Sunday, May 20, 2007

On Vampiric Embrace

Now that spiritual attunement has been 'fixed', Vampiric Embrace needs to be returned to its former glory. That is the simple truth of the matter.

Notice that VE has been crit-healing for years and nobody really cared until spiritual attunement came along. Now all of a sudden, it's 'omigah it crits' and 'omigah its 35%'. And as you know, when there's two parties involved, always nerf priests. Spiritual attunement and Vampiric Touch having synergy? Nerf VE! Warlocks doing too much damage with shadow weaving? Nerf Shadow weaving! If circle of healing ever works with some other class? Nerf circle of healing!

Even reverted to its original state, VE is still worse than it used to be. The silent resolve nerf (part of which I personally agree with) has completely unraveled VE in terms of aggro. Now, no, we shouldn't have 50% aggro reduction on shadow spells. But VE shouldn't make us aggro magnets either. The fact is, alot of raiding priests are dropping the 2 points in improved VE because it simply generates too much unnecessary aggro.
This would be okay if it didn't affect pvp shadow priests. But it does. Because you see, in pvp, things tend to go like this:

If you can't heal, you can run. And if you can't do either of those, you can smash face. Some people, like paladins, can heal and run around with freedom on, so I guess it's no real surprise that they tend to hang out with people who smash faces.

Well, Priests can't run, and we don't really smash more faces compared to anyone else. Shadow priests can't heal, except for VE. And now you nerfed our VE.

The suggestions:
1. Restore VE to its original 25% base, +10% improved. It's all meaningless overheal now, anyway.
2. Restore VE to its original 25% base, and 2 points of Improved VE to reduce healing aggro caused by
VE. That way PVP players can save 2 points, and PVE priests can actually use the spell.

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