Thorongil

Many thoughts about making CoH baseline or completely throwing it out of the holy´s arsenal have been thrown around lately. Yet, one should remember that CoH defines Holy at the moment. By removing it (or making it baseline) there would be no further need to even specc Holy. Holy would be obsolete, disc would offer better efficiency, better heals and the same group heal. That´s not were you would Holy want to be.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Idril.png

 

Lambi

Exactly! And this is what makes people want to roll priest, nothing else. When blizzard removes the need to think, they've destroyed the game for me. I see no reason to play priest if they remove my tools or make the fights easier to adapt to crap tools.

 

Thorongil

I agree basically, but seriously, would you like to tell me that you had to do big chunks of thinking when raid healing before 3.x? You just spammed CoH, that was the bottom line. While I also think, that making decision and such is what defines Priests I simply do not feel like we had to do lots of thinking before or after 3.x when rolling Holy and thus being degraded to a mere CoH-bot in terms of 25man raiding. The only possiblities are either giving CoH a cooldown or giving it such an incredible mana cost that would prevent spamming. The latter is basically impossible since it would make the spell worthless anyway. However, simply removing smart target wouldn´t solve anything apart from taking the ability to group your raid frames the way you´d like to instead of group-wise.

A recent blue post stated that Blizzard wants to more or less remove the concept of 'group' from raids. Take it as it is, we won´t get back to it from the present point of view.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Idril.png

 

ld1938

You'd need to make sure the priests were in the group they were assigned to heal so they could use POH, which is one of the only group targeted spells left in the game for some reason.

Its kind of funny, Ghostcrawler said they didnt wasnt to make COH group targeted again because then people would be back to micro-managing group composition, but by making it a smart heal which than "forced" them to nerf it by adding a CD they force raids to micro-manage groups around priests POH if they expect them to AOE heal.

The fact that it makes makes haste almost worthless for Holy priests is also a problem, especially when you consider how well Shamans scale with haste. Shamans are going to be THE only AOE healers if they go ahead with the changes they're proposing, and the difference is going to only get more pronounced as gear improves.

 

dukes

I would like an explanation of:

- How AoE healing is balanced around classes that can spam smart targetting raid heals which heal instantly;
- How priests are now worse than paladins for AoE healing while they retain CoH (with a cd), Holy Nova, PoM and PoH;
- How haste is now worthless with CoH having a cooldown; and
- How Shamans are the "only" AoE healers now.


Can people please step back, take a breath and get some perspective on this before posting? Encounters in WotLK are not going to be like those on live - if there are not the spells that can be exploited, they won't design raid encounters around them. Every change to raid composition has made this clear, especially the buff/debuff design change.

 

Liriel

@Thorangil:
Yes, I had to think before 3.0. I nerver hit one buttom for the lengh of a fight. I used PoM and Renew and stuff much more than I'm now. And I love those other spells. I had to think whom to target in what group to get an efficient CoH. Now I simply can stay on one person - maybe a person wiht whole health - and spam it and get MORE proccs then I had most times pre 3.0 in most fights. With groupbound CoH I had to use other spells if ther were only few people wounded in one group. Maybe I could have come around without that if we had more shadows but we often had none at all in our raid and most times no shaman for healers.


@dukes:
None of your quotes comes from me but:

- About AoE-healing balanced around CoH:
Blizz said that they constructed SW around priests having CoH to bring them back into raids.

- About Paladins:
PoH is very situational and only works for groups. PoM is not that sitational but it is not controllable and has an even longer CD than CoH. Holy Nova is expensive, forces you to stand very near together (which is no option for many boss-fights) and only works for your group. So if CoH gets a 6s CD your only AoE-Tools will be FH and Renew for most of the time.

Renew is one of our worst spells with 80 as many pointed out very often in this thread. FH is relatively expensive. FoL on the other hand is one of the most effective spells.

So if most of the raid-dmg has to be healed via single target heals - and that would be the case with the 6s CD and you have only a paladin and a priest, the paladin can do that much better than the priest.

- About Shamans:
Who else should be there if that comes true? Druids and Paladins will not get much more tools than before. And priests were only comparable to shamans because they had a spammable CoH. Every other spell is nice but never brought us in the range of shamans and since none of them got a big buff they will not do so for lvl80.

- About Haste:
Haste dont works on GCD but not on other CDs. CoH was one of the spells that got the most benefit out of the reduced GCD with haste-gear. If you apply any CD to it that would be gone. Worse. If you get a CD that works around having spells that run for 1.5s, 3s or 2.5s and the CD is balanced around that, every haste-gear will bring a rotation with such a spell out of synch.

 

ld1938

-The amount healed is very minor compared to the health totals of most people. As constantius said somewhere else in this thread, COH is there to stabilize peoples health until the real AOE heals hit. With a CD and 20k+ health pools, you'll barely notice COH.

-No one said they were worse than paladins for AOE healing, but paladins are unequivocally better single target healers and bring more utility. BOL is surprisingly effective for AOE/Tank healing however. GC is saying AOE healing isnt a Holy priests niche, that its the shamans "role". Single-target healing is obviously the Paladins niche, so where does that leave priests?

-For priests, Haste is equivalent to about 5 healing with COH spam and 3 +healng with Gheal spam So its a clear increase in throughput over pure +healing, but it doesnt also increase your efficiency like +healing. When COH/Gheal is the majority of your healing, haste is a worthwhile stat if you dont have mana issues. With a CD, haste will be almost no benefit to COH making haste only really beneficial for Gheal. When compared to +healing, which increases the throughput and efficiency of every spell you have. haste becomes a clearly inferior stat.
And Btw, I've seen people comparing the theoretical max healing of a shaman vs a COH priest using only +healing. In a situation where a shaman expects to be primarily AOE healing, haste is a far more efficient way for them to increase their HPS and benefits them considerably more than a COH priest. Comparing the theoretical healing of a COH priest and Shaman with 0 haste isnt very accurate.

-With a CD on WG and COH, if you need high throughput AOE healing, you'll need a shaman. A CD effectively caps the amount of time either can spend on AOE heals. With POM and COH on CD, priests will have to revert to single target heals, same for druids when WG is on CD. Shamans will be the only class with the option of AOE healing 100% of the time if needed, and even in bursts their aoe healing will be higher. Also, as I said above, they can get a pure increase to their aoe healing by stacking haste which no other healer can do.

 

Sebalot

How would you suggest any aoe damage will be designed in WotLK where CoH will be a good method to combat it?

I can think of no aoe fight in BT/SP (Naj'entus, RoS phase 2, Bloodboil, Illidan phase 2, Kalecgos, Felmyst, Twins, M'uru) where CoH with a 6 sec cd will be able to do the job. In all of those examples adding a shaman using chain heal will be vastly superior to adding a holy priest (or resto druid). And those examples are pretty much as wide variety of aoe as you are going to find (rotating groups taking a hit, one big raidwide explosion and very predictable periodic raid damage).

So exactly how do you propose Blizzard design aoe damage so we still have a role aoe healing? A mild tickle in 6 second intervals?

I completely agree that the current implementation of CoH is insanely overpowered but it seems Blizzards insistence of moving away from the concept of party in raids leads too very negative concequences for holy priest versatility. It is their insistance on giving us a smart heal that is the problem here. That's what caused CoH to go from useful to insane. My suggestion is to back off from the smart heal portion of CoH and WG. Then take a step back and figure out what really needs to be done. Because what they are currently talking about isn't a solution. This will sour a lot of holy priests that will feel completely impotent whenever aoe damage breaks lose. One CoH+3 flash heals+ one CoH+3 flash will not be an option when you might as well get another shaman in.

And I feel even worse for druids. An aoe HoT is a very cumbersome thing. It has to have an extremely high HPS to be able to combat with direct aoe healing. And if it has an extremely high HPS it could easily be the only aoe healing needed with some clever planning. I think druids would be better served with a CoH v 2 than WG. I have the feeling they will get an even shorter end of the stick than priests.

 

Saladin

Not to turn this into a class feud, but this leaves priests right where GC left them--the "versatile" healer. Already have tank heals covered? Paladins don't get to go. No AOE on this raid? Shamans don't get to go. The priest is the person that gets invited whether the raid leader's looking for a Raid, Tank, or Gimmick healer. You're the Kim Possibles of healing--you can do anything. And we love you for that.

Each of the four healing classes brings unique, necessary utility. Paladins have Blessings/Hands. Shamans have totems. Druids have MotW/Thorns. Priests have Fort and possibly Spirit depending on spec. I don't think that it's at all feasible to claim that any of those classes is going to be left behind because the others "heal just as good, but with utility."

Yes, CoH is supposed to be a bandaid heal for the real aoe heals to hit--so what is stopping a priest from firing off a pom and then hotting up the damaged targets after a CoH burst while you're waiting on the CD? Believe it or not, we healers have actually existed in a CoH-less world at one point in time. This is just something we all need to get used to.

Personally, I'm glad they took this approach. The last time a healer started getting OP (Holy Paladins in BC), they designed every endgame raid instance to be unhealable by said class. I would rather them add a stipulation to CoH rather than design the rest of the game to keep it from being so overwhelmingly good.

In fact, I recall a blue post on this very subject. He used an analogy of balancing a chair--you can either trim one leg down to size, or you can try to lengthen the legs. I'm not happy priests got nerfed, but it is far from the death of the holy priest.

 

Sebalot

Or they can realize that their decision to make one leg a smart leg was a poor idea to start with and go back to making it a pre-3.0 leg. Where it did exactly what was expected of a leg and no one had a problem with it.

 

ld1938

You seem to have forgotten some of the other healers buffs

Paladins have Blessings/raid-wide auras/DI
Shamans have Totems/Heroism/Reincarnate
Druids have Innervate//Motw/Thorns/Bres
Holy Priests have ..Fort
Disc Priests have Spirit + Fort

The other healers not only have MORE buffs, they have unique buffs. Either of a priests buffs can be nearly replaced with a scroll...........

Raid leaders dont look for classes that fit many rolls unless they have no other option. If you need a single-target healer, you get a paladin or druid. If you need a raid healer, you get a shaman. If you have no other option, you'll bring a priest

 

Isin

Naj'entus and Illidan can be done with cleverly set up groups with Prayer of Healing priests if necessary.

That being said, I am pretty sure that the other fights are specifically the reason that Blizz rolled back the Cooldown change on the PTR. If the CD had gone in in 3.0.2, no raid would be able to do any of those fights without a minimum of 4 resto shaman. Starting on Wednesday, level 70 raiding content will be a non-issue, and we have to assume that future raid content would be built around the new healing mechanics, including the removal of downranking, the mana pot limitation and maybe a CD on CoH.

Let's wait and see, people.

While I agree that the "smart" aspect of CoH was probably unnecessary, my main concern is that holy priests in wotlk will have less options to make their decisions with than in BC. While most classes are gaining new abilities, a holy priest will have far fewer tools to work with than we did on level 70 content. We won't have downranked greater heals, and we will only have circle a small fraction of the time (if the nerf goes through). I really can't think of any other class that will be using a smaller set of spells/abilities at 80 than we did at 70.

Particularly on a site focused on squeezing efficiency out of every spec and stat, you must understand why this is not an attractive role to be given. High end guilds address progression boss fights with the goal of min/maxing. The "versatile healer" role would be great for a casual healer or a main healer in a small guild, but the aggressive progression oriented guilds are going to go with whichever class is best for the job.

 

• Playered

Why are people being stupid talking about Priests never getting in to raids? that mentality should of been abolished a long time ago. If there are any glaring issues of this happening between the healers then Blizz will fix it rather quickly I'm sure.

Druids will Innervate themselves most of the time now due to mana constraints so it equates to your Shadowfiend.
Buffs should not be a reason to bring someone to a raid either - especially not for healers and sticking class buffs and not spec buffs in here is stupid.
You also have Guardian Spirit which is your version of a SS/BRes (which requires more attention, but is more controllable/raid saving if used as intended).

If your a good healer there should be little holding you back from being invited.
Single target healing should be viable from all classes but Disc Priests and Paladins will be 'the best' at it - this does not mean if you have no Paladins or Disc Priests your MTs will die because of inferior tank healing.
Raid healing roles are iffy for Paladins, nothing else really should worry.

 

Sebalot

They specifically said they added smart healing to CoH and WG (and thus have the need to nerf them because they are too good) to get away from the party concept in raids. And now we are supposed to be even more dependant on group composition than we ever were to motivate some aoe healing usefulness?

Does not compute.

As for waiting and seeing: the most effective way to get Blizzard to back off something is throwing yourself on the ground kicking and screaming. So, that is the rational response to things like this. Waiting just means that a year has passed and nothing has been done to fix the situation (ask mages, druids, paladins who endured TBC about this)

 

Isin

Did they really say they did not want party composition to be a factor at all? If that was the case, then they have failed. Vampiric Embrace is quite significant at 80, and is a major consideration for party composition. There are several other effects like mana and health totems that raids should still be considering when making parties.

 

Sebalot

GhostCrawler

"We're not crazy about reverting the smart heal aspect, though that is still on the table. Having too many spells that favor party over raid forces you back to having to worry a lot about your raid composition. "Oh, sorry hunter, we can't bring you because we need another melee for our melee group or else CoH won't reach you." PoH isn't as big an issue, because honestly it's just not such a big contribution to total healing. Though we could consider pushing it raid wide."

The main reason for clinging to the smart targetting concept seems to be to make party a non factor. And it seems they are willing to take an insane amount of bad will to push this through. So it seems to be the dominant principle here. And VE was significantly nerfed now so it remains to see what it can do at 80.

 

Isin

OK, we're so far off topic here it's crazy. All I meant to say was, those two fights mentioned CAN be accomplished by setting up raid parties properly. I don't care if parties are not meant to be a factor or not in the grand design; as far as holy and disc priests are concerned, parties will continue to be a factor as long as prayer of healing is limited by party; let's discuss these tools assuming that raid leaders are setting up parties optimally.

 

Sebalot

Well, if we are going to assume parties are going to be set up in a certain way, isn't that a strong argument for removing the smart targetting part of CoH? What was the problem with CoH pre-3.0?

I know that if CoH was a smart heal with a 6 sec cd in patch 2.0, we would have seen even more shaman stacking. Because shaman stacking would be a superior way to deal with all aoe damage in the game currently.

 

Volbak

Thanks for the post. I do agree with much of what you wrote, and I personally think that the CoH 2.X should be reverted back. However, Blizzard stated that they are reluctant to do so. I do not understand why, since as written at some posts already, our other tools for group healing are party based, and it may end up that we will need to make up groups based on that anyway.

About making decisions, yes, the fact that we have many heals and have to make decisions is what made me roll a priest. But a CD is not a help to make decision: it's something imposed. Decision is when you can do different things and choose the one that fits best. The old CoH had to be spammed in some situations, but in others it would make little sense. That's a way to make a decision: to know when to spam and to know when to not even use it; an imposed CD is not helping my decisions, but forcing me in a way to play.

However I would like to post my thoughts about complexity. I think that more complexity should give bigger rewards. With that I mean that if one class needs to have a complex rotation to achieve what another class can to simply casting the same spell, the complexity is meaningless. So I think that using more spell should result in a better healing; just using more spell for the sake of using it and achieving the same thing has not real benefit. On the contrary, it's a liability, since the chance for error is bigger. So, I like the fact that priests have lots of tools, it adds choices for me; but I want those tools be strong, because a set of weak tools is no better than less but more powerful ones.

Now, I am not complaining about our tools, we have powerful healings, no doubt about that. I just would not like that our raid healing tool become an weak one without us getting any other compensation for healing a raid.

I do hope that a good solution is found for our AoE healing, making it effective when needed, but not used all the time in detriment of other spells.

 

Isin

I really never understood the point of these EJ arguments about what spells "should" be. While I am aware that blizzard developers do read the EJ forums, I still think that suggestions to fix existing spells or talents are out of place here, maybe that's just my opinion. I would personally be all for reverting CoH to it's pre-3.0 version, and I think you'd find most holy priests would be fine with that, but I don't see what the point of a show of hands poll is. Blizzard obviously changed it for balance reasons, not because it was unpopular in it's old form.

And you don't have to assume anything. It's very simple: as long as there are effects that affect specific parties, raids will be set up to accommodate them.

 

Sebalot

I think the big problem is a feeling of impotence. We don't want to be pushed into a situation where we simply have to throw our hands in the air and say "I can't deal with this". Previously, we have been proud to being able to decently handle whatever they threw at us. Not perfectly. But good enough. That's what made priest healing fun for me.

With a cd on our only targetted aoe heal, I would feel like I don't have an answer to any signifcant aoe damage and that would make me back off healing and go back to playing my lock full time.

But would raids be set up around forming parties around PoH or just adding more shamans whenever there is significant aoe damage?

 

Isin

OK, we are getting railroaded into trying to generalize what I said about two very specific fights (Naj'entus and Illidan Phase 2) into a broad speculation about raid encounters in WOTLK.

I agree with the general thread that with a CD on CoH, priests cannot fill a generic raid healing role like resto shaman; no one is arguing that they can. I was JUST responding to your post here:

Just pointing out that ignoring PoH for Naj'entus and Illidan Phase 2 was not looking at the bigger picture.

 

Plea

One thing I don't understand is, if there's any raid damage, people bring shamans to heal that. If a priest was merely spamming coh for 70% of his healing, then people will now bring even more shamans to compensate the loss from the priest. If that priest was doing 70% of his healing by coh, then probably there was just too much raid damage spread around the raid. Priests weren't using coh at Patchwerk or Loatheb, were they? And if they did, how will a cooldown change anything, except making the class unreliable in the remaining 4.5 seconds?

Right now each tree of priest mimics a primary class of wow; but it doesn't feel that well to be the versatile class when you have a cooldown on Holy Light, Chain Heal, and Shadowbolt. I'm not asking to remove mind blast cooldown, but adding one to coh wasn't any more brilliant.

"Nerf coh so I can push other buttons."

If this rationale brought the cooldown, then let's hope they're working on renew in order to push that button too.

 

Lambi

I'll give you a little different approach. I play this game because it's fun, what makes this game fun is because I play a challenging class, what makes my class challenging is because I have a tool for every situation which might not be the best tool, but it's still usable and I feel comfortable using it.

What makes this game less fun is:

1. Dumbing my class down.

2. Removing my options and tools.

3. Making my class too good.

4. Imbalancing stuff.

5. Making me feel as though my holy priest is impotent for 4.5 seconds.

6. Telling me how to play my class.

 

Sebalot

I think the problem is an instant heal hitting 5-6 people and being smart targeted equates to an insane amount of effective healing no matter who gets hurt. Spam it on tanks and it will do a good chunk of tank healing too while topping up melee group also.

So now CoH is a superb soak heal for any situation and Blizzard are worried by the development. And I don't think priests are happy with just spamming CoH and the game rewarding us for it. I don't think Blizzard is considering the cd because we suddenly were too good in aoe situations, but because CoH were insanely good in all situations.