shield for 10%/20%/30% of the damage healed for 12 seconds on the target. So let’s say you critically heal someone for 2000 health. They’d have a shield on them for 200/400/600 damage. Pretty nifty since the shield shouldn’t cause additional threat.

Grace makes Flash Heal/Greater Heal/Penance apply a buff on their target that reduces damage done by 1%/2% and increasing healing done to the target by 1%/2% which can stack up to 3 times. So at max rank that’d be 6% damage reduction and 6% additional healing. Someone in a raid will need this ability for sure.

Borrowed Time is at 46 points and reduces the global cooldown of Power Word: Shield by 0.1 sec per rank (for 5 ranks) and increases the amount absorbed by Power Word: Shield equal to 4% per rank (for 5 ranks) of your healing. That time isn’t the major focus here (since that’s .5 seconds on a 2 second global cooldown) so much as it’s the amount of additional shielding. Let’s say you have 1000 bonus healing (a relatively low number). You’d gain 20% of that so 200 extra damage for your shield. Let’s say you have about 2,000 which is an ok amount. That’s 400 extra damage. With all the new gear in Wrath we’ll see this upwards to 600/800 extra damage which is a pretty nice bonus. Some may skip this to track back into the tree for something but some will go for it.

Penance is the 51 point talent that is channeled and does something pretty interesting. It will do 437 Holy damage to an enemy or 670-756 healing to an ally every 1 second for 3 seconds. We don’t know if it has trainable ranks (which is most than likely does) but those numbers right there seem pretty good. Let’s say that at 800 heal a tick (way more with healing) that’s 2,400 health recovered in 3 seconds. Not bad at all.

The new skills and changes to the Discipline tree seem well balanced. It fixes some of the skills that made people scratch their heads like Wand Specialization and Force of Will and adds in some nifty healing spells and more bonuses. The changes seem to be very positive and look to make disc priests a powerhouse of utility and healing.