Blizzard need a little help with Priest T13 bonuses

Sometimes it feels a bit like Blizzard just throw stuff at the community and sees what sticks. It's very early doors to be moaning about set bonuses for T13 but there's definitely things to moan about were these to make it live. Could it be that the designers pick something in the direction they want to go and let community feedback smooth out all the obvious problems? Nothing inherently wrong with letting smart players tell you what works or not, but it does give the impression that Blizzard are somewhat clueless about their own game.

Holy/Disco Priest

2pc - After using Power Infusion or Lightwell, the mana cost of your healing spells is reduced by 25% for [10|15] sec. (10 sec for Discipline, 15 for non--Discipline.)

When healing as Discipline I rarely use PI on cooldown for mana reduction, it tends to get saved for healing intensive periods because the 20% throughput bonus is far more powerful than saving a bit of mana on whatever you happen to be casting when it comes off cooldown. So less mana cost when you're guaranteed to be casting quite a lot of heals, perfect, makes sense and works well. It doesn't change how you heal at all in interesting ways like the best tier bonuses do, but it's nice to have a bit more icing on your cake.

Lightwell though, oh wow. If you look at what it could be tied to in the Holy tree it would have to be between that and Guardian Spirit and that would be rough too as it's really a clutch "oshi-" spell you want off cooldown for those hairy moments. But Lightwell is cast several minutes pre-pull where possible to lower the cooldown during the fight; use it two minutes before the pull and you can use all 15 charges in the first minute of the fight and have another one up without having to wait any longer. And then when it's re-cast, it's so it's up and there to be used, long before lots of damage comes in. Asking Holy priests to wait for the last second before that damage so they can get most benefit from the mana reduction is plain bad, raiders have difficulty enough finding the Lightwell when it's sitting there for the entire fight, imagine how much use a Surprise Lightwell would get. And the longer you wait between refreshing Lightwell, the less use you get out of it. Is the 15s mana reduction even a net benefit over losing just one Lightwell in a fight, with the huge healing it does compared to the mana cost? Of course if Chakra hadn't been made into an idiot friendly permanent stance you could tie the reduction to that instead with a few tweaks, but that boat has sailed...

4pc - Your Power Word: Shield has a 10% chance to absorb 100% additional damage, and the cooldown of your Holy Word abilities is reduced by 20%.

The Discipline bonus could be good depending on how it's implemented. Is it 10% chance that the shield you cast has double the absorption, or is it 10% chance on every damaging hit? I'd prefer the latter because it would smooth out the randomness of a 1/10 proc if it was on every hit instead of every shield cast and 100% of a whole shield is going to lead to an awful lot of overhealing when the unused shield amount expires after 15s. Even better in either eventuality would be 20% chance of a 50% increase, making it a significant bonus for both tank healers and raid healers spamming shields out.

Holy, well what needs to be said? Unexciting but workable bonus for all those Holy tank healers out there... Now's not the time to talk about what, if anything, Sanctuary is good for, but a handful of seconds off the cooldown is at best a quality of life improvement depending on the period between large raid damage spikes, assuming everyone can be grouped up. Let's be clear, were this to go live it would be competing strongly for worst healing 4pc ever.


Now all of this has probably already been said by various parts of the community in various places, and Blizzard will very likely listen. Don't panic, explain the problem, offer solutions and hopefully we'll get something well designed through collaborative effort.