Some ideas about holy priests

[Deleted]

Right now, healing as a holy priest feel a little bit unsatisfying for me, so i tried to find some ideas that would make it a bit more enjoyable (in my eyes) and competitive. Contrary to what happens with the disc spec we already have the potential of a satisfying gameplay with the serenity mechanic, but this gameplay is left aside because it is hard to play and not enough rewarding, while the sanctuary gameplay is easier, a little bit more powerful and better assisted by set bonuses and trinkets.


First i would fuse the two healing chakras (serenity and sanctuary) into one. We would then have a healing chakra and a dd one. While in healing chakra, each single target heal would refresh renew on the target (like serenity chakra) and each healing spell would reduce the cooldown of CoH (like sanctuary chakra, but CoH would then be nerfed to compensate for the healing increase of the serenity mechanic). We would get rid of HW: sanctuary but keep HW: serenity.

Serendipity should once again increase the healing of PoH and heal in order to feel more rewarding and to give us some more capability to heal single targets (tank healing or whatever). Also it could help making us on par with the heals of the disco spec that have the grace passive.

Escalade could have a chance to refresh renew on the player it heals while in healing chakra. That chance would be a little lower than the chance to have a SoL proc from divine star or halo to keep things fair (it used to do that in MoP, but a 100 percent chance is too strong and would make that the go to talent). Maybe it doesn't need to have a lower chance, because the SoL procs also gives serendipity when used so they have some kind of bonus in themselves.

PoM could have a chance equal to our multistrike to not trigger its cooldown (making multistrike something a little bit more interesting than just a flat increase in numbers) and maybe to also refresh renew when its healing is triggered (making it a spell worthwhile to be casted)

Divine hymn could be replaced by lightwell as a healing cooldown.
Lightwell : 3mn cd, 8 sec duration. healing done by the priest on the lightwell are distributed evenly on allies within 40 meters of the lightwell. Healing are increased by X percent. (basicly it would be a healing version of prismatic crystal, with range and duration comparable to the others healing cooldowns)

Also, i think that Guardian spirit should work on every spell that would kill a player but that a paladin can BoP in order to avoid that (molten torrent of flamebender for instance). It would gives us some real utility that a disco can't provide. And you can also lower its cooldown to 2 or 1 minute(s) (it could then apply a debuff to the target in the same way BoP do to avoid abuse).

Finally, the clarity talent could use some buff, especially its range could be increased to 30 meters instead of 10 currently, because right now the spell doesn't even really do more heal than PoH. The two things interesting about that spell is the non group restriction, and its interaction with serenity, but it's hardly usable in the current raiding environment. By increasing the range and doing the other changes i propose, you would then have a choice between a talent that give a group heal not restricted by groups and with the ability to refresh renew on the primary target or a talent that would give more PoM that also have a chance to refresh renew.

Any thought or proposition?

[Djriff]

1) That would be nice, but honestly would be moot. Chakra dancing is an engaging part of holy, granted most people stick with Serenity and heal from that. The only difference we would see is reducing the CD of CoH which would be wonderful.

2) In t16 (SoO) we did have that but it was part of the tier bonus. We already have a reduced cast time and reduced mana cost for PoH or Heal. Adding more healing to it would mean more overhealing as you can get people topped off pretty quick with PoH into CoH as well as EoL/renew ticks and the other healers pushing bars.

3) I'm assuming you meant Cascade. It use to do that but it was to easy to blanket renew with that. I do wish we could still do it as rapid renew was very nice and I would love to have it back for mythic fights. Cascade is already the go to talent.

4) PoM is always worth casting on CD if it will be triggered. It's free healing and holy needs all the healing it can get. Unless we could blanket renew 15 people the RNG on PoM refreshing renew would be terrible.

5) I would say keep Divine Hymn the way it is, but add a glyph for lightwell that would enable you to turn it into a Healing Crystal at the expense of all the charges left over.

6) Guardian Spirit is suppose to do this already, however its been buggy as all hell since it was introduced to the game.

7)Clarity is strong than PoH in 2 ways. It's healing is increased up to 100% based on the targets health at the time. It also releases PoH from a group and works more like Daybreak on a paladin. The biggest downfall to it is outside of a very few fights you won't get to use it to its full potential as people will be spread out more than 10 yards. A great place to use it currently is Oregorger as both the melee and ranged are stacked in groups. The biggest downside is you need to precast it and if you choose the wrong person to precast it on and they don't take a lot of damage you wasted the cast time and everyone else that benefits from it loses out on a lot of potential healing. I would say increase it to around 20 yards so that way you could have loose clump groups and still get use out of the talent.

That's the only problem I see with your proposed changes.

[Deleted]

1) Chakra dancing is theoretically an engaging part of holy gameplay, that's kind of true, can you honestly say you chakra dance a lot tho? I don't think anyone truly does that. It's either serenity or sanctuary. And i might not be the most knowledgeable of high end progression raiding, but i think there are way more people using the sanctuary chakra than the serenity chakra currently.

2) The t16 set bonus increased the healing of our holy words serenity and sanctuary. Serendipity on the other hand, from cataclysm till end of MoP used to increase the heal of PoH and heal by 20% per stack (or something like that). Right now i don't think that you would do that much overhealing trying to heal a tank with heal. PoH might be strong enough, but i wouldn't say no to a buff either considering what the other healers can do.

3) That's why i said not a 100% chance, because it would be too strong, and Cascade is the go to talent because of number tuning mainly and because we rarely use SoL. If we weren't that much mana starved, then when could use SoL and the others T90 would get some love probably.

4) About the refreshing part i'm not completely sure either, but currently the reason why we cast PoM is because of the set bonuses, without them i don't think we would use them a lot. Did people hard casted PoM a lot in Highmaul?

5)I wouldn't say no to two healing cooldowns, but i don't really like the ways those cooldowns work. This is a lot of healing tied into one button you press and then forget, while the boss is working is ass in order to kill you. I would prefer if all those cooldowns were more like Ascendance or Avenging Wrath.

6)I remember reading a tweet long ago of a dev saying that it wasn't intended as a full feign death because it would be too OP. Did they change their stance?

7) Yes it can be strong when stars align, the majority of time it isn't. I'm just arguing for an increased range here, nothing more really.

Thanks for taking the time to answer

[Djriff]

1) No, most holy priests I know actually spend their time in serenity. Its much better imo to have an insta heal you can use to burst someone up for triaging than lowering the CD of CoH to do more HPS.

2)The t16 2pc is what increased PoH's heal. http://www.wowhead.com/spell=145306/...ealer-2p-bonus
You probably wouldn't get overhealing on a tank, but most of the time I use PoH now I bounce CoH right after it and it'll top people off. I think it doesn't need more power and will heal for more as we get higher ilvl gear.

3) I would rather holy not be an RNG spec going into a phase for refreshing renews. What I wouldn't mind is if it was only a chance and we had something similar to genesis to use as a minor raid CD it would be awesome.

4) I casted PoM all the time in Highmaul, when it would bounce. That's always been the way you use PoM. If you aren't spamming renew and triage healing what else are you doing as holy? Smiting?

5) A lot of healing being tied into a button is what a healing CD is. Healing Tide/Revival is the worst of all as you literally don't need to do anything and can just heal on top of it. Divine Hymn is a weaker version of Tranq that when you have more people comes closer to Tranq but still loses out. Lightwell Prismatic Crystal would require some forethought and let you take a couple of options for using it. For example Saving Grace would be awesome to use on it if the raid is taking insane damage. Pop Serenity, BH x2 (extra heals), Heal, BH, Saving Grace. That's a lot of AoE healing and on a 3m CD would be perfectly fine and not too OP. Just requires you to think ahead and place your lightwell properly and adds some complexity to the class which isn't a bad thing.

6) It's not suppose to be a FD but if someone takes a hit that would otherwise kill them it is suppose to save them, not bug out and not work. There are some boss mechanics already in place that you can't use it on, Basically boss hits designed for to kill you unless you do something to avoid it are one of those situations. The problem is a tank will be at 50k health and take a 150k hit with GS on them and die anyways cause it didn't activate. That's the main issue.

7) I think it could use a lot of rework as its a very small niche even with increased range, would be hard to use viably.

[Deleted]

Just a wee thought about the Lightwell-PrismaticCrystal idea you guys are talking about. I think it's a pretty good idea, and I've had a similar one for a while.

I think that it would make more sense for Discipline and Holy to have a passive that turns Shadowfiend into a Lightspawn. In terms of damage and mindbender this would function exactly the same, except that the lightspawn would radiate all single-target healing or absorbs received (by the priest) as healing to up to 5 nearby injured party or raid members. For holy especially this would provide a very interesting and efficient way of splash healing during phases of AoE in a way that could be considered mana efficient and capable of reducing overheal. In addition, as holy you could use Guardian Spirit on the Lightspawn (even glyphed) for a very powerful AoE healing CD - but at the cost of 2 of your healing CDs and a glyph slot, which is a fair tradeoff I think. You can use them to smaller increases or sacrifice them both for throughput. This would turn the Shadowfiend into a meaningful ability for both discipline and holy that fits thematically, and functionally with the toolkits.

This would open up the option for a variety of interesting glyphs surrounding lightspawn like:
- Increasing the healing radiated by lightspawn but increasing its cooldown.
- Allowing healing done to the lightspawn to increase its damage output at the sacrifice of its healing effects.
- Having the lightspawn release all healing recieved while active as a big nova at the end to all raid members instead of each time it is healed.

[Deleted]

Personally, before the 6.2 set bonuses were announced I felt my healing was on par with the other throughput healers, regularly found myself pulling ahead on meters through using the entire toolkit correctly and precasting etc. To touch on your point about making Holy competitive (And to an extent Mistweavers) I feel the solution for giving holy a competitive chance at achieving a double priest/X Healer/X Healer raid comp for certain bossfights would be to come up with some new raidwide utility to give Holy. Paladins have double bop, devo aura. Druids have roar and tranquility. Shamans have double SLT and Tide, also windwalk if needed. Disc's bring an increase to everyones EHP. Monks have Revival and some nice AoE stuns. Holy has... sub-par healing cooldowns and a versatile kit which you don't need to make use of to do good healing.

To toy with some potentially stupid, overpowered or maybe great ideas to give holy something that would potentially be on par with these great utility spells that we simply lack. Also added some ideas for making some glyphs more situationally viable:

Some kind of modification to Leap of Faith through Body and Soul. It already increases the targets movespeed by 60%, but Feather + Grip is just better. I think adding an option to talent LoF to target everyone in the same group (Similarly to PoH) within 10 yards of the target could add some nice options to play around with. Downside is we don't have Angelic Feathers.

Give us a new Chakra. Anyone within the radius of the little Chakra glow around our character (Maybe increase the glow slightly to be 10 yards, will cover any lagging behind of the game) gains 40% Movespeed but our mana drains by 1% per second while maintaining this Chakra. Makes it potentially longer duration than a Stampeding Roar, less movement speed and gives us a downside to maintaining it for long periods of time. We already have spells like Angelic Feather so movement speed increases through the Holy Light aren't really out of the question in terms of lore. For the Holy Word in this Chakra, it could grant the bonuses of the Chakra to X player for 8 seconds. Making a Ranged/Melee split movement possible.

Tweak Guardian Spirit to grant us a selfbuff if used on ourselves rather than anyone else. If we decide to use it this way then the bonuses to healing recieved are instead made healing done, the prevents death no longer activates and we've wasted a tank cooldown to give a downside of this.

Let us reposition Lightwell as we want, gives us the option of using the Glyph of Lightwell, which actually makes it deal really solid healing on demand.

Spirit of Redemption Idea's (Probably OP) Number's mentioned are definitely subject to change, just came up with them off the top of my head

Give us a spell version of Spirit of Redemption accessible through level 100 talents. Clarity of Purpose either needs a major number tweak through healing done or the range or just outright remove it from the game. This spell would have a 10 minute cooldown and last (30?) seconds and significantly increase our capabilities to do everything through the Chakra system.

The Serenity buff would apply to all targets within 10 yards of the initial target, giving us the crit% buff on all of them. Renews will instead automatically refresh their full duration after the first tick.

Sanctuary's active would deal something like 500% more healing and apply echoes of light and the passive would remove the cooldown on Circle of Healing instead of reducing it.

Chastise's active would instead work as an AoE Stun/Snare around the initial target. The passive would give us significantly more damage (Probably needs tweaking for PvP) But let us obliterate shit for 30 seconds if we so wish. Turn Smite into a chanelled beam of light that would allow us to deal about 75% of a dps' damage and grant 20% of the damage done split amongst the raid evenly. Holy Fire leaves a debuff on the target that makes dps who hit it with direct spells/attacks recieve some healing too.

Chakra: (Movement concept) active also removes all movement impairing effects around that person. The passive becomes raid wide and doesnt require mana to sustain.

A lot of the idea's from this spell are pretty overpowered. But as a Holy Priest I often just feel like my identity is lost on me apart from when I die and by then the fights over any way. I want to be able to have my Ascendance Mode. I want to have a huge cooldown that makes my identity apparent. Druids can turn into Tree's, Paladin's have holy wings that come out of their back when they want to heal more, Shaman's become an Ascendant, Mistweaver's just look cool with Rushing Jade Wind and all their green mist abilities that are very noticeable.

The only time I feel like people know I'm playing my spec is when I die because a wipe has been called or I place down Holy Word: Sanctuary, which is a terrible spell anyway. The rest of the time it just seems to be a lot of criticism towards holy that I have to defend, whereas it's just clearly understood why every other healer is solid.

A lot of this is terribly formatted but it's just a quick idea of some of the thoughts I've had towards bringing Holy towards having a competitive raid spot during high end raiding progression. Personally I disagree with Ion Hazzikostas' view on Holy from the recent interview with us being in a fine place. If I'm getting told that my raid leader is doing it wrong for allowing me to play Holy in a raid, then I feel pretty shit as a player and also as a customer. Holy needs something new to make us just ever so slightly more viable like druids/shamans/paladins/discs

Moving in to 6.2 I think the disparity between the raid healers will become very apparent, largely due to the set bonuses but also the utility problems. All I feel I bring to the raid as a holy priest when I join is that I have a wide range of tools to achieve the job, and a lot of them aren't even needed because staying Blue Chakra and doing that rotation pretty much gets the job done anyway.

[Deleted]

at djriff

1)About chakra dancing : I don't think anyone is actually doing any kind of chakra dancing.
If you are a serenity user, then you have absolutely no reason to ever get into chakra sanctuary. Holy Word: Sanctuary is completely useless, and if you have decided to play with serenity you have already chosen to pass on CoH with a reduced cooldown and that reduction doesn't justify loosing all the renews you have built if you don't plan to sit in that chakra for several minutes.

If you are a sanctuary user, then using serenity here and there for some spot healing could be useful. One can think about mushrooms on Brackenspore or the rune soaker on Ko'ragh, but then a paladin or a disco priest are way more suited for those situations (those situations are exactly the ones where we can feel the weakness of Heal)(well actually that's not completely true, holy priests could be very strong on those situations, but that had more to do with glyphed Guardian Spirit than our capability for single target healing). Since those two encounters i haven't seen anything that could remotely justify getting into serenity for a sanctuary user.
At some point i was tempted to consider serenity chakra as a bursty one while sanctuary would be the mana efficient one. If sanctuary delivers as a mana efficient option, the bursty capability of serenity is offset by the time it needs to get into motion.
Currently for me, chakra dancing means using serenity in 5-mans and possibly in 10-man, and sanctuary in 12+ mans.
Not to mention that if devs truly believed chakra dancing was a thing, they wouldn't have designed Repudiation of War.

About triage healing : for me, triage healing meant throwing renew on a dd and knowing it would toped him off or almost if he didn't take too much damage in the next 12 sec then precasting a Greater Heal or whatever on the tank in case he would take some meaningful damage, and then, if the damage did not came, stopcasting in order to not waste any precious mana. Triage healing is something you can do in a more slow paced healing setting than what we have now, and most of all it is something you can do if you don't have 3 other healers that just want to top off everyone NOW because else "my hps will suck and my raid spot will be questionned and we don't really care about mana".
Nowadays, and since at least mid cata, healing is a spam feast where you spend all your gcd throwing anything at anyone in hope no one will heal your target first. Triage healing might have been something in 5-mans and in the first 2 weeks of Highmaul if your co-healers wanted to try to play this game, but i don't think it has any sort of meaning now.

TL;DR: chakra dancing is a myth, it doesn't exist and will probably never exist (unless you make it so sanctuary has something that interact with serenity in some way, and encounters are designed with some spot healing in mind that would insta kill the paladins and the disco priests in your raid and force a sanctuary user to get into serenity. Any idea?)


2) The idea was about serendipity and its interaction with Heal and PoH, it has devolved into a discussion about PoH. But nevermind, i'll bite.
You are saying that PoH+CoH make for a good group heal, i think that PoH should be a good group heal by itself, and CoH is too strong the way it is currently. Actually i don't think PoH is a bad group heal in itself, numbers aren't really off. But in order to use PoH you first need to build serendipity*2, and i think that this requirement should come with a bonus to the spell. Currently serendipity*2 only serves to make PoH usable in a raid setting.
It is more a matter of feeling, you have a spell that you feel you can't use without first generating ressources, but then consuming those ressources doesn't really feel rewarding. And you can't even play with them, i mean, if we were able to bank more than 2 stacks of serendipity, then we could anticipate large raid damage by banking serendipity and using several PoH one after the other. You would then have a phase for generating your ressources and then a phase to spend them. But here, when you get to 2 stacks, you have to use them else they're lost, and during a high raid damage phase you have to throw 2 BH or FH first in order to consider using PoH.

Sometimes i feel like every spell for holy is created with a drawback in mind, as if we weren't allowed to have spells that are just good. Maybe in the talent tab, when you select a spec, they should say that flagellation is a core aspect of the holy spec (of course it's hyperbolic and a bit bitter, don't take this too seriously xD).


3) I don't understand xD You don't want it to have a chance to refresh renew, but you wouldn't mind if it had a chance?


4) As a serenity user, trying to keep your renew the longer on the maximum number of people i would think you would have a better use of your gcd than to cast a PoM (this is without taking in consideration the tier set). I was mostly a sanctuary user in Highmaul, and i tried to play with casting PoM a lot, and not casting it, it didn't make that much of a difference. Why do you talk about smiting? I was just wondering if it was really useful to cast PoM in between your renew spam, and i don't think it is.


5) That's exactly the idea, having a healing cooldown that requires some forethought and
some skill (but nothing too drastic), and i think every healing cooldown should have those requirements, not just a fire and forget potent button.
I didn't thought about Saving Grace, but i like the idea, because then maybe Saving Grace could get some use in PvE : you could then have a choice for T100 between a talent that gives you a very powerful healing cooldown for the price of a lesser steady healing, or 2 talents that gives you a better steady healing and an ok healing cooldown. Of course Guardian Spirit should not work on Prismatic Lightwell (especially glyphed Guardian Spirit).


6) At that point i can't really say it is a bug. It has worked that way for so long now (3 expansions?) and Guardian Spirit doesn't strike me as something way more complicated to code than Necropol Will or BoP. I think that they have deliberately put some restriction on the spell and they don't consider it a bug, else it would have been fixed long ago. Maybe someone could tweet a dev to have their stance on the topic (or link a tweet if it has already been done)?
Maybe am i wrong, but i think Guardian Spirit is caped by a percentage of the maximum health of the target, hence why for molten torrent where damages might exceed that percentage it can't save a player. If so, then it is fully intended that Guardian Spirit doesn't work on those abilities, and i say it should.



at Healeze

I suggested the idea of the Prismatic Lightwell because i think that the current Lightwell isn't an interesting spell, once again it is something you place somewhere in the room and forget for the next 3 minutes, but you still need to refresh it because it does a meaningful part of your healing.

Shadowfiend as no real purpose for our healing spec that's true, but mindbender does and you don't want to have your mana regeneration mechanic tied to your healing cooldown, because else you would always find yourself in the situation of needing a healing cooldown but can't do that because i used my cooldown to regen my mana or vice-versa.
Also making your Lightspawn heals the nearby players would mean that you would always heal the melees and never the ranges, and i have seen so many times now my mindbender sitting beside me doing nothing while in a raid that i don't really want him to be more important than he already is (well not really that much, but enough to make me remember it). Unless you meant something different about your Lighspawn and not making it a pet that attacks the enemy?

Lastly, discipline doesn't need any more healing cooldown in the current setting, it already is strong enough and has already all the utility it needs.


at Thorgak

I really like your idea about making Guardian Spirit a burst cd when used on ourselves, plus it would give us the ability to see our wings! (almost like a holy form)(pretty please).

About your mass LoF, while i think it could be fun, it would also give us a too powerful tool to f**ck up groups.

About a new chakra : i am advocation for less chakra, because as of now chakra dancing isn't a thing and i don't believe it can exist. Your idea looks more like a cd than a chakra actually.

I completely understand when you say that we lack something to make us feel like holy priest till the moment we die, your guardian spirit idea of a burst cd could help with that. But at the same time i think that our Guardian Spirit should really be reworked into a real utility cd like BoP and it would help us in the utility department, if so, having your burst tied to it would defeat its purpose.

Your other ideas about Spirit of Redemption seems way to OP in my eyes xD

[Deleted]

About a new chakra : i am advocation for less chakra, because as of now chakra dancing isn't a thing and i don't believe it can exist. Your idea looks more like a cd than a chakra actually.

I completely understand when you say that we lack something to make us feel like holy priest till the moment we die, your guardian spirit idea of a burst cd could help with that. But at the same time i think that our Guardian Spirit should really be reworked into a real utility cd like BoP and it would help us in the utility department, if so, having your burst tied to it would defeat its purpose.

Your other ideas about Spirit of Redemption seems way to OP in my eyes xD

Think the self-guardian one is one of my favourites

Leap of Faith could be cool, and potentially trolly

Disagree, Chakra dancing is definitely a thing, or at least swapping mid fight. Blackhand Phase 1 vs Phase 2 vs Phase 3 I swap a between blue and yellow. Same for periods of high/low damage on Thogar. During Pillar phase on Kromog I swap to yellow since having a burst heal for anyone who gets hit by the knockup is useful. There's a lot of times where just sitting in once stance isn't utilizing the whole playstyle of holy. Having an extra Chakra for mobility wouldn't be too bad.

Although I definitely do understand why people wouldn't bother swapping, there really is very little reason to and having there be a somewhat more... I dont know, prominent reason for swapping between the three currently available would be fantastic, it's just a bit of a personal preference that I like to use the entire kit where I can. This usually results in me pulling slightly more varied/inconsistent numbers on logs and my numbers are more spread evenly rather than it being focused around CoH/Renew/PoM or whatnot, but this does feel rewarding to play.

Agree that spirit of redemption would be OP but 10m CD and some number tweaks to it could make it really identify us and not be -too- strong.

[Djriff]

1) I agree, I don't think most people chakra dance.

2) I agree that it did focus on PoH, but in reality you aren't going to be spending Serendipity on Heal unless you need to burst heal a tank. There is something that you need to note that while you can use FH to build serendipity, BH is better during AoE dmg especially when glyphed as you'll be healing 2 other people other than yourself to build up serendipity then top it off with PoH. CoH is not OP, if anything its rather weak in comparison.

3) I said I wouldn't mind if it had a chance to refresh if we had something similar to genesis.

4)There is a point when renew spamming is useless. You really only need to do it 6-7 seconds before the damage will occur otherwise you are just going to be overhealing. That's why PoM can be awesome as you can finish your renew spamming about 2 seconds into the AoE damage and cast PoM, if its pulsing damage like Tantrum or Stone Breath. It's free healing and in t17 tier generates serendipity which is a huge plus.

5)I disagree, I think GS should work on the Prismatic as it gives you a choice to burn a potential tank CD for more AoE healing and gives you some great burst healing.

6) You would think so, but I've never seen anything official regarding a health percentage requirement nor does it state that in the tooltip. I would relate GS more similar to purgatory, however a purgatory death doesn't trigger GS for obvious reasons.