With the return of lightwell, I couldn’t be more excited. Especially since Blizzard has made this ability a final-tier talent. Unfortunately, the way the tooltip reads it has me worried. The following are some things I hope the dev team takes an additional look at.
1. Effective Range: The 10-yard range will most certainly make this a “dead” talent. Practically 99.99% of raiding is all about movement at a moment’s notice. Adding the ability to move the lightwell would not only be clunky but cumbersome. Extending the effective range to 40 yards would be the saving grace of the range issue.
2. Cooldown & Stacks: This issue, I feel, is a joint problem. Three mins for 15 stacks of healing seems a bit low. I feel like there should be 30 stacks at three minutes, and at 1.5 mins, there should be 15 stacks. Those figures seem more relative. This is especially true because lightwell always distributed minor healing in the past.
With all of that said, I feel like Lightwell is just such a signature ability and something that says, “Hey, there is a Holy Priest in this raid,” I hope this gets fixed and doesn’t become a dead talent. I know everyone has their opinions on the matter, but for someone who has been playing the game since the beginning, I feel that somethings that are old can remain new. In this case, a healthy return of lightwell would be so incredible for the Priest’s identity.
I would love to see some positive discussion on the matter from the Holy Priest community.
As things stand, plopping down a Lightwell says a lot more than that. It tells everyone in that raid that holy priest probably has no idea what he/she is doing.
Since they’ve once again said they ran out of time on actual class design, I wouldn’t expect any usable form of Lightwell. Like everything about the talent is wrong: its range is wrong, its healing is wrong, its design is wrong, its cooldown is wrong, whatever philosophy was responsible for producing such a bad concept is just… wrong.
Anything Lightwell can do Holy Word: Sanctify, Divine Word: Sanctify, CoH and PoH and our proper raid CDs do better.
Side note: FF14 implemented their own version of the Lightwell for White Mages, called the Liturgy of the Bell.
It’s almost as bad a meme over there as Lightwell is here, since you plop it down and it’s only triggered by damage to the healer. Honest to God you’ve got some guides over in that game then going so far as to suggest healer pulling aggro off the tank to proc the Bell. Which is mostly as dumb as it sounds and wouldn’t work if the game had trash like WoW’s M+ or raids.
But one thing they did to make it slightly less useless is to let you “detonate” the healing early. If that was combined with some kind of disorient or stun effect on nearby mobs, that’s about the only way I’d see Lightwell filling a useful niche. Casting “blinded by the Light” would actually be a fun talent as opposed to a meme.
It’s also not considered a meme at all. It’s one of their best healing tools in a lot of raid situations, because FFXIV raid fights quite often have damage patterns where the boss will pulse damage a few times.
Even in WoW, a version of Lightwell that worked more like Liturgy would likely be well received - because sometimes you have a Rot fight where it’d proc quite a bit because an AoE DoT goes out, etc. The biggest thing that makes liturgy useful though is range. Liturgy covers a good 1/3rd of the boss arena in a standard fight.
Well it makes more sense in FF14 so healers can plock it down and avoiding having to use any GCD heals as they go about their Glare spam. I’m not really sure if that would be as valuable in WoW with its different casting timings.
But really not my point anyway. From the logs I can see of the Bell I just checked it seems to basically serve the role and power of a raid CD, which I don’t think they’d want holy to have a third? Although maybe the Lightwell “sticking around a lot longer” could be its unique selling point as opposed to a burst raid CD, kind of like how Hymn has a lot of its value in the extended healing buff.
So there has to be some other way to make it relevant, although, the idea of plopping it down, letting it take care of the healing while you spam away with Empyreal Blaze etc. (maybe in combination with Divine Word: Sanctify) actually sounds potentially cool, mechanically speaking. But not at the expense of Lightweaver, I wouldn’t think.
Admittedly that’s how it might not be useless. Lightwell would be an interesting choice if it fulfilled the role of “automated healing” while you were busy DPS’ing, at least in some situations. It just doesn’t even look close to that at the moment.
If lightwell was simply an AOE heal like shamans and druids have fine. But nobody cares if you put up a lightwell, and people in your group will literally stand beside them on the brink of death and not click them and happily die instead.
Just reading the above posts, it has been written off. Apparently it bites. Good enough for me. Another dead talent nobody will ever use is fine. That is often the case with talents. You simply figure out what is the best by consulting guides or looking to how the best in the game are choosing them, and follow suit.
Nobody knows how good lightwell is, because the talent isn’t finalized. Once were into tuning passes, we’ll know. They could multiply its range by 5, up the health threshold to 75% and increase its healing all at once in tuning for all we know.
Lightwell has been rated between poor and useless (in PvE) in all the forms they’ve tried in the past. Since they’re not trying anything new with it, and the meta really hasn’t changed, its on track to be “PVP only”. The class tree is not supposed to be where PvP talents are, they are supposed to be in the PvP talents section.
But at least you can pick something else that isn’t a trash tier ability in its place.
Alas, Lightwell was seldom hampered by its tuning. It was hampered by the mechanics of it making it something that seldom was usable to anywhere near its potential. Be that because it required interaction from other players, or making it so that it would shoot out maybe 3 charges over its duration.
And in this case, it would be almost impossible for Lightwell to be tuned competitively with Lightweaver.
Holy priest already has a boatload of AoE heals and raid CDs - but without Lightweaver holy’s single target healing is sub-par at best. It’s going to be hard for any talent to compete with something that shores up one of the spec’s biggest weaknesses.
Lightwell isn’t a good bottom tree ability though. It’d be fine higher up off to the side or noded with something else.
It’s just not usable in its current form. 3 minute cd, abysmally low healing, and can’t be moved after placed.
You can’t use it in dungeons because the group moves pack-to-pack. You can’t use it in raids because you’re rarely sitting in the same spot for more than a few minutes. Its range is small making it only usable for melee range.
Lightweaver in comparison is playstyle changing and actually matters.
