3.0.8 PTR Priest Updates

[Emmalina]

[blizzard]

• Dispersion: This ability can no longer be cast while affected by Cyclone; doing so consumed the cooldown to no effect.
• Guardian Spirit: It is no longer possible for simultaneous killing blows to trigger the heal from this ability multiple times.
• Improved Holy Concentration: The tooltip has been rewritten to indicate that this talent reduces cast time rather than providing haste.
• Mind Flay - Fixed a bug with targeting where you would not deal damage if not facing the target while channeling. Also corrected an issue where the damage from this ability was slightly delayed.
• Prayer of Mending: Will now only benefit from the healing talents of the priest who cast the original spell.
• Rapture: This talent will now correctly return mana for Power Word: Shield based on the caster?s mana poll instead of the target's mana pool.
• Shadow Weaving: Shadow Word: Death: Will now only apply one copy of this buff per cast.
• Shadow Word: Pain now will gain the correct damage modifiers for the creature type of the target.
• Surge of Light: Prayer of Mending will no longer sometimes cause Surge of Light to trigger on Priests who do not have that talent.
[/blizzard]

These are the latest changes to 3.0.8. Changes already announced are:

[blizzard]


• Abolish Disease and Cure Disease can now be cast while in Shadowform.
• Holy: Circle of Healing now has a 6 second cooldown.
• Levitate is now castable on others.
• Mana Burn: Now burns a percentage of maximum mana.
• Shadowform: You can now shift into Shadowform while mounted or sitting.
• Vampiric Embrace- Mana cost of this spell has been removed.
[/blizzard]

Full notes are available

here and here.

[Docsamson]

The Abolish/Cure Disease changes are huge, and are a huge leg up for spriests in PvP, and help a bit more to establish more counterability to Death Knights as well.  It'll also help a big amount in 5 and 10mans to have another spec that can remove diseases, as shifting out of Shadowform is a giant nerf to DPS (and can cause some gnarly aggro pulls thanks to losing the threat reduction).  Most of these changes are just minor tweaks, the only major "nerfs" are the CoH cooldown addition and the Guardian Spirit double-trigger.  However, Guardian Spirit can still crit, returning the target to full health anyways.  The ProM change is a straight-up buff in almost any situation.  The SW:D change is actually a minor nerf, as it will now take a full 5 GCDs to get a 5-stack of Shadow Weaving up, which delays our casting of SW:P by one more GCD.  The SoL change to ProM is a minor nerf, mostly because it was a rare occurence.  It was only useful for a Discipline priest in a raid, and the rarity of it is low enough that it wouldn't make a huge difference anyways.  The Mana Burn change is a huge buff, and will hopefully make "offensive" healing in PvP viable once again.