Holy's niche?

Classes Priest
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So I pulled this priest out of mothballs in preparation for SL. i plan on going Shadow/Holy for the duration (please lets not devolve into a discussion on soulbinds and covenants for hybrids) I haven’t healed on a priest since Cata Firelands was current content.

For Cata if memory serves we were a good but not great single target healer, mediocre large AOE healer, and a pretty good multi target healer (+1 or +2 targets)

But now… IF I AM FIGURING THIS OUT RIGHT, It seems that Holy is a really really good AOE healer, a “meh” single target healer and only +1 target healer if you talent into it.

Am I wrong in how I am reading Icyveins? Or have we become primarily raid healers now?

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The healing game has changed considerably over the years. There are no “tank” or “raid” healers anymore. Every healer can do each of those things and do it fairly well. I’d say holy’s niche would be two strong (not game breaking) raidwide healing CDs. They can shine in both spread and stacked encounters, ticking rot damage or even burst damage if they time their holy words correctly. They can sustain over a long fight and don’t seem to have nearly the amount of mana issues as other healers. They are arguably stronger in a raid environment, but still completely viable in dungeon content (until you get to keys past say, +20).

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Long story short holy is an OK raid healer. Everything else…well you can say that the class/spec fantasy of the holy priest is mediocrity.

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I’d say the “strongest” feature Holy Priest has going for it would be flexibility.

In a Raid setting you are not the best at any particular type of healing but you can do all of them pretty effectively and even swap on the fly to adjust to different moments of the fight (no need to fully re-spec or change your talents/stats you just focus on one thing or the other depending on what’s needed).

Sometimes I see Holy Priests who only do AOE and that’s imo not the most effective way to play the spec, it might lead to higher HPS sometimes but it’s not as helpful to the group as the one who can quickly adapt to what’s needed at any given point which will include periods of focused single target healing (and DPSing obviously).

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Holy’s niche is that it’s a jack-of-all trades, master of none. The spec has the most overall healing spells out of any other healing classes which allows it to respond and adapt to any kind of raid encounter. As a raid healer it can put out fairly solid throughput, has two raid-wide AoE CDs (all other classes only have 1), and can restore all the healers mana (twice in a fight if you time it at the start & end). You can literally play like a druid throwing HoTs on everyone or spam nothing but your AOE heals. So if you don’t like being stuck in one particular role then it can be fun.

In M+ holy is able to use its toolkit to pump through affixes like bursting, necrotic, etc. that give other healers a hard-time (especially Disc) and can do fairly decent dps (priests are on the bottom end of the healer DPS totem pole) as long as you properly weave your damage spells inbetween heals.

Utility wise holy also has a spammable tank CD with Guardian Spirit resetting to a 1 minute cooldown when talented. It doesn’t reduce damage taken, but allows the tanks to self-heal themselves for 65% more (tanks really do like 80% of their own healing), and also your own heals do 65% more. This gives you that kind of comfort zone where you can safely throw it around and when it does trigger: you just saved somebody from dying.

Most of the other utility is shared with other priests in general with Mass Dispel and Leap of Faith. Mass of Dispel will become more useful come pre-patch because you can now remove affixes with it like bursting. We can also shackle undead, but that’s not used at all in M+ (ccs pretty much aren’t used ever).

You also have Psychic Scream and Shining Force to interrupt adds, but requires aggressive gameplay, and being aware of your surroundings. This is especially useful in some dungeons where there’s mobs that do AoE damage or their spells will hit the tank really hard if cast. It also takes a bit of experience to actually learn what you need to help interrupt.

Healing wise Holy Priests can really power through anything that’s thrown at it in M+ because you have a big arsenal at your disposal. You can heal two people simultaneously with the Trail of Light feat with Flash Heal/Heal, dump renews, or pump out a few aoe heals and top the group off.

You’ll start seeing a decline in popularity around the +24/25 keystone which really is the extreme end of the rankings (its like being in the 3k arena rankings). It’s not because the spec is bad, but priests generally aren’t desired in the groups of the top M+ players (even Shadow). High 22+ keystones are usually run by groups instead of being pugged because everyone has to be on discord to coordinate.

I had the #7 priest on the EU rankings tell me this is the case. Below that… like the casual 1-15 or 1-20 range you’ll be able to find groups without problems.

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Holy’s niche is flexibility.

They’ve got good tools for healing a spread fight, they’ve got pretty good tools for a stacked fight, they’ve got pretty good tools for single target emergencies, etc. Where they are weak is when the fight focuses on one of those things.

For example, if a fight is almost entirely stacked, a shaman will be better. If a fight has your raid almost entirely spread out, a druid is better. If a fight is mostly single target burst, monk/paladin will be better. If a fight focuses on large group-wide burst patterns, Disc will be better.

But Holy makes for an adequate healer in almost all these situations in a raid, so as a healer slot, their use would be to have a healer that can adapt to most situations. Rather than something like Shamans who just aren’t anywhere near as useful if the fight is very spread out, or its specific utilities aren’t wanted.

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Holy’s niche is that you can easily switch to disc when things are getting tough, and you don’t have to level up a different character. Same niche its constantly had since they added spec swapping, now that I think of it.

Oh, sorry, you meant a reason for taking them instead of another healer? In a RAID?

  1. Mass dispel - oops, disc has this too
  2. Leap of faith - no, while this is unique, nobody’s taking you because of this
  3. Symbol of Hope - no, nobody’s taking you because of this either, although you would think it would actually be desirable, since nobody else has this and on paper it looks good. Maybe if mana mattered?..
  4. Spirit of redemption - oh wait, dying generally isn’t a great plan.

I do agree that we pretty much do have a healing spell for every occasion (while the other healers all have a weakness in one type of damage/healing pattern), but its not like our numbers are better than everyone else because of this. Strange. (Probably because everything except PoH/Renew is on a cooldown.)

Thinking, thinking, thinking… Salvation is a 2nd raid cooldown, but shaman has that (SLT/HTT). Offensive dispel… not really used in raid fights, but shaman has that too (Purge). Nope, not seeing anything else.

Mass Dispel is the only thing we bring over other non-disc healers that would be desirable. If only they didn’t occasionally booby trap it (and yes, if you haven’t been around for very long, they DO this) so that “no, you can’t use mass dispel on THIS mechanic, we’re explicitly making it unusable on this fight by wiping the group if you try” it would be stronger.

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Holy’s niche to me is heroic raiding. 30 man raid with 2 raid cds and several aoe heals makes holy priests the boss of heroic raiding

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You know… in a way that is sad actually

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Saw the recent buffs (?) to throughput healing on the beta for holy. Once again blizzard does not get it:

  • mobility
  • survivability, defensive cooldowns
  • brez
  • powerful consistent utility, not in a few niches

Blizz has released new covenant abilities recently like “flagellation”, so maybe there is still hope for something changing beyond small meaningless throughput changes.

If blizzard’s intent is that holy priest will be good in the “raid or die” focus of shadowlands, then these tuning changes are consistent with that direction. However that means this spec is still hot garbage in M+ compared to the horde of resto druids that will be out there.

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since it restores % of missing mana, using it early in a fight will net you around ~1% mana restored for sitting there wasting your time channeling it… So it’s a once a fight thing.

We’ve been waiting 4 years for those changes. I highly doubt we are getting them this expansion. Prepare for another entire expansion of being the least desired healer for virtually all content. 3 expansions in a row, that has got to be a record.

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What interesting about Holy spec is that it has an answer to pretty much any occasion that requires a healing, but at the same time this also created a situation where the Holy spec has way too many spells compare to Discipline and Shadow.

It took me a couple of minutes to distribute all of the Shadow and Discipline abilities around, but Holy took almost half an hour, and even after making a few macros I still had a couple of abilities left out unused, while toolbar for other specs had a couple of vacant spots instead

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+1 for raid heals… People whine and complain about DPS so their rep in M+ gets diminished.

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holy is better than just OK in a raid environment, it’s where they shine the most

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Disco’s still only REALLY better in raid content when that has predictable burst phases when it comes to throughput, and fights where barrier is a must-have. They’re always better in M+, and that’s largely because of how M+ is designed.

I agree that Holy has little to no utility. And as I’ve said multiple times on this board, it’s why they’re never going to be good in M+. Blizzard clearly doesn’t care about anything above the +15 range, and they view Holy as being a pure throughput healer. But they’ve never fallen out of raid viability. They were perfectly viable in several fights during BfA, they got used during vectis during the world first race by a number of groups (which is an insanely small % of players skill-wise). Salvation IS an insanely strong raid CD, so to act like it’s really NOT good and that other raid CDs are better or good stand-ins is asinine.

Yeah, Holy sucks in M+. Yeah Blizzard tends to only buff throughput on them and never give them a real tank CD, raid utility or even just a personal. But they’re not bad raid healers, and they never have been anywhere near as bad as this board pretends they are all the time.

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only in 25+ man content, they are objectively worse than every other healer (when played at the same skill level) Raids with less than 20 people, barring specific fights where one of the other healer’s kits don’t work ie spread fights as a Shaman. Holy only shines in 30-man Heroic Raiding.

I can’t see any reality where this is true. If Holy has less throughput than other Healers in everything outside of 25+ man raids. Holy being a “Thoughput” healer is nonsense, the actual reality is that Shadow and Disc have been extremely problematic for the game for the past 4 years and have required constant tuning/redesigns. The unfortunate side effect of this is that Holy has seen little to no Development time and has become stagnant.

It also doesn’t help that Blizz purposefully make our only Utility nearly useless in M+ by making every Undead immune to Shackle Undead and making the worst Mechanics Curses and Poisons with most Diseases being largely inconsequential in most dungeons…

Holy was constantly nerf’d all of BfA because Disc was too strong, because most Disc nerfs (smite, Holy Nova because Disc had the Azerite Trait) also applied to Holy for literally no reason. It’s one of the contributing factors to Holy Nova being utter garbage right now.

100% agree, Salvation is incredible, but it is also being nerf’d constantly. I can think of 4 nerfs in BfA and there has been one more in SL. But Disc also has Barrier which can “Heal” (reduce damage that would normally require healing) Just as much or more than Salvation, and it doesn’t show up on meters. So it looks like Disc and Holy are competitive on meters, but reality is that Disc is 15-20% stronger because of damage reduction is considered.

Holy has 1 Niche

30-Man Heroic Raiding. We can do slightly more HPS than most other Healers in that situation, but having 5% more Healing is not good enough to warrant having nearly no utility and no damage reduction.

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I didn’t say Salvation was terrible… I said it was a 2nd raid cooldown. And, it isn’t nearly as good (in a raid) as Hymn is. Just like shaman HTT isn’t nearly as good as SLT.

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You say this, but you can’t substantiate it, because it REALLY HEAVILY depends on the fight, and what healer you’re comparing it to. You can literally go to warcraft logs, look at statistics for Mythic on every BfA raid tier for all bosses, and find that Holy is never at the bottom, and almost always is top 3 HPS in mythic.

In fact, in prepatch they’re ahead of everyone else in HPS by quite a bit in mythic nyalotha. Makes you think.

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Farm content. They are always almost near the bottom for the first month of a raid. The are the worst for progression, and okay when you outgear the content and can brute force heal through fights.

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You are way too desperate for your spec to be bad if you’re trying to say that Holy is bad in raid, full stop.

They aren’t the worst for progression at all. They’re less desirable for the world first race, because those guys are in high need of utility that might let them cheese through mechanics. And holy still sometimes sees use on certain fights during the world first race, too. And that happened in both BfA and Legion. So the idea they’re the worst healer there is still not universally true.

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