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".

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.

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.

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.

Havoc you are assuming no other healers here so the reasonable assumption is that this is a single 5 man group that is getting the crap kicked out of them. In which case put the priest in with the other 4 and PoH 3 times with a coh kicker. That is (non crit) 4.5x3 = 1.8 k healed to everyone which is 15.3k to everyone. Leaving all 5 people down to 3300 and still alive. Now in any realistic healing situation 5 people at random taking 30k damage over 10 seconds (your scenario) will be a multi healer event to heal as your own numbers show that everyone looses at least one person.

Your hypothetical situation is so extreme that to be honest it's not worth considering as a realistic scenario. To put how unreal this scenario is into perspective Saph 10 man generates ~ 14000 incoming dps across the raid. (1200/second frost ticks + tank damage, tomb damage and incidental cockups) and if you are very very good you can get 2 healers to keep the raid up (alternatively you get resists, judgement of light, shadow priests etc to assist) . The random damage in your scenario is generating 15000 dps across the raid in a non predictable manner without any other effects being considered and you are asking one healer to keep up with it. Sorry this is just not a plausible situation to put any single healer into so I do not consider it a meaningful measure of how CoH has been changed.

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.

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.