I’d roll a shaman for keys but I need the gear on my priest so it’s pointless.
Leveling my holy now. I like to prioritize PoM. Is that wise or worth talenting into? I just find its concept really cool
In keys there’s a Resto Shaman fotm going on so they’re 50% of the healers on anything +10 or higher. The other 50% is evenly split between the other 5 healing classes.
What’s driving the FOTM is player perception more then anything because Resto Shamans were the only healer that received an overhaul in the beta whilst not receiving massive nerfs like Mistweavers and Holy Paladins. Historically people tend to gravitate towards the specs and classes that received overhauls during patches.
Prevokers in raid are just flat out overtuned because they’re 15% ahead of all the other healers. They were like this during the beta and it was only when the world first guilds double stacked them did it became a problem. They nerfed the healing checks this week on 2 of the middle raid bosses and will probably hard nerf Prevokers soon.
Is Holy dead in M+? No way. Holy feels like it’s the strongest its been compared to the last couple of expansions. It’s just not going to be FOTM status because Priests received zero updates the entire beta.
I still get invited to about 80% of the keys I apply too so this season isn’t as bad as some other ones where there was a hard one healer meta. I would get invited to maybe 10% of the keys during those seasons.
Stats don’t lie, isolated anecdotes are misleading; individuals might be able to get into groups because their io is high respective to the current average, but holy priest is currently the worst or second worst healer when ranking healers by key success rate. And the gap isn’t even small either, groups can increase their success rate by up to ~10% just by not picking holy priest.
Honestly, just play disc in keys at this point, their healing output is very high, and they have far better ways to heal the group. They don’t need to do anything special, or demand the party to play perfectly in order to heal the toughest M+ bosses on 10+.
This isn’t helpful, I’m sorry. Most people are getting absolutely slapped playing holy in 7s and 8s. So sure. Maybe you’re the Holy Prodigy. But you’re not representative of the majority who are struggling.
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There’s a reason why I’m posting advice and suggestions for others to follow if they so choose too.
I feel like every non-Shaman healer has to play better or rely on their groups a lot more, which is kind of wild to me. I might end up taking a break until they fix some of the healer balance a little. Shaman deserve to be in the spotlight, but my god, the other healers should not feel like a liability.
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That’s a bit of a head scratching statement because if Resto Shamans are 50% of the healers they’re also 50% of the healers in bricked keys.
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Most people are getting slapped playing in 7s and 8s period. And I think it’s largely the death affix that they shouldn’t have added.
7s and 8s are around the level of 17s and 18s in an older season - something the vast majority of the playerbase never did, but also more punishing on death. The absolute top keys currently are 13s for the harder keys, and +10 is a large gap from +9 in difficulty.
It’s not that Holy priest is bad this season. It’s that dungeons are harder for a huge amount of the playerbase, and people in this thread are being very myopic to the spec they play. IF you were already pushing to the mid-20 keys in previous seasons, this season doesn’t feel too hard. If you were capping at the +20 level in DF, you’re going to struggle to get your 10s done fully geared.
There’s really nothing preventing Holy from progessing this season (besides maybe invites). The spec is functioning pretty well, and can pass all the healing challenges. There’s spots that it’s better than Disc.
Priests as a whole lack utility that makes them attractive to groups, but it’s not like they’re in the dust left way behind in key levels.
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We also need to account the group as a whole. A healers job is significantly easier if the group themselves know what they are doing.
I didn’t want to do grim Batol, especially since it just sucks…periodt.
But a group i was in, we were straight farming that dungeon and i had a fantastic time healing. We couldn’t finish our 6 because of a bug causing the 3rd boss to reset after knocking us up. But we would have 3 chested it.
And there are other keys where its a +2, and its a wipe fest because of the players in the group.
So healing as holy is fine. I honestly am not having trouble at all. There are instances sure where i feel less powerful, but maybe i just wasnt paying as much attention as i though i was.
I think the average (or even non top 10%) player is just suffering much more heavily this season. I doubt it’s holy specific. My groups I play with have quite a difficult time right now, and I can’t “save” the key. We tried an 8 NW and on dragon boss, a few missed volleys, auto death to all, 1 dps down, not clearing ads, auto wipe, stitchflesh boss- 2nd ad comes in for any appreciable amount of time. Yup we’re dead. We tried several times and we all had to get in the rhythm of everything, but for an average group any mishap, there is no coming back from it. So my experience is not so much feeling were inadequate, but more so in the sense that the keys are currently tweaked to sustain a level of difficulty higher than before… we and likely all other healers just don’t have the above and beyond capabilities to circumvent a small mishap as were expected to use our tools efficiently to get thru expected damage.
A little ironic that raids on the other hand feel the opposite, the average players on a heroic raid, feels like there more wiggle room for mishaps and we can make make that extra push to counter some of these.
Holy is not dead, and is totally capable of doing high end content both in Raid and M+.
But saying holy is in a good spot is a bit misleading.
A holy priest has to do way more micro management in their healing and cooldowns.
The spec needs a talent revamp, something alongside what Arcane, Hpal or Mistweaver had during Dragonflight and Beta TWW.
We still have many less tools than other healers while having ok throughput.
So yes, Hpriest is good for high end content and is viable. But in a comparison against all healers across the board, hpriest is totally on the weak side.
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Compared to DF S1 and SL S1, this season so far is a lot easier overall in terms of the healing checks.
DF S1 had some of the most brutal bosses and trash to heal on-top of affixes that were mainly healer only problems. You also had to heal that season without the single target healing buffs that came in S2 and beyond.
SL S1 was just a different beast. You had to time the keys instead of the current point system and the dungeons were very hard dps checks which required comp stacking. Tyrannical was also +40% boss health for a while and you REALLY noticed when it was Tyrannical week.
TWW in comparison is a lot better balanced overall and has a few problematic bosses mainly almost all of them are in CoT and Stonevault. Stitchfest is also another problem because you HAVE to triple spear and lust to kill them otherwise good luck. Those dungeons bosses are easily +2-3 key levels higher then the other dungeons in terms of difficulty.
Most of the bosses this season just burst out damage over 5-10s and you have 20-60s before the next round of AOE. This makes the healing challenge not just a raw HPS check, but an actual preparation check because you have to plan cooldowns around the next abilities.
Overall this seasons like a 5/10 in difficulty and if they nerf a few of the problematic bosses it’ll be a 4/10. DF S1 was easily a 10/10 in comparison. The biggest key bricker this season is tanks dying and there’s often nothing I can do about it because they go 100% to 0% in 1s. I ran Siege many times on a +10 and +11 and 80% of the tanks fell over on the 2nd pull usually.
I do feel like the penalty of -15s off the timer for deaths should have been pushed up to +11s if anything. 9s and lower you can still time with 5-10 deaths, but 5 deaths on a +10 will almost certainly brick your key.
If you’re looking at it objectively, and comparing very high keys to 11s, yes. I pretty much agree with this. There’s some exceptions where personal responsibility and defensives come into play for sure - some bosses have things that will just outright kill if screwed up.
But if we’re talking about people who normally did 12s or 15s as their high point and they’re moving into +7s now, it feels way harder to them. That’s what I was saying. Even trying to compare it at a +10 level - people who capped out at 20s are not going to be able to time a 10 right now. With the key levels being as condensed as they are, and 10s being a much larger difficulty jump than previously, things feel very weird right now, because people are used to pushing higher key levels gradually.
Going from a +5 to a +15 in DF for your average player was a couple weeks and the whole time you’d make progress like ‘Nice! I timed something 2 levels higher than my best! Let’s try and get the other keys up to that point!’
Now those same players are fighting for 1 key level - and they’re not used to it. It feels like you’re barely progressing but hitting walls that you didn’t hit for several key levels in previous seasons.
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This has been my experience so far as well ^
I honestly feel like it is because of the change in where the crests are dropped. I think I have like 30 something of the top crests so far where as previously it was easier to push up keys to where you could farm the top crests to upgrade your gear. I do not think I ever used enchanted wyrms for crafted gear and here I am this season with 2 crafted pieces using the equivalent.
I know that the 9/10/etc keys will feel better with ilvl but man is it so much harder to get over that hump to get it this season.
Not a bad thing though, not whining, just expressing my opinion on why, to me, this season feels harder.
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Ok except not always. There are in fact periods in which a holy priest can’t cover for if the DPS doesn’t do their job that a shaman for example can, and this is the utility gap.
Far more often when a player says “we don’t have the throughput” more often than not should be read as “I can’t cover for X mistake a group made”
This results in other healers who can cover for DPS mistakes, see Shaman atm, being taken while others are shunned outside of smaller circles creating the scenario people are talking about in which people either won’t let them come because they don’t realize they made mistakes and it becomes “we did it with a shammy but you can’t bad healer” or it creates the perception that Holy healing is low because the check is artificially inflated by lesser skilled DPS, and a lack of tools to cover.
In either case the healer pays the price for DPS stupidity both in terms of watching a key get bricked, if they made their own, or getting rejected from groups for, effectively, not having the tools to carry them like the meta healer can.
Ignoring this problem and saying its all about the healer playing well is both dismissive and elitist.
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Umm, the head scratching statement is yours. There are quite a few sites out there that record which healer specs contribute the most or least to a key’s success rate.
I don’t know how exactly you made the ridiculous jump in logic from “50% of the healers in keys are shamans” to “therefore 50% of the healers in bricked keys must be shamans”.
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They’re not totally wrong. On average, that’s going to be true in the vast majority of cases. Just statistically, it’s very rare you’d see something super different. Like this kind of discussion comes up in Mobas, which have way better tracking sites - where it will be a discussion like “well only the absolute best people play this character at a high level so their winrate is obviously only super high at top elo and it’s terrible below that!” But when you isolate the numbers it most often turns out everyone is usually failing/succeeding at the same rate regardless of rating.
I’m also not aware of any site that actually tracks the data of percentage of runs timed vs untimed. It’s all popularity/score comparisons. The stat would be inaccurate for WoW anyway - because abandoned keys wouldn’t be counted and at a high enough push level people just abandon keys the second it looks like they’re not timed because they’re there for score and not loot. But it would still be very interesting data to see.
I didn’t play SL or DF. I returned for TWW because people said Blizz was finally listening and gifted me the xpac.
And I load in to this broken mess of my class.
I’m not “used” to anything. I’m just trying to play the game and it feels TERRIBLE. The class feels TERRIBLE. If they want to keep damage this high then fine but at least equip Holy Priest with tools to handle it. We can’t Flash Heal spam our way out of this one lads. And frankly I don’t WANT to. I have a spellbook! Make the spells not garbage.
You definitely heard wrong if Blizzard was listening during the beta. We had a 4 month alpha-beta with minimal blue post feedback to class changes.