Any of you disc priests miss playing holy?

[Noradin]

because disc's output in jinrokh is very high due to lucidity+atonement, and the extra damage allows you to push the fight faster. and do we really need to examine archangel bubble spam before the lightning dodge phase? even in poor gear an arch'd PWS can absorb an entire lightning ball's worth of fuckup/lag.

plus you can absorb most of a focused lightning/ionization nuke with a PWS.

plus binding heal is atrocious, and isn't a smart heal.

Did you see the post I quoted and responded to? It was stating holy where better because of the lightning phase which disc had problems with. (<- this is essentially what I responded to, not my opinion.)

My response was that lighning phase could be done with both specs (which means it is no problem for disc!), since spamming glyphed binding heal would be enough on its own, you don't even need to move unless a ligthning strike targets you directly in which case you just use one of your on-the-move options.

Note how nowhere did it say there was no advantage to atonement or spirit shell in this fight. Neither did I state PW:S was of no use.
I didn't state they where useful either, but that is because I thought it went without saying that a disc priest would use them.

The raid dying when only casting atonement spells is obviously (I hope) a generalization that applies to most fights but not to those with huge buffs to atonement.
You can kill heroic Horridon never casting anthing but atonement spells, but if you exspect that to be the case for all those encounters then the rest of your healing team most likely doesn't really need you to meet the requirements.
The same is true for holy and PoH/CoH/PoM, you can win fight with them but you should exspect to have to use other spells, too.
The difference is: You don't have to constantly keep track of the fight like disc does to preemt damage. Reacting is mostly enough, thus I find it is much less involving.
So my opinion is that I can be more laid back playing holy.

[moremana]

Have always been Holy, specced Disc once, it was too easy, went back to Holy!

[Deleted]

because disc's output in jinrokh is very high due to lucidity+atonement, and the extra damage allows you to push the fight faster. and do we really need to examine archangel bubble spam before the lightning dodge phase? even in poor gear an arch'd PWS can absorb an entire lightning ball's worth of fuckup/lag.

plus you can absorb most of a focused lightning/ionization nuke with a PWS.

plus binding heal is atrocious, and isn't a smart heal.

I have done Jin rokh in both specs and on both 10 and 25 and there only one conclusion. Holy has much more output here on both 25 and 10 man with equal gear, especially in the spread phase, when ppl are dying, but disc is better, because the potential for one shots is high.

If you think binding heal is attrocious you don't know how or when to use it.

Post 5.3 on 25man, holy is better for council, tortos, maegera, iron qon, twins. Disc is better on jin'rok horridon, dark animus, lei shen and ji kun. Durumu and primo the sepcs are equal. I haven't done ra-den.

[Felade]

maegera,

PW:Barrier is the better raid cooldown, even though it doesn't show up on meters. As long as you can get your raid inside the bubble for a decent amount of time, like you can on Magaera.

Holy's problems are mostly that it is designed by Blizzard. Blizzard has some pretty odd ideas about Holy's healing, and they'd rather stubbornly hold onto those ideas in the name of variety rather than fix the problems.

- They want Holy to be a "Jack of all Trades" healer. So they give us spells that work similarly to another class' spells, but are much weaker. So you get a bunch of spells that aren't really worth casting. Sanctuary is a weak Healing Rain. Renew is a weak Rejuv. These spells have their place, but are pretty situational.

- Lightwell exemplifies their stubborn attitude. The old Lightwell just didn't work for your average raid group. Sure, if you bent over backwards, you could get some use out of it by coordinating your clicks, but even then it was only moderately useful. They held off on fixing this for years (until Lightspring) simply because Lightwell was different than what other healers did. They even put in a note on the loading screen! They were *desperate* to get this to work, but put lipstick on a pig...its still a pig.

- The talent system revamp fixed an old problem with Holy, where the talents basically made no sense and had nothing to do with how you actually played. But it was a problem for quite awhile. There were 7 talent points you had to take, just to make Renew even remotely worth casting (its better now that it isn't competing with POH on the same Chakra, still terrible though). It just showed that Blizzard had some strange ideas about Holy.

- The big one, though, is Chakra. Blizzard basically killed the spec for 10 mans the moment they put in Chakra. Its a nice idea, being able to be intelligent about switching between tank and raid healing. Unfortunately, that's not really how healing 10 mans works. Sometimes, the tank or a single player takes damage. Two seconds later, the whole raid takes damage. Then its back to tank damage. What's more, Chakra is only an advantage in a theoretical world where the other healers struggle to switch between tank and raid healing, which they definitely do not. So Holy doesn't really see any advantage from Chakra, and only gets the drawbacks. Blizzard has stubbornly clung to Chakra for two expansion now. Perhaps we're seeing some cracks with GC's mention that they'd like to "make Chakra more fun".

- Somehow they manage to mess up the mana cost tuning for Holy again. Disc has no problems (and not just due to Rapture) - possibly because Atonement is nearly free and really strong for moderate damage. Holy is fine if you sit around waiting for the big AOE damage to happen. You'll have a hard time with mana if you try to triage damage. What's worse, is as you get later into the expansion and everyone starts to drop Spirit - well, that isn't really a viable option for Holy, so Holy has sort of the same problem a Prot Warrior does (they stack Dodge/Parry while everyone else gets to stack DPS stats as a tank, and Holy stacks Spirit while everyone else gets to stack throughput stats).

Holy is mostly fine on 25 mans, because you can get away with focusing on nothing but raid healing. For 10's? Holy needs more flexibility, and a better way to triage during light-to-moderate damage. They should probably just jettison the whole "Jack of all Trades" mentality for the spec, and focus on making just a few spells really strong. And they need to take Holy out from under the yoke of Chakra.

[Vicarious]

Divine hymn scales, barrier does not. When you have upwards of 47k spellpower without procs it heals for more than any reduction barrier is going to do during rampages, it heals people outside your small stack who are finishing off worms if they were stunned away from the group and it makes all your other healers heal for more as well which doesn't show up on the meter directly. Also with a DA and a smoke bomb for every rampage another reduction cd looks even less appealing.

We had one wipe early on in progression on this boss where I was the only healer alive going into the 5th rampage, had sanctuary down a DI PoM threw Divine Star CoH reg PoM Divine Hymn CoH PoM one PoH got a second DI proc used it and a second Divine star and literally no one who wasn't already dead died. We still had DA and smoke bomb from dps on that one but still the raw healing power is insane. In that phase divine hymn did 13 mil echo of light did 9 mil two divine stars did 7 mil pom did 2.5 mil

My point in all this is that if I was disc I would have had a pre SS used barrier after the other two reduction cds dropped when everyone was getting low by then used my 25% less effective 90 talent and slow cast PoH and everyone would have died. Now after that the tanks had to be out of range of each other, we had no hand of purity and he had the debuff from the previous head so we wiped there but still...I didnt say holy was the end all be all of tank healing did I! :P

[nobodysbaby]

Vic, you could absolutly say PW:B scales, cause the further into tiers we get, the higher dmg we take.

[Isheria]

Divine hymn scales, barrier does not. When you have upwards of 47k spellpower without procs it heals for more than any reduction barrier is going to do during rampages, it heals people outside your small stack who are finishing off worms if they were stunned away from the group and it makes all your other healers heal for more as well which doesn't show up on the meter directly. Also with a DA and a smoke bomb for every rampage another reduction cd looks even less appealing.

We had one wipe early on in progression on this boss where I was the only healer alive going into the 5th rampage, had sanctuary down a DI PoM threw Divine Star CoH reg PoM Divine Hymn CoH PoM one PoH got a second DI proc used it and a second Divine star and literally no one who wasn't already dead died. We still had DA and smoke bomb from dps on that one but still the raw healing power is insane. In that phase divine hymn did 13 mil echo of light did 9 mil two divine stars did 7 mil pom did 2.5 mil

My point in all this is that if I was disc I would have had a pre SS used barrier after the other two reduction cds dropped when everyone was getting low by then used my 25% less effective 90 talent and slow cast PoH and everyone would have died. Now after that the tanks had to be out of range of each other, we had no hand of purity and he had the debuff from the previous head so we wiped there but still...I didnt say holy was the end all be all of tank healing did I! :P

The only way your divine hymn can do 13 million on megaera is by having the other healers being afk and health bars lurking around 10% hp so there would be 0 overheal just saying!

[TyrantWave]

Come to think of it... I've never even specced holy on my priest.

So I guess I'm not missing it really =P

[Soulstrike]

Divine hymn scales, barrier does not.

????? PW:B also scales proportionally to amount of damage you take

damage taken: 100k first tier, 150k 2nd tier and 200k final tier

[Deleted]

PW:Barrier is the better raid cooldown, even though it doesn't show up on meters. As long as you can get your raid inside the bubble for a decent amount of time, like you can on Magaera.

You probably did your maths in 5.2 or for 10man. The new reality for 25man is entirely different:

From my logs
[02:04:30.269] Shaarra Divine Hymn Haáaze +118632
[02:04:30.269] Shaarra Divine Hymn Revêrie +107847
[02:04:30.293] Shaarra Divine Hymn Rinotzk +107847
[02:04:30.293] Shaarra Divine Hymn Põntos +*167834* (O: 69429)
[02:04:30.293] Shaarra Divine Hymn Mouninja +109890 (O: 8742)
[02:04:30.293] Shaarra Divine Hymn Gosak +*182768* (O: 32925)
[02:04:30.294] Shaarra Divine Hymn Wíndstorm +*158188* (O: 102802)
[02:04:30.294] Shaarra Divine Hymn Tallor +118632
[02:04:30.294] Shaarra Divine Hymn Sneakyluap +*182401* (O: 54862)
[02:04:30.294] Shaarra Divine Hymn Duele +118631
[02:04:30.294] Shaarra Divine Hymn Absentiz +118631
[02:04:30.294] Shaarra Divine Hymn Recette +*237263*

Lets just say that DH hits for 100k per target before mastery and crit to round things up. I have 26% mastery and 18% crit in my holy gear, so

100*1.26*1.18 ~150k per target. Multiple it by 1.05 from the healing buff it applies and you get ~155k per target. DH hits a total of 48 targets so 7.44m healing. It requires an 8s channel so with 10% raid buffed haste that is a 7.3second channel. I.e. DH provides about 1m HPS before overheal. It also applies a buff of 10% for an average of 12s per target to the whole raid.

Lets look at maegera

80k DPS per raid member raw or 75k average modified by the various damage reduction abilities present in the game. Thus barrier provides the equivalent of 18.75k HPS per target for 8s, which is the equivalent of 470k HPS. In addition the disc priest has an additional 5.6s of casting time at say 300k HPS, while barrier is active. This is the equivalent of 5.430m healing.

Now the raid is also taking about 1.8m HPS during the time, so assuming the rest of the healer team is providing 1.2m HPS the 10% bonus is worth roughly 120k HPS over 12s for an addition 1.4m healing.

That 10% bonus gets stronger and stronger the higher the incoming raid damage, so DH also scales with outgoing raid HPS and thus indirectly with incoming raid damage. And don't forget you can use an intellect pot with DH. You can't really do anything to make barrier better.

It can be shown mathematically that barrier can never overtake divine hymn, without fairly massive overheal.

Right now tranq and DH are the strongest CDs by far for megera 25man hc and you have zero reason to play disc in this encounter.

I run the 13k spirit as holy and can effectively spam the whole fight. Just need to be smart about using your legendary meta procs. I even use int pots during the fight.

[snaxattax]

barrier scales going from tier to tier in terms of mob damage and it also makes absorption spells relatively stronger as it takes longer to burn through them. however, the biggest thing that makes barrier better is that it doesn't require the priest to stand completely still channeling to use, and it can also be used as a tank cooldown when the raidwide component is not needed. DH is only useful as a raid-wide hps cooldown and requires you to be completely sedentary - even tranq can be used while moving via shaman symbiosis. part of what makes disc so much better than holy is that it has massive flexibility, and even on 'holy' fights disc's hps can keep up, and even on 'holy' fights holy is generally tied if not outclassed by other raw hps/hot healers (most notably, mistweavers).

every fight you put as a 'holy' fight was originally a disc fight because the dps helped to push phases on qon, or doing things like pre shielding stomps so that crystal shells never fell off on tortos, or the general utility of 1 min cooldown spirit shells. the only reason they're 'holy' fights now is that people have such high ilvl/hp that you don't need the absorbs to survive. sure, once you have enough health that you can take every single raid nuke to the face without dying, the extra HPS of holy is nice, i guess, but i'd rather kill farm content faster by doing more atonement than spam hots.

holy needs to bring some unique thing to raids. disc has their arsenal of absorbs, holy should bring something. one thing that could be neat would be if they were to bring back the energizing effects from druid hots and give variations of them to healer specs. it gave a reason to keep hots on as many people as possible, even when the healing wasn't immediately needed as it sped up the fight.

[Grubjuice]

i have no personal loyalty to any spec.
i have one of every healing class, and my priest i regularly switch between Holy and Disc. What ever seems appropriate for the encounter.

[Vicarious]

Vic, you could absolutly say PW:B scales, cause the further into tiers we get, the higher dmg we take.

yeah I mean once you are in a tier thats it for scaling on barrier but the tier scales 3 times in the xpac only maybe my raid comp has too many damage reductions already but I feel that gear scaling>content scaling at this point especially looking at the healer legendary cloak proc

and yeah look at post #70 and my divine hymn hits a lot harder, that buff you get on the raid from it isn't considered most of the time but hes right it also scales with content indirectly and its one of those things where I don't care if I do nothing in low damage fights/phases because when damage hits there's nothing like a holy priest.


---------- Post added 2013-07-01 at 12:56 PM ----------

The only way your divine hymn can do 13 million on megaera is by having the other healers being afk and health bars lurking around 10% hp so there would be 0 overheal just saying!

that was my point, what other healer can do that to save 25 people? not even druids

[snaxattax]

EM + berserking + HTT + ascendance comes pretty close, and can be done while moving.

>yeah I mean once you are in a tier thats it for scaling on barrier but the tier scales 3 times in the xpac only maybe my raid comp has too many damage reductions already but I feel that gear scaling>content scaling at this point especially looking at the healer legendary cloak proc

you're still not factoring in that barrier makes absorbs stronger. if raid damage would otherwise consume all of your pre-cast absorbs, casting barrier would cause the absorbs to still be up after the raid damage.

[Noradin]

EM + berserking + HTT + ascendance comes pretty close, and can be done while moving.

>yeah I mean once you are in a tier thats it for scaling on barrier but the tier scales 3 times in the xpac only maybe my raid comp has too many damage reductions already but I feel that gear scaling>content scaling at this point especially looking at the healer legendary cloak proc

you're still not factoring in that barrier makes absorbs stronger. if raid damage would otherwise consume all of your pre-cast absorbs, casting barrier would cause the absorbs to still be up after the raid damage.

It is a multiplier to EH. You could just as well claim it makes heals stronger since you get everyone back up to full health faster, but does it fell that way? No, of course not, because the numbers don't change.
The reason why Barrier never seems to scale is because it will always be the same reduction on any damage an encounter does, since new content also means new encounters.
If you have it it is not really scaling at all. It will always be the same absolute reduction on the same damage source (encounter ability) regardless of the progress of the caster and the affected.
You will never ever notice any scaling: if you get to the encounter at all then it will do that encounter-ability specific reduction regardless of what else you can do.
Thus, it is basically all your other stats, especially you health, that do the scaling (so you can reach the encounter), and damage reductions behave more like optional parts of the encounter design, than parts of your scaling toolkit.

[smiiiff]

if you miss being holy, go holy.

our guilds top healer is a Holy priest. he might be outhealed on some fights but he is the most consistent player we have and always performs a 100%. He knows his class and will, given half a chance, outheal disc and holy paladin. He does miracles with his gear and proves skill still means a lot more than most think. He just is the best at what he likes best. If we asked him to go holy because it might get more healing output, he would probably heal less because he can't play as he likes it.

Also, being the best healer has nothing to do with numbers. being the best healer means you your aim is to keep people alive, not top the hps meter. If you can do that while playing holy and having fun, you are playing the game better than the recount-munchkins

[Deleted]

I play Holy in RBGs and in 90% of all games I am top healer. Holy has very nice AOE healing abilities that are quite useful for RBGs. In Arenas I guess that Disc is a bit better but still playable.

[Thelxi]

Blizzard should bring back holy concentration. I really miss that from holy.

[nobodysbaby]

They might do just that Thelxi, it seems finally they realized Holy have low regen compared to the other classes (most of all compared to Disc). I think it's got to the point it's very hard to keep a dualspecc/gears now and do it good, cause the gear differents so much between Holy & Disc. Different stat prios and regen lvls.

That or a regennerf to the others, I don't mind that either. Would probably be better or we risk that Spirit will become a non-desired stat for most classes in this tier and I do like that you have to manage mana as a healer.

[Blachshma]

They might do just that Thelxi, it seems finally they realized Holy have low regen compared to the other classes (most of all compared to Disc). I think it's got to the point it's very hard to keep a dualspecc/gears now and do it good, cause the gear differents so much between Holy & Disc. Different stat prios and regen lvls.

That or a regennerf to the others, I don't mind that either. Would probably be better or we risk that Spirit will become a non-desired stat for most classes in this tier and I do like that you have to manage mana as a healer.

They said they were not sure if disc's regen is too high or holy's is too low. They might as well nerf disc's regen and holy ends up the same as it is now, which is not good enough. They also recognize mana regen is the only problem with holy, totally ignoring Chakra, Spirit of Redemption being useless, GS being buggy, no utility, no niche, no extra dps, nothing really special to make us stand out, crap in 10s as well.