Holy Priest usage in raids
 

Hello,

I am a holy priest (ya, rly) and I'm starting this topic to get to know what you guys think about how useful a holy priest is in a 25-man raid as the situation is at the moment. Lately my guild got disbanded and thus I started seeking other refugees to satisfy my raiding lust (this is particularly poetic mind you).

Every door I knocked and everywhere I asked (about 5-6 TK guilds so far) I got the following answer: "Your application is OK and so is your gear but we're really not taking any more holy priest as it is, about 0-1 each raid, paladins are so much better, come back if the situation changes." Now that has really troubled me. Aren't priests supposed to be number 1 healing classes in all content? I feel that my beloved priest which I have spent so much time on is turning into rubbish and seeing videos by top guilds confirms that since the priest population doesn't exceed 1-2 priests per raid, 1 always being shadow.

I don't wanna turn into a shadow machine because I don't enjoy DPS and I don't wanna farm all my gear again :(.

Discuss.

P.S.: Please accept my apologies if a similar thread exists already; it's kinda late to go through all your forums :P.

Every healing class has roles that it excels at. As such, there is no "number 1 healing class in all content." If you look a little harder you will find a number of threads that deal with this misconception.

Condolences on your guild, and good luck.

Yeah, not to beat a dead horse, but holy priests are fine. 1-2 per raid works great, which is just about the number of healing spec people of any class that you'll bring (except paladin, but that's because their other specs aren't especially raid useful)

I'm glad to hear this and I hope you speak the truth :). Moderators can very well close the topic if they think enough discussion has been made about it.

You only need one holy priest per raid for DS. Stacking paladins and shamans gives you the about the same healing output but much greater returns in totems and blessings.

The issue here is there needs to be a significant gain on a second holy priest beyond a second renew.

My guild brings 2-3 Holy Priests per raid. Circle of Healing is pretty useful on most fights now. If it were possible to get good, reliable resto druids anymore, I'd rather have one of those than the third healy Priest though. Our only tree isn't there all that often ;/

1 is nice, spirit buff is fine. More really depend on itemisation.

Let me explain:
at the current state of 1800 (ssc) to 2200 (hyal) +healing of the paladins, noone can really compete with them. They don't need a shadow priest and it's really usefull to have 3-4 in your raid (bok, wisdom/might, light, salvation).
When the downranking nurf hitted us (druids, priests) like a truck in the middle of naxx - i thought of times getting better because of outscaling heals in further times... but it didn't happen until now.

A 2.0s heal, bursting out 5000 hp and crits for 8k (happens often at 3x% chance) is to much to really compete with.

What can a second priest bring to the raid? PoM is strong, and with the bunch of spirit and mp5 they can heal well without a mana battery - but PoH and CoH aren't needed (CoH < Chainheal in any terms) and the 4th paladins still add something feelable.

One tree druid is very nice to have (improved motw -> more stats/res), aura for your maintank(s) - but hotting of the raid not that easy, while some paladins or shamas are assigned to heal the camp as well (fol is fast and fine at topping, chainheal is awesome at close to any fight i can think of). They can't really compete with paladins/shamans at the moment, and i think we have some very decent healdruids. But combat ress and innervate (for our top mages ~~) provides them as well as one holy priest at least one slot.

Holy priests could add inspiration for you tank, but a shaman can do that as well (and add a full load of totems and bloodlust/heroism for his group), if needed. They have only good mana regenartion for themselves, resto shamans or shadow priests for all other groupmembers..

I play a holy priest and my guild typically takes 1 holy priest (imp ds) along to 25 man raids.

It'd be quite easy to bitch and moan about the situation as we have 4 very dedicated holy priests after that 1 spot each night. If i remove myself from the situation it becomes obvious as to why we're bringing paladins/druids/shaman over more holy priests and for the sake of the raid i'm happy to be on sit out if it's my turn.

What exactly do we have that would convince our raid leader to drop the 3rd paladin or 2nd shaman/druid for another holy priest ? Not much at all it would seem. I don't feel it's an issue of healing as i don't have mana or healing problems and neither do the other healing classes.

It's all about utility and holy priests seem be lacking in comparison to the other healing classes. Having said that though we do take 2 shadow priests - the class balance IS there just the roles have changed a little. There are 2 roles a priest can now play in a raid where as the paladin has but 1 option.

Well, most raids are heavy paladins (at least 3) because the buffs are quite useful. The big problem is that a protection paladin can't do much at all when not tanking, while a druid can do great dps.

A ret paladin isn't bad either. Except it is typically ideal to only have one pure melee group so there usually isn't much room for him. But a priest can easily out heal a paladin now and have much higher versatility in the pure raiding role. In fact, I think all healing classes are as good as paladins anymore. I know our druid healer keeps up fine along with our shaman and priests. (And the shaman isn't even heavily resto!)

All the other healing classes have alternate raid specs that can easily be assimilated into most raids. Paladins are not so lucky in that regard. Personally I would rather have 2 of each healing class (maybe one tree) than 4 paladins and 1 of each other healing class. But I can't figure out where to put two other paladins that aren't healers. It just wouldn't work.

I think holy priests are good in that they can fulfill any given healing assignment with ease - whereas Tree Druids and Shamans aren't spectacular single target healers, and Paladins are poor at best raid healers and only really excel at single target. Priests can do any of the roles, plus some good stuff like PoMending and PW:S/Renew.

And on the subject of Shaman : Chain Heal is so utterly retardedly good :(. wtb. A shaman healing for double what the next closest healer does is fairly insane. Yes he had a Shadowpriest, but keep in mind thats with somewhere in the neighborhood of 17% OH. Chain heal owns face when used properly.

Ideally I would bring 3 Shamans, 3 Paladins, 1 Druid and 1 Priest to each raid for healing. A 4th paladin when we wanted a 9th or if a Druid/Priest was missing because blessing of light brings Paladin healing up a tier of loot.

With that said we usually run with 2 Priests, 4 Paladins, 2 Druids and 1 Shaman. This is our healer setup simply because these are the people we have and they are all great players. Eventually it would be nice to work some more Shamans into the lineup, but right now it's not possible. Priests and Druids would be the first classes to cut for Shamans. All healing classes can do whatever job is necessary absolutely fine, but out of all the classes Shamans and Paladins benefit the raid the most.

I played a Holy Priest from release of the original game until the release of the expansion and compared to the other healing classes I am quite disappointed with Priests right now. Not because of their healing, they can heal just as well as any other class, but because other healers can do just as well as they can and also provide massive buffs.

This is an issue that's coming up a lot lately for us, we always run healer light, although I think we're gonna try to stack a few more healers in for the freshly 'tuned' BT. Since we don't run with feral druids, we don't have an abundance of combat resses when our raid makeup is 3 paladins 2 shamans 1 druid and a holy priest. So when it'd be nice to have another combat res and get a healing druid, we can't really fit it in and keep 7 healers. And then we have the issue of having two very able holy priests, and realistically only ever being able to fit in 1. While priests and druids are great healers, truly, and bring a lot, right now paladins and shamans fill their own healing nearly as well if not better, but bring a TON more.

Priests definitely aren't weak healers, don't get the wrong idea.. they just don't have much else to bring to the raid besides their heals!

This is very correct. A holy priest can do everything well, while another class can do specific tasks better (there are some situations where Prayer of Mending seems unique and awesome, but chain heal often does the same job better). Yet as has been already mentioned, the major downside of holy priests is not their ability to heal, but their inability to bring the non-healing related utility that the other classes do.

My guild runs with 8 healers for most encounters (though many can be done with 7). Five of those slots go towards fully buffing your raid (3 pallys, 1 disc/holy priest, 1 resto druid). Then just look at what the other classes bring to the table. Shaman totems are just too good, and chain heal trivializes group healing in some encounters, so you can't go wrong there. An extra druid brings another combat res, which can make a big difference at times. A holy priest brings slightly more versatile healing utility then druids and shaman depending on the encounter (ie: if it's not a chain heal fight), but often times its simply unnecessary, as the healing differential is not significant enough to overcome the benefits of totems or combat res's. I would probably take another holy priest over a 4th paladin, but even that situation is close, since the 4th paladin can put BoL on the whole raid and provide a boost to paladin output.

Xaviera and Zwink pretty much summed it up. I constantly hear this ridiculous arguement that "paladins are better healers"......why? Usually the response is something mana related, which honestly is a pretty silly arguement. Do your priests constantly run out of mana? I don't. I don't see why anyone would. Do we sit at 98% mana for entire fights while chaincasting two second holy lights because we have a shaman and 7 shadowpriests pre-2.1 in our group? No, but who really needs to? I truly have yet to face an encounter in which my usefulness was compromised due to mana, no less class. Having said that, clearly there are things other classes bring that make them strong(plate, hp itemization, etc.), but as mentioned the main thing is buffing. In late vanilla, and hugely now in TBC, we find ourselves in many(if not all) encounters where dps is everything. You can't stack healing to beat an enrage timer(just to illustrate the point), and as such having your few needed healers be classes that can strongly boost dps is very relevant. Ultimately the actual healing ability of different players, comes down to the player, not the class. I have yet to meet XXX class/player that I can't rival or surpass, but that doesn't make heroism show up on my toolbar, and 99 times out of 100 lately, that heroism would have more of an impact than my skill. That point also goes both both ways. In assuming that to be true, a(lets say shaman) of equal skill(and often, less), is a stronger raid slot simply because the dps boost is tremendous. As long as encounters remain in a place where the emphasis on those dps additions is so strong, the raid slots of holy priests are, and generally(assuming "a perfect world") should be in jeopardy. Does it make me sad? Sure, but it also makes sense. At any rate, there isn't anything to be done about it really short of giving us kings, but that doesn't mean we aren't useful. Our healing is fantastic, and anyone who tells you otherwise is uninformed(and yes, our paladins are extremely skilled).

Hmm, I feel like my comments may have implied a point I didn't intend. Short and sweet: Holy priests are great....just don't join a guild that has 5.

But hey, it doesn't work like that, respeccing shadow is like just having hit 70 again!

I think Xaviera summed it up, that's my picture of the situation as well and I think hybrids are overpowered as it is. I don't intend to start a whine topic right here but sometimes it's too much, it's not like a mage whining after dual trinkets nerf because he can't two-shot warriors anymore, it's like a class getting seriously handicapped and being fit into raid only because of renew and DS.

I read through all of your posts and I wanna thank you very much for replying to my topic :).