Spooncraft

This is is actually quite long as there’s a pretty in depth Q/A session.

Broken talents & Naxxramas - I feel ya on the broken talents, these are all working in my local build which should be public very soon. Don’t worry too much on talents being broken as why you feel the class is not “polished,” no talent should be broken or not working when we’re finished.

By the way, I did Naxx 10-man the other day as Discipline and our tank didn’t notice any reduced threat with Divine Aegis (with around ~30 spell crit) or Power Word: Shield. It probably did lower his threat, but it was pretty minimal and it definitely wasn’t an issue for us. Against a hard hitting boss/mob you hardly even get to see the visual on the tank. One lame side effect is that because a good portion of Disc Priests “healing” is through absorption mechanics, you don’t really see that in a healing meter, though that’s kind of a side issue. Our tank was excited by how much he was absorbing with Divine Aegis/Power Word: Shield though. (src)

Global Cooldown removed from Guardian Spirit - Oh, and we did remove the global cooldown from Guardian Spirit. (src)

Divine Hymn - Divine Hymn is intended to be PvP utility and an emergency tool in PvE. Accidentally pull 3+ mobs? Hit Divine Hymn, they all fall asleep, and you have some time to get your bearings and set things up. I don’t think it will become that useful until you start doing more challenging dungeons/heroics, though. Any and all mobs can be afflicted by Divine Hymn’s effect unless they were specifically intended not to by the encounter/raid and dungeon designers. (src)

Talents/Spells Q&A (src)
Blessed Recovery: Broken; refreshes on noncritical hits (via procs from resilience), and the healing is nominal even without this problem. Changing this ability to NOT proc off noncritical hits, and healing for an additional 10 - 15% of the value of a crit would make it more valuable for 3 talent points. Currently its use is just for dispel fodder — clearly not the intention of the talent.

Agreed this talent could be better.

Shadow Resilience: Still not much benefit for 2 talent points deep in the Shadow tree. If the damage reduction added to Shadowform that would be a different story, but multiplied with other damage-reduction mechanics it just doesn’t provide much benefit. A secondary effect (*cough*Interrupt duration reduction*cough*) would make this talent more attractive.

Don’t think this is a big issue.

Holy Nova: Now practically useless with the downranking change; not enough healing, not enough damage, party-limited. Needs focus or a unique mechanic. This ability will virtually disappear from priest specs in Wrath if it isn’t addressed.

Agreed, could improve this spell somewhat. Not an easy one.

Improved Mana Burn: 3 second Mana Burn is pretty much useless in both PvP and PvE these days. This talent is required to make Mana Burn PvP viable, so it doesn’t really improve Mana Burn at all. The devs have commented on other classes having talents that are “too required,” well, this talent is the definition of “too required” for the trainable spell named Mana Burn.

Fine with this talent.

Surge of Light: It’s a nice soloing talent, but given that Discipline is now the tree that scales with crit, its placement is odd, and it does nothing to buff your healing ability. Adding Flash Heal to the instant cast proc would make this talent quite worth it, even in a Holy build which isn’t focused on crit.

We’ve talked about that specific idea before, but not sure the tree needs instant cast flash heals right now.

Blessed Resilience: It’s not clear that this talent provides enough PvP survivability for a deep Holy build, at this point. But I suppose that remains to be seen.

It’s always been better than Focused Will IMO, it’s just that the tree is less popular because of the lack of Pain Suppression. Guardian Spirit can act as a Pain Suppression replacement now, and the tree can hold it’s own in PvP. I think you’ll be seeing a diverse mix of Holy vs. Disc Priests in PvP from now on (hopefully).

Silence: Somewhat outdated, the cooldown and range are prohibitive. A very modest decrease in cooldown (~5 seconds) and/or a standard range (30 yards) would be a welcome update.

Not a big issue. We’ll think about it, maybe a Glyph.