I’m also looking at this through the lens of desperately trying to get away from Lightweaver Flash Heal spam and not wanting to suffer through not being able to heal AOE burst in M+ so I’m hoping this “rework” addresses both these things (even if it’s via POH) but tbh if it doesn’t I won’t be coming back.
I’m honestly not even sure what the point of all these changes are if these incredible sore spots are not addressed. They’re just blowing smoke up our collective butt at that point.
Patch notes show POH buffed by 40%.
Lightweaver increases affected casts by 25%.
Does 175k hp per person sound like enough healing when the group is taking 1 million damage per AOE tick in a +10? Nope, Lightweaver-buffed Heal on each dps and Binding Heals to cover yourself will remain the only viable solution.
It’s also getting affected by Resonant words, so everytime you cast a holy word > PoH it gets a 40% increase healing.
Btw I don’t think the idea is for us to just spam PoH through AoE dmg and more like how Rshams chain heal works.
Rshams do not just spam chain heal through everything, they mix Chain heals and single target abilities for aoe dmg.
Seems like will be doing pretty much the same for aoe dmg as holy priests.
We’re gonna mix Sanctifies - Heals - PoHs through aoe dmg.
They also buffed trail of light 10% and now transfers 35% so I don’t think they want to remove our cleave healing as a way to cover aoe dmg. And it’ll be nice for Power word: Life to be affected by this talent.
One thing to notice is that sanctify is getting a lot of buffs through talents too, feels like it’ll do nice aoe healing now.
And I don’t think people is noticing how maaany sanctifies we are going to be spamming now.
Sanctify is now a 45s cd with Holy celerity talent
PoH → Reduces Sanctify cd 6s
Renew → With empowered renew it will reduce Sanctify cd 8s
Halo → Reduces Sanctify cd 4s (Voice of harmony talent) if replicated Halos from archon also reduce sanctify cd it will be a total of 12s
And during apotheosis it’ll be just more and more sanctifies.
I don’t want to 100% confirm anything, but it sounds really good on paper, we just need to test the numbers and how it feels in practice.
But overall sounds a lot better than live gameplay
This was pretty much my take as well. 40% is a pittance, you’d need to buff PoH by like 1000% or something ridiculous. I just. I’m not even sure why I bother anymore.
Sanc being improved + getting a larger radius does help, so I think you’re right about that. But the fact remains that AOE damage surges are a huge thing right now and the toolkit absolutely must have answers on a shorter cd than Apotheosis.
I don’t have the confidence that hpriest will fare very well in M+. Sanc into a resonant+lightweaver POH isn’t much of an answer to 25 million damage happening over the span of a couple seconds. If the group is too spread for Sanc or you don’t have 2 charges banked then it runs out of gas, fast. And then you’re immediately back to Heal-weaving like now.
If there was an announced shift toward more constant rot instead of damage profiles ALWAYS centered around massive AOE spikes then these changes would rock. Well, not entirely since mobility is still a problem, but better.
Want to know how to fix Prayer of Mending?
Just make it work like Circle of Healing. Add a talent that makes it instant cast every 6-12 seconds or whatever.
FFS, hire me already Blizzard.
I think with how punishing talent selection/omission is with the new tree, taking that many POH talents will hurt our overall build a lot.
Not saying it won’t work, but I hope they make some more changes.
Agreed. To me it feels like they’re trying to make it do more healing per cast than a fully modified heal with trail/binding so it feels like a better option in AOE, but it’s not addressing the fact that we still lack proper burst aoe healing.
Needing 3 talents active just to make it do reasonable healing doesn’t feel great.
There’re a couple options here
It’d be nice if they made Prayer of Healing do more healing outside of raids so that they could tune it a bit easier (be able to adjust it without making us crazy in raids), but I suspect that’s not going to happen. Then again, there were changes posted a day later that made PoH semi-smart and gave it more visuals, so who knows. Putting PoH on Divine Word: Sanctify could also work, particularly since DW:Sanct only has one the effect.
Top and Middle spec tree aren’t restrictive, you don’t really lose anything by picking up the PoH talents.
The problem is bottom tree where you don’t really have much choice for any kind of content.
So to be fair you don’t really hurt your overall build by picking the PoH talents.
This is just how all healing specs work.
Only disc has a way to do massive aoe healing. The rest are just a mix of AoE + Single target healing. They are making Hpriest to have this same playstyle.
You are not supposed to massive heal through AoE by spamming one button, you’ll have to mix between Single target cleave healing and AoE now which in my opinion is overall better than live gameplay.
Divine hymn seems to be now another option besides Apotheosis
Also I made a build that lets you have Lightwell for M+ (Now heals starting from 75% hp) on top of Lightweaver and Divine image.
I can totally see our AoE healing being way much better now, but can’t confirm. I can’t be sure until I test
The difference is Chain Heal actually does good healing with lesser steps. You don’t need modifiers like High Tide and Unleash Life for Chain Heal to move health bars, but it sure helps. Also, you get to cast Chain Heal in 0.5 seconds every 10 seconds, and if you need more, you have Spiritwalker’s Grace.
You barely get PoH to this point with PI, Unwavering Will, Prayer Circle and Lightweaver all rolling at once.
At least it now prioritises injured targets which is definitely welcome.
Nope. Hit by a swirly and dead if you try to use it. M+ AOE damage is specifically designed to coincide with movement these days, if a healing cd isn’t mobile then it basically doesn’t exist. Healer mobility is one of the things I hate MOST about S1. Sanc into boosted POH works and is mobile enough, I just don’t have a great feeling that it will keep everyone alive through the AOE surge that then has to be topped up with single heals.
S2 hpriest will be incredible in raids, no doubt about that.
You’ve summed up the problems with retail wow design. Elegant simplicity has been long forgotten by the devs.
These are tuning problems, my thoughts are just how it feels they want to push the new rotations.
We’ll have to test when PTR is out how it performs and balance around that or ask for new changes
This 1000%. “Less is more” and “keep it simple, stupid” were abandoned long ago for “unique and different” and that has resulted in some objectively terrible design.
Unlike what a lot of forum and reddit bellyaching will try and make people believe, creating complexity where its not needed is always bad for a game.
Not a fan of losing CoH, it’s been iconic and fun since BC. I HATE not being able to use it in M+ because it’s weak, but it should be default kit that we get always.
I’ve been experiencing a problem with this lately. We had CoH and people were complaining about lack of mobility and AoE healing in dungeons. Circle of Healing is an instant cast AoE heal, so why did we have to remove it and replace it with the complicated Lightweaver stacks followed by Sanctify and Apotheosis in order to get through that stuff?
It’s incredibly frustrating to see people rejoicing additional complexity because they believe that it will result in finally being able to perform better.
It’s like attaching a second wheel on the outside of a flat tire in order to fix the flat tire. Now they’re going to get rid of the flat tire. All they had to do was fix the flat tire.
They could have buffed the existing spells is all I’m saying and now we’ve got a whole redesigned talent tree and playstyle and I’m grumpy about it.
I wouldn’t have minded a buffed CoH on a 4-6 second cooldown, while having renew still buff it and removing prayer of healing, but they went the other way.
I would have preferred circle staying as well over POH. Keep the CD, increase the power and maybe have it interact with our kit in some other way.
But here we are.
