I’ll start this off by giving context to how I play - I’m a raider only, and while I don’t detest M+ as much as I like to think I do, I have no interest in running keys above a 10 at any point, and only occasionally get dragged in by guildies to do so, other than hitting 3k for the season once. This season with the resillience on keys I made a point to run at least all 12s and ended up with a set of 13s done just because it ended up that way with the guild. For raiding, I’m a mid-tier CE raider now-a-days, our guild is currently working on Bandit prog here on week 11 of the raid at US#510 raiding twice a week.
So, Holy Priest. I’m not here to fish out responses; just adding my feedback to the pile, since I know the teams do read through these a bit, in the hopes to keep hammering feedback in that this spec needs a redesign. Or a backtrack. Honestly, a backtrack sounds good. Used to love Holy.
Pretty sure for the first time since I started playing Holy in legion, I’m going to be dropping the class next tier. I played Rogue/Resto Sham from Vanilla to Legion, then swapped to Fury Warrior/Holy Priest and have played them ever since. But this is the absolute worse this class has ever felt to play, regardless of it’s performance in raid being technically decent. I ended up dropping it to play Fury again this patch after the first few weeks, and have brought it in occasionally to fill in for prog when I’ve needed and off nights do the first few fights. It just… feels incredibly bad.
I’ve always hated Apotheosis personally; it felt like an incredibly unfun button to hit that meant you had to SLAM spells for as fast as possible to pump HWs out, when raiding normally doesn’t really work that way. And now the default talent tree is all about extending Apot for as long as possible. It just does not make sense. There’s maybe a couple fights this tier where there’s constant medium level damage going out the entire fight where you’re able to rotate CDs enough to have something like Apot cover it. But the rest of the time it just goes into overhealing and sucking mana down (not that mana is much of an issue right now, but theoertically). It just feels bad. Raid healing does not work like that, especially when you have a set of healers now-a-days that are built to snipe every heal the moment someone drops below 90% health.
In keys, it’s obviously a great button, where you’re the only healer. But Holy has always been at the absolute bottom of the M+ tier lists anyway, rarely are we feeling like we’re good healers there, and this tier felt damn near impossible early on before the buffs started cycling in a bit. I remember struggling in 10s early on watching my resto sham afk through them because I just could not keep up with the damage patterns by only having access to FH and Heal.
I really feel like the spec started running downhill for me with Lightweaver’s introduction in DF, where we essentially started turning ourselves into WotLK Holy Paladins spamming FH, instead of being the versatile true healing spec that we are. Gone are the days where I’m making moment-to-moment decisions of “slam a PoH here, Serenity the tank up, couple FHs to catch a couple low people, Sanc → PoH for some damage pulses…” etc. It’s just. Pop Apot. FH. Heal. FH. Heal. FH. Heal. Slam Serenity as soon as it’s lit up on someone to overheal them a bunch because it’s gonna be off CD in 3 GCDs anyway. It feels like it’s never come back from the introduction of LW and has just tripled down on it since then. Even if we were the only S tier healer, it’s boring.
Here’s to hoping we go back to actually being able to cast multiple spells for all situations; and here’s to hoping there’s a replacement for Apot in raid settings (just give me my Salv back). Otherwise I fear I’m either stuck being done healing in this game or playing the only other spec that feels like it’s a traditional healer still in Resto Sham, as I’ve just never really enjoyed Druid.
Just, for the love of absolute #^*&, do not make me have to DPS in order to do healing. If people want to play Disc they can play Disc. Or Monk. Or Paladin. Leave me to my healing.