Bonus Ambivalent

Yesterday, Miss Medecina made a post on the T10 changes Blizzard recently made for priests. More accurately, they changed the 4-piece bonus. I have to admit, the original bonus made my brain hurt when I first read it. I'm not the quickest thinker when it comes to numbers and maths... ugh. This is what it originally said:

Your Circle of Healing and Penance spells have a 20% chance to cause your next Flash Heal cast within 6 sec to reset the cooldown on your Circle of Healing and Penance spells.

I found this sentence to be grammatically ambiguous at best, but then that's just the little grammar nazi in me. It does take some time to take in what this means, though. Basically, what this means for Holy priests:

You hit CoH, and cast FH six seconds later. One chance in five, it will reset the cooldown on CoH.

Sounds reasonably nice, right? But it does only proc in specific types of situations, rendering this bonus useless for a majority of priest healers out there. Especially for disc priests. (I heard. I don't play my disc offspec that often... Still learning the ropes). Miss Medecina pointed out that it proved Blizzard was completely out of touch with what Discs are about. I see her point.

Now, Blizzard decided to make some changes about that. This is what the PTR states:

Priest Tier-10 4-Piece Healing Set Bonus: Redesigned. This bonus now increases the effectiveness of the caster's Power Word: Shield and Renew spells by 5%

*sigh*

I don't feel the love... On the one hand, it's nice to have an increase on Renew, and it is definitely a more general bonus than the other one. But, on the other hand, it really looks like the development team just slapped something on there. As if they just picked the two most basic spells for both specs and gave it a little 5% static increase. I am not particularly happy, but not particularly sad either. I do use Renew quite often. That may change, however, when I set my white hoof on raiding grounds. We shall see, I suppose.

On a completely unrelated note:

Tamarind is starting something new on Argent Dawn. The guild is called Single Abstract Noun, and will be all about the blogging community. I'm sorely tempted to roll (yet another) alt so I can take a peek there. It looks like a lot of fun.

Thanks to Tam, I actually posted something on my own guildforums to ask if they'd be ok with being mentioned in this blog before I write about them. Otherwise, I would probably have written myself straight into the snakepit Tam just managed to escape.

~Ari