So last season I was in the top 10 IO for Holy Priest pushing 27-28s. This season though I’ve been playing Disc for M+ and this spec is far better than Holy in a lot of areas.
Single Target Healing
Disc has better single target healing than Holy.
- Baseline Flash Heal is +50% higher on Disc than Holy.
- Penance heals more than Holy Word: Serenity if you need to use it as a direct heal.
- Penance also gets boosted by talents (Power of the Darkside + Harsh Discipline) into doing 2x+ what Holy Word Serenity does.
- PWS absorbs more on Disc and with a talent each time you cast Flash Heal it makes PWS reset faster. So you can go Flash Heal x2 - PWS, repeat on people who have nasty bleeds you need to tunnel heal into.
- Disc doesn’t need to dump a huge amount of talents just into single target heals. It’s all free, but on Holy you need to path for it.
AOE Healing
Disc claps Holy in this department bigly.
- Power Word Radiance is a ranged AOE heal whereas Holy Word Sanctify is a target ground AOE. This makes PWR far better in group spread situations.
- Atonement healing hard counters the constant pulsing rot aura mobs a lot easier than on Holy.
- You can AOE ramp heal on Disc for huge amounts of hp. Mindbender, Power of the Darkside, and Harsh Discipline combined can take a group from 50% to 100% hp in a single penance cast.
- Holy has to do about 2-3x more hard casts to group heal through rot auras than Disc.
- Disc does basically all its group healing via atonement which just requires either recasting Radiance on CD or keeping atonement up manually.
Cooldowns
Disc blows Holy out of the water.
- Holy only has 2 minute Apotheosis and Symbol of Hope got nerfed. They really could use something else or a shorter Apotheosis.
- Divine Hymn sucks compared to Ultimate Penitence for a number of reasons. DH does 1/2 the healing, locks you in place, and doesn’t give you a safety bubble like Disc with the 50% hp absorb shield.
- Disc has 30s Mindbender, Rapture, Barrier, and UP. It always feels like I have a cooldown available in case crap hits the fan.
- Guardian Spirit is better than Pain Suppression imho so I will give Holy credit here. The extra +60% healing takent and cheat death is a much better comfort zone than just a flat -40% dr. It’s also up every 1 minute.
Mana
There’s no contest here: Disc has way better mana management.
- Penance spreads your dots around making it so you get maximum Throes of Pain mana return whereas Holy needs to tab target SWP everything before they die.
- Mindbender on a 30s cd just prints out mana on Disc to the point I don’t even need to think about it. I can walk into bosses with 40% mana and still be fine at the end.
- Disc gets free mana by just doings its normal dps rotation whereas on Holy you have to actively work for it. I can get 500k+ mana from mana returners on Disc easily.
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What changes do you think Blizz can implement this season to address this large gap (i.e. shorter Apotheosis, as you mentioned)?
Does any of this change with Holy 4-piece?
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Yeah, I am only playing holy because it is all I know. I can probably get my 20s done eventually, so far I just have the easiest one, but I won’t go much beyond that.
Personally I don’t think that Holy’s ever going to be an amazing healing spec for M+ unless their base kit/borrowed power is overtuned (IE: S4 shadowlands), or just overhauled, period.
They’re kind of the basic jack of all trades healer - who’s supposed to be able to flex into anything, but they’re never the best at any of those things. Which means the specs that do those things better are just going to be better in a single healer comp most the time.
For holy to truly be good in M+, they need better utility than symbol for small groups, or they need their base kit to push health bars a lot more - closer to Druid or current Monk.
Disc is doing so much better and has no longer as any kind of skill cap (which is good imo).
Holy is suffering harshly in terms of mana.
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I am in the same boat. I only know Holy, so that is what I am stuck with, haha. I only go so far as KSH, which I am sure I can get eventually later in the season. Hopefully Holy gets some patch help along the way.
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After playing both of them, I feel like holys real problem is mana. It can cope with everything else and might feel easier if its what you are used too. I find trying to deal with damage on disc stressful - whereas with holy its second nature. I really wish they hadnt wrecked the mana so badly on holy. No one lets you drink in m+ and go I oom on bosses with high healing checks.
I honestly prefer healing on holy a lot more than disc. I hope they address the mana issues on holy.
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Yeah, it’s not fair that disc got such a significant buff. The 50% additional healing to atonement alone makes disc supreme even if it didn’t get the overhaul it did in 10.2.
I got my 4pc and I hope that you fellow holy priests get yours soon because it did make a dramatic improvement though compared to disc’s 4pc which is just a buff to smite.
2 Likes
As holy all I know is pain. I’m still pretty undergeared with the keys I’m doing too, so that doesn’t help.
I got the 4-piece and it procs fairly often. 18 procs in a 7 minute fight which give you the 4-5 minute Salv resets.
My Renew healing w/ Rapid Recovery talent is also out in outerspace as my #1 heal after Echo and its beating PoM by 50%.
My Renew healing w/ Rapid Recovery talent is also out in outerspace as my #1 heal after Echo and its beating PoM by 50%.
Do you ever hard cast renew or is that purely from renews spawned from various talents?
Mana reduction to flash heal and help with rot healing would be the two things at the top of my list.
Could make sanctify not a ground target heal and just group heal like radiance does and maybe have prayer of mending reduce its cooldown on cast so we have it more often in m+.
Edit: or make prayer of healing actually do some healing.
3 Likes
Agreed with everything here. The functionality of Sanctify and the throughput of Prayer of Healing are the two biggest offenders I think for Holy.
I mean just compare how resto shaman’s chain heal is to PoH. Or how much better AoE healing is with cloudburst totem is without needing such strict positionals from your group.
Some other niceties would be to get an actual interrupt for both holy and disc.
Personally, and this might be a hot take, but I think priest should have gotten the battle rez instead of Paladin. Paladin already brought oodles of amazing utility, battle rez is overkill.
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Disc has never be meta in keys. Im not sure where the holy doom comes from, disc has frequently been bottom and still people played it
That in itself is the biggest joke ever told in history.
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I still hard cast Renew like I did with the Empowered Renew playstyle, but what is really amping up the Renew healing is the 2-piece. The 35% healing bonus applies to the 2-piece Renews without decreasing the duration and also feeds into Benediction/Holy Word Salvation.
The 2-piece renews also stack on-top of existing Renews above the 15s restriction. So when you get a proc of the 4-piece and dump double Sanctify on the group that already has Renews people are getting 20s+ Renews.
It also feeds into the Heailng Chorus talent giving me a lot higher CoH healing.
Also, the 4-piece on Disc is absolutely disgustingly busted. In dungeons I’m resetting Shadowfiend in 15s so I’m getting 80% uptimes on Shadow Covenant, and beyond infinite mana.
Either way… for M+:
- Holy needs more utility now that symbol of hope sucks. Divine Hymn is also pretty weak compared to UP.
- Holy needs a way to spread SWP around like Disc to maximize Throes of Pain passive mana return.
- Holy needs shorter cd Shadowfiend or reduce the mana cost on Flash Heal.
- Holy could use Divine Word on a 30-60s cd baseline. Could even make Lightwell available higher in the tree.
- Holy needs a shorter cd Apotheosis.
- Rework the Holy Word system into being an energy bar. You get 100 energy and spending a Holy Word costs 25. The bar passively fills itself and is refilled by hard casting spells. This gives you more flexibility on which Holy Words to use so you can go 4x Holy Word Serenity in emergencies.
5 Likes
Played some more holy and disc last night. I feel like the Throes of Pain talent is basically mandatory to get holy to work in m+. It wont help you on most bosses and you’ll still go oom if its an intense healing check, but at least it helps on trash.
It just seems like they didnt put much thought into the mana nerfs by each healing spec. Holy got hit unreasonably hard (probably due to raid where you dont need to use the expensive spells as much) and suffers really bad in m+ for that. It be nice if they could come up with a talent for m+ holy users that wouldnt appeal to raiders. Being mana starved in m+ feels terrible, most pug groups wont give you a chance to drink.
I would also love to see prayer of healing - made to actually heal something, or if its going to suck this badly, just remove it so i am not forced to take it as a talent on the way to better talents. I think they could give it the “heals x more in 5 man” treatment so it could be good in m+ but stay the same in raid.
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This is what I want from great father winter. I absolutely love the talent and hate that I can’t use it because divine image is so much better.
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I’m not finding myself as mana starved on bosses as I expected this week as holy, but I’m still needing to drink a few times per dungeon which is annoying. So far I’ve timed 3 20s which is much earlier than last season for me.
The boss fights are shorter than they were last season, but that might change as you push up into higher keys. Tyrannical bosses last season were usually 3.5-4 minutes long and heavy group healing. I was ooming around the 3.5 minute mark on the last week of the season.
This season… most bosses are 2.5-3 minutes long on Tyrannical. Also, this season has more breaks in-between the AOE damage and a lot of bosses that don’t even do any group damage at all or its once every 30s.
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