It Looks Like Blizzard Listened For Holy...Kinda

Classes Priest
1

I posted in a previous thread a previous thread about how, if Holy is going to be good at throughput and that only, we should have so much throughput, we don’t know where to put it all.

Blizzard: Hold my beer.

I can’t post links for some reason, but in Build 35522 (on WoWHead) Holy just saw some insane buffs to spells.

There’s literally so much that I can’t post it all, but I’m happy to see these. It looks like Binding Heal might make a return, Benediction could maybe be viable in M+, and Enduring Renewal got reworked so now it looks like it will be in competition with other T1 talents. Also some crazy number changes, HW Serenity got buffed by an additional 200%. But the biggest thing to me is a potential new spell, Holy Prism

Holy Prism: Fires a beam of light that scatters to strike a clump of targets.
If the beam is aimed at an enemy target, it deals (75% of Spell power) Holy damage and radiates (50%70% of Spell power) healing to 5 allies within 15 yards.
If the beam is aimed at a friendly target, it heals for (100%140% of Spell power) and radiates (45% of Spell power) Holy damage to 5 enemies within 15 yards.

Pretty sure this is a Pally spell so it might be a typo, but still, crazy stuff

2

I saw the edit at the very end right as I clicked reply lol.

Unfortunately Holy Prism is a Paladin spell.

But the buffs do look real nice. Now they need to scrap Body and Soul and bring back Perseverance.

3

Yeah, I looked at it and was like, hold on this looks familiar lol. Although, it seems like Holy Pallys and Holy Priests get their powers from the same place, so it wouldn’t be far stretch for them to share spells. And Holy Priest can use all the help it can get from their plated brethren lol

All the other changes are ludicrous though.

4

I hate to be the bearer of bad news but these may not actually be buffs. It looks to me like all they did is move the power away from the aura and into the spells themselves

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5

Care to explain? I’m a bit ignorant on what exactly that means, from the auras?

6

So each spec has an aura that just buffs all abilities. Its a tool to make balancing easier. Instead if going through each spell and adjusting their numbers, they can simply adjust the aura. Holy had a +40% aura buffing all their abilities by 40%. Its probably a little more complex than than but you get the idea. The spell powers went up but the aura is now down to +0% from +40%

7

Ah, that’s an incredibly disappointing bait & switch if so. Thanks for explaining

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8

From our perspective yes, but from thiers it kinda makes sense to try to properly tweak all the numbers in the spells themselves without the aura messing with things and only use the aura when they need a quick fix

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The aura is down to 25% from 40%, not to 0%.

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If by “Listened” you mean did almost nothing to improve Holy in M+, then yes, they “Listened.”

Jokes aside, I love pretty much every change to Holy that has come with Shadowlands. They did good.

But what they’ve really done is Polish a Car that has the Check Engine Light on.

The (very positve) improvements don’t address the glaring issues.

Lack of Meaningful utility

Our only real Raid utility is Symbol of Hope and it’s …okay.
But Shaman now has Mana Tide Totem and it’s better in every way

  • SoH is a LONG Channel, Mana Tide is one Global.
  • SoH gives mana based on missing mana (So only really effective late in encounters), Mana Tide is flat, so it can be used early and often.
  • Soh has a really long CD, 5 mins. Mana Tide is 3 mins.

AOE Mana restore was our only real Raid Utility and it was unique to us. Granted it was barely useful at all but it was something, and now Shaman (Who arguably has the most and BEST Raid utility) gets one better than ours in every way.

No meaningful Damage Reduction of any kind

Damage Reduction is far too prevalent in the current Raid Meta, and is almost mandatory for a Healing spec to remain competitive. There are so many potential solutions to this it’s a wonder it hasn’t been addressed yet.

Here’s 5 minutes of brainstorming completely unqualified person:

  • Give Holy access to Power Word: Barrier (detracts from the identity of Disc, an inelegant and rough solution, but still a solution)
  • Divine Hymn Reduces Damage taken by 10-15% for Allies within 40 yards while channeled. (A simple elegant solution that makes Divine Hymn far less boring, and makes the channel less punishing)
  • Allies affected by your Renew take 5% less damage (Perseverance gives 15% damage reduction on yourself)
  • When prayer of Mending Heals an ally, it reduces the damage they take by 10% for 4 seconds.
  • Circle of Healing leaves behind a small patch of Holy Ground under the initial target for 3 second that reduces the damage of Allies inside it by 10%

Imagine the better ideas qualified game designers would find. I just wish they’d see how important this is to a healing spec in the current game. This isn’t Classic, it’s Retail, throughput is not everything.

We are most likely still going to be the worst M+ spec

It’s been almost 5 years now, fix this already!!!

Can we get ONE patch where we aren’t garbage in M+ compared to every other healer? just one…please…

  • We are the least represented Healing Spec in M+
  • We have objectively been the worst M+ Healer of every patch, in every expansion, since M+ was introduced.
  • Our Single Target sucks, even though Holy Word: Serenity is supposed to be the “Best” Single target spell in the game (Outside LoH)
  • No Damage Reduction (see above) and this is paramount in M+.
  • No Passive Damage, which has become almost mandatory for M+ Healers, and our single target is so bad we rarely have free time to DPS anyways.
  • Our Mastery is almost useless in M+. This wouldn’t be that bad except that we get so little value out of Haste/Vers so our M+ itemization is horrible.

If they are “Listening” then this is what we need for our spec to grow into what is should be:

  • Any sort of ----> Baseline* <---- damage Reduction.
    *Notice: the word is Baseline, not talent, not legendary effect…Baseline.
  • Talents or other Options that offer substantial improvements to our M+ toolkit.
  • Unique Raid Utility specific to Holy. We need at least one thing we are better at than any other Healer, it can be something small, but it should exist at the very least, right now it doesn’t.
  • Utility that sets us further apart from Discipline, there should be a reason to bring a Holy Priest over a Disc priest. Right now, there is no benefit since Disc has almost everything Holy is lacking and more.

Holy is so close, we just need a little more attention to grow the spec into what it should be.

1 Like
11

What am I missing here? This is what I see on wowhead for the current 35522 build.

“* Effect #1 Apply Aura: Modifies Damage/Healing Done
Value: 400%”"

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Renewed Faith (previously Enduring Renewal)
Your healing is increased by 10% on targets with your Renew.

This one looks fairly competitive now at the 1st tier, but I don’t know if I would use it for raiding or mythic+. I don’t renew enough people in raids to make it viable to use and in mythic+ I do keep renews up constantly, but that 30% transfer from flash heal (which is like 60% of your healing) to another target is better.

Holy used to have their own kind of stance system with Chakras when I played WOTLK, but that has been since removed.

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from mmo champion

Was:
[Holy Priest] Holy Priest core passive Increases damage/healing by 40%: Binding Heal, Circle of Healing, Cosmic Ripple, Divine Hymn, Divine Star, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Halo, Heal, Holy Nova, Holy Word: Salvation, Holy Word: Sanctify, Holy Word: Serenity, Holy Words, Penance, Prayer of Healing, Prayer of Mending, Renew Increases periodic damage/healing by 40%: Binding Heal, Circle of Healing, Cosmic Ripple, Divine Hymn, Divine Star, Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Halo, Heal, Holy Nova, Holy Word: Salvation, Holy Word: Sanctify, Holy Word: Serenity, Holy Words, Penance, Prayer of Healing, Prayer of Mending, Renew Increases damage/healing by 25%: Divine Star, Halo, Holy Fire, Holy Nova, Holy Word: Chastise, Holy Words, Mind Blast, Mind Sear, Penance, Shadow Word: Death, Shadow Word: Pain, Smite

To:
Increases periodic damage/healing by 25%: Divine Star, Halo, Holy Fire, Holy Nova, Holy Word: Chastise, Holy Words, Mind Blast, Mind Sear, Penance, Shadow Word: Death, Shadow Word: Pain, Smite Priest - Holy Spec. Priest - Holy Spec.

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They must be rebalancing the healing between Holy & Discipline is my best guess is why they removed the 40%. All that matters is your output at the end.

15

Chakras were introduced in Catalcysm.

Renewed Faith is a lot stronger when coupled with Benediction

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Chakras were out pre-Cata launch patch in WOTLK (same with the vanilla leveling world stuff). I remember using them because it was basically like toggling between raid heal mode and single target mode. Back then the playstyle of Holy was revolving around putting a renew on the entire raid and spamming circle of healing and discipline was tank healing and spamming power word shield on the raid before a big nuke came. It was two distinct playstyles you switched inbetween boss fights depending on what it needed. Having near infinite mana at the time and being able to get enough haste to hit the GCD cap encouraged these playstyles.

Then they went and did the whole discipline does damage to heal the group kind of thing to try and make it unique.

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Disc still relied heavily on shields moving forward, they just got the extra spice of atonement healing and DPS as flavor.

Yeah, I consider the pre-patch events as part of the expansion launches, as the expansion we are leaving behind is done with and the patch is for implementing the changes for the next expansion. But yeah, you are correct, it is technically Wrath content.

18

Chakhras had a 30 second cooldown, meaning you could swap between being poor at single target and poor at AoE, to being dreadful at single target and good at AoE.
You typically had one fight every other raid tier where boss mechanics & phases lined up and it actually worked well. Outside of those 2 fights, if you were part of a 10man, you were boned at all times, since you were required to do both ST and AoE healing. If you were part of a 25-man, you just stayed in Sanctuary the entire fight and let everyone else spot heal. It was a truly appalling mechanic and an albatross on the spec.

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I liked Chakras because I thought they were interesting but they certainly did end up being bad in practice. WoD was the only time where they were finally starting to get it somewhat right and then they just scrapped it.