Now that things have calmed down a bit and I finally have my main on maintenance mode (Druid if it matters.) I am seruously for the first time ever considering my priest as a serious alt. I was planning on playing mostly Holy with the ocassional Shadow in raids and stuff when I am not needed as heals. I was wondering how Holy is doing ? I noticed everyones playing with the Halo hero talents and it looks fun but is the other option not viable ?
I dislike discipline because I have never liked having to dps as a healer for me personally its a little overwhelming balancing that out with how much people spike in damage the way enounters are designed now. Thoughts ? And any advice or recommendations?
The top Oracle parse is usually pretty far down the rankings, unfortunately, and the top Oracle parse is doing ~20% less healing than the top Archon parses.
Maybe some of that is due to the mastery curve being steeper for Oracle, but there are plenty of cracked holy priests out there that if Oracle was competitive with Archon at least one of them would have pulled it off by now.
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Holy is doing well so far. It’s a great choice.
It sounds like you’re doing mostly PvE. Oracle and Archon are both fantastic choices for different reasons.
With Archon halo you get massive AoE burst for about 20 seconds that also gives you flash of light procs, giving you instant flash heals. This plays into our Lightweaver talent well since you then build up stacks for our Heal spell which will be faster and more powerful after using those instant flash heals.
It’s all very cyclical and satisfying. It plays well into itself.
Oracle is great for a different reason. Premonition gives us such adaptability in our tool kit, it’s fantastic. The cycling buff means each time it’s up, you’re benefitting. Whether it’s spamming Prayer of Mending or holy fires, or pumping yourself with heals to aoe heal the group. Or just getting a massive shield. each buff has its use and each one is wicked strong.
It can take a little time to get comfortable cycling through the buffs and planning ahead, but it’s a nice bit of complexity added to our kit that rewards smart play.
Unfortunately every healer should try some dps these days. It’s how blizzard has been trying to design healing. Thankfully holy has a super straight forward dps rotation that actually pumps pretty hard. Chastise buffs our Holy fire, and smite gets chastise back quickly. It all plays into itself nicely.
Holy is pretty straight forward. You see health go down, you cast a heal. There are a lot of little things you can do to improve, it’s got its fair share of depth, but at its face it’s pretty easy to start on.
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Yeah, I don’t see how to square that circle either - too many of the oracle talents are designed to be strong in a 5 man environment but don’t scale up to 15-20 people in a raid, and obviously Halo does the heavy lifting for Archon and it’s a raidwide AoE.
Maybe if the tooltip were actually correct and Oracle buffed PoM 40% (instead of the 25% it does in reality) it might stand more of a chance. That or they need to add in an interaction with Holy Word: Salv or Divine Hymn to give the hero spec raidwide throughput potential.
A fun, classic alternative might be if they really leaned into renew with the build and worked on some interactions there, say buffing Benediction and hard-casted renews.
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I am enjoying archon for raid, kind of nervous for oracle in keys next week as I still don’t have it down. That is on me as I am stubborn about addons. I will probably crack this next week and download some to yell at me about what buff is up next so I can be useful to the people I play with though.
I’m not a huge fan of too many addons either. Instead I added an extra bar in the UI editor, set it to an easily viewed area, blew it up to max size and put at extra Premonition button there. It’s unbound, so it just helps me track which buff is up.
Just make sure the rest of the bar is invisible so you don’t have an ugly set of empty boxes on your screen.
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Oh man, that sounds lovely! I will see if I can do the same and hopefully it will help my old mom brain lol. Thank you!
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If you’re having trouble with it I think I can copy the code I use for my personal set up.
Obviously you wouldn’t need to use what I use, but just see how I set mine.
Just let me know if I can help further 
Still haven’t seen anyone play what I think is probably the right Oracle build.
I have seen a couple parses from Oracle that are fairly good for the ilvl, though. Sikran has a parse in the top 100 and it’s 595 ilvl - the highest in that ilvl range is only ~40k hps higher. They were also running Divine Word/Lightweaver with no LOTN/Answered Prayers/Harmony.
Oracle is about where I expected. It’s pretty decent, likely slightly behind Archon. But it’s not 20% less by any means.
Still think most people should play Archon, especially for their first time on the fights. It’s WAY less to think about, doesn’t require a ton of timing, either.
Edit: Played my oracle build now that I’m finally raiding, and I’m parsing 98, so I think it’s pretty decent. I think anyone can play Oracle that wants to at a casual level at the very least.