As someone who plays Holy Priest on a fairly decent lvl; currently RL for a 7/12 mythic team, 15+ ish keys and some RBG’s now and then. I had some hope that we Holy Priests would get some love from blizzard come Shadowlands, but the current news from the alpha has me concerned.
Now don’t get me wrong. I like the changes to the Priest Class as a whole. Its great that we as Priests are getting some of our iconic spells back as baseline abilities available to all specs like it was before, such as:
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Shadow Word: Pain
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Shadow Word: Death
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Power Word: Shield
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Desperate Prayer
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Flash Heal
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Mind Blast
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Mind Sear
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Mind Sooth
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Leap of Faith
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Psychic Scream
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Power Infusion
But that’s just what this is. Changes to the Priest Class. Not Shadow or Disc or Holy but just Priest and as a Priest its going to be fun to cast these spells again, because they have been missed.
Now if we look at the changes to Holy there is not much to get exited about. Its just a lot of numbers tuning to spell power and mana cost thats not worth mentioning. Pluss a couple of changes to certain spells.
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Holy Fire now has a 1.5 sec cast time and deals more damage
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Circle of Healing is now baseline
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Prayer of Mending is now instant cast
The CoH and PoM changes are good but can only be noted as minor changes and the new talent Prayer Circle is unintuitive and a dead talent because we do not need 30% faster cast speed on PoH. These “Changes” are nothing that changes the fact that Holy has the lowest mobility, worst personal mitigations and lowest utility out of all the healing classes and this is whats makes Holy Priests so undesirable in all aspects of the game.
We need something new or a rework of a spell/spells that gives Holy Priests something that makes them desired again.
I personally would love to see a rework of Desperate prayer and Focused Will into something like this:
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Desperate Prayer (minor rework): Increase maximum health by 15% and give a 20% damage reduction for 10 seconds and instantly heal you for that amount. (currently we lack some survivability and this will give us the utility we need).
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Focused Will (minor rework): Direct attacks against you cause you to gain Focused Will reducing damage you take by 15% for 8 sec. stacking up to 2 times. While you have no Focused Will you gain Fortifying Will reducing the damage all allies within 20 yards take by 10% (Does not stack with other damage reducing abilities like Devotion aura and PW: barrier. This makes it so its a nice passive damage reduction focused on the ranged dps and healer groups and not a dead passive like it is now in raids).
Please Blizzard we Holy Priests really need some love come Shadowlands