THE WOW FOREVER COLLECTION · DISPATCH · RESEARCH CHECKED OCTOBER 5, 2026
Short answer: Penance is strong at level 30, but the numbers are smaller than the angriest posts suggest. The October 1 build raised the beta cap to 30, which is exactly when a Priest has the 21 talent points needed to reach Penance. By Sunday night a forum thread titled "Penance must go" was up, and it passed 190 replies and 2,000 views in under a day. The same weekend, paladins' 20-minute Lay on Hands and the crocolisk pet's 50% healing reduction got their own complaints. Blizzard has not replied to any of them.
What Penance does at level 30
At level 30 you get rank 1. Wowhead's Forever tooltip lists it as a 100 mana channel with a 12 second cooldown and 40 yard range, "causing 81 Holy damage to an enemy, or 184 healing to an ally, instantly and every 1 sec for 2 sec."
That's three pulses. Before spell power, a full channel does 243 damage or 552 healing. One tester in the thread put the total damage with gear at around 300, which they called "1/5 of someones HP at 30." A Discipline Priest playing in PvP made the healing case instead: Penance "costs a 1/3 mana that max rank Heal does (at lvl 30) and does the same amount of healing in 2 seconds immediately."
Those are two different complaints, and the second one is the stronger. The damage is fine on its own. The healing is cheap and fast, it comes on a 12 second cooldown, and it can be aimed at yourself. You can check the rest of the Discipline tree, including Divine Aegis and the Power in Light talent that buffs Penance against Holy Fire targets, in our talent calculator.
There may be a bug muddying the numbers. A separate thread on October 4 says Penance's tooltip showed 233 per pulse for one Priest with 175 bonus healing, but the heals landed for 185. Nobody from Blizzard has confirmed it, and only one person has reported it so far.
The "Penance must go" thread
The opening post, written on Sunday evening US time, argues that Penance "has no place in Classic" and that "it looks and feels like SoD pacing." The claim that priests are hitting for "50+% of people's HP" didn't hold up well in the replies. Several posters pointed out the 300-ish damage total, and one asked how much of the gameplay the original poster had played themselves.
The SoD comparison is what keeps the thread going. Penance was a Season of Discovery rune, and players who healed in that season's Warsong Gulch remember it. One wrote that they were "still scarred by the 80% heals in WSG in SoD." A former SoD Priest said "you really didn't want to press anything else except penance on cd."
The pushback has three main points:
- It's level 30. "You can't make any assumptions until people are lvl 60," as one reply put it. Priests also don't have their full kit, and nobody has raid or PvP gear.
- Other classes have their own tools. A warlock in the thread argued that rogues, whom Blizzard's Kris Zierhut said on the podcast will be "the highest single target damage dealers in the game" on standstill fights, are the bigger PvP problem.
- Tune it, don't delete it. Even the players who agree it's too strong mostly want higher mana cost and lower numbers, not removal. One suggested tuning it so the ticks grow as the channel goes on, instead of front-loading the value.
Shadow Priests have a separate grievance. In the Shadow feedback thread, one wrote that it is "always a fun time watching penance do more damage than my casted shadow spells."
It started before Penance went live
A thread from October 1 had already called out the new heals as a group. Its author listed "penance, prayer of mending, binding heal, riptide, and swiftmend" and said they "do WAY too much healing for WAY too little mana on WAY too short of a cooldown." Their worry is that Blizzard has kept damage close to Classic levels while healing went up, and that PvP fights stop ending. Another poster replied that they hadn't felt the heals were overpowered while leveling, and the author answered that the strongest ones "aren't usable yet." Penance is the first of that list to become usable, so it's taking all the attention.
Lay on Hands every 20 minutes
The paladin version of this argument is on the EU forums, where "20 minute Lay on Hands is incredibly annoying" passed 110 replies over the weekend. Forever cut Lay on Hands from one hour to 20 minutes and removed the Improved Lay on Hands talent (Warcraft Tavern covered this on September 21). It still heals for the paladin's maximum health and drains all their remaining mana.
The complaint is about how often you see it, not how strong it is. The poster said paladins now "have it off cooldown for every open world encounter" and use it in duels because they no longer worry about wasting it. Replies were split. One argued a full heal "every 20 minutes" in world PvP is the problem. Another said Lay on Hands was always part of the paladin kit and that "you should go into the fight expecting them to be available." A third thought the old talent's 40 minutes would have been a fair middle ground.
The crocolisk's Dismember
The last piece is a hunter pet. Blizzard's Hunter class deep dive lists the crocolisk's Forever ability as "Dismember: Damage and reduces the target's healing received by 50%." That makes it a Mortal Strike on a pet any hunter can tame. Players had already spotted it on September 29, and the Penance thread brought it back. The original poster wants it cut to 10%. Another reply asked why a hunter pet should have another class's 31-point capstone effect, and argued that only Warriors should have it.
It also bears on the Penance argument: a Priest healing through Dismember gets half value from every pulse. Warriors, the class that used to own that effect, have their own list of complaints, which our rage normalization explainer covers.
What happens next
Blizzard hasn't said anything about PvP tuning since the level 30 build. On the October 1 podcast the developers talked about hybrid tax and single-target damage, not PvP. Nothing in the October 1 notes touches Penance, Lay on Hands or Dismember, and there was no new build over the weekend.
The real test comes when the cap rises again and Priests can push past 31 points into Power Infusion, and when Penance gets higher ranks with bigger numbers. The beta ends October 21, so that may not happen before launch. If you're choosing a class now, the Priest sits in A tier on our Forever tier list, and the full Penance, Prayer of Mending and Divine Aegis breakdown is in our talent changes for every class. For the build that brought all this on, see the level 30 beta build roundup.
Sources: Blizzard forums, Penance must go (October 5, 2026, with replies), The developers are not aware of how overpowered the new heals are (October 1), Penance not working correctly (October 4), Feedback on Shadow Priest Design (reply dated October 4) and How do crocilosks get mortal strike (September 29); Blizzard EU forums, 20 minute Lay On Hands is incredibly annoying (October 4); Blizzard, Class Deep Dives: Hunter and Druid (September 30); Blizzard, The WoW: Forever Podcast, Episode 2 (October 1); Kaivax, WoW Forever Beta Development Notes, updated October 1 (October 1); Warcraft Tavern, All Changes to Paladins in WoW Forever (September 21); Wowhead Forever tooltips for Penance and Lay on Hands (checked October 5).