I think the reason why they are considering the cooldown is two-fold.

1) CoH is an extremely raid-healing spell that has almost no downsides. If there's raid damage then using CoH is the best option by far I guess. Maybe they think it is slightly too good.

2) The real reason for considering the change is that Priests would end up casting CoH for very large parts of encounters, sidelining most other healing spells. Blizzard has repeatedly stated that they don't like classes spamming one button throughout a fight. A cooldown on CoH would certainly solve that problem.

No dobut it is, since they made it ride-wide and smart target in first place... The value of CoH is however entirely dependent on content. Either they make fights that force you to use it (BB) or not (Keg dragon realm). This however makes me wonder - GC claimed that the reason for nerf is that priest use almost only CoH in Naxx on beta. This is totally opposite to what many members (most noticeably - Constantius) claimed on this forums many, many times. Why the different opinion?

Concerning the spamability: The truth, at least from my experience, is, that CoH is not spammable in Naxx/OS-content. But - and that´s the point - once you are T7(,5) geared and properly buffed it´s nearly the same as it is now (aka. spamming would be possible again). You get back to your Sunwell regeneration levels and you have incredibly high returns from replenishment due to a high mana pool, it´s just a question of gear. A higher mana cost doesn´t prevent CoH from being spammable again (remember, you couldn´t spam CoH in Blues/Karazhan gear either).

I hope they consider a compromise on the cooldown. A 2.5-3 sec cooldown on CoH and Wild Growth would be a reasonable place to start, but 6 secs seems extreme to me. A 3-sec cooldown would be enough to get priests used to doing something else again (PoM, Renew, GH, Flash or Binding).

This explains a lot.

I have definitely noticed a bug where I didn't get mana, I didn't have the explanation. Thinking back, it *was* when I was shielding warriors.

Hopefully they fix this bug, but in case it takes them a year to get around to (like SoL), it will be useful to test whether we get mana from shielding bears/cats, i.e., can it find their mana pool to do the calculation.

I agree, a 2.5sec cooldown would force us to use a GCD on something else while still allowing us to retain the spammy feeling. Another way to do that would be to apply a prohibitive mana cost but not too soon, maybe a 5 second debuff : up to 3 or 4 stacks would incur no penalty but more than that would make the mana cost skyrocket.
Let's not forget what GC said about shaman CH : at one point they were considering nerfing it to the ground (baby) and a smarter designer said it was now iconic of the shaman class, nerfing it too far would not be a good thing to do. I think he ended up saying that shaman spamming CH for 80% of the time was OK, as long as they had better choices to make the remaining 20% of the time. Maybe us spamming CoH 50% of the time is OK too ?
Because let's face it : spamming CoH for a limited time is fun, seeing green bars going slowly going up as we spam is fun, being able to cast it only once (green bars barely moving) ? not fun.

I agree wholeheartedly with nerfing CoH. The main problem with CoH though is when Blizzard gave it smart targetting! The only thing smart targetting brought us was less thinking... pre smart targetting I had to see what party had atleast 3 people damaged, if I was in range of that party and if those 3 people were standing in range. On top of that I had to check who was standing in the middle of the party to give the furthest reach with the heal.

Make PoH heal a party of your choice (targettable like the old CoH), make holy nova smart target (the range is so small anyway) and give CoH 4-6 second cd with smart targetting while boosting the healing of it with 15%. Problem solved.

Undoubtedly true. A flat 6sec cooldown change to both CoH and WG will make WG vastly superior, since WG will still have 100% uptime on 5 targets. But if the cooldown came with a buff to the amount healed with CoH (even combined with an increased mana cost), I would be more than happy with that change. I certainly hope it's not the case that the "whole point of CoH is that it's spammable," as this playstyle is excruciatingly boring.

As an example, if CoH was turned into basically a targettable Prayer of Healing with a 6-10sec cooldown, well, that would be an extremely useful spell in both 10 and 25man content. (I think making PoH targettable on its own will put Disc way ahead of Holy, bad idea. The PBAoE nature of Prayer of Healing is important in limiting its utility.)

Just so you know, this was a pain to figure out. I saw really confusing rapture returns from a recent Mount Hyjal parse, and being obsessive and perfectionistic, I simply could not let this go. The log was huge, so I ended up dumping the first 65535 lines of into a spreadsheet and spent portions of the next 3 days sorting the data, cutting and pasting portions to another sheet, resorting and trimming everything down until I had about 500 lines of damage events with absorbed damage, rapture returns, and heals that should have rapture returns.

This only highlighted how what happened didn't make any sense at all. Try it on some parses and you'll see what I mean. I could tell that a divine aegis shield was up for 1.6 seconds, for instance, but sometimes I'd see no rapture return that I could pair to it and other times there'd be a return that was just way too low -- some 3-5 times lower than they should be. In contrast, the heals worked with rapture like clockwork, returning exactly the right amount every time.

I figured out the second bug first, and that actually was crucial because I was then able to see that I was seeing a fairly constant mana return per absorbed damage for short stretches, which led to noticing that the pally tank I was healing consistently yielded mana that was 2-3 times lower than expected, and then suddenly realizing that was probably about the difference in mana between us. From there, everything made some tragic sense... and then there were some fits of rage that programming so sloppy could ever pass through any QA at all, let alone make it into a release version...

Anyway, to actually get to your questions: yes, you do get mana back from feral druids in bear form. So it's related to the max mana in any form and not their current form.

From the parse I was looking over, the second bug has very little impact on gameplay. It returns more mana than it should but overall it's very little mana. The first bug represents a much more significant loss in mana returns. However, I'm finding that even in 25 man raids, >80% of my rapture returns are from healing, which may explain why this could go unnoticed.

Adding my own less important bug, the damage received from your own SW: D won't proc rapture either.

With regard to the ongoing CoH/WG discussion, I feel Blizz has failed in three fronts; namely, the design of boss fights in that they require near non-stop AOE healing spammage, the axiom that Resto Shammies are entitled to prevail in their niche and the near-complete obsoletion of the Holy Priests' "many and varied healing tools". Bear with me, and also bear in mind that I solely address the raiding domain. In 5-mans, I see all healing classes/specs faring quite well.

You do remeber the wasteland that was raid healing for Priests and to a lesser extend, Tress prior to 2.1 right? For almost a full year, we had to endure the concensus of one Priest for buffs, 2-3 Shadow Priests (DPS/mana battery) and Shaman/Pala stacking. A note here. I did not go with the trend, for I believed that a good Holy Priest could still provide solid healing despite being "a jack of all trades, master of none". As healer wing officer, I made room for two Hollies in our raids. The gamble paid off. We were competitive. However, in order to be competitive, we had to put in twice the effort as opposed to the rest of the healing classes. No harm there, for the Priest who likes a challenge.

Prior to 3.0.2 and with game mechanics as they were, Holies enjoyed a parity with the rest. We now had a much improved mana regeneration, spirit was indeed our main stat, all of our healing tools were fully operable and CoH (as a party-only prop-up) was shining. We could match Palas for ST healing and give Shammies a run for their money in the AOE department. Easily visible who were the Holy Priests that employed their arsenal of spells more efficiently.

Enter 3.0.2. Suddenly, it all goes full swing. Even mediocre Holies and Trees start outpacing seasoned Shammies and Palas, while the latter are now finding themselves in the overheal abyss. On the other hand, a revamped Disc tree offers a viable route to a Priest who is not too enthused on AOE healing - or simply, wants to try out something different.

Allow me now to shift to the core of my thesis. Through CoH we dominate the throughput, with Trees coming in a close second. Our Shammies/Palas whinge no end. They feel irrelevant - which is not true, as I time and time again assure them, just do not want to jump on that wagon right now - and I can understand their plight.

All latest parses indicate CoH rates of 70%+. Ask me, do I feel that pressing one button is rewarding? No and yes. As a Holy Priest for four years, I always admired our versatility in the inherent class ability to approach any fight from different angles. Hence, I would hate to be confined to a Shamanesque role of clicking on CH for eternity. On the other hand, faced with battles such as the Twins or M'uru do we even have a choice? Even SoL, which I find to be a very handy new gimmick, is largely tied to procs attained through CoH useage.

Now, if Blizz were to implement a 6 sec CD on CoH - as far as WG is concerned, Liths's post compounded my feelings - I do not want to dramatise it to the extend that I will exclaim "Holy Priests are now irrelevant". Ths is not true. However, I do feel we shall find ourselves outgunned by CH, outsmarted by the Trees' HoTs and outpaced by the Palas' quick heals. For as CoH changed post-patch, so did the healing mechanics for the other classes.

I am saddened by a host of healers who decry CoH spammage. It is unfortunate that they cannot grasp that even if one wants to spam it, it is not possible for extended fights - even the trivialised SWL ones, let alone lvl 80 raiding content (the latter I presume as I have not taken part in the Beta). Conversely, I cannot discount the need for such a re-adjustment as to make all four healing classes satisfied in their particular contribution.

A 3 sec CD would be optimal in my opinion. But based on past experience, I would rather have a tool that I may use at my discretion rather than none. This is an answer to Holies who complain of boredom regarding one-key mash.

PS- I realise that many of the points raised above stem of and reflect on healing meters. I take meters as a valuable indicator and by no means as an end-to-all Bible. Since RspE (Raiders saved per Encounter) has not been been designed yet (nor is it likely to) I do my best with what is on hand.

Long time reader, first time posting

Exinfernis,

I agree with what you said.

"I am saddened by a host of healers who decry CoH spammage. It is unfortunate that they cannot grasp that even if one wants to spam it, it is not possible for extended fights - even the trivialised SWL ones, let alone lvl 80 raiding content (the latter I presume as I have not taken part in the Beta). Conversely, I cannot discount the need for such a re-adjustment as to make all four healing classes satisfied in their particular contribution. "


Priests were fine before the smart heal, instead of putting a CD on CoH why not just revert it back to the non-smart heal?

This and the fact as raid lead healer, if there is a fight were alot of AoE damage is going around how can you not bring a Shaman?

I asked Ghost Crawler this on the forums:
World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> What does a guild do with no Shamans?

and his response was

"You don't need Resto shamans to raid.

If Chain Heal ends up being the only spell that gets used to heal, or the spell that pushes Holy priests and Resto druids out of a raid, then we'll nerf it. We don't think those cases are likely, but we always try to leave the possibility open.

I've already said we'll adjust the content with the assumption that CoH and WG aren't going to be as huge a percent of total healing. "

But with the CD on CoH and WG I just dont see this. Can someone who has been to WotLK Naxx maybe confirm this?

I hope Blizzard know what they are doing when it comes to nerfing CoH. I'm worried if they draw conclusions based on Naxxramas-10/25 meters as it is very easy content and hardly any group going there is anywhere near min/maxing.

CoH shines on easy content. If healers have plenty of mana and damage is easy to heal, the fastest heal win the meters and that is CoH. Speaking of the new encounters at 80, I'd say Malygos is kind of designed for CoH (we did him with four healers first time we killed him on the Beta, 3 holypriests and 1 holypaladin) while Sarthovar (hard mode all aspects) is better for druids because priests will run into mana issues after a while and the pure efficency from druids will win. Paladins dominate tankhealing completly with Shamans acting as hybrids between melee/raidhealing and tankhealing. That's how I see it after Beta and I thought that was nice and fair (but I'm not that concerned with the meters compared to Blizzard developers obviously).

With the current state of paladins, there is not much room for holypriests healing the tank (if you bring two holypaladins and there is no reason not to) - it will be extremly high overhealing which we can't really afford. We're basically better off doing _nothing_ while waiting for AoE-dmg to hit the raid so we can do our PoM/CoH/Binding Heal/Prayer of Healing.

Now, I understand that something needs to be done with CoH as it dominates a bit too much on easy content, but if you have proper enrage timers to beat and you need to cut down on healers, then you won't bring any CoH priest for raidhealing over a restodruid or a shaman if we get the CD (unless you need bursthealing from stacking PoH). Pure numbers is then heavily favouring druids (especially) and then shamans. The "max HPS" nerf is incredible for priests if we get a CD on CoH. I understand encounters will be changed etc etc blablabla, but the truth is that giving us a 6 sec. CD on our main raidhealing tool based on meters from Naxxramas, just doesnt make any sense.

If we get both our main tools for raidhealing on CD (any other healer having two core spells on CD? or one core spell on CD?), we need something else. If we could use PoH on other groups that would be a start - and bringing back group positioning and actual thinking. Making Divine Fury also reduce cast time on PoH would be even better. Having 2,5 sec targettable PoH would be a good change compared to "CoH spam" (for those who've been doing it) with a CoH as backup. That would also make Discipline a lot better for raidhealing - making that spec viable also when you have paladins available.

This is not really meant as a QQ, a CD won't really affect my playstyle much on easy content as I've never spamed CoH 80-90% of the time (what guilds have Blizzard been monitoring?). What I just want to say is that we need something to compensate the max HPS-loss if they go through with it. Having PoH work as "old CoH" with a cast time seems like the best solution if you ask me.

And no, please, we don't need smart targetting, let us do the thinking.

I don't think the WG cooldown would be as steep as people make it out to be. Druid's still have their "niche" to fall back on and no one or thing even comes close to competing with Druids. Renew and Riptide will NEVER replace a Druid HoT or even come as a good substitute, they are just supplements.

That said, I believe this is relevant to present discussion. If Priests become outgunned all 3 fronts, then we may go back to the days at the start of TBC.

Further, I think we should bring the discussion towards other things. In my mind, putting a cooldown on CoH also makes haste near worthless for us. As two of our big heals will be cool-down restricted rather than mana-restricted. Of course, I am talking about Prayer of Mending and Circle of Heal. To compound that, the gains of haste on Renew don't seem to be all that great, either.

On that topic, anyone else think Renew needs to crit? It's been brought up earlier in this thread, but Renew has literally seen 0 improvements in years. None of our upper talents affect, whereas we've gotten plethora or talents that affect our other heals. Well perhaps not even needing to "crit" but some sort of ability that would proc from Renew based on our crit chance perhaps -- (but allowing Renew to put up small Divine Aegis seems like it would help Discipline a lot, it would mitigate the fact that most of Renew ticks tend to be overheal).

[e] Another idea would be a talent that allows Renew to instantly heal for a fixed/small amount based on the priest's Crit chance. (e.g. if I cast renew and it "crit" it would immediately heal for the same amount as the first tick, or something).

I totally agree with this point. I believe it is the nature of Sunwell fights, not CoH that is to blame. For virtually every fight in Sunwell, I am on raid healing. There is one exception to this - Brutallus. If you took a look at my log for a Brutallus attempt you would see 90%+ Greater Heals, because that is the best option for the encounter, and I don't think anyone would support the idea of a cooldown on Greater Heal because of that. Its the fact that Sunwell encounters spew out so much raid damage that makes CoH so good, not because I enjoy being a 1 button wonder.

twins is the only fight i can think of that you should even get close to 90%+ healing with a single spell (coh). making coh a smart heal bliz has allowed the 'less smart' priests do outshine other good healers in other classes, and that is unfortunate and probably enough reason alone for a nerf. i personally love the new coh but hate seeing less skilled ppl near topping charts by 1 button spamming, so my feelings are kinda neutral.

fact is, at the end of the night in a raid, if you see 80%+ of 1 spell IMHO you've completely missed the point and the strength of being a priest, and that's diversity.

i think if i was given a chance to resolve the problem that coh smart heal has made i would simply remove the 'smart heal' from it and make it exactly how it was pre3.0. even though they took downranking from us we still would have to 'think' about where to use coh instead of blindly clicking pretty much anyone and using your 1 button to dominate.

I am really frustrated over the potential CD to COH and the best thing that came out of Beta imo was that the proposed 6 second cooldown was not going to be implemented. Now the Beta is closed (where it could have been tested) and this is gonna take place?

GC and Blizzard must re-read the boards over Beta development and one of the major gripes for Priests has been Cooldowns - for Priests WOTLK should be called Wrath of the Cooldown - Penance, Divine Hymn, Guardian Spirit. Please show Priests that you can think out of the box a little and nerf COH with something other than a CD /yawn. Cooldowns = unfun! Cooldowns for heals = stupid (in the main) - I can't match my Cooldowns to the stupidity of the rogue/mage/hunter stepping in the fire!

The Blizzard forums and others have been inundated with other potential solutions and my preferences are:
COH to hit 3/4 targets with Glyph to increase by one*
COH with Cooldown but Glyph to remove CD*
Arcane Blast like mana increase (Mana management is the most fun part of healing for me - an OOM healer is a useless one)
CD on COH but POH being smart. (I don't care that this gives Disc priests a way to raid heal - as a Healing CL, I'm not bringing one to raid over any other healer, especially a Paladin)

*Im starting to sound like Koraa - "just glyph fix it".

Greater Heal
Flash Heal
Binding Heal
POH
Holy Nova
Renew (sorta CD on one person)
Lightwell (CD on use and on cast)
Penance (CD)
Divine Hymn (the lvl 80 cc/heal hybrind monstrosity) - CD
Guardian Spirit - CD
Penance - CD
POM - CD
PW:Shield - 2 x CD

Blizzard, do you really want to add a CD to another of our healing arsenal?

GC had said to locks that DPSers with more difficult rotations (Affliction) should out-dps one button smashers. Will this philosophy apply to healers with Paladins/Shamans (one button smashers) generally below Druids/Priests who have a more complicated (and more fun imo) way to heal efficiently and effectively?

Also, it has been said that Priests are the jack of all trades type healer, now is that title is specifically for Holy Priests? Didn't GC say that Holy was our "raid healing spec" and Disc the tank healer? Make up your mind - constantly changing design goals leads to badly designed classes.

Raid AoE damage happens in waves, whether a predictable cycle (Bloodboil) or an unpredictable burst (someone sets off a firebloom partytime on their way to the bubble on KJ). In most situations it doesn't take more than 2-3 successive CoH casts (especially now that it is raid-wide in its scope) to bring the raid up to where it needs to be, and usually to proc a SoL that then launches me back into my single-target raid healing cycle before the next wave of raid-wide damage hits. However, only being able to hit one CoH at a time would severely limit this capability, usually in the moments where it's absolutely needed most. My vote (not that any of us get one) is for an Arcane Blast-style increasing cost, or possibly a diminishing amount healed per successive cast, to reset after so many seconds of not casting it.

I've been trying to figure out if a priest could keep up a Bloodboil group with the expected gear of a person who is learning Bloodboil, if Circle of Healing had a 6 second cooldown by filling in the extra time by casting renews. So I'm guessing like a 1000 heal per tick for renew with the glyph, and a 1000 heal for CoH.

Bloodboil:
600dmg/sec x 24 sec. = 14400 dmg x 5 people = 72000dmg

In 24 seconds 16 instant casts
CoHx4 - 4000 x 5 = 20000
Renewx2 - 8800 x 5 = 44000
Healing = 64000

But you've got 3 seconds to cast up to two spells. Probably prayer of mending, basically means that hopefully your bounces are good and the group gets healed up. But it seems like, without the renew glyph a priest wouldn't be able to keep up even for a single bloodboil group, which is kinda dumb, basically means that without restro-shamans raids are boned if there's AE damage in that kind of scale (which is to say, I have no idea if they are planning on making raid damage that crazy in WOTLK). I thought Blizzard was trying to get out of forcing raids to take a certain spec/class for raids to get by, but whatever, hopefully they change circle to have a beefier heal per cast if they keep the cooldown that long.

Removing the smart target function is a much better idea than adding a cooldown. The spell needs a nerf though, on trash im doing around 30-40% of the total healing done sometimes, just spamming CoH before people have time to cast.

If im healing raid, i pretty much only use CoH. That used to be the case back pre3.0 too, but it wasnt as crazy good then, because you aimed for at least 3ppl, today i always get 5ppl. I wish they wait with the nerf until we reach lvl80 though, since some people are reporting that CoH is not as good then.

Now that i think about it, a prayer of healing that i can target sounds really fun to raidheal with.

How are these going to fix the problem? They both ensure you get basicly the same COH as now if you use a glyph. I don't think its getting less imba if you have to glyph it. Especially the first one looks like a parody to me. As far as I see the situation, the problem is that COH is the answer to nearly everything. You don't only use it to heal AOE-Damage as intended, you also use it to heal single persons just because its fast, cheap and convenient. The first solution without a gem practically ensures you are unable to heal a group with COH, but still can abuse it to heal a single person. Thats about the opposite of whats needed.

My prefered solution would be a small cooldown (about 3 seconds to ensure it isn't spammed) and additionally the mana costs should scale with the number of targets: The more you hit (and really heal) the less it costs, so a COH that hits 5-6 persons would be very cheap (and used just the right way) while a COH that hits a single person would be insanely expensive.
I didn't suggest that anywhere else though, just invented it on the spot

Blizzard stated that they are concerned with Healers "playing the UI" rather than the game. What you describe for the old CoH is pretty much that. Staring at health bars. I realise that some people enjoy that. Most people probably find it tedious to stare at the health bars of whole raids and would rather see the encounter.

Even though the comparison has slight problems:
In the arena a healer has to watch the surroudings as well as the health bars and it feels more like playing the game. I imagine that's where they want to take raid encounters too. So I guess if there were more "threats" to the healers based on their positioning, like taking damage, being in line of sight/range of enemies or being out of line of sight or out of range of friends.

So if the encounter satisfies certain conditions then even with no cooldown CoH healing could be more interactive. The smart targetting is nice in that respect because you can watch the encounter, see an area where damage was taken and throw a heal over.

The cooldown on the other hand is a poor way of handling the healer attrition I believe. But then I may be irrational here. I don't mind the cooldown on Mind Blast or Holy Fire.