Any theorycrafting HOLY priests out there?

None of secondary stats like haste, crit, or mastery really do anything for our damage. The only secondary stat that can indirectly help is crit.

What is the max amount of crit you think a HOLY priest can get for pvp?

For PvP just go Vers > Haste.
Crit is not a reliable secondary stat for it.

You want fast casts, and survivability that’s it.

Vers gives you not only survivability but also dmg. → Priority
Haste gives you faster heals, and let you cast faster Smites/Holy fires
Crit is just the 3rd option if you can’t get vers > haste.
Never go mastery for PvP.

PvP for all healers isn’t much about dmg, but more about healing and surviving while complementing with CC and some dmg.

Yea, I understand that for healing. But for damage, would it not be good to go crit over haste? What’s the point of casting fast if you are doing no damage? This is more for Blitz Brawl. I don’t plan on entering any arena matches.

I guess my ultimate question is this. Based on the pvp gear available to HOLY priests, would it be possible to get over 30% crit and 30% versatility?

I’m gonna disagree with this as Mastery provides such a huge bonus to healing that it can often win fights that head to high dampening territory. The lack of haste can make it easier to get interrupted, yes, but fake casting and Divine Ascension can easily make up for that. Heavy hitting echos easily makes up for this as well.

You’ll probably never make it to #1 Gladiator with those stats, but if that’s what you’re aiming for, you shouldn’t be using these forums as a resource to begin with.

With the more recent change to mastery, I’ve seen it’s value go up in casual PVP at the very least.

I haven’t PvP’d in a minute, but given the current tier set bonus, and Apotheosis you aren’t actually doing -that- many hard cast where you need copious amounts of haste. Most of your healing is going to be done through Holy Word Serenity so having Mastery/Crit benefits you more there. Also if you’re sitting there chain casting Flash Heals you’re just going to oom yourself.

Vers > Mastery/Crit > Haste would probably be the wombo combo stats imho.

I tend to stack crit but I solo world PvP a lot and only solo queue casual bgs where I look for kbs ( I am still a good team player in solo casual bgs). If you’re planning on healing more than dpsing then I wouldn’t worry about stacking crit

Guess my original idea won’t work as well as I thought. I was fooling around with the Divine Image talent, and it was obviously nerfed since last I played my holy priest. You used to be able to summon 3+ divine images when using your holy words. And each of them would cast a smite or holy fire.

That isn’t the case anymore. Now you “empower” one Divine Image. Yes, the one image casts an extra smite. But it’s only casting one extra smite no matter how many holy words you use. And the smite is doing the same amount of damage. So there really is no point spawning more than 2 images at a time.

Talk about a nerf… lol. Were holy priests really pumping out that much damage with 3+ divine images that caused it to get nerfed like this?

No clue when it happened, but it destroyed any idea I had of using crit and versatility to pump out decent damage and heals.

The individual output of each divine image may or may not have been nerfed for smite (it was for certain healing spells for sure), but stacking divine images was not nerfed. Empowering the image is intended as a QoL improvement only to remove clutter, i.e. instead of 3 divine images, it would be empowered to hit 3x as hard, and would increase / decrease in strength equal to when the image would spawn / fade.

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It’s a combination of 4 factors.

  1. Divine Image saw nerfs in 10.1 and 10.2 that nerfed its overall healing.
  2. Holy’s baseline damage/healing has steadily increased (single target healing is +40% stronger for example than in S1) over the expansion without increasing the scaling modifier of Divine Image. Burning Vehemence just does a massive amount of our overall damage which makes DI look smol.
  3. Divine Image was nerfed around our tier set bonus because we get an extra Holy Word every 18-20s (i.e. higher overall uptime).
  4. 10.2.6 retuned a lot of our end tree talents and overall they do about the same relative amount of healing (5-6% overall).

So yeah: the TLDR is it’s a combination of hps nerfs to DI on-top of our baseline healing/damage getting many buffs without increasing the overall scaling of DI.

For one point DI used to provide a massive hps increase. It’s not as strong as it used to be, but its still mandatory because it passively provides a dps/hps increase compared to the other end tree talents which are activated.

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That’s the thing. I didn’t see the “empowered” image hitting for more damage.

Whether I empowered it with 1, 2, or 3 images, it was still hitting for the same amount of damage and only hitting twice. So for example, if I had one image, my smite would hit for 10k and the image smite would hit for 10k. Now if I had 2 or 3 images, my smite would hit for 10k, and the image smite would still hit for 10k. I didn’t see anything “empowered” about the damage done by the extra images based on how many holy words I used.

Mastery is really good in pvp if you want to focus on maximizing your healing but if you want to focus more on damage then go haste. No crit. Obviously versatility.

General rule of thumb for situations like this is to look up the gearing of the top 10 or 20 arena holy priests and see what they run. Unless you are trying to invent a wild card build never heard of (like how glimmer manifested for paladins in BFA), then you are best off looking at real world data on what is already out there, and work from there.