EDIT: I concede to Isin and the other priest logic shown to me. There really is no justification for my earlier comments and for that, I apologize again. I appreciate the effort and patience you've shown in helping knock some of the silly out of me.
This quote seriously boggles my mind. It's clearly anti-CoH-nerf, which is contradictory to your last two sentiments, but more importantly... impotent? Is that really the word you want to use? Does training CoH cause you to unlearn renew, prayer of mending, or power word: shield?
OK... there is so much wrong with your post, but I'll let the admins get to the major forum violations.
You would know if you read the thread or played a priest what's wrong with Renew at 80. Mending is on a longer CD than CoH. Holy priests throwing PW:S should be smacked, as they are directly hurting any disc priests in the raid by applying their weakened soul to these targets.
I know it's not your class, but you are just making yourself look like an ass by posting crap like this here. I'm by no means a "sky is falling" priest, but I just don't think this thread is improved by people from other classes posting their uninformed opinions.
As a quick note on the CoH cooldown: This is very similar to the categorization of Elixirs into Battle and Guardian. Blizzard was having to tune instances to the assumption that everyone had full Elixir buffs all the time, which necessitated having full elixir buffs all the time.
A self-fulfilling prophecy if you will.
If they have to tune instances around CoH in it's current form, raid's may be unable to even zone in without a CoH priest. That has the nasty side-effect of making CoH the only raid viable Priest spec. At least that is what Blizzard has stated (paraphrased) that they are trying to AVOID.
I personally hope to never see: 2: Trade LF1M Nax.10!!! Need COH Priest!
Last post before I hop out, because my girlfriend's the priest and I just hop on her to heal the occasional Hyjal pug nowadays. More than likely if I keep on I'll end up saying something really retarded about priests that reveals how ignorant I am, and I'd rather save you guys the frustration and me the embarrassment. But this post confuses me.
There are many, many priests that feel like that is all that CoH did.
Again, Blizzard's logic is that by encouraging you to CoH spam, they ARE removing the many healing options and tools you have at your disposal. But I assume here you mean you're against the nerf in this sense, as it removed the spamming option (in so much as any rotation involving spamming anything can be called an "option").
...Like they did with CoH?
...Like they did with CoH?
This quote seriously boggles my mind. It's clearly anti-CoH-nerf, which is contradictory to your last two sentiments, but more importantly... impotent? Is that really the word you want to use? Does training CoH cause you to unlearn renew, prayer of mending, or power word: shield?
Blizzard has always, and will continue to always, do this. In fact, the whole reason these forums exist is to discover the "right way" that Blizzard is telling us to play our classes. Sometimes it's awesome. Sometimes it sucks. Hunters have been told they can't melee. Paladins have been told they can't AoE heal. Priests have been told they can't spam CoH.
Again, I have to stress the fact that I am not happy with this nerf. I am not coveting all the priest's healing tools and wishing I had them, because I don't. I chose a paladin because I love the way ret, prot, and holy play. But I'm trying to say in a friendly way, if adding a six second cooldown to one ability on the class with the most heals in the game has ruined the class...then something else has gone horribly awry long before this. It may be time to look for buffs to other abilities rather than asking for an unnerf.
Furthermore, I do not condone, nor do I even accept, that "the only way to get Blizzard to fix something" is to throw a tantrum and roll around on the floor wailing until they change it. And that is from the perspective of a full-BC paladin.
If you've read what I've been saying for 2-3 pages now is that they made CoH too good with the smart target. Please oh please revert it back. Giving me cooldowns on spells I've been succesfully using and having fun with for over a year after they made it too good for 1 patch is mind boggling. Why not revert it back to the balanced version?
I've raided as discipline and every time I see aoe damage I feel as my spells aren't doing what they should be, I'm feeling as I'm playing something else than my priest. Discipline however DOES have fun tools to use that aren't overpowered, so not being able to group heal while specializing at single target healing is a tradeoff that's fine to me.
My dream is to be holy and whilst not being able to perform as well as the specialists in all areas, I can atleast be in those areas. If you put a cooldown on something you need to introduce a weaker or different alternative. When penance is on cooldown I can use flash heal or greater heal, when mind blast is on cooldown I'll use another damage spell. When shield slam is on cooldown my warrior uses one of her other threat improving abilities.
When CoH is on cooldown I'm forced to use... single target heals. You need to be consequent in applying ideas (trying to leave party healing and still leaving party heals in the box?).
I'm not the best HoTer - still I can do it as much as I want to.
I'm not the best single target healer - still I can do it as much as I want to.
I used to be a decent group healer, but not the best - and I could do it as much as I wanted to.
Now I'm the best group healer - every 6 seconds, and I don't want to.
As a quick note on the CoH cooldown: This is very similar to the categorization of Elixirs into Battle and Guardian. Blizzard was having to tune instances to the assumption that everyone had full Elixir buffs all the time, which necessitated having full elixir buffs all the time.
A self-fulfilling prophecy if you will.
If they have to tune instances around CoH in it's current form, raid's may be unable to even zone in without a CoH priest. That has the nasty side-effect of making CoH the only raid viable Priest spec. At least that is what Blizzard has stated (paraphrased) that they are trying to AVOID.
I personally hope to never see: 2: Trade LF1M Nax.10!!! Need COH Priest!
You're not reading what we're saying? Not a single priest on these boards (hopefully) want to keep a smart target CoH that blows everyone else out of the water, we want:
1. The old CoH back which rewarded fast reflexes, smart thinking and following group geography.
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.
Thank you Lambi, once again you have written how I feel about the priest class.
1.Dumbing my class down. - Most priests didn't like the smart heal they added to it.
As a quick note on the CoH cooldown: This is very similar to the categorization of Elixirs into Battle and Guardian. Blizzard was having to tune instances to the assumption that everyone had full Elixir buffs all the time, which necessitated having full elixir buffs all the time.
A self-fulfilling prophecy if you will.
If they have to tune instances around CoH in it's current form, raid's may be unable to even zone in without a CoH priest. That has the nasty side-effect of making CoH the only raid viable Priest spec. At least that is what Blizzard has stated (paraphrased) that they are trying to AVOID.
I personally hope to never see: 2: Trade LF1M Nax.10!!! Need COH Priest!
I do not think that anyone in this thread believes that the current "bind all keys to CoH, roll face on keyboard, collect purples" paradigm is balanced. I believe that much of it is encounter design (people are currently seeing this in BT and Sunwell which feature hilarious amounts of raid damage spam in nearly every encounter). There's a lot of whining going on in the last few pages, but it's not whining about how now we're not going to destroy healing meters by spamming CoH and we "deserve" to.
So the idea is to talk about how we can remedy this problem of not using our other spells without just throwing nerfs randomly at the wall and seeing what sticks. A 6 second cooldown has some inherent issues: it limits flexibility (when you want to cast one CoH you generally want to cast several in a row and then stop until the next raid damage blast), it interacts badly with haste (which was otherwise a fairly good stat for holy priests; less so for discipline priests because two of their main spells are on short cooldowns just like the CoH proposal), and if the same nerf is applied to Wild Growth and CoH, a cooldown affects CoH quite a bit more.
The idea is that if you want resto shamans to be straight-up best at raid healing, they should be 10% better than other options, not 40% better, because otherwise you're just back to square one and "LF1M [instance] resto shaman".
You're not reading what we're saying? Not a single priest on these boards (hopefully) want to keep a smart target CoH that blows everyone else out of the water, we want:
1. The old CoH back which rewarded fast reflexes, smart thinking and following group geography.
OR
2. An alternative.
I have read what was said. But I don't really think that re-coding a spell to work a different way is a realistic expectation with just 3 days to go. It might be doable in 3.1. Until then Blizzard has to do something to stem the tide of CoH spam or else 10-mans can be trivialised wih CoH spam. (perhaps an overdramatization)
Ghostcrawler posted that he was very displeased with the percentage of priest healing that Circle of Healing accounted for in their end game parses. What was it? Like 75%? Either they forcefully reduce the CoH spam via cooldown or they have to dial up the raid pain. Changing the mechanics of Circle of Healing wasn't on the list of options.
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?
Have you lost your perspective? 12,000 heal, instant cast, spread out across 6 raid members is the highest output (*) spell in the game. These are level 80 numbers from Naxx. How can anyone take your seriously when you describe 12,000 as a mild tickle?
(*) Prayer of Healing can actually do better under perfect conditions.
I have read what was said. But I don't really think that re-coding a spell to work a different way is a realistic expectation with just 3 days to go. It might be doable in 3.1. Until then Blizzard has to do something to stem the tide of CoH spam or else 10-mans can be trivialised wih CoH spam. (perhaps an overdramatization)
Yes, this is an overdramatization. You don't really have the mana for CoH spam in Naxxramas, and even if you did you could get around this with raid design (more tank/offtank damage, less raid damage).
Ghostcrawler posted that he was very displeased with the percentage of priest healing that Circle of Healing accounted for in their end game parses. What was it? Like 75%? Either they forcefully reduce the CoH spam via cooldown or they have to dial up the raid pain. Changing the mechanics of Circle of Healing wasn't on the list of options.
Actually, dialing DOWN raid damage is one way of making CoH more marginal. Remember T4/T5, when paladins were #1 on the meters because you could solve 90% of encounters with just single-target healing?
If this whole discussion is about CoH vs CH it's actually quite easy imo:
CoH has similar Health/Mana but blows CH out of the water when it comes to Health/Second (i don't have the exact numbers here, but i think it's a little less than twice as much).
To stop this Blizzard would have to decrease healing done by X% and at the same time the mana cost of the spell by X%,
with X being a balanced amount.
This would result in similar H/M ratio and a balanced H/sec ratio, which is the imbalanced part right now.
The problem is: priests would still push the CoH button all the time.
I don't want to be turned into a one button class.
Blizzard would have to rework all our potential raid healing tools (Holy Nova, CoH, PoH) to prevent this, because right now CoH is the only real raid healing tool we have. PoH is limited to our group and Holy Nova is even more restricted.
The best solution would be to decrease CoH's Health/Second without decreasing its H/M until a real solution to the CoH problem can be implemented.
GC talked about a big healer overhaul. I think this problematic can be solved when they get to this and meanwhile they should band aid the whole problem with a H/S nerf.
Have you lost your perspective? 12,000 heal, instant cast, spread out across 6 raid members is the highest output (*) spell in the game. These are level 80 numbers from Naxx. How can anyone take your seriously when you describe 12,000 as a mild tickle?
(*) Prayer of Healing can actually do better under perfect conditions.
I'll give you a new overly dramatized perspective. Say if priests got a 500hp heal that could hit 40 people, unlimited range. Priests would be the kings of Alterac Valley right? I mean we're healing for 20,000hp? Wrong! Healing isn't 100% about numbers and while we ALL do agree 12,000 heal, instant cast, spread out across 6 raid members (glyphed) is an amazing number, it isn't that good at saving lives unless spammed. And ladies and gentlemen, healing is ALL about saving lives.
As you've concluded yourself under perfect conditions PoH is actually better than CoH, smart targetting makes CoH always fall under the category perfect condition. Remove perfect condition, restore the coding to the 2.4 targetting and CoH is hitting 3-6 targets (glyphed). Make CHs first heal actually do less healing, buff the jumps alot and make the total healing a little higher and CH is a better spell.
Wild Growth should also be party targettable for obvious reasons (can be used as a preHOT). But this might be the wrong thread for that discussion.
I think a pretty big part (though not the only part) of the problem is the CoH glyph - it adds 20% extra healing to those situations were CoH is already very strong (5+ targets) while not doing much at all for those situations where CoH isn't really overpowered. Changing the glyph should be the first step in reigning in CoH instead of tinkering with cooldown.
A 6-second cooldown is something which I think would very much destroy the feel of CoH (and Wild Growth) even if that still leaves both of them quite decent heals. A "missed" AoE heal can be quite devastating if you can't immediately patch it up by doing another one correctly targeted and timed. A significant part of priest and druid healing style is also the ability to push out lots of mana really fast while occasionally taking breaks to regenerate via spirit.
That said I think the design on WG is better than on CoH presently even if that too has issues with excessive mana efficiency. The fact that it's a hot means it's not spammable on same target. That it targets "smartly" means that it's not easy to prevent it from hitting same people again unless raid is properly spread out. Even that is still problematic when on certain encounters all these problems can be easily overcome and the spell just becomes too good (Felmyst).
Within the boundaries of existing game mechanics I think the 6-second cooldown might be a reasonably clean solution. One can only hope Blizzard comes up with a solution that leaves a bit more of the feel to the spells, though.
Within the boundaries of existing game mechanics I think the 6-second cooldown might be a reasonably clean solution. One can only hope Blizzard comes up with a solution that leaves a bit more of the feel to the spells, though.
It cannot be as simple as slapping a 6 second CD on CoH. That would directly nerf other talents, such as making our only 10th tier talent (Divine Providence) completely unattractive, and indirectly making Guardian Spirit builds much less attractive. CoH spam is also the main rationale for speccing for Mental Agility and Surge of Light.
Until Blizzard tells us what the full changes will be in a complete patch note, we are just speculating what this nerf is going to look like.
Vampiric Embrace is quite significant at 80, and is a major consideration for party composition.
Nit: This is no longer true. VE is only 5% healing (talented) to the party now. (opposed to the old 25% if talented) There will be no more spriests outhealing dedicated healers on fights.
To everyone else: Step back and take a deep breath. They're still working on healing. I think most of us can agree that COH in the TBC incarnation was too strong. I think they're unsure where they want to take priests, but they definitely don't want them jamming the COH button 80% of the time. Adding a CD is undoubtably a crude way of solving this problem, but I hardly think it's the death knell for priests getting into raids. Lets stay away from that kind of discussion, because it's not productive.
It cannot be as simple as slapping a 6 second CD on CoH. That would directly nerf other talents, such as making our only 10th tier talent (Divine Providence) completely unattractive, and indirectly making Guardian Spirit builds much less attractive. CoH spam is also the main rationale for speccing for Mental Agility and Surge of Light.
Until Blizzard tells us what the full changes will be in a complete patch note, we are just speculating what this nerf is going to look like.
I think you just hit the nail on the head there Isin -- generally if you were speccing strangely for a certain rotation (CoH being the only reason of putting talents in certain spots), Blizzard doesn't feel that is right -- look at what they did to mage arcane blast spam
You're 10th tier talent also looks ripe for re-doing
I guess we all have to wait for the "healing changes"
I'll give you a new overly dramatized perspective. Say if priests got a 500hp heal that could hit 40 people, unlimited range. Priests would be the kings of Alterac Valley right?
Yes, this would make Priests the king of AV. Bring 6-8 priests for all the healing, and you'd be virtually unstoppable. 4000hp heals per player every 1.5 seconds. Plus a few priests could switch to single target spells to handle burst damage when needed.
I think you just hit the nail on the head there Isin -- generally if you were speccing strangely for a certain rotation (CoH being the only reason of putting talents in certain spots), Blizzard doesn't feel that is right -- look at what they did to mage arcane blast spam
You're 10th tier talent also looks ripe for re-doing
I guess we all have to wait for the "healing changes"
Nothing makes me more pissed than people putting words in my mouth- I didn't say CoH was the "only" reason to get talents like Mental Agility, I said it's the "main rationale". If you can't take the time to read my posts, please don't waste ours by responding to them.
Have you lost your perspective? 12,000 heal, instant cast, spread out across 6 raid members is the highest output (*) spell in the game. These are level 80 numbers from Naxx. How can anyone take your seriously when you describe 12,000 as a mild tickle?
(*) Prayer of Healing can actually do better under perfect conditions.
There is no doubt it is a potent heal. It would be a potent heal with 3 minute cooldown. But priests would be poor aoe healers. So the question is if it is a good enough aoe heal with a 6 second cooldown. If one shaman can heal all the incoming aoe damage by spamming CH while a priest can't with CoH+filler spells, there is no reason to bring a priest for the aoe healing, no matter how much you try to convince the raid leader that CoH indeed is "the highest output spell in the game". You simply can't ignore the cooldown when evaluating the potency of an ability.
Since we don't really know what the later raids are going too look like or even the changes to healing classes are going to look like, it is all idle speculation at this stage. I do feel it is unfortunate that Blizzard has bunched priests and druids together in this since CoH and WG are different problems.
Nit: This is no longer true. VE is only 5% healing (talented) to the party now. (opposed to the old 25% if talented) There will be no more spriests outhealing dedicated healers on fights.
To everyone else: Step back and take a deep breath. They're still working on healing. I think most of us can agree that COH in the TBC incarnation was too strong. I think they're unsure where they want to take priests, but they definitely don't want them jamming the COH button 80% of the time. Adding a CD is undoubtably a crude way of solving this problem, but I hardly think it's the death knell for priests getting into raids. Lets stay away from that kind of discussion, because it's not productive.
It's not about me not getting in to a raid, if you're skilled enough as a healer you can always take a spot in the raid no matter what class you play. It's about taking the fun out of the game in a very unimaginative manner. In the end this game is about having fun, and that's why we're all paying every month am I right?
Sorry if I´m the only one to have the feeling, but the discussion that´s been going on for the last few pages tends to get futile. Seriously, we´re not far away from official forum niveau right here. I see lots of whining, lots of argumentation without any proof, lots of other classes poking in here without ever reading the whole thread or anything about priests in general (no offense to those who are serious and know what they´re talking about - no matter which class they come from).
Everything that seriously adds to especially the CoH issue has been said 2 or 3 pages ago, all that´s going on right now concerning CoH is mostly dumb generalizing for and against without any evidence (since there is simply no evidence available, some things come down to personal taste and such). While such discussion is interesting and fertile as long as new arguments are brought to the table it´s pointless and stupid if the same arguments are varied a bit and juggled around just to be brought up again 2 posts later. Everything interesting has been said, numbers have been crunched (if not very carefully), but we won´t solve the CoH issue right here with further derivatives of old arguments, at least, that´s my opinion.
I've always hated the artificial restriction of "party" within a raid, as if regardless of who's around, you're only willing to help yourself and your four best friends, or in the case of CoH, some random person and HIS four best friends. To me, the obvious thing to do would be to have CoH (and Holy Nova) function like damage AoEs do - hit everybody in range, with some cap (i.e. 5 players' worth of healing), but spread amongst all the players. This prevents it from being ultra-efficient to spam when the raid is clumped up (unless the whole raid is taking a constant, very low level of damage), but avoids the ugly, artificial restriction of "party", and optimizes it for the situation for which it was intended -- when, you know, a bunch of people within a circle around somebody need healing.
It looks to me like some people missed this or thought that Observer was proposing that COH hit the targeted person and the four closest people. The way I read this is that it would do some amount of healing up to a cap, then reduce the healage if more people would be affected - in the same way that if you were to AOE more than 10 monsters (pre-3.0) then your damage on each individual monster would be reduced.
In other words:
1-5 players within COH's radius: 100% of the COH heal amount
6 players: 83% healed per player
7 players: 71% healed per player
8 players: 62% healed per player
9 players: 55% healed per player
10 players: 50% healed per player
25 players: 20% healed per player
You could make Prayer of Healing do the same thing, but centered on the priest at all times, so rather than healing their 'parties', priests would naturally heal those closest to themselves with PoH.
CoH currently is too good because it has just about everything you'd want in a heal. It is instant cast, extremely high HPS and HPM, and it is a smart heal. One or more of those advantages need to be addressed somehow. Adding a CD is not the way to fix CoH.
One possible fix would be to reduce the four splash heals to 25% (or some balanced number) and then double (or some balanced number) the main target heal. That would reduce the HPS and HPM by 3/5ths and really take away the brainless aspect of the spell. Picking the right target suddenly becomes very important. Using SoL effectively might also become very important to stretching your mana bar through the entire fight.
CoH currently is too good because it has just about everything you'd want in a heal. It is instant cast, extremely high HPS and HPM, and it is a smart heal. One or more of those advantages need to be addressed somehow. Adding a CD is not the way to fix CoH.
One possible fix would be to reduce the four splash heals to 25% (or some balanced number) and then double (or some balanced number) the main target heal. That would reduce the HPS and HPM by 3/5ths and really take away the brainless aspect of the spell. Picking the right target suddenly becomes very important. Using SoL effectively might also become very important to stretching your mana bar through the entire fight.
I'm not a huge fan of this idea for a couple of reasons: in particular, it makes it very similar to a glyphed Holy Light, except that the spell it's attached to is a slightly less efficient (but instant) Flash Heal. Glyphed Holy Light is an interesting tool, but it's not really a main raid healing spell (ask paladins about their raid healing capabilities), and a main raid healing spell is one of the few spells that priests CAN use from talents, particularly if you're trying to make Holy vs. Discipline into a raid healing/single-target healing tradeoff.
Really, the idea is not to neuter CoH so that no one will ever use it, but that's the idea some people who've popped into this thread seem to have.
But I'm starting to wonder why Blizzard didn't guarantee that CoH hit its target; that'd be a start, at least, as that's 20% (unglyphed) off the spell's efficiency if you're just mindlessly spamming it without regard to target. (Couple this with a target reduction to 3-4 unglyphed, and we might be in business without any significant mechanic changes.) This, of course, implies that Blizzard wants to add more skill-based elements to healing, something I'm not entirely sure of (see: downranking).
Having CoH guarantee a hit on it's primary target might allow for rather easy maintenance of inspiration and could be used to guarantee a "steady healing stream" on the main tank (insofar as mana permits, of course).
11/10/08, 2:34 PM
