It’s not the best iteration I’ve seen of the spec, but I always come back to it. Dunno what it is, I like it that much.
I will say this is probably the worst I’ve seen it.
The reactivity of it is fun for me. You can kind of exist in the moment as holy rather than prepare for everything and it lets me focus more on mechanics and timers etc.
But it’s just so painful to aoe heal. Like something has to be coming for it you’d think.
The funny thing is we have had prayer of healing forever but it’s been damn near useless lol. I can remember that fact as long as I can I’ve played holy priest(since s2 of shadowlands).
Blizzard has to be aware of this and they either have some huge changes coming for priest or they just don’t know what to do
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PoH was king during BFA. Holy just spammed it in raid because you could get massive amounts of Echo of Light bonuses so it’d be 15% PoH and 85% Echo of Light healing.
Shadowlands is when they killed off PoH and it’s been dead since then.
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Or spirit shell as disc with it in MOP. Blanket your raind in all the shields lol.
Circle of healing was great for years too.
That sanctify buff will change nothing either other than some artificial HPS increase in logs.
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People commenting about “Holy is fun”, “I don’t have issues playing it”. Gratz, you’re not even playing at a level that is remotely competitive. I never said I dislike Holy Priest as a class/spec. I’ve played mostly Holy since I started this game in Vanilla. I’ve been a Blood Elf since the race came out, since I loved the WC3 Priest units. Nobody is arguing popularity, or the way the spec plays. It’s a dog spec because it’s under tuned and has little to no answer to how the game mechanically works.
- We severely lack spread healing, a Disc for example gets free atonement burst heals on demand.
- We lack mitigation. Outside fade + flash healing ourself (talented), and getting a crit on ourselves or others (another talent), we have zero mitigation. Our shields are super weak and only account for a very small mitigation to allies on demand.
- Our main single target save is Guardian Spirit, which in today’s M+ and raid climate is actually worthless. The way damage is dealt now pretty much always procs lethal hits on your target so you’re either hit with a 3 min CD, or the target dies from full HP to zero instantly. There’s not a lot of value in more healing when healing isn’t the issue.
- We are wet noodles outside of CDs, whether it’s a Premonition/Halo, or Salv/Apoth. In raid Divine Hymn is pretty good, but it is trash in an M+ environment. In general if you’re trying to Hymn in a higher key your group is dying with out stacking other CDs, it just heals way too slow, and not enough. You can couple it with Coagulum trinket to give a mid CD burst heal, but it’s still not good.
- Our damage is capped and it’s mediocre. Disc pumps damage and gets free AOE healing out of it constantly. We have to stop doing damage to heal our team. Of course with a good team, healing is minimal in many cases, but without mitigation, not constantly topping your team can result in random deaths.
Stop conflating popularity and the satisfying whack-a-mole gameplay with power and viability in content. Two separate issues here. Holy Priest objectively sucks right now, even with the buff we’re not going to be good.
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With how close all the healers are in overall hps a 2-3% increase is enough to nudge us up one spot on the hps charts.
The issue atm is with our tier set bonus pumping so much power into Flash Heal / Heal at the expense of everything else. It’s also going to be an issue when it goes away because Holy will take a big performance hit unless the next tier set bonus replaces the lost healing.
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Curious how badly we’d be performing if halo wasn’t full healing everyone when it’s not supposed to.
That’s a myth about Halo being bugged.
Each pulse back-and-forth of Halo is treated as a new cast and it DRs with each target hit.
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“Satisfying” and “Whack-a-mole” definitely being subjective. It’s similar to the discussion in Shadowlands about Power and fun. To some, being powerful is fun. I’d argue Flash Concentration was powerful, but was NOT fun. Being locked into Lightweaver now is not fun. It’s simple, it’s effective* (heavy asterisk), but they’re not fun. That Prayer of Healing and Circle of Healing are often better off not taken is not fun. It goes against our spec description.
In City of Threads, the solution to some of those boss fights should be to press Prayer of Healing. I don’t even care if it’s Flash Heal ⇒ Prayer of Healing, or Divine Word ⇒ Holy Word: Sanctify ⇒ Flash Heal (assuming no LW stacks) ⇒ Prayer of Healing … but the “heal 5 people” spell should be good for healing 5 people)!
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I do 700k using halo, cirlce of healing and prayer of healing, and thats about it, at around 600 ilvl. Havent even really pushed my alt to see what it could do if I cared. Not sure why youre screeching.
That’s exactly my point. We have to spec into AOE healing with a ton of points, unlike other classes. And when we do that, the heals still completely suck. We have no answer to spread heals like every other class does, and we also have to give up everything to get it. Disc has a boat load of short CDs and mitigation that can easily be applied before a mechanic goes out. In every situation you know exactly what damage is coming and when due to timers making Disc the most trivial spec to play, especially with how they’ve been super streamlined.
My favorite thing about WoW is getting into a key and then getting kicked instantly once they realize I’m not a Disc Priest. Meanwhile I’ll be like 50 IO higher than everyone else in the group. Hard to blame the players for the failures of the devs. Holy is objectively weaker, and it’s my fault for playing it into +13s and higher.
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I love divine word but nothing can complete with lightweaver and it makes me sad.
At 600 ilvl prayer of healing is probably doing less than 90k healing per person for 110k mana and circle would do slightly more for less mana.
One flash heal or heal will eclipse that without any modifiers. Factor in the tier set, trail of light and binding heals and there’s 0 reason to ever use prayer or circle. They simply don’t do anything.
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I was being a little hyperbolic for sure. But in the content Ive done with my priest I dont use flash heal or heal very much, maybe 5-10 casts during a pull. I think i have the 2 pc bonus but not the 4 pc. Since my raid groups often have 4-5 healers I just usually cast the aoe/group heals because I’m a lazy priest lol. It just my own anecdote that I seem to have stronger HPS at 600 ilvl on my priest casually casting aoe heals than on my 620 ilvl Holy paladin and getting extreme carpal tunnel from having 10 gajillion casts per minute. This expansion has been really odd imo healing wise. I say that as someone who has healed on most healing specs in some way for the last 10 years or so.
There’s definitely more of a skill cap, and even more of a required strategy on healing this season, for keys and M+… maybe the same for Mythic raiders. But it has to do with the shear amount of CDs we have now, and the power level of those CDs. Getting in a rhythm for when to use them and to have them available is paramount to big hps numbers.
It’s not even bad healing +14s as a Holy. The biggest issue is that other healers are so much better, groups won’t even take us.
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This is a culture of the game issue, not a balancing issue.
Perception of meta is much more influential than raw number tuning.
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No, at a certain point other classes when not balanced are so much better they run away with the game. Sort of like Demon Hunter in Dragon Flight. Also, you can’t blame the player base for not taking a healer when there’s like 3 healers this season that have more answers to literally everything than every other healer. Holy is capable of pushing very high, but needs to be played around unlike Shaman and Disc for example which can plug and play and be pretty successful.
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Every class needs to be played around to some extent. I’m not saying you’re wrong about your frustrations with Holy. There are some glaring issues. No poison cleanse comes to mind as a basic one for priest as a whole.
My main contention is that players are more often the ones who decide meta than actual numbers. Some mechanics certainly favor some classes toolkits over others, but no class is designed to take on every challenge on their own. Coordination is required regardless.