WotLK Disc Priest Talents
Posted On Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 By Jay
WotLK offers disc priest some great new talents to look forward to. I won’t go over the entire tree. What I will do is break down a couple builds I think disc priests will find useful come the expansion. Discipline priests are one of the more survivable cloth classes out there next to warlocks.
Reflective Shield boost spec. I really like this spec. As a discipline our main trumps are rogues, warrior, and ranged caster specs. Reflective shield is a potent weapon against each of these classes. While it is difficult for us to prevent damage before it is done. We can make a low life attacker think twice about dropping that 5 pointer, or shatter crit with our shield on, shiny and for all to see.
We keep spell warding from the holy tree against our caster trumps and to mitigate dot damage. We gain an increased bonus to PW:S thanks to the new talent Borrowed Time. This reduces the cooldown on PW:S and increases its absorption by 20% of your “healing”. I am assuming the wording means spell power and that hopefully its an increased bonus in addition to scaling normally with spell power.
The new 51 talent also gives a nice holy damage attack for those clutch moments when a burn down is called for. Remember that holy is largely un resistable. That means this channeled attack right after a mana drain/mind blast + PW:Death can be quite a potent burst damage combo.
Largely you’re still pursuing you’re traditional disc priest play style with this build. Which is nice.
44/27/0 – You use smite in the arena?
This is an experiemental build for Disc Priests. Instead of using mana drains, dispels, PW:S and Renew as your primary attack, you enter the arena as an offensive damage dealer and secondary healer. You’ll maintain all the survivability toys of the current disc builds. You’ll also gain free smites. Since you’ll be relying on critical spells to fuel instant smites, this build is less predictable but more fun. Important note: with WotLK spell power is the governing stat for spells. No more separation of +healing and +spell damage. As such both you’re heals and damaging spells will become more potent with gear.
61/5/0 – Where’s that extra point go?
The final spec I’ll propose today is the full discipline tree. A quick over notes that all deep disc talents are taken advantage of. Mana efficiency, mana return and increased damage reduction are the key to this build. You’re greater heal takes longer and you’ll be using it less in favor of a quicker flash heal. The extra point can go where you like. I opted for enlightenment due to the additional 1% to spell power. You’ll be ultra survivable and have great mana return.
Ultimately, I have no idea how these spec will play out. I imagine that due to itemization discipline priests will gain many more options. Depending on play style and team make up, stacking either of the big 3 (MP5, Spell Pen, Spell Haste) will be useful. Take care! Our role is still one of strong support and cloth tanking. I foresee we’ll still be resilient, standing up to the powerful new spells and abilities of the expansion with ease.
