What is blizzard's healer niche Design Objective for Holy Priest ?

[Deleted]

Heya,

Holy priests have changed quite a bit. Most healers have a somewhat clearly defined niche :
Shamans make great utility and raid healers, druids are the HOT guys with great raid healing, paladins the tank healers and so on.

Holy Priests seem a bit over the place. Are they supposed to be excellent in most areas ?

Are they meant to be a jack of all trades ?


I can see that at some point in Beta, Priests had the highest hitting single target spam heal with 500% but this has since been toned down.

[davesignal]

They're supposed to be the generic template from which other healers iterate off of; if they had a niche, the niche would be 'easy to play'.

[Deleted]

I dunno, maybe it is just the fact that Hellfire is so easy now, but I feel very useless compared to shamans and druids. So far I am not a fan of the holy priest changes.

[Deleted]

They're supposed to be the generic template from which other healers iterate off of; if they had a niche, the niche would be 'easy to play'.

Right but what are they supposed to excel at ?

[FelPlague]

Right but what are they supposed to excel at ?

they are one of the highest "instant direct heals" out there, they have some pretty insane spells for healing that just "oh your about to get hit hard, banm your 10% now your 100% with one spell"

[Deleted]

they are one of the highest "instant direct heals" out there, they have some pretty insane spells for healing that just "oh your about to get hit hard, banm your 10% now your 100% with one spell"

Isn't that the job of shamans ?

[FelPlague]

They have the highest single target heal in the game (Holy Word: Serenity). So they excel, I would imagine at single target healing when there is a lot of spiky damage incoming. Though with Circlet of Healing and Divine Hymn, their AE healing is pretty good as well.

All in all, they are just a good/easy class to play if you like healing.

^^^^ exactly this, druids have their hots, shamans have their chain heals, monks have their reactives, paladis have their shields, disc has their damage

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Isn't that the job of shamans ?

no, as holy priests do much highers, shamans have their chain, totem, riptide, etc

[Daedius]

Still a lot easier to heal as a Holy compared to Disc atm... :P


Hope the Z-perl author allows atonement to be tracked eventually, sustaining a lot of AoE damage and not having atonement up on everyone in the group is just awful >_<

[Deleted]

^^^^ exactly this, druids have their hots, shamans have their chain heals, monks have their reactives, paladis have their shields, disc has their damage

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no, as holy priests do much highers, shamans have their chain, totem, riptide, etc

Calculating it, considering lowish haste, serendipity talent, spamming heal, you could use serenity every 15 secs or so.

10 secs ish with flash heal.

that's pretty hot.

[anon5123]

Are they meant to be a jack of all trades ?

Holy Priest has always been jack of all trades, since WOTLK or Cata.

At least, that has been my experience, maining it since BC. It always had good AoE heals but not as good as others (with the exception being Sunwell, where CoH spam was king) and good ST heals but not as good as Paladins.

Nowadays though, the gap between healers is much smaller, with Blizzard's "bring the player not the class" ideology. Classes still have slight niches, but nowhere near as big as in the past.

[Veyne]

Holy Priest has always been jack of all trades, since WOTLK or Cata.

At least, that has been my experience, maining it since BC. It always had good AoE heals but not as good as others (with the exception being Sunwell, where CoH spam was king) and good ST heals but not as good as Paladins.

As someone who mained it in BC as well, I'd say the Jack of all Trades has been there since then as well. And it's the niche that they've been trying to reinforce ever since. And then they gave us Chakras because they didn't want use to be pretty good but not incredible at everything all at once so we had to stance dance. That was some bullshit. Good riddance.

[Puupi]

Still a lot easier to heal as a Holy compared to Disc atm... :P


Hope the Z-perl author allows atonement to be tracked eventually, sustaining a lot of AoE damage and not having atonement up on everyone in the group is just awful >_<

You should track individual Atonements on players on your raid frames.
The total number of Atonements is easily tracked by making a weakaura/tmw aura of Plea.