Originally Posted by constantius
There will be no builds based around CoH if the current cooldown-driven CoH goes live.
...
Maybe there will be some kind of CoH -> Holy Nova x3 -> CoH rotation people will mess around with, but we're not going to be pure AoE healers in WotLK, unless things change dramatically from Alpha -> Beta.
|
Indeed. With the cooldown on CoH, it is unlikely that priests will be assigned to raid healing much at all. This job will go to Druids and Shamans. Tree druids get Flourish, which affects an area similar to CoH, but with no cooldown, and seems to heal more than CoH per cast. No cooldown and a mass HoT means that unless the damage is very spikey, two tree druids can easily keep the raid up even in a fight with lots of raid wide splash damage. (Tree druids also get other stuff that will further make them more desirable for raid healing, such as the Replenish talent ). And Shamans will be as strong as ever, with Chain Heal buffed, in handling raid healing in general, and handling the spikes in particular.
Without too much QQ'ing, I have to say that whilst the buffs to priest tank healing are nice, it saddens me that priests are likely to be pushed into the "paladin role" (mainly tank healing and buffs and utility) rather than the raid healing role that I at least have enjoyed.
Although, in all fairness this impression could change if some additional AOE healing abilities shows up for priests in the beta.