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Holy Priests in 3.3 ... Like TBC, Only Worse
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Post by
387103
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Post by
turkey
Then again they are not the worst, infact they are pretty much right up there with the best, er rest. But what about Burst AOE healing? Yep, the best or atleast right there with Shaman,
With all due respect, Icebeard7, one of the main problems with priests beyond simple class mechanics and scaling is the reality of the content in ICC. Sure, holy priests are amazing at burst aoe heals, but how is that helpful in the slow and steady damage in ICC? That's one reason why the lousy wanna-be-druid renew spec is becoming popular, and holy priests still can't match a druid's output even when they put everything possible into renew.
Single Target? Sure right there with Shaman and Druids. So basically THE major problem is that Priests are not the best(by a huge margin) in any one thing. OK, I see the problem...
Holy priests are right up there with shaman in single target healing capacity? Perhaps if we spec everything into into GH and completely negate the reason we get raid invites in the first place.
Post by
303152
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Post by
387103
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Post by
turkey
If a druid isn't there, could the priest use his burst AOE heals to cover the damage? Answer is clearly yes. Priests can AOE just as good as Druids, with slightly different styles. The problem you seem to be talking about is how the Druids little heals, constantly ticking leave almost no room for the priests burst AOEs when you are looking at the meters. Many small heals, leave little room for waiting around until large burst AOEs are needed. Just the opposite thing you see when Druids struggle to cover burst AOE damage, when a priest is in the raid. Meters show the priest dominating the druid in covering burst damage. Druids AOE healing potential is larger due to the nature that most HOTs will be overwritten, by burst and direct heals.
Maybe I just aint explaining myself clearly...
Well here's the thing with ICC: the holy priest's burst aoe heals are rarely if ever needed. The damage just never really requires it as it did in Ulduar. Hence the benching of holy priests, hence holy priests speccing to heal like inferior druids.
Post by
303152
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Post by
518371
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Post by
Pachuca
There will always be a healing class who will QQ that they're not on top of the meters, just like there will always be a (pure) DPS class who will QQ that they're not on top of the meters, and tank classes that will QQ that they're not as good as the others.
Deal with it.
Learn to adapt.
Try a slightly different spec or playstyle.
If your guild really is benching you because you're not on top of the meters then either try a new guild or switch your playstyle. Your guild's healing team should be
one cohesive unit of synergy
. There should be room for at least one Holy Priest on your healing team.
Post by
518371
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Post by
ignayshus
I would love to see blizzard expand upon our healing trees a bit.
There's two basic kind of healers, offensive (shaman, priest) and defensive (druid, paladin).
In vanilla, disc was a utility spec and holy was the healing spec, disc couldn't heal anything (though that was pretty true for the other healers as well) and holy could heal everything. Essentially we had two trees, shadow and holy.
In BC, disc was the pvp tree and holy was the healing tree. It could still pretty much heal everything as well or better than anyone else. Essentially we had two trees, a dps tree and a split healing tree (one tree for pve and one tree for pvp, while every other healer had both in one tree).
In Wotlk (until recently), disc was the tank healing tree and holy was raid healing tree. Essentially we have two trees, a dps tree and a split healing tree (one for tank healing/pvp and one for raid healing, while every other healer has everything in one tree).
In Cataclysm they have a chance to correct this, but they're not really going about it completely.
Again there's two basic kinds of healers, offensive and defensive: Disc should be the defensive healing tree and Holy should be the offensive healing tree. Both (like all other healers) should capable of pvp, tank healing and raid healing in their own style: offensive v defensive.
Disc pretty much has this covered already and the chakra effect from holy seems to be pushing things in the right direction.
I have my own ideas about how it could be realized, but if priests are finally going to get out from underneath the curse of having two incomplete healing trees for the last 5.5 years, this is the only reasonable direction I can see that still gives each healing tree distinction and purpose.
Post by
karlusdavius
please explain how we have incomplete healing trees?
Post by
dimichan
Actually I'd love to see some reworking of the talent tree (holy). I'm not as familiar with disc, but one of the things that's bugged me for, oh boy, since BC is some of the talents that benefit spells we don't even use past say lvl 30.
Lesser Heal? Heal? And yet buried in some of those "increases healing done by.. *insert early crap spells* and damage done by *insert spells most don't use except to play around in heroics* will be ONE thing that benefits ONE spell we use.
The "toolbox" we're supposed to use requires us to choose a few things in an already style specific tree and either toss them out (dump the spells benefitting Gheal, for example) or improve them at the cost of others in the same tree (take those Gheal improves due to your holy pally getting killed by latency too often... and gimp renew in the process.)
Though I haven't looked at all of the other healing options for other classes in this much exhaustive detail - does any other class force a spell choice/gimp along with the tree choice? It's probably THE most irritating thing I find about holy at this time.
Post by
397772
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Post by
387103
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Post by
Panik8
Forget the top 100 guilds, forget about what other raids do. You're not unhappy with Priests in general, you're unhappy with YOUR OWN situation, within YOUR OWN guild/server. If YOU are replaceable or if YOU play within a guild/server which is so "elitist" that they won't even consider giving it a try with a Holy Priest (despite what I wrote earlier about 2 of the first 3 guilds to kill the Lich King on Heroic actually having a Holy Priest within their ranks...), while YOU want to play a Holy Priest, then, by all means, find yourself a new guild/server where people will bring the player, not the class.
This isn't about the class/spec being broken, this is about you not getting what you want. Sorry about that. There was a time in TBC when each boss would "require" it's own optimal raid composition... I'd get in for Moroes and sat out for a few fights until they'd need a Priest again, that sucked. I understand your frustration, but, like I wrote earlier, it's not Holy Priests that are under-represented as much as it is the Holy Paladins that are over-represented... Or at least, that's the way I see it, despite all that's been written in this thread...
No offense meant, by the way, I would not go as far as saying that YOU are the problem, but if your guild/server in general are elitist to the point they won't take the best players, you're screwed. Then, if they do take the best players, but you're not among the best healers in your guild and you're getting benched for that reason, you're still screwed.
In any case, it's been proven that Holy Priests are viable all the way through ICC 25 Heroic, I don't know what else to say.
Post by
174266
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Post by
Panik8
Deleted my post after reading beanee's post correctly... My bad, what you said makes perfect sense. I guess I skipped a few pages of the discussion and was mostly being irrelevant with whatever it is that I was trying to prove.
Post by
skribs
This is going to be a LONG post. I work graveyards and this is giving me something to do. However, I believe it is all relevant, and I’ll try to format it so it doesn’t
look
like the wall of text that it is.
I'm not speaking as a priest, I'm rather speaking as my guild's healing officer who has played the three other classes as mains at some point in WotLK, and has raided on all 3 in ICC. Here is the raw perspective I have on each class, just to give you a comparison:
Holy Paladins
– Very high throughput as a result of the ability to stack intellect and then chain-spam Holy Light. HL was supposed to be an expensive emergency heal used when you needed a lot of “umph,” and by its very nature is incredibly efficient once you’re hitting 37k+ mana raid buffed. This is very well suited for the random-target type effects in ICC, as well as tank healing (or, with glyph and proper spammage, works somewhat for AoE as well).
Resto Shamans
– These guys have only 1 button, which doesn’t have a CD. What this means is they scale fairly linearly with haste, while other healers have a slight root function to how they increase with gear (because haste does not affect CDs, on many classes it will not increase the power by as much. A druid with 0 haste from gear or talents could get a 3x1 of rejuv-WG, while a haste-capped druid gets a 5x1. This means you get less % of your healing from your strongest heal, even though you’re overall healing is increasing). Similarly, shamans have a higher haste ceiling than anyone but a holy priest (to which they are equal), so they benefit the most from this raw throughput stat.
Resto Druids
– Can I say OP? “Druids can only heal 6 with WG, Priests can heal 11 at one time.” Actually, by properly using a raid fight timer addon (such as DBM), my druid could plan ahead and actually be healing
more than 25 targets at once
. A big AoE is going to come in 28 seconds? RG until 17 sec, Rejuv until it hits, then you’ve got HoTs on everyone. My druid would handle raid-wide bursts better than a priest or shaman could, simply because of the ticks. Rejuvenation is more powerful than renew (both in number of ticks and on a per-tick basis), so druids really push priests out. When the most powerful
and
most mana efficient rotation – the 5x1 – is all instant casts, you get a pretty OP setup.
Just to dispel another myth real quick – Nourish is not a druid’s flash heal. Regrowth actually is closer to that effect – even though it is 0.5 sec longer. When people are low, if no HoT is present I use RG+Nourish spam instead of wasting several GCDs, and it actually does fairly well. Even then, if you need the slightly faster cast, Nourish is only slightly weaker with no HoTs present (you can also do a Rejuv+Swiftmend if needed). So druid synergy actually has plenty of ways of still providing a quick heal.
Discipline Priests
– Disc priests are really strong coming one of the spec, a second disc priest adds a little bit (e.g. more flexability, “you do groups 1-2 I’ll do 3-5”), but doesn’t offer the same buffs. A third disc priest would offer very little, unless you’re suffering for tank healers due to a lack of Paladins. This is why most guilds want to bring 1, maybe 2 disc priests. Most of this has to do with the mechanics of the class – you cannot have 2x PW:S on a target, but 2 druids can both fully HoT a target up. So while you can stack other healers, the disc priest is sort of “Filled our disc slot, now need a tank healer and some raid healers.”
Holy Priests
– This is where trouble begins. Remember, I’m not speaking as a Holy Priest, but as a healer officer and as one of each of the other classes. With 2x pallies spamming HL, we really don’t notice a whole lot of times when tanks are having issues. The only fight a priest is really nice is on Valithria, but now even that’s easy enough and we’re so far ahead we could easily get it without. Serendipity lacks the ease and built-in intelligence of CH spam without providing throughput, Renew is significantly inferior to Rejuvenation, and based on what I see on Valithria, Holy Priests are the
worst
tank healers in the game.
So they have two AoE styles, both of which are inferior. It really doesn’t boil down to using all of the abilities, because for the most part it seems priests pick one or the other, so you’re picking the best of your inferior specs. “Jack of all trades, master of none,” translates to the Holy Priest as “Horrible tank healer, mediocre raid healer.”
As you can see, I at least believe the priest is underpowered. Actually I believe the other three classes are overpowered, but when you break it down that 75% is overpowered, it’s easier to simply buff up the 4th to make it competitive. So I don’t see “that would make priests overpowered” as being a problem. Overpowered means on par in this situation. Healing meters aren’t everything, but when it’s consistent that once class is severely on the bottom (e.g. we’ll generally have a pally/shaman/druid combo at ~16-18% each, and then the two holy priests at maybe 11-12%, on any fight) then there is a problem.
One of the things our top druid said to me last night was “I may never beat you on PP, but you will never beat me on BQ.” We are usually close, though. The only time our priest comes close to us is on LK, and even then she isn’t top. It is not fight-specific, it is not a “they’re 2% behind,” and it is not a “QQ about meters” issue. It is that priests are a good 33% weaker (i.e. replace 3 priests with 2 druids and you’ve filled a slot) at everything when compared to a shaman/druid (yes, I mean weaker tank healing even than them as well), which makes them good for nothing.
I have to say I agree with Grimbard on his suggestions:
ProM isn’t like Earth Shield or Sacred Shield, in that you cast it on someone you expect to take damage repeatedly. It also isn’t like Living Seed or Power Word: Shield, in that you cannot spam it every GCD. It has the longest CD of any of the “short CD” abilities a priest has (oxymoron, but basically not looking at things with over a 30 sec CD), so it should be powerful. If it jumps to the wrong target – it’s not. Maybe if it worked where it jumped when another target took a hit
and
placed a 1 sec ICD on that target to where no ProMs could jump (thus not having one eat another if cast at the same time) and where another couldn’t jump while it was active, then it might be better.
CoH, IIRC (haven’t looked at it in a while) is weaker than WG, but has the same cooldown. Also, from what I’ve read (and again, haven’t verified, but it’s what I’ve inferred from blue posts), CoH is based on proximity instead of health (e.g. 4-5 nearest targets who are damaged, not 4-5 targets in range with lowest health). With that in mind, I think it needs a buff somewhere, I’m just not sure where. I don’t think removing the CD would be a good idea (because you have other spammable tools already for AoE healing), but maybe something like causing targets within the range of CoH to receive 10% extra healing from you for 6 sec after you cast it.
Lightwell would not be the same as Healing Stream Totem in this implementation. If you’re going to say “if you want that, roll a shaman” then I would say “You already did, both classes have a 1.5 sec heal and a 3.0 sec heal that can be reduced to 2.5 sec cast and then reduced further by synergy with another ability.” Even so, the ToC 5-man trash version of Lightwell, if used with a 3 min CD to 10x single-target heal for a large amount would be a lot different than a no-CD ability which does miniscule raid-wide healing for 5 minutes. They would only be similar in that it would be something on the ground with a health bar doing the healing, other than that it would be like saying “Flash heal is basically Wild Growth” in terms of their similarity.
A party-based ProH has the problem that when AoEs are not raid-wide, they are also not group wide. Positions are generally not assigned by group because you need to “spread out” so any high AoEs that hit are more likely to hit 2-3 people from each group than 5 people from 1 group. This is because we may try to arrange groups based on location (so you have melee and ranged in group 2 who are going left, which means only 2 melee get hit) or on need (e.g. each group having a draenei, putting shamans in the right group for tremor totem), so the group-based approach doesn’t work.
A smart heal would not necessarily be CoH spammable (the cast time actually makes it a different spell when a lot of movement is required) or CH revisited, because of serendipity. The spell itself would be very similar, but once you factor in Serendipity, and make it weaker with 0 stacks but stronger with 3 stacks (than CH) it becomes an interesting tool with differences from the shaman way of healing.
After those changes that have been mentioned, a buff in some way to Renew would be all that’s left. Greater Heal will continue to be weak until Cataclysm unless it goes over some huge change, and Flash Heal will be buffed in usefulness by proxy if Serendipity was powerful again. However, I think Renew needs a bit more power, when you compare it to Rejuvenation. In this case, I’d go with the druid synergy method – your flash heal, binding heal, and greater heal is increased by 10% when Rejuvenation is active on the target (making it useful for healing through debuffs or tank-healing, since serendipity is better for aoe once the changes above have taken place).
A note on top guilds using priests
: Top guilds will use what they have used, which means priests are likely to hold a spot by virtue of being the stereotypical healing class, and the fact that those players likely have a history. Additionally, the better the team is, the less healing is required by each healer. When people stay out of fires and you don’t have healers pulling 1.4k HPS (I’ve seen it and cried), you have a much lower ceiling for raid-wide effective healing. In this situation, the priest would look a lot better. As a sort of proof of concept, going into ToC 25 with crappy healers and one tank, my paladin can pull >10k on twins. Go in with good healers and most people are healed to the point where all I do is FoL spam the tanks and I barely do 3k. So in the top guilds, the throughput ceiling of the priests is less of a hindrance than when you’re making up for “Johnny stood in the fire AGAIN” or “Jimmy, seriously, read up on your class because a Holy Paladin should not have 40k mana and then have 98% of their healing from Holy Shock.”
In the first situation, you may have 30k healing needed by 5 healers, which means if each are at 6k you're good (and 6k is within range for priests). In the second, you may have 40k healing needed by 6 healers, 3 of whom are at 3k (leaving 31k for the other 3). In this situation, each healer needs 10.3k (Druids, Paladins, and Shamans can) but if you have a priest capping at 8k it means the other two need to do 11.5k. So you're basically requiring your better healers to do more by bringing a priest if you're in a "normal" guild (e.g. one that raids with the 25 people that actually logged on tonight) vs. having no problem with a priest in a competitive progression guild.
A note on encounters:
Yes, encounters in Ulduar favored priests more than ICC, but they also favored a well-played druid to the same degree. A druid who blanket-HoTed the raid could get the same effect on burst heals, however they also maintained sustained healing. At least, this was my experience. In 3.1 and 3.2, druids were considered OP, and in 3.3
A note on Cataclysm and Blizzard promises:
I’m honestly surprised GC “promised” Priests anything; they rarely promise, but more often make non-binding statements of intent. This can easily be seen with their trademarked “soon” (wowwiki it). However, Cataclysm will level the playing the field, in that with all classes being revamped, new encounters being designed, and the healing system undergoing an overhaul: all classes are effectively rebalanced in so many ways that you can’t compare WotLK healing to it.
I think that shamans/paladins getting spirit won’t change much, since right now they get MP/5. Maybe not much, but it’s still there. I think the bigger issue is that they aren’t going to scale gear as fast – you won’t have paladins with 100k mana, druids stacking SP because they don’t need regen and are at haste cap, and shamans stacking haste to the point its ridiculous. So the fact that priests don’t really scale with 1 stat or cap in the others quick enough to stack SP won’t be as big a factor. With Beacon changing (that will nerf paladins) and with the plethora of other changes that are happening, I see the gap closing for priests. Also, Blizzard is, IIRC, going to look at lightwell. It is a poor talent in its current implementation.
I also agree that priests are the hardest class to learn, and that should be represented in what they are capable of. The easy classes should have highest healing for inexperienced players (because there’s less room for failure) but the lowest ceiling for those who know what to do (albeit close to the others, because knowing when to use each spell even on a pally or druid is a fine-tuned process). Priests should have a clear front when they really know their class and have practiced on each fight. Currently that is not the case.
Post by
karlusdavius
The biggest thing in cataclysm for a priest, oddly enough, is the change to health pools. having DPS at around 7k health will mean that a rejuv tick won't heal for 30 - 40% health, more like 7% - 10%. Meaning a priest can start to spam those PoH without worrying about overheal, hence chakra.
Renew needs a buff in scaling. it's just weak as.
PoM needs to change. having two priests means 50% chance to get your PoM bounce canceled out.
PoH might be raid wide come cata..but don't hold your breath.
Dear god PLEASE give us a lightwell that's useable. ToC version would be amazing, but unlikely as shamans would QQ. I'd love to see it targetable. Cast lightwell on the tank and all members within a X range get Y amount of healing per second? yeh, that would be nice!
Spirit of Redemption needs to change. I think i mentioned ages ago about making it our *form*. maybe a 30 second duration where we gain something to our spells, or all of our spells gain secondary effects. our AMGHERECOMESPWNDMG! button.
I'm looking forward to cataclysm. i think it might just be the second coming of WoW.
Post by
174266
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