Disc needs Holy Nova! ...but how?

[Kelesti]

Begin context rant:

Holy Priests have an obnoxious amount of area effect spells at their disposal. It's true. But what's also true is despite the number of these spells, Holy Priests still can't be "better" at multi-target healing than the other specs.

But where does that leave Discipline?

Sure, someone that's terrible would point out the Wrath model for healing, saying lolbubblespam should count, and the rest of us would want to burn these idiots with fire.

Then someone else with actual knowledge and experience would point out that 2 out of 3.5 tools that Holy uses, Discipline has access to. And while they'd be right, another person would be quick to point out that it would be inherently weaker than Holy's, and a debate would ensue over whether numbers matter so long as the whole package works...

Blah.

Right, so anyways. Discipline is not replacing Holy. It shouldn't. But they all need the "tools" to do what is required of them. Out of all the things in the Priest Class, Holy Nova seems to be a nice fit for Discipline's Area Effect of choice, or at least closer now.

TL;DR version: What can we do to make Holy Nova feel Discipline?

Should we tie in the damage aspect through something like Atonement? Absorbs? Forget the name, just something to help it stand out to Discipline and say "that one's mine!"

So what can you come up with?

[Abandon]

Personally, I would say gauranteed Divine Aegis-type shields. Something for 20% of the amount healed on each target sounds decent, and it wouldn't exactly be insanely overpowered considering it is pretty much melee range around the Priest.

Or they can keep the Glyph bugged and let us become Holy Singularity.

[Owltoid]

First things first, don't call it "holy" nova



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVaL92-jssk

[Mandible]

Once Pw:B actually work better off our mastery then there would be time to work on other spells - in the meantime use those your got at your disposal

[Rystastic]

Disc Exclusive:
Power Word: Barrier

Holy Exclusive:
Holy Word
Circle of Healing

Both:
Holy Nova
Prayer of Mending
Prayer of Healing

So its more like 5 holy aoe abilities and 4 for disc.

That said, Holy Nova is already better for disc than for holy. Aegis makes it pretty rad. I'd agree with the guaranteed aegis procs off of holy nova for disc.

[Kelesti]

Disc Exclusive:
Power Word: Barrier

Holy Exclusive:
Holy Word
Circle of Healing

Both:
Holy Nova
Prayer of Mending
Prayer of Healing

So its more like 5 holy aoe abilities and 4 for disc.

That said, Holy Nova is already better for disc than for holy. Aegis makes it pretty rad. I'd agree with the guaranteed aegis procs off of holy nova for disc.

I wasn't counting Mending, because it may be multi-target in one sense, it doesn't really help you recover from area damage, now that it's not "lolaura" every single fight. And calling Barrier an Area Effect Heal, you may as well include Divine Hymn/Tranquility. It's a cooldown, when damage isn't.

I've been doing some of my own brainstorming, and I like Abandon's guaranteed Aegis (probably tone it down to 10-15%) but I would like to add in one awesome thing to incorporate the "do damage to heal" design that Discipline has, inspired by Fire Mages:

If you hit at least three targets, the healing done to your Grace is increased by X%. I was thinking triple might be overkill, but what do you think of double?

[Quehn]

This post doesn't make sense.

Discipline is all about shield, whereas Holy is about direct healing.

Holy is superior at aoe healing and Disc is superior at shielding and solo target healing.

[Kelesti]

And Holy is superior at single target healing. And druids are superior at single target healing but they can multi-target quite well, and shaman...

There aren't "single target" and "raid healing" specs anymore, because the whole game is Bring the Player, not the Class. They managed to apply that to DPS, and to tanks, it's supposed to reach healing as well, by their design.

[Lysah]

If I may, they still have a very long road ahead until they can say "bring the player, not the spec."

I'm not even sure that this is still their goal, anymore.

[Kelesti]

Why not, Lysah? They don't have to perform identically, just have the tools available to them. Given the BC mindset of healing, Greater Rank 1 was a viable tool when using proper Triage, it wasn't just Flash Spam or Circle.

Given that Heal now fills this role, even Paladins have some of the "tools" to do the job. Not as well as a Druid/Shaman, etc, but they could. There's no reason this can't apply to the Holy/Discipline crossover.

The answer should never be "respec/reroll" or "find another healer". It's not that far out of place, really.

And given the crap that is expensive mending, low output 10 second Circle, Discipline's not in much worse of a place than Holy is, considering how "accessible" Sanctuary is.

The point of this is to make one of the tools feel like it belongs to Discipline, a quality of life/playstyle thing, instead of what will be interpreted as "holy-lite".

[Lysah]

Fair enough. Keep in mind that it is unreasonable to compare priest to any other healer class, as they have two different healing trees to balance around what every other class must accomplish with one. I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard kept "traditional" roles for these specs.

If we're just talking about holy nova, specifically, then that is something else, entirely =)

[Druishprince]

Talent deep in disc tree:

Your Holy Nova is replaced with Divine Explosion - Divine Explosion replaces the healing from Holy Nova with a shield that will absorb incoming damage. Affects the nearest 5 friendly targets. no longer does damage. Absorb amount cannot exceed 10% of the priest's maximum health. scales with mastery.

---------- Post added 2010-10-14 at 11:02 PM ----------

This post doesn't make sense.

Discipline is all about shield, whereas Holy is about direct healing.

Holy is superior at aoe healing and Disc is superior at shielding and solo target healing.

How is disc superior to any other spec at single target healing?

Edited out the unnecessary parts, thanks. ~Lysah

[sacrypheyes]

the trick may be to create a disc talent that increases healing + crit chance in proportion with how many friendly targets are actually healed by nova (capped or not, doesn't matter for now).

let's say it's 3%, for each person affected by the holy nova (yourself included), that'll end up giving :
-5 players : +15% healing/crit
-10 players : +30%
-25 players (never know) : +75%

also, since i specified that should take in account friendly targets, we could add in pets and pnjs.

[Repo123]

How about reducing PW:Barrier cooldown to 90 seconds. Change glyph of PW:B to do aoe heal to anyone outside of barrier equal to 10% of PW: Barrier absorb, or something like that.

[Azyoulike]

Discipline is all about shield, whereas Holy is about direct healing.

Please wake up and smell the cataclysm.

[Deleted]

agreed with Azyoulike there..

And as an answer to OP. I've been thinking to use Holy nova more often but the radius is just to small, the mana cost too high and it shouldnt only heal the ppl in ur grp

[Hushkoon]

agreed with Azyoulike there..

And as an answer to OP. I've been thinking to use Holy nova more often but the radius is just to small, the mana cost too high and it shouldnt only heal the ppl in ur grp

Wake up and smell the patch, Holy Nova is now way cheaper and heals everyone inside it's range, completely ignoring wheter or not you are in group/raid with them ^_^

[Lionor]

Well I came up with 2 ideas of how to squeeze in holy nova to the disc tree.

The first one is pretty simple, you just include it in Strength of Soul, not game-breaking but still a nice addition.

The second one is a talent (3 points) that reduces the damage portion of Holy nova by (33/66/100%) but increases the chance that it will trigger a PoM bounce off a friendly target struck by Holy nova by (33/66/100%). I kinda like the second one much better to be honest

Thoughts?

[Kelesti]

Wake up and smell the patch, Holy Nova is now way cheaper and heals everyone inside it's range, completely ignoring wheter or not you are in group/raid with them ^_^

It seems that Holy Nova has a target cap, where it will go beyond group limitations but still only hit a small number of people if you're all clustered together.

[Abandon]

Thats still a big improvement over the party restriction, I must say.