Hi all.
Long time holy priest here. Just trying to get acquainted with oracle. The premonition of insight seems good but more raid oriented. Im finding the playstyle basically wack a mole healing with serenity flash etc. Ya Ive got prayer of mending bouncing on CD. Honestly renew seems pointless.
So just wondering how people are dealing with all the AoE dmg in dungeons when it feels like all our heals with this build are single target. Ive used online resources and it appears to be the GOTO Mythic plus build. Im just wondering though if thats based on coordination and skilled players. It feels like with so much damage going out all the time in heroics that this build isnt it.
Any suggestions?
Thanks all.
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I don’t think this is limited to Oracle. Halo for Archon of course provides some more AoE healing but it’s not particularly bursty for really dangerous damage spikes, and there was a post here the other day commenting on HW: Sanctify being tuned much lower relative to health pools/Heal/Flash Heal than it has in the past.
CoH is suffering from the same thing, with weak tuning and the buff from renew ticks being all but useless without the previous season’s tier set renews. PoH has been weak for ages now, and PoM even with all the buffs isn’t even as (relatively) strong as it was in early DF.
So I don’t know how others are dealing with tanks that pull every mob on a straight line to the boss and then engage the boss even while they’re alive, but for me the only throughput that can keep up at that rate is Lightweaving like crazy and Heal/Serenity carrying the day.
I shifted points around to ensure I have both Crisis Management and Desperate Times and shifted to crit as my main stat. I’ve even upped my haste to Lightweave faster 
It is making me think more about playing around with Divine Word and seeing if that’s another answer.
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Premonition of Piety (or the 4th prem, which grants all 3) → Guardian Spirit on self → Spam single target healing into self, and it will cleave your overhealing onto the group. You get this every other premonition cast.
When in Prem of Insight, cast 4x PoM. Use Holy Word: Sanctuary
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Haha, especially with Prophet’s Will that’s kind of ingenious - I hadn’t realized Premonition of Piety had been buffed that much. I remember writing that off back when it was like a 5% healing buff and 50% overhealing redistribute to 3 random players. That is a 40 yard effect right?
It feels so unintuitive but imagine that and laying down a Divine Word: Sanctify (or really goosing up the overheal with Divine Word: Serenity into Lightweaver) how insanely bursty your AoE healing could get for a 5 man.
Yeah prophet’s will and the buff to piety that made it 98% with the talent is exactly why. It’s a very, very high amount of healing whenever it’s up. You can keep the group alive through most things doing it provided you’re not getting oneshot or something.
This is making Oracle much more tempting for M+ for sure, having a DR again (like Shadowlands) plus actually useful bubbles and some real burst AoE is pretty enticing.
Essence Devourer does a decent amount of healing as well. If you combo it with PI it can do nearly as much group healing as Divine Hymn.
Holy by default has no passive AOE healing outside of PoM and CoH so you’re primarily going to be relying on single target heals to top people off.
Like Capstone pointed out, if you use Piety or Capstone w/ Guardian Spirit on yourself w/ the talent that increases your self healing received by 30% you can do dumb amounts of healing for 15s in 5 mans.
Archon Holy also has passive healing w/ Halo every 1 minute which for 15s gives you consistent group healing on-top of 4-5 Surge of Light procs.
Which one is better for the job will really depend on how hard the healing checks are in keys.
Oracle feels more situatonal, Archon brings more consistency.
even though its just heroic dungeons, i have found archon to be more forgiving. Having a traveling AoE heal every 1 minute feels great. A natural part of healing rotations that intertwines with other spec tree choices make it feel smoother.
Oracle just feels out of place in most parts. like I HAVE to press this to get to a point in the cycle, then hold on to it until that situation arises. It’s not bad per se. but most times i feel i need to hold onto my charges throughout the dungeon…waiting.
Yep, consistency in this case can be both a good and a bad thing, depending on your needs. If you’re using Halo and the other procs on CD appropriately, you can’t wring much more throughput out of it.
After all, you can’t stockpile extra Halo charges for especially brutal healing checks and no matter how hard you smash down your keybind for Halo, it’s not going to do any more or less than what it always does.
Oracle opens up way more possibilities for stockpiling throughput and having more mitigation. It’s more flexible, but it’s also more fragile in that it can be used quite poorly, too.
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i know Light weaver is pretty good right now, but i enjoy taking Divine word with archon.
Archon fills that AoE healing gap that plagues holy priests. While you are correct in the bursty healing part. i like pairing it with Divine word sanctify for bigger damage phases, or serenity for high AoE but needs more priority healing as the forefront.
It’s been very fun to play. Not only that, but that’s more of the situational feeling i want. Divine word lets me choose at a moments notice what i need it for, while i need to cycle through with Oracle most of the time. Pairing it with archon makes it feel complete.
That’s true: Oracle is much more flexible than Archon, but it’s not as flexible as Divine Word which instantly becomes whatever you need it to be: single target or AoE, healing or DPS. (
(Although there’s a lot more potential power packed into those Premonitions than a 20%-30% buff, too, so we are being compensated for the headache).
It makes sense though that you like having the flexible Divine Word to complement the more predictable and consistent Archon. And Lightweaver really is outstanding single target healing after the late beta buffs.
I’ve actually been playing around with dropping Divine Image at this point, particularly since our AoE heals don’t hit for as much and Dazzling Lights on DI was also nerfed pretty badly in late DF. 5-6% extra passive throughout is a nice to have, but think of the burst potential of combining Oracle Piety with Divine Word Serenity into Lightweaver… that kind of burst might be worth sacrificing trickle healing elsewhere that doesn’t actually matter.
Same TBH, like its nice having that passive extra healing but i barely notice it. Popping DW: Seren with Surge of light proc with archon is so good lmao, top everyone off while moving with archon going off, feels so good.
honestly, didn’t even think of that, yea i can see that being super powerful.
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It’s tempting, but man I’m a sucker for animation and spell effects. Having a freakin’ Narru show up to help out. 
Also it jives well with Champion of the Narru title 
But alas, I’m starting to think the healing benefit of it is rather lacking. That said, I do enjoy having the Narru out whilst spamming holy nova, seems to be a nice dps increase. I think the overall damage contribution of DI might become more important in higher keys? Hmm…
Divine Image is the only end tree ability that we have which is a passive hps/dps increase. If you’re in Apotheosis and have 2-3 images out, your Flash Heals are doing almost double healing.
Some quick math on Healing Light (the pet Naaru ability) vs. Improved Flash Heal (not counting other bonuses) show it at 30% of Flash Heal’s SP, although when I tested it in-game before working on that Holy Word: Sanctify question from last week I saw the pet naaru hitting for more like ~20% of my Flash Heal, so I don’t know if there’s some other multiplier in play.
Of course they stack but the total duration is only 9 seconds with the GCD intervening between your holy words, so even if they could double your direct heals if you stack 4 at once it wouldn’t be for very long!
It’s a nice passive throughput increase, but wouldn’t you agree that the potential for burst throughput might be more attractive in many cases?
Besides, they severely nerfed Dazzling Lights, the AoE component of Divine Image, and it’s AoE healing where holy seems to be weakest, and where Divine Image does the least to help.
Divine Image was nerfed in S3 because it was supposed to be balanced out by having a higher overall uptime of DI. Since you were getting a free Holy Word every 20s that was a free 9s extension.
They didn’t remove the nerf because were supposed to be generating more Holy Words through quad PoM on Oracle for Answered Prayers and Surge of Light double Holy Word CDR on Archon plus extended duration Apotheosis. Our 2-piece bonus is also like having 1 point in LoTN which means about 1 cast less to reset Holy Words.
To answer your question: in a raid setting all the end tree abilities (if used optimally) only contribute to 5-6% of your overall. In both M+ and raid you can maintain a high uptime on Divine Image (around 50%+) and on M+ bosses it can be closer to 80%.
So the TLDR is if you don’t have Divine Image you basically need to cast 10-15% more Flash Heals to cover the hps difference. Lightwell and Divine Word isn’t going to cover that.
Well, I haven’t mathed this out but I don’t think we’re remotely close to the same uptime on holy words as the tier set provided.
Nope. I don’t even think it’s possible to reset Holy Word Salvation in 5 minutes.
They nerfed our Mastery, Halo/Divine Star, Sanctify, and Divine Image for S3 and didn’t revert the nerfs in TWW.
This is why I’m expecting Holy is going to suffer on high-end content and is going to see a lot of buffs probably by 11.0.5. This happened at the start of DF as well.
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I might be the odd one out and since it’s only heroic, I’ve been running Lightwell/DI Archon and leaving out most of the AoE talents. SoL procs so often that spot healing isn’t much of an issue and serenity holy words seem to refresh nearly often enough for the loss of the s4 set bonus. Halo covers quite a bit of AoE damage and if things get bad or the tank is pulling more than they should, lightwell saves the day. While I doubt it will work out very well in higher end m+, it has worked for me for dungeoning and solo play. AoE damage with Halo, Holy Nova and Holy Fire cleave is great for rounding up 10 or so mobs and watching them die. If you pull too much, emergency lightwell/GS to the rescue. Run a follower dungeon and pull a room or two, no sweat.
It’s fun to play for me, unlike Oracle. I’m not really an M+ person though and just can’t wait to raid.
Maybe something like this? we don’t take Divine Image, but instead split for Divine word and Light weaver, touching on the better aspects when considering our tier set bonuses.
Divine Word: to mitigate the time gap between our archon CD to help benefit our spells during the DW window depending on the situation, or to even pair together to enhance our throughput while both are on a 1 min CD which is awesome.
Light weaver: since our archon is providing tremendous amounts of uptime on SoL, light weaver is very important of a spell, especially when paired with our 4 set bonus.