No one recommends or uses these spells for any content for holy priest (even though PoH is part of our 4 set bonus right now, and built into serendipity).
It seems like a massive design flaw that single target heals + trail of light are better for healing multiple targets than actual aoe healing spells.
What is the plan here? Why are these spells still in the game if they aren’t allowed to be effective even for the specific job they’re supposed to do?
11 Likes
I don’t think there was a plan.
Rather, they were making tank survivability lower. They knew this would mean we needed better ST heals. They buffed EVERY healer’s ST heals by a lot to a point where most specs are struggling in their AoE unless they can cleave for some reason. (See Druid wild growth, Pally LoD, even Shaman Chain Heal isn’t great it’s just they get a million free chain heals and their CDs can redistribute). Pretty much every AoE heal that is even slightly decent this season is a longer CD (like Sheilun’s gift).
For Holy priest it’s an even larger problem because ToL exists and PoH was already weak. They tried nerfing ToL a bit in late DF, but with how much they increased heal/FH, nothing’s going to keep up with them unless they retool every healer in the game to have efficient AoEs. But who knows if they’ll do that. Just Hpriest is not the only healer struggling with their native AoE abilities right now. Most the healers are.
5 Likes
Circle is a good hps provider it is just removed from raid due to the lightweaver synergy on the set. It would be nice to see more prayer of heal benefits, which would then trigger circle increased strength. From a design perspective they pushed it in light weaver and it’s okay that circle and prayer have taken a back seat, when we get brushed off this build I actually do expect bliz to address prayer and circle.
In other words, I actually think we’ve been radio silent because buffing these spells would make builds stronger than using LW, which would make the set bonuses more worthless, causing further iterations of balance and it’s just easier for them to let us stick to what we’re doing.
Well see if I’m right come next season patch notes.
The plan here is they don’t feel like putting any work into Priest to make it actually fun or interesting. So instead they rotate between buffing our Single-Target spells and AoE spells so at any given time only one is viable to really cast. It has been this way since Shadowlands.
This leads to rotation changes each patch while never needing to actually make the class make sense from a design standpoint. You know, like having your AoE spells do your AoE healing, and your Single-Target spells do your spot healing.
It’s just a revolving door so they can put as little effort in as possible to the spec. Expect PoH buffs going into 11.1 and that’s what you’ll use for that patch, and Lightweaver will be out the window.
1 Like
Yup, its the curse of extra steps. DPS specs have been putting up with it forever, but a lot of them love the idea of “mastering” convoluted rotations/priority lists…for no benefit whatsoever…but thats a whole nother topic.
But for healing specifically it goes completely against the goal of the role. The time between people taking heavy damage and getting healed needs to be as short as possible. It all comes back to “keep it simple, stupid!”
Evoker: tip the scales into spiritbloom. If thats not available, resonating sphere into communion. If THATS not available, charge up a dream breath…see? Simple.
One of Blizzards biggest problems is creating complexity where its not needed. The solution to this problem is…buff the heck out of prayer and circle. Lets see how long it takes them to get there.
1 Like
There’s two different schools of thoughts.
-
People just want to use Flash Heal/Heal and nothing else. They dump CoH, take the extra +30% Halo healing talent, and use Apotheosis instead of Holy Word Salvation. They pop Apo + Halo simultaneously to benefit from the constant SoL procs so they can chain out Holy Words.
-
People who still use CoH w/ Healing Chorus because the bonus healing from CoH still contributes a lot. This is more the traditional Holy build w/ Holy Word Salv and still using Lightweaver.
The biggest thing I’m seeing is people doing #1 are almost always in the top 100 HPS parses for Holy. This is starting to trickle down because in Mythic raiding because I’m expected to play like #1 now even though I prefer #2 because ERT notes are setup to use Apotheosis.
1 Like
I really can’t stand the lightweaver play style for raiding, it feels quite degenerate. Unless our raid really needs me to pump, I just stick with the more traditional CoH build, it’s far more fun to play and I feel a lot more mobile.
For some reason blizzard is absolutely horrible at tuning AoE abilities.
Light of Dawn for holy paladins is a good example as you use it in raid but in PvP and M+ you basically just take it off your bar.
For Resto shaman, all of DF you just didn’t spec into wellspring or downpour. They were just tuned so low it was pointless.
They need to give all spells the “has reduced effectiveness over 5 targets treatment” since they apparently tune all AoE heals for raids.
Circle hps was only good cause of the talent that increases it when our renew ticks. now without dragonflight tier, it just doesnt stack as high and also alot of mythic fights use apoth now. and salv is a our main spell for renew applying.
Without any renew ticks, it heals about the same as PoM. With the renew ticks it can provide as much healing as serenity. Overheal is typically low. It was a top (3) contributor to hps rivalling halo and echo (I had low mastery then) before I switched to full fledged LW build.
Not having reliable aoe healing for m+ is just a mystery.
I wasn’t far off title range in season 3 of DF as holy but it’s crazy to see that every issue that plagued holy still exists now even if hero talents help a little.
The addition of Archon did help fill in the lack of AOE healing that Holy had in M+ though. People are just playing Oracle mainly because it’s in the wowhead guide. Archon Halo + Coagulated Blood is a nasty AOE healing combo.
The only way to min-max AOE healing on Oracle is using a cheese strat of GSing yourself and spamming single target heals on yourself w/ Piety. The extra +30% self-healing taken and GS will make you instantly burst heal the group from <50% hp to 100%.
Holy this expansion is just very cooldown dependent to handle the AOE healing checks. You have Divine Word, Apotheosis, Archon Halo or Oracle Piety, Divine Hymn, and Essence Devourer Shadowfiend.
You’re still reliant on single target heals though and the main reason why both PoH and CoH suck is because Flash Heal was scaled up roughly +80% since the start of DF S1 while these abilities weren’t touched. The new tier set bonus just amps up Flash Heal even more which is why Lightweaver is the dominate build in raid atm. CoH lost its value in raid due to losing the DF S3 tier set bonus that gave you free Renews for Healing Chorus stacks.
In M+ Disc just uses Radiance, Mindbender, and Mindblast to basically brrr your way through all the AOE checks that Holy has to work for. IMHO, Holy requires more skill to play on a high level then Disc.
I’ve been pushing +12s and now +13s on my tank though simply because tanking is way less stressful then healing.
From a M+ standpoint, prayer and circle were useless in DF as well. I’d love circle of healing to really do good numbers and maybe benefit 3 times from mastery or something so it’s a bit of a mini CD, but I also don’t want to have to talent into prayer to get there.
1 Like
I only played Holy in S1 and S2, but back then CoH definitely was contributing a good chunk of my healing (8-10%). Divine Image was also a lot stronger pre-nerf and it was 10% of my overall healing. For raid, CoH was running as our #1-2 heal for a while.
Just now with this expansion… CoH does so little healing in M+ I chucked it out of my build a few weeks into the season because it was 1-2% of my overall healing.