Wrath of the Lich King Priest News from the Weekend – Nov. 3rd

Mind Flay bug fix
We rebuilt Mind Flay to make it work under the new system. It’s now much more like Arcane Missiles, so the possibility does exist you can clip some of the ticks. It’s possible for us to rebuild the spell again, but that will mean changing a lot of talents (which introduces the possibility of bugs) so we need to make sure this is absolutely necessary first.

Can anyone else comment on Misery falling off? It could get overwritten by Improved Faerie Fire and if you’re playing with a sloppy Moonkin, it’s possible they put the debuff up and then let it fall off.

The problem in this case is that the glyph did not remove the snare — it just set the effect to zero. So the trinket etc. still could cancel the spell. Because there is no easy way to have the glyph remove the snare component entirely, we recently made a change so that the glyph instead lowers the snare to a very small percent. (src)

Developer Q&A (src)
Dispersion. Some call this the ’self cyclone.’ In other ways it’s very similar to a mage’s Ice Block.
We’ve gone back and forth on Dispersion. At times in beta it was overpowered and we backed off of it. We do think casting out of it would be too powerful. It’s supposed to be a defensive ability, not something you do to keep someone from being able to counter you when you’re wailing on them.

Being Dispelled… Dispelling resistance.
We are working on a redesign of the whole dispel system. This is a big topic, but to be brief:
1) It adds a lot of randomness to who wins or loses a battle, just based on whether the dispel worked.
2) Some classes were designed with powerful self buffs. It’s hard to balance those when they are often immediately gone.
3) The whole strategy of junk buffs feels lame to both sides, but it’s effective so players feel like they must do it.
4) Defensive dispelling (getting a debuff off of you) feels more legitimate than removing someone else’s Fort or whatever. We want to try and steer the system towards that.
5) We need to be more consistent with dispel resistance among classes.

Hymn of Hope is useless in Shadowform…
We have some plans for hymns. More when we have the details worked out a little more.

Dropping shadowform to heal. Again, there is a severe mana penalty when we are forced to heal. All our healing casts cost a lot more plus we take on added damage and do less damage. While I’m fine with this increase/decrease aspect, I think the mana cost of switching forms needs to be removed entirely.
I don’t think we’d remove it entirely, but we can look at how much it really ends up costing. There should be a decision involved with going in and out of forms, but we’re re-evaluating what that is right now. Druids have a similar problem.

No real burst damage… In PvP, Priests really don’t base their overall damage around critting. Our current gear doesn’t reflect spell critical strike… As for Penance, I really like this spell. However, we cannot self-cast and it’s also currently target-faced bugged.
We made a recent change to allow Shadowform to do more with crits. I believe the target-facing bug on Penance was also fixed. Preventing self-casting is by design.

Current Vampiric Touch is useless. You reduced the mana regeneration so raids are less reliant on Shadow Priests in order to run instance.
Um, Vampiric Touch does a lot of damage. It’s coefficient was doubled and is now almost overpowered. When we noticed Shadow’s damage was a little low, we gave a lot of it back just through VT. As far as Replenishment goes, I explained why we tied it into Mindblast elsewhere. It has to do with the cooldown – duration of the spells involved as well as not wanting to lose ticks.

Fade/Improved Shadowform does not match up with the tooltip. 2/2 Improved Shadowform states that it will have 100% chance to ‘remove all movement impairing effects.’ It doesn’t remove Cyclones…
There aren’t many things that remove Cyclones, but we’ll look into how the bonus to Fade is implemented.

Overall Survivability. It’s really lackluster.
Do you mean priests in general or specifically Shadow priests are squishy? We do think everyone feels a little squishy at 70. Players understandably got the new talents that enchance damage without getting the corresponding survival oriented ones that they will probably pick up in the next 10 levels. In addition, health just grows faster than damage on the way to 80. Compare PvP gear and you can see that it gains defensive stats a lot faster than offensive ones.

One reason why pre-3.0.2 that warlocks were more successful is that you could live over time through their dots and fears but their armor/survivability was high so they weren’t focused as much. Basically they were a persistent CC nuisance.
Warlocks were designed to have high dps while Shadow priests were designed to have much lower dps. They were a utility class that paid in dps in order to justify their amazing group benefits. With the buff overhaul, we improved Shadow’s dps significantly. (We also dropped lock survivability in PvP too.)