Coping with the New Penance Cooldown
Since the institution of Patch 3.2 the spell Penance has had it’s base cooldown increased from 10 seconds to 12 seconds. With 2 points in the Aspiration talent and the Glyph of Penance this gives Penance a minimum 8-second cooldown.
It is no joke that this is a considerable nerf to Penance, especially considering that the Glyph was only introduced two patches ago and the Discipline Priest community had enough of an uprising the first time Blizzard suggested they were going to increase the cooldown and prevented it. Originally Blizz was just going to change the glyph, making it increase the crit chance of Penance or something equally underwhelming. This would have effectively put Penance back at to it’s original minimum 8-sec CD with talents.
This time around, Blizzard nerfed the base cooldown instead of the glyph, with the same end result of an 8-sec CD. However you have to have the Glyph along with the talent in order to get to it. As you’re probably already aware, there have been many arguments against this decision. Why not nerf/change the glyph instead, giving back other glyph options to Discipline Priests? Etc, etc.
Whether or not you are happy with the change, however, doesn’t really matter anymore—what’s done is done. Now we have to learn to live with it.
In a 5-minute fight, Penance on a 6-sec CD could be cast (if you spammed it every time the cooldown was up) 50 times. With an 8-sec CD, this is reduced to 37 times. That’s 13 less chances to hit Penance, which in retrospect isn’t a whole lot. This gives you more opportunity to rotate in your other healing spells. Here’s a few things you can do with your 39 extra GCDs. (If you’re wondering where I got 39 from all of a sudden, that includes the extra 2 seconds [assuming, of course, that your GCD is down to a second and there is no lag, which I am assuming this because it makes the math easier] you’ve now gained on every Penance cast because of the increased cooldown. So that’s 3 extra seconds to cast something else. 13 x 3 = 39.)
- Cast Power Word: Shield on yourself or a raid member (assuming your tank is already shielded and/or has the Weakened Soul debuff): There’s no harm in mitigating some raid damage while you wait for your CD to come up. And actually, depending on the size of your mana pool, this can be used as a mana regen method.
- Use Flash Heal: You can either spam it on the tank for Divine Aegis procs or splash some low raid members. (Though be mindful when using it on the raid, as you’ll lose the Grace buff on the tank until you heal him/her again.)
- Use a Borrowed Time-hastened Greater Heal: If you’re one of those people who has the talents for it.
- DPS!: That’s right, I said it. You could throw some DoTs on the boss while you wait if there is no healing to be done. The three seconds gives you enough time to pop Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Shadow Word: Death. (Again, assuming your GCD is 1 second and, like in my perfect math world, there is no lag.)
- Send in an angry GM ticket: Complaining about how you’ve written this entire ticket solely in the extra 3 seconds every time you’ve waited for Penance to come off CD.
There are, of course, a few other options available but these are my most used ones (except for that last one there). What do you do? Let us know via comments!
(Also big thanks to Crutches, our healing lead for standing still while I shot him with holy sparkles and took pictures. :D )
Tagged as Cooldowns, Discipline Priest, Penance, Spells + Categorized as Priest
When the patch came out and i was still trying to adjust to the new CD i would do my usual “rotation” (if you can call it a rotation anyway, there’s always things changing depending on the fight) and suddenly get “You can’t cast that spell yet” with Penance… >.> you can imagine i wasn’t happy at all.
For me it was mostly about doing more PW:S either on the offtank or the rest of the raid, and also Flash Heal on the offtank (i tend to be healing both our tanks for 10 man raids so i guess this just means i have more time to switch between both with the new CD) and just try to keep renew on both tanks to fill in the gaps specially on fights when interrupts can happen. PoM also helps, in the end is just a matter of using more of our healing spells rather than just spam Penance and PW:S.
I def agree they should have just changed the glyph and not the spell itself (unless they have plans for tweaking it again for next patch…. never know) but i’ve gotten used to it already and i’m guessing most Disc Priest have as well.
I’m a creature of habit so the change in the CD really threw me off. I’ve been so used to just staring at the unit frames and healing without looking at my bars, having everything just naturally timed in my head so that I didn’t have to see if a spell was ready or not… Getting that message that my spell wasn’t ready yet was jarring. What I’ve done to compensate has been to either spam Flash Heal instead or if they’re going down faster than I think they should be I cast Power Word: Shield, Renew, then Flash Heal… it seems to work pretty well since I’m glyphed for my bubble to heal. I seem to have more time to throw Renew on everyone else as well. The change in the CD was annoying but was easily worked around, really… and maybe has made things go a little bit more smoothly for me. I’ve not yet seen the need to glyph for the lower CD on Penance.
@Celine Yeah, I’m also guilty of getting the “Spell Not Ready Yet” message for the first few raids. Now it seems more natural again because I’ve gotten used to it.
@Gynx You’re the only Disc Priest I know of that doesn’t use Glyph of Penance! :O
I leaning more and more away from penance and saveing it for bursting a tank back after a hard hit and useing hasted PoHing more and more with bubble spam while keeping grace and renew up on the tank,
I’ve gotten used to the change for the most part. It’s a hassle during PvP but that’s my only complaint. The only time I grit my teeth is when the tank has taken a bunch of damage suddenly and I need to heal him up quicker than my other spells.
I’m actually kind of happy that we now have a reason to do more than spam two spells. I *like* having more things to do. I even started throwing up dots when no healing needed to be done simply because it was more to do. My main is a pure DPS class so I’m used to having lots of things to cast, lots of things to monitor. Having more to do on my healer is fun!
I’m looking at my recent healing charts and leaning towards reglyphing. I believe I’m going to pickup Glyph of Renew and drop Glyph of Penance since I’m using it less and less. The Prayer of Healing two-piece T8 bonus proccing aegis and the HoT from the glyph of PoH are the majority of the heals. Penance is only 15%. Renew is 10%, unglyphed.