It’s not a hard cap, rather a soft cap. I think the intent was to ensure you don’t feel nerfed picking up an ilvl upgrade that doesn’t necessarily have the secondary stats you want.
If anything, it’s indicative of a scaling problem within expansions as ilvl spread becomes huge between content releases. It’s a bit of a design problem and playerbase expectations because if the ilvl spread is small, people will question the need to run new content. However, if it’s as large as it is now, and there aren’t any softcaps, then scaling becomes a huge issue for certain classes.
If someone is about to die, I’m not going to cast Renew. If someone is < 100% HP, I’m always tempted to Renew. Hpriest has an “order of operations” where plenty of spells take priority, and Renew has its place. I love Renew and could never take it off my bars.
The old model of ilvl meant very slight increases over the expansion. We had this in vanilla/TBC. Sometimes your best piece wasn’t even in the current raid, etc. But they were running into problems in modern WoW where item effects were getting more interesting and crazy, tier sets were a thing, etc.
What happens when players think the tier set from season 1 has a better effect than the tier set from season 2? Or even beyond tier sets, what about rings/trinkets? If a trinket is really cool in S1, or a ring has really good stats or a cool effect, etc. If it’s a minor ilvl gain, well it’s not actually an upgrade. So you end up with people disappointed with loot.
They bumped the ilvl quite a bit to solve any of those issues.
That said, I don’t know if soft caps were in response to this. It seemed a lot like soft caps were introduced specifically because BfA corruptions really highlighted the problem they had with scaling. The corruption meta was to stack secondaries to insanely high amounts - making the other corruptions with cool effects kinda bad. I think they introduced the soft caps mostly because they want to be able to make things with cool effects and not have secondaries always beat them.
Oh I don’t disagree, that said I also am one that doesn’t have an issue with older items beating out newer, hell for a while in WOTLK I was still getting a small group together to help me farm AQ40 for the scarab trinket as the % shields is provided was actually pretty strong against the mostly predictable raid wide AoE of Ulduar.
I can see why some would hate it though, as a general rule you want new gear to be better than old, and its a hard thing for Blizzard to find that balance. They had to full on remove some stats completely because they couldn’t scale it right, looking at your armor pen, and in other cases they added new stats to fix scaling they broke, which is actually what I feel Echo of Light is a response to them breaking Holy’s scaling during Ulduar.
Having said all that the issue with Echo specifically is there is no method to really tune it outside of hitting it’s scaling and the fact it scales every single spell we cast except renew makes it harder imo. Thats why I feel if they made Echo a baseline HoT and then allowed mastey to scale its stacking it would provide a little more control without needing the soft caps as much.
I could be completely wrong but just some of my random thoughts.
I cast Renew all the time, but only as:
• a pre-HoT before aoe damage
• as a HoT to put on the tank for the +6% extra healing it provides (with talent), or
• if someone is at like 92% health where a Flash Heal or Heal would just be a gross amount of over-healing.
The great thing about Renew is that it has a very low mana cost, so you can freely spread it around as needed without worrying too much about it zapping your mana. I deliberately do not choose the Renew talent that makes it faster, so that I can enjoy the +6% boost it provides for a longer period of time.
Some people have mentioned power word: shield here - I rarely use this. Really only if I am expecting myself or another player to take a ridiculous amount of damage, like tanks on the monk boss in Jade Temple or tanks for Hyrja for the light beam. I might cast it on myself prior to massive aoe damage or for a speed boost when I have a lot of mana. Definitely is not in my regular rotation though.
I played Holy the last 2 xpacs and I rarely ever used renew, if it was removed I wouldn’t have noticed.
I play disc in DF and I use renew a decent amount when PWS is on CD, to apply atonement while moving, increase surge of light procs, and PWS CD reduction.
Almost everyone in this thread that has talked about use cases for renew are 2400+. I’ve been playing super casually this expansion in terms of playtime and I’m still approaching that too.
While you’re right that you should generally avoid hardcasting renew, saying NEVER is bad in M+ because pre-hotting certain bosses and movement between packs is still valuable.
I see that you have 35% haste, what is the average duration of your rapid recovery renews with that haste? And I imagine flash heal casts are less than 1 second cast time?
Do you keep renew up on the entire party all the time since you rely on it so much.
Super weird, then, that literally every holy priest above 3k is taking that talent. Also super strange to see them on stream pre-hot specific things.
I’m not even trying to say they use it the majority of the time. They may only get like 5-10 uses of renew through an entire dungeon. Possibly even less. But there’s some things renew is still undeniably useful for. I outright said you should rarely cast it - and my first post in this thread says as much. I only take issue with the idea that you NEVER should.
haste scales tick rate rather than duration, so with rapid recovery it’s still 12 seconds max duration with roughly 6.4 ticks over the entire duration.
Do you keep renew up on the entire party all the time since you rely on it so much.
Depends on damage patterns. I run with some mastery too and oftentimes a Sanctify and Circle of healing is enough with mastery to top people up before the next burst. If I’m expecting heavy incoming damage then I’ll pre-Renew everyone.
Don’t most dungeon priests stack haste + crit as there secondaries?
I only seen raiding priests stack mastery due to more powerful echos but how would it come in use in M+? There is a lot more burst dmg in dungeons, while continual damage seems to be more common in raids.
I think a rapid recovery renew build could totally work but wouldn’t it benefit much more from crit and mastery doesn’t seem to affect it?
I think it’s more than damage though. You don’t really need the short HoT heal of an echo. Holy priests already have abilities in there kit that should top people up, I have noticed quite often that holy priest mastery does a quite a bit of over healing just because it procs on all of our abilities. A serenity can get someone to 100% but with 30% mastery, you are essentially doing 30% more unnecessary overhealing.
In many fights it would be useful. It doesn’t really matter if it overheals for the trash if the boss has a phase (like the lightning elemental in NO) where damage is constant. Also if you look at top player logs for M+, echo will consistently be one of their top heals and usually contribute very close to either heal or flash heal.
You have to view it as opportunity cost. If someone takes 14% of their max HP for the next round of damage that would otherwise kill them, you’d have to expend some time healing them. With mastery, it opens the possibility of mastery/renew filling that gap and allowing more time for damage.
This also has an opposite opportunity cost in that it might take some more time to heal since you lack verse/crit. In the end, it comes down to what style you’re more comfortable with.
As disc i only renew when shields on cd to apply atonement, as holy its easily more valuable the double hot and renew generally is healing for 75% of my prayer of mending totals in PvP i was underrating how much value it gives but again its better as holy and filler as disc.
