[Priest] State of Holy - 4.0.1

[Amethystine]

I'm happy with 90% of the changes we Priests are enjoying in Holy Spec.
Chakra/Holy Words are fun and useful (though macroing my mouseovers for Holy Word is still gonna be a b*tch), Spirit of Redemption with the glyph is great for those fights you're on the edge winning, and Lightwells are much, much more viable now that they're click-and-forget as they should be.

But... Surge of Light either needs to proc more often, or proc off more spells at its current rate. :_; 6% off either our slowish spamheal or our situational DPS for a two-spell exclusive clearcasting proc just isn't right. x.x

[Deleted]

Long time lurker:

Bearing in mind the caveat that the new patch brought all manner of problems with DC's, general lag and in particular, lag on sound that was absurd (think ~ 10 minutes behind for me!) I found Holy to be suffering some mana issues on certain encounters.

My experience was over the course of 2 and a half hours in ICC 25 Heroic, which would normally see us clear 11/12, we managed to hit a wall at PP which is a 1 shot most weeks; no doubt the fact that we were 3 or 4 healing (depending on DC's) it had a certain impact, but I found I used a pot and fiend for the first time in months, our best attempt which was 5% ish had me totally dry with no CD's of any description to turn to. Likewise LDW was also a serious mana drain, though I'd conceded that due to nasty lag we had way more ghost hits than usual.

My feelings are that while we have this period of adjustment and imbalance during raids pre Cata; Heal is too slow to be effective in ICC, and as such SoL and Chakra Heal are both marginally useful at best. Flash heal is expensive but usable and sustainable to a degree.

Chakra PoH is clunky as PoH is hardly something the majority spam, and without regular usage, State of Mind will not be sufficient to keep the state going. Fine, you can re cast Chakra once available and change states which is something that familiarity will improve upon, but I cannot help feeling that Wrath encounters just don't quite mesh with the new healing design in their incoming damage levels/frequency/speed-not that they were designed to, it just leaves a fairly sizeable gap until Cata hits where things are 'different'

As for talents, right now I avoid SoL as I feel it's very poorly suited to my spell usage, though I did use Heal a little, while trying Chakra, I failed to see a single SoL proc. Assuming you skip this talent for now, then the only way to progress through the tree is to take desperate prayer, lightwell and spirit of redemption, none of which (lightwell needs people to be trained)I particularly like right now, but are still, in my opinion, better than the non existant SoL.

Do appreciate that these comments are from healing in a raid perspective. Prior to the raid I queued for a random heroic and got HoR during which I used Chakra: Heal exclusively and mana barely moved the entire dungeon.

[Evolixe]

Long time lurker:

My feelings are that while we have this period of adjustment and imbalance during raids pre Cata; Heal is too slow to be effective in ICC, and as such SoL and Chakra Heal are both marginally useful at best. Flash heal is expensive but usable and sustainable to a degree.

1k mana = expensive? imo.. with all the intellect we got from the stat changes and the extra regen i almost get that full FH back within the cast.. its spammable almost unlimitedly.

[Kelesti]

I am tending to agree with you, Nekror. The whole thing's very clunky, and the only thing Blizzard said about it is "lol we don't care at 80". Instead of avoiding Serendipity, I'm avoiding Surge because I don't use Heal hardly.

That said, the crap that Festergut served us has my group going into smaller more focused healing assignments, only crossing over when Traige permits it. It means I have to play really conservatively early on, so that I can use Prayer Chakra and Sanctuary, abusing them to hell in Phase 3 for both him and what I expect of Sindragosa as well.

Back on the topic of PvP, Chastise's cooldown is quite laughably small. It's amazing what I can do with that.

[Zeuq]

So, did a raid last night, and I really liked the new Chakra, but it felt a bit clunky. Obviously, it was my first time working with it, so that's part of it, but I do see two potential problems, especially when mana becomes a real concern as we level up.

One, PoH Chakra is awesome, but it's difficult to maintain since even when it is clearly the best Chakra, to take advantage of HW:S and a faster CoH, there were times I had to essentially waste a PoH cast to maintain it. I'd love to see State of Mind also benefit from casting the associated HW spell, so PoH Chakra will be a bit easier to maintain. I wouldn't mind seeing a few more spells associated with SoM too, like maybe FH/GH for Heal Chakra, and possibly CoH with PoH as well, but that's not really necessary.

Two, the CD on Chakra seems just a smidge too long. When we did Festergut, I tried to switch between PoH and Heal Chakras as appropriate, and my timing was off just enough each time that by the time I tried to switch back to PoH the third time, I had to wait a good 10s or so, which resulted in some deaths (DPS was low, between some people not knowing their new rotations, and missing others because of patch problems). I think it can be made a bit shorter, either by adding it to Tome of Light or, probably better, making a Major Glyph for it, so on fights where we want to switch often, we can get a reduced cooldown, and for fights that we don't, we can use that glyph slot for something else. I don't think it would be particularly bad for people who suck at maintaining the chakra, because at 85, that penalty will also include the cost of having to recast Chakra.

Also, SoL really does feel useless. If it only procs off of Heal and Smite, then it ought to have a higher proc rate. If it's going to maintain a low proc rate, it should also proc off of other abilities. Otherwise, it'll be great for Heal Chakra, which is already more mana efficient than the other ones anyway, and pretty much useless for Renew and PoH Chakras.

Finally, some apparent bugs. Was anyone else have problems with Renew and Haste? They were definitely ticking faster, but the durations were around 10-11s, which is what one would expect with my Haste reducing the time between ticks and the duration not staying at 15s. If it's going to stay that way, Haste seems worthless in Renew Chakra because the GCD is already dropped to 1s. Also, my Mastery doesn't seem to be working quite right. I was running with 12.33 Mastery (199 Mastery Rating), and the EoL ticks totalled about 15.4% of the heals, which is about right for just the 12.33 Mastery, but doesn't include the 15% base that I thought it should include. I would have expected them to tick up to about 30% of the total heal with that level of Mastery. Did anyone else notice these?

Asor my spec, I ran 3/31/2, because of the apparent reduction in the value of Haste. I changed around glyphs several times throughout the night to play with different ones. I also reforged any piece with Crit to Mastery. I may even change my gemming back to an Int priority from Haste if Haste continues to seem to be somewhat poorer than before.

[champ3000]

Chakra/Holy Words are fun and useful (though macroing my mouseovers for Holy Word is still gonna be a b*tch), Spirit of Redemption with the glyph is great for those fights you're on the edge winning, and Lightwells are much, much more viable now that they're click-and-forget as they should be.

You don't need to make individual macros for each Holy Word. Holy Word: Chastise will *morph* into the Holy Word you activate with the Chakra state. So you just need to set all your macros to Holy Word: Chastise.

---------- Post added 2010-10-14 at 04:54 PM ----------

Here is my two cents:

Chakra: Heal - Why even use that? Most guilded groups have a true dedicated tank healer. I can only see this being beneficial in a fight such as Heroic Saurfang when healing marks can be overwhelming as a Holy Priest. Or in trying to zerg such as Sindragosa's All You Can Eat achievement when you are the only healer.

Chakra: Renew - Amazing. Will spamming those heals at 85 be possible? I don't know, but in a 10 man group, I cannot see how this wouldn't be incredibly effective. Especially with the new Glyph of Renew.

Chakra: PoH - Eh. I love HW:S, but here is the problem. I don't think Blizz will use the same "Stack on boss for win" mechanics in Cata. I think this will make HW:S a novelty. I think we will have to wait for that one. But 30 seconds in that Chakra state seems painfully long compared to what you can do with Renews and HW:A.

Surge of Light: It is trash. Maybe one proc a minute from a spell you don't really need to cast. Maybe it will be useful in Cata. But at this point, it is a waste and Blizz should just remove it and give us something with actual utility.

Lightwell: Get real. No one clicks it. Without a raid with a mechanic that Lightwell will seriously counter, then it will always be useless. Also, the lightwell itself is too small. A bigger, more noticable lightwell may get people to click on it.

Just my two cents. Haven't done my 25man raid yet, so I will update when I get a better feel for this spec in raids.

[Zeuq]

Chakra: PoH - Eh. I love HW:S, but here is the problem. I don't think Blizz will use the same "Stack on boss for win" mechanics in Cata. I think this will make HW:S a novelty. I think we will have to wait for that one. But 30 seconds in that Chakra state seems painfully long compared to what you can do with Renews and HW:A.

I don't think "stack on the boss" is necessarily the best way for HW:S to work. For instance, on Festergut, melee was easily kept up with HW:S, CoH, and PoM, and then I could just drop PoH on the ranged groups. I can also see it being quite useful in P3 for Putricide on ranged and especially P3 for Sindy, just dropping it near the tombs.

[champ3000]

I don't think "stack on the boss" is necessarily the best way for HW:S to work. For instance, on Festergut, melee was easily kept up with HW:S, CoH, and PoM, and then I could just drop PoH on the ranged groups. I can also see it being quite useful in P3 for Putricide on ranged and especially P3 for Sindy, just dropping it near the tombs.

First, I guess we should say HW:Sa haha.

Those situations would be useful. My only point of contention would be that, the synergy between other healers, would dictate you to use it differently. Say, for example, on Fester, you could have a druid focus on range, groups, while you take of melee. The sheer amount of healing you could drop on the melee would be insane.

But really, as of yet, I haven't had enough raid experience with the new set-up to really judge the best way to use each spell. Just my first impressions.

[nevermore]

I really love Holy as it has been greatly improved compared to our earlier state.
However, I feel that in certain cases Holy healing is just too much (I don't mean output, I mean game mechanics) and in need of a slight trim. I never thought I'd say this but we have too many healing spells. I don't even know where to put Binding Heal any more as I've ran out of space and sensible key bindings.

Also, why does Chakra have a cooldown and a mana cost? Shouldn't it be either-or ?
I love healing on my Priest atm, but it feels a bit clunky mostly because of:

- Chakra cooldown and State of Mind forcing me to cast certain spells or I lose my buff
- Revelations ("so I'm in this Chakra now, right so this spell does what now? WTF why doesn't it heal... oh shit my Chakra expired lulz")
still working on my addons to comfortably keep track of Chakra

[RyanD157]

Anybody mind helping me with trying to get the maximum from my gear, currently im at 36748 Mana, 14.58 Mastery, 27.51 haste, 18.62 crit, and 3631 spell power with inner fire on, and 1108 mana regen in combat and 833 out of combat. I am using the rather basic build with 2 points in mental agility. I feel like my mana pool isn't as high as everybody elses, should i drop some haste and mastery for more int?

[Danner]

So, my take on Holy:

FUN!

Chakra is an interesting mechanic. Though admittedly, also a bit clunky. It felt like I had to cast three spells in turn to get the effect I wanted.

Heal is very underwhelming in power. I didn't really expect a lot, but it's even less than what I expected; I can't even keep a tank alive in a heroic with it. It really makes SoL useless for pretty much everything. As a result, I didn't get to try out the Serenity(Heal-chastise) much, there was absolutely no time to cast Heal in the first place. Our paladins had been nerfed, and it meant everyone else had to work harder. The fact that I actually was able to fill part of the gap was awesome though.

Renew-spam, which has been advertised as a big holy thing, didn't really work out for me. I simply ran OOM too fast. I tried spamming renew with gusto on BQL HC, but I had spent pretty much all my mana cooldowns before the first airphase. Aspire (renew-chastise) was also very very weak, didn't really feel worth casting. I am seriously considering just speccing out of all renew talents now, but there is really no alternative talents to take anyway. Sigh

Ironically, despite my mana troubles, Prayer of Healing was the heal I had the most success with. And Sanctuary(PoH-chastise) is ridiculously giggleworthy. If the entire raid is stacked up, seeing 200 green numbers tickle on the screen, plus PoH, plus PoH glyph, plus Echoes of Light... I now know how druids feel. And even though most of those numbers were really low, the sheer amount of them made up for it. I liked seeing 11 numbers on the screen before... now it's 200 numbers. I am in love, and I adore this spell to death now. It was also very easy to keep the PoH chakra up, casting a single PoH seemed to reset the timer to 30 seconds.

The fight I remember best from today's raid was LDW. It was ... exceedingly messy. Our paladins were healing for less than usual, and my regular job of healing up people failing hard blowing the raid up with ghosts every 3 seconds was suddenly turned into keeping tanks alive as well. The utter decimation of Guardian Spirit meant I had to pull a lot of GHeals to compensate. GHeal is great now, but I really really miss GS. I think I would gladly trade the spell Gheal completely for the return of a 1 min GS.

Mana was a massive issue all night. I have stacked a lot more int / spi than most healers, due to not owning any decent regen trinket (still using the U10 trinket to compensate). I was usually the first healer OOM, and it felt like I was healing in overdrive more all night due to how fast I depleted my manabar. My fellow holypriest healer was even worse off, and was talking about reforging INTO more spirit - most other priests I've seen are talking about reforging SPI -> mastery.

Echoes of Light was weak. Not a surprise, but I still suspect haste > mastery due to this.

Tanks were nerfed hard. We had tanks dying on trash despite all healers being ready. One of our warrior tanks (with full 277 gear) got oneshot by a trashmob in front of blood queen. That shocked us all. As a result, keeping them alive was really messy. If only I had had that one minute GS. Seriously, it's ticking me off.

Meter wise, druids > priests > paladins. No shammies turned up today, so can't say. The paladins seemed a lot weaker, but I suspect this is due to having to relearn how to heal. The new paladin cone heal looked really awesome at least. Druids are just OP anwyay. PW: Barrier sucked more than I imagined it would, and ...

Glyphs... suck. The only glyph I feel I really wanted to take was the glyph of CoH. Everything else made for holypriests could use a serious re-run throught the fun-machine. Did I mention I miss the GS glyph yet?

... apart from that - I had a TON of fun. Holy is definitively going to be my only specc in cataclysm.

[nevermore]

Chakra cooldown reduced to 30sec... YAY <3

[Tezmata]

I like the lowered cooldown on Chakra but I don't feel like it was necessary. Still, neato. We will officially always either be in a Chakra state or have one available.

[Neichus]

I like the lowered cooldown on Chakra but I don't feel like it was necessary. Still, neato. We will officially always either be in a Chakra state or have one available.

It's definitely a convenience move; my biggest problem with Chakra dropping off was usually while soloing or between packs of mobs. This definitely fixes that, although I'm not particularly counting on this change until it sticks for a while. It seems like the sort of change they might just be testing.

[Zeuq]

Mana was a massive issue all night. I have stacked a lot more int / spi than most healers, due to not owning any decent regen trinket (still using the U10 trinket to compensate). I was usually the first healer OOM, and it felt like I was healing in overdrive more all night due to how fast I depleted my manabar. My fellow holypriest healer was even worse off, and was talking about reforging INTO more spirit - most other priests I've seen are talking about reforging SPI -> mastery.

Echoes of Light was weak. Not a surprise, but I still suspect haste > mastery due to this.

I had some mana issues, but I felt like it was mostly because I was doing stupid things like casting PoH just to keep the Chakra up. And I had the opposite result from EoL, in the worst fight, it was about 10% of my healing; it others it was more like 10-15%. Considering that I only reforged away Crit for it, that's quite worth it in my book. It's at least on par with Haste, possibly better with mana concerns.

Tanks were nerfed hard. We had tanks dying on trash despite all healers being ready. One of our warrior tanks (with full 277 gear) got oneshot by a trashmob in front of blood queen. That shocked us all. As a result, keeping them alive was really messy. If only I had had that one minute GS. Seriously, it's ticking me off.

We had this problem too. We were running 5 healers, and oddly enough, it took 4 just to keep up the tanks on Marrowgar and most of Festergut, while I was solo healing the raid with Chakra:PoH. On Festergut with 4 Inhales, even I was spamming the tank. Though, I think part of that was just that the other healers weren't used to it.

Meter wise, druids > priests > paladins. No shammies turned up today, so can't say. The paladins seemed a lot weaker, but I suspect this is due to having to relearn how to heal. The new paladin cone heal looked really awesome at least. Druids are just OP anwyay. PW: Barrier sucked more than I imagined it would, and ...

Funny, I felt like I was MILES ahead of the other healers, but that might have been because I was able to stick to raid healing most of the time. Paladins definitely got hit hard by the nerf bat, our Druid felt about where he was before in terms of HPS, and the Shaman felt like she was healing for more than usual. Things might change as people adjust.

Glyphs... suck. The only glyph I feel I really wanted to take was the glyph of CoH. Everything else made for holypriests could use a serious re-run throught the fun-machine. Did I mention I miss the GS glyph yet?

Boring, perhaps, but Renew is now a solid glyph. And PoH was boring before, but as you mention with all the green numbers, the PoH glyph is absolutely giggle worthy. At a few points, I had so many green numbers I literally couldn't see what was going on (which I normally turn off precisely for this reason, though it was only a minor distraction before). The other glyphs feel pretty blah though. The new GS is sad, the lightwell glyph is pointless when no one uses it, and FH is nice in some situations, but still boring. Oh well.

... apart from that - I had a TON of fun. Holy is definitively going to be my only specc in cataclysm.

I hope it works out well in rated BGs, precisely because of this. I think once I adjust, it'll be a blast.

[Samurai]

Lightwell: Get real. No one clicks it. Without a raid with a mechanic that Lightwell will seriously counter, then it will always be useless. Also, the lightwell itself is too small. A bigger, more noticable lightwell may get people to click on it.

It has improved, but its still pretty lolwellish.
I went out of my way to announce on vent that lolwell is usable now, and then some smart arse went and used it all up before we even pulled

[Zeuq]

It's definitely a convenience move; my biggest problem with Chakra dropping off was usually while soloing or between packs of mobs. This definitely fixes that, although I'm not particularly counting on this change until it sticks for a while. It seems like the sort of change they might just be testing.

It's not just convenience, it'll make it so we can adjust Chakras with the fight, where the 1m CD is really tight. For instance, I tried to adjust chakras on Festergut, but being a little off each time just pushed it farther and farther; with a 30s CD, I could have done it perfectly. If we can't choose to change chakras with the flow of the fight, it stops being a fun mechanic and starts being a hinderence.

I think it will also help with soloing and dungeons. I've run a couple of heroics, and it's been difficult at times to maintain the chakra without throwing away casts; this will help fix that. Same for soloing, where running from mob to mob could see Chakra:Smite drop off, and result in some frustration.

And, of course, it'll also allow some flexibility for when we screw up. Right now, if you choose the wrong chakra, you pay a mana cost AND a 1 minute penalty. That seems just a little too harsh, particularly for new players. Less experienced players will still pay more mana penalty from having to switch more often.

[Selerious]

Did 10m Heroic ICC last night. Only went to BQ, but I found the fights overly simple compared to before the patch. The most trouble I had was trying to keep myself in chakra state as I wasn't used to watching another buff.
Mana was more of an issue than I'm used to, specially on BQ. It was fun in some ways, but yeah. The whole chakra system could use a little work. More spells linked to the PoH chakra is nothing else. Renew is way to easy to keep up, heal, a bit harder if your tank/raid healing at the same time.
Chakra reduced to a 30 second cool down is a good start, and I know they say fights should be less hectic at 85? But right now it has the possibility of being another global cool down choice when you don't expect/want one.

Oh, and I hate the heal spell :P So bloody slow for so little healing. I'm sure I'll get used to it, least I hope so :P

[Neichus]

It's not just convenience, it'll make it so we can adjust Chakras with the fight, where the 1m CD is really tight. For instance, I tried to adjust chakras on Festergut, but being a little off each time just pushed it farther and farther; with a 30s CD, I could have done it perfectly. If we can't choose to change chakras with the flow of the fight, it stops being a fun mechanic and starts being a hinderence.

Yeah, I'm not unaware of its balance implications. Just as I've argued frequently: the shorter the cooldown on Chakra the more closely we have to be balanced around being in the right Chakra. I'm always careful to steer clear of stating definitively that 1 minute or 30 seconds or whatever number is the correct number, but I'm keeping a very close eye on Chakra's cooldown.

That said, I've softened my previous argument a bit about being balanced around the "right" Chakra because as I've played with Chakra more on Beta I've come to appreciate that there's less of a distinction between the "right" and "wrong" Chakra. I mean, there are times where you can definitely choose badly (being in PoH Chakra on Patchwerk is wrong) but if you look more closely at the Chakras it's just not accurate to interpret them as Heal = tank, Renew = aura, PoH = raid damage. There's a bit more subtlety to it:

-Heal Chakra is the mana conservation Chakra that emphasizes the low HPS Heal and Renew rolling for conservation. Yet at the same time it's a good single-target emergency Chakra via Serenity.

-Renew Chakra is something of a middling Chakra. Renew is reasonably efficient, especially if you are using Inner Will for another 15% reduction on instant casts. It also has a really great heal-per-cast-time because of the 1 second GCD. Also a really nice trick is that with Tome of Light you can keep Serenity rolling on two targets nearly simultaneously (18 second duration, 10.5 second cooldown) which I bet in Cataclysm raiding will be more significant. Also if you're using Inner Will + Renew Chakra you're pretty mobile.

-PoH Chakra is something of an emergency Chakra. I forget where I've argued this, but if you look at the numbers PoH is as efficient as Heal if you hit 4 players with it; the illusion that it's inefficient just comes from the fact that it consumes mana so quickly while Heal benefits a lot from background regeneration. It further backs this up with Sanctuary, which helps produce extra background healing while you use other spells. I haven't had a lot of experimentation with this one to say much more.

In any case, my point just being that I think under most circumstances each of the Chakras has certain merits. I'm sure with extensive discussion people will arrive at which Chakra is "best" for each phase of Cataclysm fights, but I'm willing to bet that a lot of Chakra usage will vary just because what your raid needs will change based on class composition, healing style, and honest-to-goodness accidents (i.e. another healer dying). So I've become a little less worried about having a shorter cooldown Chakra, although I still argue that a no-cooldown Chakra would be a bad idea.

[Feigr]

I was wondering, looking at pure mana regen, should I keep my 10 int 10 spirit gems or switch them out for 20 spirit?
I was noticing some mana issues in ICC 25 heroic and I'm looking at some ways to make it easier on myself. I have reforged away spirit on a lot of gear pieces so I will probably revert some of those but since I feel my output is so good now after the patch I though that maybe changing some gems around would be viable as well.

This most likely also comes down to me being a bit too spammy with PoH while in that Chakra and other things that I need to get used to.