Circle of Healing: Adding a 6s cooldown to this spell is fine, but certain damage mechanics should be reworked to compensate. In a 10 man Kel'Thuzad run with heavy melee, Circle of Healing is the best way to react to a Frost Blast which hits 2 raid members. But, as hit points scale up, the frost blast damage scales up, necessitating casting CoH twice to ensure survival. Reworking the Frost Blast to a 5 second effect would safely allow 2 quick casts. This is a lot of work, which is why it makes more sense to penalize it's usage through mana consumption (following the model of Arcane Blast).

Lightwell: The output, efficiency, and cooldown of this spell are all fine, but it's targetting needs improved. If you try to use it to recover from Malygos' Arcane Vortex, few can click on it because character models are in the way. If players could activate it through a macro, it would be infinitely more useable.

Renew: A glyphed Flash Heal beats Renew in efficiency and proc potential. In multi-healer situations, Renew is nearly always negated by a Chain Heal, Flash of Light, etc. Its primary use now is as a tank damage buffer, and it still does not tick often enough to justify the cost most of the time. It's throughput and efficiency should both be looked at. At the same time, consider having it increase healing received while active by some compelling amount, say 3%. Alternately, consider allowing Renew to benefit from crit chance, much like DoTs now benefit from.

Greater Heal: A glyph for this spell would be nice, particularly one which increased it's usage in raids (where it is currently largely ignored in favor of Flash Heal). Increasing the amount of mana returned in an overheal should be considered.

Divine Hymn: Most PvE priests use this in situations where nearby enemies are completely immune to the incapacitate effect. Consider a glyph which removes the incapacitate efffect but grants a raid-wide buff, like +haste for X seconds (does not stack with Heroism/Bloodlust).

The vortex graphic itself seems to interfere with the lightwell too. Might be worth mentioning.

Keep in mind that Blizzard tend to dislike "x is bad so make it do y and z and its good" if you have issues with an ability then that is generally what you should lay out, something like:
"Renew is weak because it is expensive and generally not competative compared to Flash Heal due to the benefits FH recieves." while providing numbers and such to illustrate your point where appropriate.
Pinpointing the issues talents or abilities have in order for Blizzard to understand the situation and decide what to do with it themselves will generate a much better response and understanding rather than cluttering up your concerns with the magical desires you have for your uber spell.

Things I think we all agree on so far:

1) Introducing yet another cooldown is not an effective change to make us cast CoH less. With this change, 3 out of 6 of our raid healing tools have cooldowns, the 4th is situational (PoH), and the 5th is highly inefficient (Renew). The 6th is Flash Heal. So basically, we're paladins with cooldowns.

2) Cooldown-based healing is a stupid idea. We're not dps classes, and we don't do a "rotation". We can't simply use an ability when it's off cooldown for maximum healing throughput. We're supposed to watch health bars, our own mana bar, our environment, specific tank health for GS usage, *and* cooldowns? It just makes healing the dumped on red-headed stepchild of raiding. No-one else has to deal with that much crap. Long cooldowns are fine; you use them in moderation, once, maybe twice a fight. Short cooldowns are stupid. PW:S having a cooldown is stupid. PoM having a cooldown is needed, but still obnoxious. CoH having a cooldown is a dumb solution to a real problem.

3) Renew needs major work and buffs, and on its own, if buffed, would mostly solve the overuse of CoH. Make it scale at the same level as Rejuv, same 3-second tick method, and we suddenly have an efficient, useful raid healing spell that doesn't snipe other people's heals. In fact, the only effective "spammable" raid healing tool becomes CHeal again, and shamans are actually learning to raid without spamming it.

4) Our Hymns need work. This is a long-term goal, but they're anemic and feel really insulting as the only new spells we get in WotLK (as holy).

My main concern for the moment is the stacking of Disc. Priest.
We are 2 Disc Priest in my guild (and often 0 Paladins). I know it isn't optimal at all ;-) But, would it be needed, I'd like to be able to heal the same tank as my the other Disc. Priest does. Disc Priest plays a lot with cooldown, and we loose a big part of our utility / healing when this buffs can't stack.
Grace reduction won't stack, I understand, ok.
PW:S is another problem. Not using it cripples the healing, but at least, we beneficiate all from the weakened soul debuff for renewed hope. And it's one cd every 15s only, for about 2000 more healing than a FH.
When you cumul it with the fact that DA doesn't stack at all, it's a big problem. I don't ask it stack with itself from one priest. That would be cool, but it is not my current point. I don't ask either that 2 different DA from 2 different priest combines in one giant DA with renewed duration. That could lead to exploits. But just that when I crit and have a DA, and that there is another DA already on the target, both can coexist. One take the absortion, then the second (I don't care about the order). But at least, I would'nt have the impression to do half the healing I shoud do when we are 2 disc. priest on the same tank.

My second concern is the stacking of Int, and the power of resplenishment (and potentially blessing of wisdom). Int is a too good stat currently for Disc. There is no point to take any other regen stat. So we stack Int. And when for some reason, you don't have any resplenishment (we have only one Sp, no retadin, and our only hunter is for the moment MM in our guild), you don't haveresplenishment, suddenly your regen decreases a fair bit. In raid 25, I hardly can have any mana problem. I ended Patchwerk with 60% mana, and no potion used yet, spamming flash heal all the fight on the MT3. But if in a raid 10, we don't have the sp, neither any paladin, then mana is suddenly a real limitation. I know I can use different gear for different cases, and I do it, but I'm not a hard-core gamer (we raid only twice a weak, but were trying ROS / Bloodboil when 3.0 hit live, starting months later the HL PVE in BC), and it's a pain to have different good sets (I don't even have a good primary set for the moment).

3rd concern is more a question : rapture and shields. Please either clarify the tooltip, or correct the talent so that it works based on priest mana, and not target. I would prefer the later, even with a reduction for keeping the global effect at the same level), because I don't like to differenciate healing based on wether the healed target has mana or not (and how much).

4th idea : give an AOE spell that is not group based. Make POH a group-targetable spell. It's range should not give too much trouble for group managment, and it gives a way to heal AOE damage for disc. (and for holy as well when COH is on cd). To keep holy as better AOE healers, one could make POH benefit from some holy talents (DP ? IHC ? ). That's fine. But I fear the day that we will have to split priest in different groups for some special fights (loatheb ? We haven't try it in 25 ). We have lot's of priest in my guild...

Circle of Healing: I am perfectly fine with the cooldown. It was the spamability factor that made it such a crutch for many priests and eliminating that is definitely the best choice of action. I do not agree with the suggestions of adding an arcane blast type mechanic to it at all. I love the smart heal aspect and would hate going back to the party only mechanic again.

Renew: I still use this spell very frequently but it does need a boost to it's coefficient. Our spellpower has almost doubled since BC yet how much renew heals for does not reflect that.

Divine Hymn: I love Divine Hymn but the cooldown is extremely harsh for the comparably little healing it does. The pvp mechanic on it is worthless as well. I would love to see the stunned portion removed and the cooldown cut in half. Being able to cast even 2 times a fight would make it so much more valuable.

Hymn of Hope: This helps our mana pool so little considering we have to channel it for 8 seconds and it is party only. Also, any damage will significantly reduce the amount of mana gained from it. My suggestion is to make it like Divine Hymn, affecting the 10 nearest raid members, and either increasing the mana gained by 50% or reducing the cooldown to 3 minutes, instead of 5.

Prayer of Mending: Overall, a fantastic spell, but it getting overwritten when having more than one priest in the raid significantly reduces it's efficiency. Obviously, having it stack (similar to hots) would be ideal but I realize the mechanic to get that to work properly would probably be pretty complicated. Mostly just voicing a concern on this.

Binding Heal: If this spell could be added to the Serendipity talent then it would be perfect.

What I would love to see -

Mass Cure Disease. Cousin to Mass Dispell and for fights like Heigan where if you only have 2 or 3 people who can cure disease you can actually enjoy the fight again.

Otherwise, I am good with the priest class currently. Still fun to heal with.

I'll jump in, even though i have only started healing since WotLK.

Roles in the Raid.

I think one issue that has been brought up, is "what makes us unique", and the answer of "our flexibility" doesn't seem to hold much water when comparing between specs. Yes, a disc priest is a great tank healer, but can struggle with group heals and or raid healing. Holy Priests are decent tank healers, but obviously shine on group heals, and just don't compare too well against Pally heals on tanks.

I think our tendency then has been to ask for something unique or something to make us more desirable than other healers. The problem is that this will tend to run against Blizz's "bring the player not the class" mentality. Priests are unique among classes in that we have 2 specs that are healing. I think if we really want to hold true to the idea of flexibility as our true strength in raids, then perhaps make it easier for disc priests to truly raid heal, and holy priests do a nudge better on tank heals. What i think this will entail is to improve some of our baseline abilities that play those roles.

That is why I do think that changes to PWS (such as removing weakened soul or cooldown), changing hymn mechanic, and improving renew will actually go a long way, and not just be seen as "fix this spell or that spell."

Buffing PWS as a baseline ability might help holy priests do that extra kick on Tank healing. Improving renew and hymns will make it easier for disc priests to heal raid-wide damage.

If we truly can manage to heal tanks and group damage regardless of spec, then we do have an advantage over other healers when it comes to learning encounters, experimenting and downing bosses. Now I happen to love the difference in play style between Disc and Holy, and i don't want those differences to change. But i don't think improving some of the baseline abilities will do that.

I enjoy both Discipline and Holy and have been switching between them a bit. My major frustration with Discipline is dealing with AoE damage in raids. Prayer of Healing is a great AoE healing tool in 5-mans but only marginally useful in raids due to the party restriction. The only other annoyance I run in to with Discipline is the internal cooldown on Power Word: Shield. Otherwise, Discipline is great.

My largest frustration with Holy is how much my greater heals end up getting sniped. As an example, let's say I see an off-tank at a 7k health deficit. I start winding up a greater heal. By the time I finish some resto shaman has already bounced a chain heal off them or a holy paladin has hit them with a holy light. As such I either need to stack large amounts of spell haste or resort to using flash heal -- but Discipline makes a much better flash heal spamming spec with Enlightenment and Rapture.

Renew: I am far from the first to mention this, but Renew has all but fallen off of my action bar. There are few cases where this is more useful than just casting Flash Heal unless I'm on the run. Even then, it's usually better to wait till I can stop and cast a Flash Heal instead unless that won't be possible for some time.

Power Word: Shield: The internal cooldown on this spell makes it a bit clunky. As it is, Discipline priests are already trying to manage their Penance cooldown while keeping an eye on Weakened Soul and Grace. The cooldown is short enough that I don't look at it or use a mod to track it, but long enough that it delays what I'm trying to do. E.g. PW:S -> Flash Heal -> (wait for CD) -> PW:S or PW:S -> ProM -> (wait for CD) -> PW:S.

Prayer of Healing: I alluded to this above, but the party restriction on this spell turns a great 5-man AoE healing spell in to a highly situational, frustrating-to-use AoE healing spell in raids.

Circle of Healing: The cooldown seems like a horrible idea for this spell. When I use CoH it's almost never cast just once. I hit it 2-3 times and then go back to ProM, FH, GH, etc. I never considered myself a CoH spammer, but any time I wanted to hit CoH I wanted to hit it more than once.

Question: Arguably adding a cooldown to CoH simply brings Holy in line with Disc. Penance is in many ways analogous to CoH - both are very powerful and essentially tree defining heals, and (once 3.0.8 goes live) both have short cooldowns to keep them from being spammed. If a cooldown on CoH is a bad idea, doesn't the same logic apply to Penance? And if not, why not?

Edit: Rooj's point below is fair enough. Penance is a great single target heal, but we have other viable single target heals. Alternating Penance with FH makes sense. CoH is a great AoE heal, but we don't have other viable AoE heals. Alternating CoH with PoH would be crazy in almost any circumstance I can think of. What I'm trying to get at here is that the core Disc heal has a cooldown, yet it still seems to work fairly well. Is the problem with a CoH cooldown on CoH that all cooldowns suck, or is that we're missing the tools we need to heal while CoH is on cooldown? It seem to me those are very different problems with very different solutions.

i don't think that analogy; Penance : CoH quite works.

Penance is essentially a much better version of GH and even FH. Without a CD, there would almost be no reason to use either of those spells at all, well perhaps to avoid turning or something. There really isn't an alternative to CoH, as PoH is still group restricted.

I've been reading the thread in question and some of the responses have been interesting, some amusing and some cause despair. Some of the issues are based on perceptions of the underlying game mechanics. I say perceptions because doing actual analysis is challenging and there are a lot of people pro or anti who prefer things to be more emotive than statistical.

This would be my summary of the "meat" from that long long thread.

a) In theory the "bring the player not the class" does not apply to raid healing. GC stated in the past that there will be sufficient healers brought that having niche specialists is fine. In practice though each class is expected to be able to heal a 5 man heroic instance and many of these encounters mimic the stresses on healing found in a raid environment. Thus each healing class has become reasonably well rounded so that each has the mechanics to heal a tank and keep multiple targets alive in a reasonably challenging environment.

b) In such an environment where there are 5 well rounded specs (2 priest specs) constituting the heal team for a raid a given healer becomes a more optimal selection if:
1 - They have a dominant niche advantage in a meaningful role, though this tends to shadow other specs out of this niche.
2 - Bring acceptable healing in all roles and have a good mechanical synergy with the niche class. For example HoT's or mitigation abilities working to assist tank healing.
3 - Bring acceptable healing in some or all roles and have enough secondary utility / buffs that not having a niche is acceptable.
4 - Have acceptable healing in all roles in an environment where this is the norm. This is the DPS within +/- 5% that was used as a heuristic in the wrath beta. In which case buffs also should not dominate / stack to the extent it is advantageous to stack a subset of the classes.

c) Effectively you can have either 1-3 or 4 in any environment where people are going to be selective about class balance.

d) The general assumption on the thread is that the healing classes are not balanced to equality. Indeed this was not a wrath design goal so that is hardly surprising. In which case the priests are identifying that a significant reduction in the power of CoH may be moving them from having a strong niche (priests were recruited on the basis of CoH) without there being another niche, a mechanical synergy or buffs unique to healing priests.

e) Discipline is mentioned as potentially having a mechanical synergy ("the mitigation healer") but there are concerns as to its efficiency, scaling, stacking and some flaws in how the mechanics operate.

So the fundamental question is what is the design goal for the post-3.0.8 Holy tree is. Are they the "all round" healer in an environment where the other classes are not well rounded or everyone is balanced? If not do they have a strong niche advantage? Do they have a mechanical synergy (unlikely since most of our spells are direct heals and interaction tends to result in over-healing)? Do they have unique buffs? If the answer to all those is no then it is possible to assert that game balancing has failed to the extent that one class is always the last selection. GC believes this is not the case, "Priests are fine". Many forum posters believe otherwise and a great many words are posted as a result.

In terms of analysis the problem is very complex. Partly because it is large, partly because it crosses class boundaries and partly because Ghostcrawler hasn't been tempted to describe his view of how the priest class fits in. Not knowing the design intent means it is very hard to say whether the mechanics are supporting the goal.

On Discipline:

The tree excels at - and feels most 'fun' to me when doing - fast, reactive tank heals rather than raw brute-force throughput. The ability to react quickly to deficits (or prevent predictable ones by pre-emptive PW:Sing), thus allowing Disc more flexibility than other tank healers. That is, even if my primary responsibility is the tank, in some fights (where tank damage is a bit lighter, especially in 10-mans) I can reliably raid-heal to an extent while reactively healing the tank, or can realistically focus on multiple tanks simultaneously. If tank damage is very high, I would rather play the role of smoothing out the large spikes (via mitigation and reactive heals as needed) than being the one to put the biggest numbers up on the tank (that's what the Pallies are for).

On fights like Sarth+3-25, for instance, I like having the flexibility to be primarily on the Sarth tank but to be able to throw heals on the other tanks (to keep Grace up and help the other healers if needed) without running the danger of losing the MT. (I don't always feel this is doable now.) The 3% DR and ability to smooth out big spikes in the other tanks I think would more than justify slightly lower raw throughput.

I think more effort needs to go into making Discipline able to be a good 'multiple-single-target' healer rather than push its throughput up to the level of a Holy Paladin. I also like the idea of having Disc be a bit more based around crit than Holy - currently there isn't quite enough benefit in the tree for crit.

I agree that the tree in general lacks throughput, but I'd rather see it tweaked in such a way that it can get around that (via more mitigation and better ability to focus on more than one target at once if necessary) rather than just being flat buffed (otherwise it plays very similarly to a Holy Paladin).

Some thoughts that may help with this (these are in no particular order and generally unrelated to each other):

- PW:S: Re-introduce a reduced GCD in addition to the BT effect, making it more realistic to use reactively. PW:S is fairly good as a proactive heal right now but as a reactive raid heal it's situational at best (unless you know they're going to be taking more damage) and as a reactive tank heal its amount of absorption isn't quite high enough that I can often justify putting it on a tank that's low over simply facerolling GH and Penance. Perhaps the GCD reduction could only occur when Penance is on CD (to encourage using PW:S -> Penance as an effective fast heal). PW:S could also be changed to scale with crit as well as spell power (making crit more enticing for Disc).
- Improved DS: As mentioned many times before, it's worthless. Going in the same direction as I just was, another option to improve PW:S would be to add an effect to Imp. DS to scale PW:S with a percentage of spirit - making spirit more desirable than it currently is for disc (and making MP5 vs. spirit more of a choice).
- Penance: Having a glyph or talent buff the crit chance of Penance would help quite a bit with its throughput. (I like buffing Penance better than buffing the tree's heals as a whole, as the cooldown on Penance forces you to think about its use and more often use it reactively.) Another possibility may be to have each tick of Penance have an x% chance to re-apply PW:S on the target if it's affected by Weakened Soul (once again, making PW:S -> Penance a more enticing emergency heal).
- In situations where raw healing throughput is needed, having a glyph/talent with a chance to remove Weakened Soul on GH hit (or a much higher chance to remove it on GH crit - I like this option better). This makes PW:S much more useful in situations where tanks are taking a regularly high amount of damage. (This would also more or less be without PvP side-effects as GH is almost never used in arenas.)
- If throughput is added to the tree, I'd rather see more passive crit than spellpower, as that boosts mitigation talents i.e. DA/Inspiration.

There have been many good suggestions about how to improve our various spells. I'm wondering though if we shouldn't look a little bit more closely at the utility Ghostcrawler associates with priests. There's a lot of talk about our big toolbox and our great platter of spells which is always at our disposal. That's all nice but it doesn't make much sense to me to identify issues with these tools when we aren't looking at the jobs we need those tools on.

There's no need to go in great length about the various encounters in the current state of the game but I'm pretty sure that quite a few of our spells are incredibly situational at best. From a holy priest standpoint, only very few of our spells are really good tools (when properly glyphed) and will be used in every encounter. PoM, Fheal, CoH. Those three are the big three which see heavy usage. Depending on the encounter we'll toss a few variations in there, some Gheals for Patchwerk, some Renews for Sapphiron maybe. Now, I believe that the Blizzard designers look at this and think something along the lines of:

"Look at these priests, they can adjust their spells depending on the encounter making them extremely versatile and useful to a raid since they can fill so many different roles."

While there's some truth in above it also hints at the issue, namely when we aren't playing specific encounters which require us to use certain spells we simply can forget that we do have those spells. Now, I'm quite aware that encounters are fairly simple at the moment and things can change in the next raid instance. But even when looking back into the Sunwell, which wasn't so long ago and was supposedly only for tough cookies, there were very few encounters in there where priests were really forced to make use of almost all the spells at their disposal. This has been going on for a while now.

In my opinion, Ghostcrawler isn't correct when he talks about our big toolbox. We don't really have that. Instead, priests in WoW are the equivalent to mechanics in the SnapOn tool world. We have tons of tools, yes. They're all shiny, too. But unfortunately we just look at them most of the time while we futz with our three tools we got from Sears since we don't really need to touch those shinies unless that crazy old lady brings in her clunky ancient Renault.

We need less fire and forget spells and encounters which challenge us to use close to everything at our disposal. We need a toolbox where we can reach in blindly and grab a tool which is useful to some extent. And mind you, I don't think this is on us as the players. Adjusting playstyles and forcing ourselves to use various spells over others is not the answer to this problem.

Blizzard gave us the tools now they need to provide use with meaningful ways to use them. Maybe not all of the time, but most of the time.

Please!

Hymn of HopeOne of the last big utilities that can't be brought by anyone but a single class are stacking mana returning totems. Priests already are among the lowest utility classes in the game,so i think it would be a good idea to bring the mana returned from the Hymn to similar levels as the mana returned from mana spring totem. Also the channeling shouldn't take much longer than the time a shaman needs to drop a totem or two, e.g. two or three gcds.

CoH The main reason why this spell is overpowered is its insane Health per second. Instead of adding the cooldown the amount it heals should be cut in half and the mana cost should be cut in half. This way would not change the Health per mana but it would bring Health per second down to reasonable levels and it would be easy to implement.

PoH That this spell is still limited to party only is a relict from old days which basically renders it useless in many 25 raid situations. Make the spell group targeting like the old CoH was.

PoM This spell is unbelievably strong when there is short timed raid wide damage and pretty average else. I'd like a mechanic that makes PoM automatically jump every 3 seconds, so it doesn't get trapped by the life tapping warlock all the time.

Disc: Flash Heal disc needs something to cast between Penance. A strong buff to FH for disc priests, so they don't end up as the 6s tank healers they are right now.

Inner Fire the charges only affect soloing and pvp. Unless Blizzard thinks that holy priests are too good at soloing, farming and pvp please remove them.

Divine Spirit One point for this is enough for the spirit and the spellpower. It should also be moved down to tier 1 or 2.

In general: Any mechanics like SoL proccing free FH would be welcome. GHeal or Fheal could reset renew for example. Targeting someone with CoH could make PoM jump.


edit:Encounter Design i would also like to add that the versatile healer,which also includes druids imo, role doesn't exist at the moment because there are no encounters that need versatile healers. Unless we see encounters which demand something like 4 -5 raidhealers out of 5 healers in p1 and 4-5 tank healers in p2 there won't be a versatile healer role. If you only need 2 raid healers and 3 tank healers throughout the whole boss fight people will bring the best 2 raid healers and the best 3 tank healers they can find. Not the versatile healers, unless they have no choice.

Brief points of mine:

Poisons: We definitely need a way to deal with these. It could be as simple as a Glyphed Abolish Disease also being able to remove a poison affect each tick. On that note, Abolish Disease should tick faster.

Renew: I think changing this to tick every 2 seconds would be an elegant compromise -- make sure it still scales better than it does now though.

Circle of Healing: I don't like adding more cooldowns. Make it cost more/heal a little bit more, so you reduce the general efficiency somewhat, but spamming it is not sustainable in any real form. Truth be told, I'd rather it go back to party-specific targetting as well-- it was already quite efficient in TBC that way. Making it smart-target was over the top and promoted even more laziness. I don't think it should be a bad thing if you hit the CoH button 3 times in a row -- you should pay a real cost in mana though. CoH spammers will quickly run out of mana and be forced to re-evaluate their healing decisions. Someone who is more well-versed in holy theorycrafting can figure out a better mana cost to move it from "one button wonder" to "situational spell in the holy priest's toolbox."

Hymns: Being looked at, but worth stating anyways. Hymn of Hope -- work in Shadowform, lower the channel time some. Divine Hymn is clunky at best. I'm unsure how exactly I'd want to see it changed, since priests in PvP get completely carved up at the moment. The cast time makes it unwieldy in that regard along with the shared CD with Psychic Scream.

Improved Divine Spirit: Largely useless. In fact I'd just remove this talent, and roll in any changes to the Divine Spirit spell itself -- which needs to be better all around.

Thankfully, they're changing DS, so we can just put a point in there about "thanks for listening". GC confirmed that the 21st->23rd point monstrosity in Disc atm is not going to persist past 3.1.

One thing I'd like to see:

Prayer of Mending: please make this proc off self-damaging abilities like Lifetap. At the moment, it only procs off what it perceives as environmental damage (like Shadow Word: Death), and can get "trapped" on a warlock who has tapped because the next tap does not proc the heal.

I have to disagree. Don't change PoH. It's only good because it's party-centric. Change Holy Nova to do something useful, and I'm onboard.

And as far as a cast-time reduction for GHeal: we have it, it's more than 0.5 seconds, don't mess with it. IHC is great.

Your idea about Inner Focus is grand, and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Another thing that is somewhat painful as a Priest, is that unlike Paladins (Holy Shock -> Holy Light, Judgement -> Spell Haste, Sacred Shield -> Flash of Light), Druids (Rejuv/Regrowth/Lifebloom/Wild Growth -> Swiftmend/Nourish) and Shaman (Earth Shield -> Lesser Healing Wave (Glyph), Riptide -> Chain Heal -> (Lesser) Healing Wave), Priests have no real combo moves. Discipline has PW: Shield -> Penance -> Greater Heal in the form of Borrowed Time.

We have a lot of tools, but they all overlap eachother, they do not complement eachother. Once you get Penance, you do not really want Flash Heal nor Greater Heal anymore, but you use them anyway... Because of a cooldown on Penance. Same goes for Holy. After you get Circle of Healing, you really no longer want to use Renew, Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing, Holy Nova. Not because the old spells are bad, but because they are worse versions of the new spell you got.

Ghostcrawler responded to some more questions that answer some of the things mentioned by people (here).

Try and think of other talents / abilities that exist when wanting modifications too... an 11 point Inner Focus which does -100% cast time/cost would cause uproar in comparison to Nature's Swiftness which is 21 points and "only" -100% cast time.

If PoH was smart targetting at 5 players only it would change nothing for 5 mans, probably be weaker in 10 mans but stronger in 25 mans though.

Given that all other classes have an instant-cast extremely-high-healing heal, I'm really not fussed if druids want to get cranky over priests getting NS. They buffed Lay on Hands so much in this expansion, we're the ones who are missing out now.

Of course, you could argue that Guardian Spirit is our NS / LoH. But we pay 51 points to get that ... so if you want to argue apples to apples ... 51 > 21.

One thing I have noticed about the early content is that the number of healers that can be used drop significantly as gear goes up.

In 10 mans two or even one healer may be all that is necessary, and even in 25 man naxx, i think content can be cleared by as few as 3-4 healers for most encounters.

I think this may be affecting our judgment. And I don't mean in terms of raid spots. What I mean is that right now, one of our primary complaints is how easy our heals are "sniped" by other classes. This may not be as much of an issue if encounters are differently tuned.

I think some of the views here and the community are: 1) hots are the best non-reactive heals, and our hot is just not up to par. PWS would be, but not with its current CD and weakened soul. 2) Our reactive heals (FH, GH), are much slower than pallies, and suffers from less throughput versus a shamans with the CoH nerf (?).

But if encounters are designed around requiring 5-6 healers, i wonder if sniping won't be as much of an issue at all. Our GH may be slower than a pally heal, but the tank may still really need it if topping off doesn't happen with a single heal from a pally anymore. Our non-reactive heals may not be as strong as the hots, but if a single hot no longer can keep dps or other classes topped of on its own, our heals would still be really needed. And the key of course, is that it really would be a positive to have a class that can handle multiple roles in healing during an encounter.

I guess a simpler way to make this point is this. Cross healing used to be something that was required to be a good group of raid healers, and right now i don't think this skill is needed until maybe Sarth 3-drake. When my guild goes into naxx with 5-6 healers, we barely bother assigning heals, the pallies know to heal tanks, the druids and shamans on group heals, we don't communicate much, and never tell each other when we need a regen break. Not because we are bad healers, but because it is completely unnecessary.

I am not saying we don't need changes, but i do think that we shouldn't focus as much on "sniping" from other healers, and rather focus on how to increase our flexibility between roles for both specs.

Constantius -- happy to point out the GC post, thank you for taking the time to create this thread on EJ.

I'm not going to address individual talents, but rather the conceptual issues involved. What GC seems to be pointing to is a lack of vision regarding the priest class.

Priest utility:

Priests need some form of raid buff equivalent to combat rez, heroism, totems, auras and blessings.

Power Infusion is a nice idea -- expand on it.

Hymns are a good idea -- fix them, make them more useful.

Holy Priest healing:

Conceptually, holy priest healing has always felt to me like playing a musical instrument.

A holy priest had a large array of spells (notes) to play, and could decide which spell to use at the proper time. A priest could find moments where they could rest for ~10 seconds and get a bit of mana back (a pause in the music), leaping back into the fray when the situation called for it. Playing a holy priest felt very natural to me.

Removing downranking changed this a bit; the number of notes I could play decreased substantially. However, adding more cooldowns to the class is a more dramatic and lasting change. With the CoH nerf, too many decisions for a holy priest will be dictated by cooldowns and random procs.

Holy priests are starting to be boxed into using a healing rotation in order to maximize their efficiency (Constantius hit on this a bit already). This makes them feel more like a DPS class. Personally, I don't like this change in playstyle.

I want my holy priest to have a wide variety of spells at his disposal at any moment, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. The skill of a holy priest should be demonstrated by their ability to use the right spell at the right time, not in their ability to manage a HPS rotation.

Discipline Priest healing:

This spec shows a lot of promise, but as it stands right now discipline HPS and utility is simply too low.

The discipline spec is is a cooldown-based class that is more suited to a spell rotation. This is necessitated by their spike healing abilities (having penance and PW:S available on demand would raise their HPS too much).

There is an inherent conflict for the discipline priest, however. They can choose to either:

1. Use their cooldowns whenever they're available, maximizing their HPS.
or
2. Reserve their cooldowns for spike damage, using relatively low HPS spells for the majority of their spellcasting.

Either the cooldowns need to be reduced on discipline spells like Penance and PW:S, or discipline HPS needs to be raised on 'bread and butter' spells like Flash Heal, Renew, Greater Heal and Binding Heal.

One other fundamental problem with the discipline spec is that mana is returned only on effective healing, but tank healing requires a substantial amount of overheal. Either discipline priests need more tools to reduce spike damage on multiple targets at the same time (as atrinitydream suggested), or a reduced mana cost on overheals while single target healing.

The last fundamental problem with the discipline spec is that they are the only type of priest that doesn't derive a secondary benefit from stacking spirit. Unless Blizzard intends to reitemize Tier 8 class sets specifically for discipline, they need to address this issue.