Designing My Own Priest Talents/Glyphs for the Next Expansion

With the announcement of the new expansion, I'm quite excited to see what the class designers have in mind for the priest class. Well...actually I just have nothing to write at the moment so I thought I'll make up my own. The idea here is to favour Holy DPS but not to the point of destroying class balance - ie. nothing too overpowered.

Glyph of Holy Fire - Reduce the cooldown of Holy Fire by 3 seconds and increase its damage over time component by 15%.

Holy Fire cooldown ruins smite rotation, so remove it.

Glyph of Surge of Light - Your Surge of Light will automatically fire a non-critical Smite at the enemy when triggered. This effect costs no mana and does not consume a global cooldown. However, your Surge of Light no longer affects your Flash Heal spell.

GCD of Surge of Light ruins smite rotation, remove it, but not let it affect Flash Heal so that healing priest won't go into god mode.
Talent Fix:

Searing Light 3/3 - Increase the damage of your Smite, Holy Fire, Holy Nova, and Penance spell by 5/10/15%

10% damage increase is not enough, let's increase it slightly.

Holy Precision 3/3 - Increase your chance to hit with offensive holy spells by 1/2/3% and reduce the mana cost of your Smite, Holy Fire, and Holy Nova spell by 5/10/15%

No one wants to carry 600 spell hit rating on their gear at level 85, don't leave us out with the heavy duty gear please.

Improved Spirit Tap 2/2 - Your harmful spells have a 3/5 % chance to grand you the effect of Spirit Tap during combat.

This will benefit our mana regeneration. It's also great for leveling and the talent is still beneficial to shadow priests. I see this as a build in mana trinket.

NEW* Martyrdom 1/1 (Replacing Lightwell) - Activate Spirit of Redemption at will. When the effect ends, the priest's health is reduced by 50%. 3 minutes cooldown.

Lightwell sucks, no one knows how to use it. Priests have been crying about it for years now. I figure it's only logical to have a talent related to Spirit of Redemption, why would you set it as the prerequisite otherwise? I added in the side effect because the talent is overpowered in pvp otherwise. But it is still useful in pvp, just pop guardian spirit after this, heal up and your guardian spirit will reset to 1 minute cooldown.

So what do you think? Feel free to post ideas on your own blog. Let me know and I will link your post back to here.

Response Posts:
Smite Priests and the Mastery System by Kourtnie McKenzie

Surge of Light vs. Non-SoL: Not So Serious Version

This is my most recent attempt at number crunching Surge of Light vs. non Surge of Light. And no this is not a well planned "serious" post, I'm doing this for two simple reasons: 1. To show that this blog is not dead, and 2. To hope that I can attract a wow math wizard somewhere to verify my calculation. (I'm very unsure about my method of calculating this) I'm incapable of developing a straightforward formulas for every possible variable combination (lack of brain I apologize) so I'm using an excel sheet to help me generalizing numbers, just so I can see the range of things.

So let's get down to business, what we are looking for is whether Surge of Light actually improves the dps output of a 37/27/7 Holy Fire Spec (I say Holy Fire because without it, Smite nuke numbers are low).

Assumptions:

• You have enough haste to enable 1.33 global cooldown and 4 x smite in every holy fire DoT duration.
• Cast duration is 272 seconds (4 and half minutes non stop approximately)
• 24 cycles: 24 Holy Fire, 96 Smite, so we have a total of 120 casts.
  
• Ignoring damage done by other spells
• Hit capped, 2000 spellpower, 37/27/7 pure holy dps build

http://img36.imageshack.us/img36/2585/screenshotlc.png

Top table is with SoL, bottom table is not. Blue represents "real time", orange represents "ideal time or pure dps"

The Smite glyph has a lot of limitations, the fact that holy fire DoT runs shorter than Holy Fire cooldown creates "gaps" in between casting. During these gaps, casting Smite un-glyphed is inefficient, it also reduces the effectiveness of haste, since the primary advantage of a SoL smite is that you spend only 1.33 seconds casting it instead of 1.74.

As you can see, in "Real Time", SoL dps is lower than non SoL dps, but that is perhaps compensated with filler spells such as SW:Death or Mind Blast, since 1.74 seconds normal smite won't allow you to squeeze those spells into your rotation (at least not as many).

However, if you were to assume "pure dps" calculated ignoring spell cooldown and waiting times, SoL spec will have higher dps output than non SoL build up to and until 80% critical strike rating.

Note: spreadsheet not done with easy understanding in mind, it's just a quick sum up of what I imagine the calculation should be, some columns should be ignored as they are used to check formulas and consistency.