My only problem with the cd on CoH is that it's against the blizzard design philosophies. They've clearly said that removing the smart targetting isn't an option since you'll then have to think about group setup, but the cd on CoH is actually enforcing a much bigger party awareness in raids than before. PoH and Holy Nova, our only real aoe spells out of CoH cooldown are party bound and requires intense raid planning for future aoe-intensive fights.

Maybe a buff to Holy Nova would be fitting? Moving it to smart target raid healing and being affected by a few more holy talents (to prevent discipline of having the same raid healing capabilities). It's still going to be a very strategic spell where you are the epicentre of the heal yourself, leading to strategic positioning and movement. A very fun and challenging idea in my opinion.

Also while we're still at it. Divine Hymn's actual heal is very very interesting, maybe put it on a 30 sec cd and make the incapacitate another spell?

I welcome the cd on CoH it's simply too good, but please add some flexibility to our other spells.

In my opinion the CD nerf is the worst way to go. It feels cheap nerf, like the -30% hp to all bosses prewotlk, except now it's the class we're talking about, not some raid content that will be useless in 1month.
I do agree that some sort of nerf is needed and truly, would be fun to see the difference in healing input between the cohspammers with max 3 spells used per fight and a good priest. However a CD is not a wise way to go. Two major things come to mind:
- CoH can't be used anymore as a raid life saver sort of thing. Bumping fast a pile of hp to raid and then going back to other spells. A system of stacking increased mana cost per cast would've supported this. You can spam coh for a moment but there's relatively high price to pay. High enough that it truly encourages people to think of their priorities before spammage
- 6sec cd on CoH really violates the 5sec rule. Before priest was able to cast couple of CoHs, regen a bit and go again. With 6sec cd you can hardly do it at all, most of the time you must be casting always in between if you want to keep raid HP nice and steady. I'm sure there's several ways to manage and snipe some oo5sr time but just the idea of blizzard slapping 6sec cd on major heal of a class that has their mana conservation based on 5sr is already silly.

In general this mentality of nerfing is just stupid. "If CoH cd makes priests unwanted and shamans stacked, we will nerf shamans" Oh come on! Also feels like they've given up proper testing+thinking, all the statements are "if this will be major nerf to priests, we'll look into it" and "if this makes encounter X too difficult, we'll consider changing the encounter." Which means these things take months and months to fix. If the CoH nerf takes priest raiding to hell, we're most likely to expect a change to it around next summer.

A totally personal opinion is that I dislike CDs while healing. Priest got couple and they're manageable and surely, CoH cd will be manageable, I can prolly handle it. But it doesn't mean it'll be fun, especially considering how it'll affect the 5sec rule.

I have a hard time swallowing this, but I will have a look. I took everything into account including 50% crit, divine illumination and using DP on cooldown in my calculations, but perhaps there is something I missed.

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Its not possible to get everyone past the 3rd tick, by effectively lowering your own HPS by putting CoH at the end for a short lived burst. You might think this is fine, but a shaman or druid can deal with this situation better. Because of tidal waves and haste totem the shaman can use a sequence, chain heal, LHWx2, chain heal, LHW, chain heal, LHW, chain heal combo, to keep the group alive through effectively 5 ticks.

I am not sure about the numbers with druids but I a quick and dirty calc says WG and lifeblooms/rejuve, swiftmend and some single targets will keep ppl up to the 5th tick.

Now do you want to add insult to injury? Even a paladin blowing a beacon on 1 target can get past the 5th tick with a HL-HL+HS-HL spam sequence if his HS crit (and with 50% crit chance there is a pretty good chance it will). Ok its far fetched, but the fact that despite your high HPS output you don't have much more power at keeping ppl taking simultanous damage alive should say somehting.

As for the rest, I don't undestand what you mean by what this change will do. It does not DO anything. It just limits our options.

Renew and PoM are not going to see any greater usage than they do now. The change means that instead of priests healing mostly with CoH, PoM and flash heal, they will heal mostly with Flash heal, PoM and CoH. It will make encounters challenging for sure, but in a frustrating not a fun way. Consider how much better would a mechanic be, where CoH triggers a stacking buff, that nerfs CoH while buffing renew and gheal. Now that would be a great balance, you would have so many more tactical choices and some real reasons to use more of your spells. All that the cooldown has done is destroy our ability to respond to aoe damage outside our group and force us to interchance flash heal for CoH. Gheal is even more out of the window now, because everytime you use it you are going to lose either casting time or CoH CD time. Its really the worst case senario for holy priests.

I do not bemoan the loss of CoH, what annoys me the most is that I am now chained to a 6sec and a 7 sec CD for my raid healing. I cannot describe how annoying and frustrating this is and how much it restricts my healing style and tactical options. I loved my priest exactly because I had so much freedom with rotations and tactics. I resent being put in a straightjacket. I would be happier if they removed CoH completely and gave us something that has a real impact on our healing power, rather than just padding for the healing meters.


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At the end of the day any real value CoH had is gone once the CD goes it. Its going to be a great tool for padding the meters, but the ability of priests to keep ppl alive through aoe damage is out the window. Even with CoH on a 6 sec CD, you can get decently high HPS, if you are really good as a priest, but your ability to heal aoe damage is without question less than druids or shamans, in the same way that paladins can outdo you when it comes to single target healing.

With Aoe damage tuned out of encounters, there is no question that priests are the healer 25man raids want the least. Priests are not going to be taken because of their healing power in 25 man raids, they will get taken because the raid does not have another healer to bring along.

We are either going to see a corresponding nerf to both paladins and shamans, or holy priests will only be able to carry the weight in 10mans.

This is the shortsighted logic that has led us to a change that has singlehandedly undone everything that holy priests priests gain since the begining of TBC. Holy Light spam has a higher throughput than chain heal, does that make paladins the best aoe healers? In fact if you stop to consider it the current CoH heals 6 targets for about 1.8k so a total of 11k damage in 1.5 seconds, while a paladin can fire a HL for 10k every 1.7 seconds just about, so a holy paladin should be about as good as a CoH priest in healing multitarget damage. On top of that SoL decreases throughput, it does not increase it.

Without a CoH you can cast multiple times, your ability to deal with multitarget damage is not as good as a shamans and that is the end of it really. You may be able to keep up in the healing meters if you are able to chain cast flash heal and CoH with little overheal, but when it comes to keeping ppl afflicted with multitarget damage alive, you are nowhere near as good as a shaman, no matter how much you calculate HPS. Run through any senario you like and you will see how dangerous and awkward the 3 second delay between casting an instant and landing a flash heal really is in a multitarget senario.

You keep on nailing the problem, but from the wrong direction. Yes, Holy Priests need something beyond overscaled AoE raid damage to get them to raids. This is why I dislike Circle of Healing. The only thing it resulted in, was Blizzard increasing raid damage to levels where not having 2 CoH Priests meant you would have a much bigger difficulty in beating it. Perhaps Blizzards promises to do something bigger with Hymns will give raids a reason to bring more Holies.

CoH limited the options a Holy Priest had when Blizzard cranked up the raidwide damage. Nerfing CoH or plain out removing it, gives Holy the options back. Yeah it might be frustrating (to not pad the healing meters), but its needed.

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Both Chain Heal and Circle of Healing aren't used to 'save' people - they're used to steadily restore health in the fashion of a HoT. Even against effects like Bloodboil, a Druid could manage with HoT spells. But for generalized spot healing, actual HoT work poorly due to healing coordination issues. So while throughput isn't all that useful a metric in tank healing (where reaction speed is king), it is a very useful metric in terms of raid healing.

If you're legitimately faced with a situation where multiple targets are taking massive damage this is generally do to a raid event AE which you can face off with situational spells like PoH/Holy Nova/ProM or HoT.

Currently Circle of Healing spam...
1)...trivializes whole all raid damage being thrown around in current WotLK content. In worst cases I did 1 million healing during 1 boss fight with next raid healer of a 25-man raid coming with over 500k less healing done than me. Yes, I healed that much dmg alone. I think 2 CoH priests could alone deal with all raid damage currently in WotLK. Short of Sapphiron, maybe.
2)...is extremely boring thing to do.

If CoH and Wild Growth have cooldowns, raid damage will be adjusted accordingly. Lack of AoE healing power isn't a problem. Also, we won't lose to shamans either since chain heal can't be cast while moving. It also has cast time, so chain heal is bad when you need to move (which is often!) and when you are taking damage (happens in encounters with heavy AoE damage).

Next is the issue: "Why bring holy priests in raids if CoH gets nerfed?" Well you bring me because I'm damn good at healing. Oh, and you can put a holy priest do anything. Need more AoE healing? Sure. More tank healing? Sure. You need someone heal in a threath sensitive situation long away from raid with a tank while both take damage and you need to keep moving? Sure thing.

Priests also have so many spells that you can fill the gap left by CoH cooldown easily:
Coh.
4,5 seconds left after global cooldown finishes.
Prayer of Mending. 3 seconds until cooldown finishes.
Prayer of healing or 2xFlash/Renew/PW:S.
Cooldown finished. Coh again.

In my opinion CoH cooldown is a wonderful thing. It reduces boring spam and increases need for thinking and interaction.

You don't use CoH in Sapphiron. You use Prayer of Mending, Renew and Lightwell. I always love that my lightwell charges get all spent before cooldown is even half finished. 80k healing with 650 mana, can't get more mana-efficient <3

As for Malygos... Wild Growth gets 6 second cooldown too. There are no better instant AoE heals than CoH, even after cd. But to tell the truth, it's not CoH that makes priest so insane AoE healer. It's prayer of mending combined with all our other tools.

The most annoying thing is that the raw power of CoH is so blatant that the most optimal holy priest playstyle in many situations is literally the dumbest one of doing nothing but spamming CoH nonstop. I have no problem with CoH getting nerfed as long as they avoid putting situations where you have insane raid damage that requires nonstop healing, since that would simply put us back into the Sunwell days of resto shaman stacking.

If you want to nerf CoH, fine, but don't balance raids then around the idea that shamans will provide bulk of the raid healing.

I really like what's being said here, a stacking increased mana cost (or DR... sigh) would fix it in a far better capacitiy!Also the FSR thing is pretty valid, It's a blow to spirit based regen no doubt.

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I love how you nail the problem perfectly every time. CoH does up front healing. It heals at the start of a global cooldown. Flash Heal at the end. I think that means, it requires slightly less whack-a-mole with Flash Heal than CoH (Which also smart picks targets). In reply to the quote; Flash Heal requires MORE thinking and forward planning than current CoH.

These are all very valid concerns, yet, they do not have anything to do with the reason CoH gets a nerf.

And again, you nail the problem directly on the head. This is the reason CoH gets the nerf.

Anyway, I am done beating this dead horse. This thread needs to get more discussion on how to deal with the new reality, and less complaining about how the dead horse is no longer alive.

Both CoH and Chain Heal, despite being direct heals, are generally used not to heal damage that is immediately dangerous but rather damage that may become dangerous some time in the future. They are, in a very real sense, used as "proactive" heals like HoT are. Which is why Wild Growth is actually a decent raid heal. If the way you imagine CoH/Chain Heal working was actually the way they were used, Wild Growth would be essentially useless since it doesn't deliver its healing in a timely enough fashion to actually save people from imminent danger.

And your Paladin example is silly. You'd need at least one target taking truly massive amounts of predictable damage sufficient to not overheal with those Holy Lights and even then the level of healing on secondary targets would be far less than more conventional multi-target healing.

I would much rather have a cool down than an increasing mana cost mechanic. It is much simpler and it requires you to use one of the other spells in our arsenal. Just because you are being forced to finally look outside the CoH box doesn't mean it is the end of our class or that we 3rd rate healers. Played correctly I don't see how a priest still cannot top the meters, even in an aoe damage situation. PoM, SoL, CoH (with a 6sec cd), renew, binding heal, even PoH; all these spells/talents still have their place in raid and aoe healing. Healing is all about adjusting, whether it is because of a raid change or class mechanic. A CoH cool down will require lots of adjustments for some priests, but it won't kill our class and it still will be fun as hell to play.

I have to say that I am disheartened by Blizzard's decision to just tag on a CD to CoH. I do believe that the HPS of CoH needs to be reduced by 20% or so, but a CD just smacks of a cop out. One can only hope that Holy Nova will be reevaluated and adjusted to compensate for this change --- there is still so much potential for this ability beyond farming. An obvious and easy fix would be a glyph that would remove its limitation to the Priest's party. I'd love a new situational Holy Nova that worked similarly to Arcane Explosion, an AE that divides a set X amount of healing (scaling with SP) over all friendly targets within a certain range, even without smart targeting. PoH ought to be reexamined in light of Blizzard's new philosophy as well. It seems sometimes as if Blizzard is most hesitant to make radical changes to the Priest, but sometimes a swift departure from ill-thought mechanics can at least bring to surface new ideas. Just testing out a freshly tuned ability on the PTR, even if it's eventually canned before it reaches Live, would renew my faith that Blizzard is aware of and willing to address our issues.

One point emphasized in this Compendium is that the Discipline Priest excels in tank healing and that raiding Holy Priests generally focus on raid healing. Neither is necessarily the 'best' in either of these fields, each spec can fulfill the other spec's niche adequately, and each spec and can be easily replaced with even a smidgen of any impact on a raid's performance. This entire discussion, though, brings to surface what I consider to be somewhat of a design flaw in regards to hybrids. The Priest is the "purest" healing class, with two different specializations devoted to healing. Each of the Priest's specs includes talents designed for all intents and purposes specifically for PVP and which require sacrificing one's healing abilities by forgoing healing talents in order to really compete in PVP. Meanwhile, Druids, Paladins, and Shaman all are hybrids that can spec to fulfill any task very well (although Shaman have much less potential for tanking). While they may lack the number of options for talenting healing that are available to Priests, their only talent tree for healing provides talents that allows for them to do well in both of the healing niches. Druids excel in raid and tank healing and have many, many tools to choose from. Paladins, while lacking the sheer number of healing spells available to the other healers, are amazing tank and, if used properly, raid healers; Shamans will once again be very excellent raid healers due to CoH Priests being unable to put out ridiculous HPS and okay raid healers. Each of these hybrids brings something unique to raids which allows for a raider leader to 'stack' them (totems, battle rezzes, auras, blessings, innervate, reincarnate to an extent). Some of the hybrids' healing specs even include talents that provide both PVE and PVP utility (Druid's Natural Perfection is a prime example)... All of this being said, the DPS hybrids all suffer a slight DPS penalty, and yet it seems as if the hybrid healers are exempt. The hybrid healers have PVP talents that somehow work into PVE, but Priests (Holy more so than Disc) do not. If one tree was meant more for PVP than PVE, shouldn't the trees be redesigned? If the trees are meant to excel in certain fields, shouldn't Blizzard's philosophy be more in line that the Priest is to be the "best" healer in a particular field by a small margin? I realize it isn't all about numbers and that judging performance and abilities of a healing class is much more complicated than DPS,
but this been an issue bugging me for quite some time. I am curious to hear what other Priests think about this and if I am wrong to be concerned.

Raiding as Discipline at the moment, but I can contribute a few suggestions.

During Vortex, I find myself able to cast 1-2 ticks of Penance, maintain a PoM, and shield targets who are low. Pain Suppression is also a great tool to have in a bind. As Discipline, crits to any spell (PoM bounces crit now) leave an Aegis during Vortex, and my shield absorbs for somewhere north of 4k. I've found my impact to be quite valuable on Malygos, though again I've been raiding Disc not Holy, so I'm more focused on triaging 4-5 people plus maintaining a PoM than I am pushing raid throughput.

Vortex is supposed to test your ability to keep people topped and to top people off afterward, and only peripherally to test your ability to heal people DURING the effect itself. For the before and after, a Priest can cover the entirety of their own 5 person group trivially.

Sorry to deviate from the subject, but this seemed like the most appropriate thread for this post. If it's not, please feel free to move it.

I noticed while looking through the logs from our Malygos kill that my Glyph of Power Word: Shield wasn't healing for the full 20% of the amount absorbed. It was healing for 18.4% on a target with a full Grace stack (I am assuming Grace applies). You can observe in this link that after my glyph heals Dankykong for 1117, he subsequently absorbs 6057 damage. Those exact values are repeated throughout the log.

To further investigate, I went back to a Patchwerk kill and observed the same thing. Here you'll notice my glyph healing Atrum for 1006, followed by an absorb for 5458. These values are also repeated numerous times throughout the log. Also, this amounts to 18.4% on a target with a full Grace stack.

It would seem that the glyph isn't using the actual value of the shield, but is being calculated independently, and is missing some component that PW:S takes into account.

Edit - I should add that upon looking into this further, the value healed by one of our holy priests is correct. He's specced into Twin Disciplines, and has one point in Imp PW:S, so my guess would be that Borrowed Time is the culprit.

Doing normal difficult Sapphiron the other night with only nine pople, none of whom had any frost resist and all of whom were doing it for the first time, I was obviously using CoH a lot. The thing that concerns me the most about the 6-seecond cooldown is not that I sit there and faceroll CoH, which is apparently what Blizzard is most worried about, that but I very often cast two CoH's in quick succession. With more than 1.5 million effective healing on the fight, only 42% of that was from CoH. But putting a CD on it is going to limit it's usefulness a lot because I want to cast it twice or three times in a row when people are taking damage then take a little break. Sapphiron I could probably still manage because the damage is so consistent over the fight, but I agree with other posters that this is just going to force us to divvy up groups so we can use PoH and Holy Nova, which is silly. PoH smart targetting would probably be a little much given it's incredible range, but it could certainly target the nearest X people to you, rather than the people in your party. Having to pay attention to position on the battlefield is fine with me, but having to organize groups ahead of time is a pain.

All that being said, I'm personally looking forward to the change. Assuming they fix the shield/Rapture it will mean I can go back to discipline and leave the raid healing to the shaman. I know that's not very constructive for those of you who want to be holy, though.

I think we all knew the cd was coming from the minute they said that they were going to nerf CoH. I have less of an issue with the cd in general then I have with its length. I think 6 seconds is excessive. It would be nice if they changed Divine Providence to reduce the cd on CoH by 2 seconds instead of the unneeded 2 secs off the cd of ProM. 4 second cd is enough time to weave in one other spell in between CoH w/out making CoH worthless, but also preventing "spam".

I agree that while I'm not using CoH to the exclusion of all other spells, I am concerned about losing the ability to use 2 CoHs back to back, especially in a 25-man raid--often to cover those persons who weren't covered by the first CoH. I would have much preferred a limiting factor where the effectiveness of CoH was reduced by each successive cast (where after so many seconds without casting CoH this limit expired).

While no one likes being hit with the nurf bat this is honestly not nearly as big a deal as a lot of people are making out. Mylagos is the only fight that really has "must heal now" AoE and my experience is that you do just as well healing wise and better mana wise with judicious use of PoM, shields and renew. Honestly the renew glyph is very very good in this and Saph as it compresses the healing into a shorter time span. Be proactive with your renews, get a couple rolling before the vortex starts and those players can be ignored for the vortex itself.

Other fights such as Saph are the same, renew and PoM do the heavy lifting with flash for the emergancies. Also take a good look at how good PoH is. Mine is giving 4.5k heals to everyone in the group in a 36 yard radius about me. Even in saphs room there should be plenty of opportunity to use this constructivly. Just remember that healing prayers really really helps if you use a lot of PoH.

Finally if your only reason for being invited to raids is CoH then you aren't playing as well as the other healers and your raid leaders ARE following blizzards maxim of bring the player not the class.

This is true Ellyh, in 10man Malygos I prefer letting PoM do the work with Renews on the lowest HP raid members and try to limit myself to just 1 CoH per Vortex (mostly out of the extreme need for mana conservation in phase 1, but now we'll have added reason for it I suppose). I'm more concerned about how the cooldown will scale in 25-mans, where in my guild we usually only add 1 more holy priest but add 15 more raid members who require heals. If my glyphed CoH heals 6 in 10 mans, that's a potential 60% of the raid from 1 priest. If 2 holy priests with the glyph can heal 12 raid members in a 25-man, that's less than 50%.

When comparing to Wild Growth keep in mind that it is only better if it is left alone for the majority of its full duration - and it has its own downsides of the fact it takes 7 seconds to do this healing, its not instant.
Considering most of the AoE healing will target the same people this is generally not often the case.