[Priest] State of Holy - 4.2.0

[Deleted]

I am curious what you base this off. As a tank healer holypriest have a asortment of spells at thier disposal. Any good player who knows the fights and what damage to expect when can be a very efficient tank healer. Even taking fight knoledge out of the picture it is efficient enough and does a good job. The only class better would be a pally.

Holy priest is great because you can tank heal you can raid heal in 1 spec all you need is to change your chakra and your good to go.

I would be curious to get a responce as to why you feel it is not efficient. As a tank hear you have a endless renew, heal, greater heal, flash heal, holy word: shield, guardian spirit, and prayer of mending. All these spells are at your disposal i even didnt list serenity. Your heals will proc free no mana flash heals, and im even often suprised how often that procs. I just dont see how its not efficient. I want to assume you are over using flash heal.

TL: DR at end

I think the term efficient has been misinterpreted.
I think what the previous poster was trying to say is that holy isn't 'mana efficient' when tank healing. not that your spell choices don't make for effective tank healing. Sure, trying to tank heal using CoH and PoH would be dumb, but when using the 'right' spells to tank heal it eats through a fair chunk more mana than disc. Most bosses will be hitting too hard for 'heal' to be of any significant use. I doubt any priest has enough regen to support spamming flash heal so that makes gheal the main go-to tank healing spell for both disc and holy. As disc you inner focus, combined with ToT that massively increases the mana efficiency of gheal (works out that every 6th gheal is free if spamming?). You also have grace, I consider the holy equivilant of test of faith. 25% constant on a single target must outweigh 12% when they're under50% (raid healing ofc you can't have grace up on so many people, so test of faith really shines once groups of people drop under 50%, healing when you need it). You also have penance vs HW:serenity. Neither are bad although I often feel I'm risking the tanks life actually spending the GCD on HW, even if the crit afterwords makes up for it, on the plus side it's instant so nice for movement (although so is PW:S, although honestly for single target throughput renew is effectively the PW:S for holy), penance gives a pretty nice boost to HPS and also has excellent HPM. I'd argue that guardian spirit is probably the stronger tank CD compared to Pain suppression, but negligible aside from gimmick fight mechanics. Inspiration uptime should be about equal for both. Crit chance should be higher as disc in the same gear (same crit from talents, increased int from disc). Echo of light and DA can also be compared, both have strengths and weaknesses, if your tank isn't in danger of being 2-3 shot then echo is just as good on a single target imo, more reliable at least. potentially wasted as overheal.

Overall I'd say the two specs were fairly comparable with effective throughput. but disc just has a lot more talents boosting it's mana efficieny using the same or equivilant spells. (strictly single target healing)

PS, i didn't mention power infusion or serendipity.



TL: DR, both specs have comparable throughput abilities, disc has more mana efficiency talents.

[Ultima]

And that made me laugh out loud for the third time today in public. God it never gets old

I do enjoy our little community.

And guys, come on. Two pages (or one?) and we're back to "Holy can/ can't tank heal". I feel I should say more on this, but then I'd be discussing Holy's ability to tank heal. This is madness.

[ramennoodleking]

I do enjoy our little community.

And guys, come on. Two pages (or one?) and we're back to "Holy can/ can't tank heal". I feel I should say more on this, but then I'd be discussing Holy's ability to tank heal. This is madness.

Am I wrong to have the urge to tell you, "No, this is Sparta?"

Or am I wrong in that I wanted to supress that urge?

I would definitely be wrong if I commented--again--on holy tank healing. So instead let's talk about my long lost idea of lightwells distributing free snowcones every click.

[Arlee]

I like snowcones

[Kelesti]

Blue raspberry or get out.

[Ultima]

Am I wrong to have the urge to tell you, "No, this is Sparta?"

Or am I wrong in that I wanted to supress that urge?

I would definitely be wrong if I commented--again--on holy tank healing. So instead let's talk about my long lost idea of lightwells distributing free snowcones every click.

I was baiting someone to respond with that. Can I say that you are right and wrong?

Lightwell should dispense the ability to click it.

[ramennoodleking]

Blue raspberry or get out.

Get outta here, blue isn't even a flavor. Pickle flavored, imo.

[Ultima]

Get outta here, blue isn't even a flavor.

Excuse me, when I ask for a "Blue Slush Puppy", I get a blue-flavoured Slush Puppy.

Thoughts for 4.3 Holy changes? As in, band-aid changes.

[Kelesti]

Thoughts for 4.3 Holy changes? As in, band-aid changes.

Blizzard will ignore everything, tack on a 3/5 minute reduction of Divine Hymn without buffing its healing or any actual benefit to the raid while casting it, and say "Hey look, here's your cooldown, now shut up about it" and we'll be exactly as we were before.

I hate being cynical.

[ramennoodleking]

4.3 will bring about an additional mana decrease to Druid spells while loading them up with haste leather. Upon further review, tranquility was a bit underpowered, so it will get a direct 25% buff.

Shamans will be brought back in line by making each boss room the size of a healing rain.

Paladins will be given an ability that mimics the spark stacking on baelroc since we felt their single target was a bit lacking.

Disc priest will also receive Power Word: Awesome. Don't ask.

Holy priests get snow cone dispending lightwells.

[Sykezs]

To be completely honest (basing this entirely from my own point of view) Firelands has rendered holy priests absolutely useless when most of the mechanics in FL require a raid cooldown (Power Word: Barrier). Pop cooldown X survive boss ability Y.

This in my opinion needs to change. I want healing to be more "healing" rather than mitigating a buttload of damage then slowly heal up the raid for the next "boss ability Y". My guild is entirely dependant on me playing Discipline purely for Power Word Barrier as it is indeed a very good cooldown a bit TOO GOOD.

I love playing holy it allows me to enjoy the game more, but Discipline is far more "usable" in FL. Holy is far superior to disc on ragnaros HM however though, which Im glad because Disc seriously makes me want to quit this game, its boring AoE output is feeble and there's nothing fun in having the ability as discipline to be able to spam GH constantly and have no major mana issues. The only way holy could become more attractive is if they brought in yet ANOTHER mitigation cooldown (BORING). Instead I'd quite like it if a new talent was put in the holy tree to either make Divine Hymn receive a 100% buff or to hit more targets per tick, even then I don't think that's enough because the only reason I use Divine Hymn is for the 10% healing buff it places on players rather than the actual healing it does, looking at logs my divine hymn heals for ~160k+ but if I were to spam PoH/CoH I hit about 350k+ healing in the 8 seconds it would take to channel divine hymn. I've looked at logs where our top restoration druid has done 650k healing from a single tranq, which is absolutely absurd.

Boss encounters in Cataclysm feel as if raid cooldowns such as Power Word: Barrier are a MUST, if you don't have them then go wipe basically. (25 man raider here, no idea about 10). I can't begin to imagine how tough the healing on Alysrazor HM would be if there wasn't a barrier used on the ground phase, the fact that a glyphed Power Word: Barrier adds 10% healing buff to anyone under it makes it even more powerful.

Holy will never truly become useful as long as Power Word: Barrier exists. Either Blizzard change the way raid encounters are designed or holy receives Holy Word: Barrier(TROLOLOL)

TL;DR, FL boss encounters favour Disc priests more than Holy based purely on how powerful Power Word Barrier is.

[Arlee]

Blue raspberry or get out.

Pfft everyone knows Green flavor is > than silly Blue flavor.

[Kelesti]

Pfft everyone knows Green flavor is > than silly Blue flavor.

Only in your dreams, hun.

Ghostcrawler: Yes, we’ve really liked the way the healing model has worked out

Considering the model is Wrath 2.0, everything Cataclysm was supposed to be moving away from, this isn't the answer we needed to hear. This wasn't the question that needed answering from my end, but this speaks volumes enough.

[[-Spiritus-]]

All of you are mad. [Pink flavor, btw, owns all].

Ghostcrawler: Yes, we've really liked the way the healing model has worked out...
Spiritus: ...for me to poop on.

[Vook]

Yeah, I'm also disappointed that healing has become wotlk 2.0. I was really hoping for the "triage" thing, sounded like fun.

[Wuga]

Off the top of my head...

1. CoH could use a major buff. I'm not sure why its direct counterpart WG smartheals for 150k while CoH only smartheals for 60-70k.

2. PoH could use a better targeting mechanic - wider radius, able to splash to 1-2 targets out of group, ... something. I think it could also use a holy-specific buff because the difference between Holy and Disc PoH is pretty small.

3. GS glyph should be reverted to something like the Wrath one or GS should just be completely reworked. I'm not sure what the point of this cd even is any more, since any "interesting" uses of it have basically been nerfed into oblivion.

4. I think Lightwell is fine as is. A tweak to make it easier to click when it's inside an enemy hitbox would be nice.

I guess you could turn DH into Tranq Jr. too, although I don't think that will actually help things much. To me the two major problems with holy are 1) it's worse at everything than resto druids, unless you need B&S for something; and 2) the difference in throughput between holy and disc is not large enough to justify losing barrier, pain sup, better tank heals, etc.

[Vook]

Holy is fine as it is, it just doesn't fit very well at all with the current raid design of balancing healing around raid CD usage. Sure, they're a little behind resto druids, but they beat resto druids greatly at burst healing. But if Blizz continues this bad healing design in 4.3, we're fucked.

And I do agree about DH being painfully underpowered for the 8 minute CD. I mean...jeez, it's like the longest healing CD in the game, only beaten by unglyphed LoH, and it heals roughly half of tranq, which is a 3 minute CD.

[Ultima]

Has the model become Wrath 2.0? I feel like we're nearly at that level of disregard (although, my play style has refined a bit since then) but there's not enough damage to warrant the "nearly one shot" aspect of Wrath. It's like 76% Wrath style, maybe 68%. I want 105% Wrath or 0% Wrath, not some funky hybrid.

I love Divine Hymn, seriously. I feel so smart and awesome when I can say; "Right, these are our cooldowns. We'll use Divine Guardian on the first, SLT on the second, Aura Mastery on the fourth and I can Divine Hymn every other wipe. Is that cool?" on a progression boss. Not to mention I'm not sure that I could just pump out betters healing with ProH and CoH, especially being in a 10 man guild.

Guardian Spirit is a shadow of what it was. It's hard to balance that thing, while it sounds awesome, the things you'd want to use it on usually don't let you due to the damage cap. This is working as intended though, probably.

[KaPe]

You didn't have aoe one shots in WotLK, unless you count something like Festergut explosion with 0 stacks - which would be like standing in Smoldering Devastation or right next to Molten Seeds.

[Ultima]

No, but you could have lots of heavy single target damage to multiple people. Deathbringer Saurfang, for example. I've not done Beth'tliac or Ragnaros Heroic, so I'm not sure what they are like from an AoE PoV.