Patch 10.0 Holy Priest Changes

Incomplete List

This is not a comprehensive list and may be missing some changes, for example undocumented hotfixes or uninteresting bug fixes.

Patch 10.0 is the Dragonflight pre-patch and has a release date of Oct 25th 2022.

Spell Changes

The entire talent system has been reworked into two talent trees. One is the Priest Class tree which contains generic talents shared between all specs, and the other is the Holy Priest tree.

Some of the notable new or changed talents in the Priest Class tree include:

• Shadowfiend is back.
• Mindgames Shadowlands covenant ability is now a talent.
• Power Word: Life is a new, powerful single target heal with a twist.
• Void Shift is back.

Some of the notable new or changed talents in the Holy Priest tree include:

• Empyreal Blaze is a new, powerful buff to Holy Fire
• Lightweaver added as an alternative design to the Shadowlands Flash Concentration playstyle.
• Divine Image Shadowlands legendary power is now a talent.
• Divine Word is a new talent, a versatile on-demand throughput increase.
• Restitution Shadowlands legendary power is now a talent.
• Miracle Worker Shadowlands pvp talent had Holy Word: Sanctify added and is now a talent.

Other changes of note include:

• Mastery: Echo of Light was nerfed.
  • Note: Presumably to compensate for the talent Prismatic Echoes that no-one asked for.
  • Base Mastery reduced from 10% to 9%.
  • Mastery rating required for 1% mastery increased from 144 to 160.
• The mana cost of Prayer of Healing was reduced from 5.0% base mana to 4.0%. It was then increased back up to 4.4%.
• The healing of Renew was reduced by 10% through the hidden Holy Priest Spec aura.
  • Note: This change means it is unlikely Renew will be strong enough we would consider spamming it.

Dragonflight Systems

Most of the Dragonflight systems are coming in Patch 10.0.2 on Dragonflight release.

Shadowlands Systems

1. The Dragonflight talent tree replaces the old Shadowlands talent options.
2. Tier set bonuses from Shadowlands are marked as legacy and are no longer usable as of Dragonflight pre-patch.
3. Legendaries continue to work in Shadowlands content.

Other Systems

• Shining Force has been controversially removed from the game.

Shining Force

This spell was deliberately removed in Dragonflight. Powerful spells being removed can cause frustration; however, the amount of control available across all classes in Dragonflight is causing concern. On top of this, the prevalence of knockbacks is already increasing in Dragonflight PvP and knockbacks can be the most influential control effect on arena or battleground maps with verticality.

• Holy & Discipline are now the only specs in the game without an interrupt.

Silence

We understand that Holy and Discipline are the two specs without access to an interrupt, either baseline or in a talent tree. We also realize Shadow has Silence in their tree which adds to the number of non-throughput nodes in their tree. With that said, we are not adding Silence to the Priest class tree. Having access to an interrupt is not something we view as necessary for all specializations. In PvP, Holy and Discipline already provide valuable control to their team and additionally having Silence would provide more control than we’re comfortable with. This is especially true with how much control is becoming available across all classes in Dragonflight.

Opinion

• Sep. 06, 2022: Beta feedback post by Shelanne on the Power Word: Update'd beta talent tree is here.
• Aug. 03, 2022: Alpha feedback post by Xaph on the initial alpha release can be found here.
• Jul. 25, 2022: Alpha feedback post by Shelanne on the initial alpha release can be found here.
• Jul. 15, 2022: Alpha First Look - Some opinion on the first release of the Holy Priest Alpha talent tree and spell changes can be found here.

Bugs

See the Patch 10.2.5 page for details on Dragonflight bugs. They're being tracked and updated there.

Other Notes

• Nothing of note.