Renew for holy priests seems to get buffed pretty often, but is often almost never cast.
The obvious reason for this is that while right now in very poor gear renew is worth casting, the spell does not scale at all with mastery, and is basically the only spell in our arsenal not to do so. As such by the time your getting 30-40%+ mastery renew is pretty much useless to press.
It also causes other problems, as it means all the talents linked to it, such as Holy word salvation, or benediction do not scale as well with gear as other talents are left in a state where they will permanently need tweaking every patch.
to me it seems like they should find a way to make renew scale with mastery either. there is a number of ways to do this, the one I think that would be most interesting would be to make it so renew instantly pops an echo of the light on your target in proportion to the total amount the renew will heal, while at the same time removing the current instant heal part of renew.
I mostly agree, renew is a bad spell that I basically never intentionally cast. Not sure I agree with what you said about HW Salvation. It’s the insta heal and the PoM that make that spell useful, the renew is just a bonus.
Renew should probably have some sort of scaling or allow it to increase its healing for each ‘single target healing spell’ we use on a target up to a certain cap. It would certainly make it good to use/keep up on a tank. Particularly as we rely so heavily on long cast time abilities and have no damage mitigation, a worthwhile ticking heal would be a nice filler
Renew are a really efficient heal thou if used properly.
But it whould be good if mastery affected renew a bit more, like maybe applying the mastery every tick on the target making it a little bit more impactful. But considering the hpm for renew are fairly high I whould not see this happening.
What i have suggested to blizzard regarding this specific topic are a change to enduring renewal talent too make this baseline. Simply put you could use renew and refresh it with any single target heals. In place of the Enduring Renewal talent I suggested “Empowered Renewal” were the passive simply transforms into applying to all spells, which whould allow for some nice synergy. Like keeping renew up on whole groups and refresh it with prayer etc.
Not agreeing about the Salv either. The HoT portion of Renew was never its strength, and rest of it scales very well with gear/mastery.
But do agree that Renew by itself is in need of some changes. Maybe make the HoT portion apply mastery but with a reduced rate. Or maybe increase its healing a bit on targets with your mastery on them.
I too would enjoy seeing Renew interract with the mastery. Either that or make the Benediction talent baseline, with a nerfed % chance to leave it or so(?)
It may not be that special but I enjoy using it in casual PvP and the open world on people high and low level. Just a comfortable spell to slap around ever since vanilla.
Other alternative may change how Renew works, adding something like “The total heal of renew is increased by the 50% of your mastery”. So if you have 30% of mastery, the renew heal is increased by a 15%.
That way I could find some logic on the Benediction nerf. Also will make that Renew grow with us instead need great buffs on each major patch.