Holy's niche?

Classes Priest
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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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12

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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21

This is why I like being in a smaller guild, where its more

GM “Ok guys __________ isn’t coming tonight, we need a 3rd healer or we don’t raid. John you mind changing specs?”

JohnOliver “Ok boss”

Less worrying about ok we need a druid for this fight, a disc priest would be helpful here, or we definitely need lolwarr to change over to his shammy for this fight.

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Provides statistics to substatiate what he’s saying

“You just want your spec to be bad, I can’t dispute the fact that they have little to no utility, but they see fringe play in world first races, so you should be happy”

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I want the spec to be great, but it’s missing the tools to be so. Holy is by far my favorite Healing spec, and for you to tell me how I feel is presumptuous, rude, and wrong.

I Mythic Raid as Holy on my Priest. They are by far the worst progression healer, except in very specific fights.

And being good in 1-2 fights as opposed to other healers being good in 9-10 fights is a pretty stark difference. If a DPS spec does half the damage of every other class, but are top damage in 2 fights, does this mean they aren’t a worse DPS despite being worst in 80% of situations? You live in a fantasy world of your own creation, every high end raider, every content creator, everyone who has first hand experience agrees, Holy is the bottom healer (except in PvP where they are okay), and needs buffs/changes to bring them up.

I don’t know if you are aware of the term “parsing” but it’s where you let a 1 DPS do all the AOE while everyone else doesn’t use a single AOE spell so that one DPS can get a Rank 1 or High parse. Healers do it too. Those “top logs” you are looking at are fights where the other healers ONLY heal if someone is going to die so that one healer can get crazy high HPS. Everyone does it (because it’s fun, honestly) but it skews logs and makes them inaccurate. This is done on farm content, which is why you need to look at logs during progression.

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He didn’t, though. He just said that the statistics are wrong because ‘early on in a raid tier they’re bad though’

Which also just isn’t true. If we move the scale to pre-nerf Nyalotha logs, Holy’s actually #2 behind only Paladin. This specific poster has consistently said things that just aren’t correct, literally didn’t understand how warcraftlogs sets up its M+ data, or was just dishonest about it (I still don’t know which). Because he won’t accept that when it comes to Throughput, Holy is consistently good. Even if when it comes to almost anything else they are bad.

No I don’t. I just understand that Holy has good throughput, which you refuse to recognize because you REALLY REALLY want holy to be worse than it is because you’ve deluded yourself into thinking that if holy is bad at everything, then maybe Blizzard will buff them. But joke’s on you, the only place they’re going to buff them is throughput. Remember when I told you that in that age old thread? And did you see that they got a literal % buff to their throughput as their most recent balance change?

But I still disagree with this absurd notion that they don’t work in raids. I’ve also been a mythic raider in several expansions. I haven’t touched my priest in a while, and DPSed in BfA, but I absolutely understand how to read logs, and I seem to know a great deal more about how aggregate data works than you do.

The fact you thought that people parsing for top logs was a gotcha is hilarious to me, as if it was a granted that I was specifically looking at the top logs, lmao.

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This isn’t where they are lacking. Have you seen a single post saying Holy needs to heal more?

No one said this, you keep misrepresenting what we say.

Wow, really? I never could have guessed… /s

I HAVE played my Priest…and other Healers, the difference in extremely noticeable. The argument isn’t that Holy trash and can’t do anything, it is that…

relative to other healers…

Holy is objectively worse. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if normal balancing happened but we have been the worst in M+ every patch for 4 years, and have been the worst in Raids for majority of those 2 expansion as well. They had moments in the sun but they were extremely brief.

Worst is used in relative terms, I don’t understand how people like you don’t get this. Holy isn’t a useless trash fire, it’s a great fun spec, but it’s missing the basic tools that every other healer has…cough…cough…damage reduction…cough cough…raid utility.

Meters aren’t the game.

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No, but I recall several saying that they had bad throughput in comparison to other healers, really. More than one was from you, in fact. You’ve also said multiple times that they have bad raid throughput as soon as you’re at 20 man content in mythics.

Uhuh. I suppose when you’re saying Holy priest can only do slightly more HPS than other healers in 30 man content and nowhere else, you’re saying they have great throughput! That makes a lot of sense, ok.

Second time you’ve said this, so let’s look at the ACTUAL data for healer throughput at the start of each mythic raid tier.

Uldir:
At the start of the raid tier, they were 3rd, behind mistweaver and discipline. First balance patch, Holy overtakes both and becomes first. From there, Discipline and Holy maintain top healers in the raid.

Battle of Dazar’alor:
Holy priest starts the tier at the top and stays that way for 3 months until Holy paladin makes them #2 in late may.

Crucible of Storms:
The wackiest raid tier by far, especially considering there’s so few logs. Holy priest started that tier at 3rd in throughput, and dropped far below the rest later.

The Eternal Palace:
The only raid tier that supports what you said. Holy started this tier lackluster, and by the time it was on farm and everyone was geared, they were 2nd.

Nyalotha:
Started the raid tier at second. Very quickly moved above the rest of the healers a couple weeks in. Maintained that top spot for a long time, only moving to 2nd again later.

We can do this for legion too, but the story looks much the same. Holy’s always had really great throughput in raid. It’s all they bring and they are very good at it. Normally, if they drop below anyone it’s because that fight has heavy stacking, or another healer got some astounding buffs (like the Paladin glimmer playstyle) that shoots them to the top.

Someone entered a thread about what Holy’s Niche was, and replied to me talking about throughput and flexibility to say “Lol their niche is that disc is betterrr” And when I responded to that to say ‘OK, but disc does suffer in several fight conditions, and Holy doesn’t have a fight condition that’s specifically bad for them, and that’s their strength’ you decided to argue about holy isn’t good at throughput.

Don’t act like this throughput angle came from nowhere and that I was saying Holy is some god tier healer that’s better than all others. YOU SPECIFICALLY WERE SAYING THIS:

And you’re FLAT WRONG about it. The reason Holy isn’t taken in world first progression has NOTHING TO DO WITH THEIR THROUGHPUT. Yes. I’m glad we agree. But don’t pretend like 3 posts ago you weren’t saying something completely different.

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