I have no problem with PoH, and find it useful in mythic+ only. You need to take all of the talents, and you need to understand when to use it. First, its not used as a health topper. It used as an AOE negator. Let me explain.
First, people get a little obsessed over HPS without thinking about how that HPS is going out vs globals. When AOE goes out, you need to be mitigating it as much as possible, ensuring people don’t get into “the danger zone”. Fire Sanctity, CoH, then fire 2-4 POH out. Then stop.
When you’re done, evaluate. You could do another round, but I find this is usually not needed. Your life bars won’t be in any real danger, so at that point go back to single target healing. I talent archon as well, so if people are still low after that round, feel free to pop halo.
I have found with efficient use AOE combined healing is about 15% of my overall healing. PoH usually has very low overheal as well. I’ve healing +7s and a +8 without any panic or worry about keeping people up.
The thing that gets me is all the people who try to defend the state of holy priest as if it is in some sort of good place and everyone else is just a noob or cry baby.
POM, POH, Flash heal, Even PW serenity all feel like they are weak as dog crap right now.
It’s because they tuned all of the output into hero class abilities. For Archon, you are 1 min cooldown halo king, with Oracle, You are whatever crap buff is up at the moment.
And so the base kit has to suffer to make up for all the power bleeding out into the hero classes.
Instead of Hero classes being something to send us over the top, like the separation between a normal unit and a hero class in warcraft 3, Its just another overtuned borrowed power gimmick that steals its power from the base kit to maintain the absurdly over tuned state of the game. And yet, Even then. There is 0 balance.
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Some people just have very few things to be proud about other than wow. And even then the audacity that they’re better than pros living in gaming houses who are saying this is crap rn is so cringe.
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I also did the math on it.
It’s only slightly less efficient than Flash Heal for the 8 seconds following Sanctify and CoH. Like only 3% less effective. But only against Flash Heal spam (with talents) and only for 8 seconds.
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I’ll redo my numbers after raid, but I’m getting not even remotely close values. If it were 3% to flash heal I would argue its stronger than FH but I’m pretty confident with my sheet.
Ahau! I modified my equation for calculating the 15% FH crit bonus (crisis management) and i counted it twice by accident! Update below:
HPS HPM HPS/M
Flash: 898773 12.29 9.99
POH: 785902 11.72 8.93
Heal: 1349758 32.29 22.50
Kinda close to being used, if prayer circle and sanctified prayer were part of its baseline, and they incorporated it into Lightweaver… then maybe
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…and also has to interact with Binding Heal and Trail of Light. 
That’s how bad PoH is currently.
I included that <3, it’s a net hps sheet so it includes things such as the odds of hitting renew from a prayer and adds the expected heal. Was gonna go a step further to take all my average overheal, but didn’t and won’t.
Let me include hero talents and tidy it up and I’ll share it somewhere somehow. Im sure it can even be heavily improved on.
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Not quite that much.
Oracle isn’t amazing but it’s only ~10% behind Archon in my experience. A lot harder to play though.
You got the 20% faster cast time and 15% increased healing for PoH in there? You got the .25x5x1/2 Renew in there? Are you running the 4-Piece double cast for that Renew proc rate for PoH?
My numbers did not include the Flash Heal procs but that’s something that gives a bonus to Flash Heal in regards to HPS. The instant cast proc thing that I forgot the name of. But for FH as you already indicated you had included, it’s an extra 45% to the spell to account for Binding Heals and Trail of Light.
I think Mastery affects both the same and shouldn’t be included.
I still think the whole exercise is futile. Even if we were to discover that PoH is somehow 10% more effective than FH in certain situations I believe that FH is going to be far more effective from a practical standpoint. Even just the Renew proc alone for PoH demands that you anticipate not having anybody in your group fully healed up for 6 seconds following your final cast or it’s wasted overhealing.
I’ll come back and comment my calculations for the two spells to show my ~3% difference. And I honestly don’t know why I’m getting so caught up in this. I really do think it’s a spell that’s simply not worth casting. I guess I want to like it or something.
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It’s an exercise I do to start every season, but this one I redid my sheet completely to make it more elaborative so I can pick builds and compare. I got overwhelmed and lazy so it didn’t finish. But the point of it for me is to determine viable builds and outliers. For example PoM was outlier in DF, basically doing the most healing and the best hps/cost of ratio so I really focused on casting on cd, but in shadowlands it wasn’t as strong and didn’t warrant a priority cast from me. PoH is an outlier now being underwhelming and avoided completely, which pushed me to consider to drop a decent performing circle from raid and have 3 more points to double down on lightweave build. With circle gone, the 1 pt in harmonius became half as good and I easily dropped it. If PoH was stronger and part of lightweaver, then i could switch build around.
To answer question, I included the best hps on all talents. So I did not include 15% increased prayer from sanctify as it adds 100k hps but its counter pick to apply Renew would add 200k hps on average, and renew has further synergy. All other buffs applied.
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I don’t understand how the Renew is a “counter pick”. Just not enough talent points or am I overlooking a choice node between the two? I thought the 15% Sanctify thing was down at the bottom near Lightweaver?
I’ve been disappointed this season with PoM and CoH but is there anything better to cast on cooldown instead of those? As it is I cast Renew as filler and PoM and CoH on cooldown unless I can clearly get off needed Flash Heals. It does seem like I could be doing something better though.
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You are talking about raid, yes? Because you just don’t run either PoH or CoH and go full M+ style healing, except without the top-right holy fire talents.
can confirm. hpriest felt like a knock off mini druid bc renew was beast in wrath. pretty fun.
now it’s only good here as a quick atonement app on disc lol
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Revitalizing prayers (25% chance to apply renew) and sanctified prayers (15% poh after sanctify) share a node. I’m looking at it right now. And the Renew one contributes twice as much hps on average with the added bonus of renew tick synergy and removing condition of sanctify
Spells used to be balanced based on cast time, cool down, and immediacy of effect. Over several expansions of tuning aura buffs instead of spells, we are now at a state where the kit just feels off. Everything has drifted from a balanced state because they don’t bother to keep individual spells balanced, but rather they keep an entire kit balanced within some margin of acceptable performance over time.
I’m convinced this is the reason Mind Blast and SWD deal such a low amount of damage at this point now as well.
It shows such a lack of care to the details of spec design that it isn’t very surprising to see these tuning adjustments rolling out every week. The polish of the game is so incredibly low and it’s not simply a priest problem.
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Yeah, you’re right. My numbers were messed up. If I correct that on my calculation than PoH would be closer to 18% less effective than just casting Flash Heal. I’m not saying that my 18% figure is perfectly accurate, but I think the conclusions are the same.
I think there’s simply no way that Prayer of Healing is feasible to use.
I’ve noticed that they also keep balancing things a little too much, as if they’re trying to reach a state where everything is equal. I notice it most in trinkets but I also see it sometimes in the spells. Because it’s POSSIBLE that under the right circumstances Spell 2 can do twice as much healing as Spell 1, they nerf Spell 2 to be half a powerful, and then it just becomes useless, especially when they nerf or remove the circumstances that allowed Spell 2 to be twice as powerful.
Examples include increasing the cooldown of Holy Word: Salvation to 12 minutes from 6 minutes because our tier set allowed twice as much cooldown reduction.
For the trinkets, it seems like they’re all currently balanced around about a 7% figure. 5% from Primary Stat and 2% from a Secondary proc, or 8% primary but it has a 50% chance to to decrease a secondary by 2%. No primary but gives 2% secondary and procs an additional 5% overall healing. I appreciate the choices but most of them don’t feel any more powerful than any others. It just feels like lazy balancing… or too much balancing.
I think spells get adjusted and forgotten. Reduce the power of Renew because it got boosted by 35% from a talent, then they remove the talent, and don’t revert Renew. Proc Renew with the tier set, nerf Renew because it’s doing too much, but never change it when the tier set changes. But that’s okay because Halo heals a ton and our overall numbers look good. I’m not saying that’s happening, but that’s how it feels like it’s happening to me.
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In earlier versions of the game a max rank PoH healed for about the same amount as a Flash Heal on every person hit. It’s doing about a 5th of that right now. And I’m being generous. No amount of Echo of Light makes that okay.
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