Has anyone calculated/tried this? [HOLY]

[Deleted]

Hey buddies,

I've been trying to compare the different playstyles available to us and I'm very curious about one specific one; the renew playstyle. Not renew playstyle as in blanket renew-spam a' la WoD, but the new Legion one.

Let's start by saying that renew is laughably undertuned, but it seems like Blizzard really wants us to use it. They created the An'juna legendary (increase renew duration by 6 sec) as well as the Phyrix's Embrace (which is completely horrible), and they added quite a few renew traits to our artifact weapon. Not to mention the talent Benediction.

I'm wondering if there's been any calculations on how viable a renew playstyle would be, if you have the +6 sec duration legendary, spec into Piety and Benediction, along with the "Say your prayers" and "Holy mending" traits?

All of these fit extremely well with eachother (especially in fights like the Cenarius one) - legendary giving an overall heal increase from renew, benediction giving you free renews (if the encounter works well with it), "Say your prayers" letting your PoM bounce even more, generating more renews, and "holy mending" causing your PoMs to heal even more when they bounce to renew'd targets.

Has anyone played around with this or even tried it? It looks super interesting for a fight like Cenarius or Dragons where we have constant ticking damage. Even with an undertuned renew, all those things combined should make renew pretty strong anyways.

The real issue I see is that mastery/crit would be bad for such a playstyle, and if we DON'T go mastery/crit we'll be completely and utterly useless for any other fight that does not feature ticking damage on the raid. At least with mastery/crit we can transition into a FoL/serenity build and be useful on spot-heal fights.

I humbly invite you to join in this theorycrafting, and if you're good with calculations, feel very free to do some numbers.

Note: I like the mastery/crit playstyle, sanctify/poh are fun to use, but just looking at our legendaries and the different artifact traits, it really seems like Blizzard never really intended for us to use that playstyle. I don't care what they intended for us to use, but chances are sooner or later we might have to adjust.

On a second note, I'd also like to voice a complaint toward the responsible priest dev who designed holy priests for Legion, considering that our legendaries are extremely bad in comparisons to others. Not to mention that T'uure brings us a PROC instead of a use effect. Yes, we can "bait" mister T'uure with our holy words, but more often than not you get unlucky and get no proc when you actually need him. Why did they not decide to give us an ability instead to summon T'uure to do the exact same things as he does now? The other healing classes got use effects, but holy did not. It's extremely frustrating.

Not that they'd ever read this, but still. Gotta rant somewhere.

Yours,
Starmind

[Danner]

IMO renew right now seems like a complete waste of a GCD: Use Flash Heal (or Binding Heal if you're so inclined) instead. It may cost marginally more mana, but has the added benefit of reducing the cooldown of serenity. I see no reason to ever use renew except as a pre-cast buffer.


For the math:

Flash Heal
- 2.8% mana
- 475% upfront
- Reverence: +9%
- Time: 1 GCD cast time
- Baseline: 184 HP%M (healing (throughput in spellpower) per % mana used)
- Baseline: 517 HPC (healing per cast)

Renew
- 2% mana
- 55% upfront, 275% over 15 sec
- Holy Hands: +15%
- Time: 1 GCD cooldown
- Baseline: 189 HP%M
- Baseline: 379 HPC


Deliberately ignored in the equation:
- Any ability that gives a flat healing increase to all abilities
- Artifact overall healing bonus, Follower of the Light, Beacon of Light, intelligence bonus, echo, stats, more spellpower etc

But as you can see - Flash Heal is strictly better in throughput, and only marginally worse in efficiency; and that is assuming absolutely none of the renew ends up in overhealing. Flash Heal can also stack on one target - whereas renew cannot. The only place renew is remotely better is as a healing buffer. And even as such it's fairly worthless compared to just casting Flash Heal.

--

Legendaries change this.
Entrancing Trousers of An'juna - Adds two ticks to Renew
Phyrix's Embrace - Hard to model, but promotes multidotting. And has a fun synergy with the doublecast guardian spirit talent in the artifact.

If we focus on the former, two ticks to renew is pretty big. Each tick heals for 55% healing, so that's 110% extra spelllpower per cast of Renew.

Renew
- 2% mana
- 55% upfront, 275% over 15 sec + 110% extra for two more ticks = 440% total healing
- Holy Hands: +15%
- Time: 1 GCD cooldown
- Baseline: 253 HP%M
- Baseline: 506 HPC

As you can see, the efficiency shot through the roof. That's a massive increase to efficiency compared to Flash Heal above. The HPC is now actually comparable to Flash Heal. The main difference is that Flash Heal can be spammed on a single target, whereas Renew cannot. Nonetheless, the legendaries make Renew competitive. I claim it is NOT competitive without it. But maybe I overlooked something important?

--

The real interesting part here is the artifact sockets that give bonus traits. I tend to get tons of socketables that increase the power of Flash Heal. I've had 5 stacks of Reverence at some point, which really push Flash Heal way ahead. I've never seen any artifact socket item giving +level to Holy Hands.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah, I actually forgot Trail of Light in that equation.
This still ain't looking too good for Renew!

[Fascinate]

I just healed cenarius normal with renew spreading/circle of healing and did 205k. Would have been a lot higher but we didnt cleanse the dude that gives mana back. I was ahead of the resto druid doing that, its probably not optimal i just dont like tol flash healing. I didnt focus on reducing hold word CD's i just wanted to blanket as many people with renew as i could, and it seems fine to me.

Edit: Main reason i am doing this is because holy is my offspec ive only got 13 points into it, 4 points into the trait that buffs renew (one from relic).

[Dawon]

I've been looking for (and tempted to write) exactly this kind of topic as I'm very curious about how strong you can make a PoM/Renew-combobuild. Will follow this thread close.

But yeah, I get a feeling blizz wants us to either be FH-spammers (with Holy Word for ohshit) OR build some kind of renew/PoM build where we have shit jumpying all over the place, applying hots and spotheals automatically.

I've always been a renew lover (remember back in MC/BWL and such that it was such a contest between us priests to get the highest renew ticks and passing 250hp/tick was crazy nice!), so I'd completely LOVE if there was an viable option to gear+spec for PoM/Renew kind of build. Atm I am testing Benediction a bit, but I feel it procs at 25% rather than 50% (might be me but feels low) so not satisfied with that talent. Tho I'm not at my trait that makes PoM auto spotheal on renew'd targets yet, it's close so as soon as I've gotten that talent, I really hope for some more boost in the "auto-healing department".

We'll see, I'll monitor this thread as it's a very interesting topic. And let us all pray that the renew-legendary drops for us all!

[worcester]

You can use benediction and the pants legendary with all the traits, never hard cast a single renew and still benefit significantly from the combination. Even without the legendary renew does around 10-12% of your total healing with benediction alone. The ring is probably much better for mythic+ dungeons. 5 renews being funneled into you and the tank on a shortish cooldown with the talent could be quite strong in a pinch.

[Deleted]

IMO renew right now seems like a complete waste of a GCD: Use Flash Heal (or Binding Heal if you're so inclined) instead. It may cost marginally more mana, but has the added benefit of reducing the cooldown of serenity. I see no reason to ever use renew except as a pre-cast buffer.


For the math:

Flash Heal
- 2.8% mana
- 475% upfront
- Reverence: +9%
- Time: 1 GCD cast time
- Baseline: 184 HP%M (healing (throughput in spellpower) per % mana used)
- Baseline: 517 HPC (healing per cast)

Renew
- 2% mana
- 55% upfront, 275% over 15 sec
- Holy Hands: +15%
- Time: 1 GCD cooldown
- Baseline: 189 HP%M
- Baseline: 379 HPC


Deliberately ignored in the equation:
- Any ability that gives a flat healing increase to all abilities
- Artifact overall healing bonus, Follower of the Light, Beacon of Light, intelligence bonus, echo, stats, more spellpower etc

But as you can see - Flash Heal is strictly better in throughput, and only marginally worse in efficiency; and that is assuming absolutely none of the renew ends up in overhealing. Flash Heal can also stack on one target - whereas renew cannot. The only place renew is remotely better is as a healing buffer. And even as such it's fairly worthless compared to just casting Flash Heal.

--

Legendaries change this.
Entrancing Trousers of An'juna - Adds two ticks to Renew
Phyrix's Embrace - Hard to model, but promotes multidotting. And has a fun synergy with the doublecast guardian spirit talent in the artifact.

If we focus on the former, two ticks to renew is pretty big. Each tick heals for 55% healing, so that's 110% extra spelllpower per cast of Renew.

Renew
- 2% mana
- 55% upfront, 275% over 15 sec + 110% extra for two more ticks = 440% total healing
- Holy Hands: +15%
- Time: 1 GCD cooldown
- Baseline: 253 HP%M
- Baseline: 506 HPC

As you can see, the efficiency shot through the roof. That's a massive increase to efficiency compared to Flash Heal above. The HPC is now actually comparable to Flash Heal. The main difference is that Flash Heal can be spammed on a single target, whereas Renew cannot. Nonetheless, the legendaries make Renew competitive. I claim it is NOT competitive without it. But maybe I overlooked something important?

--

The real interesting part here is the artifact sockets that give bonus traits. I tend to get tons of socketables that increase the power of Flash Heal. I've had 5 stacks of Reverence at some point, which really push Flash Heal way ahead. I've never seen any artifact socket item giving +level to Holy Hands.

- - - Updated - - -

Yeah, I actually forgot Trail of Light in that equation.
This still ain't looking too good for Renew!

I realize that hard casting renew is probably never worth it. I am however more interested in the comparison between CoH and Benediction to be honest. It's going to be a PoM/renew build per se, since PoMs will be our absolute most important spell to keep on CD for the free renews/the automatic heals from Holy mending.

What actually makes this build interesting is the +6 sec legendary, the "Say your prayers" artifact trait, the "Holy mending" artifact trait and Benediction. Renew feels like a waste of a GCD, but if you can use your standard FH/serenity/sanctify/PoH playstyle, but keep PoM on CD for all those free renews and free heals from holy mending, the real question is whether that would equal more healing than just using Circle of Healing. With our current mastery build, CoH is quite strong since it puts up a massive echo of light whereas renew does not. But perhaps it's better to use benediction anyway?

- - - Updated - - -

You can use benediction and the pants legendary with all the traits, never hard cast a single renew and still benefit significantly from the combination. Even without the legendary renew does around 10-12% of your total healing with benediction alone. The ring is probably much better for mythic+ dungeons. 5 renews being funneled into you and the tank on a shortish cooldown with the talent could be quite strong in a pinch.

Yes, I don't think I'd be using the ring in a raid setup.

Have you done any comparisons between Benediction and CoH? I mean, we're getting close to 25-26 traits unlocked in the artifact which means accessibility to Holy mending and Say your prayers which automatically should bump Benediction by quite a large bit. Perhaps even so much to make CoH a bad choice? CoH is a dangerous spell for your mana, and tracking it/using it the same way as in WoD will most likely OOM you quickly. Benediction just feels like a better choice overall once you unlock those mentioned traits, and ESPECIALLY if you have the +6 sec renew legendary.

Does anyone have any numbers on how many traits are necessary to actually make Benediction a better choice than CoH? And whether or not the +6 sec legendary is required to make it better? Disregard the fact that CoH costs a shitload of mana, that's always managable in other ways. But I just feel like Benediction could be such a strong talent - help me out!

[Deleted]

Yesterday I killed Cenarius heroic and used Benediction instead of Apotheosis/CoH. It's a very good boss for the renew/pom spec due to all the ticking damage, but you can't really hard cast renew or you'll lose a ton of healing. What I did was basically make sure PoM was on CD at all times and then play the regular sanctify/PoH playstyle and it worked out quite great. Renew ended up as my 4th most healing spell and I sort of dominated the other healers in the group (including two druids and a shaman). This was without the +6 renew legendary, and without the "Holy mending" trait!

If one is lucky enough to get the +6 legendary and artifact-spec into Holy mending, Benediction should be much better than Circle of Healing and Apotheosis, not to mention it's free and doesn't OOM you in 2 seconds. From what I could tell yesterday, it was already better WITHOUT all those extra traits.

Of course, Benediction only really works on bosses with ticking damage like Nythendra, Dragons and Cenarius. For Il'gynoth, Elerethe, Ursoc and Xavius, Apotheosis or Circle is probably better, and you might want to switch the legendary to another one for those encounters.

[Cheze]

casting renew really feels like a trap, especially in five mans where you're probably using trail of light (and any efficiency advantage renew had completely disappears)

benediction is kind of interesting in extreme sustain types of scenarios (e.g. cenarius), but that's more a matter of leveraging all the interactions PoM has on the artifact weapon than it is renew being all that great

[Rici]

Yesterday I killed Cenarius heroic and used Benediction instead of Apotheosis/CoH. It's a very good boss for the renew/pom spec due to all the ticking damage, but you can't really hard cast renew or you'll lose a ton of healing. What I did was basically make sure PoM was on CD at all times and then play the regular sanctify/PoH playstyle and it worked out quite great. Renew ended up as my 4th most healing spell and I sort of dominated the other healers in the group (including two druids and a shaman). This was without the +6 renew legendary, and without the "Holy mending" trait!

Same experience here.

There is so much movement here, which makes casting our spells kinda tricky, additional the mana problems most of us know from raiding, could make this combo powerful.

Renew ended on #2 of my healing spells, right after the echo.

Should I ever be able to get my hands on the +6 Renew legendary, I would really even consider the Enduring Renewal talent...