MMO Champion has reported that Val’anyr has a new effect added that lends more weight to the fact that it is a hunter healing weapon.
Val’anyr Hammer of Ancient Kings – Equip Effect — Your healing spells have a chance to cause Blessing of Ancient Kings for 15 seconds allowing your heals to shield the target absorbing damage equal to 15% of the amount healed.
This sort of sounds like Divine Aegis on a stick.
I want to stress that there’s still not a whole lot of information about the weapon yet to effectively conclude who can make the best use of it. For now, based on this one effect, it seems to be a favorite for Holy Paladins and Discipline Priests. I think more information is going to be needed like a rough proc rate. Heck, this might not be the only ability. It could be one of a multitude of effects.
I’ve got another post on the way in the future to help discuss Val’anyr and what to keep in mind among all healers when looting the shards.
Anyway, here’s the list of healer changes.
Priests
Discipline
- Mental Agility changed from 5 to 3 Ranks. Now Reduces the mana cost of your instant cast spells by 4/7/10%. (Old – 2/4/6/8/10%)
Holy
- Serendipity now reduces the cast time of your next Greater Heal or Prayer of Healing spell by 4/8/12%. (Down from 6/12/20%)
- Body and Soul *New Talent* – When you cast Power Word: Shield, you increase the target’s movement speed by 30/60% for 4 sec, and you have a 50% chance when you cast Abolish Disease on yourself to also cleanse 1 poison effect in addition to diseases.
Paladin
- All paladins auras had their range extended from 30 yards to 40 yards.
Holy
- Sacred Shield now cannot be on more than one target at any one time.
- Infusion of Light no longer has a chance to reduce the casting time of Holy Light, but increases the the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead.
Druid
Restoration
- Tree of Life mana cost has been changed from 28% of base mana to 13% of base mana.
Your thoughts?
Serendipity change makes sense. I was thinking that I probably wouldn’t let it stack up to 3 times too often if I was actively trying to gain a hasted spell because 60% really seemed like overkill (though I do understand the situational uses). The change makes it seem a little more attractive to take it all the way to three stacks. As for Body and Soul, it’s completely useless as a PvE spell and not even all that good for PvP. You need to raise the 50 to 100% cleanse if they truly want Holy to become even slightly viable as a PvP tree. Even then, I wouldn’t make any bets on this talent being picked up with any regularity.
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If the proc has a CD, it’s meant to be in the hands of a Paladin, almost unquestionably.
If it doesn’t, it could be VERY useful in the hands of a strong CoH priest or Resto Shaman, much like the Crystal Spire was.
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There’s also a fairly signifcant (another) resto druid nerf in here in the Balance tree:
– Nature’s Grace now increasing your spell casting speed by 20% for 3 sec. (Old – Reduced the casting time of your next spell by 0.5 sec.)
Seems similar to the changes to paladin and priest. For some reason, we as healers are no longer meant to have means to greatly haste our big casts. Might be a very specific change to balance healing on some specific fight. In the druid’s case however, the talent is now pretty worthless to resto and we get nothing to compensate us.
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I really hope they don’t make it “a paladin or disc priest weapon”.
Make it viable for ALL healers 🙁
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Body and Soul might be a reasonable pvp talent if it’s within reach of the disc spec. Does anyone know where it’s at in the Holy tree? I could see that 60% burst nice if you didn’t have to worry about PW:S’s 4 sec CD. (P.S. take what I say about pvp with a grain of salt, because I don’t)
/grumbles about the Sacred Shield change
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/mine
I guess we could have seen the seredipity change coming 😀
But it still looks interesting. Personally I was hoping they would only nerf the haste effect for PoH and keep it on GH as the spell really could use the push in the back.
The change to MA is awesome for holies though. Man… That’s incredible.
I’m definitely hoping the Mace has other effects, I mean Ulduar is so much like previous instances and ways of thinking for Blizzard and to think that a system exactly like the atiesh shards leg system is being used for this, and blizzards attitude of ‘the more then better, segmentation is the devil’ I’d really be surprised if the mace was limited not only to the classes as it’s stated but to healing as well.
I’m thinking that the new nourish-heavy resto druid would benefit from the proc too. We’re being pushed towards being single-target healers with the changes to Lifebloom and regen.
I would think the bonus shielding would be beneficial to any mace-wielding healer, not just a Holy Paladin or Disc Priest. The bonus would probably be more of an “ohshit” button for any healer using it.