Yes this point concerns me too. Im undecided about the proposed CD to CoH. On the one hand, now that I have developed my gear over my old SWP epics, in some fights CoH is clearly OP, and needs balancing. Then on the other, Im not sure a per-cast CD is the answer. To limit CoH with a 6 second CD will certainly be interesting on fights like Malygos. We have various instant casts which can be used, like PoM's, PSW, using SoL procs from CoH, and Renews which will have to be strategically used to compensate where CoH might have been used before. We'll have to develop spell rotations more fully perhaps, which could work to some interesting, more varied healing strategies. I do wonder, however, if it might have been better to limit CoH by say setting it to have 2 or 3 charges, after which a 6 sec CD would kick in. This might have allowed for effective burst healing, while cutting down on over-reliance on CoH. Alternatively, there are such things that could be adjusted like, for example, mana cost, or coefficients.

Some thoughts:

The hardest fight right now is sartharion + 3 drakes. Our raid has killed it, we brought 2 holy priests, 2 resto shamans, 1 resto druid, and 1 holy pally. We only used CoH a lot in the shadow realm. We've talked post nerf of dropping to 1 holy priest and bringing 3 resto shamans for chain heals (seeing as we're probably not going to bring 4 coh priests to make up for the CD ). PoH will not be sustainable since it's a long and mana intensive fight not to mention it's a pita to set up groups for it with all this portal and phasing stuff.

If they nerf this encounter, it won't be the fun challenge that it is now (not to mention twilight drakes for everybody =P ). If they don't nerf it, we'll be taking more shamans. Ulduar is supposed to be harder, I'll hazard a guess that some aoe damage will be forthcoming.

Bringing the player not the class is only true if you have bad players in the raid group. Most of my raid group, especially the healing crew are all good players. Ours is a case of bringing the player that plays the right class to make the encounter possible/easier.

I'm not really worried about spots, I'll always have a raid spot, I just don't want to sit more than I have to =p

I really liked the idea of reducing the number of people coh healed. Make it 3, 4 with glyph. But alas, they seem to be set on applying the CD.

I think the cooldown is going to be a pain, and overkill. Why not just add a 6s diminishing return on COH? So you cannot just spam it on the same people over and over?

That would actually make it even stronger, cause once you topped the 5 (or 6 with glyph) players off and the mechanism you just suggested prevents you from healing the same players (or at least some of those) once again, lets say by a debuff bound to you, it ultimately forces you, or the CoH for that matter, to heal 5 different targets. At least in a raiding situation it would make CoH even more valuable, since you'll be able to not overheal that much. Depends on the Encounter though, i admit that much.

What your suggestion actually would do is nurfing CoH as a 5man-Dungeon Heal, again, depending on the encounter and the situation.

In my opinion CoH should get a casttime of aprox. 2.5-3 seconds.
Though one might argue that this would make this spell far to similar to Chainheal and thus trivialize the restoshaman even more, i strongly disagree as shamans have other very valuable abilities aside from spamming chainheal. This is actually what blizzard is trying to do.... "de-trivialize" classes to just one spell. anyway.. this is not a shamans discussion ^^.

While some people might suggest a Cooldown on CoH, I think this might make the spell very unliked, in a sense that holypriests, if played and geared right, have enough cooldowns, popups, proccs and such to worry about and I personally don't necessary wanna have to care about yet another CoH Cooldown Ready!!! Popup

I hope i'm making sense it's kinda late in germany ^^

Just my 2 cents.


On a different matter:

Constantinus, what is your opinion about the "new" Nobles Deck -> Darkmoon Card: Greatness-Cards?
Could you take those into account in your upcoming update for this compendium. I'd really like to hear some different points of view on whether to chose the Spirit version or the intellect version. Just a suggestion. Though i'm sure you already have formed an opinion which again, i'm very interested in hearing.

Intellect version, and keep your spirit slightly higher with raid buffs. Great regen trinket.

I will have to post a retraction here on the paladin versus priest on the tank issue. It seems I have indeed missed two things. Paladins have a libram that decreases HL cost by 113 and glyphed SoW, reduces cost by 5% on top of that, with 50% crit this would put a HL cast at slightly over 600 mana on average.

That means the difference in sustained single target HPS between a paladin and a priest is actually very large, which certainly makes paladins much better single target healers.

=============================================

On the CoH subject since I was scolded for whining and since I don't think people quite realise what this nerf means I will make a more constructive post with an example to illustrate my point.

First off all lets have a look at the benchmark for AoE healing, which is a shaman. Chain heal at 2000 odd spell power heals for about 5000 on the first bounce and glyphed bounces 4 times, healing a total of 9375 and cast time is 2.38 seconds, which means max HPS is 3939. Riptide heals for about 3600 with 1k ticks. Both riptide and chain heal proc tidal waves which like IHC does not do what the tooltip says and decrease HW cast time to 1.75 seconds (1.67 sec base for shaman) and LHW cast time to 1.05 sec (1sec base for shaman).

The senario is this: 5 targets with 17.7k HP take 10k damage 3 times with 5 second intervals in between. This damage is not predictable, you know it happens when you see the first damage tick. So I factored in a 0.2 second reaction time. I specifically chose the 5 second interval because it helps the single target whack-a-amole even though it reduces the value of PoM.

[edit] Amended the values to use the correct numbers for healing wave, lesser healing wave and CoH.

Here is a shaman just spamming chain heal
The shaman manages to save target 1 and maybe target 5 if he gets a critical.

Total healing: 41100
HPS: 4228

Straight chain heal spam yields 3858 HPS

However the shaman can (at least in my inexpert oppinion) do it better this way:
HEaling: 41550
HPS: 4271

That is a more decent performace as 2 ppl are alive thanks to tidal waves and 1.66 second healing waves. If earthliving weapon, totems and crits are factored in the shaman is highly like to save target 3 as well.

Lets look at the current CoH.

Healing: 67830
HPS: 7373

No one can dispute that this is disgustingly OP if its compared to the benchmark, and the reality is even worse because this does not include the possible 6th target or test of faith which procs on about half the cast and adds 100 healing per target and 6% more crit chance. Incidentally these targets are taking 3k DPS, each and no other spell could keep them all alive, showing just how insanely powerful CoH is as an emergency spell, for saving people's lives.

After the nerf this is what happens.

[/code]

Healing/absorption: 39964
HPS: 4343

The priest might save 2 targets, if his PWS is glyphed or if one of FH's crits or if he has the PWS glyph. This of course assumes that the priest has test of faith. Without test of faith only a single target can be saved by using a flash/PWS at the end.

---> Incidentally and this is very important, SoL here makes almost no difference. An SoL from CoH is undesirable because you really need the chance to crit, as it can save a target and proc an SoL to potentially replace the PWS for extra healing. The fact that the next flash might be instant, does not allow you to squeeze anymore spells in the rotation. In fact because you are not guaranteed a crit on the FHs, you have to spam the PWS button to keep that additional target alive, so getting an SoL, means you are guaranteed to not get a crit on the FH after the 2nd CoH, which drastically reduces your chances of saving the additional target.

A chain heal spamming shaman, heals for slightly more overall yet also saves only 1 target. A shaman taking advantage of tidal waves and riptide, has a good chance of saving 3 out of the 5 even though the HPS is the same.

Notice how awkward having no control over the timing of your instants is. Twice you are forced to wait for 3 seconds between a CoH cast and the next fheal landing. The result is that where the shaman convincingly saves his targets at the 5 second mark, the CoH priest is already in serious danger of losing 2 people. What the priest would have liked ideally, is to cast CoH twice at the begining flash heal everyone and then add add a CoH at the end. This would have produced a similar result to the shaman, convincingly saving the group to the 5 second mark, but at serious risk of losing people at the 10 second mark.

Here is what a paladin healer can do.

Healing/absorption 44600
HPS: 4527

Yep this is not a joke. The paladin does better than the priest and equals the shaman, by burning one of this 2min CDs. The use of the CD might be unfair, but a paladin has enough of them to spare, next time round he can use his DP+HS combo instead. An important thing to also remeber here is that the paladin also has a high crit rate, meaning his output maybe higher as some of the FoLs and possibly the HS will crit. The paladin can probably maintain the highest HPS of the lot by virtue of his very strong single target HPS, even though the opportunity for saving targets is only 5 seconds, but still he does not do any better than a shaman, who is able to save everyone at the 5 second mark without burning any CDs.

The druids will also be able to get everyone to the 5 second mark, with just a single cast of WG and will have all the time to add lifeblooms and rejuve, which will buff nourish and allow him to use a swiftmend for more burst.

In this particular senario the priest does not come 3rd. He comes 4th. The 6 second CD is restrictive because it adversely affects the value of haste and IHC for chasing aoe damage with FH.

Although this senario is slightly rigged, I think its serves its purpose well to show the reality of things.

Although given a constant supply of targets and frequent PoM bouncing or good renew targets a holy priest can certainly produce competitive HPS, his ability to keep people alive in a multitarget senario has taken what I can describe as a mortal blow.

I am not going to discuss this further. Everyone can make their own conclusions.

I personally have a sinking feeling that the OPness of CoH has been masking a lot of inadequacies in our holy tree. I think no matter what GC says, priests were wanted mostly due to CoH being so OP. Blizzard has succeeded in putting priests squarely behind the specialists in this expansion instead of being able to effectively match any of them in TBC. I am curious to see where this effective removal of everything that was powerful about CoH will leave priests in this environment.

I believe your intentions are good Havoc12. However, what you just showed, is that under no circumstance can any solo healer except a Shaman deal with your given situation. That might be why you bring several healers. Also, since you originally would heal this situation with Circle of Healing exclusively, that means they are somewhat in range from each other. This means your situation might be a typical case of "Get out of the Rain of Fire/Blizzard/Void Zone", since the same 5 people keep on taking this random non-predictable damage. (Actually, this Example reminds me most of Chained Ice Blocks on Kel'Thuzad)

Also you forgot to add the 1.06 multiplier from Test of Faith on your Example. Also you could have used Guardian Spirit to save one more. Also you could get lucky with Imp. Holy Concentration.

Havoc, any reason the priest wouldn't use PoM in your scenario? I know it is hard to model but that situation you describe is perfect for PoM. PoM is disgustingly potent during Vortex on Malygos or for Sapphiron. PoM shines even more when the interval is set at a more realistic level than 5 seconds between ticks. There are more abilities that tick every 1-3 seconds than abilities that tick every 5 seconds.

Also, remember that in any kind of multi healer scenario the cast time of chain heal is what is limiting the shamans and paladins beacon. They pick a target for the beefy part of the heal and most of the time in any aoe situation currently one-two CoH has landed on his target before the cast is done making him massively overheal.

I am no big fan of creating hypothetical situations around healing. They simply match reality so poorly that no relevant conclusion can be drawn apart from situations dealing with non stop spam on a single target. There are plenty of available empirical data that shows that CoH is too good a heal. I don't see how anyone could argue that it doesn't need to be toned down significantly with what we know these days.

Anyway, we just have to wait and see what happens. I don't think the nerf will arrive in a vacuum. The news of the death of the holy priest is premature.

As one of the targets in your scenario will be you, you can use bh to save 2 target at once instead of using fh two times. Also I'm missing pom, which 'd be the first thing at least I'd cast in your scenario.

Have you even been on a raid in wrath havoc? Or is all this complaining and generation of hypothetical scenarios that never actually happen in the game for 5 man content? Your example seems to have no bearing on any content in the game whatsoever.

First let me say that I applaud the work people here put into demonstrating what exactly the CoH cooldown is going to mean to us, especially when it's based on actual analysis, not gut feeling.

However:

Constructing theoretical scenarios in WoW rarely leads to usable results. This is especially true because Blizzard designs encounters, they don't just happen. Players modify them by behaving in unexpected ways, but basically all important things that we encounter in the game is by design.

We don't need to create scenarios that might occur, except when that possibility is given within the degree of freedom that the players have. It's an interesting thought game, but not one that is beneficial to us playing the game. Theoretical scenarios also lead us to mistakes because we tend to overlook solutions that we naturally find in actual encounters. The missing use of PoM and Binding heal in this scenario is an example of that. It's not stupidity, it just happens when we construct in the void.

We can also construct a scenario that only a priest and no other class can solo heal. But it's no use - because Blizzard won't design such an encounter. And should they do so by making a horrible mistake, they will fix it, probably even hotfix it. We can modify Havoc12's theoretical encounter but adding a bit of movement - and where does that leave the shaman and the paladin then?

I think this is a research project that is not going to be helpful. Let's turn to more relevant projects. EP values based on statistical analysis of actual WWS logs, anyone?

For some reason I forgot to check what the Rapture constant was for Level 80 until today. Anyway, it seems to be 0.00845'ish.

Is there a reason you changed your mind? I'm not meaning to sound like a smart ass -- I just want to clarify the contradiction.

He actually listed both.

The spirit version is listed in both the throughput section and the regen section.

The intellect version only appears in the regen list.

[Edit] I guess he did only mark the spirit version with a (*)...

My thinking is the following:

90 int is flat out better than 90 spirit. You do lose about 20 spell power, but since you are using a regen trinket we can assume you're willing to take a significant amount of extra mana and .6% crit over 20 spell power.

However, 300 int is not necessarily better than 300 spirit for regen, because of the way OO5SR regen works. I'm sure everyone remembers that, if you have a fixed amount of int+spirit, then OO5SR regen is maximized at a 1 int: 2 spirit ratio. And a 300 point swing the wrong way might be enough to outweigh the max mana based regen possibilities.

For concreteness lets start at 1100 int, 1100 spirit, and see what happens with just replenishment and OO5SR regen.
(Assuming SoR, Kings, and no MS for the procs, pretending we already counted all of this for the base stats.)

With an extra 330 int, you gain 5 * .005775 * 1100 * (sqrt(1330) - sqrt(1100)) = 105 mp5.
" " 347 spi, 5 * .005775 * (1447 - 1100) * sqrt(1100) = 332 mp5.

That's 227 mp5 OO5SR for spirit. With meditation and 10% OO5SR, that's (.9 * .3 + .1) * 227 = 84 mp5 in favor of spirit.

330 int = 4950 mana, and .0025 * 4950 * 5 seconds = 62 mp5 in favor of intellect.

So that's roughly a 20 mp5 difference, or 60 mana per proc ... not quite as much as I would have guessed.


Of course there are things you can do during either a 300 int or spirit proc (shadowfiend, cheat the 5sr) to help one more or the other.

So, to clarify, the formula for Rapture at level 80 is (amount healed or absorbed) x (maximum mana / 3863) x 0.00845, and the heal number to achieve 2.5% of max mana is 3863 / 0.00845 x 0.025 = 11428? Is this accurate? I remember my calculations working with the 0.01035 figure I'd seen earlier, but to be honest I might have done those calcualtions at level 70. It's been a while (more than a few hours at least).

This is an important consideration to make regarding the comparison between Druid AoE healing and Priest AoE healing.

I can't help but bring up the fact, however, that Circle of Healing is our 41-point Holy talent.

Wild Growth is a 51-point talent.

At the risk of sounding obvious, by definition, it would seem, Wild Growth *should* be a stronger spell, taking into consideration the relative "weight" of talent points. On top of that, we get many more talent points to invest in bettering our CoH, and we even get a glyph for it. Of course now, you could argue, that since CoH is getting a nerf, so are a lot of our other talents.

And on top of everything, Circle of Healing will still beat Wild Growth in ALL situations where that group heal is needed NOW.

What would irk me most about a 6 second cooldown on CoH is that PoM is on a cooldown of similar length. And 6 and 7 second cooldowns especially would not play nice together, I think...

It feels like there might be a happy amount of haste that would make them play nice, but I'm a little too tired to work it out myself right now.

I think that any suggestion that a cooldown is going to affect Wild Growth in the same way as it affects Circle of Healing is ludicrous. A cooldown will always have less impact on a HoT than on a direct spell because spells that work over time automatically have a chance of recasts being redundant. This is *especially* true when the cooldown is less than the duration of the HoT, which it is in this case. Certainly a six second cooldown affects the usefulness of Wild Growth, but it hurts Circle of Healing much more.

I really don't think that this nerf is the end of the world, but it is poorly thought through in two ways, one is that applying the same cooldown to an instant burst and a HoT makes little sense, the other is that it goes against their stated goal of trying to make groups not matter by making groups matter because Prayer of Healing is a strong AoE heal. The solution to the second part, of course, is not to remove the cooldown but to fix Prayer of Healing and Holy Nova. The first part might not need a solution, but if it doesn't then there was probably a problem in the other direction in the first place.

Deleted

There's some good coh cooldown discussion, and some good numbers. But all of it is preparation for an eventual discussion of how raid encounter "NYI" is built in a way that is impossible for a priest to heal, making the priest class no longer as viable as it is now for 25 man content.

The numbers and discussion are good, but I think it's important to also consider that the situations discussed are hypothetical. Blizzard has already discussed the possible need to update existing content to coincide with this change, and I would take that to mean that future content would be built with this in mind also.

So.. I appreciate the work people have done in thoroughly understanding/working through the changes, there's a lot of good stuff on rotations, etc, but I'm ready to move on. If a situation does show up later that only the old CoH can address, we'll have this work to depend on to prove that this isn't and wasn't ever a good idea(and a few people being able to spout a few told you so's). But until that happens, I almost think we need a seperate thread for discussing the cooldown.. It seems like it's become the primary priest thing to discuss, and is 'taking over/drowning out' the other general healing discussion going on here.

So, what fight does this happen in?

More generally, my problem with your scenario is that you appear to have carefully chosen the intervals, totals and damage to 'just happen' to make some priest tools inadequate to the task at hand. For example, you take PoM off the table by making the interval large (5 seconds) rather than 2-second ticks of 4K damage (and I can actually find examples of 2-second ticks of 4K damage... 10K at 5 second intervals, not so much). You choose spellpower, damage and life so that one application of CoH 'just happens' to leave everyone 100 health short of surviving a second attack. You remove PoH as an option by assuming the people being healed are not in your party. So in addition to being (arguably) unrealistic, the scenario appears also to be contrived.

Oh, and:

Not really. In particular, you don't account for the fact that some 75% of the time the initial CoH will crit at least once, leaving that person with enough health to survive the second shot of damage even if you can't get to them before the five second mark. Also, using Guardian Spirit on one person leaves you trivially able to save two and often able to save three depending on crits.

It's your call, really. If you want a regen trinket, then 90 int >> 90 spirit as a static stat. If you want a "balanced" trinket, then 90 spirit > 90 int, because it provides some spellpower as well as regen (assuming you're holy, of course, which is the point of this thread).

90 spirit is the more "balanced" choice. I would make your decision (assuming you decide to spend 3000g to buy one, at my conservative estimates based on proc chance of getting the cards you want and the cost of Eternal Life atm) based on what your second trinket is.

If you have [Forethought Talisman], get the 90 int version. If you want to use it in conjunction with *another* regen trinket, get the 90 spirit version (so you at least get *some* spellpower).

And remember: that loot list is entirely arbitrary, and just what I decided, for myself, based on the context of my guild and our raids. YMMV, etc, etc, etc.. (and in case someone looks at my Armory, I have 2 chests (T7, Sanctum) and I wear them both on occasion, as well as 2 weapons (Spire of Sunset, Staff of Restraint) for similar reasons).

There's very few "wrong" choices when it comes to gearing. For example, I consider [Signet of Manifested Pain] to be the BiS healer ring. It's obviously a "dps ring", but it's still amazing compared to our other choices because it has so much haste, crit, and spellpower that we can afford to drop some spirit/Mp5 to get it. Similarly, my first choice for a neck is [Cosmic Lights], which thankfully is much less competitive because most dps casters are ending up using [Wyrmrest Necklace of Power] instead.