They say they dont understand why priests are QQing ova this nerf, i will xplain

[mutantboy]

Spamming 1 button, regardless of effectiveness does not make for a fun playing environment. Ask any pre wrath holy paladin or destro lock.

So yesterday i went and looked at some WWS stats for a freinds guild - wanted to see what theier mages are doing (I've gone from failhealer to noobmage) and I ended up looking at what their healers do. As they are a pretty high rated guild (top 50 to down maly and do 3 drakes) I figured what they do would give me some ideas.

What I found is their shaman use chain heal for 70-75% of healing done. They normaly do 3% more healing than the next class - a Druid. The Druid is the only class where heals are fairly evenly divided between a number of spells. (as in more than 2). Pallies next - Bacon and spam one button. Lowest HPS were priests - but with over 60% heals done with CoH that is going to get interesting.

So I wondered if this was typical. And looked further - yes it is. To say priests are topping the meters by standing round using CoH I believe is a massive eggageration. I also think when the nerf hits it will gut holy priests.

But it's OK. Cos Pallies (bacon and light) and Shaman (CH and Riptide) need 2 buttons.

[Instant]

And yesterday i went for a walk. I met GC and he told me he hates priests, and he secretely wants this class to die, so he can get rid of it.

Its a fact! I almost can provide you a screenshot, and almost recorded my conversation with him.

And you're almost right that all shamans spams 2 buttons, and none priest is topping meters with CoH.

Almost.

[Rando0m]

Pallies next - Bacon and spam one button. Lowest HPS were priests - but with over 60% heals done with CoH that is going to get interesting.

But it's OK. Cos Pallies (bacon and light) and Shaman (CH and Riptide) need 2 buttons.

What are u talking about on paladins? Nowadays we use judgements to keep Judgements of the Pure up (1 min duration buff on yourself) and dependant on the number of paladin in the raid also keep Judgement of Wisdom/Light up (20 sec duration but all paladins in raid are able to reapply them). We got Sacred Shield which is pretty often used, mostly on tanks (30 sec duration and u can only keep your own up). We use Bacon of Light. We use both FoL, HL AND Holy Shock much now. We got Divine Illumination (3min cd), Divine Plea (1min cd) and Divine favor (2 min cd) to regulary use and we got to have the Seal of Light/Wisdom buff up on us (2min duration). + Hand spells and so for different situations.

How the hell do u get that to 2 spells? Even just the raw healing spells we use are more than 2.

[sTigmatico]

Renew and PoM are awesome spells - but when competing with a pala on patchwork, do we really stand a chance? I used to rejoice on AOE damage fights like saphiron where for once I stood a fair chance of beating my pala rival ( I say fair chance coz i beat him anyway due to pure skill) but know i have to focus to compete while he spanks up the FoL, heals 2 targets then instant cast holy shocks to heal 10,000 Hps, while now i can press CoH of once then /cry.

Yes I'm sure it was your pure skills that beat the paladin on a AoE fight, and not your CoH bashing while watching TV.

From my own priests perspective I see this as a healthy change, as in a 10 man or a heroic I could get by with 70-80% from CoH, which is retarded.

[lolpriestnoob]

I think the nerf hurts priest to a certain extent, but overall any good priest will overcome. I top healing meters everynight on my priest without question, yet my top 3 heals are farely even. CoH averages 45-50%, PoM about 25-30%, and Fh about 15-20%. I see other priests with 80-90% CoH and they are garbage. So, the nerf sucks because i cant spam in certain situations with alot of aoe damage, but it will not kill the class. Any good priest already uses PoM and utilizes SoL to where you can do just fine

[Danner]

This topic is actually slightly interesting. I just read a very nice thread by ghostcrawler where he admits to not really understanding why so many priests are going nuts over this CoH change.

You can read the full thread here.
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/27/1431...t-anymore.html

And he brings a point. There has been a lot of doomsaying, a lot of defeatism, a lot of whining and a lot of really weird comparisons. From me included. But noone has really managed to explain why a single change to one spell is spelling doom and despair for the holypriest. I think GC has a very good point - it's not the CoH change. Because when pressed, every holypriest with sanity retained will admit that holypriests still can do raidhealing after the CoH nerf. It's not about CoH.

I think It's probably a bit more psychological.

I believe Holy Priests like think that they - we - are the penultimate glass cannon of healing. We chose holy priest knowing that we would trade almost everything (manaregen, reliability, survivability and utility) in order to be the best healer around. In most of WoW classic, we were. We were the big gun healer. When the raid took large amounts of damage, you stacked Holy priests for PoH. When the tanks took heavy damage, nothing beat a well timed Greater Heal. While shammies were quite good raid healers, they were horde only, and didn't remotely pack the punch that priests did. Paladins were a joke, sacrificing healing for buffs. While druids were excellent healers as well, they were mostly about hots. The holy priest were the de facto primary healer and we all knew it.

But in TBC; things changed. Paladins and shammies became a primary healer. They didn't have PoH, but they did have infinite mana and some serious single target healing power. Your guild progress in karazhan was by large determined by the amount of paladins you used as healers, the most successful ones dropped all other healers. Priests remained a by large mana inefficient healing class, and druids had it even worse. Priests were feeling disposed. We complained. Amongst other things we complained about Lightwell, Improved Death, Holy Nova and CoH. It wasn't really about these spells. They sucked, admittedly, but that wasn't the reason for complaining. It was mostly about not being the glass cannon healer of awesomeness. If all healers were supposed to heal for the same, why bring the priest with all these weaknesses if his healing wasn't the best?

At least we were better than druids. Oh how druids sucked in early TBC. It was almost criminal.

So Blizzard fixed druids, by increasing their spell output and giving them mana efficiency almost matching the paladin. It was really a required move, druids were horrible. To match that, priests got 2.5% more healing on our TBC cruel joke spell, CoH. It didn't help soothe the priest psychology. We screamed, nerdrage all about, we were upset about useless heals and the mana efficiency of a snail. "Look at the paladin!", we said. "Why do they have infinite mana and we don't!?"

So blizzard nerfed Illumination. While a good thing in the long term, this was probably not a good move. It didn't help priest mentality, we just started comparing outselves to druids, still falling short, still not really having the slightest motivation to pick any of our talent abilities, and still feeling very inadequate. And it caused pretty much every healing paladin in the game to quit or reroll in disgust to boot causing many guilds to topple.

Then Blizzard finally did something right. They gave a 5% spirit bonus to Spirit of Redemption. At least that made the talent worth picking, even if we didn't care much for the effect. They doubled the output from meditation. This helped the horrible mana issues priests had. We still ran oom before any other healer, but at least we felt slightly pamphered. If only blizzard would make our other three talent abilities useful as well, we might maybe even feel like the glass cannon of healing we wanted to be.

So blizzard increased CoH by another 2.5%. We were asking ourselves why. Who cared about CoH? It was a horrible spell with no use and output failing to even topple off a group buffed with fortitude. Every priest worth his salt went for ImpDS instead, and every priest asked himself why CoH got this treatment. We still sulked. We weren't the best healers, and we were behind in everything else. Sure, we could heal. We even had the mana to sustain ourselves now. But we were still the only healers who couldn't survive a single hit in SSC, we were still the healer without any stackable utility. And we still ran oom first. Almost two years later and I still get bad jokes about sporebats and how they always kill me. It was not better back then.

Then blizzard introduced Mount Hyjal and the Black Temple. These dungeons were designed around CoH. Slowly, priests began to open their eyes around CoH. Maybe the spell wasn't that bad after all in these situational circumstances. Sure, spamming it made us OOM horribly fast, but at least we did a major difference against the damage pattern we encountered in BT.

Then blizzard did something even better. They made spirit a stat worth stacking, by basically doubling the manaregen of all healing priests and druids in the game. Again. Druids now had infinite mana, much to the gloom of paladins. Priests could still easily run oom, but now we had so much regen that we could regen the loss pretty fast. Running OOM was not a major problem, it just meant having to spam some lower level heals for a while.

We felt powerful. We felt needed. We were situationally better raidhealers than the shaman. We were situationally better tankhealers than a paladin. And spamming CoH acted like a groupwide HoT, which made us situationally better stability healers than a druid. This was a sweetspot for the priest. All we really had to worry about was manaregen. But we had a defined role. I think most priests were happy in late TBC. Sure, there was still the utter joke called lightwell, the badly balanced racials and the completely worthless healing spell holy nova (was a decent aoe attackspell though). We may have complained a lot on the forums. But I think we were happy. Noone felt underpowered by playing a priest. We were squishy, but we brought big heals. But at the same time, we didn't put anyone else out of a job either (Felmyst aside). Endgame TBC was good.

Ever since that, it's gone downhill.

- We lost downranking. This made manaregen a much bigger challenge.
- We lost our manaregen due to the spirit coefficient. A top geared T7 priest is close to where we were in the beginning of TBC. The only thing saving our manaregen these days is replenishment. It's utterly required for us to do our job.
- We lost our arsenal. The fun thing about playing a priest was to find the right tool for the right job. WoTLK turned us into one button spammers. Okay, not really, but 99% of the time, the right spell to cast is now CoH. And since CoH is doing all the job for us, a mechanical cuckoo can now usually do priest healing. While I maintain that COH spammers do not exist (not enough mana), CoH is the primary heal for a holypriest these days. Not nescessarily because of its healing; while outstanding, it is just got very good synergy with the holy tree talents and the procs we get allows us to cast nothing but instant heals for the duration of a fight. Mobility is fun!
- Ironically, the change to CoH actually feels like we lost CoH as well instead of fixing the former bullet. While mostly QQ, compared to the TBC endgame sweetspot, we did.
- The new cool abilitity for healing priests in WoTLK were hymns. Everyone liked the idea. Sort of triggerable short-duration buffs. Battle songs. Hymns are a very neat idea. But when we tried them in practice, we were not impressed. I personally think that the hymns we got are cruel april fool jokes that someone in blizzard forgot to call. Imagine warriors getting a channeled Taunt. That's what priests think about Hymn of Hopelessness. Divine Hymn is trying to do too many things at once, while succeeding at neither.

Sure, there were good things happening too, which are easy to forget. But the main problem here is not really these issues. There was a gear reset, we expected the manaregen to falter. We didn't get (m)any new abilities because we were well endowed already. We actually got some really game-altering changes; Surge of Light being the most notable. And we even got a decent 11-pt ability. Desperate Prayer is too expensive, but it's not possible to call it bad. Saves my life every day.

The problem is that holy priests doesn't feel powerful anymore. This is probably the major issue. Desperate Prayer is the anti-example. It's basically just an instant but self-cast-only greater-heal. That's not a very interesting 11pointer ability, and Nature's Swiftness is just totally better in any way. But it feels powerful.

Priests are a powerful healer, even after the CoH nerf. But I think that most of the problem is that we don't feel powerful. Especially not compared to 3.0.2, but also compared to late TBC. And that is the problem. In the late TBC, I could keep the five meleedpsers who failed to not stand in a fire up by clever use of ProM, renew and liberal application of a groupwide CoH in their general direction. In WoTLK right now, I can keep the entire raid up by spamming one button, trading my manabar for their attentionspan. That's messed up. In 3.0.8, I can keep one or two of them up with flash heal and ProM.

I personally feel like WoTLK overall has been a setback in terms of power. I may not be correct, but this is my feeling. And the feeling is everything here. Priests want to be the powerful glass-cannon of healing. It's not important to actually be better, but we want to feel better. Because we feel that we trade a lot for this position. We're not really. Cloth is not really that much worse than other armor types. Our utility is actually good, although not particularly useful in Naxx. Our reliability is admittedly a problem, but that's the style of the holypriest. All healers are lacking in one area or other. We're not trading a lot. But we feel we are. And that is the issue.

I believe most priests feel they are like the glass, but not like the cannon. Turn that feeling around again by giving us something that feels powerful, while not really being so. Instead of being powerful while not feeling so.

Examples:
The lightwell which heals for 90000 healing is powerful. But doesn't feel like it because it is extremely clunky to use. I often wonder if an even more OP version of the lightwell, f.ex one which healed 100% HP over 6 seconds would be used more, and I'm still not sure.

Prayer of Mending which is reactively healing the MT for 4k then jumping to some absolutely useless target isn't really that powerful given its manacost. Except under very certain conditions, where ProM shines. And it damned well feels like it shines, because you remember it clearly when those certain conditions occur. Nothing beets the feeling of power when your ProM jumps between the MT and OT four times in one second.

Renew is ticking for 1200 HP glyphed. I spent all I could improving this spell, and it is outstrippen badly by a flash heal. That feels very weak.

Flash Heal is not really a mana-efficient heal. But suddenly it procs SoL, Inspiration, holy concentration or whatnot. And that makes it feel powerful, because you have many effects coming out of it.

CoH with no cooldown is a powerful spell. And it damned well feels like one. It's almost cheating.

CoH with 6 seconds cooldown is still a useful spell. But it doesn't feel like it. You will still compare its healing vs a fortitude buff. And it will fall short, badly. This leads you to mentally label it under "weak spells" and avoid using it. That's bad playing, but it's the problem.

[mutantboy]

Danner I pretty much agree with you - but I think there is more to it as well.

Healers that I speak to already feel a bit 'put apon" and disadvantaged. We were powerful in PvP only a few months ago - not so much now. We don't level or grind so well without a respec. And mostly outside a raid or instanced area are not really as needed or useful as a DPS specced equivilent. I think all this goes to lessen the "feeling of power" in the game. More than this as a Priest I have come to accept that I won't be able to do the things some classes can.

Solo Ony at 70 - na, think I'm gonna pass on that. I have guildies solo MC and AQ20 bosses - think I'm gonna pass on that. And that's cool - if it was really important I would not have come back to playing my priest.

But then when it comes to hard content it's already started. i mean I know they won't take me 1st up - we have way better priests. But when our guild 1st maly kill on Heroic and normal had no priest healers, when they try keeping drakes up & no Priest healers I start to wonder. When that caused our guilds best priest healer to level his pally (who used to tank) and say he wont ever heal with his priest again I think If a really good player thinks healing on a pally is better/esier/more efficient it just gets depressing.

I asked why the preference for no priests and got the explanation I expected: lower HP, lower efficency, lower raw HPS. Recommendation of people who have cleared it etc etc.

I still (somewhat reluctantly) run a 10 man every week with my priest healing. But now that most of the guys have a mixture of 10man/25man epics thats pretty easy. Our #3 team cut from 2 nights 3 weeks ago to under 5hrs last night. (not bad for the riff-raff scrubs in the guild) And I deliberately kept my CoH spamming to a bare minimum and on easy content it won't affect anything. My % healed wasn't so great but my overheal was about half the others so whatever.

Meh - next week #1 team will go with 2 healers. #3 team will be alts. I will be trying to avoid healing. Don't so much care for it anymore - think I will be hanging around the mage forum way more

[cssmall]

I've been thinking about this CoH/WG nerf for a while (both back when they originally planned it for the Expansion release and then when they brought it up again). So, I started timing myself on it and found that I was using CoH, most often, about every ten to fifteen seconds when there was damage coming from multiple sources. Therefore, a six second cooldown is not going to kill my healing play style, because I prefer a rotation with PoM and Flash Heals (or Greater Heals, depending), Renew around on the DPS. Not even "greatly" geared yet, really, either. I'm sitting at around 2100 spell power with Inner Fire.

Here's some of my other issues with this "sky is falling" or "into the ground" nerf concept about CoH. A Holy Priest's mana efficiency comes from those certain procs that are deep Holy -and- you don't have to use them right away. A well-geared Holy Priest (haven't really looked at others' power, mana, etc) would be able to burst a lot just off a SoL proc and/or a HC/IHC proc. Don't have numbers on it because I've not really collected for it, but just think about the sheer amount of healing that can be done in a matter of mere seconds because of those three procs!

I very much disliked raiding in 25 man runs because of the crutch that CoH had become for both healers and raid leaders. It was even more pathetic (when a MH went down and another had to step up for them) to see Holy Priests not realize a correct rotation through which to keep a tank or OT up! That's a problem, in my opinion, and it's one you still see today. Got in to a Heroic: Archavon's Vault group and the first thing the RL says is "Go CoH spam over there." A few healers went down, so I actually got to do something except continue to whittle down the button bound to CoH.

Healing is NOT a competition. It's a team effort, especially in raiding. Meters very rarely tell you anything other than if a healer's paying attention or not. Yet, I've always consistently beaten Paladins, even with their beacon. Same with Shaman, even with their Chain Heal. But, that's a function of the group.

This whole debate is tedious, really. If this breaks your fun on your Holy Priest, please, specialize Shadow or Discipline or delete your character and roll anew. If people invalidate priests as deserving a raid spot, then they aren't very bright. CoH and WG are overpowered, if allowed to be spammed. And, don't start with the whole raid tuning stuff. There is SO much more to a priest than one, instant cast spell.

[Smashalot]

Yet shamans doesn't have a cd on their chain heal (which isn't talented).

Priests have plenty of reasons to complain about the class - the coh nerf may not be the biggest imo, but it could easily be avoided if blizzard took two minutes to check how people play and what the spells do with enough stats.

Because Chain Heal is instant cast and hits 5 targets amirite?!

Seriously, people have no idea what chain-heal even does and continue to pump out bullshit like this.

Post CoH nerf it will heal 5 targets every 6 seconds and can concievably cast 2 more spells in this time
In the same time a shaman can cast 2 chainheals hitting 6 targets in total and can maybe cast riptide aswell.

Seriously nubs, stop QQ'ing. Shamans went from a one trick healing pony to a no trick healing pony since they gave non-AoE classes the best AoEs in the game while we got riptide....... It's ok but it's no CoH.

[Danner]

Thoughtful reply, Mutantboy.

We usually bring two-three priests to Sartharion 3 drakes. One of these is always a discipline priest, the rest are holy. Mostly, this is because we do not have the shammies we would like to have in our guild. But a holypriest can hold his own, and our major weakness, the mana issue, is not a problem as the fight is usually won (reduced to one dragon) or lost (anyone dies) in 3 minutes.

But the priests are actually doing good. Our main asset is a our survival cooldown; Guardian spirit or Pain Supression. Because our major issue with Sarth 3 drakes at the moment is that our druidtank with 53k HP is getting oneshot by the extremely boosted Flame Breath attack. Mostly this is because our DPS is too low (dragons not dying fast enough, people always seem to die), but by setting up a rotation of Last Stand+fireresistpot, GS, GS, PS, HoSac, HoSac we can keep him alive for quite a while. Best try so far is getting Shadron down to 1300 HP, but we'll get him any day now. I don't think priests are a bad choice for Sarth 3 drakes. In fact, I think we're a better choice than trees in this fight.

Well, except for the fact that our disc priest can't heal bears properly and GS very often fails on bears. All that will be fixed in 3.0.8.

[syanid]

Priests at the moment are the jack of all trades, master of none, which to be honest I like. But this nerf is just taking the P***.
The one thing we had over other classes was our aoe heals. Now we are left with a weak heal with a 6 second cool down and a large heal which costs ridiculous amounts of mana and has an obscene casting times.
I would argue paladins can do better AOE heals, with BoL, than us now, which is unfair as they can dish out 1 million k crits on a traget with a 1 second cast aswell. Druids just can hot up all the targets and lol while shamans have chain heal. The one thing we had over other classes, we have just lost, fair?
Renew and PoM are awesome spells - but when competing with a pala on patchwork, do we really stand a chance? I used to rejoice on AOE damage fights like saphiron where for once I stood a fair chance of beating my pala rival ( I say fair chance coz i beat him anyway due to pure skill) but know i have to focus to compete while he spanks up the FoL, heals 2 targets then instant cast holy shocks to heal 10,000 Hps, while now i can press CoH of once then /cry.
Please, i understand if you are gnna nerf CoH, its an awesome move, maybe too awesome, but please buff something else in response. Like take off the CD of Gs
DrStorm

Are you playing to watch the healing meter after the fight or are you playing to see the encounter, have fun and get the loot? If the meter matters so much to you, why don't you join AV battleground and spam PoH?

[talrob]

There are 3 types of people in this thread

1) Guild officers who think their guilds priests are amazingly skilled because their uncles, best friends, hairdressers daughter got a whisper from ensidia that told them holy priests suck but they really are only look good because they spam coh. These people want to replace you and never want to replace them with priests because they have never had a good one.

2) The poor players who know they will be replaced if this nerf goes through and so are trying to delay it or get it changed.

3) The good priests or officers of guilds with good priests who realise that coh isn't skill and so then nerf wont affect them in any way. These people realise that the current form of coh is not only overpowered but makes holy priest incredibly boring to play.

[Deleted]

Priests will remain one of the strongest healing class in both PvE and PvP after 3.0.8 & 3.1.
Less whining please, learn to play instead.



CoH nerf will classify the priests into noobs or pro's.

[Healium]

i actually couldn't be happier with this change. it'll at least cut a bit of the population of priests that think they're good because they top meters.

everyone thinking CoH is balanced now i would love for you to try something. next time you do naxx25 find a ranged dps in your raid that doesn't afk a whole lot, put them on follow. target yourself and use nothing but CoH. tell me how it goes

[Kelesti]

i actually couldn't be happier with this change. it'll at least cut a bit of the population of priests that think they're good because they top meters.

My one problem with this, is that those too stubborn to reroll will respec disc because of all the people going "OMG this is so much fun." And they're gonna end up giving us disc priests a bad name altogether.

Even with Penance and Rapture getting fixed next patch, I'm more fretting it because of all the terrible priests who are going to respec, all prima donna style. But hey, that's just my 2 coppers' worth.

[mandana]

As an officer and raid leader of a well ranked guild, you do have to look at which classes can output the most hps in which scenarios. Right now priests are the king of AoE heals but if you take that away they really don't have much else, being a jack of all trades might be nice in a 5-man but when you are trying to min-max a raid composition (not that this content really needs it at this point) it's not really useful.

All the other classes have a fairly distinct healing flavor while priests don't. Shaman will probably become the kings of AoE heals again with perhaps Druids close behind, since the CD on WG is gonna be 6 sec and their spell lasts 7sec. Paladins already eclipse priests in terms of single target heals and utility(in terms of buffs) and their AoE heal capability is being buffed, via the glyph. Meaning that priests will not be the most effective at raid healing or single target healing. They will in fact be reduced to a pack of warm bodies that are willing to show up to raids and push the heal button.

Sure CoH and WG needed to be nerfed because they were OP and mindless, but a cooldown is by far the least elegant solution they could have provided. I think increasing the mana cost massively would have been a much better solution, then priests would either have to use it sparingly or could spam it given the situation but knowing that the priest would go oom and be useless for a minute or so until they could regen, or even change the way they gear valuing regen and spirit over all other stats, which would de facto nerf CoH because they would presumably have less spell power cuz they needed all that regen.


And in case you are still thinking that the CoH/WG nerfs are really no big deal, remember that Blizzard has stated that they forsee that they might need to nerf certain encounters that might be unbeatable now due to the nerfs.

[Neeklus]

We were not a Jack of All Trades without the CoH nerf. We were a one button class. A one trick pony.

[Drurnan]

As the Priest Class Lead for my guild (a spot I've filled for quite some time), I've been healing consistently on my Priest since the "glory days" of Molten Core, and I find this whole discussion over our potential obsolescence to be a bit sad and tired.

I remember the days before CoH, when downranking was king and mana regen was few and far between, and the good Priests chain-chugged Mana Pots to ensure that we had enough juice left to keep our tanks alive. I remember when BC dropped and no one used CoH because it wasn't worth the talent point you had to spend to get it, and only a few intrepid players decided to give it a shot. I remember when we started in SSC/TK and I took a leap of faith and specced for CoH to see if it made my Raid Healing job any easier, and although it drained my mana quite insanely on boss fights, even while being used sparingly, it succeeded in keeping our raid alive long enough to finish destroying whatever content we were currently working on. I remember when Blizzard increased our mana regen from Spirit by tenfold, and I could keep my tank(s) alive and throw the occasional CoH to make sure our melee DPS was topped off with no problems whatsoever, yet never run out of mana. Then Wrath of the Lich King came out, and all hell broke loose. The use of downranking, which all good Priests used for the entirety of Burning Crusade (my downranked Greater Heals could keep our tanks up forever with no mana issues), became a thing of the past. Now during all this, I never once resorted to being a CoH spammer and I was able to get my job done with no issues while topping the healing meters a majority of the time.

I'm not quite sure when or where the CoH spamming, cooldown QQing Priests came from, but once this patch drops you need to roll with the changes and adjust your play style accordingly, or just don't bother and continue to cry on the forums while the talented Priests fill your raid spots. It's time to use Greater Heal again. It's time to watch your IHC/SoL procs and get the most out of the 5SR again. It's time to break out the cancel-cast heals again. It's time to stop relying on the 'smart heal' aspect of CoH to do your jobs for you and start being a smart healer yourself. Know your boss fights and be a proactive healer, rather than coming in blind every time and trying to be a reactive healer. Do these things, and you'll find that you are no longer on the cusp of obsolescence, but rather at the forefront of the healing revolution....

[Instant]

Sure CoH and WG needed to be nerfed because they were OP and mindless, but a cooldown is by far the least elegant solution they could have provided. I think increasing the mana cost massively would have been a much better solution, then priests would either have to use it sparingly or could spam it given the situation but knowing that the priest would go oom and be useless for a minute or so until they could regen, or even change the way they gear valuing regen and spirit over all other stats, which would de facto nerf CoH because they would presumably have less spell power cuz they needed all that regen.

I really hope you're not a healer. Really, cause if you are i'd like to see your 'top ranked guild'.

What you said, has no sense at all. Healer cannot allow himself to be 'useless' at any time. Situation like you described should NEVER occur, unless someone was Battle Rezzed, or if he's a shaman used Ankh.

If you think that mana cost would solve any problems, you dont have a clue. There are priest (even on this forum is a topic) that are on 1.5k spirit possible more raidbuffed. Mana issue is not a problem for them at all. Also even if mana cost was doubled, it would be better to take two priest and some feral druids to innervate them than other healers.

What you dont understand is that CoH CANT BE SPAMMABLE, cause that's the issue. I know some priest are crying that they wont be able to raid heal, but that is complete bullshit. Between CoH's they will be able to cast whatever they want. It's same thing as with Elemental Shaman AoE, they got Magma totem which is pretty 'weak' aoe, but they can cast whatever they want during that. (ofc CoH is way better than magma, and you still have ProM...).

Min/maxing will be there always, going for world first will be there always, stacking to some extent will be there always, if CoH stayed like it is, then it wouldnt make sense to take anyone but priest. You THINK that opposite will happen now (noone will take priest) but like i said, thats complete bullshit, and noone will take bad priest, whenever all will be happy to have good priest with them.

[Neeklus]

You needed to spam CoH as a holy priest in SWP. End of story. To not have done so would have been to detrimental to the raid. Not in a terribly bad way, just in terms of efficiency. We healed more faster using CoH than we did any other spell. Not saying I *only* used CoH (I kept PoM out there always), but I'd have been wasting a spot if I'd used CoH sparingly during KJ or Mu'ru.

Up and until these fights (with the exception of some BT) CoH was completely redundant. It wasn't necessary at all. It certainly isn't necessary in WOTLK, though it has saved my groups many times when A) freak tank death B) tank dc C) extra mobs pulled.