In the spirit of some changes, one of the most prevalent problems among healers, is the lackluster performance of Holy Priests. This is reflected by how Holy Priests represented 1% of healers in raids in Phase 2. The spec needs some significant rework in order to make it more competitive in a raid environment.
Holy Paladins have excellent tank healing and single heal burst. Disc Priests have shields. Restodruids have the best HOTs. Restoshamans have utility and burst aoe healing. Holy Priests are supposed to be the jack of all trades but master of none, but they fail in that aspect. They also have poor utility.
So my suggested buffs are:
Prayer of Healing gameplay
Prayer of Healing is an excellent party healing spell but Holy Priests are not able to use it enough due to its cost and cast time. Some ways to fix this:
A. Surge of Light discounts the cost of the next Prayer of Healing by 100% but cannot crit.
B. Serendipity applies to 2 or 3 prayers of healing.
C. If C is rejected, Serendipity stacks should be applied by Circle of Healing (full 3 stacks) or Empowered Renew (1 stack per cast).
Now, when it comes to utility, the Holy Priests should offer more to the raid as a whole. Ways to boost utlity:
Lightwell should be useful:
A. Lightwell provides Improved Inspiration to all raid members within X number of yards. Improved Inspiration reduces all dmg taken by 10%. Lasts 15 seconds. Has a 1 minute cooldown.
OR
B. Lightwell pulse-heals all raid members within x yards for X amount for 15 seconds. Cooldown 1 minute.
Divine Providence (existing talent) reduces the cooldown of Hymn of Hope and Divine Hymn by 40%.
The effect of Glyph of Guardian Spirit is rolled into the existing talent.
I would rework lightwell like this:
1: give it a 30 yard range
2: make it activate on any friendly player on range when they take dmg
3: reduce cooldown to 2 minutes
4: remove the break effect that cancels it if the person takes too much dmg
5: make it instant cast
And guardian spirit +40% extra healing swapped into a 30% dmg reduction on target.
Just these two changes would already make holy priests perfectly viable.
Holy priests arent bad at all, but they fill the same niche as resto shaman and druid and most raids want to get the extra totems / innervate instead of bringing another priest that dont bring anything but pure healing.
Changing guardian spirit to be a dmg reduction % cd would do wonders for hpriest tho.
I’ve been a holy priest since like week 3 on wrath. I enjoy it far more than disc… I dunno, I can’t go braindead enough to press the shield button the enitre raid.
Its true that holy doesn’t bring anything in the bleeding edge group, but for the rest of the playerbase… no issue outhealing any other healing spec… but thats more down to the player, not the spec.
Circle of healing is rather annoying to use and only has a use for like 3 bosses in Ulduar. Would be neat if Circle of healing worked more like it did in TBC, maybe a 4sec CD or something.
Lightwell is completely useless, I’d make it a totem that lasts 12 sec, heals everyone within 15y for a reasonable amount with a 1.30min CD. Or basically a weaker and longer lasting Hymn without having to channel it and still keep like a 15y range on it. Maybe add a 10-20% damage reduction to people in range, but that starts sounding a bit unbalanced.
Would be neat if Holy Nova targeting worked like CoH instead of party based, but I can see that becoming a bit broken.
The problem with Holy Priests is not that they’re bad, it’s that disc is too good. If you don’t already have one, you always want a disc, and it’s not even close compared to any other healer except paladin in their own niche. This means that unless the raid already has a disc, there’s no reason to bring a holy.
Conceptually Holy Priests are about even with Resto Druids.
The problem is, in the current “meta” healing setup, they’re competing with Resto Druids and Resto Shamans for the 4th Healer spot (Other then the mandatory 2x hpal + disc), so you don’t see them often.
If you look at class representation for Priests there’s not enough of them to have a disc and a holy in many raids, nor do raid leaders actually seek out holy priests. Overall, resto shamans are better and provide more utility, and resto druids are about even but provide more utility.
Sweaty guilds will nearly always run 2x hpal + 1x disc + 1x rsham
Holy Paladin 578k
Disc Priest 345k
Resto Sham 163k
Resto Dru 113k
Holypr 32k
look at this miserable representation.
No one wants to play this spec because its completely outclassed by disc and like others mentioned, brings nothing to the raid.
Holypriest is now firmly the ret paladin of vanilla, I was ridiculed by most pugs i tried to join and every single time, “can you respec disc?”.
Its pretty bad for Holypriest enjoyers.
Its a shame Aggrend doesn’t play holy priest (he’s ret btw), or we would see buffs and a entirely new glyph.
Well, thats becuase the class is represented with a second “healing” spec. The number arent as bad as it looks at first glance. Obviously the 2nd, inferior, spec will be badly respresented when the 1st spec is more popular than the Druids and Shamans combined.
Lucky for any Holy Priest that spent their raids CoHing in TBC, they can reroll at the press of a button, unlike Shamans and Druids. Right?
I’ve been maining Priest since SSC and in TBC I played Disc because it was more fun and it wasn’t until end of BT that I was whined into switching to holy. When Wrath came out I was going to go back to disc, but since they were in such abundance of those I switched to holy. I play with guilds for fun, not to sweat hard and most people are in the same boat (in the guild). So I’m still first or 2nd on the meters depending on the fight and its nice to look at all those shiny parse numbers because there aren’t that many of us.
So I think for the majority of the playerbase, who aren’t meta nerds failing to execute, being a holy priest isn’t really that bad since you can be on-par with any other class/spec… can… it just takes effort. A buff would be neat, but from my point of view, it isn’t necessary.
Also we’re not as whiny as those Ret sods whose “Blessing of Crying” needed to be nerfed before they found their keyboards.
It’s also statvore, you need many spirit because manavore, many hast because of the Prayer of Healing, many crit for the Holy Concentration proc, Surge of Light.
And Blizzard could really buff the Holy Priest because nobody play it in PvP, so it’s safe.
Rogues have the same problem with Sub. Sub’s damage is still pretty ok for a melee, assa and combat are just strictly better so they get used instead.
Warlocks have the same problem with Destro. Destro’s damage is perfectly viable for a caster, above meta picks like boomie or ele even, but Affli is strictly better so you never see destros.
The reason its that much of a difference is because one is better, prefered and they share population. Not a hard concept to grasp, is it? Without Disc priest the Holy numbers would be about the same as the rest outside of Paladins.
Like people say, its not that Holy is that bad, its just that between the prefered Disc and the overpowered Paladin, the numbers get scewed as the potential Holy priest population have an alternative.
hahaha new ret, warrior, druid glyphs ggo brrrrrrrr hurrrhdurr
they even changed baseline ret abilities to stack up their DoT faster
(will point out that the solved game thing goes out the window when Blizzard directly changes bosses (read anything), maybe no one killed xt HM on release because it was too solved)
If one is better with even 5%, it would have a overwhelming number of people prefering it in todays min/max culture. Not to mention how raids are composed, where Discs have a more nished function than Holy/Resto/Resto.
What it is you are not getting? If Druids and Shamans had a 2nd healing spec that had nothing specific to offer and was outside of meta, you would have low representation there aswell - even if they were similar or slightly worse. Doesnt have to be a world of difference.
funny how there are 4-6x more paladins than these specs and 2x the disc priests.
Must mean they are all balanced and equally bring value to the raid.
Balanced like Ret and Feral was.
Why are you so invested in leaving these classes (read specs) behind?
