The Human Spirit is a +10% spirit racial, that'll affect that somewhat too.

Well, they have Spirit of Redemption.


Personally I think the biggest issue is that Pain Suppression is out of line with the rest of the discipline tree. The reasons you would presumably go into discipline would be DPS caster support in the form of raid and personal buffs like IDS and PI. Pain suppression provides no utility along that line.

As a side note, why is it that Power Infusion is so vastly inferior to heroism? It's highly specialized, caster only, talent learned, and single target.

SoR if things start going downhill, but it's a bit hard to quantify how much it really helps.

It would be nice if Power Infusion was a group buff instead of single target. Maybe way too powerful for PvP though

Not to be rude, but this thread is kind of silly. Not sure why it hasn't been locked.

Holy priests are perfectly viable in raids, they bring in a solid hot, solid heals, good mana pool + regen + ability to cast healing spells forever if skilled enough. All this paladins are greater than priest thing is also silly. I top the healing meters in most fights, even single target MT healing. If I ever have to raid heal, yeah good luck catching me.

Shamans on the other hand are god. I don't think you could ever have enough of them :P

But as everyone has already said, dead horse, one holy priest for divine spirit, maybe 2 but its like all other classes, if paladins didn't have 3 good blessings, you'd only bring 2 as well. But fortunately for them, they have wis or might, salv and kings.

And seriously, why would you have 1900+ healing, why? Wasted item choices, just because an item has more +healing budgetted doesn't make it better. I find anything over 1500 is too much, so you can overheal for x more with 1900. Its like taking spell crit as a priest.. pretty useless.

Saying paladins beat us in single target healing now after 2.1, good joke. Single target healing is like the lottery, you cast a heal, if you're fast you can cancel to avoid over heal, or if you don't cast there's still the chance of overhealing by being sniped. I'd say with 2 t5 set bonus priests get a huge buff in longevity. So paladins can cast their big spell in 2 sec? Yay? More overhealing and more oom faster?

If you have a raid makeup of 1 holy priest and 3 paladins, I'd take another priest over that paladin just because of the HoT.

Noone claims holy priest aren't viable in endgame raiding. Everyone in this board knows their healing power is good enough. But there's just not a single reason to bring a second holy priest over any other healer and I see that as a problem.

Just as there's no reason to bring a second mage over a warlock. After all, they are more survivable, have better longevity, and do higher dps. You only need one mage to pass out water and buff the raid with Arcane Brilliance.

Despite that, mages survive and get raid invites. They also prove themsleves worthy of those raid spots. Just as holy priests do.

Shamans are great. Druids are great. Priests are great. But if all of your guilds members want to be healers, then you have a problem. Shadow priests are great, and bring great raid utility. All 3 shaman specs bring raid utility. Druids provide value in 2 (and arguably 3) specs.

I really don't see what the problem is here. If you have too many healers for your guild, have some respec or deal with people sitting. Holy priests have value, and priests aren't underrepresented in raid percentages.

I don't think anyone is arguing this - what they are arguing is the fact that Priests have *very* poor stackability, and bringing more than 1 Holy Priest can theoretically hurt your raid if you bring them over a Paladin, Shaman or even Druid - all of whom have very tangible benefits outside of just healing.

I'm surprised how many times the core issue has been mentioned and how many people that still haven't catched on to it.

Read Deris' and heel's post several times if you are in doubt

Don't forget druids also bring tree-form aura.

Heh. Honestly, I think the solution to this would be to make power infusion a base ability.

On a side note, granted I only read pages 1-2 of this thread... SOME priests do bring additional raid utility. Unfortunately, I was too dumb 2 years ago to understand the importance of FEAR WARD and I didn't reroll to get SYMBOL OF HOPE.

For the Alliance, Draenei Holy Priests are the future... I could see bringing two Draenei Holy Priests...

I'm willing to bet that if you pug heroics for one week you'll have quite a few guild invites that you can go through. Sure, you may not get into The Uber Guild but a good healer is a good healer regardless of class and most raid leaders would rather have an abundance of good healers then just enough or a shortage.

Good ones anyway.

Not sure if 1900 healing is directed at another healing class, or at priests, but honestly i have 1930ish healing unbuffed and 200+ mp5 while casting unbuffed in my current pure healer set. I have other gear for stamina which obviously puts those stats lower at the gain of increased stamina for stam based fights. i couldn't honestly downgrade my gear enough without going back to peices of t3 or tbc dungeon blues to get my healing down to 1500, and even then, id be losing a crap ton of mp5 as well. i'm not sure what gear choices you are talking about, but you clearly did not think that statement through.

I can understand that holy priests lack stackability. They aren't alone.

What I don't understand is why it's an issue. With a 25 man raid, and 9 of each class, thats 2.77 spots per class. If a class (priests) have 2 raid viable and desired specs, then why is it a bad thing that one of those spec's doesn't provided added benefits in multiples?

When we were cutting down healing spots for Kael, holy priests had to be the first to go. You cannot replace a shaman when it comes to group buffs, bloodlust, and basically ability to heal being basically equivalent (give or take the situation). It left us with 1 resto druid, 1 holy priest with DS. I felt it was kind of silly since we had 3 paladins. They need to consolidate blessings somehow - or allow 2 per paladin so we can cut back on them.

Hm, maybe, I'll have to check your armory profile when I get home from work. I dunno, maybe its because I don't have the priest tailoring epics. I think I'm currently at 1640 healing and 180ish mp5 while casting. I am curious about your armory.. damn work filtering wow sites.

It makes more sense to consider the raid by role. ie. tanks, dps, healers. If you're taking 8 healers and there are 4 healing classes, that's 2 spots per class. If one class regularly takes 3 and another regularly takes 1 then there are issues.

Shadow priests aren't anything to do with this. No one says 'Hm, can't take any holy priests because we have some shadow priests in the raid already.' That's not the reason.

From a healers pov, you could take 10 retri paladins for dps if you wanted as long as they could do the job. It wouldn't mean you didn't want any holy paladins.

While I don't quabble with the fact that a basic raid setup demands 2 Shadow Priests and 1 Holy Priest (which is therefore "3" Priests, which is more than 25 / 9), I do quabble with the fact that 2/3 of those Priests are...not healers?

I think, ok, I know, that most Priests probably rolled their class thinking they would heal in end-game, or else they wouldn't have clicked that button. I'm of course thinking like, not before about a month or two ago when the power of the Shadow Priest became apparent (I can of course imagine right now people rolling Priests with the intention of being Shadow in end-game). However, it's apparent that there is very little use for a real, honest healing Priest in end-game (beyond the first of course).

There are many things they <could> do to improve the situation - but I'm not holding my breath. SoR could be a group-wide +5% aura (or similar) or Priests could even have an MP5 group-wide aura (or similar). Oh wait, we do have that, it's just in the Shadow tree. ><

Basically, I wanted to say that yes, there are on average 3 Priests in the optimal raid. The problem is, 2 aren't healers - which is how the Priest class is sold on the character select screen.

Yeah...Spirit, bok, Draenic Wisdon and buff food are giving a very nice boost. On top of that: The human spirit 10% works on everything, not just the basic stats. It works on items, buffs etc.

Bangle is nice, I have to agree. But we've been trying Kael and Vashj lately and I find Alchy stone just a bit better if you are chucking potions.

What I want to point out: Priest is very, very good healer if it comes down to mana regenaration while not casting. This might sound stupid, but it isn't. A lot of the boss fights got some "downtime", where nothing is really going in. Take Kael'thas for example. 5 Phases where hes talkin like 20 seconds between some of them just bullshit while a Priest can reg a lot of mana. Pop the 300 spirit trinket and reg ~800 mp5. Sum it up for...20 sec and you know how good that is.

Take Al'ar. Everytime he launches himself into the air you have nothing to do.

Spirit is great and makes priest very long living.

Al'ar is a horrible example for priests consider he can charge and one shot you.

You seem to be looking at this from one angle only.

10 retri paladins can't do the job if you want adequate dps.

From first principles, class is a far better way to consider raid spots than role. Why? Because if you've designed the game well, each class should be similarly desirable, so have a similar number of players, and on average each class will have the same number of players wanting a raid spot.

The problem would therefore be that the places that priests are taking is skewed against their primary role. This is something worth considering fixing. Making holy priests stackable so that you want multiple holy priests and multiple shadow priests isn't (and anyway, shouldn't there be /3/ priest types not 2?).

Let me ask the counter-question no one seems to be asking (at least in this thread): where are the prot / ret paladins in this raid with 3 paladins healing?

Because if priests are being squeezed out on healing, paladins are on non-healing too...

While looking at a condensed picture can shed light on a situation, ignoring the whole picture is a mistake.

You can't simply say "role" > "class", when role can be shifted with a 50g fee and a gear swap. That's certainly a barrier, but it's nothing compared to the 100 hours played barrier of rerolling.

As for stackability issues, with the exception of mana tide for shamans, there doesn't seem to be a requirement that the other classes holy priests are competing with have to be in the healing role. Or am I mistaken?

The reason people take 3 holy paladins is not becuase they need that many holy paladins, but becuase they don't take retribution or protection paladins. I'd be curious to know how many Shammies total Quigon's group brings if he's bring 3 resto ones. In our raids where we often have either an Elemental or an enhancement shammie (although not often both), there's less need to have as many resto ones. A feral druid who isn't tanking can often shift out to innervate and battle rez as needed.

Also, while your example leads to a nice even breakdown, real raids generally don't. It's not often that fights merit an 8 healer set-up, is it?

I'm still struggling to see the problem with a class that isn't underrepresented in raid attendance percentage and has multiple desired raid specs. More specifically, if a specific spec has abilities that make it sought after (Raids always want a holy priest), that puts it ahead of a lot of other class/spec combinations. So what's the point? Or is this just a whine thread typical of the WoW general boards with good grammar?

Sort of. Here's the real problem: People want blessings but don't bring Retribution and Protection Pallies; thus, other class' slots are sacrificed for the 'greater good' of the blessings since a Holy Paladin can heal just about as well as any other healing class anyway.

If a Retribution/Protection Paladin was able to pick up a blessing, a Holy Paladin could be dropped and another Priest/Druid be brought along; unfortunately, the current, and utterly incorrect, belief is that Paladins cannot deal damage OR tank effectively. Teleyn has disproved the first and made it quite clear that his current MT cannot hold a mob off of him any longer, making 3rd -> 2nd overall DPS prior to becoming horribly threat capped; I know that a few protection paladins have tanked Gruul as of now, but I'm not aware of any further notable progress (however, some offtanking has been mentioned).

Thus, as odd as it may sound, one possible way for more Priests, and Resto Druids, to get into raids would be to champion a well geared Ret or Prot Pally in order to meet the blessing 'quota' that raids desire.

Pheroz beat me by a few minutes :-/.

The issue is that the vast majority of Priests didn't role their class to be top dps and a mana battery to the raid. They rolled it to heal. Yes, Priests are not the class that you bring fewest of to a raid. They are in no way under represented, but Holy Priests are. On almost all occasions I want 2 Shadow Priests in my raids. However in the case of Holy Priests, I want 1 and then I look to see how many healers I have to hit the 7 or 8 healer count.

Just last night we killed Kael with 0 shamans in the raid and 7 other healers (2 priest, 1 druid, 4 paladin). You can manage with anything. Any setup of great players works absolutely fine. We will continue with this setup for the weeks and months to come, simply because it's what we and it works. But I can't help myself to think how different things would be if we had 3 Shamans in the raid. The damage done by 3 groups would go up tremendously. I can only imagine how much our dps could suck on Kael stage 2 and 3 if we had 3 Bloodlusts to go around. Down the road I hope to ease Shamans in, but as Enhancement and Elemental.