Given the popularity of my last thread I decided to make another one about Holy Priest PvP in 8.1 to give my feedback on the subject.
Note that different from Discipline, Holy Priests are currently unviable in Arenas and Mythic+ (high keys), and the changes in 8.1: Addition of 2 new PvP talents and throughput nerf, won’t change this at all, and here is why.
In Legion holy Priests had quite a strict Talent build: Trinket, Inner Focus, Holy Ward, Greater Fade, Rapid Mending and Ray of Hope. You rarely swapped out of one of those talents because they all felt mandatory in every matchup.
In BFA, those talents were put into a bunch of talents that you have to pick 3 from, but without having any of the -mandatory- talents made baseline.
Since Holy was so dependant on having all of those talents to compete, in BFA it was made useless because it could only pick 3.
With the current changes, none of this is fixed: the AOE Aura Mastery that replaces Inner Focus is surely a very powerful and mandatory RBG tool, while the greater heal talent change makes no sense at all, but none of these changes help Holy’s viability at all, while nerfing holy’s healing done helps even less.
My suggestions to fix holy are quite simple: Forget about the current PvP talents being added in 8.1, delete them, they’re no good for the game and just make Holy Priests mandatory in a caster-heavy RBG meta without making the spec (or the player behind the character) itself any good outside of that “press the buttom” moment. After you’re through with reverting the changes, I would suggest making both Rapid Mending and Inner Focus baseline for Holy Priests.
With both Rapid Mending and Inner Focus being baseline(for both PvP and PvE), Holy Priests will have a fighting chance in High M+ keys, while in PvP you’re only “hardstuck” into 4 talent options to pick from instead of 6, which allows the Priest some chance at being competitive.
Now, I don’t even know if Holy Priests wil have a chance at being viable in PvP even if Inner Focus and Rapid Mending were made baseline, since it would still lack something but I think its the correct path to move forward.
I would also like to know the community’s opinion on Holy, especially those with acess to the PTR or that have been constantly reading its patch notes!