Decent Holy Buffs

Classes Priest
21

This does apply to lasting words/lightwell though.

Realistically I expect the meta build to be Archon still because the apoth extension is incredibly valuable - but probably a swap of LoTN to Lightwell in the standard build.

HOWEVER, I think these changes will close the gap significantly for Oracle, and the ‘renew build’ that Blizz has been trying to make a thing is likely viable enough to actually play and be comparable to Archon now.

My expectation for Oracle in M+ is that it’s probably fairly decent now, especially in a couple dungeons. I don’t think Holy will be meta with these changes at all, but Oracle might end up taking the edge because of the renew/PoM changes. Empowered renew is actually going to be somewhat chunky for M+ now.

Basic way to look at it with napkin math (I’m not gonna go too in depth here):

Renew currently does ~55k per tick. That will be baseline next patch. Empowered renew increasing it another 120% + a bump from renewed faith. So we’re looking at a 125k ticking renew at about 6-7 ticks depending on haste. Prismatic echoes CAN take that to 160k.

Empowered renew can be extended by lasting words, which you’re likely to do on your tank. This is more of a deal in M+ because you can actually intentionally extend those renews there, wheras in raid you wouldn’t get great coverage. You also get longer duration as Oracle.

As far as PoM’s healing, it’s currently in the 130-140k range. Baseline buff of 20% + Preventative measures is going to also put it at ~218k per bounce.

These still aren’t healing FANTASTICALLY well, but it’s about in line with other spec’s maintenance heals, and we’ve still got our regular mastery, holy words, piety, etc.

Realistically M+ I could see being down to preference. Wheras raid I’d give archon an edge, but say Oracle can probably hang with it in HPS now.

22

Prayer of Mending needs a way to find value particularly in M+ content. It’s fantastic in raids, since there is almost always constant raid-wide damage that procs POM. In Mythic+ it’s a different story. Damage often comes in big bursts, rather than constant rot, meaning a lot of the time the POM stacks you’re rolling just drop off and go to complete waste.

I feel like a good solution would be to make a talent that makes Prayer of Healing consume a stack of POM and refresh its duration. This would make POH a more attractive button to press, and make POM a lot more useful in M+.

That, or just give POH the numbers buff it is desperate for. It does very little for a spell that costs so much mana. I understand that a lot of the spells value comes from its CDR on Holy Word: Sanctify, but Sanctify is just not strong or reliable enough to make up or POH’s weaknesses.

23

Oracle still feels clunky and I sincerely don’t think that the buffs to Renew are worth moving into Lasting Words or changing the talents around for. For M+, we lose the Halo but we can gain 40% damage to a couple of spells, which I thought might be good for M+.

PoM is useless in dungeons. And I think Lightwell is going to go to waste. I actually didn’t like the change that caused it to heal at targets below 75%. I would have preferred it to heal significantly more and only to targets very low on health. Like 3 charges for 5x as much and only goes to targets below 20% health. I think it just goes to waste when I’m crit healing for 5 million on targets and it’s often not a game of trying to push out as much group wide HPS as possible but get people fully healed ASAP before another hit or mechanic will hit them for 70% of their healthbar.

The premonitions drive me nuts. The rotating nature of it makes it really annoying to use. They could have done so much better. The only reason I would consider it is the buff to damage and the possibility of making use of 10% increased healing by hard casting Renew between packs.

I really really wish that there was one less point required in the top half of the tree in order to get to the bottom of the tree. I often find myself wanting just one more point at the bottom and one less point up top. Even in raid Wowhead suggests taking Holy Word: Chastise, and I don’t think that’s to increase the duration of Apotheosis but because there’s nowhere else to spend the point.

24

I’m considering rolling a priest for healing but would rather play Holy. Are these buffs enough to make them viable in M+?

25

I started healing on my priest this season (a few points shy of 2500 atm). I like the concept of Oracle, but it is hard to pull off right for a newbie. I wish there was capstone to choose either a 2-min cd version of premonition, where you could choose the buff, or the 1-min cycle with the added benefit of the buffed Solace.

Otherwise, I would like Lightwell a whole lot more of it had 2 charges.

Nonetheless, I greatly prefer holy over disc, and a buff is a buff.

26

Viable to play and succeed in M+ dungeons? Yes, Holy can do that. Pushing higher than 10s and being the best of the best with the meta? Probably not.

27

Well realistically, I don’t think Holy’s ever been lower than 3 key levels below a meta spec, and when it was it was only 3 keys behind in a specific dungeon or two, but mostly 1 to 2 key levels behind the meta. CURRENTLY Holy is 2 key levels behind on average, but one key level behind on a couple. Funnily enough it looks a lot like raid - where Paladin, Evoker and Hpriest are all very close in key levels, and the other 3 are about 2 key levels ahead.

Anyway, point is it’s perfectly viable to climb higher than 10s on unless your goal is quite literally to be best of the best. There are Hpriests who earn title on holy. But it won’t be viable enough to be in actual meta keys, no. And that has a lot to do with lacking an external, and hymn’s personal reduction not being good enough to make up for it. Holy’s problem is entirely that M+ is an infinitely scaling piece of content. The higher you climb, the more you need % reduction to survive hits, because the damage becomes enough to just delete a health bar. Once gear caps out, you’re just fully reliant on personals/externals.

The way around this, for Holy, is to rely on shielding trinkets. There happens to be a couple decent ones this tier, but the RNG sucks. (Looking at the top Hpriest they’re actually using the tank trinket from Gallywix, lol)

The upside is Holy has restitution now, so it’s actually kind of fine to die to said 1shots. I know a lot of people say 1min Guardian Spirit is necessary, but truth is that it’s not, and I don’t think any high level Hpriests are running it.

TL;DR: Basic answer, it depends on what you see as viable. If you want a spec that can do keys to title range, any spec works as long as you’re willing to do what it takes to get to title - which is hard on every spec, even meta.

If you want to push to world first keys and be the top rated healer? No. It won’t be.

And the problem here isn’t really HPS, so HPS changes aren’t going to magically fix it unless the buffs are so insane that they can push full health bars instantly. The only time Holy has ever been dungeon meta was in S4 shadowlands, and what did that was basically the above. Their HPS was so high you were full healing people instantly, and they could abuse the double leggo system to have a DPS spell on a 1 minute that was near impossible to die during and also put out dps-levels of damage. I really don’t see them bringing holy to a spot where they’re THAT wildly overpowered again.

28

Blizzard needs to stop power-gating holy priest by doing things like choosing between “guardian angel” and “restitution”. Let the spec have both… like Restitution is already a 10min cd and even if it kinda breaks the spec (spoiler it wouldn’t) then just nerf the cd of Restitution and done.
Spec already lacks a lot of utility compared to any other healer. Their healing throughput is on par with everyone else (or even less).

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29

Hpriest raw HPS is probably going to be quite high but I don’t see it ever performing well in keys with Renew/PoH/PoM, despite the buffs coming to those abilities.

The dungeons this season don’t match Hpriest healing profile well at all. Maybe I’m just a horrid Hpriest? But I don’t know what buttons we are meant to press to get through Jumpstart/Turbo Charge/Fluttering Wings/Azerite Infusion/Kegs/etc in 14+ keys. In my experience, Apoth into PoH/Sanct spam doesn’t perform as well as what Hpal/MW/Druid have in similar situations.

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30

It does increase the duration of Apotheosis, pretty sure.

31

It increases apoth, spawns DI, and has a chance to reset pom if specced. I got used to pom into chastise combo now for the 1 in 4. Feels nice when it goes off.

32

I pretty much agree with this. I still wouldn’t take PoH right now. I’m mostly entertaining a Renew/PoM setup, and largely I think it puts our hots where the other good specs are. It’s not going to be enough of an HPS pump to ignore anyone still, but they can stabilize them enough to take another hit now a lot of the time.

Hpriest is still going to deal with having to hyper optimize cooldown usage - like holding cooldowns for second turbocharge and powering through the first, etc.

My thinking is more - if you’re OK with not being the absolute tippy top of keys but just want to push high, then Holy will work. If you’re trying to really push and really aim for top keys then Holy’s almost never the choice, the only time it was it had some wild numbers. They need some kind of better utility, even if they bump the numbers.

Though I will say I think HPal is also behind in this regard right now.

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33

Increases Apotheosis by 1 second. What’s the Global Cooldown though? Isn’t that a net loss to Apotheosis? True on the Divine Image though. I suppose that would technically add some healing while the Divine Image is up and empowered by the Chastise cast. Still seems like you’d get more healing just casting a single Flash Heal if you didn’t have any Holy Words up. I was convinced they put it there because there was nowhere else to put the point and, in the absence of anything that would increase healing output, that anything that contributed to DPS output would be the next best choice.

34

Sometimes there’s no damage and your CDs are full. Think of it more like a 1 second pause, not to mention in keys the added value of resetting Holy fires and your rolling stuns on small elites. Now to convince blizz to add holy Nova to give sanct reductions :joy: :smiling_imp:

35

It’s also to fish for SYP procs when you aren’t taking damage during Apotheosis after you have capped on both healing Holy Words.

36

Good luck running with Oracle tonight after the buffs. I’ll be checking your parses to see how it goes =P

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37

Testing a bit on target dummies and yeah oracle HPS seems pretty good now. It’s also pretty easy to maintain empowered renew on small groups, to the point where it’s outhealing my Sanctify on dummies by a decent chunk (granted, no overhealing so it’s pretty skewed in renew’s favor).

PoM and Divine Image’s casts feel a lot better now too. Lightwell is better for its renew effect than anything else now, which is kinda funny.

I won’t have time to try it in an actual key till tonight but I’ll see how it goes in a +10 or 11.

38

Oracle: Preventive Measures Prayer of Mending healing was not updated. If anyone has any contacts with Blizzard, let them know. It was supposed to be updated to 40%, but it’s still set to 25%. From the blizzard post: “Oracle: Preventive Measures now increases the healing of Prayer of Mending by 40% (was 25%).”

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39

Preemptive Care buff is also not working with Lasting words its still only giving 25% not the new 40%

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40

Yeah, I reported this in-game.

I THINK they actually did increase the initial hit to 40% (like the focused mending talent). Sometimes Blizz messes up and forgets tooltips, but the change does go through. So I went and tested the actual healing. On single cast I would often see an increase of ~35%. Which is still very wrong. But when I ran out of range and allowed full bounces on dummies, it was fairly close to 25%, but still slightly higher.

My best guess is that it’s the initial hit, but TBH I don’t really understand the inconsistency, and it’s definitely not a full 40 yet either way. The initial base 20% increase DOES seem to be in though.