Along with tier sets:
My takeaway is:
Disc Priest
We had infinite mana in 5 mans already, so this won’t hurt much there. Probably will suck for raid though.
Tier set at first glance looks VERY GOOD for both hero specs. At 2 set VW is probably better. The 4set oracle is kinda nuts though. Every prem being insight as well is something I kinda just wanted for the spec overall and it’s very, very good on Disc.
Holy Priest
These mana changes feel like a net 0 change. Honestly weird that this was even done. Holy does need a better mana economy outside raid, for sure. This maybe helps a slight bit, but loss of SoL full refund kinda sucks. At least we’re moving in a direction where base spells are better cost - and we’re not tied to apoth for both our CD AND our mana efficiency. Tier set for Oracle will also affect this and make the mana economy better - but I’m always wary of tier sets specifically solving problems.
Tier sets once again are very good. Oracle tier sounds strictly better though. Maybe I’m wrong? But a free heal cast on every PoM is good in all content. Insight on all prems is more PoMs and PoM is already hyper efficient. Granted we don’t have the crazy Apoth from tier set so Answered Prayers procs will be weaker, but we still get way more procs of it in raid.
In Dungeon, PoM becomes absolute 100% prio on Oracle. But we’re going to have the scenario be that everyone has max stacks of PoM at all times in dungeon and you inevitably waste a bunch of stacks. Not the worst problem to have for sure, but still feels awkward.
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I am guessing Disc will be nerfed. Other healers are already throwing fits about our shielding capabilities, and this is the equivalent of Rapture every 45 seconds. I was honestly expecting more nerfs, especially to our shields/DR; but a hit to our mana was not in my cards. Seems manageable thus far.
In holy I’m a bit worried for mana in raids, my group usually takes a bit of time to kill some bosses and I can see the mana as a huge net loss. Not even sure how sol will work for oracle (I mean may not be worth it to press anymore unless on the run… more PoH)… that being said. I think I can pop out 11-12 Poms per minute now. The heal associated to it seems insane but there is no chance I’ll be a holding a single pom cast to wait to use it for heal (if it’s there it’s there) and I think this will be bait for many players. The extra poms per minute should account for the reduced flash heals, so net serenity should be close to the same maybe slightly higher (for me) so that brings me to an extra 2-3 poh per minute. Should result in an extra sanct per 2 minutes. So 2-3 extra poh and probably the cost of 2 extra flash heals per minute, and 50% mana cost of 2 serenity/sanct per minute. Thats a lot of mana. 5% reduction to all mana will not make up for that. I might have to do the math in spreadsheet.
I do think you probably won’t have to worry much if you’re playing Oracle unless this Tier set gets changed/nerfed. Free heal casts off PoM, PoM already being insanely efficient in raid, and 2 more casts of PoM every insight as well as the epiphany change meaning we don’t lose efficiency on PoM.
PoM having a heal on it doesn’t mean you hold it, no, but it makes it a decent tool to use on injured targets, so you’ll prio that more now than just putting it on a tank or whatever.
We’re in extremely good shape in raid as Oracle. The Archon changes are a bit more awkward on mana, but still should be pretty similar to where we are now. The issue I see with Archon tier is just that extending how many halos you do doesn’t matter if the fight doesn’t have super prolonged damage windows. You could end up extending halo into low damage phases and it’s just not much healing at that point.
This part seems kinda broken imo. IF they dont outright nerf us my guess is they will nerf the 4 set. Either way I like it.
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Thx for your thoughts, definitely some merit to it!
The additional halos are additional sol procs for archon, 2 additional sol would be pretty good for archon, so I get why some kind of mana adjustment needed to be made. let’s hope it’s still viable. Tho wouldn’t be surprised if we got another 5% mana reduction on some of our spells.
Hello everyone, sorry I haven’t been around. I ended up taking a break at the 11.1 launch and probably won’t be back until next expansion if anything.
The mana adjustments were needed because Holy has been running incredibly hot on mana for several expansions now. Flash Heal and PoH both had their mana costs increased from BFA → Shadowlands.
5% doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you factor in 100s of spell casts that is easily like having 10-20% extra mana. Also, glad to see Holy Priest running #1 on the healing charts.
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Caithyra!!! Ngl I was a bit worried about you. Welcome back <3. Oracle is crazy fun.
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Well, you accurately predicted the nerf to Apotheosis, Capslock, balanced against more modest base line mana changes.
On paper it might almost seem a bit of a wash, but then throw on the SoL nerf and it starts to look like a real mana constraint on holy.
I guess Enlightenment, Shadowfiend, Symbol and good ol’ fashioned mana pots go way up in value… I’m still not convinced this won’t make Apotheosis feel less like an empowering CD and a bit more like a wasteful burn.
I don’t get these changes, they haven’t really balanced consistently around mana for healers for ages so these adjustments are just odd.
In any event, after like 5 rounds of hotfixes post 11.1 hpriest has been dragged out of languishing since DF, so some minor tweaks on mana management are more fair than we might have expected.
Yeah that change made the most sense to me when it came to playing other healers vs holy.
I basically play priest at the start of every tier and then after 3k I start moving around and playing other classes, and sometimes pick one to push with.
Holy’s always had mana problems, but the weird thing about The War Within is that specifically OTHER classes all got mana problems pretty much erased - in M+ especially. Holy is the only healing spec that’s actually managing a mana bar there, and it’s the thing that makes me not want to play it much. I overall have enjoyed playing the spec since the start of this tier, but man every time I play Holy specifically, I basically have to sit and drink all the time, the higher you climb the more you’ll end up using pots, etc.
I don’t think we LOST mana, to be clear. With these changes we almost certainly come out ahead in both M+ and Raid. The issue is the Apoth/SoL changes does mean that instead of a major gain, we’re getting like half of one.
Ok ran some REAL quick numbers in my Gally kill (oracle) . In 10 min fight I would lose 3 million mana from apoth and sol changes and gain 1 million from mana reduction. Net loss of 2million mana per 10 mins or 200k mana per minute. This is pretty massive.
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Yeah, that’s about what I’d expect from these changes - no way the 5% baseline changes makes up for the 50% holy word mana loss on Apoth and the 50% on SoL, which of course hits harder because Flash Heal is expensive.
(I hope they didn’t make that SoL change solely to try to force Heal into some kind of relevance, BTW.)
It’s about 1m mana, and that SEEMS correct if all you’re correlating is mana cost of every spell cast in a 10 min fight.
However, it doesn’t take into account the fact you’ll be casting less Holy Words, you aren’t FORCED into Answered Prayers, and you’re casting more PoMs (and PoM comes with an attached heal).
My own numbers using the longest gally I had on current patch where I wasn’t doing a wacky build:
- 66 cast PoM - 3,300,000 mana
- 37 cast Renew - 1,665,000 mana
- 35 cast Serenity (16 in apoth) - 2,187,500 RAW
- 1,000,000 Apoth Savings
- 1,187,500 Total
- 33 cast Sanctify (15 in apoth) - 2,887,500 RAW
- 1,312,500 Apoth Savings
- 1,575,000 Total
- 68 flash heal (19 SoL) - 6,120,000 RAW
- 1,710,000 Savings
- 4,410,000 Total.
- 24 cast PoH - 3,000,000 Raw (this is probably lower because prayer circle)
Total 15,137,500 Mana
Post Change
- Pom - 3,135,000
- Renew - 1,581,750
- Serenity - 475,000 + 1,128,125 = 1,628,125
- Sanc - 1,496,250 + 623,437 = 2,119,937
- FHeal - 5,814,000 RAW
- 684,000 Savings
- 5,130,000 Total
- PoH - 2,850,000.
Total cost: 16,444,812
So pretty consistent, yeah. But if I were to add 66 heal casts to match my PoMs that’s 3,960,000 mana to scenario 1. If I were to also take out a few Holy Word or Fheal casts and put PoM in there (because of the tier set’s free Insight procs), post buff takes the lead handily.
Granted that’s not perfect either because we’ve got Insurance healing which is basically free, and 66 free heal casts would pretty much come close to Insurance’s bonus (more PoMs puts the new tier ahead though).
Which is all to say, I expect us to come pretty close to even, which still feels like a problem, to me.
I’d rather they revert Surge of Light. Or maybe bump it to 75%?
ALSO if we’re not talking raid, and talking Dungeon instead, there’s better mana gains there because you probably aren’t sitting in Apoth every pull ATM.
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The reason why Holy struggles with mana in M+ has to do with an over reliance on Flash Heal and its high mana cost since Shadowlands. If you play Oracle you also do not have the passive AOE group-healing that Archon gets nor the flood of free Flash Heals since you have to hard cast more Flash Heals to fill in the difference.
It was pretty obvious they were going to nerf Apotheosis though because you can sit in it for 30s+. It’s better to reduce the mana costs across the board.
Also, Disc has infinite mana mainly due to having an endless supply of Shadowfiends and Mind Benders. The last time Holy had something like that was with Fae Guardians in Shadowlands.
Oh momma.
Oracle is on top for keeping everyone safe, but on crest farm keys voidweaver is sounding pretty rad.
I’m so tired of this design push into Halo and Mending. I wish set bonuses did something to buff lightweaving and prayer. To me those are the spells that make up holy priest’s core kit. Not pom and renew. It is like the people that are making these sets are not long time holy priest players.
Quality of life would be boosting those parts of our kit and created some action economy like damage while healing or boost other’s dps while healing. Give me a set bonus that gives PI to a healed target for the duration of our mastery hot or something.
TBH PoM has been super core to priest healing since Wrath.
I’ll grant that Halo is strange largely because the spell wasn’t super usable in most content for a very long time and was just in general unpopular, but it’s really only the hero spec pushing it.
But I super disagree with lightweaver. I kinda just want that talent gone entirely and a different way to make heal more castable. A big reason why holy priest has such bad action economy is because of how heal/fheal roll into holy words. You want to be casting the weaker spells to get the stronger spells. In some ways that feels good, like you’re turning smaller cogs to get the bigger cog wheel to turn. But in other ways we’re kinda stuck doing super low healing half the time. We’re like a weird reverse Paladin, where instead of spamming instant cast damage globals to generate HP for WoGs, we’re stuck full casting heal/fheal on near full health targets to generate Serenity when we need it (which, IMO, is why miracle worker feels like SUCH a must-take talent, too because without it our class feels totally incomplete).
PoH changes were all good to make that spell feel pretty fun to play around and feel more impactful. I want something more akin to that for flash heal or heal. I really don’t want to be spamming alternating fheal/heal on people. It wasn’t fun in SLands either when it was just spamming heal. Kinda glad that our PoMs are actually going to have healing impact on first target now.