I’ve only played holy priest in the shadowlands expansion. Has holy ever been the meta healer? I think it was back during classic right? Any other point when it was tops?
Yeah I think it’s been a good while for Holy Priest. It’s the “jack of all trades” curse, really. There have been times where the raw HPS was really strong, but generally the lack of DRs in raids and generally poor utility for M+ makes it hard for Holy to be “meta” in terms of pushing at the highest level.
There were two times Holy was meta. First was in classic because shamans & paladins were basically buffer classes and resto druids didn’t do as much healing. Priests could spam heal their group with Prayer of Healing which no other healer had that capability. Naxxramas even had a fight that required a priest to mind control one of the boss adds to kill the boss.
Second time was during TBC for a while when they gave Circle of Healing smart AI (it was a group only heal before) when it had no cd. So you literally just brought 2-3 holy priests into the group who just sat there and mashed circle of healing over-and-over. They nerfed that eventually with a 10s cooldown.
With how the modern game is they don’t want to create “healer handicaps” and every healer can basically the same hps so it ends up coming down to their total package. High end raidings will favor healers with high damage & damage mitigation for their world first kills because stacking healer dps is like adding a 21st person to the raid. Damage mitigation helps prevent deaths from mechanics when people are undergeared.
Once the dust settles after a few months than you can get CE with really any kind of healer composition. Right now there’s an excessive amount of meme parsing going on in SoD with people taking 1-2 healers less on the fight than everyone else, funneling 12+ PIs into one healer, and bunch of other stuff.
So yeah I’d love for Holy to be FOTM one day, but they’d need to completely rethink the healer classes.
Just looking at 9.2 though… Holy is going to be pretty strong with the double legendaries. I just hope they do something to make Symbol of Hope better.
Signed,
Holy Main since 2005
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We brought Restos for 2 reasons for raids in vanilla. Combat Rez, and to innervate the holy priests…
Paladins were buff bots
Holy priests reigned supreme
Those were the days.
If you include arena, I believe Holy was meta late-patch in BFA 8.3 because with a ton of haste “corruption” bonuses, their Greater Heal spell could be cast uber-fast and nearly full-heal someone with no cooldown.
MoP S14 and S15 as well. Absolute S-Tier healer in both Arena and RBGs.
Incredible output, good burst healing, mana efficiency, utility, and arguably the most enjoyable PvP healer to play with Chakra swapping. I wish they never would’ve reworked Holy from that model.
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Holy was meta healer for pvp in 9.1 Cardinal mending was very strong.
Also pretty much whole legion Holy priest been a meta healer for RBGs.
We’ve been a solid pvp healer through last expansions, sadly can’t say the same for pve.
I think that we are in the minority when it comes to liking Chakra 
. IMO, I think something like Chakra stance-dancing could improve the current iteration of Holy.
The way healing & damaging is now it would be an excessive overload. Back when it was first implemented healers didn’t deal damage and just healed.
I want to think that, for a little while anyway, the priest healer meta alternated between holy & disc across a few expansions. IDK for sure, I rolled this character in Wrath as shadow and didn’t start healing until WoD.
WoD hpriest was still the best and most underrated iteration of the class, imo.
Holy was pretty good in WoD like one of the best, but still Disc was just absurdly op as far as I remember.
Holy may have been “OK” back in MoP / WoD, but if so, we never found out, since disc was brokenly OP.
they shouldn’t be meta- they are way too easy to play.
Paladins? lol
Shamans? 
Only real “hard” healer is Disc.
Difficulty =/= meta
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Exactly. So then remove the difficulty of playing disc if you want to make everything baseline and equal lol. Why are they the only ones that are “hard” for not much gain. (Talking when things shake down in 9.2)