[Legion] Holy Priest Discussion

[Appatastic]

I am right there with you Aeires. I think I am at around 825ilvl and every dungeon has been a blast. Your description of healing a fight is pretty dead on. Being able to use your entire toolkit for fights, and everything feel effective, makes for a very rewarding experience. I was very afraid of flash heal at first but learned pretty quick how great it and heal can be for setting up serenity. Like you said, we can let people get a little low sometimes and have a way to respond quickly. I love the triage.

I am a bit worried that raiding will not be as fun, and that our toolkit won't feel as effective. From the videos I have seen it looks just like a lot of renew spam. I realize its super early and time will tell. Just wondering if anyone else had thoughts on that?

[Deleted]

How was soloing as a holy priest?

Dull :-P but fairly easy. having the powerful heals to fall back on ment that unless you pulled like 5+ mobs you could easily survive just about anything.

Interestingly at level 103 i aquired the shadow artifact and tried shadow dps briefly. Without having the artifact power to pump into the artifact the dps is actually incredibly similar to holy. at at max level doing some dps dummy testing holy was pulling 90k with shadow only pulling 92k. Mostly this is due to the 1% damage increase the healing artifacts get per upgrade. So I honestly dont think leveling as shadow and banking upgrades is actually better than just sucking it up and 3 button spamming it to 110 as holy.

I am a bit worried that raiding will not be as fun, and that our toolkit won't feel as effective. From the videos I have seen it looks just like a lot of renew spam. I realize its super early and time will tell. Just wondering if anyone else had thoughts on that?

This would have been pre-renew nerf im guessing? With raid healing in mind id probably look at speccing for circle of healing and piety. Focusing on PoM on CD, Circle on CD and fill the gaps with renew and prayers. Equally I can potentially envisage a time where we are healing more like holy paladins do currently going heavy single target FH serenity play while still weaving in PoM and circle. Im not sure how it will actually play out in reality but i do feel there is the potential for more than renew spam.

[shanthi]

Dull :-P but fairly easy. having the powerful heals to fall back on ment that unless you pulled like 5+ mobs you could easily survive just about anything.

Interestingly at level 103 i aquired the shadow artifact and tried shadow dps briefly. Without having the artifact power to pump into the artifact the dps is actually incredibly similar to holy. at at max level doing some dps dummy testing holy was pulling 90k with shadow only pulling 92k. Mostly this is due to the 1% damage increase the healing artifacts get per upgrade. So I honestly dont think leveling as shadow and banking upgrades is actually better than just sucking it up and 3 button spamming it to 110 as holy.

Yeah, while it's a different class (resto/ele shaman), the author at the Heliocentric blog did a somewhat more expansive test of leveling as a healer empowering their artifact weapon and as a DPS who didn't use artifact power on their artifact and found it to be substantially similar.

[Deleted]

Yeah, while it's a different class (resto/ele shaman), the author at the Heliocentric blog did a somewhat more expansive test of leveling as a healer empowering their artifact weapon and as a DPS who didn't use artifact power on their artifact and found it to be substantially similar.

Good read! thanks for linking it. I can confirm that pretty accurately describes what I experienced with the holy/shadow match up aswell, and i assume alot of the numbers quoted are largely comparable.

[Muddler]

Stat priority?

[Djriff]

Stat priority?

Depends on the fight. Haste is pretty decent, faster ticks, faster heals, burns mana faster though.
Mastery is great if you can utilize it. Haste > Mastery though.
Crit is also good as a holy priest and healers in general.
Vers is meh.

Roughly I would say Int > SP > Haste > Mastery => Crit > Vers.

[Isheria]

Your stat priority is completely wrong btw haste is the worst secondary for holy by a very large margin. For raiding mastery is the best secondary stat by far followed by crit/vers and haste being dead last. For 5-mans the gap is lessened between crit and mastery but the priority remains roughly the same and haste still remains dead last. The only thing you got right is that int is better than everything else.

[Djriff]

Your stat priority is completely wrong btw haste is the worst secondary for holy by a very large margin. For raiding mastery is the best secondary stat by far followed by crit/vers and haste being dead last. For 5-mans the gap is lessened between crit and mastery but the priority remains roughly the same and haste still remains dead last. The only thing you got right is that int is better than everything else.

You got some math for that? I'm just going with what I experienced with beta, it's by no means mathed out or anything, just what I felt worked for me and my playstyle of holy.

[Deleted]

You got some math for that? I'm just going with what I experienced with beta, it's by no means mathed out or anything, just what I felt worked for me and my playstyle of holy.

I too would like too see something to back up the claims of this stat priority. Not accusing anyone of being "Completely Wrong" because my experiences have again been how things "feel" while doing dungeon content, Patiently waiting for raid testing to start happening.

On the note of stat priority I would tend to end up in the camp that mastery will be very strong for initial progress and progression and may start to weaken out in favour of of crit or haste as people start to out gear content.

However, if Blizzards plan of "people being lower health longer" comes to fruition then that would 100% play to the strength of holy's mastery so could lead to that being top stat for longer.

I am happy to be proved wrong! and definitely eager to see some numbers or a link to backup what Isheria has said.

[Deleted]

Crit: 350 rating = 1%
Haste 325 rating = 1%
Mastery 280 rating = 1%
Versatility 400 rating = 1%

I always like to take crit as my 1.0 base value, in that terms the other stats offer (raw healing):
Crit: 1.00 + Blessing of T'uure = increased chance on +20% healing
Mastery: 1.25 + Overhealing might increase a little bit
Haste: 1.077 + Increases mana spent
Vers: 0.875 + 0.4375 dmg reduce

For raid tests I went Mastery > Crit > Haste (didnt have any Vers. items). I see no benefit in using haste as a stat, since it greatly increases you mana expenditure, but offers only a very small healing benefit (~7.7%) of raw healing. Mastery offers by far most raw healing and especially for tank healing / target healing with constant incoming damage I prefer my healing to be more spread out. Now this is no in depth explanation why certain stats are better, but somewhat my reasons for my personal stat priority. T19 will also give a little additional benefit to mastery, not that big though.

[Isheria]

While my math isn't completely fleshed out yet so you won't see them here for now if you break down the spec into it's fundamentals you will see why haste is inferior to the other stats.

Haste by design increases mana expenditure for a healing increase the other stats increase healing for 0 additional mana cost, holy is a very mana limited spec because it features expensive powerful spells on lengthy cooldowns and the few non-cd abilities it possess have high enough mana costs to discourage casting as much as possible but they heal for a lot.
Holy words practically gain 0 benefit from haste other than a slightly faster cd reset while increased crit chance and higher EoL offers a substantially healing increase to them. Renew has been nerfed to oblivion making haste even less desirable. Prayer of Healing gets tremendous boost from all the traits in the artifact tree, mastery and crit since you can effectively spread EoL into the raid yet the mana cost is high enough to prevent endless spamming if you gear for haste. What haste offers you is reliability with shorter cds on stuff like CoH and PoM and faster resets on holy words but if you use those on cd like you do on live for example you will be mana dry very quickly. Someone also mentioned this already but t19 set bonuses are entirely tailored towards mastery and crit as well.

Here is what an old raid test breakdown looked like by simply gearing for mastery and crit: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...aling&source=4

In a 5-man setting which is basically the only thing you can do right now on beta, mana efficiency doesn't even matter because fights last from 1-2 min tops and you utilize alot of renew and single target heal casts thus making haste look quite good and i won't deny it faster casts are good when mana is irrelevant but that doesn't apply to raids where a fight lasts anywhere from 5-10 mins and you'll run into mana issues quite frequently.

[Deleted]

Seems like solid reasoning on the stats, im definitely inclined to agree. The lower requirements for 1% mastery is something i had forgotten about honestly.

To branch of slightly onto the topic of raid healing. How is the damage and health bars of people in the raid setting? are we in a world of more steady damage and people at low health? or is it still big damage insta-heal to 100%?

[Djriff]

@Isheria I can agree with that. You're right in a dungeon setting mana is pretty irrelevent. So for mythic dungeon pushing with keys haste may actually be useful. Now if you have that stupid affix where everyone's constantly taking damage, mastery would move ahead.

So roughly our stat priority should be Int > SP > Mastery > Crit > Vers >=Haste?
@Aeires from what i've seen from raid testing vids/streams it's a mixture of both. Some abilities will hit the entire raid so you'll have to burst heal them back up. Since the big raid CD's like tranq and divine hymn were nerfed we'll probably have to focus on healing people up. The nice thing I noticed is that even though the raid took a big hit, there isn't much damage coming after that for a good 4-5 seconds depending on the fight. That's plenty of time for you and the other healers to top everyone off. With the removal of mass absorbs on the raid, throughput healers get to shine much more, especially holy with EoL.

[shanthi]

[MENTION=523299]So roughly our stat priority should be Int > SP > Mastery > Crit > Vers >=Haste?

From what Isheria said, it sounds like Int > SP > Mastery >> Crit >= Vers >> Haste (based on the "by far"s).

[Xio]

I have a question for those that joined the alpha and beta tests.
Do I need to level as holy in legion or I can level as shadow and change to holy in level 110 without losing any advantage from the artifact system?

[Isheria]

You can level as shadow but a healer with a leveled artifact does just as much damage as a shadow priest with no artifact traits unlocked so you practically don't gain anything aside from the dps spec having better aoe capabilities since holy nova spam ain't exactly amazing. So far i have levelled 2 times as holy, 1 in alpha and 1 in beta, in a total of 12 hours played each time which is pretty much the average levelling speed for most specs.

[Djriff]

Isheria pretty much hit the nail on the head. Even doing it is as shadow was only a little bit faster.

[Xio]

You can level as shadow but a healer with a leveled artifact does just as much damage as a shadow priest with no artifact traits unlocked so you practically don't gain anything aside from the dps spec having better aoe capabilities since holy nova spam ain't exactly amazing. So far i have levelled 2 times as holy, 1 in alpha and 1 in beta, in a total of 12 hours played each time which is pretty much the average levelling speed for most specs.

Thank you for the information I do not legion access to test things like that.

I have another question to all that tested alpha and beta legion. Do you think in terms of healing holy priest will be a viable choice? I mean we will have place in mythic raids or we will be not worth like in WoD?

[Isheria]

Yes you can raid as holy perfectly fine as it is right now, it brings a very valuable raid cd for your healing team and healing is top notch. If i were to rank healers right now i would say holy is among the top healing specs right now.

[Djriff]

Not to mention Hymn of Hope will be wonderful for progression.