Since Flash heal is getting a 40% buff, when is heal going to be used at all?
Lightweaver currently does stack twice, but the values don’t increase per stack
At 1 stack: Heal cast time reduced by 30%, healing increased by 15%
At 2 stack: Heal cast time reduced by 30%, healing increased by 15%
Even with the cast speed reduction, Heal is still slower than flash heal for almost identical healing.
It kind of seems like it’s a ‘tank healer’ talent but tanks have so much sustain you are only really spot healing them anyways and focused on the rest of the group. If they are dead set on changing it this way, maybe buff Everlasting Light to have heal increase by 50% based on the targets missing health? Thoughts?
Heal is also buffed 40%, but Lightweaver will continue to be underpowered compared to Divine Image - which will have improved uptime thanks to the tier set.
Lightweaver is much more attractive now, especially because DI got some nerfs, too. I really don’t think it’s gonna be bad, especially because Lightweaver’s been bugged in a way that’s advantageous to it this this entire expansion - and it’s been reported several times but they’ve still not done anything about it. Lightweaver buffs your next 2 heals so long as you spellqueue the second heal, just like Emp. Blaze eating your Holy Fire spellcasts. So every flash heal actually enables 2 buffed heals.
I can honestly see a world where we drop Answered prayers, and play Divine Word + LW in raid, using Divine Word on Serenity and having windows of basically giga ST heals. It doesn’t sound fun to me, but it should do numbers. More depends on damage patterns than anything.
They didn’t nerf DI for single target heals which is really the only important part of it.
The healing reduction to Dazzling Light + Blessed Light (the AOE + POM heals) is counter-balanced by the fact that our 4-piece is an extra 1-3 Holy Words a minute. That’s an extra 8-24s uptime.
On the PTR Dazzling Light does about -6k less overall healing a cast… 4 Holy Words = 24k less healing… Just one extra Holy Word proc from the set bonus washes out the loss. So the TLDR is that we’ll do the same or more DI healing next season.
For single target healing the higher uptime on DI + more Holy Word Serenity’s will make us have a lot of on demand spot healing.
MW + DI is and has been basically the wombo combo build for all forms of content since DI was updated. It just took a while for Jak, WoWhead, and the other big Holy Priest key runners to catch on to it and update their builds.
All the nerfs they slapped to Holy is basically them nerfing us for our tier set bonus…
I have posts on the forum arguing for DI from the 10.0 patch, before it got buffed or even made consistent on HW casts.
I know how powerful it is. And I’m not even arguing to not take it. I’d argue dropping Answered prayers/MW, and MAYBE taking Divine Word - but that last part really depends. That one’s more just a feels thing for giga ST heals.
BUT a 40% buff to flash heal/heal is a 40% buff to Lightweaver/Resonant/Trail (though trail took a nerf). And the tierset procs are a big buff to resonant, too.
And honestly Lightweaver wasn’t realistically THAT far behind in terms of HPS.
It’s something that would take a lot of mathing out, but with LW buffing every 2 heal casts, I’m fairly certain the HPS is competitive or straight better than the answered prayers/MW side of the tree. You’d still obviously grab the rest of the PoM talents, but heal is very spammable and the holy word CDR is huge, and I don’t really think the tier set renews on a couple more Sancs will be enough to make that difference.