I’ve been recently playing Holy Priest, and I’ve been wondering about certain talents and nodes that don’t fit very well or are missing in some way. Note that these changes are specific to various encounters.
Suggestions
Holy Reverberations (new talent):
Using Smite, Holy Fire, Holy Nova increases the healing from your next healing ability by 20%, stack up to 10 times. Holy Word: Chastise grants 2 stacks of this effect.
Using Renew, Flash Heal, Heal, Prayer of Mending, Prayer of Healing and Power Word: Life increases the damage from your next damaging ability by 20%, stacking up to 10 times. Holy Word: Serenity and Holy Word: Sanctify grants 2 stacks of this effect.
Explanation: Looking at fights like Xav in Theater of Pain, there are many points where large chunks of damage occur that must be healed through (ie the jump in the middle) with almost no damage outside of those parts. Sure, the tank gets slapped around with the tank buster but generally isn’t so much in danger of needing perma watch on healing. I was wondering: why not have an ability to store healing during this “downtime”? If I have nothing to do, I’ll just cast Smite or Holy Fire anyways, so why not make a talent that allows you to benefit from doing little chunks of damage by then getting off a big heal? Similarly, on fights like Old Waxbeard, I find myself constantly healing targets that get melee’d by the adds and have that bleed in them. Why not benefit from that by gaining a big Holy Fire that you can dump into an exploding mine cart to help your group out? Just something to think about.
Arbitration (new talent): Holy Fire and Smite now reduce the damage dealt by the target with all melees swings and abilities by 50% of the damage dealt to it (applies to Burning Vehemence as well)
Final Hour (new talent): Upon reaching 20% health, targets with the Holy Fire DoT detonate, dealing all of the remaining damage stored in the DoT to that target (not AoE) and healing all nearby allies for 100% of the stored damage, split evenly. New applications of Holy Fire below 20% instantly detonate their DoT to deal that damage to their target instantly (applies Arbitration talent above) and heal nearby allies for 100% of the DoT’s damage.
Explanation: The funnest time I have healing is when players are pressing defensives and avoiding unnecessary damage. However, a lot of Holy Priest’s healing is reactive, unlike Disc which can put Shields on everybody and use Pain Sup on tanks at the start to pre-mitigate damage taken. I think Holy should have the power to also pre-emptively prepare some healing for their group. Rather than stealing Disc’s niche by giving their group a shield, why not instead have the abilities decrease the damage dealt by the affected mobs, similar to how Condemn (the Venthyr Execute for Protection Warriors) worked in Shadowlands? Building on that idea, I found out that you can get the Holy Fire DoT to last crazy amounts of time (upwards of 3 minutes!) with the right talents and setup. Obviously this isn’t useful currently, but with the new talent nodes suggested above, this could have value! One big problem, however, is that a lot of the DoT is likely to be wasted when the mob dies if it carried a 3 minute DoT. Taking inspiration from the Assassination Rogue’s Sudden Demise talent, this would allow that accumulated DoT to gain massive healing value upon hitting execute, and would also proc the damage reduction effect of Arbitration (the other new talent I’m proposing), giving a large buffer of damage immediately upon hitting execute phase.
Anduriel’s Blessing (new talent): Each Holy Word cast decreases the cooldown of Apotheosis by 5 seconds.
Explanation: Apotheosis feels incredible to play with during its duration, but feels bad outside of it due to the long cooldown. I would love rewarding more frequent uses of this ability just from a gameplay feel perspective.
We could use some more “DPS while healing options” -even if that meant reducing max DPS. That’s definitely a fair request, but I wouldn’t hold my breath since the design direction seems if anything to punish the more pure healers’ “DPS while healing” options which has affected rshaman and rdruid lately as well.
As to more frequent Apotheosis, I’m ambivalent. I’d want Apotheosis to be more like the Kyrian covenant and solve both potential issues, personally. Make it more impactful instead of more frequent.
Can you imagine in PvP getting hit by a holy priest that’s got an instant cast holy fire that does 230% extra damage to its primary target and 170% to off targets, followed by a catharsis SW: P into a SW: D to finish you off.
And then afterwards immediately popping a serenity with 80% extra healing, in fact they’re just casting lay on hands every time chastise is up.
Your ideas basically turn Holy Priest into a god. Apotheosis already has aura extension. Holy priest is a reactive healer and giving it tons of preemptive tools just makes it good at everything. Your ideas come across as asking to make the thing you like ridiculously better than everything else by having everything with 0 downsides.
Why would PvPers be in favor of a talent that is completely useless in PvP?
Also why should Holy Priest get to do disc levels of damage when disc is supposed to be the DPS healer, and why would Holy Priest be the right candidate for large healer damage instead of MW or Rsham which both don’t have a lot of damage globals?
Well first off, just because a talent isn’t designed for your content doesn’t mean you should be opposed to it. If you post something relating to PvP, I’m not gonna go in your post and shoot it down just because I don’t PvP.
By that argument, PvEers should be opposed to all PvP tuning and PvP talents as a whole. Please have the courtesy to accept that other people play the game as well for different reasons.
So that is not how that works in PvE.
If two healers are capable of doing a fight (note: one could heal more than the other, but both capable), then you always take the higher DPS one. One of the best examples of this is the fact that Holy Paladin is one of the lower end healers in Raid for raw healing throughput, and yet Ellesmere is timing world first keys on Holy Paladin. There are a number of reasons for how he does it, but damage is certain one of them.
My problem with Holy Priest, in both low keys (10s-12s) and 18s-19s that I play, is that Holy lacks a lot of the pre-emptive healing that Disc has, which allows people to survive mechanics that would otherwise one shot (unavoidable mechanics in high keys that scale out of control in damage (ie Xav jump in ToP), avoidable mechanics in low keys that newer players stand in).
Holy Priest doesn’t have the ability to do that. You pair that with its lower damage while healing and you get the 2nd worse healer in M+ currently, regardless of the fact that it’s the best in healing throughput in raid
You are arguing the complete opposite. You want talents added that only make sense for your niche, regardless of whether they add any value to the other pillars. This is bad design. Good design avoids special casing every talent and provides talents that are robust enough that you can have multiple viable builds across different pillars.
There are myriad factors at play here. Do you need a lust or brez? Do you need someone who can get a buff in a particular key? What is their io and history? Diversity of needs is a far better approach to balancing the meta than trying to make every healer have the exact same capabilities. Holy priest does not need to fundamentally change from its own niche to encompass other healer niches to be competitive.
There are only 6 healers, and someone is going to be on the bottom. Blizzard’s strategy has been to pull back front runners and then buff stragglers, and that’s exactly what they’ve done this patch. Ion has shown that players will complain regardless if there is a 1% difference between specs or a 20% difference.
It’s also very dangerous to think of balance in terms of the 99th percentile, it’s by definition balancing for the least amount of people. Watching Ellesmere is fun, but should the game be balanced around world first keys when said balancing would upend the bell curve and cause a spec to become massively overtuned? Of course not.
But Holy Priest has the exact same utility as Disc.
Less, in fact, since Disc as pre-active healing with shields, Pain sup and Barrier, whilst Disc has Guardian Spirit and nothing else.
I’m in agreement on the diversity of different specs, but disc and holy happen to be the same class, so that doesn’t apply here. One is just better than the other unfortunately.
That’s a bad faith argument.
You’re saying that like I’m some niche player; I’m talking about PvE here, which is 2 of the 3 end game pillars (raiding and mythic+). If anything, you are the minority here.
And there’s plenty of spells and abilities that are completely useless in PvE that are great in PvP. For example, I believe Living Bomb has (or had) an 800% damage increase in PvP relative to PvE. If Living Bomb were to need buffs in PvE, should we withhold that just because of PvP? Ot should we just buff it and change the PvP modifier?
My talent ideas can be tuned to be useful in PvP. You’re just assuming they will be either OP or useless, which is a flawed argument and has no backing, especially when these talents can get tuned separately.
This is a ridiculous statement. Healers should all do around the same damage, disc shouldn’t do more because some of their DPS is converted to healing.
Damage Reduction, in the classic sense, should probably not be something Holy Priests get: it’s more a Discipline thing.
Holy Priests are predominantly reactive, though, with the buff collection set-up needed for Prayer of Healing builds to work it’s less reactive and more proactive but it still has spells like Power Word: Life. Anyway, Ray of Hope is effectively Damage Reduction via throughput. You’re reducing (or eliminating) the total amount of damage received within a window of time by throwing healing the problem and the end result is what gets applied to the health bar.
“The” easy solution to DR issues is to allow HPriests to use this spell in PvE.
Symbol of Hope, our support element, of helping people help themselves, could also use some buffing in M+ but… with this talk of no longer being able to see ally defensive use… I’m heavily concerned about the future of this spell.
No it doesn’t. Holy priest has a mana and defensive CD return, that’s huge in a raid setting. It also has a huge stun.
Holy priest still gets big shield and has GS which is preemptive.
That’s not clear to me at all. Holy priest has edged out disc in raid before and been in world first runs, it’s currently the meta in PvP, it’s only weakness is m+ and it’s not really even about a lack of damage reductions it’s just spammy and bad at the cleave healing required by the refocus on frequent aoe damage design we’ve seen in TWW.
You are talking about tuning around Ellismere, level keys that’s niche. Like I already said, Holy is already good in raid, in fact it scales far better than disc in Heroic with flexible raid sizes that go beyond disc’s ability to atonement a full raid.
No one wants PvP specific modifiers, they are a necessary evil that’s best to be avoided. You also aren’t talking about tuning specific spells, you’re talking about adding completely dead talents that would be effectively turned off in PvP, and not that useful in raid. Your entire focus is on high end M+.
It’s just math. Mathematically your proposed modifiers would make holy priest oppressively broken. Everything you have said so far boils down to wanting everything disc has along with the existing holy kit along with oppressive damage so that holy will be the obvious meta.
Holy has an identity, and it’s designed around that identity. Its most iconic ability is being able to keep healing after you’ve died. In my opinion, Holy is the introductory healer and it’s fine if it isn’t god tier in every pillar of content.
No this is completely wrong, and is the reason PvP currently has different modifiers. They are different game modes entirely and are to be treated as such.
This is just way too broken even by itself. Current holy priest can already do 10+ cpm on holy words, so Apotheosis is just going to be 100% uptime with Eternal Sanctity?