The beta was honestly a waste of time. The only thing to test was the hero talent trees because they didn’t change anything else.
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There were tons of bugs to report. So I wouldn’t call it a waste of time even if I spent more time reporting bugs than being able to test anything.
I have never liked lightweaver. ever. This focus on having to stand and hard cast endlessly with Holy is getting obnoxious. It isn’t healthy for PVM or PVP. Lightweaver needs removed all together and heal needs to be treated for what it is, the base line low lvl garbage heal that should be nothing but an after thought by the time your are max level. Especially since Serenity requires flash heal to reset to begin with. Heal is nothing short of a wasted GCD and they just keep trying to force more and more power into it while the core kit gets neglected. Amplified even worse by the loss of the DF season 4 set bonus, Now we are even more flash heal dependent, more manna starved, and more struck stationary to cast while horribly immobile. We all know where this is going. Looks like my main will be an alt now.
great job blizzard. You really sure know how to take the fun out of Holy priest.
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I too dislike lightweaver, even back in SL. I’ve tried doing a few 12&13s this week with it, just feels like hot garbage. So I’m back to my DW build. I am curious if CoH will pull ahead this coming season. I feel like Oracle favors whatever build keeps a focus on PoM (which I’m also not happy about) So many PoM talents, I will never not complain about that!
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I love Lightweaver but I’m starting to think I am gonna absolutely hate Oracle. Everyone is praising it but I’m also hearing it’s taking a fairly easy rotation build of Holy and making it overly complicated. From what I understand you have to press certain heals at certain times and you have certain windows to do this or that for Oracle to shine…and I’m just like…are you serious? I don’t feel like having Disc’s overcomplexity in my Holy kit. If I wanted to play Disc for difficulty I’d do just that.
Of course this is just all from what I’m hearing…so I’ll have to play it and see.
If Holy heals winds up being an overcomplicated mess, and disc continues to just suck as is…I’m just gonna say healing TWW isn’t for me and go back Fire Mage. I just do not feel like being an everyman role with a brain power of nuclear engineer to work a spec to heal. And sometimes this expansion with disc…that’s how I felt having to figure out when to burst and when to push cds. I don’t mind it on Disc just because that’s the nature of the spec. But on Holy I love simple. Heal bar goes down, press button…we’re good. Dps a bit…heal bars all low…press button we are good. Where as Disc is all the pre shielding the pre ramping the pre cd pushing and then finally everyone gets healed with all the burst heals yay…but then you suck again and cant heal nothing til cds are off again. Yeah I’m over that.
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I mean… Heal counts towards serenity too.
If we’re being real about the history of heal/flash heal or really any other healer’s version of it (surge/wave, holy light/flash of light, etc) it was always meant to be fast mana inefficient heal vs slow larger mana efficient heal.
That dichotomy doesn’t really fit the modern game, and every single one of these specs cuts down casting the slower heal outside specific moments that talents mandate the cast.
Holy has it the worst, and I agree that Lightweaver has never felt good. In SL it was fun for a couple weeks but quickly became monotonous and shaved us down to a one button healer. After SL it’s just kind of a hassle to swap between both heals constantly.
This is not how Oracle works anymore. It’s just a rotating buff. You can play with it to be super optimal if you want, but realistically, it’s just a button you hit to give yourself a healing buff every minute. It always goes Insight → Piety → Solace → All 3 at once then loops back to insight. Insight is the only one that feels ‘complex’ and Piety is SORT OF? complex if you choose to use the overheal portion of it off yourself, but I struggle to actually call it that because realistically:
- Insight means you hit PoM or CoH 4 times because it gives them no CD.
- Piety played optimally in a 5 man group specifically you wings yourself and blast single target healing into yourself. In a raid, this isn’t even worth considering doing - you just keep doing your regular raid healing.
- Solace activates on the next single target heal you do, so just… heal someone taking damage.
None of it is particularly complex to learn. The worst part about it IMO is that it’s difficult to keep track of which one’s up next in a fight (even the symbols are pretty similar), so you’ll probably want a weakaura to tell you.
It is incredibly unlikely to if you’re talking dungeons. Lightweaver or Divine Word ST healing builds are gonna stay king. After they buffed Oracle, in 5 mans the best thing to do in high group damage scenarios (there’s a lot of these) is use wings on yourself (because oracle already gives you healing buffs to yourself specifically), pop piety and then single target heal yourself - which cleaves 98% of that healing to the rest of the group. It’s easily Holy’s best answer to very high group damage, and I really have no questions that it’s what people will be using if they’re playing holy this season (Jak started using it very recently too).
Not trying to rain on your parade here, but considering you’re pushing 12s/13s you’re probably in the range where you’re gonna try and play optimal builds over fun, and this is unironically our best 5 man healing tool. Archon Halo is OK, but it’s FAR better in raid.
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Have you tried Heal with Lightweaver and the single target talents now? It’s not a “garbage heal” and it wasn’t supposed to be an “afterthought” even if that’s what Blizz treated it as for a while, replacing the Greater Heal from Classic it’s our original Holy Word: Serenity heavy hitter.
I guess it’s fine if you don’t like Lightweaver but what would you have them replace it with? As far as filler goes it feels much more responsive to damage patterns, and mana-efficient than Healing Surge/Healing Wave and Chain Heal, e.g. and it’s much better than having nothing outside holy word resets.
Ok thank you. The way you explained it sounds soooo much better than how it was explained to me. If they did change it I’m grateful for the change. Because lemme tell you…it was finna be pure Archon over here. Like even in Mythic 10s I’m running Archon cause who finna play an overly complicated spec for no reason? You don’t have any shields? Oh well. I’m Archon baby! 
Oracle used to be random or something? well that would have been way cooler…
It had a random iteration, and it had an iteration where it was a rotating buff going insight->piety->solace and would rotate every time you cast a spell.
Resonant Words is competing against Light of the Naaru which imho is better overall. It’s 1 last cast in Apotheosis to reset a Holy Word and with the new tier set bonus it’s 5-6 Flash Heals to reset Serenity.
Resonant Words should just be 1 point… and a +50% bonus like it used to be. That would make Lightweaver + Resonant Words = Heal is stronger than Holy Word Serenity.
It’s just hard for me to make any build that takes Resonant Words. Desperate Times + Divine Word just feels more powerful because people spend more time <50% than before. Divine Word also gives you 15s of -20% reduced mana cost for your single target heals as well.
With so many healing cooldowns now you can literally chain Premonition or Halo, Apotheosis, and Divine Word to cover almost an entire minute of a fight.
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I’m think just sticking with archon
If they would clean up both the POM talent bloat and the COH talent bloat, I think oracle would be amazing in M+ when able to maximize both of them. especially with the cooldown reduction oracle offers. But as it stands, The Holy talent tree is the Holy priest’s worst enemy.
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I mean anything that broke up the line of 2 pointers guarding our capstones would be nice, as would expanding it to 4 or 5 capstones and not making them all exclusive choices.
As for LoTN vs Resonant Words, I’ll have to give that a try. LoTN is certainly easier to use, too - with Resonant Words there’s always the moments of high damage where it feels unnatural to weave filler spells in between, and as you say it isn’t 50% (or more?) like Shadowlands.
I really want to love Divine Word but it feels like it should be baseline to the spec, not such a major investment capstone investment towards the DPS side of the tree.
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Agreed. Resonant words is gating a lot of power for aoe healing with POH and COH as well. The fact that it is 2 points and have to share limited resources with things such as cooldown reduction kind of forces you to skip it or just get 1 point in it. and you can feel that it is missing. The fact that it is gate keeping so much power in such and awkward spot should be an immediate red flag to the devs.
Hadn’t been around for quite some time, but when it comes to Archon and Oracle, I’m actually surprised to say I’ll be leaning Oracle. Premonition of Clairvoyance is really powerful with Perfect Vision giving Premonition a 45 second cooldown (or 1.5 mins for a double cycle of Premonition) on tons of really good stuff. Almost 0 Cooldown Prayer of Mending and Circle of Healing along with Answered Prayers and Overheal being chained. Prepare to see Premonition ramps for Holy priest by priming for Divine Word → Premonition → Apotheosis → Holy Word spam.
I’ve taken lately to running Apotheosis in Raids over Salvation in preparation of the serious nerf we’re getting to Salvation resets due to the set bonus in DF. I cannot say if there’s any “heal the friendly mob” mechanics in TWW, but if there are, Oracle will be the best to handle it.
Ultimately, it’s a shame that we’re losing the free renew on Holy Word cast, which really should replace Benediction/Holy Mending in the tree, but everything else seems good. I will wager it may not have the flashy or hard hitting impact of Archon, but the moment-to-moment gameplay will feel far more impactful with decisions to make depending on the situation.
In the end I agree Oracle will likely be better for most content. I would say it might be tit for tat with Archon in raiding but will likely pull ahead in both M+ and PVP. But I don’t know what I think about it. Something just looks off with it. I guess once we dig in and start using it, It will likely feel better than it looks on paper especially with some practice.
For me it’s going to be Archon for raid and Oracle for M+, but Archon is still competitive for M+.
For raid: there’s no other pick than Archon atm because Archon Halo is 20-25% of your overall healing and all those healing bonuses from Oracle only add up to 10% or so of your overall. Also, the bigger the raid size the better Archon scales as well.
Oracle will out compete Archon though in smaller raid sizes probably <15 people.
I think the gap is closer than it appears once people get used to Premonition of Insight + Prayer of Mending to get more Answered Prayers or even Holy Words, Premonition of Piety and Premonition of Clairvoyance combining with Apotheosis to get a few more Holy Word spams for good AoE Healing.
My only questions at the moment since I’m not on Beta is:
1)whether or not Assured Safety and Crystalline Reflection work together with PoM
2)whether a 1.5 minute Clairvoyance is better overall than a 2 minute Clairvoyance with a 40% boost. I know people like to look at Piety with the 98% overheal conversion, but I’m still remembering Disc Ramps in shadowlands and how being forced into a boss mechanic after you ramped means it’s wasted.
All of the PW:S talents work, because it counts as a PW:S cast.
In raid, almost certainly the former. 98% is a lot and all, but in raid you’re not going to be trying to pump numbers into a full health target on purpose, really. It’s way better in dungeons where the group healing is powerful and you can cleave off of yourself IMO. I’d rather pair Clairvoyance with Hymn or Salvation.
Also the lower cooldown means more Insights.
But I do think it’s probably super hard to make up for Archon Halo with that.