The unique part of Priest healing?

[Folly]

What is the unique part of Priest then?

There are 2 things I can think of that have not been mentioned yet. A holy priest that uses the right tool at the right time will use less mana for the healing they provide. Despite what the case was in BC, the developers are pushing to make you care about your mana and that means that the efficiency of the holy priest is going to be were they shine.

While people have stated we can fill any roll, they haven't mentioned the synergy a priest provides. In the hands of a competent player a priest's versatile tools do more than let you do any roll. Those tools helps other classes do their rolls. For example, a holy priest grouped with a mt healer can help the mt healer via PW:S to buy the MT healer time to land a big healer or to help get through a healing debuff effect. The priest can use GS to help the MT healer get through a period of high damage. A holy priest can place a lightwell next to the other healer, so the other healer does not have to worry about spending time healing themselves. All of these examples can be done with a 1.5 cast/gcd. This means a priest can still do the raid healing they are suppose to while helping the MT healer keep the tank up through rough spots. It doesn't take too much imagination to see other ways a priest can use their tools to help any role while still accomplishing their own.

[Ananan]

I think you just more accurately described the druid class Folly, but sure.

[Danner]

There are 2 things I can think of that have not been mentioned yet. A holy priest that uses the right tool at the right time will use less mana for the healing they provide. Despite what the case was in BC, the developers are pushing to make you care about your mana and that means that the efficiency of the holy priest is going to be were they shine.

I agree on the notion that this is how it is supposed to be. But the reality is unfortunately not quite as good.

ProM is an excellent spell under the right conditions. But to make it excellent, you need to have it bounce back and forth the main tanks in rapid succession. Invariably, the spell will bounce somewhere else, and the only way of getting ProM back on track is to cast it anew. This means every single cooldown.

Renew is -always- a worse choice than a flash heal for reactive healing. Only when you do proactive healing (like hotting a tank) is a renew better, but it's not close to what a druid can do, so unless you are short on druids, it's rarely worth the mana.

Prayer of Healing is a perfect choice
- if four or more people in your own groupis taking moderate-to-severe damage (~8k damage),
- but none of them are in immediate danger of dying (<12k damage)
- and there is no more heavy blows incoming
- you have plenty of mana to burn
- and your party is not too spread out.
Lots of conditions. But in such cases, Prayer of Healing will be a good spell to get your own party up in health. That's five conditions for a simple party-side spell. In most of the cases, CoH spamming is better and easier and provides better healing to the ones needing it.

Binding heal the perfect choice if
- you have two or three targets hurt,
- and one of the two targets happen to be yourself
- but no more than 2 or 3 (use a heal targetting more people, like CoH, unless it is on cooldown),
- and if all three are not all in your own party, and there is no rush (use PoH instead),
- but not if you are in any immediate risk (Desperate Prayer is instant, fade is instant)
That's a lot of conditions. I find Binding heal keeps taking a low priority compared to other heals, most of which have cooldowns. It's a decent heal in the right conditions for sure, but mostly you just end up spamming flash heal, switching to a random binding heal if you happen to be hurt yourself. It's not optimal use, but it's easier. But it still wont make this spell see a lot of use.

Circle of Healing is the perfect choice if
- three or more people are hurt
- but no one important are critically in danger (use GS or PW:shield)
- unless you have a free SoL and the raid isn't in immediate danger
- and it's not on a cooldown
CoH is too good, it's always the right spell for the job right now. Will still be, but the cooldown is seriously impairing when you can use it. That's the point of the cooldown.

Greater Heal is the perfect choice if
- You are healing patchwerk
- You need to heal a fellow raider who just lost a duel
But that's about it. The spell is pretty useless in current content.

PW:Shield is the perfect choice if
- There is no disc priest in the raid. Casting it will cramp their style badly.
- GS is on cooldown
- You have no SoL proc available.
- Someone is critically low
It's still useful, but I find using it very little.

For everything else, there is flash heal.

We have a lot of tools, but not many of them are fitting the bill these days. Flash heal will be our main spell come 3.0.8.

While people have stated we can fill any roll, they haven't mentioned the synergy a priest provides. In the hands of a competent player a priest's versatile tools do more than let you do any roll. Those tools helps other classes do their rolls. For example, a holy priest grouped with a mt healer can help the mt healer via PW:S to buy the MT healer time to land a big healer or to help get through a healing debuff effect. The priest can use GS to help the MT healer get through a period of high damage. A holy priest can place a lightwell next to the other healer, so the other healer does not have to worry about spending time healing themselves. All of these examples can be done with a 1.5 cast/gcd. This means a priest can still do the raid healing they are suppose to while helping the MT healer keep the tank up through rough spots. It doesn't take too much imagination to see other ways a priest can use their tools to help any role while still accomplishing their own.

Disc priest+ paladin is a wonderful combo for MT healing, i'll give you that. These two specs were made for each other.

However, a Holy priest is not really comboing anything but other priests.
CoH is constantly sniping other raid heals, Chain Heals in particular. SoL procs is constantly sniping other healers. That's the nature of instants.
PoH is only working well with other PoH's. That's the nature of group spells.
Lightwell is not really working. Excellent healing, but useless as noone use it.
Inspiration is working well with shamans MT healing, but you don't really want a shammy on the MT.
PW:S is usually not a proper spell to cast as holy. You will get in the way of the disc priest, and the shield is very weak anyway as holy, rarely mitigating even a quarter of a hit. As holy, you use GS instead. GS has some synergy with other healers; keeping the target alive and adding extra healing. But it's not exactly a staple heal of the holypriest, even though it's the second best reason to go holy.

The best reason being "Disipline priests don't stack at all".

[derevka]

I really want to see them revamp Hymns. I think adding a few more Hymns that we can "sing" during raid encounters would be pretty sweet.

Adding a few more that provide utility would be great and add something different... I have high hopes for the revamping of Hymns.

[powstrike]

I like that Hymn idea ^. I'd pay you 10g to stand in dalaran and Sing to me Bard! =P

Alright back to the topic, i dont play a priest but the other 3 healing classes. And I think that while I have SUPERB utility for an aspect of healing on the other classes such as (e.g Hots, Bacon, Chainheal)
I am rather jealous of you priests of having the ability to taste the sweetness from each of what the other classes specialize in.

But ultimately I think it boils down to PWS,PoM,PoH and binding heal that i really envy...

Not going to talk about CoH because its really too good imo. Cherish that skill priests!
2CoH casts is about 1 Chainheal

[Danner]

Third me up on the Hymn praise. Lovely idea, horrible execution. Here's to 3.1 making the hymns worthy of hotkey'ing!

powstrike, I think you are hitting the nail here! Priests are considered awesome healers simply because we tap into a little bit of everyones domain and do it reasonably well (or in terms of pre-cohnerf raidhealing, extremely well). Paladins would kill for Renew. Shammies would commit genocide for a six second CoH. Druids would probably even be mildly enthusiastic in a postmodernistic kind of way if they got PoH. And these are some of the spells that priests are complaining about! What's up with those priest whiners anyway?

But from a priest PoV, we pay hard for those abilities.
- We sacrifice survivability; when the shit hits the fan, the spirit of redemption in the middle of the raid is the first thing you see.
- We sacrifice utility. Sure, we have mass dispel (useless in wotlk), mind control (gimmick), shackle (target immune) and abolish disease (actually useful), but that's about it. It's not exactly blessings, it's more comparable to the hand spells. Our Hymns can and should have been our utility, but they are not. You bring a second shammy before you bring a second priest. You bring a second paladin before you bring a second priest. Even the second druid is more favorable than the second priest. The choice between a third shammy and a second priest - that's more interesting. And a very open question. But there are only so many healing spots available. We were brought for our healing. Which was very good.
- We sacrifice reliability. We're the first healer to go OOM. Thanks to the fact that we have a pocked druid nearby, the shammy will be the first to feel the mana issue. But nothing can burn mana like a priest. For healing, that's actually a problem. When priests run OOM, things start to die. This makes us ultimately a liability.
- We're no better healers anymore. CoH was our last bastion of overpoweredness. Most of us rolled priest to be the glass cannon healers. Now we're average healers, fully capable of holding our own, but not much more. And that leaves us as glass. You can argue that we shouldn't feel entitled to be better. You may be right. But then we shouldn't have the drawbacks either. Most of the drawbacks may be psychological, but that doesn't make them less real.

So yeah. there is a lot of priest hate around, and there is a lot of priest QQ around
But I think there is some merit in it.

[fugace]

I think the issue is blizzard decided to make CoH a smart raid wide heal and even added a glyph to add a target to make it even more OP, then they nerf it, fine.
But what did holy priests get in LK? honestly not much, guardian spirit is only usefull for sartharion with drakes up, new lightwell is still useless, hymn are useless.
They said they don't want to have any party mechanism in raids but they don't want to change PoH and holy nova, I wonder why.

That being said, I know we'll still be awesome single target and raid healers in this patch.

By the way Danner, PoH is great to heal loatheb and Binding heal is great to heal 4 horseman if you are in the back.
With the CD to CoH, we'll get to use them more.