Holy priest beta

Constelus-sargeras · December 12, 2025, 5:57pm

Holy Priest feels completely cooked in beta. How is a DH tank doing 100k more overall healing than me? The talents are awful. Ultimate Serenity heals for basically nothing. Why not make Holy Word: Sanctify function like what Circle of Healing used to function like, instead of forcing us to place it on the ground?

And why not buff the Holy Words in general? The entire fantasy of the spec revolves around them. Prayer of Healing will never be good because they refuse to give it meaningful supporting talents—everything is either mana reduction or cast-time reduction, nothing that actually improves the spell.

Come on, Blizzard, return to the drawing board. Give us something that makes Holy Priest actually playable in Mythic+. This was only a +15 and the healing just wasn’t there. Meanwhile, the tank was doing more DPS than the DPS. Are we really just buffing all tanks to the point where we might as well run Mythic+ with a full tank comp?

This is ridiculous. Who is in charge of Development for priest? Did they just fire that developer and assigned it to some intern? Unreal.

Melopahn-2975744 · December 14, 2025, 2:20am

Priest is the internal test class for the first AI class lead.

kittysox-3260360 · December 15, 2025, 5:31pm

I’ve never been more discouraged and just beat down over an expansion.

Taedas-2066548 · December 15, 2025, 9:23pm

They are making healing so that it takes several GCDs to top someone off so every heal feels like it does basically nothing compared to live but it’s ok because people also aren’t being one shot from 80% hp.

Snow-208483 · December 22, 2025, 10:07pm

Hi, I’m going to be brutally honest here as an older player…

The lead dev, or game designer, I don’t know I can barely care anymore… Whoever the one that left and came back (Ion? I think?)

They… don’t like Holy Priests. Like, in early wow we were good, but got outshined very quickly and never really recovered until the last few xpacs, and even then it’s been arguable.

I mean, Holy Nova was our original pinnacle talent for our tree and it was pathetic. And I think it was on a 30s CD? Like, can you imagine having Holy Nova as an end talent? It’d be ridiculous in 2025 or 2026. Or with a CD?

The holy priest spec was viewed as the ‘beginner’ healer spec, the ‘baseline’ that all other healers would revolve around… not revolve around for support, but revolve around in that we were the utter baseline. Shammies get AOE healing. Druids get HOTs, etc…

There were obvious strengths, too, don’t get me wrong. But Holy always existed in a very weird spot.

And that’s not even getting into PVP. These are the same devs that made a joke story during the launch of Arathi Basin where the Holy Priest character got torn apart (Ham) with his team leaving him for dead (and basically laughing about it). When the Priest forums pointed out that this… is really rude and condescending, the dev’s response was to ‘go hide in a bush’. (FYI if you’re ever wondering where that came from, there you go…)

Our lore writer is such !@$% at their job, the Paladin’s in Legion had to come and RESCUE US… IN OUR OWN ORDER HALL. Just, Blizz views us as a joke. A literal joke. And it sucks.

Then there’s the Disc problem… we’re two healers in one class. That puts the class in a constant, precarious situation.

Right now the Priest class makes up 21.5% of Mythic+ healers… that’s 4.9% to Holy and 16.5% to Disc.

The devs MUST intentionally kneecap one of the specs… otherwise Priests would overtake things and make up, like, 30%+ of healers (What are we resto shaman? ((37.5% FYI)).

So… one spec has to suffer, and Holy has been garbage for so long, with a few exceptions here and there, that the playerbase will usually just expect us to be a garbage spec, so it’s easy for the devs to just commit harm and get minimal resistance, since they’ve trained the playerbase quite well.

That’s my piece… I’m out, gotta go buy a white elephant present for my family.

brana2-2915572 · December 24, 2025, 1:41am

It’s kinda sad they don’t put effort in making Holy big
The “tutorial healer” is such a boring concept, if you want to learn healing go learn whatever you like, all healers are relatively easy to catch up, why bring the only Holy caster spec down to a tutorial level…
Plainly bad design

Auss-43430 · December 27, 2025, 9:02am

Priests are just the dogwater version of paladins.

Especially in the lore — That’s why they were the inferior subhuman class that needed to be rescued in their Legion orderhall campaign by the paladins, lol

Seems like the devs are trying to make that lore a reality in gameplay too.

Probably a paladin player dev

Tuuros-wyrmrest-accord · December 31, 2025, 7:30pm

Replayed the priest order hall campaign and didn’t seem like the paladins played that big of a roll in the end. Still silly, I get it.

Yes, priests are super overlooked in the lore. Even in the books, they have paladins come off as the holy-users that can actually get things done.

And yes a paladin player dev is in charge of priest. Just look at the art in the background of the holy priest tree… it’s a paladin casting a spell… in Skywall (a wind elemental place). Why it isn’t Velen doing something is a crime in of itself.

brana2-2915572 · January 3, 2026, 5:23am

you literally are sent to beg them for help because otherwise we all die in the legion invasion

Governator-2794140 · January 4, 2026, 12:25am

It’s insane that Oracle presses pom, flash heal and serenity as rotational healing buttons. That’s it that’s all.

There’s no skill expression, no depth, no “trick” you can pull off within your base kit to make an impact. I legitimately don’t understand how a spec can be designed that way and deemed acceptable.

I feel like using chat GPT to do your homework takes more effort.

Muffin-2652565 · January 8, 2026, 7:42pm

I just took another brief look at the new talent tree and it just looks like our class is going to revolve entirely around playing whack-a-mole with PoM and Flash Heal and then maybe Divine Hymn as a major healing cooldown. What am I missing?

Again, I didn’t play, I’m just looking at numbers. It looks like it’s another season where Archon is completely unviable and aside from the Holy Words and Divine Hymn that it’s just Prayer of Mending and Flash Heal? Why cast PoH at all if there’s no Benediction for it. Like, they wanted to make healing more simple but now I have to pay attention to Benediction procs if I wanted to even attempt to squeeze in a PoH, if the numbers even worked out at all?

What am I missing???

Taedas-2066548 · January 8, 2026, 10:21pm

Cosmic ripples from benediction will heal for 177% spell power and PoH will heal for 517% spell power and had an increased crit chance. PoH had its uses.