I’ve been playing Holy Priest for a few seasons now in raid and keys. I decided to dust off my Shammy from DF.
I’m beginning to realize that I do everything my Holy Priest does (not just mechanically, Farseer jives with me as well), except I just do it better, more efficiently and more easily.
I get an interrupt. Self explaining, but we’re not just talking about keys here. This thing is priceless in solo content. Chastise just has too long of a CD.
I get a mass root. This is one of the reason I liked R Druid so much, back when Spiteful existed. I get a hard CC with Hex. I get Lightning Lasso which has more utility than Chastise. I get an AOE stun, which isn’t as good as Psychic Scream, but then I get Thunderstorm on top of it.
This class is stacked for world content. I haven’t even brought up the Earth Ele or Ghost Wolf yet. The survivability on R Sham makes Holy Priest look like a joke. Gust of Wind is pure comfort in raids, Priest is the opposite of comfort when it comes to mobility. Then add Spiritwalker’s on top of all of this, are your boxers soaked yet?
To top it all off, I get ankh too. This is inferior to Priest Cheat Death, but honestly I’ll take it. Lust > PI.
R Sham and Holy have similar damage projection also. They both basically just hard cast a nuke. But I’m finding R Sham’s version of this better. Oracle Holy can do a Chastise Holy Fire combo, but it requires setup and timing and this and that and casting an actual Holy Fire doesn’t buff your next heal like R Sham has, the most it will do is give you some From Darkness stacks, which is honestly kind of a weak talent on Holy because you don’t want to be spending GCDs on SW:P tbh and you don’t always have time to Holy Fire.
Holy Priest has Serenity, which I love to spot heal with. But then I can spot heal with Sham just fine also with Unleash Life, plus you get a 30 second Nature’s Swiftness with Farseer that summons an ancestor.
People don’t like the Healing Rain insurance. I can see where they’re coming from with that. But since I’ve come from Holy Priest, I actually kinda like it. Holy has arguably the worst 4 set bonus. Apotheosis isn’t something you press off CD, it isn’t even a particularly fun CD to be using to begin with, I’ll be happy to be rid of that spell and tier set bonus.
Anyway thanks for coming to my TED talk. If you were on the fence about Holy Priest, I would just stick with Resto Shaman, it’s basically a superior, more QoL version of Holy Priest. Holy Priest isn’t entertaining to look at either, there’s barely any feedback when you hit Prayer of Healing and you have no visual idea who any of your spells are hitting, you can’t even tell what the little Naaru thing that you summon is doing.
TL;DR: Resto Shaman and Holy Priest feel similar, but Resto Shaman does literally everything better.
