Another patch, Another failure for Holy priest

Classes Priest
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Here is the facts.

Holy: Raid viable
M+ bottom of the pack in io scores
PVP bottom of the pack in every game mode

When did we become a once a week healer? Run in, Raid, log out for the week?

How the heck is Disc top tier pvp healer and top tier M+ healer yet holy is bottom of the barrel in both?

Another patch, reworks everywhere. Our rotation still have gaps the size of Paris Hilton’s hoonanny, Our talent tree is still busted beyond repair. Our kit is still completely impotent and drained of all power so that it can be cycled into halo making us the 1 min cooldown wonder and completely useless inbetween.

POM still trash
Renew you don’t even notice it anymore
POH is useless, massive manna drain, almost no healing at all
COH is useless with almost no healing at all.
Serenity and Sanctify feel like a joke. Can’t hardly even cap someone off with either. Heck, flash heal feels stronger most of the time.

This has got to be a joke. Even monks are getting buffed with ancients teaching becoming baseline and 2 massive boost to fistweaving with 2 new choice talents and this is after the MOH hero class just got buffed to the moon. Yet here we sit. Stagnant, non viable other than standing around for 1 run a week in raid popping halo.

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I agree with you. Holy priest are the class of miracles. The only miracle right now is that the devs haven’t outright deleted of this class.

Because they sure seem intent on letting the spec wither and die.

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such a shame too. Considering how we closed out Dragon flight on a relatively fun and viable high note. Honestly they should have made the DF s4 4 piece set bonus base line, It would at least help with the gaps a little. I just don’t understand how they have starved the holy kit to the point of shear uselessness. Just look at murlokio. The highest rated holy priest is barely 50 points higher than my freaking fistweaver monk and my monk is a complete joke. a meme.

Holy has gotten utterly shatted on and it’s past the point of being funny at this point and borderline just terrible.

Seriously… disc priest top of the meta both pvp and pve and Holy can’t do anything but press Halo in raid???

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What do you mean? You don’t like playing 2006 Holy Paladin simulator while rotating 1 cooldown? It’s the pinnacle of design. /s

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The talents as a whole need improvement. I’m ok with less talent choices so long as everything that remains is good. Having to choose between 2-3 really good options is better than than 3-5 ok to terrible options.

The biggest mistake so far was not baking in the DF s3-s4 set into the class. It’s not only synergistic, but it should replace RNG talents like Benediction. The new health/stam scaling makes Renew absolutely worthless to cast, even taking away a lot of power from HW: Salvation because of it.

Divine Image has fallen off as the scaling for health pools has far outstripped its usefulness. It still shines for Damage, but healing is subpar.

Lightweaver is far too limiting in its use. It would be better if it simply did not have a timer attached, rather than a 30 second buff. I would even go so far as to say the timer would be acceptable, if instead it was 4-5 uses of Heal rather than 2.

Divine Word is still amazing, I just wish it had a 30 second cooldown instead of 1 minute.

Healing Chorus is far too limited with less ability to apply Renew, not to mention the same problems of health bars in addition to the lack of healing for AoE spells compared to single target. A merging of Circle of Healing and Prayer of Healing is warranted for a 0 cooldown, impactful aoe healing that is tied to Holy Word: Sanctify.

My biggest gripe with talents is this: We simply need more Holy Words and different kinds. Imagine if Divine Word: Sanctify was its own ability instead of tying it to 2 cooldowns. There’s a plethora of new mechanics that can be introduced, tied to Holy Words with or without cooldown reductions, and more possibilities for usage. Imagine an optional talent for Divine Hymn that triples the healing amplification, makes it instant at the cost of no direct healing from the ability itself.

Imagine instead of Restitution, an ability to give Guardian Spirit to 10 people or even the entire raid at the cost of the priest’s life. Can even make it count as a brez for whatever content (edit: maybe for just M+ and pvp). I guarantee I would enjoy it, because nothing feels better than saving the raid even at personal cost. Just this ability alone would be on my wishlist because it would give other people a reason for trying harder to ensure a Holy priest remains alive in Mythic Raiding if they are deadset on a lack of mobility options.

Anyway, thanks for reading my 4am brainstorming.

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I’d say the only bright side is at least hpriest isn’t entirely forgettable like it was in say, large parts of BFA (and then ultimately dependent entirely on borrowed power to even be viable).

Hpriest still has strong damage and strong spot healing so at least it has something going. Why the utility is so extremely situational is bizarre at this point, though and that obviously holds it up in other content without players filling in those gaps.

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The issue then was still being masked by tier. Rather than fixing a fundamental deficiency of Holy Priest they constantly throw more Holy Words at us via tier. Then nerf something if the tier is too strong and then don’t come back and revert nerfs due to tier set changes.

Throwing 4-6 Holy Word: Serenity at a group just masked the problem of our AoE filler healing being weak. Holy Word: Sanctify’s shortcomings got exacerbated by increases in health pools.

When they made Atonement work more outside of raids they should have done the same for our AoE filler heals because Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing should be seen as our analogues to it. Then PoH should have appeared on more abilities like Lightweaver and Divine Word: Sanctify. Chain Heal is on ~10 talents. These are just basic things that would have gone a long way to solve a long-standing deficiency for us. It’s bizarre… putting it as nicely as I possibly can right now… that these things weren’t done.

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The issue then was still being masked by tier. Rather than fixing a fundamental deficiency of Holy Priest they constantly throw more Holy Words at us via tier

This is exactly right. The class feels like a bunch of bandaids and tacked on solutions to a kit that is basically incoherent at its core.

But on the positive side that means they have a lot to work with. There is a major opportunity to give priest a redesign.

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A bit of afterwork Brainstorming.

Renew: Renew must always heal for at least 70% of the healing value of flash heal over its duration for it to be viable. It takes 15 seconds with 0 haste to reach that value. Ideally, it would be 100%, but possible synergies with Circle of Healing and Healing Chorus (and potentially making Circle of Healing have no cooldown) would potentially tip the scales of balance.

Remove dead RNG talents. Give things with consistent results so it never feels as if there’s plenty of moments where your talents do nothing. RNG is good for trinkets where you have the option of using a different, consistent trinket, it is never good for talents that cannot be changed or have no alternative paths. This automatically means Benediction and Epiphany need to be replaced.

Prayers of the Virtuous, as it is now, should be made baseline at this point and potentially replaced. Health Scaling in this expansion not only means damage amounts are higher, but it has far outstripped Prayer of Mending effective healing. In any case, seeing 7 Prayer of Mending stacks baseline would provide nice flavor for Holy. Alternatively, this talent can remove the cap of Prayer of Mending stacks allowed on a player providing HEFTY value to Divine Service and stacking as many Prayer of Mending as you can on a player and letting bounce as it pleases.

Revitalizing Prayers: Should not be RNG, should not have a lesser duration to Renew.

Sanctified Prayers: 25% is better than 15%.

Prayer Circle: 10 seconds instead of 8 seconds. 30% mana cost reduction as well.

Healing Chorus: Let it stack back up to 100% healing again.

Divine Image: The naaru should always deal a % of the triggering spell for far more consistency if possible. This would simplify balance in the future. If not, needs additional scaling on the healing spells most notably Tranquil Light, Dazzling Lights, and Blessed Light.

Potentially addition of a 4th capstone.

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Why Epiphany was even added as a talent when Divine Insight exists is still a mystery. Plenty of other specs get to have their greatest hits return as talents. If there’s ever a decent PoM talent, that was it.

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I timed all +11s as Holy, but once I got to +12s the issue became that literally 80%+ of the healers are Resto Shamans because they’re fotm, and Disc ends up becoming better because of the damage reduction to the group. I stopped trying to push for +12s because I’m not going for title and I want to focus on my Prot Paladin instead.

While I’ve been refilling my vault I’ve also been pushing keys as Disc and I have most of the dungeons timed on a +10 or +11, but I’m also not deliberately pushing IO score like I did with Holy.

Disc to me just overall feels better balanced for all the dungeons and imho easier to play. You literally just keep atonement on the group and pew-pew dps and most of your problems are solved. It gets a bit jarring when I swap to Holy and have to remember I need to cast heals on everyone 1 at a time to top them to full.

Holy’s damage is also lower than Voidweaver Disc. On Archon I can only do 250k, but on VW Disc I can do 350k+ easily. I think Holy needs a dps buff if anything.

Disc is just bad at funneling single target heals compared to last expansion so some dungeons like Dawn are easier to do as Holy. I can safely cruise control through the dot checks on people as Holy, but on Disc if I have to funnel heals into one person I’m not healing the group with atonement.

TLDR is Holy is the strongest its been in M+, but it needs a dps buff (for Archon maybe), and maybe +20% more single target healing. Disc is just overall better if you want to push big keys because you got Lenience (-3% DR), Divine Aegis, Rapture, Barrier, etc. and more overall dps (+50% more).

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This is my biggest problem with the game right now. The healer balance is so horrendous that blizzard is all but forcing me to play another class to viable, when all I want to do is play Holy Priest. I like the class aesthetic, the wings, the angelic nature of the class, etc. I don’t want to play resto shaman and yet if I don’t, the quality of my basic experience of the game is significantly lowered. Holy Priest in M+ is doing so poorly that I’m serious considering unsubbing again. The same thing happened in early shadowlands, and soon after I wrote feedback as to why I was unsubbing, the class got buffed.

I’ve been writing feedback asking for buffs in the in-game option almost daily, but I know my voice goes on dead ears. If there are any devs that actually read these forums, please stop ignoring us and give holy priest the changes they need to be at least viable in m+

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The elephant in the room at the end of the day is 7 out of 8 dungeons have poisons and curses. We’ve never had a season in the entire games history with so many required dispels.

Only NW and Siege have diseases, but Siege also has curse/poison dispels. They just nerfed poison cleansing totem to a 2 minute cd which nudges up Disc more then anything.

The other issue is Resto Shamans also gives the group +10% stamina which needs to get nerfed.

So beyond just updating the dispel patterns of all the healers… the main issue is just that Resto Shamans need nerfs. I don’t see them changing the dungeons, but I wouldn’t be shocked next season that the amount of poison/curse cleanses drops significantly.

We should also be seeing 11.0.7 going up on the PTR very soon… maybe this week.

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Disagree…
Hpriest strongest was season 3 shadowlands with Kyrian + Flash concentration.
My experience on 11s this season is that Hpriest relies A TON on the group. Either dispels, interrupts or good defensive usage.

If dungeon designs are going this way where you must dispel/interrupt stuff 24/7 then Hpriest needs more than just dmg buff or st healing buff.

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The reason holy isn’t a strong M+ spec (and VERY RARELY ever is) is basically just two things:

  1. Any season that does AoE burst damage (which is many of them) they aren’t super good at. Holy’s burst AoE healing tools have been pretty awful since legion. They at least have one tool for this now, but the cooldown is prohibitive.
  2. They can’t survive anything and have no movement.

The only season they’ve been a real contender was Shadowlands S4 when they were given access to covenants that gave some survivability - and two VERY GOOD covenant abilities with double leggos (and the season had very few moments of high AoE burst). And it took some wild tuning to get them there.

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I’m being turbo-lazy with this season, but I’ve tried to alternate between Holy and Disc to get a fair point of comparison while pugging to 2k. Current goal is to time all eights and then move to tens after touching up my low item level. My honest feelings, broadly, are just that Holy plain out doesn’t have good tools for burst AOE ATM.

It’s, of course, tuned such that Holy is fully capable of clearing things - it just feels bad. The play-style more or less boils down to ‘Press Flash Heal and Pray’ between uses of prohibitively long cooldown tools like Hymn. I’d love to see CoH and PoH brought back up in strength for small-group healing activities, personally - ditto for HoTs like renew. I’m not qualified to make suggestions for a full rework, but those particular garbage spells being prettied up would help a lot.

Chances are, once I wrap up getting the eights done, I’m probably just going to run Disc for keys because it’s absurd how much more comfortable its burst AOE makes M+.

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I’ve played Oracle disc and it’s very fun. The most telling difference is the ease of use of Disc vs Holy. Power Word Shield easily goes up for 800k instant non-crit on targets without atonement vs having to hardcast flash heal as Holy for less than that. Since I stack Mastery even as disc, my PW:Shield on targets with atonement is 1.4 Million. I can use Power Word Shield every 6.9 seconds with my Haste.

This does not even take into account Rapture, Weal and Woe, or 4pc tier set bonus. Taking all of that into account, I’ve gotten an 8.2 Million non-crit Shield on the first person during Rapture.

Voidweaver Shield Values: 689k baseline, 989k with Atonement.

My Holy Word: Serenity heals slightly under that at 784k and it takes 1 minute to get it back or less spamming flash heal or heal. While Oracle Disc can have problems taking someone or a group of people up to full health, that’s easily made up with preshielding and planning. Voidweaver with voidblast benefits just makes it work.

The entire system of Holy Healing this expansion has been thrown out of balance due to all the changes and potentially outdated mechanics of healing.

This is the reason for the discrepancy.

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I think at some point here on the forums I said I might “just,” get to 3k as holy and call it lol. I didn’t know then that the point systems was goofed and man I will not even get close to 3k this season. My hope is to get all 10s done(2 down thankfully already) and end up with whatever score that is. Goodness gracious.

Also, I will only run 10s with people I know. Only pug 8 I have done so far is mists. It is a jungle out there and I got no time for pug drama because it probably is me that stinks at keeping people alive through all of this ouch.

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PWS is stronger this expansion, but they also made Disc’s baseline single target heals a lot weaker to offset it. Flash Heal in DF after the revamp used to be +50% more powerful on Disc then as Holy, but now it does exactly the same as Holy without any of the talent/tier set bonuses or Echo of Light.

Penance used to be able to rip out some big single target heals, but not anymore.

This makes some dungeons where people are getting nasty dots or beams a lot harder to heal with Disc then Holy because if you stop to funnel Flash Heals into somebody you’re not healing the group with atonement. I’d rather do Dawn as Holy then as Disc for example, but CoT is way easier on Disc for example.

Holy Word Serenity is weaker on Holy because they baked all the power into Flash Heal/Heal with the new 4-piece bonus. Lightweaver Heal and Archon SoL bonus can do almost as much healing as Holy Word Serenity.

The issue with Holy is more so that Disc is just flat out better at printing out constant AOE healing, does more overall damage, and the damage reduction Disc provides is a lot better on +12s and higher.

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The main time I feel like I’m struggling on holy is during burst AoE healing checks. If DPS run out of defensiveness it’s good luck and goodbye.

I feel like it’s a major problem that we don’t use AoE heals to AoE heal. The spells are failing at their job. Disregard whether we can (mostly) meet the same checks with single target spread healing… the AoE spells are functionally broken.

(And we’re working twice as hard to be 90% as good.)

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