Healers aren’t weak in DF atm hence the 40% health damage buff. Healers were finding it too easy at lvl 70 and they wanted healers to do some work
I already called Empyreal Blaze getting nerfed weeks ago so I’m not exactly shocked. The 30 second cooldown interrupted your rotation too much and based on pre-patch warcraft logs: Holy Priests were competing with battle healers for top healer dps… which is a bit broken for a throughput healer. 75% of your damage was just coming from Holy Fire.
Holy Priests were also extremely bursty in PvP … at least pre-hp change. You could Divine Word Chastise + triple Holy Fire blast people in the face for massive amounts of damage.
You guys are overlooking things a bit though. Holys healing doesn’t go down: it goes up. Echo of Light does massive overhealing… like 40-50%. With bigger health point pools you’re no longer wasting your Echo of Light.
What’s going to change is you probably aren’t going to be able to 3 heal meme fights anymore. The fights will require 4-5 healers giving more classes an opportunity to shine.
By that logic rdruid which was testing higher and can lap anyone in overheals in all content should be due for 15% nerfs when?
I’ll wait and see what the new testing shows. I really don’t think it’s as obvious as everyone was doing 40-50% overhealing in all meaningful content and all that overhealing will just slot right in to effective healing, especially since according to Blizz all the healers were doing excessive overhealing not just hpriest so I don’t think we’ll have this relative advantage you predict, or if it does exist it’ll be fairly negligible.
But anyhow I’m less concerned about the healing nerfs and more concerned that damage is no longer the utility for hpriest. Remember when Blizz said hpriest didn’t need any utility? We had all these new DPS tools to play with? Well they’ve mostly blown up now, especially if you keep in mind how impactful the covenant losses are.
Like you said: it’s one of those things we need to see for ourselves. Early expansion is always a bit of a finicky experience. You start off with no gear and doing raids in basically mythic 0 gear is rough compared to walking in at the equivalent previous tier mythic iLvl.
People tend to just replicate what the world first guilds do. So if they stack 3 mistweavers and 3 evokers than expect those classes to become the #1 most popular.
Unironically those time abilities of evoker that reverse a % of previous damage, and their %-based DR and defensives based on % of player health are probably set to shine after these changes, so maybe the weird scalies get their patch in the S-tier sun after all.
1 Like
I’m hoping they see some use because I did not enjoy playing that class on the beta.
1 Like
I still feel like Holy is coming into the next expansion in a strong position though. It’s a lot more popular spec now than end expansion BFA.
Every single nerf I’ve seen has been justified based on log data. Disc was massively overperforming in raids by like 30-40% of everyone else. Holy shot up to #1 on hps in the pre-patch from being like 3rd-4th place.
Holy’s damage output was only 10-15% behind Disc and Paladins in a raid setting… yeah.
If they didn’t reign back both Priest specs than both would have been basically S-tier…
I think as Holy Priests we were too spoiled with getting buffs all of Shadowlands. Almost every single patch had some major non-PvP buffs.
What is that you don’t get about what I said? Healers are weak in DF and they were weak in SL too besides hpal for a little while. Why do healers need to do such miniscule amounts of damage and then be outhealed overall by tanks?
And to be clear, I am talking about dungeons. I hate raiding and I only do it if I have to or someone talks me into it. Raiding has not been fun for a long time.
Momentum from 9.2… we’ll see how it goes. These changes really hurt the spec, bottom line, and it felt like A-tier before. Not having a % DR means they’re going to take this 40% healing nerf much harder than others that do have an Ironbark or a Pain Suppression/Barrier, etc. etc. because all those became 40% more powerful and our spells are 5% less powerful. (All %-based heals, defensives and DR are buffed by Blizz’s action).
And not bringing big damage or much other utility leaves it back in a 9.0 spot. I didn’t really study the DPS from the beta tests but this is a lot of nerfs for me to imagine it’s going to be able to deliver in 10.0.
I think you’ll see the usual suspects trot out B-tier or worse once rshaman gets its buffs, or have they already yet? Or, maybe to leave on a hopeful note, maybe Caps has discovered this crit-based build that’ll lap anything people tested with and put hpriest back up with rdruid despite these nerfs, that’s as wishful as my thinking gets! 
1 Like
I dont get that you can be so wrong. ITs like you havent paid attn to beta.
You are offering no proofs of your case so therefore i dont need to offer any either. The only tanks out healing healers is blood dks. As they quite often but not always should.
Healer dps is an added bonus./ not a right. We have you in one corner espousing that healers should do giga amounts of dps and others in the red corner not liking healers dpsing at all.
If you are being outhealed byt every tank then thats a you issue not a spec issue. And quite frankly embarrassing.
some small proof that heals are overpowered in DF, as an fyi is the 40% health boost… because it was too easy to heal up. What more do you need?
It’s not an added bonus. If healers have damaging abilities they should be useful. I never said anything about giga dps and the only people who complain about having to do any damage are the ones who suck, like you apparently.
This is not true in high keys so don’t come on here lying and acting like you’re some fact checker when you’re just a moron. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.
Ya I’m the one that sucks here. My io is 3077, which could be higher but it’s WAY higher than yours and we’re not even in the same league.
1 Like
The tank is the one taking the most damage in dungeons, and M+ scales infinitely. It makes sense that their self healing/mitigation would outscale the healer, else they wouldn’t ever be kept alive.
We’re also talking about a game where raiding exists, even if you don’t engage with it. How do you expect the healer damage/healing paradigm to change when raid is already struggling with nothing to heal because all the healers are capable of doing enough HPS to just reset health bars every second.
I don’t see a way where you can have healers both bring meaningful DPS but also tanks can’t defend themselves much in order for healers to babysit them while also healing the unavoidable party damage. At least not one where healer DPS isn’t overtuned.
Healer damage becomes a necessity the higher the key level you’re pushing. World first guilds also calculate healer damage in terms of pushing bosses through phases because when you add up a Disc Priest and Holy Paladins damage its like having an extra dps in the raid.
Healer damage has just been all over the place in Shadowlands though. You have healers that basically do half the damage of others despite being played at the same skill level.
3 Likes
There’s an alternative design to this, of course, where e.g. in FF14 the 4 healers there all due like literally almost copy-pasted 100% the same DPS as each other. And that design is buttressed by the healers all having very basic DPS toolkits.
Not sure which is a worse evil. In theory WoW opens up so many more options to balance HPS/utility/DPS across all content types, but of course that just never seems to happen and I don’t even know if they pretend that’s their goal anymore. On the other hand, too much sameness can be awfully boring…
The problem is you have battle and throughput healers which fundamentally deal damage differently. Throughput healers are either dealing damage or healing like an off-and-off switch… battle healers heal while doing damage.
Every healer would basically need to become a battle healer to have equally balanced damage output.
And wouldn’t that be sad… every class falling into the Chorus Line like so many matching marionettes. Maybe it’s better just to leave the imbalance and shuffle it every so often hoping for the best.
This only works because FF14 as a game has a bunch of off-GCD abilities. The differentiation being the kinds of stuff you bring between your healer CDs. In savage level play, healers are legitimately not hitting their GCD heals. In Ultimate level play, they’re only hitting them when they have to. And otherwise, they’re spamming DPS buttons and weaving their heals between.
That said, healer design in FF14 tends to be pretty homogenized to healer ‘types’.
You’ve got 2 healers that do mitigation, and 2 healers that do pure throughput.
But when it comes down to it, they all pretty much play the same - they have one casted damage spell, one DoT spell, one AoE spell, and two of them have conditional secondary AoE spells. But even their healing toolkits have a lot of crossover. There’s not much difference between an Indom (Scholar) and Ixochole (Sage). They read almost exactly the same and do the exact same amount of healing.
The single unique healing playstyle they have is Astro, and that’s mostly because of weaving in cards takes some high APM.
It’s a very different kind of design - not necessarily bad or good - but I would guarantee it would not resonate well with most WoW players, because pulling it off requires making classes feel like they have nearly the same toolkit overall.
1 Like
This is what I have been doing and it’s been treating me well. I’ve seen high healing priests using Lightweaver but I didn’t go that route as honestly it just feels boring so i went with what I found fun.
I don’t look builds up so it may not be amazing later on but I also take empowered renew as it procs our passive as renew itself does not. The healiing might not be worth it but it’s what I have been doing at the moment as I don’t have all the talent points to make tons of other decisions.
From what I’ve looked at, Rapid Recovery seems better total healing if you’re going a build that uses the renew talents. It ‘seems’ wrong, because dividing 15s by 3 = 5 ticks, and you’re going to 4, so a 20% decrease in ticks to gain 35% is only a 15% increase and echo should beat that.
However, Renew ticks once at 0s. So it’s actually 6 ticks going to 5, So it’s more like a 20% increase on renew healing total.
The choice really is Rapid Recovery if you want higher renew healing, Empowered Renew if you want a bit more burst. Personally, I don’t think there’s any scenario in which I’d want renew to do a bit of burst, even with the revitalizing prayers build, but if you think most your hot will get sniped or something it’s probably better.
Rapid Recovery is just a flat 35% HPS increase to Renew which makes it the better pick because it’s rare you’ll get the full healing amount of a 15s Renew. Empowered Renew scales with Mastery, but it’s such a tiny amount of increased healing that it’s not really noticeable. Rapid Recovery also scales well with Revitalizing Prayers.