I mainly PvP as a H Priest and had some ideas I wanted to share to reduce button bloat, promote more meaningful ability interaction and lean into design choices already available.
I’d like to discuss changing (for H Priests) the use of renew and shield.
Similar to how shield is baked into pressing Prayer of Mending (Oracle hero talents), more design choices like that would go a long way to making the spec play smoother. I’d love to not have a reason to press renew and have it embedded into pre-existing spells. I only use it as a way to provide 6% increased healing, otherwise I’d remove it.
Further more, and I believe this maintains Disciplines niche, is either some form of in-built damage reduction that can be applied to team mates, ideas could be either flat % damage reduction, reduction to a spell type (magic or physical) or an auto-renew passively applied over 6 seconds if they take a critical strike.
Hoiw about just unscrew it (and power word shield for that fact) and make it like it was somewhere between Cata and BFA. Before the Activision lay offs and the morons took the helm developing. A simple roll back would fix everything but these devs just keep doubling down on stupid.
This 100%. Renew just needs to be strong on its own again. Nothing needs to apply it passively, and it also shouldn’t be a maintenance buff. We should just be getting good value from the healing it does when we cast it, especially since it doesn’t apply mastery.
Renew has its place in niche settings, last boss in Mists, shamorak, 2nd boss in Dawn breaker, last boss in GB. On high keys passing out renews before large raid wide can be the difference between success and failure.
It’s just something I have on the bars half the time. I haven’t pvp 'd this season, but that’s what I use renew for.
I dropped this into another thread - I figured I’d add it here as well… since Renew is just a piece of a bigger issue all together.
So basically – Renew several targets that need it, slam CoH on them. Boom Renew is refreshed and empowered.
This will blend well into the Renew talents as well, and will allow further uptime on Renew, and possibly keeping it rolling for long periods of time.
In Dungeon/Delve content, proper management could easily maintain 100% uptime on Renew.
It would work well in PvP as well - If you have Renew rolling on already injured targets CoH would prioritize them, refresh the duration, and empower it. All with Circle of Healing giving an additional small bump in health.
This will never happen simply for how much stronger it would buff discs burst healing in raid. Currently a good disc on top of his CDs can get atonement on 20 people in preparation for a burst window. Adding CoH with the ability to apply atonement, and prioritizing targets without, means they could very easily get everyone in the raid covered by atonement every single time the Radience charges are up.
It would effectively look like CoH → Surge of light FH/renew/shield → Radiance x2 → CoH
And suddenly disc is set up with up to 22, and could easily add a few extra GCDs to get up to 25 before popping evangalism and suddenly the entire raid doesn’t even need to worry about damage.
Not only that but it happens quickly enough your mini-ramps would be up ~40ish seconds with radiance but even so the 6 second CD on Circle you proposed means they could easily maintain 15ish atonements constantly on the raid without CDs allowing them to provide massive healing through atonement.
TLDR – The changes you recommended would make disc the premiere raid healer and it really wouldn’t be close.
It should be intertwined with our Mastery.
Echo of Light: Your direct spells heal for X amount over 4 seconds. In addition, this amount is duplicated and stored, up to X. Casting Renew unleashes this stored healing on an ally.
Renew: Unleashes your stored Echo of Light healing on an ally, healing them for X, plus the stored amount over 15 seconds.
That’s it. That’s all it needs.
Then, you can modify spells in the Talent tree to make it more fun. ie. Cutting the time on Renew in half so it heals faster, increasing the amount you can store, allowing you to cast it twice before expiring, put out a little burst of healing when you reach the maximum stored amount, and have a nice little visual attached.
Imagine implementing this into Lightwell and having it either cast multiple fully-empowered Renews on people in a short-timed burst (Where you can intentionally stat for Mastery to make it more powerful), or keep is similar to the way it is so it tosses out those Renews over an extended period of time.
Side note: Lightwell should follow us, seriously Blizzard.
I’m okay with it as is. It’s not something to be pressed when there is reqd healing going out, but it provides a non-zero value added when casting prior to damage, considered during apoth, and on the run. It can be completely ignored by the average player and leveraged by a good player. Actually my favourite type of interaction.
If button bloat is an issue, there’s little consequence to remove it off of the bar.
The problem I have with it in this way is that it’s essentially just Plea, which was removed because it provided nearly zero value aside from applying atonement. They shifted the role of atonement application to PWS and reduced its value, decided they didn’t like that, and then we got the situation we have currently.
The problem is that the damage and healing philosophy has changed - PWS shields for hardly any value without modifiers now and Renew provides no value most of the time and any value it does provide would have immediately been provided by Atonement anyway.
They may as well simply remove the cooldown from PWS, nerf it if they have to, remove Renew from discipline, and adjust the value of Rapture and the other “big shield” modifiers accordingly.
Plea’s problem wasn’t just providing no value, it was the math problem of mana efficiency that was too complicated for people. Pretty sure they said as much when they made PW:S worthless and the main applicator.
Can we just make Renew do good numbers? This isn’t complicated. Blizzard can and has separated tuning of abilities shared between specs before, and can even do that for PVP, the fact that they abjectly refuse to do it is no good excuse.
Hots in general are never strong on their own anymore. Even for Druid, they basically do nothing unless you layer them or boost them in some other way (flourish). With pres, dream breath is a good hot, but needs to be echoed to move health bars.
If renew was made to be good on its own then it would need to do like 5 times more healing than it currently does. If they added some automatic application and proc for it like we had with season 3/4 in dragonflight then it wouldn’t feel as useless.
Personally I’d like to see it have a short cooldown but actually move health bars. Like a 6-10 sec CD for 1 mil over 6 seconds. Just a random thought.
They just need to make it longer so it’s more like a short buff, maybe 30 seconds long. Then they need it to heal faster based off of haste. If it can passively spread and stay applied it’d be a really good active combat blanket ability. Pressing it is useless at this point, it should just be auto applied more frequently. Maybe make it so if a renew procs on a player that already has renew, the original renew instantly heals for full amount and leaves a shield behind for any overheal.
Holy Priest mastery is one of the few masteries left in the game that’s remained the same for years. It would be interesting to enhance it and shake it up in some way. It is rather straightforward and a bit boring. No need to make it overly complex though.