For those saying Holy is "fine" in M+

Classes Priest
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQfMyafHONE&ab_channel=yumytv

Growl, in case you didn’t know, is one of the top M+ Healers in the world, frequently getting World First high keystone completions. He knows his stuff.

It’s also important to note that the his video is not talking from a “High end only” point of view. It is his views on Healer ranking in the entire Spectrum of M+, that’s 2-15+. Anyone trying to argue this is a 0.001% problem is grossly misrepresenting the problem.

Bullet point summary of his Video
  • Holy Priest is the worst M+ Healer by a very large margin, and inferior to Disc in almost every way. Which feels wrongs for a class with 2 healing specs.
  • It has some okay Single Target options, but everything else feels far too weak.
  • Priest Covenant abilities are terribly underpowered for Holy, with Mind Games in particular being almost completely useless.
  • Mind Blast and Mind Sear removal was uncalled for.
  • Holy’s Legendaries all feel weak.
  • an exact quote “Your most important skill in difficult progression raiding or high Mythic+ as a Holy Priest is how well you can play another spec.”

There have been countless posts about the state if Holy Priest going in to Shadowlands, with many making claims that they are “in a good spot” or “feel really strong.” Well, It’s time for a small reality check. Holy is not fine, it needs serious consideration by the Priest Design Team.

The best part of this situation is that there is very little they can do to make Holy any worse (besides remove Mind Blast…again). So almost any change will be for the better.

So if you have access to the BETA feedback forum, do us a solid and keep the conversation going.

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I think things are improved somewhat in Fortified runs with the instant-cast PoM change, and Circle of Healing baseline. Additionally, several affixes are likely trivialized for us–such as Grievous.

That said, high Tyrannical Keys are a struggle. And I’m concerned they’ll still be a struggle. There’re still several weeks left… maybe in the next few weeks they’ll actually stop with the nerfs (the same week we got Apotheosis resetting Holy Word CDs, we lost Mind Blast) and start buffing our ability between Holy Words… and give us an answer for Tyrannical.

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It’s also going to be worse at raiding healing compared to disc. For a class with 2 healing specs you’d think they would both be good, instead of 1 being op and the other being a literal dumpster.

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Most likely, but it’s not guaranteed. Disc will fall behind Holy if the encounter has all the following design aspects:

  • A Spread out fight where you can’t get much value from Barrier
  • Low burst damage and High consistent ticking damage
  • High amounts of consistent tank damage that happens every minute (Only time Guardian Spirit is good)
  • A mechanic that can be Death Soaked to cheese (One of the ones that immunities don’t count for soaking) as our Cloak Legendary could fill that role.

But that’s alot to ask for in a single encounter.

Honestly, they need to give Holy a Niche, makes Echo of light apply a Haste Buff while it’s active on a player, or a damage buff, or a Damage reduction Buff. Give Holy somethibg that it does that other classes don’t. Because right now, the only Holy has over any other Healer is 2 Throughput Raid CDs, but that doesn’t mean much when Shaman exists. and When Raid-wide Burst can be done every 90 seconds.

They need to buff Holy without making it’s 30 man Raid Healing stronger, which is why I think they are so hesitant to do anything positive with our spec.

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Unless holy gets some serious fixes, I’ll be rolling disc in SL, which is a bummer because I really love holy.

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This is so sad :frowning:

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Holy gets Mind Soothe as well so I’m not sure why they mentioned that just Disc gets it. I’ve been playing Disc as well to learn it and it feels worse to me than Holy with dealing with topping the group off.

Either way I plan on trying both specs come expansion in M+ and w/e one does the dungeon better I’ll just roll with it. Right now both are handling the M+ 15 content I am doing on retail.

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Have you played much Disc in M+ before? I ask cause the transition from Holy to Disc can be jarring at first. I remember when I first started focusing Disc in the beginning of Legion it felt extremely weak for the first bit and then once I got accustomed it felt far stronger than Holy. To the point where Holy, in similar gear felt 30 iLvls lower by comparison.

What tends to happen with Disc is that as gear levels increase it gets nerfed every patch to compensate for its better scaling. The trend has been that it is extremely strong patch X.0, weaker patch X.1, and then struggles a lot in patch X.2+ since the nerfs are targeted at raid and they never compensate for lost power in M+.

You may still be in that transitionary phase where you haven’t adjusted to the more proactive style of healing? It also becomes a lot easier once you know damage patterns of the pulls so you aren’t stuck casting as many Shadowmends.

I was excited to start the Xpack as Holy, as we got new damage spells and Nightfae gives a small amount of DR, but I’m losing all my enthusiasm as the days go by.

They are slowly removing what little they gave us back and not compensating with anything else. We were worst M+ healer in Legion by a fair margin. Then the took away lot from is in BfA while giving almost nothing new (I still can’t believe how terrible our Azerite traits were all xpack) which made us fall even further behind. And put a nail in the coffin they are giving us back half of what other classes are getting, and still taking away from what little they are returning.

I still can’t stress this enough, Mind Sear is a CLASS ABILITY, why is Holy the only spec in the entire game that can’t use its own classes baseline abilities?

Why are they actively nerfing the objectively worst Healing spec in the game?

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Yeah. I started my transition shortly after hearing the bad news. The spec just feels like it doesn’t move bars. It’s gonna take a while.

I think the reason they actively nerf us is because Holy is supposed to be the beginner spec, they literally have a mastery that’s meant to help you out if you press a button and then afk during the pull. It’s sad

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Holy used to be the hardest healing spec in the game, even with its mastery. Disc was the noob friendly, shield spamming, 3 button overpowered spec. It’s sad how everything has changed for the worst. I do miss the old playstyle, but I know it’s not ever coming back.

Disc is quite fun though, it feels more complete now, there’s just a ton of buttons that will take getting used to, but juggling your cooldowns is quite fun, it’s a much better healing experience overall. Blizz just doesn’t know wtf to do with holy, I still can’t believe they gave it Salv, a raid healing cd that it never needed.

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You see, I think this justification makes no sense. Why would a spec that is meant to be for beginners be made actively worse than other specs?

A beginner spec is meant to be beginner friendly, but Holy’s mastery makes the playstyle unintuitive. You don’t want to Heal Players to full, or else you lose value on your mastery. So to be optimal you need to play the exact opposite of how a New player would want to play.

Secondly, Holy has less HPS than other Healers in M+, but our abilities increase healing received while other healers abilities reduce damage taken. So technically they should need less HPS to Heal the same content as us, since their party literally takes less damage, while we should have higher HPS since we increase the healing they receive, so why is it the opposite. The Classes that reduce incoming damage also do more raw healing. The design is backwards and Holy is suffering because of it.

Ummm, yeah it did, it desperately needed it. Holy has almost 0 Raid utility and Divine Hymn is considered the worst Raid CD in the game (Now that there is no Artifact weapon to make it decent), and Salvation was the only thing that kept Holy from being completely useless in Uldir.

The only Reason Holy was relevant in the end of Legion was because of Binding Heal was OP. Most of the fights were really long and Binding Heal made it so Holy almost never ran out of Mana, so when other Healers were running on steam Holy kept chugging along, so by the end of a fight Holy caught up and sometimes passed other Healers. It’s why they had a raid spot despite literally no Raid utility,

Entering BfA they gutted Binding Heal to the point where it is now an HPS loss to pick that talent, that mixed with the fact that the Holy Artifact Weapon made up for about half its healing meant that in BfA Holy was losing the most out of every Healer.

Consider this, even with Salvation, Holy is only Middle of the Pack in HPS…without it we would be 20% lower than the next worst, while still having absolutely no raid utility. Salvation is the only Good thing to come to Holy in years.

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Disc and Holy are complete polar opposites of each other in terms of gameplay in M+. I would say both have a fairly high skillcap in order to be effective at them. You really can’t transition from one to the other without some period of getting used to them. I did a few hours of random dungeons just to get used to Disc before trying it out in M+.

Disc in particular takes a bit of extra work with dealing with grievous when you’re out of combat because your absorbs don’t help.

What changed is when they completely overhauled healing. You used to be able to heal somebody for 25-50% their HP in one heal. Now most heals only do about 10% of somebody’s health with a faster GCD/cast time so it involves much more of a fast twitch-gameplay. Something like Holy requires a lot of fast button inputs and knowing which heal on reflex to throw at somebody plus managing what holy words are on CD. Disc involves juggling a lot of switching between heals and DPS and keeping attonement up.

Then you have other healing classes like Resto Druids which involve casting HoTs that last 12-15s each. It’s less manual button pressing unless you need to spot heal people.

When I compare this to like back in the day. I could probably on Holy just top a 5 man dungeon off with 2-3 key presses. Now you have to mash your keyboard over-and-over cause your heals are so small.

It’s their way of creating an artificial difficulty scale with healing in general.

That’s just M+… raid healing is completely different. It’s actually easier and less stressful.

It actually is needed because most raid bosses are on a scripted damage cycle where every 20-30s the raid gets hit. So between Divine Hymn and Salvation that’s two you can use. Most heal specs only have one including Disc.

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Though Disc’s are half the CD so you get just as many if not more effective raid CDs as Holy. And you could technically get even more since you can Shield spam/double Radiance every 40 seconds, it’s just mana intensive.

Salvation just has the same Problem Revival does where it’s a massive burst heal and so in RF/Normal/Heroic Raids where there is normally not enough damage going out it’s really good at sniping heals, so it seems stronger than it really is.

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Would you like some form of chakra system back, I quite enjoyed that and for raids you would run the more aoe centric, Serenity buffs your single target for Mythic plus with the same affect on renew it once had. and chastise for more dps which may buff your healing cd reduciton. Without the 30 second change over it once had

Edit: Mained holy in WoD when chakras were still around and enjoyed it

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No it didn’t. Holy dominated the healing charts throughout Legion, without Salvation. Salvation was a waste of developer time that could have been used to balance the spec and make it more valuable in m+ / pvp. Holy already had good raid throughput, it needed utility, mobility, and a talent overhaul. Salvation was redundant.

I would rather have our spells just be stronger instead of being reliant on big cooldowns that aren’t even usable in m+. Salv is so strong that the other options aren’t competing.

Same. It was a fun playstyle. Very fast paced with a lot of cool set bonuses / talents that worked well with our abilities. All it needed was a little more throughput and a bit more utility and I think it would have been perfect. :cry:

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Man I miss binding heal. With the T21 bonus it was sooo nasty, you’d just be weaving and weaving. Fights would go on for hours and you’d still be weaving PoH and BH. It was great.

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The Disc bubble is only truly effective in fights where the raid can stack up and that’s only a few of them in NZ whereas raid wide heals are used on basically every single fight. The Shammy totem works on the same principle.

That’s just how they have raid healing setup in general. They literally can’t make our heals do bigger #s without going back to the meta of where they had to give classes way more burst just to kill a healer. The encounters are designed around having to use raid wide cooldowns because if the entire raid takes 50% HP damage in one blow our current non-raid heals really wouldn’t be up to the task of topping people off. It’s an even more miserable experience when you’re only 2 man healing these raids when you have to work on keeping the tank and raid up simultaneously.

Pre-patch Apotheosis with Prayer Circle might be competitive to Salvation, but I’ll need to test it in a live environment. You can basically cast Sanctuary, CoH, trigger Apotheosis, double/third Prayer of Healing into another Sanctuary. It all comes down to how the CoH timer lines up, but if sparkles a line you can probably dump 3-4 Sanctuary’s in a row.

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Yeah, and it lost it’s Artifact Weapon in BfA, which gave all the Prayer of Mending, Divine Hymn, and Prayer of Healing Synergies. As well as Light of Tu’ure and it’s 45% Healing Increase, Talents shifted so we could no longer take Light of the N’aaru, so longer Holy Word CDs, we lost t21 so say goodby to the 30-60% buffs on Prayer of Healing and Binding Heal. Oh, benediction was nerfed by A LOT, Binding Heal became Unusable as well, that one sucked a lot :frowning_face:.

We lost almost all of our Throughput, though Holy was doing well in Legion, coming into BfA it was looking to be the worst Healer by far, Salvation Shored up that loss of HPS. Should they have just designed the class better instead of throwing in Salvation and calling it good? Yeah, of course they should have, we are suffering from that negligence going in to Shadowlands.

But to say it was not needed is disingenuous. It wasn’t the best solution, but we needed something and that filled the gap. Considering that even with Salvation we were being far outhealed by Disc kind of proves my point that it was a needed buff.

Once again, I agree that it is not the best solution, but it’s a fun and strong CD and it came at a time when Holy was the in desperate need of anything.

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Healers in general were pretty neutered in BfA because we basically have nothing coming from our azerite armor and necklace except for procs of extra haste, mastery, etc. They went with the mindset of trying to balance classes around their base abilities instead of what tier set, items, etc. they’ll be using. The consequence is that people went insane stacking secondary stats and many of these corruptions are OP.

Ion did state we were supposed to be getting tier sets next expansion though so we’ll see.

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This isn’t completely true, While most Healer’s Azerite Traits were pretty useless outside of some QoL, Paladin had some fairly decent ones in 8.0, though they were Ret Traits that made wings a lot better, and Glimmer came in 8.1 and broke the game.

And, sorry for sounding like a Broken record, Resto Druids azerite Traits were amazing for M+ from the get go. They had 2 that gave an Extra Hot, one from regrowth, one from Swiftmend. It basically meant that you got 2 free applications of your mastery on the tank. I know I keep repeating myself, but Resto Druid has been completely Broken in M+ the entire expansion.

Every new feature added in BfA was mediocre for every Healer but for some reason Druids versions was amazing. Though they did suffer a bit in raids most of BfA.