Priests are bad ass, but as everyone says, they offer no more utility other than an HP and Spirit boost.

- Chain Heal, Heroism and Totem buffs (even grounding) are huge for the current raid game.
- 2 Blessings min, 3 preferred was something we were lacking early on in BC (1 active Paladin...) caused me to reroll. I miss my Priest, but recruiting an active Paladin on our server is/was a pita.
- Battle res and highly skilled Druids in our guild (we almost always have raided with 3+ Druids pre BC) and now we run two to three (healing) depending on the night. Battle res is alot more than an extra Priest can bring. We also have at least one feral Druid.

7 Healers seems to be the sweet spot now for raiding and 8 is the new max (was 9 for us).

Not to get this thread dirty with the whole "fun" factor, but a big problem with what makes paladins and shamans viable, are obviously their buffs.


But who wants to be important for that button they press every 15 minutes? Shamans have it slightly better with recasting of totems and rotations and weeee chain heal.... But I know I'm a good healer, I've accepted that... But I don't think the difference between me and a priest should be a 15 minute button, nor that sever.

In my opinion, it's just a problem of "stacking". Obviously, since TBC, every healer became specialized. Paladins are the tank healers, hugh single target healing output and efficiency, shamans and druids are raid healers (solid hots and aoe healing) and priests are emergency healers (shield, pom, flash heal). The thing is, you generally need 3 single healer to keep a tank up, 3-4 raid healers is always good to keep a raid up vs aoe dmg and such, but more than 1 emergency healer is usually wasted. On top of that, paladins bring blessings, shamans bring totems and bloodlust, druids bring combat rez, and 1 holy priest is enough to bring spi buff.
Holy priests lack something unique, very usefull, other than their healing capacity to be appreciated after the first one.

This will get easier with time. If a guild needs healers, the flexibility of priests means they'll always get a spot.

Just the more hardcore guilds have their healing lineups set up already.

But the thing this discussion highlights for me is again how the massive emphasis on dps in TBC raids is playing out. Because everything is gated on dps, even the healers you choose to take will be based on what buffs they bring for the dps guys.

A group wide power infusion castable like coh as the 41 point holy talent would be a good start to make us catch up on that whole utility thing I hear other healing classes bring. A 10-15% nerf of every single healing class apart from us would work aswell but then you would get a sea of tears instead of a sea of joy.

Not to really derail, even though this is to some degree related, I think that this:
type of thinking is precisely what causes people to understate the strengths of priests, or perhaps rather to overstate the strength of other classes. You view priests as emergency healers and play with emphasis on shield and flash heal? We don't play the same class. I won't continue, because I made a post of this nature in a different thread that anyone can go read, but really.....c'mon, healing roles aren't static. The only thing I can really label is shaman to some extent, but they're hardly caged birds.

In a TBC raid you would be expected to take 3 of every class bar 2 for an idealized "balanced raid". So, if you are taking 2 shadow priests then exactly how many holy priests are you expecting a guild to take . . . ?

Paladins fill relatively more healing spots in 25 mans because, unlike other healing classess, they have no other role that is widely acecpted as being viable; unlike druids, shaman and priests.

Holy priests are still viable, and indeed wanted. If guilds were taking 2 shadow priests AND 2-3 holy priests then there would be a real issue for the other classess.

One problem with that is the massive advantage a raid with shadow priests have. If the raid would profit stacking holy priests the same way as stacking paladins then you would suddenly raid with 6 priests in a 25 man raid. Druid are almost similar, but not as extreme. You can raid without feral OT but few raid without shadow priests. On the other hand, paladins and shamans have offspecs that can be nice but not to the same extent as the other two.

So using one feral druid and one resto druid, 2 shadow priests and one holy seems to fit nicely in how popular those two classes are. I would rather see that the tables were turned and shamans/paladins had those roles and you had advantage stacking priests and druids instead, but that would require some massive changes.

In my opinion, and judging from a lot of people noticing that pretty much ever healer class has become specialized in a healing style, the whole ideology behind a Priest's healing methods (Jack of All Trades, Master of none) is currently flawed within the encounter designs (for the most part,) and the ability of the players behind the other classes in your raids.

We don't bring anything to to the combat of the raid, we bring two buffs of which only one is useful for everything, where as every other class brings some amazing utility (you could argue that Paladins don't bring combat utility, but Blessings are amazing, and yes BoP and the like can be used mid-combat,) while being able to do whatever they specialize in better. So if you have very capable players on your Resto Shamans, Resto Druids, and Holy Paladins, you have no real need for anymore than 1 priest.

As for the poster who pointed out that priests make for amazing 'reactive' healers, I would have to agree, but if you're in a situation where your being forced to use all your reactive heals, then there is something wrong (for the most part / most encounters,) with your other healers.

I do think it would be a nice to give Holy Priests some stronger raid synergy, as we don't really bring anything to justify bringing more than one.

As for my raiding guild, we tend to bring 2 raiding Holy Priests, and that isn't my choice, as I would rather take another druid over the second Holy Priest, but I can't really offer my criticism and back it up without any form of morality check on myself by the other officers, as I am one of those Holy Priests.

Thats actually a decent idea, although I can see some negative pvp implications etc. That being said, I don't think 41 holy is necessarily the place for it. That issue is twofold. Foremost, is that it would conflict with IDS, which is actually a fairly substantial dps boost even though it is largely unnoticed, and trading one boost for another like that is counterproductive(even though your idea would most likely be more overall dps). The second issue, is that with a lot of the raid encounters out right now, and the re tuned mana cost, CoH is finally useful. Tons of encounters in SSC and even more so in The Eye provide the opportunity to get great usage out of it. Ideally in regard to the suggestion, and with respect to numbers of class per raid and min/maxing, you would have one priest up all the way through holy, and the other being up into disc for IDS anyway being able to pick up mega-super-PI-whatever-thing.

Additionally, to respond to what you said. Nerfing other classes is NOT a working alternative. Then no one wins. I for one, have no interest in gimping my raid force for my sole benefit, even if not doing so leaves me on the bench. There are two real, clear solutions. One, is to find some way to add a damage buff to the priest class. The other, and my suggestion to anyone feeling the knife prick, is to play your freaking heart out, so that YOUR presence is felt, and YOUR addition to the raid is clear.

I know that priests can heal tanks, or can heal raids, or whatever, I've been a holy priest for 2 years and i damn know the class can do it. However, paladins beats us in single target healing, shaman beats us in aoe healing, druids beat us in raid healing with hots, that's just facts ! And at the end of the day, what makes the priest a distinct healer are these wonderfull skills : pom, shield, flash. Because they are unique and this is something that others healers can't do.
But like somebody said, the real ennemies of holy priests are shadow priests indeed. We, in fact, bring more priests than shamans or druids in a raid, it's just that 2 are shadow and 1 holy.