Honestly same — Especially for PvP, as it’s very useful there.
Removing an instant-heal spell from holy-priest’s utility feels like a slap in the face @ quick-heal-needed situations, when all others are on CD 
I personally would like to see Holy less reliant on cooldowns (Divine Word, Apo, etc) and have far better passive/group healing potential. A way to passively spread SWP around would be nice so you can easily benefit from Throes of Pain.
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Not seeing any buffs or usage of SWP in the holy rework makes me sad.
I don’t think we’ll see it either.
The main reason SWP sucks is because they’ve buffed Holy Fire and Smite 4-5 times in the last 2 years and haven’t touched SWP. Tab target casting SWP on every mob is a DPS loss because SWP doesn’t CDR your Chastise and does less damage then just casting Holy Fire & Smite.
SWP being lousy also deprives Holy of Throes of Pain mana gains. Disc in comparison has infinite mana because you’re getting free SWP spreads with using Penance and you fart out a Mindbender every 20s.
0 interaction with our kit is definitely a problem on its own but the dot doing less DMG than 1 smite is also bad.
2 Likes
SWP does 65,377 initial + 68,150 over 16s.
Smite does 148,334.
Holy Fire is 320,922 initial + 152,324 dot w/ 75% of the initial splashing to 5 targets.
Why am I going to press SWP when Smite does more damage and CDRs Chastise so I can feed back loop into more AOE damage?
6 Likes
Yes this is so confusing, it should at the least reduce chastise.
I hope chastises cooldown is reduced to 45 seconds as well btw. With the apoth change our dps combo would otherwise get destroyed, as currently it’s pretty clean with chastise-3 holy fires, (chastise 2 hf 1 nova)x 3 and repeat
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I had so many hopes and dreams of archon giving SWP something fun to do for us when they first announced hero talents.
Shadow word poke is what we have now.
I’ll honestly never understand the complaints about casting on a class which is meant to be a spell caster. I like spell casting, and I understand too much hard casting can be difficult in some encounters, but the fantasy of the class should be preserved by making casting less clunky, rather than removing casting at every turn.
You literally chose a Priest which is a cloth spell casting class. If you don’t want to your spells to have cast times, I hate to be the guy to tell you there are other classes in the game like Resto Druid to fulfill the fantasy you seem to prefer.
This doesn’t mean that all spells should feel clunky to use on Priest, but we have things like Lightweaver to make casting feel smoother as well as powerful instant heals like Holy Word: Serenity with 2 charges. I’m not sure what else you really want. Asking or wishing every spell was instant cast is unreasonable for a caster in my honest opinion.
As far as the other complaints like talent interactions and smart healing concerns, those could probably be easily remedied, and I’m all for making things less clunky.
Losing CoH is actually one less instant cast heal for us to use while mobile. This Mythic raid tier has whole segments of fights where you’re basically running non-stop for 15-20s straight. You have to be in Apo, have Holy Words banked up, and/or get an Aug to use SP on you.
The new Divinity talent may help with that because you’ll get 3 instant cast Heals or PoH’s, but the question I have is if it works with Answered Prayers. Either way: the majority of changes they’re making to Holy take into account that most players aren’t using CoH and Salv but are instead running Apo.
Renew could be viable as a filler heal while mobile if they just beefed up its healing a lot and made Empowered Renew hot 5 people instead of just 1 person on a 12s cd.
1 Like
To be fair, it’s not like people were ever talenting into CoH anyway. And I look at this issue as an encounter design issue more than a class design one. Make encounters fair across all classes and specs (some classes will always shine of course) and we wouldn’t have issues like Priests needing to be Rescued by Evokers for example.
Instant spell casts and general Priest mobility are two similar but still separate issues in my mind. I think there’s room for improvement as far as displacement and general mobility goes for the Priest class— but as far as making actual spell casting feel good, they can always do that without moving the game into a “everything is just instant cast now” mindset. (I understand CoH has been in the game since forever by the way, but I’m just saying the general mindset in the community has been about wanting instant cast spells for a while now, so I’m glad Blizzard pushes back on that and let’s casters be casters for the most part).
CoH fell off as soon as they got rid of the DF S3 tier set bonus pumping you up with 20 stacks of Healing Chorus. They also went and made Halo do 25% of Holy’s healing so they left CoH’s scaling low. In DF we were tuned pretty much entirely around PoM and CoH for raid healing. Couple this with a tier set that buffs Flash Heal/Heal, Lightweaver beta buff, and Flash Heal/Heal buffs.
CoH just completely fell off to being useless in M+ and in raid it wasn’t doing that much more then a cast of Lightweaver Heal. They could have buffed it very easily (same with Renew), but simply chose not too.
Had Archon Halo not been added to the game CoH and PoM would probably do double the healing they do now.
Yeah I think you basically said what the devs are thinking. Holy is moving in the direction of trimming away some abilities- in favor of Halo being a big deal now like you said for example (whole hero tree devoted to it so of course they’re going to keep Halo feeling powerful). And they’re not going to prune PoM. So CoH was the best choice. I think it’s better for the spec to have fewer buttons that essentially do the same job because it ends up being a balancing issue for the devs probably. You start to thin out the power across redundant spells rather than allowing for every individual spell to feel impactful.
Sad to see things we love trimmed away, but at the same time, I think it will be better for balancing and generally making the class feel better to play in the long run. Of course we need the PTR to get a hands on feel but hopefully they listen to feedback this time if anything feels bad.
Random aside, as a caster enjoyer, I’d actually like to see Halo become an instant cast spell. It’s a long cooldown and a literal hero talent tree ability. It also just feels like it should be? Hard to explain but yeah.
If they’re pruning abilities then they should condense Flash Heal and Heal into one heal. It worked with Flash Concentration because once you built it up to 5 stacks you only had to weave in one Flash Heal every 15s to keep it up.
With Lightweaver only having 2 stacks it’s just not good for responding to rapid damage events, but at least they’re giving it 4 stacks.
1 Like
Interesting idea. I wouldn’t necessarily be opposed to it, but sometimes I do enjoy having Lightweaver which interacts with it, giving a “rotational” feel instead of a spamming feel. I realize everyone is sick and tired of Lightweaver-ing at this point though lol.
Lightweaver is going to fall off next patch once we lose our tier set bonus because its talent value is going to drop a lot. Right now it’s the strongest end tree talent, but post patch it won’t be any more competitive then Lightwell or Lasting Words.
All our power lost from Lightweaver is being baked into Holy Word Serenity. You also have some really bad trade offs going for Lightweaver with the current tree design.
Hm I see. Definitely makes me want to play around on PTR now and hear what everyone thinks about it. Hopefully any issues are actually addressed. There’s a difference between giving players the choice between end nodes and making 1 or 2 end nodes mandatory for viable play. Really don’t want to see the rework fall into this pitfall again.
The issue with the current design is that by default we have 2 less points to spend because those points have to go into Holy Celerity and one of the new Apotheosis talents.
With Answered Prayers shifted over to the right side of the tree it makes it pretty dang hard to get it in any kind of build. Light in the Darkness is just flat out a mandatory talent pick regardless.
Ultimately what would be the best talent build is going to boil down to just stacking all the best passive healing talents. Light in the Darkness, Prismatic Echoes, Divine Image, and Lasting Words are all 3-5% passive hps increases. There’s no point taking PoH talents if you aren’t using Lightweaver.
Answered Prayers is also a mandatory talent if you’re using Eternal Sanctity to extend its duration because you can easily turn that 8s duration into 15s+. You’d milk out 2-3 extra Holy Words.
I’m going to sound like a mad man here, but I really wish the talent trees were closer to how they are in Cataclysm. I feel personally that there are just far too many things in the trees to balance as well as spells being in there that could simply be baseline (Shackle Undead??). It gives you the feeling of missing out on something rather than the joy of having choice more often than not. That’s a totally different topic, but I’m already weary of these kinds of issues with every single class. I like talent trees and the choice they offer but yeah idk, they just made them too large. It’s the illusion of choice issue all over again.
I’ll be interested to see how the more general tier set bonuses play out though.
The irony is that with the middle and top of the tree they pruned and trimmed so many talents that you can literally pick any and all talents that you want without any tradeoffs. You can go full dps talents for raid and still get all the healing talents. That alone is going to buff our dps a lot in raid and we’ll be #2 in dps after Disc.
It’s the bottom of the tree that is the hot mess. Right now on retail you can get Answered Prayers, Lightweaver, and Divine Image. If you want that same build post update it’s not physically possible.