Alpha testers come here ! (Priest discussion)

[Deleted]

Uh, HN right now on beta (at least with the 90 toons scaled to 100, might be dif with a 100 toon in the gear they give you) is actually the best aoe. If you're stacked you actually just stack archangel, do 90 talent, and spam holy nova and win.

HN is not competitive because of its 10 yard radius. That means it performs poorly on any fight where you can't stack people closely and there seem to be many fights with mechanics preventing stacking so far. Where other healers can use the melee clump, HN is self-cast so if mechanics prevent you from joining the melee clump HN is useless.

So even though HN is reasonably high throughput by it self, in practice on most fights other healers have the advantage.

That being said holy priest aoe throughput is higher than holy nova spam as far as I can tell.
Without the SoO set bonuses

a cycle of BH/BH/PoH/BH/BH/PoH/CoH is (132*12+226*10+226*6)/10.5 = 495.24% of spellpower per second

HN spam is 138*5/1.5 = 460% of spellpower per second.

i.e. HN is 7.7% lower.


That of course does not factor in class abilities (e.g. DA/EoL) or secondary talent differences, but those are hard to judge atm so its not certain who will have the advantage. If overhealing is high HN might edge closer or overtake the holy aoe, but even if it does it won't be by much.

Archangel trades 25% of your casting time for a 25% healing bonus + whatever healing you get from atonement (lets face it its not much). The bonus is quite slim on sustained throughput, but admittedly it is very high when you can stack evangelism during periods of low incoming damage.

However holy also has sanctuary, which adds a permanent 3.1875% per target at the cost of 1 GCD per 40s and lightwell, which is effectively a passive bonus.

Basically Holy Nova may have strong HPM and HPCT, but its just has too many limitations to be generally competitive. Even when it is competitive it is only marginally better or no different than other healers have. It is not a monster like holy radiance was in dragon soul.

The true advantage of disc is CoW/PWS and spirit shell with the 2set bonus and you will most likely gear for that, making HN even less competitive.

On bursty encounters other healers also have powerfull CDs. For example even if you have 4 clumps of 5 ppl, a druid can use tranquility in one spike and it will heal all 20, whereas disc has no such option because barrier due to the short area of effect on PwB.

If it's a spammable aoe heal that tops both mana efficiency and throughput charts, we'll end up right back where we are now with divine star doing retarded amounts of healing once we reach expansion end gear. It turns the healing into brainless spam and the only way for blizzard to make it more difficult is to up the damage out put of bosses until they start 1 shotting people. Its part of the problem they've been vocal about. This isn't really helping that situation at all.

That is actually not going to happen. Blizzard has said that health will scale about the same as healing power. So the bosses will hit harder as you go higher and higher, but that will remove the same % of health than previous bosses who hit less hard did. Rather than being able to fill more of a players health bar with a single heal what will happen is you will simply be able to fill the same % deficit in a larger health pool and keep up with the increased damage.

Why is scaling a problem for Holy Nova and not the other heals? Given that they're all based off spell power, the HPCT advantage that Holy Nova has over all the other heals is going to remain the same, no?

There is no scaling problem with spellpower, but there may be a scaling problem with secondaries. Mastery, multistrike and crit affect CoW/PWS and HN differently. So depending on which way you itemize you may see HN scaling less well than CoW/PWS or nice versa.

- - - Updated - - -

The new borrowed time gives a 6s period of haste, so it will affect all spellcasts within that period (4.5s). That also makes haste an extremely powerful stat for PWS/CoW weaving. Assuming you can afford it mana wise.

[Darkener]

@Havoc .. HN is 12yards now and making it any larger than that would totally negate the downside of the priest having to position properly. It's larger than Sanctuary and efflo, and is either larger or on par with Healing Rain size but has no cast time, also does damage, costs next to nothing, hits for a ton, is uninterruptible (Thok says hello), and is totally mobile. I don't think calls to buff HN will get noticed much. Actually, it's more like sssshhhh, stop drawing attention! Believe me it heals a large area, larger than even the visual.

[Kitmajere]

There's still no practical method for healing a spread out raid taking aoe damage. PoH would be our solution, but it's prohibitive mana cost plus disc's lack of mechanics to make it cheaper (serendipity) leaves disc without much but single target heals/absorbs. Not to mention PoH is a headache to begin with due to its outdated all members of a party must (ideally) be within 30 yards of whomever you target mechanic.

[Darkener]

There's still no practical method for healing a spread out raid taking aoe damage. PoH would be our solution, but it's prohibitive mana cost plus disc's lack of mechanics to make it cheaper (serendipity) leaves disc without much but single target heals/absorbs.

That's a common problem for many healers outside of long CDs. It marks the return of healing assignments. It's an age-old concept, but it works. An individual healer is not meant to be able to heal the entire raid alone.

[Well]

Just how strong CoW is for disc? And how do you actually use it with that long of a cast time? Is it even possible to cast it mid-fight?

[Post]

HN is not competitive because of its 10 yard radius. That means it performs poorly on any fight where you can't stack people closely and there seem to be many fights with mechanics preventing stacking so far. Where other healers can use the melee clump, HN is self-cast so if mechanics prevent you from joining the melee clump HN is useless.

So even though HN is reasonably high throughput by it self, in practice on most fights other healers have the advantage.

I'm talking about in practice, in practice with holy nova spam, archangel+90 talent on cd I've been #1. It only needs to hit 5 people and the healing # is almost doubled because of the aegis it produces. If you can't get in range of 5 people it obviously wouldn't work. Also it's OP on a fully disc geared 90 scaled to 100 which makes it better than the 100 toon would. Another reason why it's so nice is it's pretty much mana neutral, so you can just spam it non stop for the entire fight.

It's not like miles ahead of every other healer but what makes it so OP is that like 90% of your heals come from 1 spell.

[Isheria]

Testing at lvl 90 toons with SoO gear is as useless as it gets. When you actually get 100 your character won't have any sockets at all unless your lucky and won't have anywhere near perfect itemization like it does on live with fully upgraded SoO gear hope you are aware of this. First round of tuning for healers is also coming today you can probably expect quite a few nerfs on the way too good efficient heals i imagine like renew, rejuv, holy nova etc.

[Post]

Testing at lvl 90 toons with SoO gear is as useless as it gets. When you actually get 100 your character won't have any sockets at all unless your lucky and won't have anywhere near perfect itemization like it does on live with fully upgraded SoO gear hope you are aware of this.

Also it's OP on a fully disc geared 90 scaled to 100 which makes it better than the 100 toon would.

I'm aware.

[appro]

Testing at lvl 90 toons with SoO gear is as useless as it gets. When you actually get 100 your character won't have any sockets at all unless your lucky and won't have anywhere near perfect itemization like it does on live with fully upgraded SoO gear hope you are aware of this. First round of tuning for healers is also coming today you can probably expect quite a few nerfs on the way too good efficient heals i imagine like renew, rejuv, holy nova etc.

I could be taking it the wrong way but my impression is that we'll still have a reasonable amount of sockets pre-raid as its one of the 'rolled stats'.
https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...11315352883200

I'm a little worried about this Diablo style gear approach. I can see people being recruited because they've been fed gear or been lucky.

[ThePlanckEnergy]

Testing at lvl 90 toons with SoO gear is as useless as it gets. When you actually get 100 your character won't have any sockets at all unless your lucky and won't have anywhere near perfect itemization like it does on live with fully upgraded SoO gear hope you are aware of this. First round of tuning for healers is also coming today you can probably expect quite a few nerfs on the way too good efficient heals i imagine like renew, rejuv, holy nova etc.

I actually disagree, except for Holy Nova. That definitely has to change.

Unless they expect many of the Mythic encounters to be 5-7 healed (out of a roster of 20) healers need buffs (especially, say, Shaman). Particularly to mana longevity. Mana nerfs are the absolute opposite of what they should be doing (also keep in mind that spirit is barely going to go up during the expansion, it's only on a few pieces, and those pieces have the lowest itemization budge).

Of course, it may just be that most bosses during the testing have had their health severely overtuned, but eh....

[laplacedemon]

IIRC they did say 5 healers will be the norm, so anything from 3 to 7 is quite possible.

I'm a bit surprised that Holy Nova didn't get a change. Binding Heal's mana cost has been increased, Renew is a bit toned down, nothing unexpected.

[Dracodraco]

So... Did anyone but me notice that Archangel is documented in the notes as having it's cooldown removed? Anyone with beta installed that can confirm/deny? Quote:

• Archangel Consumes your Evangelism, increasing your healing done by 5% for each Evangelism consumed for 18 sec. Priest - Discipline Spec. Instant. 30 sec cooldown.

I mean, that'd actually make disc quite an interesting spec - you'd have to juggle keeping max uptime on archangel through smite/penance/holy fire, along with lining archangel use up with heavy-AOE due to the 50% reduced mana cost on PoH when activated, and the 100% crit PoH...
Or alternative you'd just fucking keep going 1 stack archangel and say fuck the rest.

[Deleted]

Yeah, just caught that. I guess that is a fix, and one I didn't see proposed here. So, we'd be balanced around almost 100% uptime of AA? That could work pretty nicely - Atonement remains a key part of the spec and Holy Nova can remain strong since the expectation is that GCDs would be spent on rebuilding Evangelism to consume AA.

I actually really like this change. It could make alternate Evangelism consumption possible depending on the necessity to spend GCDs on pure healing and it would make Discipline quite a bit more interesting and involved.

Should probably add - if the 100% uptime option of Atonement is intended then Smite needs buffed slightly. Just a touch.

Enlightenment also makes more sense now. It affects Payer of Healing with the additional crit and not Prayer of Mending.

Offensive Penance might also need a little bit of a buff if I am reading things correctly.

[Deleted]

Looks like they buffed Penance and removed cd on Archangel. If this is true it would be like a sort of "stance" in which we can be or not? Kinda strange, why shouldn't I want to be in Archangel buff? =/

[Deleted]

I doubt holy nova will be changed from what it is. Mana cost might go up somewhat. Blizzard wants to sell HN as one of the strengths of disc and they will buff it as much as they have to. If they redesigned HN with a glyph to be targeted but do no damage and have a cast time, it will be a much more well rounded spell.

@Post Coming first in a niche encounter with HN, does not really mean anything, that depends on how your strategy is set up, what the other healers are doing and so on. Also if you have time to stack evangelism between bursts and the raid is stacked HN is a fairly strong heal, but even so HN spam is still not the best HPS you can achieve. On 8+ targets holy will have higher sustained throughput, unless you have the opportunity to stack archangel with little healing loss. Testing with level 90 end of expansion gear is not informative. The set bonuses are crucial in determining throughput. Look at the bonuses:

Item - Priest T17 Discipline 2P Bonus: Penance channels for 1 additional second and generates 2 stacks of Evangelism.
Item - Priest T17 Discipline 4P Bonus: When you active Archangel, the mana cost of Prayer of Healing is reduced by 50% for 10 sec.
Item - Priest T17 Holy 2P Bonus: Prayer of Mending jumps to 2 additional targets.
Item - Priest T17 Holy 4P Bonus: When Prayer of Mending heals a target, you have a 40% chance to gain a stack of Serendipity.

No bonus for HN at all. Holy gets a sizeable buff to PoM and free serendipity procs. The 2 set makes PoM better than binding heal. It now heals 7 times and you can have multiple PoMs up feeding you serendipity procs. In constrast HN gets no buff at all.

@Darkener. Healing rain can be cast anywhere. You can even cast it on the melee, so it is very often quite usable. A 12 yard radius on the other hand when the mechanics enforce an 8 yard spread makes HN useless, because you can't go in the melee clump. The fact that its instant is nice, but how often do you have interrupt mechanics in raids. The fact that its crazy cheap, is nice, but you can expect that to change. The problem with a niche spell like holy nova, is that you can't nerf it too hard or no one will use it and you can't buff it or niche encounters will be trivialised by it, which is disc's life story. HN spam can be quite good when it has a chance to work, but to be honest it is still not the best and it is only marginally better than the heals of other healers, which are more usable.

edit:

CD removal from archangel, changes things a lot for disc. It will probably be better to use penance/HF--> Archangel rotationally during burst to keep a permanent 10% buff and stack archangel to 5 between bursts.

Unless they change the tier bonus PoH will become a very cheap spell for disc. Overall this is a notable throughput increase for disc. Lets see where it leaves us. PoH should now be better than holy nova again with the archangel buff. In fact a 100% crit PoH every 18s is crazy strong.

[Yvaelle]

Just checked, Archangel CD was removed - which feels really cool actually!

Then again, this is coming from a Spriest who - when asked to heal, specs Disc and only uses Holy Fire/Smite - and Shield/ProM while moving



One other thing worth noting is that while the tooltip says Clarity of Will only shields for the same amount as Power Word: Shield - and that makes it sound pretty underwhelming - it actually is shield for double PW: Shield, stacks with Shield, is spammable - and stacks with itself up to a cap (which appears to be 50% of my max hp).

[laplacedemon]

AA indeed doesn't have a cooldown on this build.
A new AA buff just overwrites the old one, regardless of the stacks of Evangelism used.
It gives the 100% crit PoH buff every time it's up (Even a Smite-AA-PoH rotation is possible).

One other thing worth noting is that while the tooltip says Clarity of Will only shields for the same amount as Power Word: Shield - and that makes it sound pretty underwhelming - it actually is shield for double PW: Shield, stacks with Shield, is spammable - and stacks with itself up to a cap (which appears to be 50% of my max hp).

My combat text says 33k for CoW and 27k for PW:S, while both tooltips say 27k.

[Well]

AA indeed doesn't have a cooldown on this build.
A new AA buff just overwrites the old one, regardless of the stacks of Evangelism used.
It gives the 100% crit PoH buff every time it's up (Even a Smite-AA-PoH rotation is possible).

Could you write the description of the spell as it is on beta?

[Yvaelle]

My combat text says 33k for CoW and 27k for PW:S, while both tooltips say 27k.

Hmm, I checked by using them and then mousing over the buff - I'll check later if the buff is also incorrect when I'm back in a couple hours

[Jimjam38]

I'm just gonna repeat exactly what I said over on everyone's favorite QQ thread, because i cbf rewording it:

Removing the cooldown on AA does a number of things:

Firstly, it retains its buff style, something I personally thought was pretty important considering the origins of the spec

Secondly, it actually makes tuning somewhat more straightforward. The problem having been that archangel was 'necessary' to put us on par with the other healers, but outside of it we felt useless. This easily solves that issue, and adds a bit more "rotational" depth.

Thirdly, it addresses the heavily voiced problem of archangel requiring no real decision making, but instead of it being about WHEN to use it (which would always be a problematic focus for the desired kind of decision making), its now about HOW MUCH to use it, how much you want to stack it, can you afford to get a full 5 stack buff or will you be better off only using 3 stacks etc.

Fourthly, it actually does also manage to mostly address the issue of the baked-in inner focus. This is especially important for the early tiers, where the inner focus crit effect is much more desirable than the throughput increase, but will allow the playstyle to shift as our gear improves with later tiers when the throughput increase becomes relatively more potent. I think it's actually this final point that gives the most depth to the 'new' AA, because without this baked-in inner focus, there would be much less weight around whether its best to use it at low stacks or high stacks.

I'm genuinely impressed with this change (assuming it's intended), but I do wonder how much they actually thought it out, and how much it was just a random idea to try without any real logic behind it. It kinda feels like the classic 'disc hotfix', only they actually managed to do it during the beta this time.
If smite/atonement gets a little more tuning, we could be in a very good place me thinks
We shall see.