“Lul, just go Disc” is not a valid argument.
I had high hopes for the 9.0.5 patch notes, as I was really excited to see what the devs have come up with to balance the healers out and make Holy Priest a bit more competitive than what it is at the moment. To my disappointment, the answer was pretty much nothing.
When the spec is trailing in everything compared to the others, and you have eagerly been waiting for months to see some buffs, the disappointment is quite huge when the only thing you see is a Divine Hymn rework. While the minor buff to Divine Hymn does feel nice, it’s still only buff when you can channel it to the full, which means standing still for ~8 seconds with no damage reduction or other utility spells to aid.
My thoughts on the “buffs” for our legendaries:
Flash Concentration: Rework was very much needed.
- I personally think that the stacks could be dropped to three stacks with 5% each, instead of 5x3%. It’s still actually ridiculous how much upkeep FC needs in comparison to what we are getting out of it. (When comparing to the legendaries other healers are using, and what they are getting out of it). There’re still dungeons where you will drop the buff whether you like it or not, and it punishes the already starving mana pool of the priest a bit too heavily.
Divine Image: I don’t understand why it doesn’t replicate a full Hymn channel (for example). Even with the buffs given now it wont see any real use because the naaru is so weak and the proc is way too inconsistent.
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To add to the current buffs, the proc chance should be increased and rather than allowing (the very rare) double procs, give it a bit more power and a slightly longer up time with an internal cooldown. This would allow (good) players to fish for the proc to utilize the legendary item in a way which would make it useful and impactful.
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Another option could be to just make the proc 100% on HW casts (excluding Sanctify).
Now, let’s talk about Prayer of Healing. To start, here’s some raw data from spell comparison between healers:
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PoH: 1 + 4 nearest targets for 87.5% = 437,5% - 5% mana
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87.5% sp per mana point.
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Chain Heal: 4 targets, full smart heal 210+180+150+120 = 660% - 5% mana
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132%sp per mana point.
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Essence Font: 6 Targets, semi-smart, castable while moving, 158,4% x 6 = 950,4% - 7.2% mana
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132% sp per mana point.
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Wild Growth: 6 injured allies for 91% = 546% - 4,4% mana
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124% sp per mana point
As you can clearly see, Prayer of Healing is clearly the weakest out of the similar spells that other healers have. So what I suggest is that Prayer of Healing gets a small buff. For example, you could give each target a 17.5% buff, which would bring the total SP% to 525. It would still be slightly weaker than the counter parts, but with the help from Sanctify it would even things up. This would also promote the idea of Holy Priest being a suitable raid healer who’s able to push solid raw hps. Adjusting the “four nearest” to semi-smart like “four injured within 20 yds from target” or something like that, would make sense. (Again, all others are either semi-smart or smart).
Furthermore, you could bring back a modified version of Power of the Naaru. A new version could be “After you cast Holy Word: Sanctify, you next two (?) Prayer of Healing -spells will heal for extra 25%” for example. This would not break anything or make PoH overpowered, it would make it more relevant and see more use.
Argument: “These buffs would make priest just spam PoH and break the spec”
My reply: You still wouldn’t spam PoH because you would oom in 30 seconds, give or take a few. If you cast it with less than 3 injured targets you are wasting your mana even if it would be easier to heal them with PoH. So being reckless with the spell just because it’s useful again would work against you.
It would add more to our AoE healing kit and give PoH more space in the casting tab, but our mana pool won’t allow the spamminess. You still spotheal with FH/Heal.
That a bonus specific to PoH could make it useful without forcing it as a default filler. If PoH is always stronger than 5x Heal (with Flash Concentration), you want to save your mana to default to that, and only Heal when you need to be efficient. If PoH is situationally (like with PotN buff) stronger than 5x Heal, then we would be using most of your kit again, while still being a spot healer outside of the specific windows.
Furthermore, let’s think about 5man content and how PoH is used there. It’s not. There’s never a reason to cast PoH, because the spell hits as hard as a wet wipe. With buffs like mentioned above, you could actually heal through high m+ Prideful creatures with Sanctify + PoH while Apotheosis is on, instead of being forced to use single target heals, because the AoE option is just way too weak.
Now, let’s get the real cat on the table, and start talking about numbers. Let’s start this by saying that according to the Warcraft logs in the last 2 weeks there’s been a little over 40 000 Holy Priest parses being logged. The spec is loved by a lot of people, and the treatment that we are getting from the developers is quite cold and very disappointing.
So let’s look at the Mythic Castle Nathria parses from the last two weeks. The trend is the same that we’ve seen throughout Shadowlands. Holy Priest’s are trailing by a very large margin. The spec that should be the king of raw hps (because it has the worst utilities out of all the healers), sits in the bottom of the charts every single week.
I wanted to include a Warcraftlogs link about the healer stats from Mythic Castle Nathria here, but apparently links are not supported. But anyone can go and see them, and the reality is quite dire.
If we switch from Mythic to heroic, Holy climbs up the charts, but that’s irrelevant. Why is it irrelevant? Well, heroic logs are cheesed week after week for higher and higher parses. A full group of mythic geared people who know their stuff will destroy heroic bosses for breakfast, and they do so with only one or two healers who are pulling numbers that are not normal, nor do they present the real balance between the classes.
It should be obvious that the real test is Mythic, and even though mythic is not played by the majority, the classes should be balanced based on that. When the classes are balanced for mythic, they will also work for content below that level. (I’m disregarding PvP completely from this btw, so I’m only talking from PvE perspective).
So, what can we do to make Holy more competitive and wanted in raids? The simple answer is that the spec needs a raw flat buff. As mentioned above, the entire idea of Holy Priest seems to be built around being a raw HPS turret. No shenanigans, just pure raw beautiful hps. The only issue is that all other healer classes have higher raw hps and better utilities.
To make Holy more appealing, the entire spec needs to be buffed with at least 15%. Anything below that would be a nice gesture but it wouldn’t make an actual difference. The spec itself is equipped with a very nice toolkit that offers a nice variety of opportunities to adjust your playstyle for different kinds of content and it’s actually very fun to play. But because Holy priest has no real chance to dps while healing, and utility spells compared to others is a joke, the class needs to be able to push higher raw hps than it’s “colleagues”, who bring more utility.
Another important factor that I think should at least be considered is bringing back Divinity. Buffs like Divinity and Power of the Naaru were removed, but we got absolutely nothing in return. Those were both very important parts to our healing. Divinity would allow good players to minmax their gameplay and get the extra healing to the clutch situation when it’s needed the most, and the average holy priest would feel more useful because their numbers on Details would look a bit better. It’s a win-win situation which would, again, work well with the idea of the holy priest being a raw hps turret that is easy to pick up, but to master and to unload the full potential you would need to put some effort into it.
Currently, no matter how much effort you put into it, the reward is the same. A slap on the face judging by the patch notes.
Argument: “These buffs would make Holy Priest OP and other healers would not be used”
My reply: Would we see more Holy Priests in mythic raids? Most likely. Would it make other specs weaker or less desirable? Absolutely not. Shamans still have their totems, Palas have utility to last for a week and Disc is still disc. We would prolly still not see Holy Priest in the World First race (because AM/SLT/HTT/Barrier are so strong), but we would see Holy Priest in the top 100. (It took something like 120 guilds to kill Sire Denathrius before we saw the first Holy being used. All other specs were presented in top 50). It’s a straight up fact that Holy priest needs a buff, and we needed it in the pre patch already.
Some other spells that would need some re-thinking, and my ideas what it could possibly be:
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Apotheosis should be taken off the GCD.
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Symbol of Hope could be reworked a bit so it would be used more than once very late. With 5 min CD it doesn’t make sense that it becomes useful in the last 30sec when you should be healing instead of channeling mana for 5 seconds. (Compare Shamans mana tide for example, no balance at all).
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Guardian Angel talent could be baseline (when cast on self), and make the talent: When cast on friendly also applies for self. But if it saves either one from death you get extended CD by 1-2 min or something like that. Would give us the very much needed personal CD.
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Add one more feather charge to max it to four. Holy Priest lacks personal CD’s, Damage Reduction, and general utilities. With m+ content and raid encounters that demand high movement, you run out of feathers too fast even if you try to minmax their use while other classes and specs have multiple ways to deal with similar issues holy priests have nothing. An extra charge would also allow us to give them to others (like Death Knights with low movement boosts).
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Holy Fire and Chastise should proc Surge of Light. There’s no reason why they don’t do that already.
Judging from the past, I’m not even optimistic about seeing a brighter future. But as someone who has never mained anything but Holy priest, it has been sad to see how the spec I love is being completely ignored for quite some time.
Maybe one day the sun will shine brighter. But big changes are needed, and we needed them months ago.
