Zorath

I totally agree, this is the problem

Fighting trash: (and yes GC has stated that fighting trash does matter, otherwise he would just portal us to the boss)
Currently in a 25 man raid, killing trash there is almost always 3+ people with 1000-1500 health gone. CoH will heal them up instantly before any other healer can react. If im a very active Holy Priests, whacking moles, why would i use another spell then CoH. Ofc ill bounce PoM of the tank on cooldown, and ill try to use my SoL procs if there is someone to single target heal. But most of the time CoH is the way to go, it just fits to perfect with incoming damage when fighting trash.

For me to not pick CoH almost all the time it needs to fit less perfect with raiddamage during trash. Only way i see that happen is that it needs to hit for more (ie i need to worry about overhealing) and ofc then it needs to cost more. But we cant have a CoH that does 2500 healing for 1100 mana (level 70) without having some form of cooldown on it. thats just to much HpS otherwise and currently its already to fast. our friends the resto shammie wants to be able to use their 2.5sec casts also.

I dont want CoH to be my goto spell for all situations. But i still want to be able to push out some aoe healing when the **** hits the fan.

 

Thorongil

I don´t want to start picking certain pieces apart but downranking wasn´t exactly what I would call skill-based. Coming up with the concept of downranking certainly was a 'skill'-thing but downranking itself made healing easier and you needed less skill, since you simply had to figure which spell you could spam until eternity with your current gear and then mash that button without thinking about mana. That had got nothing to do with skill.

The term 'skill' is very difficult to weigh. What people generally refer to as skill can either be a quick reaction time, luck, even good gear or the intellectual capability to read lots of theorycraft and adapt your playstyle accordingly. As it has often been brought up lately, unless a concept like 'people saved per raid' comes up we will still lack good measurements to really compare (even with such a concept it would probably be impossible).

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

 

gia

Skill in healing from my point of view is a combination of triage, awareness, being able to always pick the right heal for the right situation, mana management, timing and speed.

Down ranking added more healing choices so the "picking the right tool" part was slightly more complex but it often trivialized the "mana management" part. It's really subjective but I'm of the opinion that with no down ranking there is actually more emphasis on making the right decisions when choosing what to cast because each heal is a bigger % of mana.

I won't enter the CoH the debate but I think the real issue currently is the smart targeting. AoE spells are balanced to be situationally useful and inefficient otherwise. The problem with CoH is that having 4-5 wounded players in a whole raid is generally not the exception so the applications for it are far too common, and even if it doesn't hit all of its targets it is still quite efficient. Also, being efficient is of no concern because of how easy everything is.

I won't propose any solutions but I think that is the heart of the problem. (Or at least the perceived problem, as it still has to be shown how good it will be on content that is not trivial.)

 

Lambi

I think the real solution would have been to have an added spell besides CoH that had smart targetting and was on a cooldown, perhaps even longer than 6 seconds. If the raiding world agrees CoH without smart targetting was fine and Blizzard desperately want us to have a smart heal, why not just add one instead of changing an already fine spell? Don't fix what isn't broken.

Edit: I've read all the stickies around, what are the rules and regulations of discussing Naxx fights at the moment? I'd like to have a discussion and brainstorming of how we priests want to heal Sapphiron, in particular how to heal Sapphiron with less than 100 frost resistance.

 

gia

Returning CoH to it's old version clashes with their current design direction of taking out the concept of "party only" spells from raiding. Very few spells remain that way and I think they will be changed over time (Holy nova, PoH, mana tide, VE). The difficulty in balancing them though is not the fact that they have to be balanced for 25 potential targets, but that they have to remain useful in 5 and 10 man situations as well.

Divine Hymn is a good candidate for that as I really hate it's current implementation. Just looking at how long the tooltip is should be a big hint, it really tries to do too much and has far too many drawbacks.

 

Lambi

Yes speaking of this, - in 5 man and 10 man PoH is extremely powerful in the hands of a disc priest. With the 5% added haste from talents and the 25% haste from borrowed time, you put a massive shield on the tank and get a very fast, big group heal on your hands. I'd like to have Malygos as example but I'm not 100% clear on what is allowed to be discussed from beta when live is so very close around the corner.

 

mek

I don't think you have to worry about discussing the beta incarnations of raid bosses, as they are all very well known to most guilds at this point in time. Referring to your original point, I agree that PoH is very powerful for disc, and a "non-party" PoH worries me balance-wise, CoH aside. I think a real "fix" for aoe heals will address all aoe spells for all classes Blizzard is worried about - minor changes to a single spell will not fix the underlying problems. To fix priest AOE healing, Holy Nova, PoH, and CoH all need to be reviewed; and similarly with druids, Tranquility and Wild Growth should be assessed together. And most importantly, if druids and priests are going to be brought in line with shaman, then paladins need a new tool in their arsenal.

 

Incoherence

Not any more than Flash Heal does already. If there's no melee splash, then using CoH instead of Flash Heal is trading (a lot of) HPS and HPM for mobility; if anything Flash Heal has better Inspiration uptime because of the haste from IHC (granted, you get that AFTER a crit, but you can hold the haste buff a couple of seconds and save mana while maintaining the same uptime, or burn it immediately in the hope that you refresh Inspiration). If there IS melee splash, then even a non-smart CoH would be the right tool for the situation (and often was).

Besides, if we're going to be running 25% crit rates by the end of Naxxramas, Inspiration uptime on main tanks is not going to be a huge issue.

 

Tainter

I really don't like the way many people here propose to change CoH. I'm praying that CoH will NOT be back to group targetting and I also hope that further Priest spells like Nova and PoH will be made raid wide. Group stacking is a very tedious artificial restriction. Sadly it went on for a long time and will therefore take time to fix. I'm prepared to be patient at the cost of short-term balancing.

Of course we all know that a raid wide smart targetting PoH would be far too powerful unless the numbers changed dramatically. I neither want the numbers to change, weakening the spell, nor do I want to be so good at raid healing as to be unbalanced. The biggest problem is perhaps the smart targetting. If CoH just healed the 4 people closest to the target then it would be less powerful and require more thinking and attention. Or perhaps even randomly, like Mass Dispel.

If you can't join them?
Beat them.

 

Vuldunobetra

The 6-sec cooldown is just a quick fix that would cause the least amount of issues. If we all put our brains together, maybe we can come up with a better change. Something priests will be more happy with, yet still balanced.

These are numbers from Naxx @ 80
CH: 2.5 seconds, 9300hp heals (4 targets with glyph)
CoH: 1.5 seconds, 12,000hp heals (6 targets with glyph)
FH: 1.5 seconds, 4,000hp heal

Take an arbitrary time frame, say 12 seconds. How much can each class heal when the raid has AoE damage?
Shaman: 44,640
Priest: 96,000
Imbalanced

With a 6-second CoH cooldown, in 12 seconds
Shaman: 44,640
Priest: 48,000 (CoH x2 and FH x6)
Balanced

Come up with a different 'nerf' to CoH that puts priests in the same range as CH spam. GC's rules are:
1. Mana cannot be a limiting factor
2. Reverting to Party only is a last resort
3. Don't complain about CH spam, thats what shaman are designed to do
4. We can't buff CH

Some other suggestions:
A. If CoH is on a cooldown, Priests will cast FH or equiv.
B. Don't complain that priests need to heal more than CH over the same time frame
C. Expect mana costs to be tweaked to allow the new design (CoH/FH rotations for example)


Just some quick examples:
Give CoH a 3 second cast time = 48,000
Give CoH a 2.5 second cast time and remove glyph = 48,000
Reduce CoH to 3 targets, remove glyph = 48,000 (triangle of healing??)
Reduce CoH to 900 per target = 43,200 (with mana cost reduction)
Reduce CoH to 1000 per target remove glyph = 40,000 (with mana cost reduction)
Give CoH a 3 second CD, reduce CoH to 1200 per target = 44.800

 

Lambi

Please Mr. Mage you can't theorycraft healing purely by numbers. What if we "buffed" CH to 25 second cast, 1 million healing on one target? I mean wouldn't that be OP? My Gheal can be cast 10 times during 25 seconds and only heal for a fraction of that, surely Gheal is worse then? The answer is no.

If you need to keep the smart targetting on CoH, and don't want to mix with the mana cost there are only 2 solutions for CoH itself:

1. Cooldown, debatable how long.

2. For every CoH you cast it stacks a short lasting debuff making it heal for less every time you use it.

If we really want CoH smart target and on a cooldown I think we need to introduce some necessary fixes for PoH and/or Holy nova. Holy nova is the perfect candidate for a smart heal, since you actually have to be in the dangerzone where people got damaged to heal them, it's not very easy to get there and this will really force you to be aware of the encounter.

As for Chain Heal I find the heal fundementally flawed from a "fun" POV. The first and primary heal is so big it can be used for MT / OT healing and the following jumps are pretty small. I think a "nerf" to the primary heal and a buff to the following jumps would fix CH as it should be, - a raid healing spell. This would at the same time make shamans use other heals when they need bigger healing.

 

Carneus

Agreed

 

• constantius

I've done this 5x; 3 in 10-man, 2 in 25. It's really a matter of breaking down the responsibilities, and STICKING TO THEM. We ran 6 healers for the 25-man version, and the breakdown was:

- holy paladin healing the MT (and himself with Bacon!)
- 2x resto druid healing a ranged group each
- 2x resto shaman cleansing, and healing a ranged group each (overlap with druids)
- 1x holy priest healing the melee (me)

It takes a lot of mana to heal this fight. It's intensive, and you have to be casting almost always to keep up. The key is to realize that people have a LOT of HP in Naxx.25. It's ok if they're down 8k -- they have 22+! So take your time, be efficient, etc, etc.. If 6 people are down HP, CoH is great. I ended up using it almost exclusively, actually. Our druids used Wild Growth almost exclusively as well.

First time I did Naxx.10, I did the same method: divide the raid into 3 parts: tank, melee, ranged. I healed the melee + the druid, the druid healed the ranged, and the paladin covered the tank + himself. It worked really well when I knew I was only responsible for 5 people. I just didn't have enough mana to be dropping random heals overtop of HoTs.

Essentially, Sapp is a fight to train your healers in discrete responsibility and assignments. It's a good one, at that.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house. - R.A. Heinlein

 

gia

It's been a long time since I've done him and the fight was still getting tuned at the time so I don't know how relevant this is. But the 5 times or so I've killed Sapph/10 was with 2 healers. My strategy (disc spec) was to keep myself and the tank up with shields/penance and binding heal while tossing a prayer of mending on the raid every cooldown and the occasional spot heal or a PoH while colllapsing on ice blocks, the other healer (usually a resto shaman, but I've done it with a druid and paladin as well) focused on raid healing.

 

Sebalot

The problem with calculations like that is that all of the shamans healing would be smart targetted while a lot of the flash heals would not. In fact the targets of a flash heal is likely to be healed by a bouncing chain heal while the priest is casting it. It is the reverse of what we currently see with CoH hitting people while you guys are throwing a CH.

The thing with the old CoH (non smart targeted group heal) was that it has a very high potential HPS but we also had a lot of healing landing on people not needing it. So while potential HPS may land in your 96k vs 44k situation, in reality the difference in effective healing was much much smaller.

What needs to be done with CoH is first to remove the glyph. Adding a 6th target is too good and we are being punished for it. Secondly if they revert it back to a group heal we are back to it overhealing a lot if used like people use the spell today (a catch all spam heal) making it very close to CH in effective healing. Then you can just balance the numbers when needed to make it fit Naxx 80. I bet there won't be any need for a big nerf/boost to get numbers everyone can live with.

I don't really see why "Reverting to Party only is a last resort". It is the obvious solution. It is the solution preferred by priests. We never asked for a smart heal. We never needed it to be a smart heal. It was pushed upon us only to be used to punish us later. It is completely illogical to argue that the smart targeting component is essential or needed.

Wild Growth on the other hand is a completely different issue. I can't help but feel it has to be slightly front loaded to ever being competitive with CoH/CH or alternatively have an insane HPS. But it if has an insane HPS it might make the other aoe heals redundant.

 

dukes

You have to target the initial heal, it doesn't target itself. This seems to be a common assumption in this thread - Chain Heal is only very effective if the initial heal is effective. If the initial heal is effective, then yes it's good, but with a 2.5 second (base) cast time, the initial heal has a good chance of overhealing. CoH has the advantage in that it's instant (which also means you can use it while moving, a big detriment to CH for some fights).

 

Vuldunobetra

It is the last resort because Ghostcrawler said so. Blizz is trying to move away from party-only spells. If you want a change from a 6-sec cooldown, then suggest ideas that GC is likely to consider.

 

Isin

You forgot:
Holy Paladin spamming Holy Light with the Glyph of Holy Light: 2 seconds (with 3/3 in Light's Grace)- 9000 + 4500 = 13500 (this is assuming a very low crit rate).
Over 12 seconds: 81000

This exercise you have set up here is stupid and narrow, because no one can sustain any of these spam cycles you're talking about for any extended amount of time except a resto shammy.

Finally, holy priests have high healing throughput because that's ALL we bring to the table. If you look at mmo-champion's raidcomp tool, you'll see that there is no raid buff that holy priests provide that is not provided by a disc priest, who can provide other buffs as well. Meanwhile the shammy is bringing totems and bloodlust, a pally is bringing a judgement and blessings. Any raid leader who is only looking at healing meters is not looking at the whole picture. If holy priests are specifically brought down so that their healing output is the same as resto shaman and holy paladins, why would you bring them at all?

Finally, like I've said many times- let's wait and see what they're going to do. There is no way it's just going to be as simple as slapping a CD on CoH without some major mechanic changes for priests and other healing classes.

 

Plitschplatsch

Maybe we should make an extra thread for this CH /COH discussion.
This whole thing is starting to pollute this thread.

 

Sebalot

Actually he said "We’re not crazy about reverting the smart heal aspect, though that is still on the table". And seeing as it seems to be the by far most preferred solution by priests and it would effectively solve a lot of the problems with the current CoH, it would be silly to require us not to suggest it.

As for getting away from the party thing: if anything putting a cd on CoH will increase the need to form parties around the priest to handle all aoe with Prayer of Healing making raid setup more rigid than it ever was pre 3.0.

 

Volbak

I don't know if this already suggested somewhere, and if it was, my apologies, but what about instead of CoH, we have a talent there that makes PoH be raid wide?

Could it possibly solve the problem of it being spamable, and yet define Holy as the raid healing tree?

 

Anaram

With all the raid buff changes going on I don't think this particular argument has much wing and could really just as well be turned around. If a holy priests can surpass resto shamans healing then why should you bring a resto shaman when enhancement/elemental can just as well provide the buffs and holy priests are better in the healing department?

Raid utility is not a significant factor for DPS classes or tanks and I don't think it should be for healers either.

 

bbartlog

Making PoH raid-wide feels strange to me though. One of several things would apply:

- it also gets turned into a smart heal. This would make it overpowered IMO.
- it heals randomly. If you keep its current range, this makes it almost untargetable and means that it would scale very poorly with raid size (good as ever in 5-man, situationally useful in 10-man, dubious in 25-man)
- it heals near the priest, but with reduced range (to allow for meaningful targeting of some kind). This might be a net buff in some raid content, but a significant nerf in 5-man situations.

I don't really see what the best solution would be. I think there's a reason that PoH is still on the short list of spells that affect group-only - the redesign is a little tricky.

 

Majera

But the point is that there will always be shaman spots in a raid. Priests will have theirs but Holy priests have been getting a bad deal for a while now.

That being said Holy Priests still have the greatest array of tools to deal with problems. They are without a doubt the most fun to play and if played well bring massive healing. CoH as it stands now and has already been fleshed out means that all we would do is bind every key to CoH and roll our faces on the keyboard.

Personally if they just give it CD then priests make out like bandits. I don't want a cast time because I want to be able to respond and heal as soon as I see the damage. I don't want high mana cost added to it because I don't want to hesitate to use it when it is needed.

 

Lambi

Please can you read through the last 3-4 pages before posting?