OK, so this weekend I went out and did the perk that unlocks the celestial powerset a little early, and I've been playing a bit with it. Very, very interesting powerset. In my opinion, the most intriguing powerset in the game so far.

From my experience, the other powersets are pretty similar in terms of playstyle. To some extent, they all lead to faceroll playing, as if you push enough buttons fast enough, the baddie goes down. Ocassionally you might throw a self-heal in, or some other utility power, but not much.

Anyway, playing the celestial powerset is pretty different so far. For starters, Monk's earlier advice to pick up a passive defensive skill as early as possible doesn't seem to apply to the celestial powerset. You can heal yourself much faster than mobs seem to be able to damage you. If it's looking a little scary, take a break from pounding on baddies for a few seconds and get your health back up.

One interesting thing they've chosen to do is make each celestial power do double duty. Target a baddie, and you do damage, target a friendly and you heal him up. It might be worth looking into your targeting preferences to make sure everything's set up to work like you want it to. This is in contrast to WoW, where you've got to decide whether you're going to heal or DPS. Even with the more flexible builds in WoW, there's some penalty or other incentive to specialize in one or the other. Think shadow priests. Yes you can heal as a shadow priest, but you'll do a pretty crappy job. And holy priests can hurt things a bit, but they're going to be at the bottom of the DPS meter. As far as I can tell, the two-edged sword that is the celestial powerset let's you do both pretty damn effectively.

The really interesting thing about celestial is that it packs pretty nearly every major utility into a single toon. You can heal, rez (talented, it can be an AOE rez(!)), single-handedly manage the aggro of the entire group (boost the presence of the tank, and oh, complete aggro wipe for anyone in the group, anyone?), chain heals, AoE heals, healing buffs and debuffs, healing aura, knockback + root power, and a handy buff/debuff remover (that wipes ALL debuffs from friendly targets at once).

All this plus what appears to be some pretty OP DPS to boot (a fully charged Rebuke will just about one-shot a Villian). What's not to like?