[Class Tuning] Holy Priest Too Strong in PvP

Classes Priest
1

Look, I would have posted this in PvP, but let’s not kid ourselves, PvP tuning is done by the PvE team at the moment. So here I am.

If you don’t know this, I am telling you now that Holy Priest is too strong in Rated Arenas.

Look no further than the Arena World Championships, every team has to carry a Holy Priest healer to be competitive.

It’s too strong for a few reasons:

  1. Mastery scaling is out of hand – Echo of Light healing can do up to 200k per tick in Arena. That’s 1/8 of a health bar. For a healer that’s not a Healing-over-Time archetype, this is way too much passive healing.

  2. Serenity spam is just too strong – paired up with Guardian Spirit, it’s literally impossible to kill through Holy Priest burst healing if Serenity has little to no CD. For a healing class that already has Void Shift and Power Word: Life baseline, this is just too overpowered. Compared to other healers, Holy Priest’s “oh-crap” button is way too global-efficient and effective.

  3. Too many get-out-of-jail-free cards - Spirit of Redemption is a 2-min CD that laps really well against most DPS burst windows. Holy Priest can Shadow Word: Death to break out of Sheep, Fear, Incap, Sleep and Repentance. Holy Priest can also Fade out of most CCs every 20 seconds too. On top of that, most high-rated Holy Priests play Gnome so they can break out of Boomy’s Root-Beam wombo combo. And let’s not forget they have a baseline 1.5 min trinket to further negate CC.

  4. Mana is still too good after last week’s nerf – again look no further than the AWC games. Spirit of Redemption still offers a mana-free healing window. Symbol of Hope isn’t touched either. For a throughput healing archetype, Holy Priests still outshine Resto Druids and Mistweavers by a long mile.

  5. Lack of damage mitigation is no longer an issue for Holy Priests – this was a historical pain point for this spec, however, with gradual power creep, inflated health pool, every spec has effective ways of freezing their health and improving healing received. And even without damage mitigation, just through pure healing throughput, Holy Priests still have a 50/50 chance of keeping squishy Cloth casters alive, against the mongoloid-est of Ret/Warriors.

  6. Perhaps the most overpowered of them all is Holy Priest’s damage potential - Chastise + Holy Fire combo can literally one-shot people in arenas. For a healing spec historically took a back seat in the damage department (vs. Discipline), this is just not proper class design.

I hope whoever’s doing Priest class tuning can review this post and return the feedback to the upper management. This spec is performing too well in Rated Arenas.

1 Like
2

Oh don’t say that on these forums. To many people actually think the traditional healer should be doing just as much damage as the DPS healer around here.

No it doesn’t make sense and you are absolutely correct it shouldn’t be the case but chances are it won’t be too long before they all come defend such nonsesical design and its lack of common sense.

2 Likes
3

I feel you, friend. We don’t need homogeneous class design. Not every melee needs to be fast and cleave-heavy like Demon Hunters. Not every healer needs to be like Discipline with big dam.

4

Your tears seem to be flowing over into another thread.

1 Like
5

Bump this.
This weekend’s Arena World Championship series offer even more evidence on the dominance of Holy Priests.

6

Literally huh? Standard arena health is about 1.5mil right now (give or take a couple hundred k). I want to know how people are building where they can do 1.5mil damage in a few seconds while the below still being an issue:

7

If you are looking for a scientific breakdown, then I apologize for using a figure of speech.

Here is to clarify further - during the Chastise + Holy Fire setup, I have seen death log where Holy Priests can contribute up to 500k or so of damage, consisting of 2x 150K Holy Fire initial damage and DoT ticks. That is huge if you consider the fact that two other DPS are likely also contributing to the kill.

Most of the melees training single target do anywhere between 80-120k DPS. So let’s assume 2x melee doing average DPS of 100k each. In a 5 second window, both DPS can do up to 1 million damage + the 500k from Holy Priest. That’s most targets’ entire health bar.

And if you put Holy Priests in more set-up comps, like rogue/boomy, rogue/mage, jungle, feral/mage, ret/marksman hunter, dragon/DH, dragon/DK (the S/A tier comps at higher MMR), that 5 second burst window is probably even bigger.

8

So the other team doesn’t have crowd control? Healing during that burst window? Defensive cooldowns? Their own damage burst window? Math looks great when it’s against target dummies.