I cant stand the position of holy priest for years. My solutions to make it more viable are as the following:
Prayer of mending: adding a new talent which provides X% of damage reduction per each stack on the target.
Mastery: mastery provides X% of damage reduction the target while it persists
Fixing oracle: casting holy word sanctify detonates X amount of prayer of meneing on each target. Piety will deal with the overhealing. Also adding instant heal from prayer of mending to twin sight target.
Adding this kind of quick solutions would make holy viable in each content. It wont make it harder. It will make it fun and enjoyable.
Hey, the things you suggested will make the spec really passive, and I don’t think that’s what Blizz will be after and also for me personally, sounds not as fun.
For M+ i think just a extra defensive PS type will be enough to be viable.
And for raiding 2nd stack of Halo, with a change of the cd ofc, will be fun and boost the hps a bunch, but overall don’t think Priest needs that much changes, just not popular class, so the little it does need is in the background.
We need a change in the Mana cost of abilities first and foremost. We cannot sustain over long fights crown of the cosmos requires major downtime in our healing to even be able to last the entire fight. Other healers are just better because they never need to stop (apart from holy paladin). PoM is just a dead build at this point its a pvp talent. Lightweaver is way too mana hungry to be viable; using 4 flash heals and 4 prayer of healing costs around 20% of our mana pool and just doesn’t work.
Mythic+ at around 18 is incredibly difficult because we 1 don’t have the output and 2 have to stop for mana unless you have meld drink and even then its a nightmare.
Mastery is completely useless when it gets overwritten by any subsequent heal from the first tick. Have a 20k hp echo rolling? Nah thats overwritten by a 200 hp PoM heal stupid design.
No hots + cast reliant mana heavy build in an expansion with a tonne of movement is just a disaster…
I agree with what you said.
Mana in raids is a huge issue, and there is NO way to manage it at the moment. If you heal, you will run oom, good luck! I like the idea behind Surge of Light, but it doesn’t work reliably - it would maybe help if Holy Fire/Nova could proc it as well and the stacks to affect PoH as well, but it would probably still not be enough anyway.
May i suggest you try Oracle in high M+? I’ve been pushing in it, and it’s surprisingly fun. You you do a lot more sustained healing from PoM at the cost of Halo windows, but mana is barely in issue in that spec - I sit maybe before bosses, not always. Throughput (especially in heavy AoE burst) still relies heavily on your DPS playing their defensives well tho
Echo of Light is additive though, it doesn’t get overriden by a new spell.
My biggest issue with holy priest is the Ultimate Serenity talent. It’s a nobrainer to take it throughput-wise, but it takes away any variability from the spec when all you care about is having Serenity up in ANY damage profile… :c
