I don't understand a lot of the complaints about priests in general. Even here, where people are supposed to be more rational, a lot of stuff is being said about spells that don't need any help.

So what if you have wait 4.5 seconds before you hit another CoH (taking GCD into account). I haven't yet been in a situation (other than KT with heavy melee) where the raid would have been adversely affected if I hadn't cast another CoH immediately. I also don't agree that CDs somehow are bad for healing classes. I don't see any real support for that statement either beoynd "well obviously it doesn't work because healers shouldn't use rotations", which I don't think is an adequate enough reason.

Here are the things I think could use help:

Divine Hymn: It just stands out so much from the rest of the priest arsenal and feels clunky. You can't get more awkward than a 6 minute CD to do a mediocre healing affect when we operate usually on ~3-5 minute CDs max for spells that are much more useful than Hymn). However, I don't know how you improve this spell for PvE without effecting PvP. So while I'll just put this out there as something that needs to be worked on, I have no actual suggestion.

Renew: There's really no reason this can't be as good as Rejuv... really. The efficiency for this spell just sucks. Buffing this won't threaten druid territory, and would actually make it useful. This might fall into the category of "player's vision of the class vs. the dev's vision". This much is for sure: we miss renew. We grew up on this spell, we used all the time from lvl 1-60, then less so from 61-70, and have mostly stopped using it from 71-80.

Disc Tree: This has been mentioned elsewhere, but the Disc tree could some consolidation of talent points to make it a little less bloated, especially the bottom half. Not much, but the combining of a couple things here and there would make logical sense, I think.

I don't think priests need or should get abolish poison, per se. Priests need to be able to deal with poisons on themselves (for PvP balance), but not all four healing classes need to dispel poison for PvE balance.

I would be happy with "Glyph of Abolish Disease: When cast on yourself your abolish disease also attempts to remove poison effects".

Just some small idea which maybe others with more game design ambitions can expand on:

Hymns: A hymn by definition is something sung with the congregation to keep them from falling asleep. While I'm aware that this idea would be similiar to the lightwell dilemma and people not clicking I still think it could be fun to have hymns be a little bit more interactive. Maybe it would be possible to have hymns with some kind of radius or maybe it would be beneficial if more than one priest would do the hymn thing at the same time and therefore extending the radius of the original hymn.

Of course, it would have to be balanced and not horribly overpowered so we don't get into a priest stacking situation headache. Hmm hmmm hymn hmmm...

[e] Lightwell needs to change. How about making lightwell a beneficial area effect spell along the lines of an anti void zone? Everybody who runs through the well gets a heal until its charges are used up. No more pesky targeting change. And it would allow for fun games of "Let's cancel out the voidzone with a lightwell."

If you think cooldowns are a good idea, I suggest you think about the following:

1) Healers are already (of the 3 raid roles) the least likely to have time to pay attention to environmental cues. We live and raid off GRID (or your favorite variant).

2) Healers are the most needful role of a non-cooldown rotation, since we are the only role whose rotation changes dramatically second to second. Tanks use their cooldowns to build threat. They have a highest-threat-rotation, a "need range/RP/mana" rotation, and a "AHHH TROUBLE" sequence of buttons. DPS have a top-dps rotation, and (typically) a secondary rotation that does less dps in favor of mana/energy-for-kicking/whatever you want.

In both tank and dps cases, switching to a lower rotation does not mean the raid wipes. Less threat? Just ease off dps a bit, and you're fine. Less dps? Oh well, unless it's an enrage timer, no biggie.

But for healers? Less healing? People die. Chaos ensues. Raid wipes.

3) How exactly do you want to track all our cooldowns? It's becoming clunky. I now have to track a PoM cooldown (7 seconds), a PW:S cooldown (4 seconds), and a CoH cooldown (6 seconds). On top of that, I need to know how long until I can use Inner Focus again, what timer is left on my Shadowfiend, whether or not Hymn of Hope is up and so on.

On top of #3, I have to watch the environment (no dying to Churn or Shadow Fissures, now!), the tank health bars, the boss animations (for predicting spikes: Sarth and Malygos both do huge animations that are warnings), raid health bars, my own health, my mana pool, and use my abilities to heal the most needful target.

Healing is the hardest raid role. Adding cooldowns makes it harder.

[e] As far as poisons go: I agree. We have to be able to remove them from ourselves. The fact that the plate, mail, and leather-wearing healers can all remove poisons, but the cloth-wearing one cannot, in the new and improved "rogues do poisons" model ... is ludicrous. We're the most vulnerable to rogues, and we can't get away from them. Seems a little silly to me. Let us remove poisons, buff Abolish so it ticks on a 2-second interval instead of 3, and give PvP balance a couple more months of fun to see how it works out. We're still gib-worthy, but at least we might have some mobility again.

Not to mention the (mostly historical at this point) ultimate I-Win button of Viper Sting vs. Priests!

But who's to say that adding CDs would create rotations though? Not all fights are like Sapphiron and you won't have raid damage to heal every 6 seconds. Having a 6 second CD on CoH doesn't mean you'll be hitting CoH every 6 seconds. It just means that you can ONLY hit it every 6 seconds.

Also, giving Priests the opportunity to consistently remove Rogue poisons would be overpowered. We need abolish poison mechanics for viper sting, not rogue poisons. (Not that we shouldn't be able to remove them, say after getting them off us... but in no situation should we be able to run away from a rogue that is on us and not peeled).

A thought on Hymn of Hope - how about changing it to have the same effect as Mana Tide Totem, with a Bloodlust-like "cooldown debuff" on affected players? If it's buffed to that level, I think I could deal with an 8 second channeling time. This would be a pretty solid solution to the lack of priest utility, in my opinion. (One more utility spell wouldn't hurt.)

[e] The Hymn of Hope change should probably be deep enough in Holy so that Shadow can't pick it up. You could argue that Disc needs the utility too, but they do at least have Power Infusion...

When you need CoH, you need more than 1 of them. That's almost a truism. I very rarely cast 1 CoH in a vacuum. I cast two of them back-to-back to get 4k healing in ~ 1.5 seconds. Or I cast 3 or 4 of them to spread healing around a large clump of people (who've just landed post-Vortex on Malygos, for example).

Cooldowns are still a bad thing. I don't know why you think they aren't. There are dozens of ways to have nerfed CoH spam without introducing cooldowns. They just took the lazy route.

At the risk of getting laughed at....

A couple of ideas for deep talents/abilities for disc and holy priests that can help bridge the gap between group and single target healing.

I realize that they are unlikely to implement completely new abilities and much more likely to just tweak existing ones. But, hey, better to ask, and get told no, then never to have asked.

1) A mid to deep disc talent, that creates a similar PWS effect on an area, much like Anti-Magic Zone, but with all dmg. Large mana cost, and decent cooldown.

2) A mid/deep holy ability that causes direct heals, such as GH or FHs to increase magic resistance by 10-25, which stacks 4-5 times.

POH

I know Blizz wants to move away from party restrictions, and I believe this will eventually happen. However I am concerned this will become the new spam spell. I do support the removal of party restrictions, it just makes sense looking at it from a raid perspective.

Inner Focus

Honestly, Id take this in place of light well. Forget the 100% cost, forget the crit, just give me a talent that makes my spells instant. Be nice now, keep the CD in line with NS. This would be amazing, I can think of tons of senarios to utilize this.

Greater Heal

Perhaps its just me, and my lack of confidence in haste. (I have approx 200) I just dont use this spell anymore to the point of it being moved to a shift key binding. Last night we ran 25 Naxx with no COH, just to get some ideas as to the impact the COH nerf is going to make. I still found myself not touching GH. I want to use it, but even without COH being used in the raid, GH was still left for the most part on the bench.


Great info as always.

If PoH is changed to be a smart-target 5-person heal, I still don't think it'd become a "spam spell" due to the prohibitive cast time and mana cost. It would, however, be very useful in several situations - cleaning up after Decimate? Post-Vortex healing?

In a 10-man raid, there might not be other healers. Your second healer may be a paladin that really has no tools available for this situation. You very well may not have a third at all, and I don't think 2-healer compositions are unintended at all. I'm definitely on the boat that CoH is just too small of a heal to have a cooldown on it. Double the mana cost and double the healing done (or other numbers along a similar concept) and we've got CoH where it probably should be in the cooldown era.

Cooldowns: There's an obvious reason that cooldowns needed to be introduced. Overhealing has become very cheap and common place. We no longer have a reason to be careful about our choices due to cost, the only considerations are throughput and speed. None of the common priest spells are prohibitively expensive, so a high throughput spell like CoH is going to be chained; there's nothing stopping it. This has lead to the logical conclusion that healing is just another DPS race. Do as much HPS as possible to the people taking damage. How are normal DPS classes regulated? Powerful abilities are put on cooldowns. I see a problem with this, however, and I like the following metaphor: You don't give a man a toolbox, and tell him that he can only swing his hammer once every minute, but then, the man isn't going to use his hammer when he needs a screwdriver. Give a class enough abilities of similar power that they really are intended for situational use, and the spamming problem would go away. The answer to this may be to reduce the power of CoH, while leaving it at a higher cost, leaving it on par with some of the other abilities in the priest arsenal. I don't know the right answer here, but it seems like cooldowns are going to leave people lacking the right tool at the right time. Healing shouldn't become a rotation, unless the raid/tank is taking absolutely consistant damage.

Glyphs: I see large gaps in the glyph selection as it is now, and I think it contributes to the perception of a priest's role. Currently, if a priest is aiming for versatility or raid healing, there are many selections for glyphs. The holy tree has 3 specific glyphs that a discipline priest cannot use, Spirit of Redemption, Circle of Healing, Lightwell. Holy Nova and Prayer of Healing are obvious raid healing choices. Renew is largely used as a raid healing tool, and the glyph prevents it from being sniped as much. When it comes to tank healing, there are no obvious choices that really improve throughput. Shield gives extra healing, and is an obvious choice for discipline priests. Flash heal improves mana efficiency for a frequently cast spell, but doesn't help throughput. Renew helps a little, getting more ticks on the tank faster, but these can be lost if you keep the tank topped off. There are no glyphs that improve mitigation or enhance the discipline talents. It gives the impression that the tank healing priest is still not finished.

Role: I read an article on WowInsider that summed up my feelings pretty nicely. Priests are doing great in 5 and 10 man content, it's 25 mans that seem to be a problem with regard to role. You need versatile healers in smaller groups, but in large groups, you're always going to slot your niche healers first, and then your priests second. Yes, we're healers, but some of us want to be tank healers, and some of us want to be raid healers, right now we don't feel like we can really compete in either field. These problems over role wouldn't exist if the community didn't like the class. We'd all reroll other classes if that was the case.

I could agree with that. If CoH healed for 4k, and was on a 6-second cooldown, I'd be ok with it. Because then I'd be able to make a conscious choice that I needed 24k healing, and use it. It wouldn't be every 6 seconds, so the cooldown wouldn't do much except prevent me from healing through something that isn't meant to be healed through.

Double the healing, double the mana cost, triple (ish) the cooldown. Fine solution. Just the cooldown? Stupid solution.

I could probably agree to that too. The main point here is that one priest should not be able to top off a 25 man raid (which i can do after a vortex if I had mana to burn), and CoH should not be doing ~80% of a holy priest's healing in 25 man raids (which it does for me, for a full naxx clear). It needs an HPS nerf while maintaining the efficiency, in a way that also results in priests not spamming it. The suggested solution would probably accomplish all of that.

Hi there, I have been reading EJ for a long time now but this is my first real effort to become an active member of the community and post.

In general the previous posters have addressed the major concerns of our class; my goal is to propose a change to the Hymn system that will give them more functionality and add a new element to playing a priest.

Make Hymn's function similar to warrior battle stances or DK's presences. You would be able to have only one hymn active at a single time and they last for, say 2 minutes with a cooldown on them so you could not switch mid fight.

Hymn of Hope:
Chance on successful heal to restore 1% of healers total mana.

Divine Hymn:
Increases spell power by 60 and has a chance on successful cast to heal 2 additional players next to the target for 10% (similar to the Paladin glyph)

Then maybe add some new hymn's to replace Lightwell and Improved Divine Spirit.

Hymn of Sanctified Mind (Replaces Lightwell talent)
Reduce the cooldown on all instant cast spells by 2 seconds (CoH, PW:S) and chance on casting any instant spell to increase haste by 5% on all of the casters spells for 8 seconds.

Hymn of Divine Spirit (Replaces IDS)
When active increases spirit by 80 and 60% chance to give the raid 5% haste on successful critical casts.

I came up with the numbers capriciously and was just tinkering with this new Hymn design and was wondering what you guys think.
Pretty much everything else has been addressed by previous posters already, however I would like to add that we need a new CCing spell in Arena's because Divine Hymn currently is only viable in limited situations.

I also agree with Nid, too many CD's = a terrible idea in PvE healing, by making the hymn's a passive thing they free up some of our concerns while still buffing us. It would also allow us to consider before every fight, hmm do I go with mana regen here, increased AoE heals, maybe more through put, ect.

Being restricted to so many CD's is a valid concern. Its the whole intent behind how healing should work. We can heal predicable damage, but we need spells that allows us to heal unpredicable/burst damage. AGREED.

Increasing the healing done to COH, as well as the mana cost is a reasonable solution to the 6's CD.

If I may suggest, you should probably stay away from suggestions like "It'd be cool if we had auras." I know the post was well intentioned, but the feeling that I get from GC in his post is that in general the devs are happy with priest design. He was more responding to sentiment among the priest community rather than coming to the forum of his accord. They're really not trying to do a redesign here, just trying to get a feel of what priests think they're lacking.

With that in mind, making suggestions like "Renew is a useless spell 90% of the time" can be helpful, while suggesting huge redesigns like adding auras to the priest class will probably just drive the devs away. In a similar vein, I don't know that "CDs don't work for healers" will have much effect when expressed to Devs who have alloted priests with plenty of CDs already, and thus expressing their view of class design.

I'm hoping there can be some more critical discussion on Renew here. It used to be a spell I could rely on in TBC, not only for its efficiency, but also for the way fights were designed. It's a spell that I would love to use once again as a difference-maker between good and bad priests, as it used to be.

I'm concerned that simply improving Renew's coefficient will not change anything. I avoid Renew not really because it's inefficient, but because it simply does not have the opportunity to tick in an environment predominated by instant heals (which is what WOTLK is all about). I still cast it during raids once in a while to figure out when a three-second tick time on Renew ever really gets a chance to happen, and it rarely ticks. When it does tick--talented and glyphed--it ticks for 2200 or so. So if you only improve the coefficient, you get a Renew that potentially ticks for much more, but still never actually gets a chance to tick. The coefficient is not the answer.

The other issue is not with the spell itself, but with the fights we have available in WOTLK. In TBC, damage was slower, heals were slower, and Renew had more opportunities to tick (and tick it did). We brought more healers to raids and we -still- got individual healing assignments. I could put Renew on two tanks during Illidari Council and almost every tick would count, and no one else was really sniping those heals. The biggest issue facing a Renew Renaissance would be that as long as the content is easy (or the damage so bursty that you can't afford a GCD for Renew), and we're bringing a low number of healers already (four or five), that Renew's problems stem from an overall design issue new to WOTLK and not one of spell power scaling. I'm honestly not sure how Renew can ever compete in a world of instant heals unless you have much, much more to heal.

I thought of the same thing when the most common concern was about when you need to CoH it's generally needed to be cast more than once. However the whole intent was to weaken AoE healing so compensating for the CD with higher throughput works counter productive to their main concern.
You(/generic Priest) would also feel 'forced' to use CoH every CD if it did a 4k instant heal on multiple targets even if only one or two people really needed it.. which is somewhat the same issue as now.

You never know, GC already stated they are looking for a way to rework Hymn's (they are on his list of priorities) since they seem to be fairly useless ATM.

But as far as current in-game mechanical changes, I would personally like to see some sort of change done to Binding Heal in a PvE atmosphere. Granted its amazing in PvP, but currently it just occupies space in my tool bar for raiding (granted this may be due to CoH in its current state)

Addressing the issue of cooldowns to a developer, I would summarize and say that:

1. Numerous short cooldowns is new to the holy priest class, and it is not a fun or welcome change.

2. Cooldowns should be limited to abilities which affect the raid in a meaningful way. Healing six people for ~10% of their total health is not very meaningful.