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.

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.

From mmo-champion undocumented changes:

Thoughts?

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.

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.