These are pretty major for raid HPS, and Oracle is honestly a very attractive choice now. M+ is still not looking super hot, tbh. PoH + Divine Image buffs are welcome there, though. A lot of renew-focused changes which feels strange in dungeon.
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Those are some pretty meaty buffs for the content I enjoy most.
I, for one, am happy to see these renew buffs. I was halfway debating changing secondary stats, but Renew is going to be beefy now and Lasting words get’s a huge buff in subsequent healing now.
Also, good to see Divine Image buffs too. I’ve been dabbling around my last point for talents and every time I tried Divine Image I was disappointed. This should change that now.
I am thrilled about the buff to Prayer of Healing. That alone, for me, should add about 2% to my overall raid healing. The PoM buff is appreciated but I think all Holy Priests are casting it on cooldown in raid anyway.
I want to like a Renew focused build but I’m not sure it’s possible with my currently playstyle. I also want to like Oracle but the healing done by Halo is so very, very hard to beat. I’ll do some math at some point but I don’t think the increases to Renew and doing Oracle beat out the massive amount of healing that Halo gives Archon. But, it would be cool to see a viable Oracle/Renew build.
Is Oracle the play for M+ now? Or is it still too clunky? I don’t think Renew or PoM have much of a place in dungeons but you can cast them between packs and 10% increased healing taken buff sounds pretty good. The increase damage that Oracle gives makes me think that it’s worth it for Dungeons.
Overall I’m pretty happy to see these changes.
It’s going to beat halo, for sure. The question is whether it will beat halo’s Apoth extension + free flash heals that reduce sanc, and whether you can flex to lasting words to make up the difference.
I think it puts them very close to one another in overall healing and Archon might have a slight edge. The advantage archon has is more predictable full raid healing coverage and better tier set synergy. But the sustained throughput of having like double the PoMs with 40% more healing is high, especially with the baseline pom buff and you still have piety.
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Oracle should be granting a 28% increase to Answered Prayers proc time. I think that will make up for the Halo’s extension on Apotheosis.
You know, I think I’m going to try an Oracle raid build out just to see how it goes. I just don’t think I have the points to spare to get the Renew talents.
I don’t think that it’s going to get me the 230k HPS that Halo does.
5% throughput in raid is always nice. It’s… at least something in M+, and since I am a Lightwell afficionado, I am quite happy that Lightwell is getting buffed in both key and raid.
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I’ll be trying out a new Oracle Raid build this evening. I should be able to adjust the healing numbers by the proposed buffs to the associated spells and determine the preformance compared to my other runs. If it’s a drastic improvement over my best runs then that should be enough to prove it’s the optimal raid build (maybe not for Mythic raiding).
I’m running oracle in raid and loving it. No problems with healing tbh these buffs are all very juicy for my build!
Is there a clear winner between the talent that makes Premonition 40% better or 15 seconds shorter?
I tried Oracle in a Normal raid and it was, by far, my worst parse.
I don’t think, even with the buffs, that Oracle is going to outperform Archon. You have to sacrifice a lot to get the Renew talents and I just found myself starved for Holy Words.
I did Stix Bunkjunker today as Oracle and last night as Archon. Last night I got the rolling garbage debuff five times in a row and still managed to do 2.76 million raw HPS. My best run to date was 3.61 million raw HPS. The run with Oracle had 2.35 million raw HPS and I was only trying to pump my numbers.
Oracle has less overhealing. Halo in particular is nasty with the overhealing. But I think there’s just too much sacrifice in the talents to get a benefit from Renew.
Maybe I’m just doing it wrong.
After the buffs, I would expect Renew to add 206.4k, PoM to add 42.1k, and PoH won’t add anything over my Archon build because I already run PoH. I didn’t ain’t for the extra 10% healing on allies with Renew but even if I add another 10% to this the new total after buffs would be about 2.81 million HPS.
Oracle is viable. Speccing into Renew talents is viable. But I think the interaction between Renew and Mastery and the loss of Archon benefits (Apotheosis pause on stun, instant cast Flash Heals, and a wicked raid wide Halo) just doesn’t make the build worth it.
After buffs, my average run utilizing Renew, PoH, and PoM, and Oracle is just a bit better than my worst run using Archon.
It’s Hpriest time to shine. Stand down discs and know your place 
j/k but these are bigger buffs than I was expecting. I’m going to have so much fun in pvp on Tuesday. Let’s watch how many of this disc army shifts to holy. I’m a very happy pvp Hpriest atm
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I orange parsed our last prog fight in heroic so it’s not getting blown out by any means. I think Renew might get out of hand and they might nerf the buffed to be honest. They should remove the 40% increased renew duration and put back to 25% for oracle. I fear if it is too strong they may overnerf it after as they have issues with exponential math.
And yes the 40% over reduced duration is far superior cuz blizz applied the 40% buff on 2 variables on piety (again… exponential math 
) and solace (i think). This means in piety your buff is actually 1.4*1.4 = almost double the strength of not using it (you do more healing and have more distributed healing)
The PoM healing is going to be ridiculous can’t wait. I can only imagine there will be follow up nerfs but hopefully we get to be OP for a week.
Idk about renew but I would love to WANT to cast renew again. I wanted the old empowered renew back that gave us 40% immediately healing, but I’ll settle for it healing more and maybe the new empowered renew will be crazy with that scaling. From a pvp perspective I still don’t think I’d ever take prismatic echo.
I looked at the log, both your disc and prevoker are slacking off to give you the parse, and your raw healing was only about 3m hps where most Archon hpriests are averaging 4-5m hps in similar scenarios with minimal effort. Not really convincing, especially when your cpm isn’t even low either while casting the right spells, so it’s not like you are playing egregiously wrongly or anything.
Oh no, Renew might actually do more than 2-3 % total healing, and maybe get closer to 5%. And even if it’s like 10%(it won’t, because everything can already be accurately mathed out based on current values versus projected buff)…who cares? It’s on Oracle, and it’s still not going to make Oracle remotely competitive with Archon. Plus it doesn’t proc Echo of Light unlike almost every other spell in the breakdown, so what you see is exactly what you get.
For Lasting Words, if the Holy Words apply a Renew to their target, does the Holy Word benefit from the 10% increased healing received by the target having Renew, or does the Renew happen after the target gets the Holy Word?
It gets directly applied. sanct and serenity receive the increased heal buff from renew. Tested during ptr.
@bananakitten yes. But… that’s pretty much what I would max out in archon as well. I’m not the most efficient at stacking the right CDs (that is, I wouldn’t do 4k hps raw healing in archon as well so I’m comparing me to myself). Not saying it’s equal to archon, but I feel I’ve been competing with it within reason.
As far as the Renew goes. When I put lasting words and prismatic echoes on, with the buffs I expect renew heals to be 12-16% of my total healing. Note this will be a drop to litd and lotn for prismatic / lasting (which hurts ).
Anyway this will be tested next Fri/Sat by me and depending on our wipes I may swap skills around to get a feel of delta power. We will see then 
Note this is my original impression and I do hope I’m wrong!
I mean, the point is that the top Oracle parses is at least 20-30%(or even more, like on Cauldron) than the top Archon parses, and these are some of the best holy priests that are deep into mythic prog compared to other mythic raiding guilds.
Even if Renew adds 10% extra throughput to Oracle compared to Archon, it’s just somewhat closing the wide chasm between both hero trees. But it won’t, because the only meaningful Renew buff that Archon doesn’t get is the extra 15% duration to Renew relative to current patch.
What about Oracle for M+ now?
Better, but the buffs are useless to push Hpriest higher.
Lot of the buffs are to Spells/Talents that are waaay to undertuned to these changes being consider as game changing.
Renew is still useless in M+ even with 60% buff.
PoH is still useless for M+, I know some people are like meh you can make it work a bit, but in reality it’s not…
Dmg buffs are nice → These are actually the big hitters on the buffs Hpriest will do quite good dmg.
Oracle is now a good option alongside Archon in high keys.
All the other healing buffs are mid/low impact. We’ll still be bottom. Buffs do not iterate over the rework correctly