per research, I was going with http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...00510812&sid=1 (the survey on unpopular talents) which gives a roughly 60/30 split for holy/shadow from the level 70 priests in the survey.

If you checked lower levels only, you'd get a heavier trend to shadow. Even people who rolled their priests to heal would enjoy it more if they can heal AND dps with the same spec, which you can when you are levelling

For players in the 15-30 level range, the number who are leveling for endgame content should be completely dwarfed by the casuals just playing for fun. Sure, a good number of them will read leveling guides and spec shadow accordingly. But the majority just spec whatever they feel like. At least that's been my experience with pickup groups in the sub-40 level range.

While that's the optimal choice I'd expect any reader here to do (pick what's best now instead of what you want long term), it's not how most players approach the game.

I think that is the problem. Priests were king of healing and are no longer. Those complaining remember the "good old days". And it has reverted totally. From must have to must not have (or at most one) is quite a large step down.

Is it more fair in a global scope ? Probably. I can't say really, because I'm very jaded about the issue - I was one of the best healer in my raidgroup and I almost stopped playing when the realization hit me that I have no chance to maintain that status anymore. Might sound very stupid but one gets attached to such things. I switched to shadow after almost 2 years non-shadow and I found my fun again by knowing I'm helping the raid more in this way. I adapted, but something inside of me still wants the old days back.

That said, we raid with more than one holy priests. We seldom raidstack or only slightly if it can be helped. Perhaps we're limiting ourselves more than we should due to that.

Letting oneself inspire by others and pick good stuff is certainly clever but I don't know if following exactly what other raidgroups do meticulously is best. You won't instant die when you invite that second holy priest. In the end, you always have to make do with what you have, be that less than stellar lineup, lags, or disconnect sprees. It's always about adaptation.

Also, there are now 4 healer classes competing per side for the spots. The world has changed.

I don't think this is a good experiment. Many many people know when starting the game (due to playing with friends, making an alt, rerolling) that Shadow is the best leveling spec. I'm in the process of making a new Priest myself and you'd find all my points in Shadow despite my intention (blind faith in Blizzard?) to be a healing Priest at 70. I think this is practically the norm.

Do I really have to say it? They can't compete. That is the problem that this entire thread is addressing.

The class description used to be, basically, "the king healer". Then eventually all of the other classes got better healing itemization, and better talents, all while retaining all of their utility and even gaining more, and priests got nothing. Is it so unreasonable to want to bring something special to the table?

Every holy priest you bring to a raid brings an extra lightwell. Tell your friends.

We're already rolling with at least 3 Priests every raid, more commonly 4 . No more please!

I think alot of people aren't counting Shadowpriests into their Priest raiding viability.

While yes, Holy Priests stack terribly - it is still a near pre-requisite to have one per raid, and two isn't bad since they can fulfill any role required at insane levels. Even with 200mp5 and 30% holy light crit raid buffed I'm still competing with a Priest on heal meters just fine. Granted my overheal is an order of magnitude larger, but thats mostly due to crits being wasted.

Paladins are *only* wanted for Holy. Priests are wanted for Holy and Shadow. 3 Priests, 3 Paladins, 3 Druids sounds like pretty good balance to me - the only bad part is the Paladins are all the same spec, the Druids have 1 Tree, 2 Bears, and the Priests have 2 Shadow 1 Holy.

Paladins regardless of spec bring Blessings (minus kings obv) yet no one wants a Ret or Prot Paladin.

Priests bring something special to the table in that they can do everything.

Yes I would suggest against having more than 1 or 2 for a raid, but doesn't that hold true for *any* class of one spec except maybe DPS? Even then having 4 Affliction locks isn't a great idea (debuff slot limitations), and varying the specs a little is good. The only class this doesn't hold true for is Paladin, since 3 is optimal and 4 is even nicer. But that is regardless of spec, it just so happens that Prot/Ret are terrible raid specs and as such Holy is the only real viable spec, and thus thats what guilds bring.

I'd be fine if Ignite in its current form at least, you know, worked right (I'm speaking of the 5 bugs currently associated with it).

If you need 8 healers, how are you planning to do this without stacking some kind of heal spec? Once you need more than 4 heal specced people, what's the justification for stacking some classes and not others for any reason OTHER than take the first X who are geared and ready.

8 seems to me to be overkill, espescially if any of those 8 are grouped with a Shadowpriest. 6, maybe 7 seems to be optimal. 2 Resto Shamans, 1 Tree Druid, 1 Holy Priest, 3 Holy Paladins sounds perfect to me!

The biggest issue to consider from an Alliance point of view is that resto shamans are stupid-hard to find.

Good ones. Who want to heal. Who don't suck.

The Horde has 2 years of history of thinking of shamans as raid healers, just like Alliance has 2 years of thinking of paladins as raid healers *only*. Yet I see a *lot* of horde paladins on Shadowsong as protection. 40-50% lot. Why? Because there's no preconceptions preventing them from doing so. (at least, that's a suggestion)

I'd love to have 2 resto shamans. Unfortunately, I don't even have one. I have an enhancement shaman (paladin re-roll, healed for two years, wanted to beat on stuff), and an elemental shaman (new recruit, because we tend to run caster heavy, and a second Heroism = sex).

So what do I take for healers? 6 pure healers: 3 holy paladins, 2 holy priests, 1 resto druid. 5 hybrids: 1 feral druid, 1 boomkin, 1 protection paladin, 1 enh shaman, 1 ele shaman. I have yet to ask the shamans to heal in a raid situation (their gear isn't up to it yet, mostly). The paladin and boomkin off-heal all the time, and both have very competent sets for doing so.

We also have 2 shadow priests. Is this "fair"? Sure. The day that our other classes can consistently out-dps the shadow priests is the day they can cry about their raid slots. Until then, I'll take 1000 dps mana batteries, and dump a mage and a hunter.

What sets Paladins apart is the fact that they can only bless one target at a time. A holy priest can cast DS, Fort and Shadow Prot - all three of them - on anyone. An idea for encouraging more holy priest usage in raids is to make "Power Word" spells work by the same mechanic as blessings. For example, Power Word: Fort, Power Word: Spirit. A priest with DS could cast spirit OR fort on raid members, but not both. Additional "Power Word" buffs would need to be introduced if the goal is to actually encourage bringing more priests. Personally I wouldn't want this system to be implemented.

Our guild brings two holy priests to every raid. One with the ever-required imp. Divine Spirit, and another (me) with Circle of Healing. However, if given a choice, we'd probably go with one priest alone in favor of a third resto shaman.

Yes, priests can cover many healing roles well. Circle of Healing is really nice for melee groups on many fights, and decent for ranged groups where range isn't an issue--Vashj, for example, is a nice encounter to have CoH. Typically, our two holy priests are highest on the effective heal meters in heal-intensive fights, but I don't see why other classes would really be lacking in that area.

But, just to echo everyone else in this thread, a second renew, lightwell, and mending out won't affect the outcomes of many encounters. And as such, a raid would be far better off with another healing class.

shad priest casts fort/shadow prot.

edit: i missed when you said additional power words would be needed, so you know this heh.

its hard to argue for class changes when priests are automatically given more than their share of raid spots (2.7~). the main issue seems to be with guilds who had a heavy healing priest pop that is not interested in switching to shadow. for my guild, I had a priest alt, so dropping a hunter for a shad priest has worked well for us. we also have had 1-2 of our healing priests convert to shadow. we typically have 4-5 priests in a raid though and it has come at the expense of our hunter/mages numbers (one mage rerolled to a shammy and I swapped my hunter slot).

There's a strange sort of irony to all of this.

Conventional wisdom tells us that Shadow is the most powerful priest raiding spec, while Holy is the most powerful pally raiding spec.

So as a result, you have the priest, which has a full third of its spellbook devoted to healing-related spells, pigeonholed into a DPS role at endgame. Likewise, you have the paladin, a shield-carrying plate wearer, being pigeonholed into a healing role at endgame. This is, arguably, a hint that things got a bit mucked up along the way, balance-wise. I say this as a response to the people suggesting that things are just as they should be now and that no change is needed. But it's not unreasonable to assume that a person might roll a priest hoping to heal, nor is it unreasonable to assume that a person might roll a pally hoping to smack things with a hammer.

But while everyone seems to agree that Ret and Prot need help, there's something of a debate over whether Holy and Discipline do, which strikes me as the result of an understandable (though incorrect) assumption that DPS is more fun than healing and that any healer would jump at the chance to pewpew in a raid. Unfortunately, being pigeonholed into a role you didn't sign up for isn't any more palatable just because that role happens to be DPS.

More viability for Ret and Prot pallies and Holy and Disc priests, I say. As others have suggested, fixing the first would no doubt go a long way towards fixing the second.

I'd suggest that the cooldown on lightwell be reduced to the point where it was considered useful and/or worthwhile. Possibly have it affect by +heal, or not as neccesary for balance. That gives holy priests a buff they can bring to the table that would (in a perfect world) be on par with other classes and specs and gives you a reason to bring more than one.

But of course everyone has hated the skill for so long this might be ignored as "@*%^&# Blizzard. Buff my LIGHTWELL of all things". Cue priest weeping.

As pointed out, the issue comes to exist due to many different factors, not all of them related to priests:

- Paladins lack raid viable alternatives to Holy. I believe though that protection paladins can be very good in some situations (whenever multiple adds need to be tanked, in threat sensitive fights and/or where burst threat is useful), but the problem seems to be that they are not as good when it comes to tanking bosses, yet can't switch to a dps role like feral druids can.
Retribution definitely needs stronger group wide utility - they are competing with enhancement shamans/shadow priests and losing. Both of these specs give higher dps and better utility than Retribution.

- Shadow is the stronger raid spec for priests. Aside from Shadoweaving and Misery, which a single priest can provide, it is Vampiric Touch and Vampiric Embrace that lead to shadow priest stacking. In my opinion, other talent trees should receive similar spells or abilities that restore mana to their group, because at the moment no other class can provide this type of utility.

- Holy priests have little to no stacking utility.

Inspiration (+25% armor after a critheal for 15 seconds) is decent, but it's not good enough to bring multiple holy priests. If the talent was changed to

Inspiration: your Flash Heal, Binding Heal and Greater Heal spells grace the target with Inspiration for 15 seconds. Inspiration reduces all damage taken by 5%.

If tanks could have multiple Inspiration buffs from several holy priests at the same time, then those holy priests could easily be justified in terms of raid utility. In fact they would be the preferred choice in fights against heavy hitters, whereas paladins/shamans would continue to be the choice for fights where you need to maximize dps.

- Last important factor is the crappy holy talent tree. Other healing classes gain improvements to their effectiveness from their tree defining talents, but holy priests do not. Holy Nova and Lightwell are not raid viable. Spirit of Redemption and Circle of Healing are borderline useless in my opinion for a raiding priest.
The passive healing improvements in holy are fine, but it's the lack of viable active talents that takes away flavor and unicity from holy priests. Immagine any other healing class without their 11, 21, 31 and 41 talents for a moment. They would still be able to do their job, but definitely lack something.

I like Inspiration. It's fine where it is. It's 3 points in an otherwise useless tier of our holy tree.

What pisses me off the most, coming up on 2 years as a priest, is that Blizzard can't seem to get past their idea that holy priests are to be the benchline of PvE healing. Accordingly, to them, priests should be boring. And not *too* powerful, please.

When we were given our big 2.0 review, like everyone else, we all assume Blizzard would finally focus the holy tree in line with all other classes. There is no other healing-capable class in the game that is forced to spec a minimum of 14 points in a SECOND tree to do their job.

Druids: 61 resto is a viable, and often chosen, spec.
Paladins: 41-45 holy is actually more than enough to get every meaningful talent, leaving flexibility to take other stuff to be even MORE useful in a raid.
Shamans: 41+ resto is useful, needed, and leaves 20 points to shuffle into whatever you want.

Priests: 41 holy? Lawl. I can *spend* 41 points in holy, and most of it is useful. But the tree-defining talents are very very low in the tree, leaving a bunch of random stuff in the middle that doesn't really sparkle. I want something like the paladins have, only unique to priests. A genuine CONCEPT of what healing as a priest is supposed to be, and then talents that synergize around that concept.

Right now, we have:
- 12:14 disciple -- regen (15% passive)
- 11 discipline -- Inner Focus, a slightly nerfed / modified parallel to the paladin version (I'd love IF to be guaranteed crit, is that too much to ask?)
- 21:23 discipline -- Divine Spirit
- Lightwell
- SoR
- CoH

Looking down the list of talents, what is there in the Holy tree that is unique? There is the +heal talent that almost everyone has, there is the spirit->dmg/heal talent, as a counterpart to the paladin int->dmg/heal one, only lower in the tree in our case. There is the Empowered Healing talent, which is almost universal now across multiple classes' trees (mages, warlocks, priests to name 3).

And when you examine the spells that they think are important ... we get Flash Heal and Greater Heal. The two spells we have that MOST resemble paladin spells.

PoM was a good start to making priests unique. PoH and CoH remain our niche. Yet they are remarkably non-useful in raids. I mean, I *use* them ... sometimes ... but it's certainly not my primary focus.

I just want Blizzard to completely redesign the priest trees and very clearly give LABELS to them.

Shadow: pure dps and raid support
Holy : pure healing, the "kings" of healing. Highest single target and 5-person healing in the game (or something). Obviously the 5-person one is something we already have (ignoring the druids and their cooldown-based one). Just something to make us stand out.
Discipline : go back to the original purpose, and make this the raid buff / raid support / sustainable tree. Make the 41st disciple talent be a group version of Power Infusion, and make it apply to physical & magic damage (in other words, it's a targettable Heroism, stolen from shamans). But add in cheap (like really cheap) mass dispel, really good regeneration (like: REALLY good), and other raid buffs and tricks.

Make it so a raid WANTS to take 1 shadow priest, 1 holy priest, and 1 discipline priest. Make me want to at least TRY spec'ing 41 discipline for something other than self-flagellation. I think a raid-buffing quasi-healer has a lot of potential. Imp DS is already a very well designed buff, ideally placed in the tree to make people rethink their choice of 41 holy. Now extend that idea. Add another Power Word, deep in discipline or Holy, to make one or the other stand out.

Instead, we're left with the same crap we've had forever : unbalanced racials, a lack of focus to our trees, and a very clear lack of commitment to changing the glaring issues. There's such amazing potential in this class, but no-one in the development community at Blizzard seems to be willing to throw out the old box and build a new one.

I would like Circle of Healing if it worked exactly like Mass Dispel -- Ground targetted AoE with a generous range and smart targetting.

But mass dispel does not have smart targeting, aside from targeting Divine Shield & Ice Block first.

Don't believe me? Try casting it on 10+ people when only a few of them have magical debufs - not all of them will lose their debuff. Mass Dispel just picks 5 random friendly players and 5 random enemy players and attempts to dispel them, whether or not they actually have magic effects on them that can be removed.

It's yet another priest spell that fails at its intended purpose, aside from its PvP usage.


But anyway, a Circle of Healing with smart targeting, as 31 point talent and perhaps with some adjustments to its number would be talent worth picking up and using. It's the low range and lack of smart targeting that's really preventing it from being useful in my opinion.

I also would much prefer if it healed for more but was capped at 3-4 targets, because it is preferable to heal fewer people up quickly than to heal many people up slowly...

I would definitely not want it to be ground targeted - it takes too much time to position the targeting circle correctly. There will be other healers that will try to heal the same people up as soon as possible.

If you're wanting smart targetting on COH, then you're asking for something equivalent to Shaman Chain Heal. A COH Priest when paired up with a Shaman Chain Heal is a very viable raid healing method. I'd love an additional boost to how much it actually heals for, but if you build your raids "smartly", COH is an incredible effective spell that eliminates some of the issues that can arise from Smart Targetting not being so smart.

Either way, at roughly 2k +healing raid buffed, you're instantly healing 5 targets for about 900 each (non crit). That's a lot of threat, so I'm not sure a boost to the amount without a consideration to the threat generation is ideal either.

This is an unreasonable goal. You don't see this sort of distribution with other classes (except perhaps Shammies), why would you see it with priests?

Discipline's a muddled mess, but they have to be careful about how they fix it. I've never been into the idea of Disc being the "mana regen" tree simply because that makes it required for both Shadow and Holy specs (all priests need mana regen, after all), which completely eliminates the idea of spec choice. There's a reason you never see Shadow/Holy builds-- which could be a fabulous choice for the casual priest, farming and healing ability all in one!-- and that reason is Meditation and Inner Focus (and to a lesser extent, Divine Spirit) in the Discipline tree. This is part of why Evocation was made trainable for mages; Elementalist builds simply weren't viable for raiding before that.

I'd love for Discipline to provide something unique and interesting that isn't required for either healing or DPS but that provides a nice bit of support to either or that can work on its own. An interesting idea would be if they expanded on the "Power Word" theme and gave Discipline more short-term buffs or utility spells that buff healing, damage, or survivability. Power Infusion is actually a perfect example of a talent that fits this theme, as is Improved Divine Spirit (the baseline DS buff should be trainable though, imo, which conveniently would also make CoH much more attractive to healing priests).

However, this kind of talk should probably go in the Holy Priest Theorycrafting thread, yeah? Happy to continue the discussion there if others want to.

Well, technically, that would be a worthwhile goal for every class, not just priests. Just because it's not currently the status quo for everyone doesn't mean it should be completely scrapped as something to aim for. Personally though I'd be happy just to see priests equally viable for both healing and damage in a raid setting since those are the two roles we can fill. Discipline needs help but it doesn't necessarily need to be ideal for raiding (as long as it's not completely useless for it like it is now).