World of Warcraft®

07/15/2011 09:22 AMPosted by Kaivax

They have enough benefits that few guilds seem to be sitting them for want of yet another raid cooldown

...are you even looking at what 10m raids are doing?

You're right, I suppose, holy priests don't get sat. We go Disc. Unless there are already too many disc priests.

Q: With the changes being made to critical heals, do you feel that crit will become a more prominent stat for healers, up there with haste and mastery? Or is it a less important change aimed at balancing between the pve and pvp aspects of the game? – Derëk (LA)


A: Even with the 4.2 changes, haste may very well be a more attractive stat for healers. We’re just trying to narrow the gap. It’s not important for all stats to be identical as long as they aren’t so far apart that you’re tempted to keep perfectly optimized gear from a previous tier instead of less perfectly optimized gear from a new tier. We want a healer to take gear with crit seriously (even if he would ultimately prefer haste) rather than passing or sharding it. We made the change mostly for itemization reasons and for any PvP vs. PvE concerns. PvP healers tend to have low crit chances anyway and we have other ways to balance healing in PvP should it become too powerful (predominantly the Mortal Strike and related debuffs).

you do realize that if you use mortal strike and related healing debuffs to re-balance healing output you've put pvp right back in the position of needing a mortal strike on your team to be able to do anything, right? :p

Don't see how spirit is an particular "uber" stat. You can't stack spirit unless you're putting spirit gems in the sockets instead of intellect but that would just be a silly thing. Or any other stat for that matter but *Shrug*.

Seriously!?!? I think blizz fails to see holy priests 'getting sat for disc' because those said priests are just being pressured to switching as disc. GS is not amazing enough that raid leaders will prefer you holy over disc because disc has a single Target cd AND a raidwide one. If GS was as great as you claim then you would actually see holy priests being used on heroic baleroc.......instead they stack discs. Infact as of last night with 56 guilds having killed heroic baleroc not a single holy priest was brought....grant it resto druids and resto shamans weren't much better. It saddens me that you (blizzard) are so blind.
It's not even so much that raids prefer disc over holy so much as they prefer ps/barrier over holy....and being caused to switch over these two spells is saddening.
This expasion is becoming a "bring the cooldowns, not the player"

if you make Holy Radiance a casted heal you're going to need to rethink the way Holy Paladin PvP healing works - right now that "Fire and Forget" functionality is the only preemptive heal we have in our toolkit that will continue to tick when we are stuck in our hour long cc-chains.

Not to mention you'd be removing a sprint if you made it casted. It would end up being a liability of a spell that would be fodder for spell school lockouts.

But with your approach to PvP balance I would honestly not be surprised to see it changed directly to a casted heal with no other changes made whatsoever, effectively removing it from the PvP toolkit

I'm having trouble reconciling these two quotes:

07/15/2011 09:22 AMPosted by Kaivax

we didn’t want the Holy spec to be unrecognizable for a long-time player.

07/15/2011 09:22 AMPosted by Kaivax

The paladin model is close but as mentioned above, they have to rely on the three heals too much because they don’t have another heal like Riptide or Penance to add to the mix

It seems like you're admitting that you've made the serious error of not doing enough to fix Holy Pally gameplay because you're scared to move away from the one-heal-fits-all gameplay that has been the hallmark/stigma of their toolkit. The second problem is that despite that, you still tinker and change paladins so often that even though they haven't been changed enough, there's still a lot of fatigue from patches and alterations.

It might be too late for this expansion, but please please do not be afraid to completely rework the Holy tree for the next expansion, with an eye for huge cross-spell synergy, and more multi-target ability. Suggestions: Make Beacon of Light a 10 second buff given to the target of a Holy Shock heal. Make Holy Power Point spells also cost mana and increase HPP generation to reduce your fear of too-efficient Holydin spell rotation diversity. Go through with making Holy Radiance work more like a Healing Rain hulu hoop. Make casting Holy Shock on an enemy target reduce the damage (for a short time/of it's next attack) by a %.

Unbelievable...

The question being asked (over and over and over again) should not be "why is there no spirit cloth in Fireleands" The question that they need to address is "Why are priests being given no options besides valor gear, to upgrade, when all the other healing classes are not being limited in such a way?"
Rolling on perceived "caster dps gear" is causing a slew of problems for Holy Priests.
For crying out loud...for all that is holy (pun intended), address this issue one way or another.
If they don't intend to throw in a few pieces of spirit gear for holy priests (easiest solution) than make a blue post explaining to caster dps that YES, holy priests can and will be using the same gear you use.
Assist the priest community in getting this sudden decision to leave them off the loot table in the new raids, smoothed out.
Most of the Holy priests on my server have switched to Disc or Shadow, rerolled or are now playing another toon altogether.
Explain to the priest community why they in particular are having to sacrifice spirit, if they want to raid for gear instead of farm valor, when the other healing classes do not have to do this.
We don't want another blue post explaining how the tier set has spirit on it. We know this. We want to know how a blue can sufficiently explain the lack of options given to holy priests, in comparison.
Please...this problem isn't going to go away just because you ignore it. Don't say it has already been answered, the question at hand has not been answered.

Er...what Blizz? GS is not "amazing" enough to bring a holy priest over a disc priest. Half the time, I cast it and it doesn't work. Either lower Hymn to 3 minutes or give Holy a raid CD, The H Firelands fights I've done so far support Disc more than Holy because Disc has one more raid CD, and an additional throughput CD (two if you're atonement spec).

Seriously!?!? I think blizz fails to see holy priests 'getting sat for disc' because those said priests are just being pressured to switching as disc. GS is not amazing enough that raid leaders will prefer you holy over disc because disc has a single Target cd AND a raidwide one. If GS was as great as you claim then you would actually see holy priests being used on heroic baleroc.......instead they stack discs. Infact as of last night with 56 guilds having killed heroic baleroc not a single holy priest was brought....grant it resto druids and resto shamans weren't much better. It saddens me that you (blizzard) are so blind.
It's not even so much that raids prefer disc over holy so much as they prefer ps/barrier over holy....and being caused to switch over these two spells is saddening.
This expasion is becoming a "bring the cooldowns, not the player"

This.

Since i've been playing holy since I rolled a priest, i tried disc and was horrible at it. I could spend the time to re-learn it but why should I be forced to?

But its not so much the lack of spirit, its the lack of choice.

in T11 I could choose to not take the T11 chest and instead take a chest with mastery, or haste, same with most other pieces of gear.
Now , since the cookie-cutter answer is "T12 has spirit, use T12" so I dont have a choice anymore? Where is the fun in choosing your gear then? You're pretty much taking all the choice out of gearing. No more will I think "hmm.. which 4 pieces of T12 should I get, and are there better stats on any main pieces from raid drops"

Pretty much only 1 piece for each slot thats possible. no choice. (assuming i dont roll on +hit gear)

I just want the choice back.

We know the three-heal, mana-and-Spirit based system largely works.

Priests dont seem to have this mana and spirit based system anymore. At least not to the extent other classes do.

Shamans yet again will be ignored. Even admitted that the class is based on mana tide when it's seriously gimping the class. Remove it. Balance around it being removed. It seriously is the worst thing to ever happen to shamans and its almost as an outdated ability as backstab. It just can't / doesn't work in current raiding.

There's a reason why guilds are stacking resto druids disc priest and holy paladins. Because HPS output DOES matter.

Holy is fine?

Just proves how out of touch the dev's seem to be, what a joke. Thank god i pve retired this toon.

I read the whole thing and I did not see anything that would deal with the problem of players in a group or raid treating the healers like they are the scum of Azeroth.

therefore I will continue to not heal anything.

You should have just started the post out by saying "We don't feel like answering any tough questions at this time so we are just going to patronize you"

07/15/2011 09:22 AMPosted by Kaivax

Just try and distinguish between “my dude hasn’t changed lately” and “my dude is fundamentally broken and the developers don’t know or don’t care.” We can assure you the latter sentiment is never the case.

My dude (er, rather, my preferred spec) is fundamentally broken and the devs don't know or care. You can "assure [me] this is never the case" by fixing it. Or, at the very least, ceasing to insist explicitly that it's fine.

Holy priests need help. We don't have a unique niche. We can fill the same niche as druids, but worse. We could also, in a pinch, replace a disc priest - but worse. The only spec we could compete with in their usual role is resto shaman (which, by the way, could still use some help, especially in 10m) - but we can't even do that because shamans bring far more things to the raid that are actually useful. Body and Soul and GS don't stack up to raid buffs, Tide, interrupts, ghost wolf, and totem of win.

There's literally no reason to bring a holy priest if you have access to any other healer who can fill the role you need filled, unless the player behind the holy priest is just that much better than all your other options (and also that much better than that same player in their Disc spec). A lot of us have been riding on skill for a long time now. Fix us. Fix us, or admit you don't care.