Now I am creating a feedback thread for Holy Priests for the changes give in 12.1.0. And while I was far more understanding in the Discipline Priest Feedback Thread I created, I am going to be rather blunt and a bit more malicious in my response to what we have gotten for changes so far in 12.1.0.
To say that the Class Dev Team responsible for Holy Priest has been wholly Tone Deaf and providing Band-Aid fixes to a class that has been completely decimated and left behind since Shadowlands, specifically patch 9.2, is NOT an exaggeration, but a statement of fact.
These changes make it abundantly clear that the current tuning approach relies on ineffective, superficial fixes. Redesigning Resonant Energy to provide a personal throughput buff to healing done by the Priest alone does nothing to resolve our fundamentally obsolete toolkit, while the new 4-stack limit represents a strict ceiling reduction. Minor numbers adjustments to personal output will not fix a spec that is trapped at the bottom of both raid and Mythic+ meters. Holy Priests are fundamentally lacking the robust, high-mobility burst tools required to push through modern high-key dungeon healing checks, and adding flat throughput modifiers fails to address this structural design flaw.
Furthermore, the adjustment to Divine Hymn completely misses the mark. The raw, independent healing output of Divine Hymn remains entirely negligible, particularly in Mythic+ where a stationary 8-second channel is often a death sentence. By forcing Holy Priests to rely on Divine Hymn’s baseline 10% healing-received amplifier to be viable in raids, this design effectively reduces us to the healing equivalent of an Augmentation Evoker—a spec with underwhelming personal throughput whose primary value is reduced to acting as a passive buff-bot for the other healers’ meters. If you want a class that supports healers, then simply create a class to do so. Do NOT try to force an existing class into that role just because it seems to be easier for you, the dev team.
Compounding this frustration, the PTR notes highlight a severe double standard in major healer cooldown design. While Restoration Druids are given active tools to root themselves or gain knockback immunity during Tranquility, Holy Priests are forced to stand perfectly still for a weak Divine Hymn channel that can still be completely canceled and wasted by a simple boss knockback effect. Giving us personal Guardian Spirit protections during the channel fails to fix this mechanical flaw. Holy Priests do not need stationary, interruptible survivability tweaks to act as passive raid-buff tools; we need a complete mechanical modernization that restores our independent healing identity and provides reliable utility across all endgame pillars.
Now lets look at the 2pc and 4pc designs that you all have come up with shall we? I fear this critique does not get better with these either.
The primary focus of this tier set is Renew—a spell that was completely pruned as a hard-cast active button.
The 2-Set Bonus: Grants a vital 6% Haste buff tied to having three active Renews. However, because players cannot manually cast Renew, we have zero direct, on-demand control over managing this buff.
The RNG Trap: Forcing players to fish for passive RNG procs via Benediction or burn heavy Holy Word cooldowns just to activate a baseline tier set buff is incredibly poor design.
The 4-Set Flaw: A flat 10% increase to automated Renew healing is just another superficial numbers tweak. It fails to address Holy’s fundamental lack of independent, impactful burst throughput.
The “cherry on top” of this design is that the 2-set forces a Haste modifier onto a spec where Haste is actively avoided in endgame content.
Currently, the established stat priorities for Holy Priests are:
Haste is our absolute worst secondary stat for raiding because it causes players to bottom out their mana pools far too quickly. In Mythic+, it still sits near the bottom of priority lists. This tier set actively forces us to play around a stat that doesn’t align with current optimal healing profiles for either hero tree.
Why are we buffing Haste when it is the worst stat for Holy Priests in Raids and the second worst in M+? Merely because it interacts with a passive Renew mechanic? Forcing players to track a Haste buff they cannot manually activate—on a spec that actively avoids Haste to conserve mana—is fundamentally flawed. We do not need automated tier sets that contradict baseline stat values and playstyles; we need tuning that respects the actual state of the Holy toolkit.
Unless there are massive changes coming to the baseline Holy Priest toolkit, this tier set guarantees Holy Priest stays on the bottom rung of the ladder. At least with our current tier set, we can actively power up a Naaru and leverage our Apex Talents to meaningfully beef up our throughput. While that current set heavily favors Archon, it is still statistically and mechanically superior to what is being proposed here. I strongly recommend going back to the drawing board with this tier design unless the team is planning to introduce actual, effective mechanical changes to the core class.
Once again, the developers seem determined to ignore holy priests
We received no meaningful changes at all. At the start of Midnight, they butchered the spec, and now the gameplay feels bland, repetitive, and uninspiring. We have no real raid-saving utility, no exciting mechanics, and very little that makes Holy Priest feel unique or rewarding to play
And somehow they still can’t do something as simple as removing those ridiculous glowing Oracle eyes or giving us a glyph to disable them
At this point, it feels like nobody on the class design team actually plays holy priest
And as if to add insult to injury lets take a quick peak at the Restoration Shaman Tier Set for a moment shall we? Here it is:
So Restoration Shamans, who are not known for shielding, minus the Earth Shield which is an additional healing tool, gets ANOTHER form of Damage Mitigation, while Holy Priests, who have very little, or next to no damage mitigation gets a Haste buff on a spell that they can not manually hard cast. This is exhausting.
I was talking to my husband about the shaman set and how cool it sounded. He said that when a new healing rain drops the previous one goes away? So if I am on my hunter out in narnia running out a puddle or just chasing a butterfly I could catch a proc of healing rain all by myself and take the one intentionally placed on melee or wherever? If that is true, that tier set doesn’t sound as cool. (But if I am a cool hunter and stacked, it is pretty cool )
I think their Tier is pretty good, it really plays into Healing Rain, which is universally hated by Farseers, but this could be an easy remedy to their biggest issue of not being able to move it. I am just pointing out the lack of care or stat priority from these updates by the devs
Here is my feedback… I’m gone if these changes go through… I’m not rerolling a new healer . Got it Blizzard ??? Whoever is working on Holy Priest please fire them.. you are adding nothing to this class !!!
Hell with it I’m out.. canceled my sub till these devs do the right thing and revert these horrible changes to my fav class .. ya’'ll need to get a friggin clue…
As is your choice to pause your sub. I won’t dissuade you from doing so. The fact that the changes were so miniscule, compared to the egregious mountain of issues, is equally disappointing as it is infuriating. I get that this is the first round of changes going out, but Holy has not been in a good spot in quite some time, and this was the best they could come up with?
There are 9 talents in the holy spec tree that modify or interact with prayer of mending. There are 6 oracle talents that interact with or modify prayer of mending.
I actually like or liked PoM. It was my favorite spell in TBC when they added it. Currently even with all of these talents combined, PoM doesn’t seem impactful.
Oddly in season of discovery where they brought prayer of mending into a vanilla world via a rune, they added a mechanic that made it more interesting than it is in retail WoW with 15 supporting talents. In SoD, the healing amount was higher relative to health pools and on top of that any direct heal on a target would cause prayer of mending to proc/bounce (this included both your direct heals and any other healers direct healing).
If they added the direct heal proc mechanic to PoM in retail I think that alone would make the spell significantly more engaging (though it could also use a bump in how much it heals for). It would let you force PoM procs with flash, PoH, both holy words and hymn. Cosmic ripples might proc it as well. Divine hymn did force PoM bounces in a previous expansion and it was pretty neat visually in addition to enhancing the output of your cooldown (which hymn could use right now since it’s a fairly mediocre cooldown). It would also create more interaction with benediction and Light’s Resurgence.
I think Surge of Light needs to go back to 100%. Mana issues for both disc and holy ramped up significantly after they nerfed this in TWW.
I agree 100% on the Mana aspect, our mana economy has been atrocious, and the fact that it has been crickets on that, outside of one measly reduction for Holy Priests that still has not fixed how mana hungry our spec is.
I have said it many times, I feel in order for PoM to feel anywhere near good to press it needs a bare minimum of a 100% increase buff. It does way to little healing for it to be a core part of our Holy’s Kit, in both Archon and Oracle.
Divine Hymn in my opinion also needs to be reworked. I don’t like how it current is acting like a healing buff to pad other healers meters during raid. Holy should not be a healer version of Augmentation Evokers. That is extremely disingenuous to Holy Priests, not to mention we don’t even get credited for the extra healing like Aug does for the Extra DPS it puts out currently.
At this point, I feel that Holy is going to have to be Modernized to be able to compete with other healing classes. This constant being unable to move while casting or not having spells that are quick to cast that don’t drain our mana bars, no longer fits in the current way that WoW is being developed
Can’t wait for the % buff that always comes 3-4 weeks into the patch because holy priests have “fallen behind” the other healers. Just once I would like to start off a patch with holy in a good place.
Hang on, hang on… Are you really speaking negative of Holy when the devs specifically said this:
Does 6% Haste and 10% Renew healing not seem like a COOL and IMPACTFUL VARIATION OF GAMEPLAY???
I think the devs do play some kind of Priest.
It’s just that the version of Priest they play is the in-game lore supercharged version of Priest when characters are tired of being Priests and want to pick up a sword.
Paladins. They play Paladins.
They actually overlap. And the best part? If you have Downpour Talented, when you activate Downpour, it pops out from every Healing Rain you have down.
What an insult to injury that is, eh?
Just give us back Cascade, Blizzard. It’s about time.
Cascade can save this spec as an Apex-Talent. I would take Cascade over Divine Image any day.
No way, see that is how I imagined it and I thought it was so cool!! He thinks that the new procc’d one removes the previous one and only 1 can be out at a time. Anyone play PTR know how it interacts for sure? Because man oh man, what a unique and cool addition for shamans!
I don’t think you are incorrect when you are saying this. The tier set seems to skew towards oracle, but man is it going to feel horrible to burn Holy words and/or Benediction procs to fish for RNG renews.
I have been maining Holy Priest since cata and can honestly say right now I wish I knew a different healer class as well as holy. I still can’t believe they took away Power Word: Shield, I mean SERIOUSLY?? This may be the last patch for my poor main.
Could always use this slower time to build up another healer to see if you like it? Even when I was jamming with priest healing I liked variety. I lean towards preservation evoker and resto Druid myself.
It seems Blizzard finally realized Haste is not the stat players wanted, and I am glad to see this adjustment. However, I still do not understand why a whole tier set is centered around a spell that was pruned from our spellbook. We cannot even hard-cast Renew anymore, it is strictly applied passively through other talents like our Holy Words. Centering a tier set on a passive trigger misses the point entirely; other baseline spells should have been used instead. Prayer of Mending and Renew both contribute negligible healing, even though I accurately predicted Haste was originally chosen for its mechanical interaction with Renew.
Ultimately, Holy Priests received no functional gameplay changes, no solutions to our core mana issues, and no tier set improvements to make us viable in Raids or M+. This is as humiliating as it is disappointing.
If reports are true that your class design team consists of only 6 to 8 developers, it explains why so many specs are left behind. The math speaks for itself across WoW’s 40 specializations:
6-Member Team Math: Each developer handles at least 6 specs (with four handling 7). When you factor in two distinct Hero Talents per specialization, each designer is responsible for 13 to 14 unique combat experiences.
8-Member Team Math: Each developer is responsible for a baseline of 5 specs. Factoring in Hero Talents, that is 10 unique experiences per person.
When the development output for a specialization is reduced to generic aura tuning adjustments, as seen with Holy Priest, it indicates a critical bottleneck in your design pipeline. The current workload structure forces developers to rely on numerical band-aids rather than resolving underlying mechanical flaws. To retain the players who are deeply invested in these classes, Blizzard must transition from passive balancing to active, dedicated specialization management.
Just chipping in that I would also love to see cascade back! I don’t know if it would be my first choice as an apex talent, but I think it could be a cool addition to oracle hpriest as our little AoE heal/damage similar to halo but still different.
Divine star as well maybe? It just feels like we’ve been over-pruned.
Hero talents aside, I think we need a group defensive CD to stay relevant with our otherwise nearly fully reactive kit. Priest already buffs health, so maybe something that gives a massive health boost. /shrug
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