[6.2.3] Holy Priest PvE Guide and discussion

[Djriff]

Any fights you use row on for mythic?

[Angelicat]

Hey guys, between a mythic WF auto-repairing autoclave and a mythic iron chew toy, which one is better? Been behind on holy priest so any help is appreciated. My other trinket is mythic iron reaver piston, which should be better than either of those I'm assuming?

I was using the mythic WF auto-repairing autoclave and mythic iron reaver piston and mana was alright (though I did run mindbender), I got the chew toy in a cache so wondering if I should try to use it.

[Djriff]

If you are suffering from throughput issues (lol holy priest), I would run the Chew Toy. Autoclave is a great spirit trinket but unless you plan on rocking that and furnace trinket and PoH spamming, you'll be better off running Chew Toy and Crucible. For HFC you'll want to get Demonic Phylactery and either Flickering Felspark or Unstable Felshadow Emulsion(leech trinket) trinkets.

[Thirteen]

So, multistrike is getting removed (huzzah); how do you guys think this will affect holy? Will some of our shit (and I use that term in every sense) get changed, or will we simply get a new attunement, likely haste?

[Deleted]

It's interesting-ish.

The removal of multistrike doesn't really have any huge impact for holy directly. None of our spells rely on it or have any special interactions, it's only the best stat because it's tuned to be via attunement. What that means for Legion? Nothing yet really. We don't even know if they'll keep attunements or scrap them entirely. We might get some new secondary stat added to the game or simply get a different one that already exists. So long as it's not mastery without an echo of light rework then it's all good

[PosPosPos]

So long as it's not mastery without an echo of light rework then it's all good

Doesn't really need a rework per se if the design doesn't need to be groundbreaking or unique - just needs to proc on HoTs and HW:Sanctuary. EoL refresh isn't even a balance issue given that it's not like IH where you can potentially prestack it to ridiculous values, and the latter isn't a problem in its current iteration to begin with.

[Deleted]

I just don't really like it as a mechanic. For most scenarios I'm always going to favour more immediate healing than healing that comes later. Pushing us to favour mastery for throughput just makes us less good at spot healing and better at padding, a role I'd argue is already filled by mistweavers and a smaller extent trees.

[KaPe]

Maybe they could bring back our "old" mastery - which is to say make the damn thing tick every second. That way it might actually get to heal something in the first two seconds before overheal kicks in. Or maybe make it 3 seconds instead of 6. Either way, the "fix" back in SoO really made it worse than it already was.

What really needs to be reworked is PoH (and Sanctuary, but that will never happen). Isn't it the only spell in the game to still have group based targeting? At least back in the days it used to be pretty strong, so it balanced itself out. Right now it's just your average aoe heal, except with annoying limitation that means more work for raid leaders for next to no gain. They tried something new with Clarity of Purpose, but it competes with WoM and has hugely limited range, so it didn't really work out. Maybe just remove the limit altogether - it will be "boring", but I won't be losing (N*20%) effectiveness every time someone dies, moves out of range or goes into different realm.

What worries me is the reworking of Disc. I just know this is going to end with Disc getting major buffs a week after release and Holy being neglected.

[Myllior]

For most scenarios I'm always going to favour more immediate healing than healing that comes later.

Expanding on this, I'd like it if Holy's Mastery was brought up to par with the other (non-Mistweaver) healer Masteries in terms of the relationship between the type of heal that produces or benefits from the Mastery effect and the type of heal that the Mastery effect produces or gives benefit to.

In other words, if we 'rank' the different common types of healing according to some measure of desirability, we'd probably get Absorb -> Direct Heal -> HoT -> Nothing. If we then examine the behaviour of the non-MW healer Masteries with respect to the above, we have,

• Discipline Priest: Mastery increases the healing of healing spells and the absorption of absorption spells; it also has the innate benefit due to Divine Aegis of increasing the absorption of healing spells when they are critical. So the Mastery benefits a healing type that is either equal to or greater than the heal type that benefited from it.
• Holy Paladin: Mastery produces absorption effects, so it produces a healing type that is greater than the heal type that produced it. Does not benefit Beacon of Light healing nor Sacred Shield*.
• Restoration Shaman: Mastery increases all healing by a percentage based on current target health percentage, so it benefits a healing type equal to the heal type that benefits from it.
• Restoration Druid: Mastery increases all healing by a percentage, so it benefits a healing type equal to the heal type that benefits from it. Requires maintenance.
• Holy Priest: Mastery produces a HoT-like effect when a direct heal does healing and does nothing when a HoT (i.e. Holy Word: Sanctuary, Lightwell and the HoT effect of Renew) does healing; PW:S also receives not benefit. So the Mastery produces a healing type that is lesser than the heal type that produced it.

Examining the above, whenever a healer, other than Mistweaver or Holy Priest, or a Holy Paladin doing Beacon/SS healing, chooses a certain heal type for a given situation, their Mastery will either directly improve that heal type or will provide an effect of a 'greater' heal type. In contrast, a Holy Priest's Mastery will always provide a 'lesser' heal type.

*I'm not well-versed with anything non-healing Priest, so apologies if I've made any mistakes with the Holy Paladin, Restoration Shaman or Restoration Druid Masteries.

[PosPosPos]

I just don't really like it as a mechanic. For most scenarios I'm always going to favour more immediate healing than healing that comes later. Pushing us to favour mastery for throughput just makes us less good at spot healing and better at padding, a role I'd argue is already filled by mistweavers and a smaller extent trees.

What we *really* need are more fights that favor staggered but higher output, than immediate output.

Blizzard has not even come close to achieving their intended design with fight encounters in general when moving from MoP to SoO. Most fights are still incredibly spiky in damage rather than the "sustained damage" model they wanted to push out. Just think about how many fights can be 3-4 healed instead of 5 healed this tier and previous tiers? Only certain fights on Highmaul really lived up to expectations, like Twins, Brackenspore and Imperator on progression. Every other fight featured spiky damage that you would inevitably favor specs that did their healing "now" as opposed to "later", unless it is in the form of absorbs, which transcended the level of just "now" or "later" and just went "I am going to go first regardless".

[Deleted]

I will agree with that completely. The healing now is still a game of topping people off rather than triage and constant throughput. Honestly though I blame healing cooldowns for that. No mechanic would be dangerous if it only did ~50% of your health as damage because you can always just tranq etc before it lands, so they tune up the damage to near one shots and healing continues to just top everybody non-stop.

[PosPosPos]

I will agree with that completely. The healing now is still a game of topping people off rather than triage and constant throughput. Honestly though I blame healing cooldowns for that. No mechanic would be dangerous if it only did ~50% of your health as damage because you can always just tranq etc before it lands, so they tune up the damage to near one shots and healing continues to just top everybody non-stop.

It should feel safe to leave people at ~50% health during periods of high damage, but it doesn't. Anyone below 100% is at a big and noticeable risk of dying, which is exactly the same as in MoP.

Not to mention, there are still big gaps in damage where nothing happens and healers just sit around twiddling their thumbs.

[Grimbold21]

Whats this i heard about that surge of light a long with divine star is a good combo for HFC? Or that Halo replaces cascade for both holy and disc.

[Thirteen]

Whats this i heard about that surge of light a long with divine star is a good combo for HFC?

It's always been for holy, less so for disc because it rarely uses SoL. But the high target count (up to twice your total raid roster), and low cooldown/mana cost of Divine Star makes it a very good combo with SoL. As for Halo, no it's awful, never use it.

[Djriff]

It's always been for holy, less so for disc because it rarely uses SoL. But the high target count (up to twice your total raid roster), and low cooldown/mana cost of Divine Star makes it a very good combo with SoL. As for Halo, no it's awful, never use it.

DS is great with SoL I agree. I thought halo provided the most potential raw healing out of our 3 90's though.

[PosPosPos]

DS is great with SoL I agree. I thought halo provided the most potential raw healing out of our 3 90's though.

It does, but you only pick Halo when you can't run DS.

[Djriff]

It does, but you only pick Halo when you can't run DS.

True, I just thought something had changed.

[Deleted]

It does, but you only pick Halo when you can't run DS.

Not quite, it's worth going halo surge on short fights where you don't need the mana from extra surge procs, in such a situation SoL procs aren't a signficant throughput increase anyway, since the procs would only be replacing glyphed BH. The overall gain of halo outweighs the gain from using flash heal instead of BH (if there was any benefit in the first place, in terms of throughput).

We're talking very few fights where this happens though. Maybe a 3 heal zakuun or 2 heal iron reaver

[PosPosPos]

Not quite, it's worth going halo surge on short fights where you don't need the mana from extra surge procs, in such a situation SoL procs aren't a signficant throughput increase anyway, since the procs would only be replacing glyphed BH. The overall gain of halo outweighs the gain from using flash heal instead of BH (if there was any benefit in the first place, in terms of throughput).

We're talking very few fights where this happens though. Maybe a 3 heal zakuun or 2 heal iron reaver

Yeah, I don't think it's rather practical of me to name all the fringe/cheese situations and exceptions, was just speaking in broad terms.

[Ins0mnia]

Yeah, I wish the fights were less dmg and actually requires you to think about how you gonna use your mana. But then again, that is wishfull thinking.