Big Hpriest Nerfs

Classes Priest
#1

You know, in the drama around the disc priest evangelism change and reversion, there was that whole 5% hpriest nerf thing which seemed a little questionable (especially since hpriest was testing about where you’d expect it, the main outliers being rshaman trailing badly and disc lapping everyone) but ho hum, you know, par for the course…

But did anyone notice in the same patch Blizz nerfed Empyreal Blaze from a 30 second to 1 min CD, lopped Divine Word: Chastise from 50% DPS to 30% DPS buff, Mindgames was nerfed 25% for holy and shadow (and 50% for disc which gets the atonement interaction), and at some point they nerfed bene down to just 12% from 15%, after previous nerfs from 25% and 30%… the number may seem misleadingly small but this is another 20% nerf and perhaps more importantly this proc is getting to be so rare as to be unreliable, which isn’t good for any talent to be so hit or miss.

And okay, maybe hpriest doesn’t need all that damage or healing, but then on top of this enemy damage was buffed 40% and the health bars reactive healers have to fill increased 40%… but your spell power is staying unchanged (or actually nerfed), which does hit reactive healers harder especially those without %-based heals or %-based DRs (like Pain Supp or Barrier). Holy is losing its Fae Guardians %-based DR in DF, regrettably, with nothing to replace it.

Not saying sky is falling but these nerfs (besides the 5%) seem kind of stealth nerfs that weren’t telegraphed in advance and haven’t really been discussed at all. Any thoughts fellow priests?

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#2

Hpriest was actually doing pretty well before those nerfs. And bigger health bars/damage, ironically favors them because the type of healing they were doing was very overheal heavy/able to be sniped. Their throughput was pretty good, but they’re doing a lot of healing over time again, rather than the spot healing playstyle of flash conc. Especially stuff like the divine word on Sanctify which was doing little to no healing but heavy overhealing.

It could be bad, time will really tell there, but the bigger concern, IMO, is mana. (And you know, the thing that’s always kept Holy Priest out - their utility isn’t great).

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#3

I had heard mana for hpriest was pretty good? No? I know other healers mana will be an issue. Which is nothing new to disc cause we are used to struggling for it.

#4

Yeah, druids have to be the huge winners in those terms since they’re the overheal kings, but I get your point that the mastery could lean into that, as well as more sustain healing.

I hadn’t really noticed mana concerns on hpriest but it could be all bets are off if fights become more of a slog with desperate flash heal/heal or PoH spamming to fill slowly collapsing overinflated bars.

And I vaguely recall Blizz trying almost this exact same thing in Cata and then the “Wow dungeons are hard” blog and then Blizz desperately backtracking as players fled the game, though I was a total new player back then so no idea if I’m remembering that correctly… but it did seem to work out much worse than Blizz claimed it would, and that was without raid content like today or infinitely scaling M+.

Hey, there’s a thought… maybe we can bank on druids and shamans and well, I never worry about monks not having the mana to sustain. Here’s to hoping the other healers go OOM early and often! Although even if we can sustain for days it might be feel bad having to engage in that slog without being able to DPS as often and having less DPS to contribute even if you did, and no DR to slow the pace of the incoming damage.

#5

You had control over your mana regeneration through gear in cataclysm. The larger health bars in Cata also weren’t difficult to heal as there wasn’t much designed to one-shot players so you always had time to heal efficiently.

The problem with dungeons in cataclysm was people just standing in everything bad for 3-4s until they died.

#6

You’re going to make me nostalgic for spirit…

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#7

It’s petty of me but I want pallies and shammies to struggle on mana for once lol. I’m tired of watching my mana like a hawk in raid and they in the past could cast with impunity

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#8

I miss having control of my mana regen. The forced pacing and/or bringing an extra healer to an encounter has made raid healing boring.

#9

I thought every disc in a raiding guild had pet druids assigned to them for their ramps? :slight_smile:

#10

It was good in earlier testing, but the more throughput that needs to be done, the more you’re going to have to spend. I’m talking about after the health/damage increases.

#11

Speaking of, the patch notes also mention some aura changes for hpriest. Many of them are the 5% nerfs widely advertised. But then there’s the 44 to 30% “core passive” aura change.

And I know a lot of times these sorts of things are tooltip corrections or some such, but I’m not a huge math nerd when it comes to these stats and given the unexpected bene and DPS nerfs and damage/health changes, I’m just hoping this isn’t another little fun surprise?

(I’m assuming the aura change is nothing… else. But Blizz with this flood of very impactful last-minute nerfs, the flip/flopping on disc, and then the decision to really upend the endgame re: healing when they’ve already declared a release candidate, I don’t even know what’s going on).

#12

I have never been that lucky sadly.

And yes caps I know what you meant

#13

The 44% to 30% are damage spells - it won’t affect healing. The 5% aura changes are the healing spells.

FWIW, I’ve been trying to number crunch some stuff with hpriest, and so far what I’ve found is that the PoM talents (except divine service) are by far the best return in the tree the whole way down, regardless of these nerfs. Following that is Divine Word/Divine Image. It SEEMS like Hpriest will put out competitive healing from what I can tell.

I also think nobody’s been playing the correct ST healing build because everyone’s grabbing Lightweaver, which seems really bad to me.

Basically what I foresee is 2 builds:

Both builds will take trail of light and benediction, then symbol of hope, Prayers of the Virtuous, say your prayers, answered prayers and miracle worker. Every single one of those points has better return than your whole tree besides your holy words pretty much. That means both will be casting PoM off CD.

Then you’ve got the Heal build, which ironically doesn’t take Lightweaver, but takes Divine Word, pontifex and LotN. Like this: https://www.wowhead.com/beta/talent-calc/priest/holy/DAQEFBVBVARBRAoVKIUCFAOVFAFQJURJlFIIUCBQ

And essentially uses Divine Word off CD on Serenity, and spams heal (flash for surge procs). Should pretty much always have pontifex for every holy word.

Then the PoH build, which is LIKELY worse because of mana efficiency being a problem: https://www.wowhead.com/beta/talent-calc/priest/holy/DAQEFBVBVARBRAoVKIUCFAOVFBVRBVBChUJIUDAFQ

Where you instead use CoH and spam PoH after - the entire point of the build being that rapid recovery works on Revitalizing Prayers, benediction and Salv. You get a ton of renew healing this way by never casting renew. You pretty much NEED prayer circle for it to come close to working though, and a raid scenario where the damage is pretty constant.

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#14

The PoM talents outperforming doesn’t surprise me, given how efficient the spell is. Neither does Divine Word which to my mind slots in perfectly in place of the covenant abilities we’re losing.

Divine Image not being garbage even on paper is a bit surprising to me. The randomness though…

And I agree on Lightweaver. Ping-ponging between flash heal and heal is just very different than having an always-on maintenance buff that often could be kept up with SoL procs alone, or even without a timely SoL proc casting one flash heal every couple of minutes is hardly the same as having to consistently spam it for sustained ST healing. But everyone was pretending it was Flash Concentration 2.0 instead of 0.5.

#15

It’s really how they all play into Answered Prayers - and how good Answered prayers is next to miracle worker.

More bounces = Apotheosis = more holy words, and it’s unlikely you’ll ever waste CD time with 2 stacks of each. In a scenario where you find use for all your Serenity casts, and the playstyle is basically just PoM off CD and mash heal, Answered Prayers is like a near 22% healing increase if you’re getting full value out of your heals/holy words (you won’t, likely, so it’ll probably be half that) considering you can Divine Word serenity, which gives you higher Pontifex procs, which gives you even stronger holy words.

We lost Flash Concentration, but we gained way more Serenity casts, basically.

#16

Wow, honestly wasn’t going to give Answered Prayers a second look. A bit of a wonky buff to have a half-baked Apotheosis proc randomly. Certainly better than the random PI proc, but… well, guess it’s worth another look if you say so.

#17

Basically, what it allows us to do is keep HW: Serenity on full CD. Any time Apoth procs, we should be spamming heal anyway - even though the apoth proc is random, having 2 charges of Miracle worker means even if it’s just about to come off CD as your heal is being cast, you still wasted 0 apotheosis time. So the apotheosis proc should always be able to be fully utilized unless literally nothing is happening in the fight and everyone’s full, basically.

And Answered Prayers also works off all our bounces from salv, too.

But there’s more synergies, too -
A divine Word: Serenity increases heal by 30%, but also its chance to crit 20% - and with crisis management, heal’s already got a 15% increase, so now BEFORE our actual crit stat Heal has already got a 35% chance to crit. There’s also our tier set which will give us crit each time we get another charge of Serenity. That’s why we take pontifex rather than harmonius apparatus. So now we’re constantly critting in those 15s, which increases our holy word casts by 10%, and also constantly refreshing serenity. Unfortunately there’s only 1 point left to go into resonant words, but that’s still a 25% increase on the heals we weave in.

Oh also pontifex does increase Holy Word: Salvation’s healing by 10%, too.

Granted it’s all napkin math, and it may feel very different to play, but from what I can tell we shouldn’t be struggling too much.

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#18

You’re just straight spamming Heal without Lightweaver, which you mentioned feeling weak in raid?

This is some next level thinking about stacking all the crit synergies like this. I was just thinking of Divine Word mainly in terms of Sanctify (or Chastise for DPS) but there’s a lot of cool interactions I glanced over. Really interesting thoughts, more clever than anything I’ve seen from Jak yet, maybe that’s going to wait a while with the publishing delays on WoWhead and Icy Veins.

#19

Hpriest didn’t need nerfs and especially such HUGE damage nerfs. No healer needed damage nerfs because none of them even do half the dps of a tank. I’m kind of sick of doing less healing and damage than tanks in a dungeon and just feeling worthless as a healer. Not sure why healers need to be so weak every expansion.

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#20

If you’re not going PoH, yup. Heal is still just that efficient. Especially with divine word up, and the PoM talents still seem necessary to me. Also our tier does make PoM reduce the cast time by 1s. And we also get Power Infusion now when we cast on allies. Again, a LOT of your healing is going to be holy words now though. That’s what’s making up for the lost cast time (about .4s per cast).