25% serenity & sanctify recent buff feedback (m+ based)

Classes Priest
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  1. Holy Word: Serenity. Nothing game changing, but a welcome minor change. Its value is 1.2 million for my 623 ilvl priest with 6.2 million and it does feel now a bit more than an instant version of Heal ability it used to be.

  2. Holy Word: Sanctify. Does 348k healing per target. 99% of the time still not even worth pressing. Just finished Grim Batol 9, Sanctify did 0.9% of my overall healing (9.8 million out of total 1.07 billion healing). My weapon enchant does more overall healing than this trash of a spell.
    2.1. Even if Blizzard does a proper tuning buffs Sanctify by like 200%-300%, it would still be a bd spells because:

  • it has a very limited radius and requires all the group to be stacked, which is outright impossible in many m+ fights.
  • its cooldown reduction is based upon 2 dead spells (Circle of Healing and Prayer of Healing), which are not picked by Holy Priests even in raids, let along m+.

Conclusions: lackluster mistargeted tuning, that barely changed anything.

If you wanna do some adequate healing tuning maybe try the following:

  1. Increase Sanctify radius by 100-150% and its basic healing further by around 200% at least.
  2. Increase Circle of Healing basic healing (which is 124k for me atm) by 300% in m+ with additional 100-200% increase based upon interaction with other spells (e.g. targets affected by renew receive 100% additional healing from Circle of Healing, but the renew buff is consumed in the process).
  3. Increase basic healing Prayer of Mending 400-500% at least. I have like 8 talents dedicate just to Prayer of Mending and it currently does 60k per hit and it considered Holy Priest signature ability, what kind of gruesome joke is that.
  4. Rework / Delete Renew or increase its basic healing by 300-500%. Currently it heals 28k per tick. Another “iconic” priest ability.
  5. Rework Divine Hymn to Make it relevant. This ability is strong in Raids and very weak in m+. allow us to move and cast other abilities in m+ during DH or reduce its casting time to 2-3 seconds. You gave us 8 second channeling spell and then create environment where you can’t stand in one place more than 2 seconds. What kind of degenerate logic is that?
  6. Do something with Prayer of Healing. I dunno delete it or rework it completely. This ability was a feckless joke of healing during entire Dragonflight, somehow you managed to make it even worse in TWW. Personally I would happily lose this ability in favor of getting stronger Circle of Healing.

Next time you do your tuning, please take in consideration suggestions of mine and other veteran priests or delete that blatant lie phrase “based on player’s feedback” when you next time introduce your clueless tuning.

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Numbers tuning isn’t going to do anything substantial at this point. We need a full rework, period. Keep in mind that we need to use 7 talent points to make PoM mediocre, not even good. Add in all the other poorly tuned, poorly placed, useless talents - especially 2 point talents and a lack of viable capstones - and nothing short of reworking the whole spec to be more coherent is going to make a difference.

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I disagree, tuning can go a long way to make holy priest viable and more enjoyable to play. All these m+dungeons are all about AoE burst damage and with properly tuned aoe spells + prayer of mending it can be solved.

Proper tuning can be done within a day or two, rework will take months, knowing how slow blizzard is. I’d prefer a quick tuning first to make our key spells actually viable and then hope for some rework.

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But that’s pretty much how it’s been going since at least Cata, if no longer. We get numbers tuning and minor buffs, and the glaring issues get ignored. It’s long past time Hpriest got a rework to actually function like a modern healer - right now we just kind of do a little of everything, but worse than every other healer because of the class fantasy. We need things to change at a much deeper level to actually make Hpriest consistently viable - band-aid fixes just push the problem further down the road.

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This is just a super abstract talk without any points, it will be useless even Blizzard starts listening to feedback.

If you have actual ideas on what spells should be changed and how they should be changed, what spells could be added so that Holy Priest can be a more competitive and more fun spec to play without losing its unique identity, please share them.

Apart from tuning I already suggested a few spell changes that could improve our performance and playability and I am most happy to hear more constructive ideas from my fellow holy priests.

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There have been dozens of threads about what we need, from tuning to utility.

Basically, it boils down to:
Need - interrupt (on a reasonable cooldown,) movement ability improvements, and a talent tree rework to rebalance things and remove the overwhelming number of 2-point nodes, and the significant chunk of talents devoted to PoM.

Nice to have - Bres, CC improvements, better dispell profile, and a rework of how mastery works.

Pipe dreams - making Spirit of Redemption relevant without needing to die, or making the death actually worth it, fixing Guardian Spirit so we don’t waste it because everything after a certain point is considered “massive damage”, and making Divine Hymn relevant in terms of healing (even if it just scaled better for 5 mans, it’d be good enough.)

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Yea thats pretty much spot on. Holy is going through the same cycle for at least 3 expansions now:

  • We are weak at the start of the expansion, because the base kit just isnt there

  • We get a ton of numbers tuning throughout the expansion, and/or we get an overpowered tier set, until our output is so strong , that we are THE meta healer for the last 1-2 seasons

  • We get nerfs to our base kit at the end of an expansion, and once again we are the worst healer to start the next expansion.

Fact is, we are only anywhere close to the meta if our output is far above what other healers can do. Because our toolkit is outdated, and our healing profile is not desirable, at least in 5 man content. No amount of tuning is gonna fix that. We need a full rework with a vision of what a holy priest should be.

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  1. Interrupt would be nice, though I’d prefer it function in some unique way from other healer’s interrupt, e.g. psychic scream working as an aoe interrupt.
  2. Movement ability Improvement. We have our mediocre angelic feather movement increase. While giving it additional speed would be nice, I don’t think that will make holy priest more viable. Movement speed is not something that is holding us back in most of the content. If you personally struggle with movement speed, get yourself nitro speed on your belt via engineering takes 15-20 min to level up and 3-4k gold for all mats.
  3. If PoM was proper tuned, those talents would feel much more relevant. But I agree that even with properly tuned PoM talents feel excessive and wasteful.
    4.1. I do not find Brezz necessary at all, let other classes have it as their niche, we have our own utility in form of PI and Stama. Moreoever, you can always do battle rezz via engineering defibrillator, you do not even have to level up eng for this.
    4.2. Our CC kit is pretty strong if you know how to use: Mind Control can take almost any creature out of combat 30 sec, chastise can stun annoying mobs for 4 seconds and in Apatheosis you can almost spam that stun, psychic scream is an AoE stop. What kind of CC imrpovement would you like to see?
    4.3. We’re the only class with mass magic dispel, we cannot dispel poisons, but we can dispel deseases and I think we’re only one of 2 healing classes that can dispel enemies. The current season has way too many poisons in dungeons, which makes us feel weak, but that’s not spec / class problem, it’s dungeon composition problem.
    4.4. Yeah, I don’t like how our mastery works either. How exactly do you see it reworked?

5.1. What do you mean by “fixing Guardian Spirit” and how do you waste it? I do not understand.

5.2. Even if they further scale Divine Hymn by say 500%, it would still be a very limited ability because of its channelling nature and its ultra long casting time.

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  1. I doubt an AoE interrupt would get a short cast time, so I’d prefer something single target and ranged. Not really fussy beyond that, but there is solo content that is unreasonably hard as Hpriest or Disc because we lack an interrupt.
  2. Movement other than movement speed, ideally. Make Divine Star baseline, as an example, and have us move to the end of it. It can keep the healing and damaging properties so it can remain a skill shot, but it would give us a viable “Gotta move!” button. Or anything of the kind, again, not too fussy.
  3. PoM should be 2-3 talents at absolute max, so as long as it’s pruned and tuned, I’m happy.

4.1. Is bres necessary? No. But it is hardly a niche now (we’ve got, what, 5 classes capable of ressing in combat now? And hey, one of them is priest - but A) we have to die to do it, and B) if we don’t talent two specific talents, we either can’t do it, or we die and have a 45sec cooldown before we can be ressed. Not to mention we have to hardcast this res. But hey, at least it doesn’t actually count as a battle res! That totally makes up for either gimping your healing output or being dead for 45 seconds. In case my point wasn’t obvious - they should just skip the middle man and give the one class with two healing specs a battle res. It’s weirder not to have it, and it’s just a QoL improvement.

4.2. Agree to disagree. Mind control/Dominate mind is extremely strong - assuming the target isn’t immune. And you have to hard cast it, and there are other drawbacks - but absolutely agree it’s great in theory. Psychic scream breaks very easily, but is otherwise solid, and tentacles is classic, but is still just a root. And yeah, a stun is great if you can spec into it, but let’s bot pretend that is apotheosis is on cooldown that it’s going to be doing much, not to mention the diminishing returns. We even have shackle undead (yay?) and mind soothe (hyper specific use cases) - but we have very little that can answer a threat. It’d be kind of cool to have something like an AoE blind, but this one is just a nice to have, so I’d be fine leaving it as-is. But I definitely notice how few options I have when I’m solo in a bad situation.

4.3. Mass dispell has been crazy nerfed, and we only get magic and disease. It’d be nice if we got a little something extra - curse, maybe? Especially since we are spending two talent points to get disease. Or let mass dispell be a little more potent given the massive cooldown and not insubstantial cast time.

4.4. I’m not exactly sure how mastery should be reworked, but Hpriest is literally an overhealing machine at the best of times. Echo of Light feels like it’s just adding more to the “waste” than it is actually helping keep people up. I think it’d be nice if Echo was reworked to function like PoM - overheal, or maybe just mastery% of heal, is saved on the healed player(s) for X seconds, triggers a heal upon taking damage. Nerfs our up-front healing a little, but gives us a little on the “mitigation” side of things. It’d be more mana efficient for one thing (assuming overhealing would be occuring otherwise) but with the drawback that we’d need more casts to top people off (since we wouldn’t be relying on echo to add the rest over time.) Could even use the jumps (healing less per time) of PoM in some way - but I’m just spitballing something that feels functional and fits Holy’s thematics, it could work any number of ways.

5.1. Right now GS has two effects - bonus healing, and a cheat death. However, once you reach higher content, the cheat death portion basically stops functioning all together because the damage is too heavy to trigger - so our external defensive is really only useful to top people up, not actually save them, which seem like a big flaw.

5.2. I’d just argue for a shorter channel with movement allowed. 4 seconds, or 6 seconds with the healing increase baked in and not a separate talent. That or drop the CD to 2 mins and give it a raw HPS increase so we can at least use it more consistently. Just something to make it less of a “Eh, kinda” sort of heal.

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4.1. if we get battle rezz, other classes will reasonably start asking for something that we have and they lack (e.g. PI, Mind control or offensive dispel). That will lead to class homogenization that will make this game bland and boring.

4.2. If the target is immune to Mind Control in 90% + cases it is also immune to any other CC. I have no problems with its hard cast, 1.5- 2 sec is enough to recontrol target before it reaches you. This spell requires practice and to be used effectively and this is something I absolutely like as it makes the game more engaging.

If you call Mind Soothe hyper specific, you mostly likely don’t know how to use it. It is an insanely useful ability in m+ and delves that I use a lot, it allows you to skip many inconvenient trash packs or simply make sure awkward dps doesn’t asspull another trash pack. In many cases it works like mass stealth except that it doesn’t have a long cooldown. Priest has very strong long CC, you just need to learn how to use it. Interrupt / Silence that is something we need now, especially with Psychic Scream nerf, but not long CC.

4.3. To my knowledge there are only 2 classes with mass dispels effect: Shaman (desease & poison) and priest (magic), both of them have 2 min cooldown. This nerf is universal.
You can get yourself in a group pallies, monks or shaman and they will dispel deseases & poison for you, while magic can be reliably dispelled only by healers.

I never found a problem with its time cost (prolly because of high haste) but its mana cost seems way too high.

4.4. I think your idea is great! Turning mastery from a short HoT that usually leads to overhealing lot of the time, to a heal store, that will proc whenever target takes damage.

Maybe it could even be a blend: the mastery healing is stored and the next time the target takes damage it will proc into a short 2-4 sec hot.

5.1. Still don’t quite understand what you mean, because my GS saves people regularly on high content (8-10 keys). My problem is that I feel like it is being wasted when CD procs as it increases cooldown to all 3 minutes. But GS is one of the few more or less functioning utilities so I’d prefer Blizzard not start with it. Because chances they will ruin it instead of improving it.

5.2. From a perspective of m+ player I disagree. 6 or 4 seconds will barely make it more competitive it will still be not enough to counter burst aoe and thus worthless. Nor will 2 min cooldown change this situation.

I thinm it must be useable while moving, have 2-4 seconds cast at maxx and be much more powerful tuning wise. So far with my 624 ilvl it heals for 1.1 million, this is pathetic for 3 minute cooldown spel, especially with such long cast.

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Mw Monk has revival, which is a 3 min cd but does magic, disease and poison, so basically MD and PCT combined+ it heals. Thats not a complaint about Revival btw, just stating what it does.

Fully agree. HPriest need a metric ton of changes but GS is not among that. GS is fine as it is.

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GS is fine in lower end content, but in high end content where GS stops functioning as a cheat death because the damage is too high (which triggers the clause about extreme damage cancelling the effect) the skill becomes nearly dead - most things become 1-shots, so you don’t get the benefit of the cheat death or the extra healing.

Considering the lengthy cooldown for content like M+, it should actually have a consistent function - and I’m just not seeing that consistency enough as I get into higher and higher content.

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That does make sense, what level of keys are we talking about here though? Like 13-14s?

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I’ve seen it happen in 10’s - it’ll work fine in combination with defensives etc, but faced with the right ability, your external cooldown just fails to save someone - and I’m sure it gets worse as you get higher. And while I absolutely understand that an external cheat death is insanely powerful, if it gets to a point that it’s a dead skill, even talented? That’s clearly not intended as part of the core design.

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We have a talent that makes the buff persist even after it saves somebody.

In 10s it serves me very well, especially with the tank that has self healing capacity -put it on blood DK or prot pally for example, and they cane fend for themselves with that huge 60% healing increase.

Again, I would argue that we need additional defensive utility, rather than rework of GS.

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Again, if it fails to save someone (a legitimate possibility in some cases especially as you push higher) that talent is dead. It’s a great talent the rest of the time, but absolutely worthless if it’s bypassed by massive damage.

I’m just saying that it needs to be retooled in a way that either makes massive damage be a specific mechanic (so only certain abilities bypass it) or that it has some other kind of benefit, like DR/absorb on the target to make sure it’ll actually have some use when these cases occur.

Or they could refund it if the target dies (not that it would help it be viable as an external defensive, but at least it would be off cooldown for, say, a bres into GS into big heals.)

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Holy priest is saved!
They really have lost the plot havent they…

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Like a man dying of thirst in the desert - I’ll take the buff. But they really don’t want to work on our AoE issues.

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Look, at least we are finally getting buffs.

Flash Heal is even understandable because Discipline priests heal more with it than Holy right now.

The Holy Fire is pretty random tho.

If they keep this up, we might get out of deep D Tier by season 2.

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its great and all but if a boss does 150% in aoe blasts, how does even an instant flash heal or serenity saves 5 people?
i mean it is literally impossible to survive