I copied Sthenno over to the test realms yesterday just before they went down for the next patch because I wanted to see if the healing from Atonement was affected by Grace or Archangel. The answers were no and no, as I expected. What I didn't expect is that Atonement does not heal for 120% of the Smite damage as advertised, but rather for 12%.
I'm not really sure what to think about this. When they changed it to 120% I thought they were a little crazy, since this makes its healing coefficient per second well over double that of Heal's and with the mana return from Archangel means that Smite will replace Heal for discipline priests with about 4.5k spell power or more - that is, all discipline priests. At 12% I can't fathom how those points would ever be worth spending. With a factor of 10 it should be easy to tell which one is the bug and which one is intended, but to be honest I just don't know.
GC commented that Disc priests would be able to do a pure smite build that would outheal a normal build but he wasn't worried about it because they wouldn't be able to control the healing. Given the new idea that damage is much less spiky I question whether a healer than outheals other healers and does 1/2 of the dps of a dpser is balanced, even if the healing is uncontrolled. Time will tell.
ReplyDelete12% was indeed the bug, and 120% was the amount they intended.
ReplyDeleteSmite at 120% outheals Heal, it doesn't outheal a healer, which is a pretty important difference. Still, if you are doing a Smite build you can still cast Heal, Flash Heal, Shield, etc. If everything looks like it does now, Smite is the build I expect to start raiding with.
On the other hand, I think that smiting will be *much* less than half a dps, but I guess it's hard to tell right now because a lot of the dps builds are really broken.