Holy Paladins are most likely to see another round of damage nerfs, and IMO, rightly so. I really hope we don’t just see another flat aura nerf, though.
IMO, Summer is playing a big role in why Hpal damage is so high with the current M+ meta comp, and flat aura nerfs to Hpal will just make Summer more of our overall damage as it won’t be affected by an aura nerf at all.
With the current meta, casting Summer on an Aug-buffed and power-infused Fire Mage is insanely good value. Roll into a comp with pet-based classes and you’re actually just down bad. Last night I did 2 Brackenhides, one with a WW, BM hunter, and Demo lock, and those are all super low value. The other had an Aug and a Fire Mage. Summer on the Fire Mage did 9k dps overall, Summer on a BM hunter did 500… why does it work like that?!?
I really hoped they would have gotten rid of or changed Summer as part of our recent rework; the next best thing they could do with it is normalize its damage so Hpal damage is independently balanceable, isn’t subject to another spec being completely broken, and ensures that healer damage is tied to the player’s skill expression and not whether another player pressed their buttons correctly.
I like Blessing of Seasons, but the variation in Summer’s damage is so broken it needs to be normalized in some way.
E.g., give it the AG nerf where it is capped at doing x damage per second
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Fully agree, tried pointing this out a lot during the ptr cycle but not sure they saw it or were able to get to it. Summer is absolutely doing way too much damage, its 40-50% of our damage in raid, and a large amount in m+ as well.
Its also quite annoying in a way because we aren’t just buffing an ally so they -can- do more damage, we are throwing a buff on them hoping they blast so our damage can look good. Don’t have an arcane mage in the group? Well, now its going to do much less than it can do. Have an arcane mage you put it on that inted their cds? Well, now its going to do much less than it should do.
I like Seasons as well and think its actually pretty cool, rotating blessings is interesting but summer is actually so much better than the other 3 its wild. I would take a cap to summer damage, or just a change to how summer itself ie make it an actual buff to an ally (increased haste or something actually cool) rather than a direct damage contribution.
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Couldn’t agree more to this… If they are nerfing damage again for sure I think putting a cap to Summer would be by far the best way to do it…
That way it really mostly target the super high-end groups and not the more casual player base or people running mid keys or those who like questing as healer for whatever reason.
Hpal had a pretty bad issue with doing active damage in m+ in season 1. But they fixed a lot of those issues in the rework by giving us new ways of doing damage.
We are no longer forced into spending HP on LoD purely for wings procs - we can press SoTR. There’s a SoTR on single target talent. We have consecration procs from judgement. We have so many holy shocks glimmer, daybreak and daybreak powered Holy Shocks (via Rising Sunlight) are all good. There’s just no need for Summer to be doing as much as it is anymore and further nerfs to our base kit is going in the wrong direction completely.
Yeah when you describe it like that, it’s so obviously flawed as a concept.
I would take a cap to summer damage, or just a change to how summer itself ie make it an actual buff to an ally (increased haste or something actually cool) rather than a direct damage contribution.
I could see them doing something like that but that too feels kinda bad in the world we’re moving towards. With the support role being a clearly defined role, I think having Power Infusion and a reworked summer where it gave stats or haste or power to a single player is dangerous. I could see the meta devolving into: bring a priest, hpal, aug and the best busted spec and just funnel all those multipliable buffs onto the cooked spec. IMO if support is going to be a thing, then nothing else should bring support like power. Otherwise stacking those specs where you get multipliable benefits is far more value than anything else.
i hope they get rid of summer, but given the new external stance blizzard has, i doubt it’ll happen 
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I saw you pointing it out probably a dozen times, and it’s kind of crazy that it hasn’t been addressed at all. My biggest fear is that they’ll just keep flat aura nerfing us, and the only thing that will accomplish is forcing us to take the one broken ability that they need to fix.
I do agree that with a support spec in the game, support based abilities on healers can be a muddy area. I think they could change summer into something interesting though, rather than just a direct damage increase for the hpal/group. I think the other 3 blessings are very cool, and all have a purpose but arent too strong where you are required to take it for raid or m+, summer is the one that kinda pushes us in that direction. Not sure what they could change it to but i’m sure there is something they can do with it.
Yeah i really am not a fan of flat aura nerfs honestly. We’re in a situation where, outside of summer, m+ damage is coming from different spells than raid damage is and I want them to go after those spells rather than throwing out an aura nerf that hits things that do not need to be hit. For example with the healing nerf, it was a flat 8% nerf and kind of effected some healing spells that really didn’t need it. It’s probably the easiest way for them to nerf something quickly, but does come with issues.
In terms of summer, really saw this coming a mile away. It was already doing too much of our damage when put on a mage in cds and with aug evoker it was clear you could do some pretty busted stuff with it. Its the fact this 1 talent does 40-50% of our damage though, thats a bit crazy. I don’t mind hpal having to do active dps to contribute damage in raid, and we do good active damage as well, but we keep getting nerfed because this one spell dominates our damage and they haven’t targeted it for some reason. I’d like to see some changes to it overall personally, or at the very least a cap.
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How to you get value out of Summer outside of …
It barely registers on my radar as it only adds about 1k dps overall and I think my last Mythic (with a stacked DH) only netted 2.3k overall.
So I don’t know. Cap it? Get rid of it and bake it into our damage? I’m definitely not getting the value the rest of the thread is getting out Summer.
Yeah and that’s exactly the point and why we believe that spell should be the target for the damage nerfs… It’s very dependent on comp and group coordination. When you put it on a mage with stacking buffs (PI + Aug evoker) who’s doing about 1 Million DPS on a big pull it will do totally insane damage too…
But in a more regular or average comp even when trying to use it correctly (meaning you put it on a non-pet DPS during his CD widow) you get a lot less value. For myself I think I’ve had only like 1 or 2 runs where I’ve been able to get that type of value from it cause I just happened to fall into that comp while pugging (I mean you literally just throw it on the mage during the big pull at the start and watch your DPS go to like 160-180k during that window).
So nerfing or capping it would be a great way to limit how much DPS a H Pala can do at the very high-end without having much of an impact for the other 98% of the players.
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They are talking about putting on a dps not yourself.
Lmao. Sick burn. Totally got me. 
Nerf will occur on Fri, Sep 22, 2023
Honestly I just don’t understand.
So they originally nerfed Summer proc damage by 10% (30% ➜ 20%). While this isn’t what I’ve called for, it was a step in the right direction as nerfing it rather than an aura nerf meant that they at least understood that part of the reason why Hpal is doing insane damage is because we are tied to dps spec balance and are reliant on a good Summer target.
Nerfing Summer now gave me hope that Summer would become a smaller part of our overall, and if in future they needed to buff our damage they would aura buff - further extending the gap between our damage and Summer damage.
However, by their actions today, I think I’ve lost all hope in what they are doing with this spell. When in the same set of patch notes they are nerfing Consecration damage by 25% and Righteous Judgment proc chance, they chose to reverse part of the Summer change. Like what?
They clearly just want to have less control over how much damage this spec does. 
They could have said: “hey, perhaps we went to far with the damage nerfs, let’s reverse some of the consecration nerfs to bring their overall in inline with whatever our damage expectations are”. No they went, lets reverse 5% on Summer which could equate to any completely variable random amount of damage. 
Cool. Great. Excellent. Top tier thinking. Good job. 
Honestly what are they thinking?
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Yeah I agree with you.
I’d much prefer Summer to be nerfed than Consecration.
Summer is too variable. I dont want to rely on other people for my own damage output.
I just want consecration to be strong, similar to having some strong dots like sunfire.
Seeing as im casting a little more than I used to it’s nice to have something to throw down for some passive damage.
The damage variability on summer isnt great for me at least, I PUG a lot. Im sure its nice in coordinated groups.
I would have thought that Blizz would have liked to try to nerf the pally in a way that does not impact the everyday mid level pugger but target the high end coordinated groups that are smashing 30 keys or whatever and blowing everyone else out of the water.
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There’s nothing wrong with Blessing of Summer, it has a 3 min CD for a 25% dmg increase 40% of the time.
- so it’s actually 2.5 times lower than 100% of the time, meaning it’s basically 10% dmg increase 100% of the time for 30 seconds out of 3 minutes.
- 10% dmg for 30 sec out of 3 minutes means it’s actually 180/30 = 6th of the time up, so 10/6 = 1.6(6) dmg increase for a dps.
Let’s calculate the value of PI a bit for a target (not the priest himself). Which is 25% haste for 20 seconds over 2 minutes.
Well, we don’t really need to, it’s 25% dmg vs 25% haste which could mean more or less in the end, depending on spec used on. And it’s 20 sec with a cd of 2 mins (PI), versus 30 sec with a cd of 3 minutes(Summer).
So in the end it’s the same 1.6(6)% dps increase.
Now realistically, their value is higher than 1.6(6)% dps increase because they are used during burst moments with cd’s rolling, so they’re worth more.
But, they are worth basically the same.
If dmg meters could quantify the dmg gained by the extra haste and appropriate it to the priest, their dmg would be increasing by the same amount that a paladin would.
What to do to solve this issue of stacking cd’s and making a DPS go super saiyan for a while?
It’s simple, just:
- make Summer give a “recently infused” debuff
- make PI give a “recently infused” debuff
Now they’re not stacking anymore, more DPS would receive infusions and not 1 of them would hog them all.
They can probably add more infusion types over time(since they seem to want to go in this buffing direction) and it wouldn’t be overpowered, since they can’t be stacked on 1 target for mega dmg.
I disagree a little bit in the sense that I think the haste buff from PI will typically be more valuable for specs that scales very well with haste but leaving that aside… Didn’t you just prove the opposite of what you were trying to say??
If Summer is similar or “basically worth the same” as PI wouldn’t that make it too strong??.. I mean idk but I wouldn’t think Summer is supposed to be something of comparable power to PI which is the iconic Priest spell. Not to mention Summer is only one of the 4 seasons, you still have the other 3 in between that are also pretty good.
Or I mean hey they just announced Disc talents are being reworked so they should definitely add a new support spell… Something that can give various offensive and defensive benefits, make one of those be basically equivalent to divine shield. 
The issue with Consecration was its damage was too high. It’s literally a set and forget ground AOE that was doing 50-60k+ passive ticking damage. Then you had Blessing of Summer contributing millions of extra damage on big pulls. So you push 2 buttons and basically outdps every other healer by a wide margin.
I didn’t, I showed Blizz made it exactly the same power up like PI is.
No, unless you say PI is OP and should be nerfed.
Iconic or not, nothing prevents one buff from rivaling another.
And PI is also applied to the priest that casts it. They both have other benefits.
I really don’t care if another spec or even class has a rework. Good for them.