Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
"Overpowered" AE Spells in WotLK
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Prayer of Healing
We'd like to change PoH too. The challenge there is making it not feel like CoH.
[...] Right. I mentioned this in another thread today, but you have a few broad options: either PoH heals the 5 most injured folks (in which case it's a lot like Circle) or it heals the whole raid (in which case it's likely overpowered or not useful enough) or it has a longer cooldown to compensate for the previous (in which case it's a lot like Divine Hymn) or it heals the target and the 4 closest targets (in which case it's like old CoH).
It's a goal to get it to not be group only. It's just a tricky goal. At the very least it's not as bad as Tranquility since you don't have to decide what group the priest is in ahead of time. There are spells that still suffer that restriction, and we'd like to change them too if possible. (
Source)
This is something that I think has been a long time coming and I fully expect to finally happen in Cataclysm. As such, I'm interested in discussing what the best way to modify PoH to remove the group specific mechanic without making it either OP or mostly just a copy of other spells. So here's a few idea that I've had; they aren't necessarily good idea, but they're a place to start
1. It essentially becomes CoH with a cast time and no cooldown. It could possibly be balanced further by making the radius smaller so the main balance is target selection. Or simply having be kind of cost prohibitive (much like it is now, but obviously worse in Cataclysm), such that casting it more than a few times will pretty much put us OOM.
2. It could become a bit more like Chain Heal by reducing the number of targets it hits to 3-4, likely reducing the radius to something similar to CH or CoH, but being different by being a radius around the target rather than chaining.
3. It could be a small radius true AOE with unlimited targets but does a set amount of healing (sort of like the new Healing Rain Shaman spell). For instance, it might split 20k healing over all targets in the radius evenly.
4. It could essentially become CoH as it stands now, probably with a cast time instead of being instant with a CD, and rework CoH into a ground targetable AOE, or a Priest centered AOE heal (kind of like Holy Nova meets Healing Hands).
5. Like the last suggestion, make it like CoH now except with a cast time, ditch CoH and replace it with a talent akin to Nature's Swiftness so we can use it on the new PoH to get similar functionality to how CoH works now, with also the added benefit of being able to use it on Heal or GH for some nice single target burst too.
What do you all think?