1. #1
    Herald of the Titans Ynna's Avatar
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    Smile Returning to Priest after five years

    At the insistence of my girlfriend, I started playing World of Warcraft again. The last I played was during Cataclysm in 4.2, when I wrote a guide on how to heal everything up to heroics.

    Yesterday, I logged into my main (a Holy Priest) and wow, have things changed a lot. I'm looking at how the talents work and a friend explained to me how the artifact weapons work, although I'm nowhere near to getting one. Looking at the game and this forum, it seems like the only thing that hasn't changed is that Blizzard doesn't know what to do with Discipline. I mean, Prayer of Healing isn't party-based anymore, Levitate doesn't give you a walking animation, Spirit of Redemption is baseline, Binding Heal is a talent... So much has changed, I'm sorta lost.

    I was planning on starting a brand-new priest and learn the ropes by leveling and healing in dungeons while doing so, but my girlfriend is paying for a server transfer on my main, so I'll be doing high-end content a lot sooner than expected. I figured I'd drop in here again and ask some questions:

    • Are Holy Priests decent right now? I never needed to be the best healing option, but I do like to be somewhat effective when raid healing.
    • Looking at the talent trees (are they still called trees? They don't look like trees anymore) it seems like Blizzard really wants each talent to be a viable option. Is this actually the case?
    • What the hell happened to Spirit as a stat? In all seriousness, what sort of stats should I look out for?
    • What are some indispensable addons? I used to rely heavily on Grid back in the day and most of my other addons where just aesthetic or convenience.
    • What does a typical fight looks like for a Holy priest? Back in my day, it was mostly spamming Heal in five-mans and relying heavily on Renew, Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing for raids.
    • How's the mana? During Wrath of the Lich King, healers had mana in abundance, but at that start of Cataclysm they really made it a scarce resource if you made a couple of mistakes, which was a lot more fun.
    • Is leveling as Holy still a terrible mistake, only stupid and stubborn people do?
    • Are there other things I should definitely know?
    Resurrected Holy Priest

  2. #2
    NOTE: I main Discipline personally, but your questions are general enough for me to answer.

    1.) Holy Priests are in a good spot. They are basically a jack of all trades healer (can raid heal, spot heal, and are pretty decent in dungeons).

    2.) The goal is to provide more flexibility with less complexity with the Talents. Trees used to be 1-2 options and that was it, but with quite a bit more complexity involved. With the current setup you can still maintain options with less clutter, I feel.

    3.) Spirit was scrapped after Warlords and now we all rely on base mana regen. Spirit scaled far too high later in the expansion and, I'm assuming for balance reasons, they removed it. It's really not felt too bad so far not having it. As long as you're running out of mana as the boss is dying, you're probably doing ok. Ending with 50% mana or going oom at 30% means there is a problem.

    4.) ElvUI is a complete UI replacement addon that I prefer due to the ability to customize and ease of use. I found it easier to get ElvUI rather than configure 15 different addons separately to do the same thing. Clique (click cast addon) is pretty nice for assigning healing spells to mouse clicks / mouse over keybinds if you don't want to make mouseover macros. WeakAuras is another one I find to be essential to track cooldowns. There is a website that you can go to get WeakAuras that you're looking for.

    5.) I'd recommend to check out the Holy Guides on HowToPriest:
    General: http://bit.ly/HPriestBasic
    Advanced: http://bit.ly/HPriestAdv
    Video Guide: http://bit.ly/HPriest715Vid
    Video UI Series: http://bit.ly/HPriestUIVids
    Video Log Analysis: http://bit.ly/HPriestLogs

    HowToPriest Discord

    6.) Mana is pretty decent for Holy, but if you cast the wrong spells when they are not needed you're going to run into some issues regardless of spec.

    7.) Spec you level as doesn't make much of a difference. Healers all have decent enough damage to do well.

    8.) For asking addtional quesitons I'd highly recommend creating a Discord account and heading over to the HowToPriest Discord.

    Hope this helped answer your questions!

  3. #3
    Are Holy Priests decent? Yes. A hair weak in high-end content compared to other healers tho. (Mythic+ 10 and higher, 5/10M Raiding, etc).

    Talents - Bliz tried to make it so people weren't so cookie cutter about their specs. However, if you min/max, it gets a lot more standardized.

    Spirit is gone. Mana regen = Base Regen.

    Addons - DBM, Clique/Grid is still very popular. There are many and "most" addons are personal preference.

    Typical fight - Holy basically uses single target heals to lower the CD of Serenity, and POH/POM to lower the CD of Sanctify. Beyond that, only cast renew when moving and have no other options and cast POM on CD.

    Mana - Mana is decent. You'll OOM quick on high AOE fights, but who doesn't. You should have the tools to be useful in most situations tho, if you are playing correctly.

    Changes...
    Holy is great, but other healers have more desireable CD's and/or SMART heals.
    POH has changed and no longer goes by group.
    Renew is weak/expensive.
    The right legendaries make A HUGE difference.
    Farming AP is life right now.

  4. #4
    yes the old chakra thing was kinda terrible juggling those 'stances' its a lot smoother now, I like holy for fights like Cenarius where there is just pure damage all the time skorpyron is similar the spec just does way better on those types of fights than disc, but disc is still great for everything else it just doesn't really have the mana to simply chain spam radiance, you can, i found the mindbender helps and using mana pots, if you get wisdom that also lets you last a bit longer but disc i find you just go oom if your not careful. both specs are fun i have them somewhat equal now but even though my holy weap is like 7 ilvls lower, the spec is way better at dealing with constant raid wide damage because pom will just bounce around constantly leaving renews and then triggering more heals when it bounces back and forth because of the weapon talent holy mending, disc i don't think can really compete with the amount of consistent heals but it does have a combination of really powerful cooldowns that can make certain situations where everyone takes one big hit, into everyone taking a medium or small hit.

    disc is a lot better when you know damage is coming and you have atonements up for when it lands, then you can bring everyone back up quicker more times than holy can. holy has divine hymn, disc has lights wrath with like half the cd.

    tellmewhen is nice i use it to keep track of things with longer than average cooldowns mostly set it up for holy and pom so i would remember to keep casting it on cd.

    i use a bunch of different addons, i've used healbot since tbc so i still use that. weakauras is handy sometimes if you wanna know when something procs or if you wanna track a specific debuff or something, i think i got one that tracks grievous wound for example, oh and an atonement tracker. i think i use this one just scaled down and stripped a bit. https://wago.io/Eyvqyfcv-
    Last edited by Heathy; 2017-04-24 at 07:39 PM.

  5. #5
    Herald of the Titans Ynna's Avatar
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    Thanks for all the answers :-) I look forward to healing in WoW again. Healing in Overwatch is fun, but completely different.

    Quote Originally Posted by MendUS View Post
    NOTE: I main Discipline personally, but your questions are general enough for me to answer.

    1.) Holy Priests are in a good spot. They are basically a jack of all trades healer (can raid heal, spot heal, and are pretty decent in dungeons).
    Cool, so that's mostly the same I was used to. Good to hear Holy Priests are still plenty flexible.

    Quote Originally Posted by MendUS View Post
    3.) Spirit was scrapped after Warlords and now we all rely on base mana regen. Spirit scaled far too high later in the expansion and, I'm assuming for balance reasons, they removed it. It's really not felt too bad so far not having it. As long as you're running out of mana as the boss is dying, you're probably doing ok. Ending with 50% mana or going oom at 30% means there is a problem.
    I can understand that decision to some extent. Healing is most interesting when mana is an actual consideration and it doesn't just rely on split decision making on who to throw a flash heal, which seemed to happen at the end of most expansions. Still, I liked the flexibility of gearing for throughput or for mana.

    Quote Originally Posted by MendUS View Post

    5.) I'd recommend to check out the Holy Guides on HowToPriest:
    General: http://bit.ly/HPriestBasic
    Advanced: http://bit.ly/HPriestAdv
    Video Guide: http://bit.ly/HPriest715Vid
    Video UI Series: http://bit.ly/HPriestUIVids
    Video Log Analysis: http://bit.ly/HPriestLogs

    HowToPriest Discord
    Thanks, those look like good resources. Having yet another Discord channel to waste time with will probably not help my productivity, but will definitely be useful.



    Quote Originally Posted by angrydragonv8 View Post
    Are Holy Priests decent? Yes. A hair weak in high-end content compared to other healers tho. (Mythic+ 10 and higher, 5/10M Raiding, etc).
    That's similar to when I stopped playing. I've got no idea what Mythic+ is, but that doesn't sound like a thing I'll be doing soon.

    Quote Originally Posted by angrydragonv8 View Post
    Spirit is gone. Mana regen = Base Regen.
    Alright. I guess this makes the talent that gives 10% extra mana regen is a lot less mandatory than I suspected.



    Quote Originally Posted by Heathy View Post
    yes the old chakra thing was kinda terrible juggling those 'stances' its a lot smoother now
    I always sorta liked managing the stances, but I can see how it would be cumbersome after a while.

    Quote Originally Posted by Heathy View Post
    disc is a lot better when you know damage is coming and you have atonements up for when it lands, then you can bring everyone back up quicker more times than holy can. holy has divine hymn, disc has lights wrath with like half the cd.
    It's weird to hear that Discipline deals with raid damage better than Holy. It was mostly a tank healing spec when I played. Except for the couple of weirdos who tried to heal and do damage at the same time.

    Thanks again for all the info! I'm really looking forward to playing Priest again.
    Resurrected Holy Priest

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Ynna View Post
    I always sorta liked managing the stances, but I can see how it would be cumbersome after a while.

    It's weird to hear that Discipline deals with raid damage better than Holy. It was mostly a tank healing spec when I played. Except for the couple of weirdos who tried to heal and do damage at the same time.
    Stances as a thing is gone but have more or less been replaced by Holy Word management. You've got Holy Word: Sanctify as a 1 minute base CD strong AoE heal, Holy Word: Serenity as a 1 minute CD strong single target heal and Holy Word: Chastice as a 1 minute CD incapacitate (or stun if you spec in to it). The cooldown of each spell is lowered if you cast PoH (PoM if specced), FH/Heal and Smite respectively. Basically, you work the cooldown of each type of holy word by casting similar spells, which is more or less the core of the gameplay now. With your artifact leveled up HW: Sanctify provides a large boost to PoH healing, which in turn reduces the CD of HW: Sanctify. HW: Serenity is a very strong (Crits for up to a full health pool) and is reduced by single target heals.

    IMHO (I raid Mythic as Holy 2 nights a week with "decent" progress at 7/10 atm) the Holy toolkit has very good synergy overall and Holy is fairly fun to play, but we lack utility to be considered one of the three mandatory specs for Mythic progress (Hpala > Rsham > Rdruid). We work just fine in dungeons even though we're not the strongest.

    In terms of Discipline handling AoE better than Holy that is only true to a certain extent. Discipline excels at healing burst AoE and requires set up before each burst of healing, while Holy deals better with constant raid damage where our mastery (Echo of Light, additional x% of our healing as a 6 second HoT) doesn't overheal. It's perhaps too simplistic to put it that way as both specs can deal with both situations, but if you are to put any labels on the specs that's as close to reality as you get.

  7. #7
    yeah the difference is definitely in the burst healing, holy can keep up a sustained output without really ever having mana problems where as disc relies on atonement layering before hand to really shine, fights like krosus for example, holy can hymn one or two slams and keep everyone topped, disc on the other hand can lights wrath one slam, barrier the next slam, rapture the 3rd slam, mind bender, each cool down can be combined or just used one after the other to bring ppl back to full hp much faster, in the case of lights wrath, 15+ ppl with atonement if it lands just after the slam you can reduce the time ppl are low hp substantially because the heal is just instant and raid wide so hymn, ticks hp up quite nicely, light wrath is like an instant raid wide serenity.

    the only other thing i think is over looked about disc is that atonement kinda breaks the 40 yard healing range, i think holy palas get something similar a spell that increases the range of some heal that can extend 40 yards but generally if someone has atonement and they move out of range for a targeted heal they will still get healed from damage. its minor but fights like the dragons in en where the raid is split in two, a disc priest can with clever placement heal the whole raid where as you would be running more as holy or you'd only be able to pom the other side while flashing and holy wording your side.

    disc fills a specific niche or niches that i actually am enjoying playing, holy puts out amazing hps even without throughput legendaries, i use prydaz for both spec and the res cloak which lets you fail whenever you want or velen's for disc because the overheal is insane so its bis. if you get the cloak for holy its great for progression stuff, even if you survive and res after the reset you can just res the raid and maybe get 1-2 more pulls per raid night. a free death can be quite op imo i do often feel gimped playing disc for that reason alone.

    i've got more holy legendaries than disc ones, i think i'm going to play disc more if i can and maybe use the bracers with velen's, not sure if any of the other legendaries are that great, i have muze's bracers for holy they are quite cool for 5 mans, faster flash heals and poh's, phyrix is alright if you talent guardian spirit you can fire that off more often and use it as a healing multiplier. thats about all i've got so far, I think the legendaries do kinda influence your playstyle a bit but some are just clearly better than others for nearly all occasions.

    as for a better list of addons. bagnon, dominos action bars, sexy map minimap, prat chat, quartz cast bar, elkanos buff bars (old ct_raid style buff list, or maybe raven), recount, dbm, shadowed unit frames, xloot, tiptac and tidy plates. moveanything is alright aswell if you wanna move achievement popup windows, and well practically any element. i'm pretty happy with this list combined with the above tmw/wa and a healing frame of your choice. oh almost forgot there is also omniCC and MSBT combat text. and now the list is complete a mod for most things.
    Last edited by Heathy; 2017-04-26 at 05:34 AM.

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