Priest Talents. And Lightwell.

I made a post in my guild’s forum about this, inviting opinion:

http://www.wow.com/2010/06/13/spiritual-guidance-for-the-love-of-lightwell/

Anyone want me to spec into Lightwell so we can practice using it? No-one picks it as a talent at the moment because it can be bypassed – and the main difficulty is getting a raid to use it.

The main difficulty is target switching to the lightwell to use it – although it doesn’t trigger a GCD, it’s the target switching that’s the problem. Perhaps there are macros that could help with that though – something so that you immediately target last target (lolwell apparently cannot be targeted with a macro)?

It looks like the talent is going to be mandatory for holy priests in Cataclysm, so everyone will spec into it -just seems a shame to waste a potential healing source – that’s all.

and posted a supplementary

Although nothing at this stage is finalised, the proto-talent tree for holy priests is here: http://cata.wowhead.com/talent#b – which is where the “lightwell will be mandatory” statement comes in – because the chakra talent will be fairly unmissable, it seems.

Very few holy priests spec into the lightwell talent because it is something that can be bypassed. It’s a talent that has no secondary happy side-effect. And although potentially it is powerful, if no-one uses it, then it is wasted. Let’s face it – it’s called lolwell – it’s got a bad name. It’s not on the recommended builds anywhere. Not many holy priest guides talk about how to use it [1]. Any guide that mentions it says that a raid has to be “trained” how to use it.

As you can see from the wowhead talent tree linked above, in cataclysm, it will be a talent that will be on the way to a better one. But it is one that only works if a raid actually uses it. And if the healer puts it down in the right place and at the right time (yes, I can guess I’ll put it right in the middle of a defile…).

If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how much healing it *does* accomplish, and let people know how it works. Because it’s a talent that is not going to go away, it seems.

[1]There are a few. I can provide links… Thing is, it’s non-standard. Matticus even says
Quote:
The really limiting factor on Lightwell is that it requires other players to use it. It’s just unfortunate that it isn’t utilized by players often enough.
here http://www.wow.com/2009/08/10/spiritual-guidance-a-lightwell-primer/

The thing is – no-one wants to even try using it. And this would be a great time to – because this is something that the whole raid needs to learn to use – not just a learning curve for a healer whilst the raid lets healing happen to them.

Other useful lightwell comments are found here: Miss Medicina’s blog and here.

I get the feeling that the fight encounters in Cataclysm are going to avoid huge distances. Why else would we get Leap of Faith? Lightwell contains the ability to put down a source of healing, at one end of a raid (even before an encounter starts) and then heal from out of range of that point – and it has only a 3 minute CD takes a short amount of time to cast, and is mana efficient. Sounds good to me…

I am so tempted to spec into it, just to see how things turn out…