Is the new divine hymn still not worth it?

[ackis]

Just looking at the new divine hymn.

It takes two talent points for something we get in disc for just 1?

It just seems that given the choice of disc/holy I'll still be going disc in raids because of the group bubble.

Lightwell seems useless on half the fights now (Domo, Shannox, Alys for example).

[Deleted]

1 poinst in disc, what point? and talented hymn heals for 700-800k

edit: you mean barrier, for that 1 point?

[Deleted]

Yes, it defiantly will be worth it.

And you can't really talk about the new DH in the context of Firelands, because we will all be progressing on the dragon Soul raid.

[Themos]

Direct talent comparison doesn't work well between classes, and in this case between specs either. What matters is the complete package.
You might as well compare the positions of the talents while you're at it :/

Lightwell seems useless on half the fights now (Domo, Shannox, Alys for example).

On Shannox, put it out in the middle between the two tanks somewhere. Casters running around with Rageface can use it.
On Domo, put it next to the group during any scorpion phases and the whole raid has access to it.
On Alysrazor, I guess you can use it during the burn phase, while everyone is stacked up... but honestly this fight is not a heal check at all so ./shrug


LW requires a raid who knows how to use it. Used well, it's a LOT of healing for the mana and GCD it eats and can be used well on basically every FL encounter.

---------- Post added 2011-10-13 at 06:20 PM ----------

And you can't really talk about the new DH in the context of Firelands, because we will all be progressing on the dragon Soul raid.

Context like that makes sense for discussing set bonuses, but class abilities should be viewed in the context of all of PvE and PvP, imo.

[Priesthoodz]

I think it will be worth it. It's a priest version of Tranquility, except better (or at least I think it will be).

Holy priests everywhere will now be added to the CD rotation during fights!

[Ultima]

It will be definitely be worth it. After making this talent point change, they can easily tweak the numbers to adjust (be it buff or nerf) the healing output.

[Vook]

"Not worth it" ? It ticks for ~21k now (as holy)! ON 5 TARGETS AT A TIME! So even with no haste buff, that's ~550k healing right there! Definitely worth it.

[Kaeldin]

Just looking at the new divine hymn.

It takes two talent points for something we get in disc for just 1?

It just seems that given the choice of disc/holy I'll still be going disc in raids because of the group bubble.

Lightwell seems useless on half the fights now (Domo, Shannox, Alys for example).

you're kinda forgetting that Disc raw throughput is way way less than Holy's

Holy only lacked a nice raid cooldown, and now it has the best raid cooldown ingame - it heals more than tranq (on the current state) and still adds the 10% healing buff

Unless DH will get some nerfs Holy will be the way to go on most encounters as far as raid healing go...

PW: B has problems of placement which DH doesn't, you don't need to be stacked - if you need something to absorb damage you probably just need a Holy Pala using AM

[Yrrildur]

Try not to forget that we always judge new spells/talents and whatever else, using the context we already know. As someone said already, we are not raiding Firelands in 4.3, but a new dungeon. So yes, Holy will now have a raid cooldown which is very nice (especially in 10m), but don't forget that it all comes down to how Blizz will design the new encounters. Holy's new cooldown will add hp to your raid members, where Disc's cooldown will reduce the amount of incoming dmg. Both of these abilities have their pros and cons which depend on the design of the encounter.

[Danner]

HPS:
Holy may have more raw throughput than Disc, but Divine Aegis more than close this gap. Considering that DA is almost never overhealing, that does put the disc priest on top in terms of pure HPS. The Holypriest is currently able to play ball thanks to the bugged Sanctuary spell, but this ability is very much lacking in 10man raids. That said, I am not really worried about the HPS. Holy and Disc both output sufficient numbers. HPS is not a dealbreaker for bringing a holypriest OR discpriest to raids.

Cooldown:
Holy currently has a major dealbreaker for raiding - no Barrier. The cooldown is what raidleaders care about, not HPS. And Barrier is a frickin' awesome cooldown. Come 4.3, Divine Hymn is the holy answer to this problem. It is a good answer. As far as cooldowns are concerned, it will no longer matter which spec you bring. Major thumbs up.

Regen:
The final problem of the holypriest is mana regen levels. Holypriests are built to have bursty outputs, and struggle hard on sustained heavy healing - be it on a tank or the raid. Holy simply do not have the regen to do so - Rapture is simply 2-3 times as good as Holy Concentration, and Disc get 10% more int to boot. While all healers will eventually OOM if forced to pull all stops, the holypriests OOM notably sooner than the rest of the crowd. This is causing wipes when you need to rely on your healers (hardmodes in particular). When it comes to sustained healing, Disc is still going to have a notable upper hand.

Divine Hymn will help out here as well. The best reason to currently cast Divine Hymn is to get a breather. By not casting anything else for 8 seconds, you get to regen a lot of mana, and the gains are almost comparable to a mana potion. By lowering the cooldown, holy effectively get 2-3 more manapots per fight.

Is this enough?
I do not know. I hope so. My future raiding career stands and falls on this hope. Since my guild went 10man, I mostly stopped getting raid invites due to my hesitation to go disc. And the times I do get those invites, my regen levels are simply not sufficient to keep the group alive on hardmodes - enrfed or not. I need to massively rely on the other healer to do my job, and this is causing major headaches.

[Loriginalediscipline]

HPS:
Holy may have more raw throughput than Disc, but Divine Aegis more than close this gap. Considering that DA is almost never overhealing, that does put the disc priest on top in terms of pure HPS. The Holypriest is currently able to play ball thanks to the bugged Sanctuary spell, but this ability is very much lacking in 10man raids. That said, I am not really worried about the HPS. Holy and Disc both output sufficient numbers. HPS is not a dealbreaker for bringing a holypriest OR discpriest to raids.

Cooldown:
Holy currently has a major dealbreaker for raiding - no Barrier. The cooldown is what raidleaders care about, not HPS. And Barrier is a frickin' awesome cooldown. Come 4.3, Divine Hymn is the holy answer to this problem. It is a good answer. As far as cooldowns are concerned, it will no longer matter which spec you bring. Major thumbs up.

Regen:
The final problem of the holypriest is mana regen levels. Holypriests are built to have bursty outputs, and struggle hard on sustained heavy healing - be it on a tank or the raid. Holy simply do not have the regen to do so - Rapture is simply 2-3 times as good as Holy Concentration, and Disc get 10% more int to boot. While all healers will eventually OOM if forced to pull all stops, the holypriests OOM notably sooner than the rest of the crowd. This is causing wipes when you need to rely on your healers (hardmodes in particular). When it comes to sustained healing, Disc is still going to have a notable upper hand.

Divine Hymn will help out here as well. The best reason to currently cast Divine Hymn is to get a breather. By not casting anything else for 8 seconds, you get to regen a lot of mana, and the gains are almost comparable to a mana potion. By lowering the cooldown, holy effectively get 2-3 more manapots per fight.

Is this enough?
I do not know. I hope so. My future raiding career stands and falls on this hope. Since my guild went 10man, I mostly stopped getting raid invites due to my hesitation to go disc. And the times I do get those invites, my regen levels are simply not sufficient to keep the group alive on hardmodes - enrfed or not. I need to massively rely on the other healer to do my job, and this is causing major headaches.

i was agreeing with you till i read that you need to rely on other for your job? Wait, what? i cleared normal in holy, switched disc for the beginning of H FL and now im rolling holy but for beth. I do not have your problem. i think some people are making holy way worst then it is in reality.Of course, i do not have the golden truth with me, sadly... but from the all the priest i know in this game, none of us have to rely massively on other to get our stuff done ( heroic content ).

dont get me wrong, im not trying to say im better then you or this kind of BS. i just dont understand how you need to rely on someone else. Holy maybe lack couple thing but its far from being broken like disc was at the beginning of cata.

good luck , i hope you get your spot back for t13!

[Vicarious]

The way I look at it holy will be much more up to par than previously and if you already have a disc or at least enough raid cooldowns in your group setup (as that seems to be the focus of the raid fights so far in dragon soul dungeon journal info) then they will be a great choice for a second priest healer(or first if you have a lot of raid CDs etc)

It will be down to play-style choice a lot more than before. I will still be disc because that's what I've been doing, I'm used to it and my gear is set up for it. on the PTR I'm getting about 20-22k non-crit heals from Divine Hymn as Disc(no flask/food/raid buffs/archangel) so figure in buffs, your haste from gear/spec/race, using it with borrowed time and either on the tail end of PI or BL, archangel, as well as a raid buffed crit rate of around 25%.....you could get a bit over 1mil healing out of it assuming 0% overheal. Now I'm also assuming that they don't limit it to 4 ticks and not have haste effect it like the tooltip would suggest because it doesn't work like that yet nor has it for years. Right now I get 7 ticks out of it under the conditions mentioned so with it hitting 5 targets that's 35 heals and 8 of those being crits (rounded down) and on top of that around 160k shield total from divine aegis. Crits could swing these numbers all up higher as well especially if it hits the tank with the 10% crit buff from renewed hope.

My point is that the CD will be great as disc if used properly and you can still have barrier. The main advantage for holy is the 3 minute CD so it can be used 2-3 times a fight in some cases where disc will just get 1 use.

I'm also wondering just how much DH would heal for as holy raid buffed with AA and BL with the mastery hot from it added in. In any case both specs are getting a good boost up here.

[ackis]

1 poinst in disc, what point? and talented hymn heals for 700-800k

edit: you mean barrier, for that 1 point?

Yes.

On Shannox, put it out in the middle between the two tanks somewhere. Casters running around with Rageface can use it.
On Domo, put it next to the group during any scorpion phases and the whole raid has access to it.
On Alysrazor, I guess you can use it during the burn phase, while everyone is stacked up... but honestly this fight is not a heal check at all so ./shrug

One of the strats for heroic domo is to not take any scorpion hits. Shannox really the only people that take damage are the rage face and tanks, and the lightwell is meh for that IMO. I'm looking forward to trying it out for sure, but I still see me being sucked in to playing Disc.

[Danner]

i was agreeing with you till i read that you need to rely on other for your job? Wait, what? i cleared normal in holy, switched disc for the beginning of H FL and now im rolling holy but for beth. I do not have your problem. i think some people are making holy way worst then it is in reality.Of course, i do not have the golden truth with me, sadly... but from the all the priest i know in this game, none of us have to rely massively on other to get our stuff done ( heroic content ).

dont get me wrong, im not trying to say im better then you or this kind of BS. i just dont understand how you need to rely on someone else. Holy maybe lack couple thing but its far from being broken like disc was at the beginning of cata.

good luck , i hope you get your spot back for t13!

I've had some major struggles in the firelands. This one week, for example, in a 10man raid:

The main raid - which I am not part of - took all the good healers. The second raid features the rabble. The healers here include a holypriest (me), a restoshaman (awesome player, but...) and a offspec shadow/disc with bad gear. Not a good setup whatsoever, but you take what you have. An in the nerfed state, it should definitively be doable.

Well... we wiped horribly on heroic shannox. Mostly this was because the DPSers failed badly to break the 10k DPS limit. So we went normal modes. It honestly didn't go a lot better. Massive amount of failures, rampant dogs, players stepping on traps. Low DPS. Dead DPS. Tanks in offspec gear. Painful to heal, to say the least.

Now, me and the shaman do neck-to-neck healing - close to 15k HPS. Very low overhealing on both of us. We're healing like champions, balancing the mana usage versus the sick tank healing needed. The discpriest is no good, and mostly just helping out barely passing 7k HPS. (Yes, I know HPS isn't a good metric, just saying that he wasn't contributing much).

Then 2 minutes later, I am oom. The shaman is still at 50% mana. The discpriest mostly at full mana. We wipe due to a lack of tank healing.
Try again, dictating the discpriest to focus on the tank. Tank goes down almost immediately. Wipes two more times with same outcome, before I take the tank again. I can keep the tank alive with no problem, but the manabar is draining fast.

I cannot sustain it. GHeal spam just isn't a feasible tactics for me to use. I run oom, and then the tank die. If I fall back to Heal - which I was forced to - then the shaman had to carry me. I used manapot, shadowfiend, hymn and arcane torrent. Full spirit gear, best in slot pre-raid gear (yea, I know this is bad, but that's what you get for being holy - no raidspots means no tier tokens outside the VP ones). I cannot keep the tank up alone. I cannot do that job. And the shaman cannot do the job alone since the tank takes too much damage for one healer to deal with.

We were close to giving up. But the solution presents itself when someone in the main raid, who just finished, suggests to come on his paladin alt, healing. Since I am a holypriest and didn't actually need any gear in the firelands anyway, I offered my spot. That paladin was less geared than I was, but shannox died easily between the three healers. The major difference between the paladin and myself was that the paladin didn't run OOM.

I may not be the best holypriest in the world. But I refuse to believe I have devolved so much in skill since the TBC days. I ain't exactly spamming flash heal here. I try to avoid renew usage as it is too expensive. I stayed in Serenity Chakra, and used Serenity a lot. But it just didn't work. I ran oom, and that was it. I've been pondering well what I was doing wrong on this fight. Sure the group was bad, but a worse geared paladin did the job easily. I tried cancelcasting. I made sure to always use arcane torrent, but at the end of the day, my mana was the dealbreaker.

[Loriginalediscipline]

my answer is for danner.

Do you have any wol to share ? Not sure you were the problem really. Yeah they killed him when you left but im not sure it mean you were failing.... you said dps under 10k and taking avoidable damage. if you are lacking gear, this will result in being oom faster then other yes. I suspect tank was taking fire trap and again, avoidable damage.Dont be so hard on yourself. Perseverance!

Good luck again
also, can you link your toon so i can look at it a bit?

[Zidius]

@Danner

A thing with holy is it is NOT meant to be a dedicated tank healer...

Holy will always serve the raid best as a raid healer with maybe the occasional heal tossed at the tank. Which is why the pally lasted longer. I dare you to have a holy paladin raid heal...watch how quickly they go OOM. Its pretty much taking a fish out of water to make a Hpriest tank heal. Of course it didn't help that you had the disc priest underperform so much with an already (as you said) undergeared group. To be fair (and no offence is intended) your scenario really doesn't say much for the state of holy in firelands. My reason for saying this is because of my own experience on my own priest who is holy. In your scenario you had lets say sub-par gear. Now my priest has a 364 ilvl all T11 gear with 3 pieces of heroic T11 (at the time) We didn't do heroic modes and there were people a couple ilvl below me (our pally healer for example who was wearing a mix of T11 and 353 pieces) When it came to throughput naturally i beat him. I did have to manage my mana a bit but had no issues. On Beth'tilac i was even the healer to go up and heal the tank and DPS which i managed to do and still come down with sufficient mana to keep the raid up through the rest of the fight.

For you it seemed to just be a gear issue holding you back. A thing to note holy does love its mastery (if it can reach a certain amount) and it is very useful as it allows you to heal people with fewer casts faster allowing you to regen more mana. Haste does work very well with Hpriests but what haste translates to (more casts shorter amount of time) means you will be spending more mana and with bad gear you probably won't be able to regen the mana you spent by the time you need to heal people up again. Of course without an armory of your priest one can only speculate what your gear looked like but it sounds to me like you either A) Started focusing on haste before your mana regen was ready for it or B) Was just way to undergeared to be doing FL in the first place regardless if the pally (sidenote paladin regen has always been pretty amazing hence why their spell costs were increased even with that however they are pretty efficient played correctly) was undergeared or not.

[Themos]

I've had some major struggles in the firelands. This one week, for example, in a 10man raid:

WoL and armory?

I cannot sustain it. GHeal spam just isn't a feasible tactics for me to use. I run oom, and then the tank die. If I fall back to Heal - which I was forced to - then the shaman had to carry me. I used manapot, shadowfiend, hymn and arcane torrent. Full spirit gear, best in slot pre-raid gear (yea, I know this is bad, but that's what you get for being holy - no raidspots means no tier tokens outside the VP ones). I cannot keep the tank up alone. I cannot do that job. And the shaman cannot do the job alone since the tank takes too much damage for one healer to deal with.

You don't need Heal, I haven't had it bound since early last tier.
Just run Serenity, spam holy word on CD, keep Renew rolling and PoM/Gheal.

Use GS cleverly if your tank trusts you.

We were close to giving up. But the solution presents itself when someone in the main raid, who just finished, suggests to come on his paladin alt, healing. Since I am a holypriest and didn't actually need any gear in the firelands anyway, I offered my spot. That paladin was less geared than I was, but shannox died easily between the three healers. The major difference between the paladin and myself was that the paladin didn't run OOM.

I may not be the best holypriest in the world. But I refuse to believe I have devolved so much in skill since the TBC days. I ain't exactly spamming flash heal here. I try to avoid renew usage as it is too expensive. I stayed in Serenity Chakra, and used Serenity a lot. But it just didn't work. I ran oom, and that was it. I've been pondering well what I was doing wrong on this fight. Sure the group was bad, but a worse geared paladin did the job easily. I tried cancelcasting. I made sure to always use arcane torrent, but at the end of the day, my mana was the dealbreaker.

Actually, with Serenity Chakra, Renew is quite nice. All you have to do is refresh it once on someone with a holy word or something and it's a very HPM favorable spell. Are you using Binding Heal at all? A WoL would go a long way. Were you on the MT or the Riplimb tank?

More info :/


edit -- Here's my heroic shannox from the previous week. http://worldoflogs.com/reports/vyym0...?s=1126&e=1407 We did it on normal this week to finish off the corrupted fire hawk achievement.

---------- Post added 2011-10-15 at 03:10 AM ----------

@Danner

A thing with holy is it is NOT meant to be a dedicated tank healer...

Holy will always serve the raid best as a raid healer with maybe the occasional heal tossed at the tank

On 10 man? ./disagree

[Danner]

On a 10man everyone need to be a tank healer. When the tank is undergeared, that means doubly so. In a better world, the discpriest would have taken the majority of the tank healing. But in my case, it just didn't work out. Holy has some excellent throughput in single taret HPS, to be honest. But even if you don't start using serendipity rotations, mana is tight. This especially goes when the DPS is low.

The healing setup with a holypriest and a shaman as the main healers were hardly ideal. Neither are powerhouses, and while the shaman can do good tankhealing, he wasn't able to do enough alone in my case. I had to help him out almost fulltime, and I could not rely on him dealing with it on his own.

I've done shannox many times on 25man, mostly focusing on offtank healing and spot healing on dogs, and gripping the OT when needed. With a decently geared OT, Heal is almost enough to keep him alive in 25man - I tended to throw in a flash heal every now and then. But in this case it was simply not enough, by a longshot, and I had to rely on GHeal due to mana concerns. I think we all agree that "Heal" is virtually useless in raiding environments.

My gear is pretty bad due to massive standbying after my guild started doing H25, so I never got much gear. But I have the best in slot gear you can get pre-raids. Meaning it is ilvl373. I have all the VP items though. And two INT trinkets (tsunami, pickled egg). All my gear has spirit on it. Mana shouldn't have been a concern. But it is. Ask Mr Robot says I could replace my T11 healing shoulders with DPS shoulders for a minor upgrade... but that's about it. I need to do actual raiding to get better gear, and to be honest, the only real upgrades I can get is a T12 shoulder item before hitting heroics. Given how much trouble I had on a normalmode 10man (bad group or not), that's just killing my motivation. And I had 2/7 25man HC pre-nerf.

I don't think I'm bad at healing. My holypriest kicks ass. But I need a period of ~30 sec of low healing after going all out to avoid OOMing. And in 10mans, I cannot get that.

And Themos:
I was on the MT. The OT was left to the disc priest, but we had to help him out a lot. Partly that was the tank's fault. We tried switching, but it didn't work much since the disc didn't manage to keep the MT up.

To be honest, the main problem was that the fight dragged out so long. If I conservated mana and cancelcasted just right, I could last for roughly 5 minutes. But then it was really GG as far as my manabar was concerned. Tank died immediately after.

So this is one of many reasons I say a holypriest need more mana. Maybe it is just me. Maybe I have never learned that Holy Concentration need to be explicitly activated for every fight or something outlandish like that. But when dealing with a bad group, I wasn't up to it. The shaman, the alt paladin and the crappy disc was.

[Dad]

I am using my Lightwell almost every fight as Tank healing bonus, and our tanks quite love it! Everytime i put it somewhere where it is easily accesible to tank and they click on it everytime they feel healers dont love em as much as they should. And with new range clicking other DPSers can use it too.

Especially Onyx tank on Neff loved me in raid an Lightwell when he had to turn her with tail to us and was Out of range for most healers..

[Dianthe]

I think that, while you had several issues in your group, the fact that changing one class for another turned the tides says quite a bit about which healers can "carry" a bad group and which can't.
Can holy priests perform admirably given proper circumstances? Of course. Can they really save the day? Hardly.