...your time is coming!

Eyonix finally posted about the new Priest Talents that talks about what the talents will be changed to in 1.10 (though still not ETA on when the patch will go onto the Public Test Realms). He posted a long essay on the official forums about some of the new talents. I'll summarize some of the "bigger" bits of his post with some comments of my own (as a non-priest, non-tank type of guy).

Right away he gave away another tease - the "weakened soul" debuff that you get for being shielded is being reduced to 15 seconds. That's pretty cool - the improved version will now increase damage mitigation by up to 15%. That'll definitely help with some of the pulls you do in bigger raids. The new level 31 talent in the Discipline tree will allow a priest to up another casters healing or damage 20% every 3 minutes. That's pretty impressive, and hopefully the priests who have it will get in the habit of spamming that every 3 minutes.

The Holy Tree has been changed a lot. A former 21 point talent has been reduced to a 5 point talent (Divine Fury)! A new 11 point talent, Holy Nova, is in, which provides threatless, no cooldown damage and healing for the priest. Very neat. They made Holy Fire a core ability, not a talent, and it has a 3.5 second cast time now. At 21 points, they'll get a passive talent that increases their healing and damage by 25% of their spirit.

Suddenly spirit got a lot more important! Plus the priest can now turn into an angel upon dying, and cast healing spells for 10 seconds for free.

Finally, the Holy Tree got "Lightwell". Basically, at its strongest, the Lightwell heals 1600 damage over 10 seconds to up to 5 party members like a bandage. This is HUGE for us non-tanks - it means that the priest can throw down a Lighwell, and not have to worry about us while we heal ourselves. In battles where you end up using whipped root tubers, major healing pots, and bandages, this is that much more damage we can afford to suck up (and that the priests and other healers don't have to worry about).

Shadow didn't get changed much - but the face melting's been good for priests.

All in all this is an exciting change. I've noticed a few more priests than average the past couple of weeks - hopefully these changes will help more people try out the class. As my guild gets more and more into raiding, the more priests we have, the easier things are.

Priests aren't just healbots. They melt faces, they can mind control, they can mana burn. I'm excited about having more of them around.