Holy Priest Talent Tuning is... sad

Community General Discussion
1

So Holy Priest.

It’s cool. Straight forward healer. Other than Shaman it’s the most reactive healer in the game. Easy to pick up. Its CDR gimmick doesn’t really change how you play it. Used to love it.

Then TWW rolls around (and maybe this was an issue before - not sure, I mained it for the latter half of Shadowlands but didn’t actually heal with it during Dragonflight) and they just don’t take their AoE talents in a dungeon setting ever. No Prayer of Healing. No Circle of Healing. Which also means basically the full CD on Sanctify since you’re not taking the spells that reduce it. You have these whole 2 pages of talents and you’re basically a Flash Heal spot heal bot.

Makes me sad already.
At least you might use the AoE talents in Raid though!

Then 11.1 hits (maybe it was 11.0.5?). Circle of Healing deleted. Prayer of Healing and related talents slightly changed. Hero Spec buffs and nerfs.

Now Holy doesn’t even take AoE talents for Raid. You’re a flash heal spot heal bot in all contexts.

How is this seen as acceptable design for the spec?

I don’t get it.

People stopped taking CoH and PoH because they weren’t worth using in small-group contexts. So instead of fixing that they just saw low use and dropped CoH I guess?

Then the reworked PoH just apparently isn’t good enough even still? So what was the point? It used to at least get used in Raid, not anymore. Probably a result of which Hero Spec was dominant but still.

Maybe some of this stuff should just be baseline.
Or short of that, buffed enough to be worth taking.

Holy has felt like it’s ignoring half its kit all expansion and I hate it.
(And I’m still mad about CoH)

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Is this all just a retrospective? Some builds use Prayer of Healing now.

Personally I’d prefer they remove it and make a new AoE model for Holy.

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Some people use PoH now, but I think even if you do it feels bad to have to spend so many scarce points to make it MAYBE work better than just doing something else and just putting the points into other things.

I also think they should let you force prayer of mending to bounce with direct heals to make the numerous PoM talents more interesting outside of encounters with a lot of pulsing AoE damage. They did this in season of discovery and it felt great.

Several of the healers have too many 2 pointers towards the bottom of the talent trees as well that make you just a point or two off being able to do more combos.

I also which they’d give you a choice talent to make desperate prayer a passive like they did for renewal for druids.