Healing Priests have lost their identity, like HPal from DF

Classes Priest
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This is not a post asking for buffs but a post looking for return to form of Holy and Disc Priest, which like Paladin in Dragonflight, have lost their identity with cluttered talents and ideas. For now I will ignore the general talent tree and priest utility, we all know that it’s a joke.

While for Holy I have a clear goal in mind, for Discipline I am largely spitballing.

Holy

Largely I think this spec needs the Holy Paladin treatment. Right now it has a lot of buttons that are all meant to fill similar roles. This keeps the potency of any one of them low and complexity high.

  • Holy Words: Reduce the benefits of Serendipity, or increase the cooldown of Holy Word spells, or reduce the talent interactions that buff holy words and move that power into them. Right now a Serenity unless you are specced into just about every Holy Word talent does less healing than just pressing Heal with a Lightweaver proc. We need to move power out of the 90 ways to buff Holy Words and just move that power into the Holy Words, making them feel impactful again. While I do think they flat out need a numbers buff of like 15-20% I also think it might be beneficial to look at how they’re used different in 5 and 20 man environments. Perhaps I should be able to choose between two talents behind Sanctify, one which buffs the 5 man potency so I can quickly top my Mythic+ teams, and one which increases the target count for higher throughput in Raids.

  • Prayer of Healing: This is sort of a “now” problem. I recognize it hasn’t always been this way but it’s surfaced pretty frequently throughout HPriest history. PoH has been tuned so low that frequently Heal and Flash Heal just do more healing than it. I have no idea why this is the case other than Devs just forget it exists? This leads to the button not being pressed in Raid or in M+ at the moment. I feel like I shouldn’t have to say why “Our AoE heal is not our AoE heal” is a problem. I think a buffed Prayer of Healing along with Prayerful Litany would go a long way in M+ in dealing with some annoying damage patterns that have “Big group wide damage + 1 player getting destroyed by a DoT” (Ahem, Dawnbreaker)… Also, why the Heck is PoH still not a smart heal?

  • PoM and Circle of Healing: Right now these spells fill two roles. They’re meant to provide some AoE healing, and they’re a button you can press on the move. I’d personally say Circle of Healing should be removed. I think PoM is largely fine as a filler button. When you press it even if it doesn’t heal now, you know it will eventually, whereas CoH if people aren’t hurt it’s doing nothing. But that’s what Sanctify and PoH should be doing. As for the movement portion of it, I don’t really care, just describing the problem, I’m not paid to find the solution. Maybe something like, after you cast a Holy Word you can cast your next spell while moving as a Talent option you could take on preference because sometimes that’d be annoying and sometimes it’d be a lifesaver.

  • Divine Hymn & Gales of Song: The design of this talent is a bit problematic. When used to buff the other healers in your raid it’s the strongest raid healing CD in the game. However due to this interaction two things occur. You want to press it before damage actually occurs, and the actual healing it itself does is abysmal. This leads to it being skipped over in M+ and super annoying to actually decide when to use it in raid. Once again as the premiere simplistic healer, I think the power should be moved out of its heal buffing and just into the heal. As it stands right now in my raid, I’m told to just press it prior to our Preservation Evokers using their healing. My actual raid cooldown is just a tool to buff Engulf healing. You could say Pres is overtuned, of course we all know that. But if it wasn’t Preservation it’d just be a different healer.

  • Apotheosis & Answered Prayers: With how unimpactful our Holy Words are, these talents just feels terrible at the moment. You really just use it to save mana and for Archon you get 10% healing which you can’t even notice. Yet again I think I’d probably actually nerf this talent but improve the base impactfulness of Holy Words. If we get less Holy Words, you can make Holy Word more powerful.

  • Holy Word: Salvation: I personally feel this talent has two problems. I think it’s very interesting that it is a Holy Word, however this makes it very annoying to plan around in raid. Whenever you want to allocate this as a cooldown you have to do it early, and then as a Priest it’s like you’re playing on a timer, and if you stop casting, or stop thinking about it, you won’t reduce the cooldown enough to get it back by the next time it’s allocated and people die and you have to redo the raid cooldowns. Then it becomes this struggle to figure out where to put it, and teams of Holy Priests are trying to predict the most accurate cooldown time… It’s just annoying. The second problem is that it just does abysmal healing. Right now from what I can tell in logs, a decent cast is netting around 20-25 million healing (this accounts for the heal, prayers of mending, renew etc). One cast of Halo from Archon hits for like 17 million… On a 1 minute cooldown. If this thing is going to be a 12 minute cooldown, it better bring my raid back from the brink of death like Pres Rewind does. Right now you can’t even tell when a priest used it. I honestly think this spell should just be locked to once a fight or have a flat cooldown. Maybe a talent that gives it an extra use or something.

  • Symbol of Hope: With all the other pruning I’m talking about I feel like this talent doesn’t have an identity… But for once, I think that’s fine. Right now it doesn’t really do anything which means it’s a blank slate for some cool utility options with the talents that are deleted from Circle of Healing being freed up. You could add some interesting options to this. Maybe make this 10% missing mana restore by default with some talent options that expand it to restore more mana, or maximum mana, or add in the defensive reset portion and buff the amount. Maybe it could give the raid temporary HP, or it could take on the Raid Heal Buffing portion that Divine Hymn currently has but I think should be removed from Hymn itself.

Discipline

For the most part Disc is doing a lot better than it usually is right now… At least in Mythic plus… In Raid it’s nowhere to be found because a new, better Disc priest just dropped called Pres.

I only have one major gripe at the moment for Disc specifically and that is how complicated our Ramps are. With Flameshaper being in the game we’ve seen two things. TUNING ASIDE we can see that it’s okay to heal the entire raid on a short cooldown without making players do advanced calculus to do it. If Flameshaper can do what I do in about 4 buttons, why do I need to press like 12 to do it? The second is, if Flameshaper is in the game, how does my Raid healing as Discipline differ from Flameshaper? What makes a Disc Priest a Disc Pirest and a Flameshaper a Flameshaper?

  • What is a Discipline Priest? If the niche of Flameshaper is group wide burst healing that sort of takes Disciplines spot. One of them will always just be better unless there is a distinction between them. This might be a hot take but in the short term … I think a way to differentiate these two healers is to bring back some of the pre-emptive care and health sponge effects of Discipline. This would actually set it apart from Flameshaper. I think this could be accomplished with the re-introduction of abilities similar to Spirit Shell. I’m not saying it should be Spirit Shell. You could, certainly, just do that. But also you could do something like change Divine Aegis to work off all healing, not just criticals, but cap the absorb it puts out to like 10% of a player’s hp like the Paladin Overhealing talent. Or change how Lenience works (see below). I don’t have a great way to solve this question at the moment and perhaps the Devs have something else in mind. But I feel like the question of ‘What is a Discipline Priest?’ and how is it different from an Evoker, specifically a Flameshaper Evoker, is an important question that needs to be addressed. Preferably sooner rather than later.

  • Power Word Radiance: This one is the elephant in the room. Clearly it’s okay to just blanket heal the entire raid every 30 seconds as we can see from Preservation. This spell originally had no cooldown back in Legion if I recall. That was seen as problematic, however clearly that has been walked back by the Devs. Low hanging fruit, lets get rid of the need to math out Haste Values versus Atonement duration to calculate mathematically optimal atonement applications on the fly while people are getting random Haste procs, Bloodlust, and Power Infusion. I don’t know what the best solution is but I think it’s safe to either make this apply Atonement to 10 players, or get rid of the cooldown, or give it more charges. I think the easiest solution is just get rid of the cooldown and slightly buff the mana cost (not by a lot, it doesn’t need a lot lol). This lets us actually have something to spend our Mana on for Mindbender priests who currently can end raid fights with more mana than they started with. Oracle still has pretty steep mana issues though at the moment but that is easily addressable by just reducing the mana cost for Oracle in a Hero talent or something.

  • Lenience: This ability has been around since Legion and it has sort of just… been there. But I think it could serve a better purpose conceptually. I think it would be very interesting to buff the value of this talent and make it stagger instead of preventing damage. This plays into the idea of Discipline smoothing out damage, and providing pre-emptive care, especially if coupled with the Divine Aegis changes above. I think something like Targets with Atonement stagger 10% of damage would be a neat touch. This sort of prevents it from being problematic because the damage is still there, it’s just staggered. Some people might say this is overpowered… But to those people I’d say Restoration Shaman can currently give significant uptime on a 21% HP Buff to allies, and Raid wide super long duration 10% HP Buff with free battle rez. I don’t think something like what I suggested is going to be out of line at all. If this mechanic were base-line it would also be super interesting to add talents that play off it like your Atonement healing is increased on targets with higher Lenience stagger, or ways to clear out or pause some of that stagger. Things like that. I think this gives an identity to Disc Priest as a spec that works on stopping catastrophes and smoothing out damage.

  • Power Word Barrier & Luminous Barrier: Barrier has lost a lot of its usefulness. Right now the time when it feels the most useful is just putting it on the Tank in my M+ dungeons. With the changes to healing to reduce the amount of 1 shots on players (which is a good change by the way), it’s not needed for World First or Raid in General, or in M+ really. I don’t really feel like I need to explain why Luminous Barrier is bad… It provides a shield for uh… 4% of a players maximum HP in raid lol… I sort of want to see how things play out before suggesting anything but I think increasing the radius of barrier and the healing of luminous barrier is a start, and monitor from there. Also drop the visual clutter of regular Barrier. You can’t see ground effects through it. It frequently unalives people rather than saving them

  • Contrition: This doesn’t play into the theme of What is a Disc priest, but I think this talent is good and would significantly improve Disc QoL so I just wanted to toss it in here. Either buff the healing by a decent amount, or make it so when you use a defensive penance, it heals allies with atonement as if it had damaged an enemy. When you use a defensive penance you’re already sacrificing spreading Purge the Wicked, extending your Dots, and dealing damage. The payoff should be pretty good. Right now it’s not. This would also give us a way to heal our groups when there’s nothing to hit, preventing groups from staring at me when we end an M+ pack at low HP and I literally cannot heal them. This doesn’t really relate to the original question of pre-emptive care but I just felt like I wanted to call this one out.

Closing Question

I would be curious to hear what other people think about the question “What is a Discipline Priest?” because I think that the identity of the spec has been completely lost with the introduction of Flameshaper. What do you all think? If you could redefine a Discipline Priest to distinguish it from other healers, what would you do?

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Serendipity at heart is basically a builder/consumer system - it’s meant to require casting low throughput talents to lead up to the rewarding high throughput talents.

They’ve eroded that design philosophy with exceptionally strong single target filler, but they’ve done so for a very good reason: the modern game doesn’t lend itself to a healer standing around casting ineffective filler. You can’t have such significant gaps in throughput potential.

Maybe they’ve gone overboard and they could shift some of that power back into AoE filler heals as well, but if they did as you suggest and buffed holy words at the expense of all the filler, hpriest’s healing profile would be severely degraded during long periods of downtime.

If anything, I’d suggest builder/consumer designs themselves are a bit antiquated and shouldn’t be the core mechanic of the class. There should be more interesting interactions and combinations and the tree already contains pieces of that, it’s just not well-balanced.

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This is being framed in a way that I don’t think any dev ever would, because it’s just specifically very limiting to design to say that two specs can’t ever specialize in the same healing PROFILE. “What is a discipline priest” is an overarching question that the answer when it comes to design is more likely WAY more simplified than that. IE: Discipline is a healer that transfers its damage into healing, and reduces the damage the group takes.

They’re not going to think on the level of: “Well, Holy priest tends to specialize in spot healing, so we can’t have another spot healer.” But more “Holy priest is a class about resetting the cooldowns of your larger spells with your smaller ones”

That said, I think the devs just messed up with flameshaper and are going to have to spend time to figure out how to fix it, because even the stated flavor of flameshaper doesn’t seem to match what it actually is, which I wouldn’t even call a ramp healer. It’s more an explosive AoE healer that has a tiny bit of setup. It feels the same way they messed up with Discipline in NH/Tomb and had to pull back a ton of its ability to ramp every single fight. Or even the launch of Nathria where Disc was just ludicrous and they massacred Spirit Shell (deservedly - spirit shell was not a smart idea to bring back).

I honestly think Evokers should be concerned right now, BECAUSE the blizz track record when stuff is this out of control is very heavy handed nerfs that break the spec, sometimes for whole xpacs.

I guess, point being, I don’t think Discipline lacks identity at all. Its identity is pretty clear, its raid spot is just being usurped by a spec that is horridly overtuned that can match its healing patterns.

I do mostly agree on Lenience. Contrition can’t be the same healing as the damage because that would make the heal cast clearly superior and there is a sect of Disc priests that HATE defensive penance.

Luminous barrier I don’t think is ever intended to compete with Barrier in organized groups. It’s meant to be an easy button for lower level Disc priests playing more casual content like normal pugs where they might not be able to coordinate a barrier, so Luminous is just strictly better for them.

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So it’s like easy mode disc but also better in throughput? Genuinely curious, never played the scalies.

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Well no, because it plays nothing like disc. It just happens to be able to do raid-wide burst in short intervals that takes more than one global.

It’s like saying Paladin is just better monk because they’re both melee, but the specs don’t feel anywhere near the same.

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Even at that though I’d argue every healer does damage. Blizzard balances that now where as that used to be Discipline’s thing. A lot of specs frequently do more damage than Disc at any given patch and requiring hitting a target in order to heal is a massive handicap. For instance not that this would happen but say there was an add before the final 2 bosses of City of Threads that put a 12 second Poison debuff on your entire group and if the add dies early you all die with it.

I think I’d still argue given that all healers do damage the identity of the Disc Priest should not be dealing damage to heal. As it’s more of a liability than a benefit, niche, or identity at this point.

I see where you’re going and I kind of get it but. At the same time you can probably rattle off what every spec does well; their identity. Shaman has overwhelming utility. Holy Paladin is the king of spot healing. Resto Druid has HoTs cornered. Preservation I’d say is the best burst healer since its introduction. Mistweavers have insane single target healing. But that kind of just leaves Holy and Disc like… What? What do they do? There’s better burst healers, better hot healers, better single target healers, better spot healers. HPal had lost their title of spot healing but it was returned to them, same with Shaman and their utility. Priest hasn’t been given back our identity yet if we even have one. I don’t think we should be relegated to ‘What the other healers can do but worse on any given patch.’

What’s the identity of Priests?

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To be clear, I mean heals through their damage rotation, not ‘deals more damage than everyone’ in M+. They’ve been tuning M+ around each healer doing near the same for a long while, for better or for worse. Like overall game philosophy I don’t think anyone’s gonna change their mind on that, because every time we see significant outliers there it becomes unhealthy in M+.

In raid they’re generally just gonna stay top because other healers can’t afford the globals.

See I’d push back on this a bit - because I don’t think what they do well is their identity.

For example: Paladin isn’t necessarily the king of spot healing - at least until herald - in raid it was more the melee specialist spamming LoD with glimmer gone. Nowadays with eternal flame they’re doing some spot heal-y playstyle, but they’re also playing more as cleave healers with BoV even in raid.

They’ve definitely had tiers where they were basically just spot healing. But they’ve also had tiers where they absolutely weren’t doing a ton of spot healing.

Similarly, in BfA holy priest was busy spamming PoH and doing cleave healing. But come SLands they were strictly spot healers.

Mistweaver has had raid tiers where their whole thing was just blast raid-wide healing in a blanket style more akin to Disc. I never would have thought of them as a strictly single target healer, etc. etc.

So I think the question is better phrased as “what is priest good at?” Which maybe sounds like semantics, but I do think the two are totally separate. You could design a version of Disc that still did its damage from healing, but it was entirely passive and slow, working more like HoTs, and NOT as a burst healer.

And that answer is gonna change like it always has when they inevitably tune the class and totally change what people are focusing on - I don’t even know if there IS a good answer to that question. :person_shrugging:

In Emerald Nightmare/Nighthold back in legion I would have said they’re absolutely the best damage healer. In Tomb I would have said they’re the best raid-wide burst healer. In Nathria I would have said they’re all about Spirit Shell and absorbs.

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Add PvP to that list… I want to use PoH and CoH, but the healing from it is simply not enough to counter the burstyness of enemy DPS, along with the additional risk of being interrupted.

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Hmm? PoM and CoH are non interruptible and PoM casts pws in oracle and is a beast. That being said I don’t think the nature of these 2 instant aoe/semi aoe short CD spells are meant to stop an onslaught of 2 dps pounding on someone.

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Holy’s in a catch 22 situation with Archon Halo because a lot of our raid healing is tied to that one ability. For 15s we burst out a lot of raid healing, but then for the other 45s our other heals aren’t as powerful as the other healers.

Overall though Holy is pretty dang stacked. Triple raid healing cds + Symbol of Hope. If the fights 5-6+ minutes long I always have everything reset by the end. All the healers are begging for the Symbol of Hope mana because they’re near oom and I can chain Halo, Salv, and Divine Hymn.

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Yes, please - but also it’s kind of ironic that the hpriest themselves needs mana the least. :smile:

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I haven’t been running oom this raid tier. You can double mana pot the boss fights if they’re 6-7 minutes long and Symbol 2-3 times throughout.

The only times I ever found myself going oom last raid tier was when I was hard casting way more then what was required. I had to cut back on some phases of the fight.

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oh a big typo on my part… I meant PoH - Prayer of Healing, not PoM.