Make Smite priest great ag... well lets just make it playable for once.

[Tess322]

Smite priest is a spec often overlooked, but obviously intended by the original designers. With couple of small tweaks we can make it playable.

Priest has 2 major issues - Mana and Hit; and 2 minor ones - Talent distribution and Holy Fire scaling.

To address mana issues we could make a simple tweak to the mana cost of Smite and itemization.

Smite (rank 9) mana cost changed from 300 -> 285

Itemization can help by adding items with MP5 / Mana Regen in Combat.

Hit could be solved by adding a new talent in 6th row of Discipline tree. We can take inspiration from the TBC talent tree and reuse part of the Focused Power talent.

Focused Power 0/2 - Your Smite, Mind Blast and Holy fire have another 2%/4% chance to hit. In addition your Smite has 5% chance to cause 25%/50% of your mana regeneration in combat.

Searing Light - is at a really awkward spot where you have to dump 4 talent points into relatively useless talents for really small reward, if we take into an account the addition of Focused Power it would be good to move Searing Light one row upward.
This talent could later be used to buff Smite priest if necessary. Example - In addition Increase critical strike damage by 25%/50%

Holy Fire is in a bad spot due to its poor scaling.
Right now direct damage scales for 59.99% of SP
Whilst DoT damage only scales for 26.66% of SP.
it would be good if the total would be 100% SP scaling as it is a 3.5s cast spell, I would propose 60% - 40% scaling to make the spell part of the rotation.

[Zvyrhol]

and 2 minor ones - Talent distribution and Holy Fire scaling. Holy Fire is in a bad spot due to its poor scaling.
Right now direct damage scales for 59.99% of SP

I think you are wrong with this scaling, maybe you took it from Wowhead but I'm sure it isn't the same on Turtle. Holy Fire scales very well on this server (isn't it 1.0? coefficient?) and Rank 1 of this spell is one of the most mana efficient DPS spells in the entire game. With good gear you spend only 85 mana to deal more than 500 Holy damage, I don't remember exact numbers though.

This spec certainly has mana issues but in a good guild with fast killing of bosses you won't run out of mana with Mana potions and Tea available. This spec is awesome in speedrunning, by the way I have seen one Naxx speedrun where priest healers were smiting in some situations to make everything faster. If you run out of mana just change your button from Smite to Holy Fire Rank 1.

Hit has always been a problem, hopefully class changes 2 might address this problem. But on the other hand there is no Holy resistance in the game so it's still good school magic even without much hit especially in PvP.

In PvP this spec is totally fine, I tried both Shadow and Smite. As a priest in Horde I feel that I can counter more classes than playing as Shadow - I have better burst damage, I have AOE, I can heal friends in need. Playing against Alliance means you will encounter more people who dispel your SW:P so Smite in Horde is natural choice.