So it’s been 1 week… ish. I will throw all my thoughts out unorganized . And fyi Running M0 and Raid (8/8 N 3/8H with competitive casual guild)
M0 oracle feels really fun, it feels like a new holy playstyle. I do find I save my premonitions too much and then not have it when I need it, need more time to play this on keys to know what kind of improvements I get.
the instant heal instead of 50% health activated life (waste no time?) was the biggest surprise pick for me. Feels really good to have that instant (almost never used it for a prayer)
Archon feels viable for M0 if you want to sit back and be traditional, less worry for dps as halo and holy fires alone is probably enough to do acceptable dps.
raid archon feels incredible with 20 or more in raid (i need to try oracle with smaller raid group). The instant flash heals are nothing to scoff at, that’s 4 free casts a minute and I haven’t had mana problems yet, as I have been casting more heals/dps ratio than past few raids.
following Caithyras advice to have flash heal procs for apotheosis is harder to hardwire in mind then thought, but it feels great if you can get 2 or more proc casts in an apotheosis.
final thought, haven’t checked out this in math but I was pondering it… so I noticed the top healers (not that it means too much at this stage) took lightweaver. This is a very interesting thought. I am using lightwell and it did 4-5% of my healing. This is quite good and I value its healing typically more than a bit more base hps, as you typically cast lightwell on a non heal req time and it thruputs on low health raid members often at critical times while you’re simultaneously casting other spells.
With the 4 piece I’m not sure if we get double chance for surge of light procs or if it contributes to refreshing holy words twice (did anyone test this in beta?), but this leads me to 2 trains of thought, if we get a lot of synergy with this, do we go all in on lightweaver and fully drop prayer and circle, or could we go all in on prayer of healing with the 4pc bonus and ignore lightweaver? Going 1 way or another gives us more available pts in the tree.
To answer this: there’s no set-and-forget meta build for Holy. Also, always be skeptical of top healing parses because 9 out of 10 times it’s either they’re bringing less healers then other guilds, healers died during the fight, and/or the other healers are underperforming.
In regards to talents: there’s no meta build for Holy. You can build and play however you like.
In raid: all the end tree talents like Lightweaver, Lightwell, Divine Word, and Divine Image are only realistically going to be 5-6% of your overall healing. Divine Image is just the only talent that is a passive increase while the others are reactive. Even with these in mind: Halo, CoH, and PoM are going to be 60%+ of your overall healing.
I personally run Lightwell for raid and since the Heroic healing checks are rough early on: all the charges get consumed almost as fast as I place it down. It has the additional benefit of the Renew ticks contributing to Healing Chorus and it can proc Twist of Fate.
The 4-piece isn’t going to be a major contributor to your raid hps since your direct casted heals do less healing than a single cast of PoM/CoH. It might be a 2-3% hps increase: if that.
It’s different for M+: the 4-piece is going to be a +10-15% single target hps buff. Flash Heal and Heal will be stronger on-top of needing to cast less overall spells in a dungeon.
Lightweaver is definitely tuned higher than the rest. I haven’t been able to get super far into heroic (my guild is very casual because I don’t want to push raiding nowadays), but I’ve run Oracle and parsed 98 in a 9 minute fight with 22 players (4 healers) and heal was my top heal.
A lightweaver heal cast is averaging a little more than half a CoH cast with healing chorus stacked, not counting ToL or Binding heal. ATM, I think it makes more sense to cut CoH out of the build and play spot healer. ESPECIALLY once tier is a thing.
Last time I played around with it on the beta the replicated Flash Heal didn’t trigger any talents and it was also consuming your mana. They fixed the mana issue before the expansion launched.
My hps was increased A LOT since I switched to lightweaver. I actually started feeling my heal. CoH, PoH and well just didn’t even feel like they did any healing. Sanctify - same. I use those buttons, loose lots of mana, I don’t see even a slight increase on health bars. Then I switched to lightweaver, every cast of heal FEELS, my hps was increased by approximately 50%, I started having way more mana, I don’t drop people because serenity on cooldown anymore, heal is too healing, this button is very mana-effective, it synergies with tier set, with binding heal and trail of light very well.
I feel like wotlk pal in terms of spot-healing but with tons of other tools for aoe-healing.
I dug around and found about a dozen logs of Holy Priests running Lightweaver. They were all Archon so they’re going to parse with Halo.
The average cast of Heal was 870k vs Flash Heal 757k (this is inflated because of the Surge of Light bonus). CoH and PoM are about 50% more than Heal per cast.
Heal (w/ Binding Heals and Trail of Light) was about 14-15% of their overall making it their #2 heal after Halo.
The TLDR is that Lightweaver is definitely hands down the strongest end-tree talent for Holy once you get your 4-piece. It contributes double what Lightwell does and Lightwell has situations where if the raids not <50% hp its not doing anything.
Honestly if lightwell is not doing anything I’m going DW chastise HF build. Let’s not overlook the fact that lightwell is a single cast on downtime and the hps for heal are multiple/ spammed casts. Even if the hps of the individual talent is higher doesn’t necessary mean it’s going to provide the most hps… but it could… and again our hps with targets at low health could be higher with lightwell build (main goal is to have ppl not die)
Im going to push out some excel numbers this week ( Should have done this already ). Let you know if I find any outliers.
The benefit with Lightwell at least is that it reacts faster than a human. If you drop it on the ground just as the groups about to get shmacked it’ll spam heals on the lowest hp targets potentially preventing them from dying.
Also worth noting, Lightweaver still has the thing (I’d say bug if it hadn’t been reported like 20 times with no answer?) that if you spell queue a second heal it also benefits from weaver.
I basically played Oracle like I would have played back in Shadowlands:
Lightweaver without taking top-left side talents is probably the way to go. In beta, Heal got buffed, then Lightweaver got buffed, so both of them multiply each other.
CoH might beat Heal on paper, but that is also if you don’t count Trail of Light into the equation.
My 3rd priest was also progging Nexus-Princess, previous night was barely touching 1m hps on the “standard” Lightwell build, the next night was pulling 1.2-1.3m hps as Lightweaver.
Lightweaver is a bit annoying because it locks you into stationary-casting 90% of your spells, but if you can min-max movement and understand when you can stop to cast it’s probably the highest hps hpriest build currently.
Edit: forgot to mention, Lightweaver also helps you reset Salvation a lot faster. Normally you would oom if you tried to spam Flash Heal to reset Serenity to reset Salvation, but because you are replacing roughly half your Flash Heal casts with the cheaper Heal casts, you actually cast a lot more Serenity spells and makes up for the loss of DF S3 4pc.
That log above reset Salvation in just under 5 minutes without 2pc, for the record.
I think Oracle may be able to pull off 3-4 min Salvs, too, if playing optimally. I got a lot of wasted answered prayers procs with the extra PoMs and didn’t cast as much Serenity as I should have in my log, but still reset it at about 4.5 mins (and delayed my salv cast for bellows). And its salvs are stronger because of the oracle PoM bonus.
I actually think Oracle might be very close to Archon played super well in a prog fight, but Archon is just way, way easier.
We just killed Heroic Queen tonight and Heal did 8% of my overall (3rd highest). I think I’m going to be running this going forward.
On Archon, the amount of Surge of Light procs you get is intense at times. In high mobility situations I have more Lightweaver charges then I know what to do with it. I cast Heal then I get 2 SoL procs and yeah. I’m constantly maxed out at 2 charges, and don’t get much time to cast them. Also, having to cast Heal interrupts my CoH/PoM rotation a bit.
You’ve gone over to Lightweaver after all? Not sure how you managed to avoid it as long as you did, were it not for the buffs they gave holy’s single target heals I’m not sure what it would even bring to the table.
. And fyi Running M0 and Raid (8/8 N 3/8H with competitive casual guild)