9.2 PTR giga holy buffs

Classes Priest
1

Priest
Holy
All healing abilities increased by 10%.
All damage abilities increased by 15%.
Symbol of Hope cooldown reduced to 3 minutes (was 5 minutes) and channel time reduced to 4 seconds (was 5 seconds).
Holy Word: Chastise damage increased by 25%.
Prayer Circle (Talent) now also reduces the mana cost of Prayer of Healing by 25%.
Guardian Angel (Talent) now has an additional effect – When Guardian Spirit saves the target from death, it does not expire.
Afterlife (Talent) now has an additional effect – As a Spirit of Redemption, you may cast Resurrection, which ends the Spirit of Redemption.
Binding Heal (Talent) has been removed.
Cosmic Ripple (Talent) has been moved and replaces Binding Heal (Talent) on row 40.
New Talent (Row 30): Binding Heals – 20% of Heal or Flash Heal healing on other targets also heals you.

Will need to hop on the PTR and take a look at everything.

3 Likes
2

These are cool I wonder looking at warcraft logs Holy vs Disc how they are justified. But maybe Ill swap lol

3

Major increase in throughput. Some situational utility. The damage increase is probably the biggest part (especially with Boon).

Glad they finally did something different with Binding, but Binding Heals seems too similar to Trail of Light.

4

So I logged on the PTR.

Healing stats comparison:

10% healing buff comparison on current character w/ 27% crit, 10% haste, 43% mastery, 8% versatility…

FC5 stack Heal
PTR: 8,425
Live: 7,626

Flash Heal
PTR: 5,041
Live: 4,563

Prayer of Healing
PTR: 2,173 per target (x5) = 10,865
Live: 1,967 per target (x5) = 9,835

Mana cost: 2,500 baseline
Mana cost w/ Prayer Circle: 1,875

HPS w/ Prayer Circle (1.4s cast vs 1.8s): 7,760 hps
HPM w/ Prayer Circle: 5.79

vs FC5 heal

HPS: 5,616 hps
HPM: 7 hpm

TLDR: Buffed Prayer of Circle PoH will do 38% more HPS than Flash Concentration heal, but will cost 17% more mana to use. This makes Prayer of Healing + Harmonious and spamming Prayer of Healing potentially competitive against Flash Concentration if you do not use Resonant Words.

Damage Abilities

Divine Star
PTR: 1,727 (per target)
Live: 1,573 (per target)

Chastise
PTR: 4,317
Live: 3,011

The damage bonus also applies to Boon of the Ascended. Holy Priest w/ Kyrian Legendary will be able to do 5.5-6.5k dps in keys easily making us one of the highest dps healers in keys outside of Resto Shamans since Holy Paladins got a pretty big nerf for Venthyr.

Talent Changes
Binding Heals (new talent) now takes the spot of Cosmic Ripple and is an extremely powerful talent. It stacks with Trail of Light so you can heal yourself for 55% of your heal & flash heal on-to other targets. In raids it’ll be a passive HPS increase (like having 10% extra leech) if you’re single target healing. It’s a much better option than what Cosmic Ripple was before so consider it a buff.

Cosmic Ripple got moved down to the same row as Surge of Light + Prayer of Circle and will absolutely not be picked over either of them.

The Afterlife talent is interesting if you can cast resurrection while in combat. This opens up the potential of Holy Priests killing themselves in raids so they can resurrect somebody and then get battle ressed after. I don’t really see any use for it outside of scenarios if the holy priest dies by accident in a raid or if you’re trying to resurrect people in arenas.

Symbol of Hope changes
This is more of an opinion piece, but I’m somewhat mixed on this change.

The cd being reduced to 3 minutes instead of 5 minutes now fixes the problem where you basically just sat on the ability until the healers were OOM at the end of the fight. Now the most realistic way to use would be to use Symbol of Hope after every single Divine Hymn or timed in the manner that you can use it 2-3 times in a fight (based on duration).

Overall mana gains will be doubled from what the ability normally gives if used 3 times on a fight vs 1.

I personally rather see it provide a damage reduction bonus instead of reducing peoples CDs. -20% DR for 8s (2s per channel) would be solid and get us into the meta tier.

Tier set bonus
There’s datamined changes on the Holy Priest set, but it’s not changed on the PTR yet.

Final thoughts

I plan on dumping my final thoughts on the PTR section, but overall the buffs are fairly solid. It doesn’t address some areas like Mastery not providing a damage increase (raid priest stack mastery) which will still put us on the bottom when it comes to raid damage output. On the opposite spectrum in M+ our damage is going to be absolutely S tier.

The Prayer Circle talent change for Prayer of Healing may potentially be a viable healing choice to play as Holy in 9.2 for raid healing and if you go that playstyle you won’t need the Flash Concentration legendary.

4 Likes
5

Guardian Angel (Talent) now has an additional effect – When Guardian Spirit saves the target from death, it does not expire.

What does this mean? Does this mean for the duration of guardian spirit, the target cannot die???

1 Like
6

I tested this on the PTR by getting naked and running into mobs.

The cheat death only triggers once, but you still keep the Guardian Spirit buff on you. It’s not infinite cheat deaths.

1 Like
7

Thanks for test. I was going to say…invincibility for GS duration would be so OP, lolol.

8

I’m very intrigued on a possible combination with Xanshi + afterlife talent. Tho still seems like a VERY situational talent and you will never sacrifice Guardian Angel or the new Binding Heal for this, so pretty lame.

Also all those buffs to our healing spells means EoL heals for more too, pretty solid buffs and changes.

Looking forward to changes to our tier set bonus!

9

It honestly will need some testing in 9.2 to see if PoH will be a new meta heal build or not.

We got one step forward, one step backwards with it.

If you take the new Binding Heals talent (+20% self-healing to yourself with each Heal/Flash Heal cast) and add that bonus on-top of Flash Concentration + ToL than Heal beats out Prayer of Healing plus you can actually use Resonant Words with it.

So it comes down to if Harmonious and it’s reduction on Holy Word Salvation would make up the difference to nudge PoH over the finish line. Spamming PoH constantly (even with the mana cost reduction) and no Surge of Light will OOM you pretty fast unless you’re being funneled Innervates or the new Symbol of Hope change makes up for it. You also give up your very strong single target healing which helps keep tanks alive.

It just leaves potential with a hybrid play style where you use Flash Concentration and Prayer Circle and alternate between spamming PoH or Heal depending on what’s going on. You then become an actual jack-of-all trades healer w/ strong single target + aoe heals, but are less flexible on mobile healing without SoL.

10

does it says something about the changes?

11

They were listed on WoWhead briefly, but it was removed after the changelog came out on the forums. The 2-piece and 4-piece had interactions that buffed up your next Prayer of Healing cast. Just eyeballing them they looked worse than what we had. I’d much rather keep the 2-piece bonus to milk out faster Salvation resets and the 4-piece do something else.

Maybe they’ll post on the forum tomorrow if they have any official planned changes.

12

Holy priests weren’t the only ones massively buffed; Resto druids also got a 10% healing & damage increase.

Take a look at how the classes are faring right now on throughput: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/28#dataset=95&metric=hps

With these healing increases to resto druids and hpriests, this will put all three - MW monks, Resto dr00ds, and hpriests - at the top throughput-wise. They will again be unironically regarded as “throughput healers.”

Those following this expansion have probably noted the irony of hpriests being regarded as “throughput healers” due to their lack of comparable utility to other healers…while the logs showed that holy was also lacking in throughput in raid content relative to even “utility healers” like resto shams who bring spirit link or disc priests who bring barrier.

Speculation: is this an intentional design shift, where specs that bring less utility in raids are deliberately designed to have more throughput? Probably too early to tell, but we are trending in the direction of that being the effect (even if it is not necessarily the intent).

As for M+, hpriests already had excellent healing throughput. It is clear at this point that Blizzard is apprehensive about the thought of giving priests a true combat rez, since the “afterlife” rez is the closest they are willing to provide.

Hpriest damage should start to make them a more respectable option in M+. Take a look at holy pally…they have been regarded as the premier M+ healer for much of this xpac in large part due to the damage they bring. Now hpally damage is trending downward, and hpriest damage is trending upward.

1 Like
13

I’m very happy to finally see Blizzard making MW, Rdruid and Hpriest throughput healing kings.

I’d like to see the Disc generic damage aura nerfs undone so that they can compete with Rsham and Hpal damage.

Still very happy overall with the direction Blizzard are going with this. The talent changes look quite nice and interesting.

4 Likes
14

Those were retroactive changes to an old set bonus to remove binding heal (t21), not for the new tier set, that’s why they were removed.

1 Like
15

I have no clue what the design goal is right now. They’re waiting until the very last patch to give two healers a +10% healing buff (even though those healers HPS isn’t bad). Maybe this is balanced around the new tier sets or our healing wasn’t up to snuff on the raid test? Every class is about to go through the re-design process for the next expansion.

I’d like to get an actual written down design philosophy when it comes to healers. The ongoing meta has been absorbs/damage mitigation > damage/utility > raw healing for healers.

Are some healers supposed to bring more utility/damage now than others, but will do less healing? Why do some specs do like half the damage of others in raids? Holy Priest, Mistweaver, and Resto Druid are only 20-30% of the healers combined that have gotten CE this tier when you look at the logs.

1 Like
17

I’m pretty excited for these changes. Would like more boon effects for H priests in the future, but these throughput buffs are great.

18

Very interesting changes indeed and a good step in the right direction.
Lets start with what I am excited about and think where a good change.

The changes to overall healing and damage is a welcomed change and was needed! Chastise now has quite the decent damage, but holy fire is still our best damage spell.

All healing abilities increased by 10%.
All damage abilities increased by 15%.
Holy Word: Chastise damage increased by 25%.

Our new to Binding Heal is a welcomed one. Its like a personal beacon of light on you that. It also proc’s Echo of Light so we get a nice extra double dip here. Having passive self healing is great because now you can focus on healing everyone else, since you will passively heal yourself up.

Binding Heal (Talent) has been removed
New Talent (Row 30): Binding Heals – 20% of Heal or Flash Heal healing on other targets also heals you.

A nice change I’d say, since I have always encountered times when I use GS as an instant death saving reaction so it proc’s but the tank or player are still taking massive amount of damage, so they die anyway because you don’t have that 60% healing increase to stabilize them. Now with running this talent it will be a lot easier to stabilize after such a proc. Good option for m+ however sharing talent row with Binding Heal is a minus.

Guardian Angel (Talent) now has an additional effect – When Guardian Spirit saves the target from death, it does not expire.

The talent position change for Binding Heal and Cosmic Ripple I understand, since it gives some great synergy options for Binding Heal, since you can pick Surge of light.

Cosmic Ripple (Talent) has been moved and replaces Binding Heal (Talent) on row 40.

Now over to what I am not excited about.

The change to Prayer Circle (talent), I am on the fence here. It looks ok from a first glace, nice it costs less mana when used after a CoH. But after doing some calculations I found out its not worth the reduced mana cost. Sure a buffed PoH will do some decent HPS, however a FCx5+trail+bindingheal does more healing for less mana! Without a significant buff to the healing done by PoH it will not come back to my bars.

Prayer Circle (Talent) now also reduces the mana cost of Prayer of Healing by 25%.

Looks really clunky, like why do we have to die to res someone, point of the game is not to die! Will not get picked.

Afterlife (Talent) now has an additional effect – As a Spirit of Redemption, you may cast Resurrection, which ends the Spirit of Redemption.

19

They just need to buff PoH’s baseline throughput. It’s long overdue. Not only would that make this talent worthwhile to pick, it would make PoH worth casting…

20

Afterlife new effect should be baseline tbh. It will never be picked against stronger talents like GA and Binding Heals.

Afterlife would only ever be picked if it’s got some cheesy mechanic that doesn’t make you waste your life in it. Like… losing a healer is quite a big hit to a raid fight or M+ run.

I would just make the pvp talent the new afterlife effect. Being able to activate SoR whenever you want can make you cheese mechanics or pop angel form when you are out of mana for those last moments where a lot of healing is needed to end the fight.

2 Likes
21

Haha! Glad I picked this class/spec when I came back six months ago

1 Like