I'm still not seeing it.

I'm not seeing it in practice. My guild never has only one holy priest in raids. Other people in this thread talk about they're still bringing multiple holy priests to raids.

I'm still struggling with the theory.

I think it's an accepted fact for most of the people posting in this thread that Holy priests are viable healers. Right? If the raid spot boils down to, "we need someone who can heal effectively" then a priest specc'd for healing is a valid option.

The primary complaint of this thread, as far as I can tell is this: Despite being a desired and in demand build for a raid spot, there is no benefit for bringing multiple holy/disc priests beyond the basic role, whereas other classes healing spec's have extra tanginble benefits in multiples.

Right?

A raid won't push out the 3rd Pally for the second holy priest, becuase of the stackability of pally buffs. A raid doesn't want to drop a shaman for a second holy priest becuase totems and bloodlust are great. Pushing out a druid costs rebirth and innervate. Aside from trading different types of non-superior healing, pushing out the second holy priest costs nothing.

That's the primary argument, as I see it. Complaints about whether the 30 point talent is better then the 40 point talent, whether you can throw talent points around randomly and still do whatever you want seem off the main point.

So - thats our main argument.
Let's examine it.

First, the stackability of those classes is not tied to the healer build/role. Obviously, there is a caveat here with mana tide totem, but for the most part, the reason you want 3 Shammies in your raid has little to do with which tree they point talent points in. The benefits of bringing druids is there, whether they're competing for healing spots or tanking spots or dps spots. While no one will dispute the quality of Paladin healers, the primary reason all 3 Pallies that get raid invites are holy is becuase tankadins and Retadins aren't in demand.

So our first problem is we are comparing apples and oranges. We are comparing a specific build of one class (holy priest) against all all the builds of other competing classes.

But stackability issues are something other classes face too. What does the second mage bring to a raid besides another competant dpser? Nothing. Just like a second holy priest brings nothing beyond another competant healer. And yet mages still get invites. So it's not just stackability. It can't be. Or else, the dismissive argument that constantius present at the end of his post would be much closer to reality (according to the WoW general forums, it is).

Moonkins stack, don't they? The crit aura either stacks, or would be useful for multiple groups. I am betting that the holy priests upset with the current situation don't wish they were in the situation of the moonkins?

So why all the descrepencies? Why are the things that are problems for the holy priests, not matching up when applied to different classes/specs?

It's becuase we are starting with false assumptions. The number one assumption I see in this thread, is that Holy priests should have more then 1 spot in the perfectly min-max'd raid set-up. The other primary one seems to be that Holy priests should be more valuable and desired then shadow priests.

So you have to argue why those assumptions are valid, or zefi and I will not see your points. A raid should be incited/benefit from bring a second holy priest because... <you continue here>. This is important becuase... well, you get the idea. That's what this thread is missing (or I and others are missing from this thread).

Now, as I see it, these assumptions are based primarily on the old 40 man, level 60 raiding game. Now as the game is changed, we have a population and perception imbalance, moreso then a game imbalance. There are more people who want to be holy priests then there are demand for them. Isn't that the main issue? Not that holy priests should be more in demand, but we have too many people and it excedes the demand?

Pheroz pretty much summed it up quite well. Those 2 questions get to the heart of the discussion.

Blizzard has seen to making sure that for 25man raiding 2-3 members of a given raid are from each class for pretty much maximum raid efficiency. This is an incredible feat which hasn't been noticed by many. 10 man Kz groups are optimized by 1 of each class and then 2 priests. One holy and one shadow.

40 man raiding where each class gets a ton of spots and class composition really doesn't matter for the most part is gone and dead. 2-3 spots are all you should be hoping for and that's really what you are already getting. The fact that perhaps 1-2 priests are shadow is frankly irrelevant to any real big picture balance discussion.

There may be a few too many priests out there; I really haven't seen it, but it could be true. In our guild, we started with eight (8) priests in Molten Core, dropped to 7 in BWL, stayed at 7 throughout AQ40 (although 2 stopped playing as much), were down to 5 by Naxxramas, and in TBC, lost two of those, gaining one recruit.

So we're down to 4 priests. 2 are shadow, 2 are holy. And I have no issues giving raid spots to all 4 of us. However, the *only* reason I'm able to do this is that in TBC, we dropped to 4 paladins (from our former 7), 3 druids (from 6) and didn't gain any resto shamans. So our healing corps is 2 holy priests, 3 holy paladins, 1 resto druid. We also run with 5 hybrids -- ele & enh shaman, prot paladin, boomkin, and feral druid OT. Any of those can heal in a pinch.

I'm not arguing the necessity of making priests more viable because of any personal need to justify my spot in *my* raid. I'm doing it out of the sheer joy of theorycrafting / arguing, and trying to understand what Blizzard is *thinking* about Discipline (my opinion: they don't have a clue).

Most raids mix and match somewhere around the 3-person-per-class number. Some days you take 4 hunters, some days you take 4 warlocks, some days you take 4 rogues. Some days you take 3 of everything, but only one shaman. Etc, etc.. Not a single guild here runs with precisely 27 people in raiding slots, with 2 sitting. Real Life > WoW comes into play, and you need redundancy.

So let's answer his question: in your guild, are there more holy priests than spots? If so, how many shadow priests are you running with, and is it a case of having lost more of every other class in TBC, or just that you over-recruited?

The answer for my guild: perfect slotting, because of weakness in the shaman/druid members. Nor do we see a huge number of holy priest applications for spots (we've seen 2 in the last 4 months).

Yeah, I thought Pheroz did a good job of summing up how people are reacting to some of the statements made here, and yes if you look at it on a class by class basis the make sense.

Sadly that's not how the raid game works anymore. Yes you'll find fights where you have certain specific (usually cc) requirements, and yes the base classes have certain basic abilities that are situationally better than others, but if you look at the general raid make up you need some tanking, some physical dps, some caster dps and some healing, with a bit of flexibility with how much of those areas you need.

So we're talking about the main roles in the fight. Caster and physical dps has 2 forms, the pure classes (mages, warlocks, rogues, hunters) and hybrids (the others), Tanking and healing OTOH don't really have any pure classes, although it warriors typically make better tanks, and priests used to be the better healers.

Ideally you should be able to choose equally amongst the possible candidates setup for that role, with some class being preferred for some fights and others for other fights. That works pretty well with the dps roles, if you don't have enough caster dps, you can usually choose fairly equally amongst the people sitting on your bench.

When it comes to the healing role, it works well too, but only as long as you look at the pure role, rather than what other pieces they bring to the whole raid equation. There as we've explained before adding an extra healing priest compares poorly with adding an extra holy pally, restoration shaman or (to a lesser extent) restoration druid.

That comes as quite a shock to most healing priests. They expect to be needed for healing. Yes, you could get people to respec and regear but that's a bit like telling a mage that we need you to play someones alt-hunter in this tier or two old gear. Yeah any raider worth their salt should be able to do it, but it's a bit of a pain in the ass for both the individual or the guild. In those circumstances, if you still want to heal you pretty much have to reroll, or play an alt.

Alternatively blizzard could fix what's broken about the setup by providing a bit more utility for the raid in the holy and discipline trees, which almost all agree are kind of broken with their somewhat haphazard arrangement of talents.

If you view warriors as a hybrid, you could argue that tanking is broken as well, with warriors being the number one choice by far for an MT. Still that's always been the case.

Should hybrids be able to function at a raid level in all the different roles they can spec for? I'd like to think so (some other specs for hybrids aren't very desired), but don't care too much. It does however seem pretty sad that a role where a class has always function well, has suddenly been closed off to many members of that class.

As for the numbers game, we were pretty priest heavy in Naxx (we didn't really raid under 2.0 though), 6-8 per raid, with 0-1 shadow priests. Our guild has had quite a turn over in personnel since then, but the percentage of priests in the new guild was about the same. We have 6 priests who raid, and until recently 3-5 priests in a 25 man raid (along with 2-4 druids, 1-2 shaman, 1-4 paladins and 3-4 warriors - so one T4 token is often needed by up to half the raid) We had 1 shadow priest at the start of 25 man raiding, and after a bit of discussion we've convinced a couple to try out shadow. We asked them for that because we often run a bit healer heavy, and because of the priest situation. All but one of our 6 or so pallies is holy, 2 of the 4 druids are resto, and 1 of the 2 shaman. It was only the priests we asked to think about switching (fortunately shadow is viable), unfortunately none of them had shamans they could level. We're a somewhat casual guild, and so would prefer not to have to force specs on people, thus we'll probably carry 2-3 holy priests for progression raids in the future but it is hurting us a bit. Personally, I'd like one of the druids to switch to a feral druid or feral/resto hybrid role, but that probably would require even more gear. I'm not sure how typical we are, but we have run pretty hard into the problem that others have observed in this thread.

Assume: 2 main tanks, 8 healers, 15 dps, primarily specced for such. Healers/dps providing offtanking, may have minority of points in these trees.
Paladins are not main tanking as it is not considered optimal, as I understand it. (If we don't care about optimality, we can bring 4 holy priests and 0 shamans, for example). Therefore specced mostly holy with 0-30 points in prot.

Balance Model 1 (class): All classes equally chosen, all raid roles within classes equally chosen.
(1/9 * 1/2) of the population is healing priests, (1/9 * 1/3) of the population is healing shamans, (1/9 * 1/1) of the population is healing paladins, (1/9 * 1/3) of the population is healing druids. [1]
3/13 of all healers are healing priests, so a balanced raid would have 1.85 of 8 healers as priests.

Balance Model 2 (role): All raid roles equally chosen, all classes within them equally chosen.
1/4 of all healers are healing priests, so a balanced raid would have 2 of 8 healers as priests.

Of course neither of these are accurate to what people actually do - the game isn't perceived as balanced! But if Blizzard is trying to encourage balance then those are the numbers that should be optimal. 1 healing priest in a raid is too few, and if that's optimal it needs to be addressed. To encourage more than two is too much to ask.

While the numbers for healing priests are similar in either model, the same isn't true for other classes, so I'll keep rambling a bit:

Balancing for roles implies a reasonable rate of rerolls - few people (in the general WoW populace) had an idea of the raiding experience on their character when they created it, and it's certainly changed over time in some cases.
Given the relatively casual target audience of WoW, I'd expect them to opt for balancing for classes. This means 2 healing priests and 3-4 healing paladins per raid, until they make paladins real raid tanks, which doesn't seem so far from reality.


[1]: Or half of shamans, I guess, since I said DPS was one role. And druids are even more iffy. However you slice it, the number for priests in this model is between 1.6 and 1.85.

I have to echo this. All guilds I'm familiar with on my server (admittedly not very progressed, but nonetheless raiding SSC) recruits priests now and then. I don't recall a time only had 1 holy priest for a 25 man raid.

I think the reality of the person behind the class is simply too great to ignore. One of our best healers is a priest. You don't discard a person with 2 years of priest healing experience just because his class may not stack as well as some other class.

There's a reason my priest is shadow and I'm leveling a paladin alt. It's not that I plan on main switching, but if my guild ever needs more healers, I honestly think Paladin is a much better choice.

Also, I think the primary reason so many guilds take more than 1 holy priest to raids is because Priests were the best healers in classic. As a result, many people who were exceptionally good healers chose priest as their class. Now in TBC they still have their (useful but less optimal) priest, and they still have their skills, so they keep raiding with it. They use the priest because it's what they have, not because they think it's a better healer than a Paladin.

I don't follow these assumptions. If 3/4 of the population of paladins were Retribution, would you be bringing 2 Ret pallies? I don't see anyone doing that ever.

What has been shown multiple times in this thread is that if your guild either has the pull to min-max its raid, or adheres to a strict "3 of each class (LOL sorry hunters/rogues, you get 2!)" policy, then it's optimal to have a 2/3 Shadow, 1/3 Holy population, and if it's half-and-half, then the real issue is that Priests are trying to bully in a 4th slot of a raid, thereby wanting more than their "fair share" of the raid slots, especially considering how Priests have always been relatively rare.

This thread's about the utility of priests and how to make it so that bringing a second Holy Priest might be an attractive proposal, similar to how "Shamans bring totems" and "Paladins bring Blessings" is. It's not about PR or "fairness", that goes on in different ways with different guilds, and you'll see 2 Holy Priests more often than not as long as healing is needed by raids.

There is no priest conspiracy to get more raid spots, it's very simple and has been stated already:

Most people who rolled priests did so expecting to be a very valuable healer, at least in a non-pvp context. Currently priests are not a particularly valuable healer compared to the others in any context. Therefore conscientious priest players who like to heal are stuck with reroll or don't heal.

Unhappiness ensues.

Please stop the sky is falling comments.

I've been reading this thread on and off for a bit, and I have to say, I think a lot of what is said in this thread that is assumed to be true, is wrong from the beginning. People are taking false assumptions, then attempting to build around them.

The fact of the matter is that holy priests are a very very strong class. They bring all sorts of things to a raid that other healing classes lack. I fully realize that these forums are big in theorycrafting and numbermunching, and I'm a mathematician myself, but at some point you have to realize that there are more than numbers.

Yes, with 4pc t5 and light's grace in the game, a paladin can put out an insane amount of HPS. And of course, a shaman can put out a large amount of HPS with chain heal. And yea, totems and blessings are good...but in the end, who has actually examined what these buffs do? Increase DPS, Decrease Threat, and Increase Mana Regen. Kings alone perhaps increases surviveability. So, saying that priests don't stack well, is saying that priests don't increase your raid DPS. That is correct, holy priests do not increase your raid dps. However, when you want to look past that, to look at instead of having a buff that increases your raid DPS by X%, you actually have a class that increases raid surviveability by X%.

Any holy priest that is half decent has seen a time when someone drops low, you throw them a PWS, they get hit again, and have <1k HP left, then the barrage of raid healing lands. That Power Word Shield is the ONLY reason that person lived, not the HPS of chain heal. Past that, there are many fights that have some sort of quick burst damage effect on the raid: Hydross, Morogrim, Winterchill, Gorefiend, Najentus, Solarian, Gruul (original), Maulgar. While many people may consider some of the fights trivial, at some point, your guild was learning the fights, and at any given point in time, some guild out there is learning them (original gruul aside). In all of these fights, any number of holy priests can easily be the difference between one person's life and death. But yea, this won't show up on any healing meters.

Paladins with 4pc t5, are very very strong healers, stronger than they ever were before no doubt (even with the illumination nerf - which isn't really that big of a deal imo. It's hard to wipe due to raid healers being oom in the curent game, I don't think I've heard of mana problems on healers since pre-BC). But even with that, no class has a 1.5 heal that matches flash heal, and that's not even counting PoM and PWS.

Past that, if a priest -wants- to sit there and play like a Paladin, they can. A priest can easily sit there and just spam single heals on tanks without stopping to think. A priest can easily do this for as long as a paladin, and not go oom. The thing is, some of us choose not to play like that, realizing that keeping 25 members of your raid alive, is much more important than where you place on the healing meters. Some people end up lower on the meters because they have worse gear, some end up there because they have slower reaction time, and others end up there because they realize that healing meters are not what makes a healer a valuable use of a raid slot.

And PoH, is most definitely still a very useful tool. There are at least 3 fights in BT so far that PoH is amazing on, and it would be folly to rely on only chain heal - Najentus, Gorefiend, and Bloodboil. I'd go so far as to say that if we don't have 2 holy priests in the raid, we aren't even going to try Bloodboil, chain heal is so weak compared to PoH there.

In summary, most the posters here are assuming stackability = raid DPS, when in reality, 1 person surviving that otherwise would not have, is more DPS than a stacking buff, than totems. If you want to stack your raid and be a DPS burn guild, go for it. If you want a raid that is more surviveable, that can give any member an extra 2k HP right before they take a large amount of semi-predictable damage, then priest stack very very very well.

May I ask, why guilds bring >0 rogues? They provide no utility. IS the only reason that rogues don't get this, is because #s can easily support that they do in fact, do the most damage? It's a shame that these mods don't count "# of lives saved". I think holy priests everywhere would be more desired.

I'm an advocate for the 3 Paladin, 2 Shaman, 2 Druid, 1 Priest healing team. However, based on what I've seen from the first six bosses in BT, the variety of heals that a Priest brings, as well as their sheer healing capacity has become even more of an asset in Black Temple than it was in earlier instances. As Failure has mentioned, High Warlord Naj'entus, Teron Gorefiend and Gurtogg Bloodboil are three great examples. Prayer of Healing, Binding Heal and Prayer of Mending are all particularly powerful in these fights. To add to the list, Prayer of Mending useful in healing Hateful Strikes on Supremus. Power Word: Shield is a godsend for Reliquary of Souls (you probably don't want Shadow Priests using it), and so is Renew. Dispel Magic is great for Teron Gorefiend and Reliquary of Souls too.

Another thing that is often overlooked is our healing capacity. Paladins are usually regarded as the champions of healing capacity due to Illumination, or perhaps Shaman for the sheer efficiency of Chain Heal. However, I think Priest beats them both. Every Holy Priest in BT should have an Earring of Soulful Meditation, and preferably a Bangle of Endless Blessings. Using them in conjunction with receiving an Innervate results in 12-15k mana regenerated. In the first couple bosses in Hyjal, the trinkets also stack with Jaina's Brilliance Aura. This allows Priests to be a lot more liberal with their heals, and put out a lot more healing than other classes. If you thought "unlimited mana" made Paladin good, think about how good it can be for a healer with three times the variety healing spells in his arsenal.

The Holy Priest's weakness is that they don't provide cumulative non-healing benefits to the raid group, but their strength lies in the extensive variety of healing and support spells. These strengths really shine in every boss encounter so far in Black Temple. It's hard to take out a Paladin or Shaman and lose the buffs that they bring, but bringing a second Holy Priest is definitely a worthy option.

I think this is a poor way of looking at it.

Yes, PW:S and quick heals are very useful, but that's not to say that Priests aren't the only class that casts clutch life-saving spells. Nature's Swiftness, Swiftmend, Holy Shock, Blessing of Protection and Lay on Hands come to mind. Sure, they are on a longer cooldown, but many of the spells listed there are arguably more powerful and versatile than Power Word: Shield, when it comes to saving lives. There are many situations where a PW:S is not enough to save a teammate, but Nature's Swiftness or BoP can.

Also, although it isn't as visible as a clutch PW:S or BoP, who's to say that sheer HPS does not save lives? For example, without Chain Heals in the raid in the Teron Gorefiend fight, the healing team can easily fall behind in the blink of an eye. Think about how NS and LoH on a FR'ed Mage can turn a wipe into a kill on Gurtogg Bloodboil.

Any number of Holy Priests can easily be the difference between life and death, but the same can be said about Paladins, Shamans and Druids.

Emphasis mine.

How exactly is binding heal useful? Are you referring to its low threat generation?

In SSC and TK I can't see ever not wanting to go with 3 Shamans, 3 Paladins, 1 Priest, and 1 Druid for healing. However, Black Temple has broken the mold for healing requirements in TBC. I definitely agree that Priests are much more desired in BT and you most likely want to run with 2, either by expanding your healing lineup to 9 or at the expense of a Shaman or Druid to maintain 8. It's good to see Blizzard adding more AoE damage, which Priests are very well equipped to deal with.

We rarely if ever raid with 3 shaman or 3 paladins. It's on average, 2 priests, 2 shaman, 2 paladins, 1 druid healing. I think priests are very good in multiple places in SSC and TK, and just get better in BT.

I think priests are hurting in TBC in general because of a few things:
1. Nerf to 3pc trans (I'd still wear it over raid gear atm if it worked).
2. Shadow Priests becoming amazing.
3. Renew less useful, PoM added, PWS/PoM both more useful than Naxx, yet not showing up on meters.


As for Binding Heal - it's good HPS output, and now that clearcast can give you free Binding Heals, I find myself using it a decent bit on fights like Gorefiend/etc.

To sum up Failure's post:

What a holy priest lacks in raid and group utility or throughput power, he or she easily makes up for in flexibility and versatility, which is the core of their strength as a raid healer.

A paladin has buffs, but spams two healing spells. A shaman has totems, bloodlust, earth shield, and three healing spells. A druid has major utility in Rebirth but a tree's healing style is very inflexible.

A holy priest healing has options.

Options?

Those options might be used if some of the other classes are deleted, perhaps..I mean, really, look at the holy priests "options"..

Good hots...druid.

Group heals...Chain heal.

Single target efficiency..Paladins.

Now, your correct in stating, as others have said, that a priest can do all of these..But how is that a strength, exactly? If your already bringing these other classes for their extra-healing support, then why not just have them fulfill the niche healing rolls?

You see, thats the conundrum, isn't it. Priests can do all types of healing, while other classes are limited, however, in a raid, you want those other classes, so the priests "all around" healing is diminished. Further adding on to this is the fact that those classes bring an immense amount of non-healing support to the role, so having them filling those niche healing rolls is extremely beneficial in the end, as you get those niche rolls filled, while also gaining amazing side benefits.

The ability for a priest to "branch" out in healing would only be useful if raids were only allowed to bring a certain number of hybrids..Well, thats not the case, and as long as it isn't, then any classes with aura/raid based buffs, which can fill a niche healing roll as well, will always be preferencial.

Don't get me wrong, I think priests still are spot on in their healing power..I think their support, however, is *terribly* lacking..They need adjustments in what they bring to the raid, beyond raid wide buffs..Replacing lolwell with a type of group aura, would be a damn fine start.

And when Morogrim graves 5 people all at under half HP? Are you going to perfectly have each shaman and paladin heal 5 different targets? Or have 1 priest save 2-3 people easily, then perhaps 2 paladins can each save 1 other one?

When original Gruul tossed people, and 2 people were a bit too close, was the paladin going to PWS the mage so that he survived with 500 HP?

When Gorefiend puts up crushing shadows, are the shaman chain heals going to expertly bounce to those people higher priority? And when they suddenly get spiked with crushing shadows up, is the paladin going to give them an extra 1.8k HP to survive?

On Najentus, is chain heal going to bounce around the entire raid, that has to be spread at the same time? PoH must suck when your entire group takes 8.5k damage at the same time. And on Bloodboil, it must just be terrible to have 1 priest able to poh the constant dmg on 5 people 2x faster than a shaman can heal it up.

And it's terrible when prayer of mending alone keeps up 3 people that all got hit by leotheras' whirlwind, while the priest can then keep the tanks up as well. It's terrible mainly because the priest gets no healing done on meters.

On Solarian, again, prayer of mending is so awful on 2 AR tanks taking the wrath, and PWS is so bad when she targets someone who wasnt topped off from the last moonfire spam shit and has a +50% dmg taken buff.

And on Alar, it's terrible when 1 priest can keep the entire raid topped off from Buffet dmg (not that buffet dmg even happens anymore).

Priests are awful, should delete them from the game.

I haven't seen a fight where raid stacking (2 Shaman, 3 paladins, 1 Priest and 1 Druid) would have been easier with more priests. In fact, more Priests is usually worse...

The endgame of WoW for min max purposes is all about getting every buff you can on as many people as you can. Also, you want to run with minimal healing if you can.

Priests are amazing healers, but others can heal close to a Priest and provide some huge buffs for their group/raid.

Fix 1): Add a 2 point Improved Circle of Healing that increases the crit chance by 50%/100% but reduces healed amount by 15%/30%
Fix 2) Change the 41 point discipline talent a buff that does: X% of overheal from heal over times restores mana to the group.

The 1st will guarantee inspiration procs for a targetted group without actually healing very much extra (1.5 * .7 = 1.05).

The 2nd will turn all classes in the raid that overheal from heal over times (priests and druids) a mana battery effect. Some balancing required of course

All it takes is one Priest to do most of that. With correct positioning and understanding of fights, Shaman, Paladins and the token Druid can fill the second Priests role in any raid.

We have one Paladin solo people on graves... If people aren't topped when graved then your other healers aren't doing their job. Chain Heal will have everyone topped off after a quake in no time, especially if you run the 3 shaman minmax some people do.

Solarian we have one Druid solo heal the two off tanks. At the end we throw extra help on them because healing her at 20% is trivial.

Original Gruul, if a Mage was gonna get hit by someone then you need to sit that Mage for someone who could actually use the pillars and blink.

Leotheras is trivial... I can see how mending is nice, but so is Chain Heal (IMO better than Mending for this example).

Al'ar any raid healer can keep the raid topped... zzz.

Some bad examples to be honest. I rerolled Paladin for my guild because a second blessing was greater than having second Priest. There are things I miss that my Priest had and my Paladin doesn't, but it's mainly because the other healers in the raid weren't doing the task I assigned to them.