DF Holy Priest: The Case for Haste

Where I failed in Shadowlands to make a haste/mastery based Holy Priest, DF seems to be ramping up this possibility even more. We have an entire list of abilities that now scale very well with haste:

  • Renew: scales tick rate
  • Circle of Healing: Scales cooldown which synergizes with Prayer Circle and Orison. Having enough haste can mean permanent Prayer Circle uptime. At 56% haste with PI, you will have permanent Prayer Circle uptime.
  • Prayer of Mending: Scales cooldown which synergizes with all Mending talents.
  • Power Word Shield: Reduces cooldown.

The addition of Reflective Shield talent in class tree makes Power Word: Shield very potent and likely enables usage as sort of a safety net for single target healing . This talent allows this ability to have a total of 322% effective spellpower healing/shields (and this is before counting mastery on the 42% spellpower from the talent) if the target is damaged at all, and haste can reduce it’s cooldown to a mere 6 seconds at 25% haste. It also functions as an effective GCD due to damage output from the shield reflect.

To put this into perspective, Holy Word: Serenity is a 700% spellpower heal.

Still, there’s likely to be some tuning passes, but I’m looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

You’re going to be bribing druids for innervates, right?

Installing beta now - I want to see how our mana holds up just with Twins and average haste to worry about in 10.0 and I already feel like I’ll have to re-learn how to DPS on the spec too with all these new options to balance against.

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I’ve sat and tested healing on the dummies in Boralus. You have roughly the same amount of healing capacity per mana bar between Lightweaver and AoE Raid healing Specs. The difference is where your healing is focused. AoE raid healing can probably eke out more with a flex point into Enlightenment.

This is the raid spec I was testing. You have 1 point for Divine Word/Divine Image and 1 flex. Divine Image, despite the RNG I absolutely detest, seems to provide similar throughput to Divine Word, but that’s only if you’re dealing with always damaged people like healing dummies in Boralus.

There’s also quite a lot of mana tools either from other classes, the addition of the potion with innervate effect, Shadowfiend, Symbol of Hope, etc.

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I’m guessing Divine Image, like Lightwell, is a bit of fun nostalgia, reminding people of T’uure in Legion. The random proc and the fact it just mimics you is a recipe for overhealing if it was powerful enough to be a competitive talent.

Divine Word is more interesting, if less flexible deciding whether you want AoE healing, direct healing or DPS mode for the next 15 seconds, although that starts reminding me of “stance dancing” from FF14 a bit.

A thing to note about Revitalizing Prayers is it scales off of Rapid Recovery (+35% increased healing) without any loss of duration because it still heals over the same 6s.

Orison looks honestly almost like a mandatory pick for any kind of raid build imho. It makes CoH a 6 target heal off of a 9s base cd. That’s like increasing the overall healing of CoH by 50%… very powerful.

Holy baseline gets t +10% haste from Unwavering Will on Flash Heal, Heal, Smite, and PoH while above 75% hp (which is going to be most of the time). Just getting around 10% haste pushes us to 20% which is pretty decent.

I’m still thinking Holy is going to be strongly leaning into the same Crit/Mastery stat weights though. Revitalziing Prayers doesn’t scale off of haste from my testing and PoH still does most of its healing through Echo of Light. So having more crit chance just means your Revitalizing Prayers can heal for a lot more…

Lightweaver build also gets a baseline +15% crit chance. However, the mana costs are still the same as in Shadowlands for Flash Heal/Heal.

I probably can be wrong though. A super stacked haste build that takes benefit of PoM and CoH reset times could be a powerful raid heal build though.

Holy’s going to be in a bit of an experimentation phase at the start of the expansion as we live test builds though. I can’t definitely tell you other than napkin math if the PoH build is going to beat out the Lightweaver build for raid healing without doing the raids.

That’s not to say Holy can’t do both builds though at the same time. You can take Lightweaver and the PoH talents. Literally best of both worlds.

Miracle Worker and Divine Word combo for a PoH build looks str0ng though.

For M+ I’m thinking Crit/Versatility is going to be the play though. We get a baseline 10% haste bonus on our main spells and Empyreal Blaze is 3 instant cast Holy Fires every 30s. I think we only really need around 10-15% haste and the rest can be dumped into Crit.

It does scale off haste. You can mouse over the buff and test with PI if you don’t have haste gear crafted up. My ticks go from 2.4 without to 1.9 with PI from Revitalizing Prayers.

That said, it’s a giant cloud of speculation which might be better. If it’s only a 5% loss compared to crit/mastery, I would still stick with haste/mastery and try to make up the difference with more salv from more holy words from more apotheosis from the mending talents.

All that said, I can say I absolutely detest Lightweaver. It feels way too restrictive compared to Flash Concentration, and this is from someone who’s spent the last several weeks on live using Harmonious to practice for the expansion before they announced this talent.

I meant more with adding an extra tick on. You’ll always get the same 2.5 ticks regardless.

It actually does add an extra tick as well. I go from 3 full ticks and a partial without PI to 4 full ticks and a partial with PI. You can also test this by standing away from any other viable prayer of healing target and parsing the buff and combat log on yourself.

They must have just updated that. I tested now on the beta and it looks like haste makes it scale now. I’m not sure what the threshold is for how many ticks, but scaling wise it’s pretty nutty when it can proc on 5 people.

It also depends on how much healing Revitalizing Prayers does overall in a raid environment. I don’t think Prayerful Litany is even worth taking though. It’s only like an extra +6% increased healing to Prayer of Healing.

I have Prayerful Litany as a keepsake as I try to make this build work for M+. It brings Prayer of Healing closer to single target effectiveness of Flash Heal, but it’s still going to rely on PW: Shield and From Darkness Comes Light boosted Flash Heals to maintain a healthy tank.

I mean, everyone who crunches numbers comes to the conclusion that HPS-wise Divine Image is great. Personally I think it’s why Blizz refuses to buff it or give it any kind of consistency despite bringing it back 4 times now.

The problem is it’s wildly random whether you’ll get use out of it or not because boss damage patterns are very set in stone. It procs in a high damage phase and you go nuts. Anything else and it sucks.

The only way I see it really ‘working’ in a raid sense is to sit on stacks of miracle worker for damage phases. And that seems like… not a great idea if you’re trying to get HPS. Divine Word seems like the much better option.

It’s great if it can be applied. It’s OP when RNG is in your favor and you have multiple images at the same time. But those are much rarer than when it can be consistently applied when it’s actually needed if it continues being RNG based.

Miracle Worker is primarily present to make use of Answered Prayers. It’d go to waste if during the proc, you’re suddenly capped on Holy Words and waste the rest of the duration. So, a 2 Holy Word cap feels almost mandatory so you can continue to pump Holy Word cooldown abilities without worrying about overcapping.

I might even flex into Chastise just to have another Holy Word if I do raid with Divine Image.