I already use prayer of healing in many situations, I even have it glyphed. 10-man Sarth + 3 drakes comes up as a very good example where I'm in a group with the DPSers. It gives me the time to heal the tanks too, especially with heroism. I don't know, but I still think haste is a superior stat for a priest, even with the CoH nerf.

I think this emphasizes the problem Blizzard sees. Circle of Healing shouldn't be our "bread n' butter" spell. And I don't see why it has to be. I haven't reached 80, but I was healing throughout BC. Yeah, the later content made CoH a staple, but then you're essentially saying "we press one button."

Blizzard is trying to get us back to using all of our spells. Sure, some spells are more/less efficient, but if you use them properly all of them can be effectively used.

The most hilarious part about these patch notes is that they actually buffed Glyph of Holy Light. I have no idea how much extra range it will receive now, but it still seems stupid to me.

All those mental agility builds look really good now

I think you're in the wrong forum. Yes we're getting nerfed but lets not fill this thread with nonsensical cross-class QQ. The Glyph of Holy Light has nothing to do with us, and I think everyone agreed that the radius was stupidly low.

The senario I posted is perfectly plausible even now up to the 5 second mark. Two closely spaced hits of an AoE that can 2-shot a DPS, is something that has been encountered multiple times in TBC and similar senarios are already seen even in the current very early stage content.

The remaining 5 seconds are added for a very specific reason. To gauge what the maximum is. I take a senario that will push a shaman to his absolute limit and ask a simple question, can a priest heal this now? Can he heal it with a 6sec CD on CoH. I look at BOTH the 5 second mark, which is a senario that is relevant right now and at the 10 second mark, to see what happens to a priest in a senario that a shaman needs every ounce, including luck, crits and all of his spells to heal at least partly successfully.

This is a very very relevant question. Whether this damage is healed by 1 person or 300 in a real raid senario is completely irrelevant. What we want to know is how a single class does on its own. This is a crucial question.

The answer are:
1) The shaman can convingly heal up to the 5 second mark, which is what is relevant in today's environment. As expected if we take this to 10 seconds, we push him to his limit thus possibly resulting in failure.

2) Today's CoH priest can heal even the 10 second mark very convingly. That means that if he had to a CoH priest could deal with this damage alone. That clearly illustrates the problem with the current CoH. If there is damage that challenges the CoH priest the shaman has no hope in hell of coping. If the damage is healable by the shaman, for the priest it is trivial.

3) Holy with nerfed CoH, cannot heal even the 5 second mark, which is a situation that is very relevant today and which the shaman can deal with convincingly. At the 10 second mark, where the shaman has at least some chance of partial success, the CoH priest has none.

4) Even if he is limited to using only average of 1 CoH every 6 seconds, the holy priest would be able to heal at least the 5 second mark successfully, provided he was able to use 2xCoH in quick succession at the begining of the sequence.

5) A paladin using single target heals is able to do more than a CoH priest with the 6 second cooldown can at the 5 second mark and even though he fails to heal the senario he is able to maintain higher HPS than both the shaman and the priest.

6) A druid can also convingly heal the 5 second mark with just WG. At the 10 second mark, he is better than the paladin and priest, but slightly worse the the shaman.

This is meant to illustrate a few basic things.

a) A holy priest cannot deal with aoe damage that pushes a shaman or druid to their respective limits.

b) A holy priest, unlike a paladin does not have the single target healing power to allow him to fill enough of this gap with single target heals

c) The cooldown on CoH is in itself an additional nerf.


The senario presented is valid and it accurately shows the full extent of the CoH nerf. That means without mitigating factors, namely a situation which allows effective use of PoM, PoH or Lightwell, priests are the bottom of the pile at dealing with aoe damage.

I will draw no further conclusions from this, but I will most certainly maintain that this is the truth. If anyone disagrees please post something more than "your example is not valid" to back it up.

How is it valid? What encounters are you talking about?

Edit: Also why are we so concerned about what a single class can do on their own?

Leaving aside the plausibility of the scenario for the moment, I would like to reiterate that you have carefully chosen your numbers to make the priest's situation bad. If we generally want to look at models where 'A people with B health take C damage at interval D', this particular one

- is sensitive to small changes in our numbers
- has a rather large interval between damage (thus making PoM look bad)

One particular thing is that your numbers for Flash Heal and CoH don't line up. You assume 5K Flash Heal and 1900 CoH for a priest with 2K spellpower. In reality, a priest with even 1800 or so spellpower will have CoH hitting for more than 2000 (for evidence, see this WWS and look at the numbers for this priest; CoH is hitting reliably for over 2K while Flash Heal is in the 4400-4800 range, and this priest is not even at the gear level you specify.
But the point here is not that your numbers are wrong in the details - it's that they're wrong in a specific direction and by a specific amount that makes your argument work out. Once we take your scenario and give the priest a CoH that hits for 2050, suddenly things change:

0.2 CoH (2050x5)-> 4.2 GHeal (8500) -> 6.7 GHeal (8500) -> 9.2 GHeal (8500) + CoH(2050x5), now the priest has saved three people and done total healing on a par with the other casters (45.7K or so). Notice that your original sequence forces our priest into lower HPS-heals (FH) because the CoH by itself can't save anyone.

We should be suspicious of a model that is so sensitive to small changes in our assumptions; likewise I frankly suspect your objectivity when an small error in detail (the size of the CoH heal) just happens to be in a direction that makes your case.

In terms of improving the model, I would start by giving the five targets different health totals. This would make the outcome less sensitive to specific output numbers for healing, and would be more realistic as well.

I disagree.

Renew has become a 5 man tank healing spell. Anywhere else 10/25 man, your renew might get in 2 ticks if you're lucky. ( I do admit I cast a couple renews prior to vortex)

GreaterHeal has to long of a cast time, even when using haste, and talents, that the amount it heals for is likely not going to be how much the person is hurt... (again overheal).

I think blizzard is copping out. They see our spells often overhealing, so they give us talents that refund mana or refund mana on over heal.. They don't actually try to come up with new ideas/spells that

Think about it.. the new stuff that is here in late TBC and WOTLK is just not that appealing.. Hymn of Hope? Guardian Spirit? these spells have marginal use, but are not anything wow.

the last wow thats cool spell (that hasn't been then again taken away), was prayer of mending imo, with binding heal being a close second.

Rather than change the OP Coh into another creative spell (My favorite suggestion was casting CoH adds a stacking debuff on you that makes casting CoH again more and more mana).

They just slap a cooldown on it.

I'm not trying to sling poo here, I'm just having a bad day. I went back and read some notes from TBC on how they wanted to look at the priest class over time and improve it further. I've heard them talk about wanting to make disc viable, but at what cost, making holy less viable?

If you reach a certain amount of Haste, you could potentially run your Greater Heal down enough to fit in 2 Greater Heals between each Circle of Healing. With enough haste, you can even manage to squeeze in 1 instant (ProM/Renew), 1 Flash and 1 Greater Heal between a CoH.

Right here I think it comes down to encounter and your playing style. If encounter requires a LOT of AoE healing, it may be desireable to stack up on crit (heck, maybe even int is better) to get Surge of Light/Holy Concentration/Imp. Holy Conc. procs for additional Sustainability. If fight is short or damage is plain and simple Havoc12 brutal, stacking up Haste to pump out extra heals between cooldowns could be very beneficial.

Sorry for not giving you a proper answer, but If I am to give you an answer out of the current content, I'd say it doesn't matter much. Nothing is hard enough right now apart from 3-Drake Sarth to challenge your gear choices.

But your model doesn't even approximate answering that question. It's like you're trying to calculate the added mass to your car from relavatistic effects - by pushing up against a boundary that isn't remotely in the realm of possibility, you're generating a nonsensical conclusion.

If you want to do it simply, you can simply make a comparison of throughput/efficiency of the heal cycles for raid healing. You'll note Priests, even with a 6 second cooldown, do pretty well here (you'll also note that this very issue was discussed on the Resto Shaman thread back when CoH had a 6s cooldown prior to release).

If you want to talk in a more detailed fashion, you have to include an analysis of heal sniping. An effect that has essentially no impact on the Priest CoH/SoL/ProM cycle but which dramatically cuts in the effectiveness of FoL/BoL, WG, and CH.

You would also have to address some other important considerations, like the fact that both Druids and Shaman are crippled in terms of direct spot heals - all of their quick, fast heals are dramatically better when focused on a pre-positioned tagret. In contrast, Priest heals are the same no matter who you throw them on.

I agree that the new spells this expac are significantly less awesome than PoM or Binding. Hymn of Hope is just silly, but Guardian Spirit can be situationally amazing. Though neither are 'WOW' spells.

I also agree that maybe a CD isn't the best way to go about toning down CoH. But I think Priests have come to depend on the spell way too much. We have other tools. We can use them effectively.

Maybe after I get to 80 and experience the new raid content, I'll be forced to realize that our old healing style has been thrown out the window. But from the healing I've done thus far, my healing style hasn't changed much at all. My regen has gone out of the window... but that's because I don't have Meditation back yet. Thinking I should have left Guardian Spirit as my last talent to get >.<

I just don't want to see Priests getting pidgeon-holed into using 1-2 spells to do all of our healing.

Honestly I suspect that is just a tooltip clarification. As it previously read it is ambiguous as to if it increases your spell haste total from gear or reduces cast time by the % stated. Gameplay shows it has always been a cast time reduction though.

If it really uses base cast time of Greater Heal that is a nice buff (3.0 base cast time). Your GH's will get -1.0 seconds and you FH -0.45 seconds.

Unbuffed I have 397 haste (12.11%) and my GH is 2.23 sec and FH is 1.34. My current IHC brings these values down to 1.56 sec and 0.937 sec., respectively. I'm not sure (the math is really eluding me atm) but I think it would be an overall buff, however the value of the 12% haste I do have would go down on the IHC hasted spells (I think?).

I removed all my haste gear and IHC brought the values to 1.75 (GH) and 1.05 (FH). The *new* IHC will bring the unhasted value of Greater Heal to 1.5, so I guess overall it is a buff. Should give us slightly higher HPS on a single target.


Currently the IHC is hasting your talented Greater Heal speed of 2.5, if it changes it to the base of 3.0 it should be faster.

[edit]
Bad math on Flash Heal, my bad.


Oh also!
Anyone else pretty unimpressed with the nerf of the dispel glyph. Sigh.

It's really too bad they aren't timing the COH nerf with the dual specs release. For those of us worried about raid utility, the 'simple' solution is to dual spec Disc/Holy. In fact, before the nerf I was thinking of doing that as I'm often asked to MT heal and let our other COH priest be the spammer.

The real question is with a six second cooldown, is COH even worth getting as a talent?

I can see why the dispell glyph change happened. If it crit on a high hp tank it was over 3000 healed as well as dispelling. This is just a bit much to be honest.

The nerf to CoH doesn't dramatically change the power of a deep holy priest. It's annoying, yes, and managing cooldowns is not something I enjoy (PoM was quite enough, thank you), but it's not the end of the world. What it will do is force us to allow other healers to get in AE heals on occasion.

Think about Malygos-P1. Arcane Breath hits ~ 6-10 people depending on RNG / totems / pets / etc. Normally, I would CoH + CoH, then go back to my job because I knew there were 2 other CoHs coming (from Wreath), and a Chain Heal (from Enragedklown) plus a couple of FoLs (from the paladins) or possibly even Holy Shocks. The druid(s) in the raid may have cast a Wild Growth, or just a HoT, or sniped a heal with awesome Regrowth spam. Any way I looked at it, I didn't need to cast CoH more than twice.

Now, I'll be able to cast it once. And in the long run, that's going to give the other healers something to do.

In fact, the only situation I can think of where the cooldown is going to be obnoxious is Sarth+3. Occasionally (read: Twilight Torment) you *do* want to spam CoH on the raid, because it's the only thing that can keep up with the incoming damage stream. Now, we'll have to think about where to put the priest re: group heals because PoH is going to be severely needed, and we'll use PoH -> CoH + PoM + Flash -> PoH to try to keep two groups up at once.

The "big reason for the nerf" as claimed by Blizzard was Vortex on Malygos. I don't know about the rest of you, but I rarely used CoH in that situation. It wasn't reliably hitting enough people with the weird spreading out the Vortex does, and I found I got a lot more coverage (and effective raid top-up) by using PoM, PW:S, and the occasional Renew. The only time I *really* used CoH was when we landed, and topped up the remaining damage (typically 3-4 casts). Now I'll just have to do 1 cast, and then start hoping we don't get a Breath before the rest of the raid is stationary and I can start casting Flash Heals. You can't stand still on a landing reliably, because Malygos lands right on top of you and you can easily get cleaved or breathed on; the only solution to quick top-up is instant-casts.

And in the end, that's the only thing that bothers me about the nerf: we no longer have a spammable instant-cast heal. Which is probably good in the long run, but it does limit the type of raid damage Blizzard can provide to encounters, because we just won't be able to keep up with certain things now (like, say, Twins). I really hope they don't go and put a Twins-style encounter into Ulduar, because it was only sustainable through raid stacking of Resto Shamans and CoH priests; if we're forced to bring 4 Resto Shamans to an encounter because of the nerf of CoH/WG, they will have failed in their objective completely. Here's hoping!

Of course it is.

The good thing about the change is that it gives other healers a chance to do some actual healing, instead of CoH just sniping all the effective healing. Cahrin and I slacked a bit with CoH this week, and our numbers together totaled as follows:

Total:
29% of the raid healing (2 shaman = 25%, 2 druids = 26%, 1 pally = 13%).
All Bosses:
29% of the raid healing (2 shaman = 22%, 2 druids = 23%, 1 pally = 15%)
Trash:
27% of the raid healing (2 shaman = 28%, 2 druids = 30%, 1 pally = 10%)

Last week was as follows:
Total:
36% of the raid healing (2 shaman = 21%, 2 druids = 22%, 1 pally = 10%)
All Bosses:
31% of the raid healing (2 shaman = 20%, 2 druids = 22%, 1 pally = 12%)
Trash:
42% of the raid healing (2 shaman = 23%, 2 druids = 22%, 1 pally = 6%)

What Cahrin and I are expecting is more of an overall equality among our healers. One fight was not included and I did not go to Archavon, but upon the completion of our Naxx run we had Cahrin doing 14% of the healing, all the other healers doing 13% and I did 12%. Very even, as opposed to other naxx runs where the two of us holy priests were sometimes doing 35-40% of the total healing it will be nice to have all of our healers feeling needed.

We needed something of a nerf, I don't like the cooldown, but hopefully it isn't as bad as it seems.

One problem with the rationale you provided is simply that 7 healers is too much for Naxx. We've been badgering our guild leadership to let us run with 5 or 6 healers, because to be frank, we're bored stupid. Once we drop down a healer or two, I think that will balance out the numbers more effectively than the CoH nerf. There's just too many healers, not enough damage, so of course the instant-cast heal is going to win more often than not!

Oh I agree totally Nid, however that is just what we happen to have currently as we are a very small guild.

Though 3-drake Sarth I'm sure requires 7 (6 for sure?), we've yet to do it and are planning on it tonight.

5 healers seems pretty much enough for Naxx once people get geared up a bit. I can see what you mean with bored stupid. For the occasional fun though, I really recommend more or less solo healing the AoE damage in Phase 1 Malygos for priests. Enjoy it while it lasts

http://i37.tinypic.com/29xsvv8.jpg

It's a 9.89% buff to the heal per second bonus from IHC.

Instead of increasing HPS by a factor of 1.3, it increases it by a factor of ~1.42857 (1 / 0.7). The relative increase is then (~1.42857 - 1.3) / 1.3, which is ~0.0989 or 9.89%. More generally, the relative increase can be computed with:



where IHC% is the percent increase in cast speed expressed as a decimal (i.e. 0.1, 0.2, 0.3).

We actually found the DPS burns to be easier with only 5. It's crazy healing, but doable even with the crazy lag on our server. As it was put very succinctly in our healer channel: If the DPS fail their check before the healers get to the hard part- then it doesn't matter how hard the healing would have been. We did a night with 6 healers and consistently failed to get the drakes down in time and slashed it to 5 the next night and got him down in 6 or 7 attempts.