This week has been on the whole another fairly weak one for raiding. Having said that we did manage to get closer to downing putricide then ever previously. For those of you that don't really follow the forums there are perhaps two things that you maybe particularly interested in looking at.
Firstly there has been a request to alter are current raiding days. If this is important to you please reinforce your point of view on the forums and do not rely on one individual to petition on your behalf. It's unfair on them and will be most likely rejected. I'm aware of two individuals who can't raid on Monday's, one who won't raid Friday's, Saturday's and Wednesday's are currently being reserved for future plans and that doesn't leave a lot of room for alternatives. If you do want a change instead of asking one guild member, express your own views clearly on the forums, as numbers do count and the more people that express their own point of view the better. Heresay will always be ignored.
Secondly we have had a couple of people expressing an interest in raid leading which in contradiction to the above may well lead to an oppertunity to expand or alter the number of days over which Icecrown is attempted. Ultimately we do want to present as many oppertunities to all guild members as possible but without overstretching ourselves and ruining the oppertunities already available.
So that in no way leads us onto our next topic of priests in cataclysm.
If we start with shadow priests I think two major changes will be no more worrying about dot clipping and no more misery. New dots when cast will just be added to the end of any current dot on the target. I assume if you cast twice while the dot is up the cast will overwrite the already qued dot. Misery is being removed along with a number of other plus hit buffs to try and standerdise the amount of hit a character needs. At the minute get a shadow priest or balance druid in your party and as a caster you can throw out a large portion of your hit gear. To prevent this sort of thing you could either give the buff to more classes or take it away. They shared the wealth with mages getting heroism, they're taking away hit buffs such as misery.
Shadow priests will also be losing a lot of the passive bonuses from their shadow talent tree and I'd be interested to see what the new talent tree looks like. I'm not sure if this will be a positive or negative thing, I suppose it depends vey much on whether blizz get the balance right. I'm sure some players will love the change and some will hate it either way though. The new mind spike spell looks like it might be nice although if trash packs don't get smaller then it seems pretty redundant as mind sear will presumably still be the best choice and if they do get smaller they will presumably also get tougher meaning priests will have time to build up a full rotation? So in either case the spell might not be that helpful an introduction.
For healing priests their seems to have been quite a bit of thought gone into how to make them both effective and how to keep the specs quite different. The new heal spell which is available seems to me like it will be a core spell of both the specs while supported by various shields from the discipline priest (including an anti magic zone style shield which protects those within from all sources of damage) and the usual cascade of heals from the holy priest. In fact the one talent that grabs my attention the most has got to be the chakra talent which is designed to trigger an effect after three consecutive spell casts, possibly even triggering off of smite. This is an attempt to make holy priests more versatile as the talents effect will relate to the spell which triggered it.
The last thing I think I saw which grabbed my interest was the leap of faith spell. This spell is essentially death grip for friendly targets. I wonder how many guild members would see themselves being ripped from the fire by Taken and the likes?