Holy feedback to add to the pile

Classes Priest
1

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.

2

Honestly just kind of looks like your group is too strong with healers that it’s limited work for you and somewhat boring specially since you don’t want to hit the chastise and smite buttons.

Your build you’re playing in raid is nowhere near the recommended build, yet likely not far off optimal and still quite viable, I’d even wager that once we lose our 4 piece set, that archon may switch to a build like yours, doubt oracle will. Which brings me to that- we were focused on this season by the devs to give us 2 viable hero class trees that has a very different playstyle. I actually thought you would resonate with oracle based on your comments, as a lot of power is shifted out of our holy words and is so dependant on our short cd spells that it leaves much less time to dps (even if you wanted to).

But I digress, if you’re not having fun with priest this season I’m not sure if priest is the class for you because we’re not going to have this much variance on talent selection and still be a legit player. We’re in a very good spot right now imo.

2 Likes
3

By no means have I played the most viable spec, but that’s because I haven’t done any prog past week 1/2 on this character, I swapped back to the Warrior since we ended up with 6 healers on the roster and I wasn’t liking the vibe the spec was giving playing the viable spec.

I just feel like, as you put it, “your group is too strong with healers” really isn’t a good excuse for it to feel bad. If I’m in the minority and people want this Apot spam spec - Fine, so be it. I’ll not play the class anymore if that’s the way it ends up. But, as I said, mostly just posting my feedback to add to the pile of it, if you don’t give the feedback you can’t cry when things don’t get adjusted, eh?

4

To each their own.

I enjoy this iteration of holy a lot, probably my favorite since SL. There is a lot of build variety and both hero talents are viable. I find holy to be in a great place design wise.

Maybe the numbers aren’t where they need to be but the feel of it I think is great.

5

This season I’m 90% focused on overhealing and sniping heals and that’s not a good feeling. Mythic raiding is changing that up a bit but I think after getting the extra 6 item levels next week I’ll be back to doing nothing but putting out as much healing as possible.

I dislike our tier set. I have no desire to try to play around Apotheosis. I do enjoy the three instant casts of PoH with it. Detest Lightweaver and it’s a stupid way to add complexity to our heals in such a fast-paced game where you really don’t even have the option to choose between a slower, more efficient Heal and a more rapid, inefficient Flash Heal. I feel like a weird toddler making sure I press 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2 instead of 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1.

I don’t dislike the class. I still feel reactionary. But I don’t feel like I can make meaningful decisions this expansion like I could last expansion.

6

The problem is that Blizzard is chronically stubborn on their flawed healer and encounter damage philosophy:

  1. Health bars are too low respective to endgame incoming damage patterns.
  2. Healing spells are too strong respective to health bars, you often get low cooldown rotational abilities each healing or shielding for more than half of a player’s health bar in terms of healing.
  3. Encounters are generally designed around very short durations of high incoming burst damage, and very low rot damage, if the latter exists even at all, leading to healers requiring powerful cooldowns in order to keep up the group or raid.

And all of these factors synergistically feed into each other in the worst ways - because Blizzard refuses to increase health pools in any relevant or noticeable fashion, every player feels very squishy and top tier healer specs must have the best burst throughput cooldowns and ways to supplement group survivability in order to be considered as such(cough disc rsham hpally).

Then at the same time Blizzard feels compelled to aura buff weak healers(cough hpriest) while also buffing healing as a way to nerf content over and over, which leads to every healer spec having ridiculously high raw throughput values respective to tiny player health pools.

And instead of adding more rot mechanics, Blizzard tries to balance future encounters by adding more burst damage to counteract the additional healing potential healers now have as a result of all those aforementioned aura buffs.

I have said it many times: buffing healing output across the board is the worst way to nerf content; if they wanted an easy, yet infinitely healthier way to nerf content(especially raid content), they should just buff health pools and leave healing output untouched except with ilvl increases and class balancing.

That way, healers have a longer grace period to react to damage before people start dying while still keeping healing meaningful by preserving the absolute amount of damage they have to heal; instead of playing this current whack-a-mole 60%+ overheal gameplay where everyone is just sniping each other during downtime and feuding over who gets to pop their big cooldowns during burst.

7

I feel like this is the thing I think about most with healing tbh. I always felt like it was because they want to force healers to DPS rather than heal, then slam as many healing spells as possible into the short time frame of a burst. Then you’re a DPS again.

Just let me heal my dudes.

2 Likes
8

So just heal? They already lowered our dps significantly, I used to be able to out dps the dps on pulls in SL. Bliz already raised health pools and ppl complained our heals did nothing to health bars so they pumped up our healing again. Bliz already has tough enough time balancing raid damage / healing in heroic given the extremely wide range of skill of players, I think this is vastly underestimated. Most of the raid can be killed by average players given 1 or 2 of them are dead mid fight. What does this mean after you’re over the expected ilvl or better than average dps? You can easily drop 1 or even 2 dps for healers if u need even on the dps intense fights and these guild breeze thru the content. With my guild, I’d say is the average experience, the dps intense fights we don’t have that luxury and we end up having stress checks on healers. If you watch my gally kill, I’m popping every heal cd pretty much as soon as it comes, players are sub 40% health seemingly the entire fight, im making full use of the extended apoth and scratching for mana. Then we got it down…. 2 weeks later this is a joke to heal. If your heroic raiding is not on the fine line natural curve all you’re going to do experience is heal sniping and downtimes. Also if all your healers are above average you’re likely not seeing much stress either, this is not cuz they “want you to dps”. But you can to relief your boredom…

Also I’m actively dpsing significant less this season, since our dps is way less significant this season than ever before, and involves a critical loss to hps, ive def been able to have better results for healing to account for it.

Play the game the way you want to play. Its a game.

2 Likes
9

I’m not sure how I hearted that post above, as I certainly didn’t mean too. Lol

1 Like
10

The point is that there’s usually nothing to heal outside of preassigned cooldowns. So unless you enjoy playing 80% overheal simulator, you are forced to dps.

And this is easily solved if Blizzard stops trying to nerf content by buffing hps and introducing more burst mechanics to balance around aforementioned assignment of healing cooldowns.