Priest heals a little low?

[Danner]

Everyone has their 'thing' in healing.

Discpriest: Absorbtion (longevity, dmgreduction, survival)
Holypriest: Aoe Burst (power, flexibility, mobility, dmgreduction, speed, survival?)
Druids: HoT blankets (mobility, flexibility, longevity, power)
Paladins: Single target throughput (power, dmgreduction, survival, speed)
Shamans: Cluster damage cleanup (longevity, power, flexibility, dmgreduction, self-ress-on-death-survival, speed)

The first word is their signature modus operandi. The paranthesis is their individual strengths.

Priests are just medicore healers atm, for AE healing they are beaten by druids and in some extend shamans (although not often).

This I will disagree on. You cannot measure healing ability on the meters. That's to say, you can. But you shouldn't, as the numbers will not reflect what the healer is actually offering.

Reading on the druid forums, they absolutely envy us holypriests for our burst; it's a major weakness of the druid to be honest. Sure, they'll keep the raid alive, they will pull silly great numbers due to fight mechanics and sniping, but they can't keep the raid topped. That's where the priest comes in.

Reading on the paladin forums, they absolutely envy us holypriests/shammies/druids for our aoe heals. They envy discpriests for the damage mitigation. They envy shamans for their longevity.

The shammies in turn are screaming for better mobility, and like us, they think druids are silly OP.

Discpriests are screaming for more throughput. It's to the point where most discpriests don't consider themselves a real healer anymore; since paladins have raised the bar extremely high. In fact, everyone thinks paladins are silly OP, and everyone except the paladins themselves would like to lower the bar.

--

It's easy to consider the holypriest a second rate healer if you look at the meters alone. I can try to heal like a druid, spamming renew on everything. I'll do really great HPS if I try. Maybe not quite up to the druid, but it's reallly close. I'll lack swiftmend and a combatress, but - there is nothing preventing me from going that route.

But at the same time, even though my HPS is awesome, I'm not playing to my strengths. I'm trying to be a druid, and while the meters says I'm doing something very rigth, I know it not to be true. My main strength is the aoe burst capabilities. My signature ability is to get people to to full HP fast, blowing insane amounts of mana in the process. That's my job in the healing machinery. Trying to heal as a druid breaks that part. And it's very important.

That's not to say I shouldn't use renew. But... it's not the end-all answer.

--

At the end of the day, it's not really a power issue. Yes, druids bring stronger raidwide HPS. Priests bring other stuff, it ideally evens out in a starcraft-style balance. But there definitively is an imbalance right now. You can easily heal any content with paladins and druids. You will have a hard time with an equal amount of discpriests holypriests and shammies.

This has led the rest of us into being considered second rate healers. We just bring different skillsets. Sadly, not many of them are useful these days. Go back to ulduar, and the situation was different. PoH was insanely useful in that content. AoE Burst healing was mandatory on a majority of the fights. Not bringing a holypriest was gimping yourself.

[Howaboutafresca]

50% crit raid buffed, 35k mana, 3k sp, 1.46s holy light cast. His holy light casts in just barely more time than my flash heal and hits for roughly twice my flash heal with the ability to crit for 3x more than my flash crits for (not counting my talents buffing it on certain targets).

Tbh he isnt even that geared, i have 35k mana unbuffed on my pally and that's with only one intellect trinket, also i have 50% crit unbuffed as well as 1.2 second holy lights and my gear is barely 264 atm since i haven't been doing about any 25 man content. none the less, hpriests are op in aoe healing, but so are druids, in my 10 man group me and a druid healer were both at 9k hps+ on queen.

[Sonic018]

Well the main problem is scaling. As we well know, pallies scale extremely well with int and spellpower, while the Bonus of crit is actually lacking on us priests. Although, with a pure trughput spec, and optimizsing the encounter mechanis, you can easily ruin most of the pallies advantages. In fact, you can steal a lot of his mt heal abilities by just spamming over. Well you need a lot of mana therefore, but you should obtain about 30k raidbuffed combined with something around 30%-35% crit raidbuffed, and it will workout just fine. And for little dmg income just use empowered renew and top him off with around 2k and you get the most part of the healing done for you. You might argue (and youre right), this tactic is just stealing the heal, but thats what meters are all about at the end.

Anf after all, it might rescue the poor guy if you give him a hot, in case additional damage is coming in. In a similar way, you can easily heal marks at the saurfang encounter.

My conclusion would be, that the healpriest needs additional scaling. I can follow the PoH nerf, as the scaling and the troughput were just getting out of control, but the class needs a better scaling of renew and espacially CoH. There might also be another option in order to buff holy nova by just making it raidwide and maybe adding a 6 second cooldown (to prevent spamming) but without changing the basic mechanics, so you have to move to the targets.

But seriously, there is not that mich to fix on the heal priest neither in the disc priest, a little upscale would solve the "problem" in my oppinion

[greysin]

Tbh he isnt even that geared, i have 35k mana unbuffed on my pally and that's with only one intellect trinket, also i have 50% crit unbuffed as well as 1.2 second holy lights and my gear is barely 264 atm since i haven't been doing about any 25 man content. none the less, hpriests are op in aoe healing, but so are druids, in my 10 man group me and a druid healer were both at 9k hps+ on queen.

your post is completely, just, wrong

"not even that geared" means not even that geared....you just described geared......if you're in 245+ gear you're geared and if you have a 2700+ gs, you're geared

hpriests come in 2 flavors, HOLY and DISC, which are nothing alike. disc is like a pally and are not very good aoe healers at all, they throw around a PoM, can throw out a renew maybe but mostly just keep the tank up and offer raid-wide BUFFS

holy is like a druid, yeah, but they also have better single target heals/mitigation and more OH SHIT buttons

you shouldn't be able to form an opinion when you haven't thought about something. that isn't an opinion, it's just "talking to talk"

[kyolance]

I would agree that Other healing classes look good in meters compared to Dic Priest or holy even. What strikes me at the end of things after comparing gear, it comes down to skills. " Smart Healing" "effective healing" all this is fine. Lets say you do your optimum healing skills as say Holy Priest. At the end of a fight. I saw how I used Cooldowns for mana returns and what not and at the end exhausted most of my mana pool. A palladin who is similarly gearscore as me still blows me by a good chunk, not only that.---------> hes at like 75% mana still unused at the end of fight.....
You can cry all you want about 'skills" and how it comes down to that. But bottom line is. That Palladin could of gone another round on that boss while I would of been depleeted.

[Izenhart]

Yeah, the difference is that they can only heal, while we can grant different things, apart from Paladins Aura+Blessing and us Shadow Protection+Spirit+Stamina, a Disc priest can land a 10k Shield, a 10k+ (2p t9 bonus) PoM on them, renew up, and Divine Aegis. 3% damage reduction every shield and a CD to burn on them, PS.

Holy Priests are the masters of AoE, the only encounter they can lose in an AoE race is where ther's damage, but spread to the whole raid and not extremely high, easily and instantly fulled by Rejuvenation and WG. (After the first Inhale on Festergut, Val'kyrs, and Blood Queen depending on your raid).

The only thing I find overtuned is CoH.

3800 spellpower raidbuffed an a 5k crit ain't nearly enough.

[Maxpowr]

I agree to some extent. Some of our spells scale horribly.

I sit around 4100SP fully raid buffed and my renews will tick for about 3400.

At the same time, my flash heal will be only 7700.

CoH desperately needs a buff in healing as my holy nova only heals for about 500 less.

PoH needs a little buff. It got nerfed hard in Ulduar, it was ok in ToGC, but now it is just miles behind our other spells in ICC.

As other people have pointed out, we may not top the meters like druids do, but at the same time, we have other equally powerful spells that no other class has.

Guardian Spirit (glyphed) is just so OP it's not even funny. Pain Suppression is nearly just as good.

Not to mention Mass Dispel (while costly) is another OP spell, especially for disc.

[supa]

One thing people need to remember is that you can't compare good players of one class to good players of another class. Any good druid or pally will beat another good priest or shaman in straight heals. People who post that they beat those classes as a priest are usually top tier and are playing against players that don't match them. Priests bring a few nice buffs, life and shadow resistance, which are good. Shamans have self-res, sp, crit, spell haste, and maybe str and agi, as well as heroism/bloodlust. This makes these healers situational. In a 10 man a shaman has more use. The strength oh holy priests are 25 mans where there is burst raid damage. That is where they shine with CoH and PoH. Otherwise, they are generally weaker than other healers.
Every healer is different and has its strengths and weaknesses. Think about this when making decisions on who to bring for what raids/fights.

[Surannhealz]

I've been noticing that our holy or disc priest just aren't healing as strong as they should. Similar geared holy pally will do twice as much. Anyone else see a change?

Can you be more specific as to what the problem is? Healing is not DPS. Are the healers in question failing to keep up targets? Have you looked at their active time on something like World of Logs to see if they are idle'ing or staying active?

[Zeuq]

Why are people complaining about Priest scaling? Holy Priests scale very well. Holy Priests are the last spec besides Holy Paladins to reach the necessary regen, which means we make use of those stats where for other classes, more Int or MP5 is largely wasted. Holy Priests also scale insanely well with SP thanks to all the multipliers and that it results in little overheal on CoH, PoM, Renew, or PoH. And Holy Priests probably make better use of Crit than any spec except for Discipline. I agree that PoH was nerfed a little too hard and probably should have only been, say, a 15-20% nerf instead of 30% or been compensated somewhat with a faster base casting time, but it's still useful and the best tool for those raidwide burst moments.

Discipline could probably do with slightly better throughput scaling and are the only spec that doesn't get some bonus SP from Intellect or Spirit but they scale fine with Haste and make better use of Crit than anyone else. Either way, even if the scaling is a little on the poor side, the added utility more than makes up for it and Discipline isn't getting benched from raids any time in the foreseeable future.


Really, looking at the meters to determine the worth of a healer is only part of the story. As Holy, I can easily keep up with a Druid on even steady raidwide damage (eg, Festergut, Blood Queen, Twins) if I mimic their style, but as Danner pointed out well, we bring a lot more than that because Druids simply do not have the tools to manage burst (eg, Exhale, Pact, missed orbs, etc.) that also goes along in those fights, and sometimes managing that burst will drop me noticeably behind the druid but if I didn't change up my healing to manage it and kept pretending to be a Druid, they would have died. It's all about how the healers work together.

[hoho]

I'd like to see any priest of any gear level able to do that

Our 10-man group has been doing Saurfang with 2 tank/1 healer for past four weeks. First one to solo-heal it was shaman, next week we had paladin, then disc priest and finally a druid. Most of them complained about being bored on the fight. Boss usually died around 40-60 energy without any marks up but I'm sure they could have kept tanks + 1 mark up without problems.

In most fights that disc priest pretty much destroys everyone else on meters by keeping entire 10-man raid constantly shielded. When he wasn't there others simply had to work harder. Healing up damage is a bit less effective than preventing it, not to mention we had quite a few cases where having a shield on someone saved them on dying.

TLR:
Every healer is good and has their strenghts and weaknesses. Disc is OP in many fights.

[RubenMarques]

You guys complicate too much the whole topic.

In short terms, yes... Both the holy priests and the resto shamans are a bit weaker atm, but its a minimal difference to be honest (in normal circumstances). All 4 are pretty balance and if you have <class><spec> doing wrong then blame the Healers Officer, because he's the one giving bad assignments to the healers.

That, or in case you're doing 25 mans you're just bringing too many healers with you. The amount of eHPS depends on the amount of healers you have... The more healers you have in the raid the less effective they'll be in terms of meters because they'll be less healing to do. And normally in this cases Paladins and Druids tend to be strong because a Paladin never ever stops spamming 2 targets, and the Druid has rolling rejuve going on convering heals before others.

Now if you lower the amount of healers to for example 5 you'll see that shamans and priests will start getting a bit better in metters.

So its basically a problem of assigning the healers wrong, or your players are just bad

In case of 10 mans, well in that case i tend to agree with you, taking 2 priests for a 10 man is not the same thing has taking 1 paladin and 1 druid. If you're raiding 10 mans with 2 healers (which is what you're suposed to do) just don't put there a priest except if he's extremely good otherwise you'll have a hard time with him (again, except if you take a holy pala with you in that case there isn't a problem)

[Rakydei]

holy is like a druid, yeah, but they(*priests*) also have better single target heals/mitigation and more OH SHIT buttons

you shouldn't be able to form an opinion when you haven't thought about something. that isn't an opinion, it's just "talking to talk"

Fyi, druids are way better tank healers than holy priests; we have a ~1 sec heal which crits for about 13-14K with about 45% crit chance raidbuffed and it leaves a seed on the target after a crit healing for 30% of the healing done on the next attack. In addition to this we have our many many hots. Dont state things like facts if you dont know what the hell you're talking about