I won’t be going into details since a lot has been already said on inadequacy of all those Holy Priest revamps and tunings on PTR. Now that the S2 release date has been announced, lets take a final look whether the most pressing issues of Holy Priest has been addressed.
Non existent AoE healing, Prayer of Healing is unviable trash, at best scenario usable in raids only.
Utility went from bad to worse, with us no longer being able to pick Guardian Spirit and Restitution at the same time. Not a single additional utility added.
Renew and Prayer of Mending remain dysfunctional spells that do abysmally low healing even with numerous talents invested into them.
We still got 7 talents dedicated to Prayer of Mending improvements only. Even with all these 7 talents Prayer of Mending is trash.
New m+ dungeons will be demanding on high mobility. Holy Priest not only has arguably the lowest mobility, it has to be stationary to do most of its healing.
etc etc
With Season 2 official announcement my last flicker of hope to be able to play my holy priest in m+ high keys and not feel like a lame duck vanishes.
Yep, the revamp looked like a promising start at first, but getting zero viable updates throughout the PTR just leaves us in the same, if not worse spot than before in M+. And honestly, we are probably worse off in raid too overall, because once we move to S3 and we lose the Apotheosis set bonus, all of these changes are going to come back to bite us in the butt.
So basically, it’s a shame, that Blizzard dont listen really to their community and also kinda ignoring the Holy Priests enjoyer, especially those for M+.
I read some Posts in the Forum like from Jdouci, that the “Guardian Angel” should be changed not only into a single target thing, maybe into a button that acutally protects the whole group from death (like a death cheat) but comes with a Cooldown of 6-8 min, which sounds not really bad imo.
Prayer of Healing: This spells tell us, that it is a Powerful spell, but it’s not.
The 150% increased healing is not enough.
My Idea could be like: Make it a 6 sec cooldown, but with a huge amount of AOE healing, even almost like “Power word: Radiance” from Discipline Priests, and also decreases the Cooldown for Holy word: Sanctify more.
My favorite spell: Prayer of Mending
Why not brining back the Talent from Mists of Pandaria “Divine Insight”?
40% chance by casting Heal or Prayer of Healing, that its cooldown got resetet and it bounced between your allys. I could see some potential for M+, if moving is necessary?
Im not sure about Renew now, its also a spell that its not really used more often, and with the new talent with 60% inceased healing but with a 12 sec cooldown, it doesnt even heal like 1 Flash Heal?
And the most forgoten and sadly very useless Spell: Mastery: Echo of Light.
Make it back to 6 sec and healing every 1 sec and increase its healing a bit.
Ofc, sometimes Mastery: Echo of Light has some good potential, but its also like kinda meh-ish, or am I wrong?
I really think Echo of Light needs to be changed to work like PoM. We already have the highest overhealing by a massive margin as it is, we could balance throughput by tuning our mastery to give that additional healing when damage is taken, rather than just having it tick for overhealing more often than not.
We could go even further, and add a percentage of overhealing (capped by mastery % or some other metric) to further increase the effectiveness of our mastery while also addressing overhealing issues.
The main reason to pick Empowered Renew is for the extra CD reduction of HW:Sanctify. The default CDR is 2 sec when you cast Renew, Empowered Renew increases it to 8 sec.
Sanctify has 1 min CD. Realistically, you can cast Empowered Renew 4 times in 60 seconds. 4*8=32 sec. reduction. So that’s 28 seconds CD on Sanctify with this talent alone.
Further, the Voice of Harmony talent makes Divine Star reduce the CD of Sanctify by additional 4 sec. Realistically, you can use DS 3 times per minute. Which grants (4*3=) 12 sec. further reduction.
If you play the Oracle hero talents, so you can pick Divine Star over Halo, you can reduce the CD of Sanctify to 16 seconds.
Even further, you can pick the Holy Celerity talent which reduces the CD of our Holy Words by 15 seconds, putting Sanctify on 1 sec CD, on paper
It’s not gonna work like this in practice, of course, but it seems that Oracle will be able spam Sanctify like it’s nothing. Archon will be a little bit behind in this respect.
I’ve made a very simple calculation that takes the 60 sec. CD and then subtracts all the CD reductions that are possible within 60 secs.
Empowered Renew has a 12 sec. CD, reduces the CD of Sanctify by 8 seconds. So 12 seconds of regular cooldown will pass between every 8 second subtraction.
Divine Star has a 15 sec. CD, reduces the CD of Sanctify by 4 seconds. So 15 seconds of regular cooldown will pass between every 4 second subtraction.
Holy Celerity reduces the cooldown from 60 seconds to 45 seconds.
I haven’t tried to make a realistic simulation because that would be really difficult. What I’m trying to say is that, with all these tools, the CD on Sanctify will be really short.
But besides all of the Cooldown reduction of Sanctify, I also think the healing is not enough and also with the new Talent that its radius is increased to 30%, so from 10 meters to 13 meters, you just hope they are in a good position to make it more impacting and the healing is also not that great.
Okay, that one talent that increases 40% healing for both the Holy words is kinda nice, but will it actually be enough?
The main problem with Sanctify is that its healing is really low. That is because its cooldown can be reduced by Prayer of Healing. The healing amount of Sanctify is designed for around 14 secs. of cooldown, not the full 60 seconds.
Currently, we don’t use Prayer of Healing in M+ so we have no way of reducing the CD. Which means we have a really lame ability on an unreasonable cooldown.
But in the next season, with all these reductions, the healing amount of Sanctify will be a lot more justifiable. Whether it’s gonna be enough tho, I don’t know.
Maybe in raids, certainly not in dungeons. Prayer of Healing is unviable, it’s a waste of mana. And Sanctify is quite weak in dungeons as well: double using it on your group will bring them health at best by 15%.
