EU+US Talent/Spec Discussion

Protego

Grandfathered
The goal of this thread is to have a discussion on what class specs/talents are the most viable for F2P players who PvP. Perhaps if/when a consensus is reached we can make a guide. I will only be sharing my thoughts on healers as they are where most of my experience comes
from. Here are my initial thoughts, please reply with yours to get the conversation started.

Healing Classes:
Priest - Disc/Twist of Fate and Castigation are both viable choices. Holy does not offer anything better than penance at this level. Twist of Fate can be very powerful if one can maintain the buff's uptime. It is especially helpful when you are being focused.

Castigation offers an additional penance volley adds 25% extra damage/healing to the spell, every time it is used, which is usually on cooldown.

Druid - Resto/Abundance is the optimal choice. Blanketing nearby players with rejuvenate is important which can lead to heavily reduced healing touch cast times and greatly increased regrowth crit chance. Staying with your group is key to surviving as a healer, so including yourself, you should always be able to have 3+ rejuvenates active at all times.

Shaman - Resto/Unleash Life is the optimal choice. Adding an extra healing spell with no casting time that buffs your next heal by 45% is a no-brainer, even if you can only cast it every 15 seconds.

Paladin - Holy/Bestow Faith is the optimal choice. Bestow faith simply opens up more possibilities than the crusader's strike ability. It allows you to heal yourself and the beacon of light target while mobile, and can be timed to heal dots/burst. It can also heal through LOS, spread healing easier (bestow faith a target, spam heal a target and have beacon on a target effectively healing 3 targets.

Monk - Mistweaver/Chi Wave is the optimal choice. Taking the time to properly aim Chi Burst does not lend itself well to the chaos of PvP healing. Zen Pulse is sub-optimal because your allies are rarely bunched together close enough to make this a worthy choice for PvP.
 
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I've played almost all the healers in the past few days and I disagree with all these choices lol

Twist of Fate is extremely strong if you are being focused. Schism is also great. If there's nothing to heal you should be doing damage. I'd rate the extra penance tick probably last.

Double swiftmend is probably best but I've been loving cenarion ward. You can get 4 hots on a focused target (rej, regrowth, lifebloom, and cen ward) and can switch to a 2nd low target for regrowth spam. Rdruid is extremely strong at keeping an entire raid up. Not as great with burst but paired with a disc seems like it would be great.

I used to like Unleash Life as it can buff your chain heal as well but Undulation is probably best. Honestly sometime you can't even afford the GCD, like you will literally die from surv hunter spam in that time. Having that third Healing Surge buffed paired with a Riptide right after can save you.

I think if you manage bestow faith well its probably the best. Its a free heal. Haven't played much hpaly though.
 
Hashbrowns said:
I've played almost all the healers in the past few days and I disagree with all these choices lol

Twist of Fate is extremely strong if you are being focused. Schism is also great. If there's nothing to heal you should be doing damage. I'd rate the extra penance tick probably last.

Double swiftmend is probably best but I've been loving cenarion ward. You can get 4 hots on a focused target (rej, regrowth, lifebloom, and cen ward) and can switch to a 2nd low target for regrowth spam. Rdruid is extremely strong at keeping an entire raid up. Not as great with burst but paired with a disc seems like it would be great.

I think if you manage bestow faith well its probably the best. Its a free heal. Haven't played much hpaly though.
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This is exactly the kind of post I was hoping for! It is a great way to get a discussion going. I'd like to pick your brain more on disc priest especially. I can see your argument re: twist of fate when focused, but that isn't always the case, especially if you are being careful about positioning yourself behind your team and trying to stay out of their reach. Regarding schism, maintaining pain uptime, using penance offensively and smiting all fills the time nicely in moments of downtime, which I find are next to non-existent. Schism also does nothing to help our healing, which is top priority.

I will happily do some more testing with Twist of Fate but increasing the effectiveness of our best spell by 25% is pretty dang good.
 
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Protego said:
This is exactly the kind of post I was hoping for! It is a great way to get a discussion going. I'd like to pick your brain more on disc priest especially. I can see your argument re: twist of fate when focused, but that isn't always the case, especially if you are being careful about positioning yourself behind your team and trying to stay out of their reach. Regarding schism, maintaining pain uptime, using penance offensively and smiting all fills the time nicely in moments of downtime, which I find are next to non-existent.
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Absolutely, good thread. I'm no priest expert. I know Schism was the preferred choice, tbh I think it's ok at 20. Without Shadow Mend you don't heal much via Atonement. You really can only keep one player bubbled at once. I'm sure Twst of Fate has an internal CD, not sure what that is. 20% increase to an already 2k critting Flash Heal is nuts. Penance channels for what 300-400. Maybe good, idk to me it looks low but I'll have to try it.
 
You may be right about Druid. I haven't played them at all since MoP but I definitely like the idea of fast healing spells on focused targets. I don't understand the schism choice. I just don't find myself with much time where I'm not lobbing heals at the raid. Maybe if my playstyle was different? I prefer to work from the back row of a group, hidden by objects. I rarely find myself in a setting where I wished I had some more damage to deal.
 
Nice thread! I'd play decent amount of healers but didn't keep up was the recent talent changes. I thought d-priest talent was to allow penance to heal allies, did they change during the recent patch? My current default is twist of fate and based on description it does seem pretty strong.

Shaman:

Hashbrowns said:
Honestly sometime you can't even afford the GCD, like you will literally die from surv hunter spam in that time
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You captured the point perfectly! I really can't say much than that. When it crits the heal boost is really significant. Sometime it feels sad that due to the lack of healers efficiency really depends on spammable a healer is. This gives hot and long casting healer (druid and monk) a hard time. Their spam heal cant really keep people alive for long and that makes thing so much trickier. I switched from Cenarion Circle to Double swiftmend. so that I can have more leisure using an instant life saver. I can't' say exactly how helpful it objectively is, but it buys time.

Monk:
I've been using zen pulse on my mw hoping to give our frontliner a blast heal, but like swiftmend, I don't really know how useful it is. The fact that its range is so short means you are unlikely the boost above 2000. Since the player you are healing is already targeted, they are still likely to die. However, zen pulse has an unique anti-stealth utility. The spell is castable only when there is hostile target nearby, you can keep spamming it when you are guarding a flag, its a really useful tool to blast out rogues and druids since there is no CD if you don't hit anything. For the other two, I've never used Chi wave since it seems to heal very little. The number Qi Burst shows feels satisfying, but I haven't used it enough to judge its usefulness.

Paladin: lol I'm for one that uses holy hammer for its AOE heal and damage. When used optimally, the total heal should be pretty high. Honestly I don't think the three talents are super helpful. I know a lot of people use bestow of light, but it doesn't seem to be really helpful compared to your spam heals.
I do want to start a discussion about how you use the beacon of light though. Who do you usually cast it on? Yourself, nearby healer, FC, or whoever taking damage. I feel like I'm not using it effectively since when you concerntrate
 
sanraymond said:
I thought d-priest talent was to allow penance to heal allies, did they change during the recent patch?
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Yea it went to a passive ability in 7.2.5.

I just did a whole bunch of BGs with Cenarion Ward, it's a blast. The double Swiftmend is very strong no doubt but after you burn both it gets a little scary. I had 3 hots, Cen War and spamming Regrowth on a player getting focused + Ray of Frost and kept them up. Druid by no means carries a team. I have hot timers and I'm constantly refreshing as they fall off and I'm lucky to break 200k. But it's a ton of fun.
 
Classes/specs worth playing (in no order) - Arms Warrior, all specs Hunter, Balance Druid, Discipline Priest, Shadow Priest, Arcane Mage, Frost Mage, Restoration Shaman, Retribution Paladin, Destruction Warlock, Windwalker Monk
 
Once we get this all settled maybe one of the more established members could make a guide out of it?
 
I've done some researching about disc and it seems like Twist of Fate is indeed the right way to go in many situations. Some more established pvpers say that castigation may be the better choice in some arena matchups and WSG because there are less people around to heal, but as your raid size increases the probability of having the twist of Fate buff up is higher. May take a playstyle adjustment on my part, however. I'm just so used to trying to keep everyone topped off! Maybe I'll learn when I can let some members slip a bit to squeeze in some more damage and get the buff. Seems much more stressful that way though!
 
Chops said:
Lemme do warrior.

Arms - take overpower. You're an idiot if you do anything else.

Fury - Why arent you playing arms?

Prot - lol.
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Oh, how Prot has fallen....I remember on my 60 twink in full Naxx gear, in days passed...near 20k shield Slams, easily going 30-0 in WSG and carrying the flag around just nuking people. It was mind numbingly easy, and absolutely hilarious 1v4ing people. Throw in a resto druid pocket healer in full Naxx gear, too? RIP entire other team.

Now? Well...

Why aren't you playing arms?
 
OK so wowhead comments say no interval CD on Twist of Fate, also couldn't find anything here https://www.icy-veins.com/wow/discipline-priest-pve-healing-guide which is a great guide. So the closer everyone gets to dying the stronger you get, which is just stupid OP. Yea if you were to wait on heals you could maintain 100% uptime. Risky but good lord.
 
Can we get a tier of Tanks here? Sorta relevant.

Finishing up what left I don't have for 20s, debating ona Brewmaster Monk or a Guardian Drood.

Both probably suck right now, as I literally see neither. Ever.
 
Hashbrowns said:
For PvP if you have heals prot warrior is probably best.
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Not really. Prot outputs decent damage and has some staying power but the absurd mongo burst of arms is just unbeatable.

That said, Prot can be extremely useful in team/group que as a hella annoying CC machine or for someone who genuinely enjoys "utility" style play. But you dont really need CC/utility when MS > overpower > slamslamslam just deletes whoever you were gonna CC anyway.

Edit: Im an idiot, he was talking about best tank specs, not best all around specs.
 
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Chops said:
Not really. Prot outputs decent damage and has some staying power but the absurd mongo burst of arms is just unbeatable.

That said, Prot can be extremely useful in team/group que as a hella annoying CC machine or for someone who genuinely enjoys "utility" style play. But you dont really need CC/utility when MS > overpower > slamslamslam just deletes whoever you were gonna CC anyway.
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I think you may have missed some of the context here. He was saying that prot war is the best tank spec for PvP
 
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