[6.2.3] Holy Priest PvE Guide and discussion

[Pearl1717]

Quite simply, you're overhealing fights. Holy is incredibly dependent on ToF uptime in order to rank well and so they're hurt the most out of all healers when you overhaul. So you were able to rank during progression when your raid took much more damage in general, and now that you're overhealing fights on farm, your ranks will just get worse. You can only heal the damage that goes out.

[Djriff]

Oh my bad, the image didn't load (still isn't loading) and didn't even realize there was one.

[flyspyro]

Quite simply, you're overhealing fights. Holy is incredibly dependent on ToF uptime in order to rank well and so they're hurt the most out of all healers when you overhaul. So you were able to rank during progression when your raid took much more damage in general, and now that you're overhealing fights on farm, your ranks will just get worse. You can only heal the damage that goes out.

I figured as much. new fights = more damg. it's still makes me sad. I was just worried I was playin worse or gear was wrong. It's demoralizing regardless

[Pearl1717]

There were some obvious things popping out in your logs as well. Other people who are better at looking at holy logs will probably find others, but heres what I saw:

1) Low CPM (casts per minute). You're averaging around 36-38. It should at a minimum be >45. Remember your ABC's, Always Be Casting.

2) Not using all your mana. Even on farm should be ooming yourself on the kill (more or less). Ending fights with >50% mana is bad. This is directly related to point 1.

3) Don't use cascade. Either go SoL+Dstar on stacked fights, or SoL+Halo on spread fights. Can also do MB+Halo if you need mana, but you clearly don't because of points 1 and 2.

4) Not using divine hymn enough, or even at all. Many fights you didn't use it at all. Should be using as many times in a fights as possible. If you aren't using it cause your RL/healing officer told you not to use it unless they call for it, bring this up with them and get them to use it more. Or like most guilds do, on farm its up to you when to use your cd's (especially on heroic)

5) Minor point, but not using serendipity stacks. Its not incredibly important to get rid of your stacks once you get 2, its okay to do things like FH/BH at 2 stacks. But there are some fights that you never used a Heal or PoH to get rid of them. This is and hps and mana loss.

[Myllior]

Hi there!

Hello to you too! I'll (try to) answer your questions, in reverse order.

For the weapon, I'd go for the Edict of Argus with the Mastery enchant. It would be ideal to swap the enchantment, as you said, but I don't think the difference between them is enough to warrant constantly swapping the enchantment back and forth.

For the belt, I'd go for the Demonbuckle Sash of Argus; the extra Intellect and greater total number of secondaries pushes it ahead of the Sludge-Soaked Waistband for your current gear.

With the tier gear, my answer is more approximate. My approach would be to use the T17 2pc on fights where PoM has plenty of opportunities to bounce around (e.g. Hellfire High Council), and to use the T18 2pc with your off-set pieces when PoM won't have much opportunity to bounce around (e.g. Mannoroth).

[flyspyro]

There were some obvious things popping out in your logs as well. Other people who are better at looking at holy logs will probably find others, but heres what I saw:

1) Low CPM (casts per minute). You're averaging around 36-38. It should at a minimum be >45. Remember your ABC's, Always Be Casting.

2) Not using all your mana. Even on farm should be ooming yourself on the kill (more or less). Ending fights with >50% mana is bad. This is directly related to point 1.

3) Don't use cascade. Either go SoL+Dstar on stacked fights, or SoL+Halo on spread fights. Can also do MB+Halo if you need mana, but you clearly don't because of points 1 and 2.

4) Not using divine hymn enough, or even at all. Many fights you didn't use it at all. Should be using as many times in a fights as possible. If you aren't using it cause your RL/healing officer told you not to use it unless they call for it, bring this up with them and get them to use it more. Or like most guilds do, on farm its up to you when to use your cd's (especially on heroic)

5) Minor point, but not using serendipity stacks. Its not incredibly important to get rid of your stacks once you get 2, its okay to do things like FH/BH at 2 stacks. But there are some fights that you never used a Heal or PoH to get rid of them. This is and hps and mana loss.

1. ok, needing to cast more.
2. don't use cascade? I've looked over many logs most people are using cascade. I'll try it though. couldn't hurt.
3. the DH issue is one that's complicated. 1. our lead calls for cds and sometimes mine doesn't get called that's the main issue i'd say. 2. some fights there is hardly any damg going on that it's just not needed, so I don't use it. I could use it for the sake of numbers though. I'll start.
4. Ok, the serendipity stacks take a look at as well.

Thank you for taking the time to look over my logs.

[Djriff]

1. ok, needing to cast more.
2. don't use cascade? I've looked over many logs most people are using cascade. I'll try it though. couldn't hurt.
3. the DH issue is one that's complicated. 1. our lead calls for cds and sometimes mine doesn't get called that's the main issue i'd say. 2. some fights there is hardly any damg going on that it's just not needed, so I don't use it. I could use it for the sake of numbers though. I'll start.
4. Ok, the serendipity stacks take a look at as well.

Thank you for taking the time to look over my logs.

1. ABC = super important for ranking/healing well
2. Cascade does a lot of overhealing on pets and wastes bounces. Thus Halo/Divine Star is superior
3. Healing CD's are weird to begin with, especially when you reach a point of not needing to use one on farm, best thing to do is just be a pad lord.

[bushkanaka86]

What are people using as Spirit caps this tier? I am currently at about 2150 spirit and never run out of mana. Well, I can force myself to run out by spamming Flash Heal or PoH but not during normal healing.

[PosPosPos]

What are people using as Spirit caps this tier? I am currently at about 2150 spirit and never run out of mana. Well, I can force myself to run out by spamming Flash Heal or PoH but not during normal healing.

Then continue to burn excess mana on FH and PoH. They have significantly higher hps than the other fillers you would cast in their stead anyway. There's no reason to use Renew when you can cast FH/PoH.

Also, consider glyphed Binding Heal instead of Renew/FH as a filler too, it's very mana efficient but heals more/similarly respectively.

[Myllior]

I'm not sure where is the best place to ask this, so I guess I'll start here.

I've had it in mind, for quite some time now, to try and develop some code that can essentially re-run the events of a combat log and accurately calculate healing, overhealing, absorbs, damage and the like. One of the first things I'd like to look at is what effect changing Echo of Light into a direct heal increase would have on Twist of Fate uptime, as well as how it would affect healing vs. overhealing.

Obviously, two of the key things to be able to track are current and maximum health. My initial impression was that simply adding all of the damage and healing taken by each player character would accurately track current health but, unless there's something wrong with my code, this doesn't seem to be the case. So I'm wondering, would there be other effects/events that alter current health, but do not register as a heal or damage? One thing that occurs to me is buffs that affect Stamina or maximum health (e.g. Tyrant's Immortality, Ursa Major), but exactly how these interact with current health, I do not currently know.

I should probably try asking on the WCL forums as well (since it is events from WCL that I'm analysing) and also have a peek through SimC to see if it gives information on how health changes. If anyone knows of anywhere in particular that they think would be a good place to ask about tracking health, please let me know. Thanks!

[PosPosPos]

Obviously, two of the key things to be able to track are current and maximum health. My initial impression was that simply adding all of the damage and healing taken by each player character would accurately track current health but, unless there's something wrong with my code, this doesn't seem to be the case. So I'm wondering, would there be other effects/events that alter current health, but do not register as a heal or damage? One thing that occurs to me is buffs that affect Stamina or maximum health (e.g. Tyrant's Immortality, Ursa Major), but exactly how these interact with current health, I do not currently know.

Tyrant's trinket increases maximum health without actually healing the target(specifically, it doesn't "heal" the target when it procs), and when you lose the effect of the trinket, you do not lose your current health. As for Ursa Major, I don't have any knowledge on this specific mechanic, so you probably would find a better understanding of the passive on the druid forums.

Oh, I think you might already know, but just in case, Rallying Cry does "heal" all affected targets when used. When it ends, it doesn't affect current health, unless the current health is above the new maximum health.

[Myllior]

Tyrant's trinket increases maximum health without actually healing the target(specifically, it doesn't "heal" the target when it procs), and when you lose the effect of the trinket, you do not lose your current health.

Thanks for that; it makes sense. After all, if you remove all of your character's gear and then re-equip it in one go, you're left with a large amount of missing health, so Stamina seems to work to only increase maximum health; various forms of health regeneration must make up the difference.

Oh, I think you might already know, but just in case, Rallying Cry does "heal" all affected targets when used. When it ends, it doesn't affect current health, unless the current health is above the new maximum health.

I didn't know that; thanks for letting me know. I think I just need to compile a list of such health-changing effects and then figure out what they do one by one; hopefully a few patterns will emerge early on so that I don't need to test all of the effects.

I think I also need to take more time to fully examine the events for a single player character. I've been using this Xhul'horac log to try and learn the structure of WCL's events, but it has over 90000 events in total, with individual characters (especially tanks) having more events than is practical to sift through manually.

[Myllior]

I don't know why, but I thought I'd see where the top Holy rank sits for each boss in HFC, as well as compare the effective and raw HPS of those logs to the effective HPS of the top log on each fight. I don't know what I expected but, other than Discipline on Tyrant Velhari, Holy Priest is the only specialisation to have any boss where the top rank is outside the top 200 on the fight. Hardly a new thought, but...bleh.

Boss	Top Holy Rank	Top Holy eHPS	Top Holy raw HPS	Top Rank eHPS
Hellfire Assault	315	70403.1	97320.5	145962.0
Iron Reaver	12	177586.2	247477.1	214968.0
Kormrok	16	136080.0	215465.7	169160.0
Hellfire High Council	445	118732.7	189342.5	164136.0
Kilrogg Deadeye	10	147741.9	305282.9	194497.0
Gorefiend	453	121247.6	149870.4	181190.0
Shadow-Lord Iskar	3	135650.4	195121.4	157392.0
Socrethar the Eternal	228	123923.9	172490.1	175308.0
Tyrant Velhari	850	154958.3	198592.2	278048.0
Fel Lord Zakuun	35	157259.9	218110.0	210322.0
Xhul'horac	266	97534.8	159761.0	134578.0
Mannoroth	457	83498.1	139171.6	136582.0
Archimonde	251	79652.0	159173.8	127234.0

[PosPosPos]

Holy Priests are quite risky to underheal with, even as they perform better as the raid health stays lower more consistently.

Their raw healing values are significantly lower than the other throughput specs and Holy Paladins with their ridiculous class trinkets even with ToF up.

Finally, their ability to snipe low health singular targets is the lowest among all the healer specs, which occurs on many fights.

[Djriff]

Still makes me kinda sad. That iskar ranking tho!

[PosPosPos]

Still makes me kinda sad. That iskar ranking tho!

Well, there's no real risk of letting holy priests rank on that fight. All the damaging mechanics are so far between you could take a year to top people up. Can't really say the same for the other encounters.

[Djriff]

True, still citing what you said about raw healing being lower, rank 3 is still decent.

[Myllior]

Holy Priests are quite risky to underheal with, even as they perform better as the raid health stays lower more consistently.

Their raw healing values are significantly lower than the other throughput specs and Holy Paladins with their ridiculous class trinkets even with ToF up.

Finally, their ability to snipe low health singular targets is the lowest among all the healer specs, which occurs on many fights.

I agree with all of that. I just forget it sometimes and think to myself that, maybe, Holy isn't really that bad, then I'll do something like look at logs and I'll wonder why I thought that at all lol.

[PosPosPos]

I agree with all of that. I just forget it sometimes and think to myself that, maybe, Holy isn't really that bad, then I'll do something like look at logs and I'll wonder why I thought that at all lol.

The problem lies with the holy paladin class trinket tbh. If that fiasco didn't make it out of PTR(once again proving to us that Blizzard is terrible at design and balance) and holy priests actually got a decent set bonus + class trinket, they would be very competitive.

Just look at all the healing specs' baseline kit, they are actually very close to each other(excepting disc, which is going to be lower than the other healers for good and obvious reasons) in terms of raw healing.

[KaPe]

That's a pretty high rank on Kilrogg. I guess they finally fixed Visions? Last time I tried it - which wasn't that long ago - it was still instant SoR after finishing.

Other than that, it just proves what we already know. Holy is dead last and by a significant margin. There are few encounters where they manage to squeeze double digit rank, but they're exception to the rule.