Players weigh a reported harsher Shadow Word: Death backlash, and a talent that looked redundant

Rouxgaroux opened the US forum thread Nice Priest Changes! on 31 October with a list of Priest changes, posted without a source. Two parts of it set off the arguments in the replies.

A harsher backlash, if the list is right

The list says Shadow Word: Death's backlash "deals 30% of your maximum health instead of 10%."

The replies don't all read that line the same way. Tactful asked why they should blast themselves "for 30% of the damage dealt", and said 15 to 20% would be acceptable. Formal put it in terms of health: losing 30% of your health in PvP is bad enough that the spell is probably too risky to use, especially for damage they compare to a Mage's Fire Blast. Whether the backlash is measured against the Priest's health or against the damage dealt is left open in the thread.

Caldesann quoted the maximum-health line and predicted it would not stay. Their concern is counterplay. A backlash that harsh, they argue, would teach opponents to anticipate the spell and deliberately answer it with a shield or barrier, Ice Block, Divine Shield, a shadow potion, Grounding Totem and the like, to the point that Priests might hardly ever use it in PvP. They also expect players killing themselves with Shadow Word: Death to "become a meme".

A talent that looked redundant

The same list says Binding Heal leaves the talent tree and is taught by trainers from level 25, and that a new talent, Holy Binding, takes its old row: when your Flash Heal heals someone else, you are healed for 50% as much. Five minutes after the list went up, Viritium asked what Holy Binding is for. If Binding Heal is baseline and, as they put it, costs the same mana as Flash Heal, a Priest who needs to heal both themselves and someone else would always cast it, which they called "better than holy binding in every way" for that job.

Asmr replied within a minute with a use. A Priest could alternate between the two spells to trigger Litany of Light, since, in Asmr's reading, spamming Binding Heal alone won't give mana back. The same account, now posting as Botonic, accepted the point less than a minute later, saying they had been "looking at this from disc priest angle".

That is a forum exchange where someone changed their mind in three posts, but it takes the spell wording and Litany's trigger as given rather than testing them. The replies cited here do the same. These are reactions to an unsourced list, so neither the 30% nor the talent changes are confirmed here.