Ok so if you are running Rapid Recovery which increases the healing of your Renew by 35% at the cost of reducing its duration by 3s, apparently you CANNOT increase the healing of Renew an additional 30% with Divine Word.
I didnt look into if Divine Word’s critical strike bonus of 20% stacked on Flash Heal with Crisis Management which gives Flash Heal a 15% increased chance to critical strike but I would assume not.
So here is my opinion. Since Divine Word is one of (what is supposed to be) our most powerful spells why are we punished for using other obvious choices on the tree.
Can we either just have the healing portion of the effect changed entirely or have the healing bonus be able to stack? This just seems very obvious and like lazy designing.
Also here is an Idea for a Lightwell redesign.
Lightwell:
Healing amount remains the same
Range increased to 35yds (Was 20yds)
Cooldown remains the same (2 Min)
Lightwell has 10 Charges (Was 15)
Healing output occurs every .5s (Was 1s) on targets below 65% (Was 50%)
Lightwell only stays active for 45s (Was 2 Min)
This way Lightwell is usefull but cannot just be used and be expected to remain until it is available again. (More of a timing spell)
The issue isn’t really with Lightwell itself, but more so that it’s competing against better end tree talents. You can’t really solve that problem without addressing Miracle Worker + Divine Image being mandatory picks.
So that’d involve needing to move some talents up higher into the tree and/or giving them baseline.
Also, given how much buffed up Flash Heal/Heal is now relative to Renew: there’s really no purpose to run Divine Word + Renew in M+ because a single cast of Flash Heal baseline does 50%more than Renew. And when you add in Binding Heals + Echo of Light (17% is base minimum Mastery for M+ with tier) + Trail of Light + Divine Image… it’s really like Flash Heal is 3x what Renew does.
I do run Rapid Recovery and hard cast Renew in raid though. Renew is my #2 heal on a lot of fights because of the constant refreshing of Renews from our tier set. It also makes more mobile because I can drop Renews on people while moving around the map. It gives me a higher proc rate on my tier set and also Rapid Recovery makes the 2-piece Renews tick +35% harder without any loss of duration.
This Renew oriented playstyle is actually really interesting, but to pick your brain, if you are spamming Renew and primarily going to use Flash Heal with SoL procs, isn’t Epiphany going to be more useful than Answered Prayers since you aren’t casting PoH when it procs anyway?
The cooldown on PoM and CoH doesn’t seem to be low enough to be either of significant or consistent benefit for the Apotheosis procs, and the point from Revitalising Prayers would go to the Chastise node anyway.
I haven’t been using Epiphany because it’s a bit too RNG for me. If it gave an instant free extra PoM it’d be way worth it imho because it’ll proc 1-2s before PoM resets.
The extra Renew ticks push up your Healing Chorus healing because I’m getting 36-50 stacks between each CoH cast. Also, Rapid Recovery increases the healing of your 2-piece Renews without reducing the duration. So take the Healing Chorus, Rapid Recovery 2-piece bonus, and the +10% extra healing from Desperate Times and it beats out Epiphany imho.
I’ve only started to try m+ out this season, still prefer to raid by a long shot, but my preferred talent choices for holy for m+ skip the top of the left side and don’t even bother with PoH or circle of healing with healing chorus. Sanctify is good, as long as your group stay mostly together. Serenity and Flash Heal do the heavy lifting with trail of light.
I really like the renew play style in raid.
I’d sure love to be able to use the divine hymn PVP talent in PVE for mythic though!
Ngl, it’s a travesty this playstyle is not documented anywhere as a competitive alternative to the PoH one, and in fact guides everywhere just say “never hardcast Renew”.
It’s also the playstyle that doesn’t oom yourself in 2 minutes if you run M+ haste set.
Huge thumbs up for your advice here, really expanded my understanding of the spec.
It’s not documented because there’s a strong bias towards casting Renew by the people that run the discords, write the articles, etc. You mention any non run of the mill standard H Priest build and people bring out the pitchforks.
Also, just in general there’s not that strong of community around theorycrafting Holy Priest as there is with Shadow and Disc. I do my own research, test different builds, etc. and come to my own conclusions. I don’t generally push my ideas onto others for that reason. If you want to try the build: test it out and it may or may not work for you.
The main benefit of the Renew build though is Renew costs 1/3rd as much mana as Flash Heal and Prayer of Healing so I have far less mana issues then the other 3 people in my group. I’m usually at 30-40% at the end of 7+ minute fights without needing any innervates.
Yep, already tested it out in raid, it’s really strong. The PoH playstyle has notably more overhealing which only really matters on farm where teams might actually drop healers for parses, and is actually a lot more worse off for spot healing.
It’s just tragic that holy priest theorycrafting doesn’t seem as robust or open-minded as say, mistweaver theorycrafting with all the different playstyles that aren’t as numerically strong still being discussed and accepted as viable by the community.
With Holy though there’s really no “alternative” playstyle options other than picking which filler spell you want to use: Prayer of Healing, Renew, or Flash Heal. Our spec is entirely throttled behind PoM, CoH, Holy Word, and Divine Star/Halo/Rhapsody cooldowns. So we have maybe 3-4s inbetween everything being on cd to toss a couple of filler spells.
All our casted cooldown abilities like CoH, PoM, etc. do 3-4 times what Flash Heal or Renew can do. Our filler spells in general are pretty weak compared to Shadowlands where Heal was literally our #1 heal.
I used the PoH playstyle in S1 for raid, but wasn’t a fan of it. The massive mana cost ontop of it not being smart AI didn’t help the cause. You could melt your mana fast if you went overboard incredibly fast.
Later on Blizzard went and buffed talents like Healing Chorus + Empowered Renew + Divine Image and that opened up the Renew playstyle for S2 for me. Renew did about the same amount of healing as Heal w/ Empowered Renew on-top of costing less mana.
With S3 though they buffed Flash Heal/Heal by +40% and didn’t touch Renew. The only reason why Renew is still relevant for HPS is because the 2/4-piece lets you refresh your Renews. You can put a 60s+ Renew on a single target if your heart desires.
In regards to the community being slow to adapt to builds… when 10.0.7 came out I switched to the current Divine Image/Miracle Worker build. Before that we were using a Divine Word/Lightweaver or Divine Word/Miracle Worker build.
It took until 10.1.5 before the current Divine Image/Miracle Worker build was even updated on a lot of guides and made mainstream for M+. So inbetween that… you had tons of Holy Priests running around using Lightweaver builds. I had a few of the top H Priest players run my build and they said it was vastly better on mana and healing.
So that’s just kinda the state of the H Priest community. A small handful of people control the discords/article writing and they dictate what is meta.
I wandered into the priest discord a few months ago and it was clear pretty fast that people liked the narrative a specific way. I saw some people post things that deviated. They were quickly corrected and asked to put a disclaimer on anything they wrote that didn’t align with discord’s posted build/rotation.
The first time I casted prayer of healing during raid was last season and that was to reset sanctify after I filled the tyrstone. That was before a boss pull, so not in combat. I think I tried actually adding it to my rotation a couple of times this season but it just felt icky so I stopped.
I think I mentioned that some time ago in the discord and was laughed at for trolling my raid lol.
I might play around with casting renew as my filler to see how that plays out. Flash heal is mine now and I don’t have mana problems. But I also don’t mythic raid so I can afford to play less serious/optimal/whatever.
Yeah, Mythic is a whole different beast than Normal/Heroic and M+. I’ve only found Heroic to be hard to heal if you’re running a full 30 man raid or doing 2 heals on a 15 man group. On most of the fights there’s nothing to heal and you can just shut your brain off.
Oh for sure. Once I got high enough ilvl I could zone out and heal and dps the fights. It was never an issue to not use prayer of healing for me in the guild I am part of.
As far as mythic, I am just not in a stage of my life where 300 wipes on a boss sounds fun so I stay in my lane of aotc and heroic runs on alts. I have gotten the first couple/few mythic bosses down over the years via pugs when it opens up but haven’t stepped foot in mythic this season and not sure if I will or not. I don’t think I want gear from the first few so I probably won’t.
I will have to peek at my last logs in a bit to see how much renew healing I have on our last clear. Could be a silly mini game to see how easy it is to shift numbers around.
So you just push it instead of flash heal/poh when there is nothing else to push?
Holy priests discords (Even for Wotlk) are trashy tbh.
Like they are not bad at developing rotations and all that stuff, but you move a lil bit away from the formula and they are gonna rip you off
I’ve found myself following your raid builds as a template for my own since season 2, I switched over to the renew style shortly after I saw you post about it. Empowered renew was great in season 2 and it gave us far more mobility than constant PoH casts that never seemed to move bars, it reminds me of riptide when I played my shaman in wrath and cata. After swapping to renew, most holy priests I’d run across in pugs couldn’t keep up and it was far easier on mana. I also remember getting flack for using holy nova whatsoever, but it’s a beast of an aoe heal at >14 stacks, especially with an image up.
Priests have hated on Renew since I could remember and it’s likely hard to get out of that mindset. However, prayer of healing always feels wrong to cast.