Originally Posted by Havoc12

The senario I posted is perfectly plausible even now up to the 5 second mark. Two closely spaced hits of an AoE that can 2-shot a DPS, is something that has been encountered multiple times in TBC and similar senarios are already seen even in the current very early stage content.

The remaining 5 seconds are added for a very specific reason. To gauge what the maximum is. I take a senario that will push a shaman to his absolute limit and ask a simple question, can a priest heal this now? Can he heal it with a 6sec CD on CoH. I look at BOTH the 5 second mark, which is a senario that is relevant right now and at the 10 second mark, to see what happens to a priest in a senario that a shaman needs every ounce, including luck, crits and all of his spells to heal at least partly successfully.

This is a very very relevant question. Whether this damage is healed by 1 person or 300 in a real raid senario is completely irrelevant. What we want to know is how a single class does on its own. This is a crucial question.

The answer are:
1) The shaman can convingly heal up to the 5 second mark, which is what is relevant in today's environment. As expected if we take this to 10 seconds, we push him to his limit thus possibly resulting in failure.

2) Today's CoH priest can heal even the 10 second mark very convingly. That means that if he had to a CoH priest could deal with this damage alone. That clearly illustrates the problem with the current CoH. If there is damage that challenges the CoH priest the shaman has no hope in hell of coping. If the damage is healable by the shaman, for the priest it is trivial.

3) Holy with nerfed CoH, cannot heal even the 5 second mark, which is a situation that is very relevant today and which the shaman can deal with convincingly. At the 10 second mark, where the shaman has at least some chance of partial success, the CoH priest has none.

4) Even if he is limited to using only average of 1 CoH every 6 seconds, the holy priest would be able to heal at least the 5 second mark successfully, provided he was able to use 2xCoH in quick succession at the begining of the sequence.

5) A paladin using single target heals is able to do more than a CoH priest with the 6 second cooldown can at the 5 second mark and even though he fails to heal the senario he is able to maintain higher HPS than both the shaman and the priest.

6) A druid can also convingly heal the 5 second mark with just WG. At the 10 second mark, he is better than the paladin and priest, but slightly worse the the shaman.

This is meant to illustrate a few basic things.

a) A holy priest cannot deal with aoe damage that pushes a shaman or druid to their respective limits.

b) A holy priest, unlike a paladin does not have the single target healing power to allow him to fill enough of this gap with single target heals

c) The cooldown on CoH is in itself an additional nerf.


The senario presented is valid and it accurately shows the full extent of the CoH nerf. That means without mitigating factors, namely a situation which allows effective use of PoM, PoH or Lightwell, priests are the bottom of the pile at dealing with aoe damage.

I will draw no further conclusions from this, but I will most certainly maintain that this is the truth. If anyone disagrees please post something more than "your example is not valid" to back it up.