I don't think that's it at all. I think people are realizing that the problem with a cooldown is that when you want to cast one CoH, you generally want to cast two or three, then stop. That's not really facerolling; that's the same way you used CoH pre-3.0. So you see people suggesting alternatives which would retain the ability to cast it maybe 2 or 3 times in succession before you would have to stop using the spell for a short period of time.

CoH being by far our most mobile heal is also an issue with the cd. There are lots of situations where I'd like to be able to move, and someone needs a heal right now, and currently CoH is the only thing I can deliver. No one spams CoH currently for long, but we do cast a couple times in succession. This is handy, but too strong apparently. The real downside of the CD is that it is very restrictive to our options. With a disc spec, you have options when penance is on CD, PWS+a GH is a very nice throughput in place, and you can always FH. There is no current alternative to healing someone while moving, nor to healing more than one person who is not the priest.

Sarth 25.3 is a prime example of where you have so much going on a lot of the time that CD watching is 1)Very hard, and 2)Raid threatening. I just looked at the wws for our kill this week, and CoH is just 35% of my healing, but I can pretty much guarantee I didn't cast them singly when I used them.

There's a lot of good stuff in the thread, but the dramatic reinventing of the Hymns is probably a bit beyond the scope of the practical.

On Lightwell: the biggest block to lightwell is not a range for clicking. It's not the amount that's healed. It is simply that you are asking DPS classes to stop DPSing and heal themselves. This is fine for certain very specific fights, but as a rule it goes entirely against every concept of raiding that DPS is expected to abide by. DPS is expected to do damage and not stand in shit, and occasionally watch out for themselves. They aren't trained to think about whether they're 4k down and will need a heal soon and then actively heal themselves.

Yes, you can train your DPS to do this - but it just doesn't work well as a concept.

I would much rather have lightwell work automatically and be activated by the priest. If you like, think of it as a second form of prayer of healing or holy nova, where it can be deployed at a point and in the future can be 'told' to heal the 10 lowest people in range and then goes away. If you like, people can also still click on it for bigger heals (and this would remove a charge). This keeps the general feeling of a deployed heal that revolves around situational positioning but removes the interaction that DPS has with it that makes it so fundamentally flawed. It would work well for certain fights - Malygos vortexes, for instance, would be great, as you can set it in the center and activate it right after a vortex. It would be flawed in others. But at least it would give priests another raid healing tool, and it could be used on the go.

This is something I've been trying to get accross on the forums. Every time another healer brings up that priests will no longer be able to "eat chips, while casting CoH", I've tried to get this accross to them and GC. They biggest reason we want to cast it a couple times is 1) due to its amount healed and 2) to get a SoL proc.

I believe I've read on EJs a poster mentioning you would have to go from 25% crit to around 40% to get the same amount of procs.

But Nid is right, its hard getting Ideas accross on the forums, you should see how long I've been trying to show priests how good binding heal is. Some priests are actually complaining about binding heal...

(e) My favorite part is when I had a priest trying to tell me anytime they could cast a binding heal, a PoH was always better to cast.

To the detractors, it's important to point out that spell-changes help our roles too.

For example tweaks to Divine Hymn and Lightwell can affect our stackability and our ability to manage raid healing without overly relying on Circle of Healing.

Tweaks to Renew allow us to better heal periodic damage; something Druids excel at and will always excel at. But in recent years Shamans have become quite wicked at such things. They are however restricted to one target, but Earth Shield and Riptide are awesome.

A high coefficient and better efficiency on Renew also makes it a suitable spell to use in place of CoH.

These changes help us overall in better being "Gap healers" and filling roles while giving us unique tools.

Second, there is a definite cool-factor in everything. Come on tell me with a straight face you guys weren't disappointed to hit level 80 and find out our only new spell was a half-ass concept that seemingly doesn't work. Even though I level'd as shadow, from 70 to 75 I looked forward to hitting 75 everyday just to get Mind Sear to play with; it was cool. Ditto getting Shadowfiend back in TBC. Or Prayer of Mending.

If you can't make/design a good spell then maybe it's better to not design one at all. Don't half-ass things. Just to illustrate a point; I could whine about Divine Hymn - how pretty much everything that breaks fear also breaks incapacitates; however Psychic Scream also buys us time by moving people away and does not have the annoying "target takes 40% less damage" component to it. Could then point out Psychic Scream is instant and on an enormously shorter cooldown. Can use Psychic Scream while holy is locked out.

It's not so much a wish-list of "Hey, make this spell better just cause"; it's more of "hey this spell feels half-assed and unfun, I think it's broken". People pointing out Renew needing a better coefficient or needs to work with more talents isn't necessarily a wish-list, it's saying "Hey, this spell is broken [and it has an important role to my class's design] and this is why it's broken".

On a slightly related topic... has anyone noticed while homogenization has made other classes become more priest-like, priests haven't gotten all the nifty things our healing-cousins have gotten? Shamans got their HoTs and instant/mobile spells. Druids got their flash heals. Cool. I am NOT detracting for that or even whining. Paladins absolutely needed a way to deal with raid-wide damage. But while they got heals that encroached on ours (/whine and god does Sacred Shield annoy the hell out of me /end whine) we never got the buffs or utility to encroach on them.

We still don't bring the battle-res, the buffs, the innervate, the totems... or even some of the overlooked things (if CC was important, druid healers can absolutely entangle things). I suppose my short point is; while I feel like they've taken away from priests, they haven't really given us anything in return (and when they did give us something new, Divine Hymn, it feels completely half ass'd). (P.S. I absolutely feel the Developers forgot about Renew; but also spent their time giving Shamans and Paladin HoTs).

I heal as a Discipline spec, and so my suggestions are mostly based around that spec and what I feel could be done with it to make them a little bit more appealing to play in general.

Hymns

I would change hymns so they function nearly identical to Heroism/Bloodlust. However, instead of a focus on damage, I'd make the focus be on a more defensive buff.

The hymns could be identical in length and cooldown as well as keeping the debuff they grant (like Exhaustion) the same length. The cooldown on them could be 8 mins with a 4 min debuff preventing another hymn. They could cost roughly 25% of your base mana and be instant cast.

For example:

Hymn of (Increased Healing)
Increases healing received by raid members by 50% for 30 seconds.

Hymn of (Damage Reduction)
Decreases damage taken by raid members by 20% for 30 seconds.

Hymn of (Mana Restoration)
Restores 1% of raid members' base mana per second for 30 seconds.

Hymn of (Shielding)
Places a shield absorbing 30% of each raid members' max hp. Lasts 30 seconds.

Obviously all the numbers would be looked at a little bit closer, but I think this is a pretty neat and fun change to hymns. The 8m cooldown and 4m debuff would be just like shaman, so you'd only need 2 priests to take advantage of the effect for every debuff period. We already have Razuvious in 25 man Naxx requiring 2 priests, so I think it's safe to assume that any 25 man guild would be bringing 2 priests to a raid.

What about Divine Hymn?

Rename it and remove the heal component of it and lower the cooldown on it possibly. It would still serve as some quick CC so we wouldn't be losing that part of the spell or functionality.

Talent Specific Changes

Renewed Hope
Rework the talent to lower the duration of weakened soul by 2/4 seconds per rank. Also have it lower the cooldown of PW:Shield by 2/4 seconds per rank.
Borrowed time
Leave the bonus to PW:Shield coefficient, but remove the haste bonus on next spell cast and replace it with 1/2/3/4/5% crit for 15 seconds after casting a PW:Shield.
Enlightenment
Leave the increased stam and spirit, but replace the spell haste so that it scales with spirit. Something like increasing haste rating by 3/6/9/12/15% of your spirit.

Divine Spirit

The spirit buff is fine, the spell damage bonus is a joke. Just add spell damage to the buff equal to the amount flametongue totem adds and remove the improved talent.

Well, I think you're both right and wrong. The beauty of CoH is it's spammability. I'm not saying that the only purpose of CoH is to cast it repeatedly and cast nothing else. But in almost every instance where we currently use CoH, we have to use a couple at a time, then go back to other spells. An arcane blast type mechanic of increasing the mana cost each cast would really help stop spam, but would still mean we can cast 2-3 at once, which is what is needed.

This post is so right it hurts. Buffing and changing spells is fine but before anything when designing spells for healers blizz need to read and follow the above.

Ghostcrawler has previous pointed our their dislike for this kind of mechanic though (here).

I do not believe anyone has thought of a combination of Blizzards desired cooldown and players preferred arcane blast debuff system.
The old Emerald Dragons use a breath mechanic which debuffs players, increasing the cooldown of their abilities by 10 seconds if they use them while this debuff is active (stacking so if they do not let the debuff expire you end up with huge cooldowns).

If after using CoH/WG you had this form of debuff (say 6 second duration, 10 second added cooldown) applied to the Arcane Blast mechanic it would result in letting players use a spell once with no issue, using it a second time in quick succession would result in sticking a cooldown preventing further use for 10 seconds, but using it a second time after the debuff expired (6 seconds) would result in no change.

Naturally this still assumes Blizzard agree that one cast is not enough and/or that Ulduar encounters are not balanced around the cooldown but it provides an ability for players to decide if they want to front end two CoHs and accept a blackout period after or simply wait and keep it spaced out.
It keeps Blizzard desire to stop CoH being used so frequently because you cannot ever exceede 2 uses per 12~ seconds no matter how you decide to manage it by assuming a window of 12 seconds where you cast two spells rather than 6 seconds where you cast one (end result should be the same).

Lots of the ideas previous posted I would agree with. As a healing CL for a guild with few (only 1) Resto Shamans but plenty of Priests and Druids I have some concern with how my team will manage AOE intense fights going forward once the nerf to WG/COH hits - but we will manage. Overall, I am happy with my Priest but there are little things that bug me or seem unfair.

GC's comments about Priests not being a Pure Healing class due to the viability of the Shadow tree will hopefully do wonders for our community and remove the little devil over our shoulders telling us that we should be the best healer as we are somehow more Pure than our healing team mates.

COH
Currently I bring my Priests (all Holy) to the raid as raid healers. My main concern as that whilst COH is off cooldown - we are godly at AOE (too good) but when it's on cooldown our tools to combat raid wide damage is limited and suddently for 4.5 seconds out of every 6, (excluding POMs) a Paladin becomes a superior raid healer, able to Flash faster and still healp heal the tank with BOL. I don't want to be godly for 1/4 GCDs and then sub-par for the remaining 3/4 GCDs. When the patch hits, what do I do with my Priests and Druids?
Additionally, I hate the idea of a CD on a healing spell but 6 seconds seems rather arbitrary - a 7 second CD imo would have been better as it would work better with WG's total HOT time and Lifebloom, as well as working better with 7 second POMs. This would help Priests and Druids better use these spells and mentally/intuitively time them without the need for CD monitors. Not done the math but I'd have thought a 7 second CD would work better with a little bit of Haste by allowing the Priest to get in an extra spell when having to chain cast. Please don't flame for suggesting nerfing us more - just picking thoughts out of my head.
As a healing CL I am slightly glad at the nerf as it might allow me to bring more of my healers into each raid and so I get less people moaning at rotating spaces and get them more gear and experience.

Renew
I love this spell and it is on my cast bar and I use regularly on the tanks as a little buffer. I do this more out of tradition, however, as I have noticed that the power of this once great spell has diminshed. I would love to see this spell buffed either through increased throughput, ticks every second or a secondary beneficial effect - similar but different (and more powerful!!!;-}) to Druid's Replenish (but why need for Druids then huh?). Also, having more talents (in Disc as well as Holy) effect this would be great. Maybe a Glyph of Circle of Healing (or 20/40/60/80/100% chance added on to Divine Providence) that refreshes the duration of Renew on any target that you COH - that would definitetly get me using Renew a lot more often as a raid heal.

LOLwell
I really feel sorry for this spell - I love the idea and graphic of this spell but never spec it because the people I raid with never use it - except one Warlock (out of many) when lifetapping. This is a spell that is an ideal candidate for Blizzard's much loved smart healing. Let Lightwell maintain its current usage (people click to heal themselves) - but if the Priest that casts it clicks on it - it sends a golden Holy bolt of Lightwell Renew healing at the person in the raid/group that needs it most. Whilst this would prevent the Priest from using Lightwell for herself - it would really help make this spell something that Priests would want to spec and would want to use. We are healers and we want control of our own spells.

Desperate Heal
I'm a Night Elf Priestess so I never used this spell before the removal of Priest racial spells - btw I think you could have done something amazing for the Priest class by instituting a Faith system - and when I first saw this in our new Holy Tree as an 11-pointer I was initially disappointed - another situational spell with a cooldown. However, I have come to really like this spell but would like it to do something more. From a PVP point of view, having it remove all poisons/curses and pyhsical debuffs would be great and would really help my lvl 80 well-geared Priest survive those pesky lvl 60 Rogues . Maybe have the first bounce of POM always remove a Poison, Curse or Physical debuff.

Greater Heal
Along with COH, this was once my bread and butter spell thoughout BT and SWP (Ranks I, III, IV & VII). Except for Patchwerk, I rarely use this spell - it's too slow and cumbersome and liable to snipes and massive OH (Serendipity helps a lot here - great talent). I like what you done with IHC and the Druid's Healing Touch Glyph - please do something - every crit reduce cast time by 1 second for 10 secs? - though that clashes with IHC. Something that makes me want to use this spell.

POH
The party-wide restriction goes against WOTLK design goals. I read that GC would prefer to work on HN over POH but I would love to see POH as a smart heal - always healing and centred on the Priest with a similar HPS and HPM as Chain Heal and this would give us an on-damand raid heal - which is distinct to CH and has some disadvantages to it (Priest always healed so potential 20% loss of HPM/HPS when Priest has not taken damage and has a 0.5 longer cast time).

Holy Nova
I rarely use Holy Nova during raids but would love to see a Glyph or (High-end Holy) talent that gives critical heals the chance to give the Priest and the person healed +50% movement speed for 10-15 seconds and critical strikes against enemies a 5-10 knockback effect. This would give Holy Priests some much needed survivability for PVP.

Divine Hymn
Attempts to do too much - I like the AOE CC and the AOE Heal but not in the same spell and not on a 6 minute CD

Hymn of Hope
8 second channel not effected by Haste is just too long to be useful and I don't like the party only restriction (now that Blizzard don't want party to be important within a raid). Revert it back to the old Draenai racial and instead of being party-specific have it always cast on the Priest and it smart targets 4 others in the raid that are in range that have the lowest % mana. This mechanic should also be implemented for things like Vamp Embrace and Shamans' Water Totems like Mana Tide.

Wipe Prevention Mechanic
Druids have BR, Paladins and their DI and Shamans with their self rez. The ability I love most that WOTLK brought was Shadowmeld - it's great and I use it in 100 different situations. NE Priests now have some (unrelaible in some encounters) form of wipe prevention but would love to see Priests of all races have something in this area.

If they change Holy Nova, I would like to see it NOT be a smart raid heal, but rather "heals nearest 5 people and damages all nearby enemies in 10 yards".

That way, they won't have to rebalance it (like a quote from Ghostcrawler claimed) for raids, and it would allow you to heal who you want (not who "needs it").

Got busy yesterday, didn't have time to post a compilation. I'll get to it today. Lots of good ideas, at least, and we *do* know that some Blizz people read EJ. Maybe they'll just read this thread and save me the time.

[e] I know this is off-topic, but I just saw this post on the WoW:Healing forums, and had to share it ...

/FACEPALM^Googleplex

Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can't help being stupid. - R.A. Heinlein

Seems I'm still in time, and considering the futility of argueing on the Blizzard forums (let alone, the European ones), this might indeed be the most productive option we have

First some more general points:

Positioning of Priests wrt other healers: Aka, our 'competitive' position. At the moment, with CoH in its current state, we have no problems putting out a high amount of effective healing. (It's even a bit easy, it might be argued) Going by the comments from GC however, it is Blizzards intention post-3.08 for Paladins to be the strongest single target healers and Shamans to be the best raid healers. Considering our lack of utility (see below), the only thing we still have going for us is our supposed versatility. This advantage has however mostly eroded as well, due to Blizzard handing many of the tools classes missed during the past two expansion packs. We have a big toolbox, but a considerable amount of tools is of questionable quality, and I'd say a Druid is no less versatile than a priest is. Shamans and Paladins might not be quite as flexible, but this gap is far less pronounced than it used to be.

It appears to me that Blizzard intends Disc to be solid single target healers, but not as good as Paladins, whereas Holy Priests should be good raid healers (worse than Shamans) and even more than Disc, jack of all trades. This works well for 5 mans, and even in 10 mans might have a place. The problem however is, that as raid groups get bigger, players specialize more and more. Versatility, being a jack of all trades, being a hybrid, are all descriptions which become less and less desirable as raidsizes increase. Having a class which is mediocre at multiple things is a concept which already failed horribly in vanilla WoW; it's kind of ironic that 3 years later the former 'hybrids' are now 'pure' (specialized) healers whereas the formerly considered 'pure' healing class (I know Blizzard no longer considers us that, but we were back then) are now basically healing 'hybrids'.

I personally don't like being positioned like a jack of all trades with no utility. I want to add something to the raid in which I feel competitive, and not like I have to put in more effort than another class to achieve the same thing. Not because I want to be lazy, but because in that case the raid is better off with an equally skilled player of that more effective class. For this reason, in my view, the design philosophy should be changed into Disc priests being equally good (but no better) single target healers as Paladins, and Holy Priests being equally good (but no better) raid healers than Shamans. For justification, in basis the same arguments can be used as those utilized by hybrid classes argueing the need for their specs to be able to tank/dps/heal competitively well (and which they have a good point in specialized raids). We can only use one spec at the same time, and we are equally good and no better than them. Those acting as if this would be the end with Dual Spec of their raid spots forget the unique utility other classes bring to the table. (As well as how this argument is constantly be shown to be wrong in the DPS realm) This way could turn the Priest's current weakness of two intertwined and fairly lacklustre talent trees into a strength with the appearance of Dual Spec. The Priest signature ability could be to switch between being a strong and competitive single target and raid healer, while not exceeding the capabilities of the other specialists in these fields. It would be a nice way of implementing the 'Masters of Healing' lore concept as well as versatility in a way which by no means makes other healers irrrelevant or less desirable, while also getting rid of the undesirable jack of all trades label.

Utility: Raid utility as I mentioned above is something Priests seem to strongly lack. We provide a Fortitude buff (assuming the Shadow Priest didn't bring it, though SPriests aren't as required as they used to be), Shadow Protection on a small subselection of fights, as baseline. On top of this Disc brings some added utility (Spirit, PS, PI) which is decent but I'd still not find quite up to par (maybe once they improve (I)DS, like GC hinted at), and Priests have some very situational utility spells in Mind Control (which is normally either mandatory or not needed at all) and Shackle Undead. Compared to what other classes bring to the table (battle rez, blessings, totems, bloodlust, the whole list which has been repeated a thousand times), it just feels our lack of utility is an anomaly from the past. In the original WoW, Priests were clearly the superior healers, and the hybrids had to compensate by offering group utility. They didn't like this (and had a point, since you only take so many mediocre healers for utility spells), and because of this got buffed strongly in their healing abilities (performing superiorly in their specialized fields and getting more and more versatile) while retaining their extra utility. These days, there is zero reason for Priests to bring less utility to the table than their fellow healers. I constantly see it argued on the forums how some of the aforementioned stuff doesn't stack and as such it's not very important because it's there anyways. Nobody has been able to argue then however why it would be such a problem for priests to receive utility as well. I rather hate the situation where all healers tend to bring something to the table which improves the other healers (ToL aura, Mana Spring, BoW come to mind), whereas I don't really bring anything which enhances their abilities as Holy Priest. As I mentioned above one way to solve this could be turning priest versatility into a proper asset as detailed above; another option would be to give Priests buff(s) which are currently unique. (Blessing of Kings, Bloodlust, etc., fairly significant buffs which have no counterpart from any other class yet)

The 'fun' factor and talent quality: I personally feel Blizzard didn't do a very good job in this aspect this expansion pack. The removal of downranking removed a lot of tools from my toolbox, I got zero useful trainable abilities for my primary role, whereas my pinnacle talent happens to be an 'oh shit' button. (A very solid one, and that's no problem in itself; just that if all you get for the entire expansion is an 'oh shit' button, that's a bit underwhelming.) Contrary to other classes, some long time annoyances didn't get removed (Inner Fire, Meditation come to mind), talents hardly got condensated (either combined or granting same effects for less ranks), and overall the talent trees still feel like they reflect the design philosophies of 2005, not of 2009. There is few universally useful talents in the lower tiers (Twin Disciplines being the only one really), most talents are bland and boring (a few % here, a few % there), there is next to no synergy between spells (rather than some other healing trees which encourage using different spells together), and there's still zero option not to spec at least 14 points into Disc and then go into the tree of your choice. (Shadow and Holy quite simply have no talents in the bottom tier which are of use to people primarily speccing into the other tree). Everything combined, I just feel like there was a considerable lack of effort into making Priests as fun as they have the potential to be if the same energy was put into them as say Deathknights or most tanking classes. As is, I feel the Holy Priest I have today is less fun than the same character I played 9 months ago, and I don't think that is a good thing for an expansion pack.

Synergy between spells: One of the ways Blizzard attempted to get Shamans away from CHeal (and maybe partially succeeded) was by offering incentive to mix in other spells, by having one spell enhance the effectiveness of the other. The same can be seen with Druids. As Priests, the closest we can get to this is 'forcing' SoL procs with CoH, which is however a RNG process. There is no real incentive to mix up one spell with the other, a fun way to encourage a mixed usage of spells.

Glyphs: We are still missing Glyphs to a number of core spells, like Greater Heal and Prayer of Mending to just name two. I have no idea why this is the case, especially when a lot of relatively insignificant spells did get glyphs.


Going into specific spells and talents:

Circle of Healing: I use the spell a lot obviously, and I can see why they want to reduce the amount of times it is used. (I can't even say I find using the spell as often as we mostly do particularly fun or satisfying) However, the way of going about the nerf was bad and short sighted. First of all, I find it strange that a developer team is surprised when classes use AoE healing spells to heal the AoE damage these same developers throw at them. Most of all though, the 6 second nerf feels lazy compared to the many alternatives suggested, as well as breaking the spell for it's primary strength of spamming in short bursts. A much better way would have been to put on a less hard limitation, as well as adding a component to the spell acting as an incentive to use other spells for raid healing as well. (Like Shamans got spell synergies to get them away from CH spam)

I think the nerf might also be a bit short sighted in that it addresses just one of two reasons of why Priests use CoH a lot. It's too powerful in its current state, but another reason it is being used far more than intended is the state of other Priest tools, basically all of which have drawbacks. Nerfing CoH leaves us spells which are either too big (GHeal), out of our control (PoM), party based (Nova/PoH), inefficient (Flash Heal, see below), too slow and scaling badly (Renew), or requiring ourselves to take damage (Binding Heal). The removal of downranking as well as the overall numbers of WotLK left us with one spell which wasn't only overpowered, but also really the only spell well suited for the job.

PoH/Holy Nova: The major reason why CoH was given a cooldown, rather than being returned to its old state, was revealed to be Blizzard's desire to move away from party configurations in a raid being meaningful. As a raid leader myself I am for the most part glad to be rid of playing this mini game headache every raid. As a priest however, I find it very weird how they impose this design philosophy on one of our raid healing spells, yet our other two multi target spells are still held back by this very same limitation. PoH/Holy Nova being effective raid heals should be a high priority thing in my view; this being a low priority thing (PoH even moreso than Nova) is something I absolutely do not get, as these two spells could easily be the main instruments for Blizzard to put priests in a balanced raid healing position without fully depending on CoH.

Power Word: Shield: I admit I personally have yet to try Discipline, but I see a major problem with this spell and how it plays a big role for Discipline in a big raid. There shouldn't be a huge incentive to bring a second of a single healer class/spec (as with the amount of healer specs/spots, a too powerful incentive would become mandatory and problematic), however, bringing a second Disc Priest should be an option, just like it's an option to bring a second player of the other specs. However, a second Disc Priest potentially performing quite a bit worse due to the weakened soul debuff seems a rather bad situation to me. (Obviously this is not quite as pronounced in fights with multiple tanks, but there's plenty of fights where there is one tank taking the high majority of the damage)

Renew: Has gotten progressively worse comparatively since vanilla WoW, due to the lack of scaling and talents affecting it (which at least partially explains the former). Used to be a staple healing spell for us, but after seeing the maths of Renew vs Flash Heal, there is little reason really to use it beyond an extra buffer for a tank's health. First of all the numbers should be changed, second thing might be some synergistic effect a la Nourish (but not identical).

Flash Heal/Lesser Heal/Heal: The removal of downranking meant the end of GHeal rank1, and basically cost us our slow but not too big heal for healing raid damage. Right now Flash Heal is the tool approximating this the most, but I see a fairly big problem with this situation. Flash Heal was originally intended as a fast emergency heal which was less efficient. It's pretty much impossible for it to be balanced as well as potent enough for either that role and that of an efficient smaller heal at the same time. For this reason I'd suggest Blizzard to return Flash Heal to its status as fast emergency heal, and finally give us those new ranks of Lesser Heal and Heal they said they'd consider a few months back. These could then be balanced to fill the efficient small and medium heals without them ever being bothered by downranking efficiency issues.

Greater Heal: For a time in the past our signature spell; lost some of its strength to the constantly increasing AoE dmg in TBC, but the biggest blow was obviously the removal of downranking. Going from a versatile slow efficient heals for various health defficits, the only application now is that of a high HPS, high cost slow heal which is efficient if a large part of the healing is effective. Sadly, given the amount of heals cast on the tank, its speed and the typical health of tanks, the overheal is typically so severe that its efficiency is not extremely attractive. It still has uses when constant high throughput is needed to make sure a tank does not die (Patchwerk comes to mind), but the amount of use GHeal sees compared to about a year ago is rather pitiful. I've actually started wondering the last few days whether I should bother sticking to the GHeal 4 piece bonus, as a 5% cost reduction to a heal I use relatively sparingly might not outweigh the additional stats I could get if I abandon the set bonus... Compared to Holy Light, GHeal is by no means competitive from what I understand, and compared to the other 3 healing classes, we are the only one without a glyph for our main big heal, which doesn't particularly help either.

Lightwell: I think Blizzard can do little more to buff this spells theoretical effectiveness. The numbers are favorable, and for now I still have the talent point in it. However it all stands and falls with it getting used by people other than the priest, which seems to be an ideal which is never going to happen structurally. I can't really come up with a realistic solution either, so maybe just scrap it and replace it with something else.

Divine Providence: Already felt uninspired when it originally went live. The extra added PoM bonus is nice for specific fights like Sapphiron, but I don't see us getting 5-6 bounces in 7 seconds normally. (Admittedly it helps getting PoM away from people not taking damage though) Aside from this, getting 10% to specific heals so deep in the tree is underwhelming. This obviously gets worse with the nerf to CoH; adjustment or preferably complete replacement with something more useful would be good.

Hymn of Hope: Should see channel time considerably lowered or removed, and mana return increased.

Divine Hymn: Too many things at once, too many restrictions, no use as result. I am personally not fond at all of the concept and would rather have them scrap the spell altogether in favor of something new.

Some ideas about fixing Discipline throughput:

Renewed Hope: Bump this back to 3/6%, I still don't get why they nerfed this before release.
Aspiration:Add an Intellect-->Spell Power conversion effect to it. This will buff Disc throughput.
Imp.PW:Shield:Add the +40% scaling boost of Borrowed Time here in addition to its current effect.
Borrowed Time:In addition to spell haste it should empower GH and FH scaling.
Rapture:Reduce it to 3 points without changing its effectiveness.
Grace:Increase its duration to 10-12 seconds and up the heal increase to 3% per stack.
Imp Divine Spirit:Replace it with a new two point talent and switch positions with Focused Power:
Divine Focus(random name): Increases healing done by your critical heals by 5/10%.

PoH
Should be nerfed to heal for less but become targetable. Maybe add it to Divine Fury too since 3 seconds of cast is high enough.

Glyphs
Glyph of Penance: Increases healing done of Penance by 10% if the target is affected by Weakened Soul.
Glyph of GH: Reduces the cast time of Greater Heal by 0.25 sec after casting Greater Heal. Lasts 10 sec and stacks 2 times.
Glyph of Renew(reworked): Your renew increases all healing done by to the target by 3%.

Numbers may be high or low but I think concept is enough of a help.

I've been thinking about this some more, and it seems like what Bliz is asking is: How close does priest healing in practice match up to what Bliz has intended it to be in theory? The reason it's difficult to impossible for us to answer is because Bliz has never explained to us what goals they have for the priest class.

Example 1: Imagine Bliz thinks that priests should always be generalist healers, okay at everything, and depending on spec, good (but never the best) at one aspect of healing - tank healing (for Disc) and AoE healing (for Holy). It follows that Disc is doing okay at tank healing (might need a small buff; unsure), but needs a hefty buff to AoE healing ability (which isn't even "okay" right at the moment), while Holy is fine at tank healing and may be fine at AoE healing (depending on just how much the CoH nerf hurts - not being Holy myself its hard to judge).

Example 2: Imagine Bliz thinks that priests should be able to specialize - Disc should be as good as anyone at tank heals, but terrible at AoE; Holy should be as good as anyone at AoE, but terrible at tank heals. It follows that Disc AoE is fine, but it needs some hefty single target throughput buffs. On the other hand, Holy is probably too good at single target healing, but post-nerf, much too weak at AoE healing.

The issue, of course, is Blizzard has never clearly explained what their plan for priests is, which makes threads like this tricky. Some actions, statements, and design decisions strongly indicate they've got a generalist model in mind; others strongly indicate they want priests to specialize. Is speccing Disc meant to turn priests into a paladin, much like speccing Shadow turns us into afflicition locks? Or is it just meant to marginally buff our tank healing while leaving us good at everything? Either way I don't think the class is working as intended right now, but it'll take radically different changes to fix depending on what the goals actually are.

Well to be fair, I think their plans have changed considerably since original conceptualization at release and down the road at 4 years.

2 years ago we effectively got a new healing class that changed a lot of things. The way I always saw it back then: for the Alliance Paladin's could cleanse, but Priests could focus on Flash Healing instead of dispelling. For the Horde, Priests could dispel, but Shamans could focus on Lesser Healing Wave and poisons could just eat Poison Cleansing totems. And druids always had the big slow heal; because Rejuvenation didn't stack and they had to rely on Healing Touch.

And even so, we know their plans with trees have changed. Eyonix once said Discipline was the longetivity/endurance tree and Holy was the throughput tree (of course, the problem with that was more throughput + downranking = longetivity), but that has certainly changed too.

I do think Blizzard has the right to not tell us what they expect; because if they tell us their expectations it's going to give us more ammo and fuel the fire. Imagine if they told mages they were suppose to be the best CC class... then imagine what a proverbially shitstorm would occur if they ever gave another class some new cc that was situationally better... like say cyclone or hex.

I won't belabor the stuff that has already been repeated many times in this thread and that I agree with.

My main observation is that downranking was popular for a reason: it gave healers the option to trade off throughput for incredible mana efficiency. The problem, from Blizzard's point of view, was that this technique was not accounted for in the game design. However, it is a mechanic that healers already voted for with their feet and obviously find appealing. Blizzard can take that basic idea, tune it to fit within the parameters of their desired game design, and implement mechanics that give Priests the option to be the most mana-efficient healers in the game.

Two examples that I can think of:

-1) Bring back Heal, that spell that disappeared from our hotbars halfway through vanilla WoW. Make higher ranks of the spell that are still slow as hell but extremely mana-efficient. A continuous spam of a low-throughput spell would a pretty straightforward copy of the mechanic that made downranking popular, but would also mean that Priests spend less time in FSR. This may not be the desired class design.

-2) In that case, Blizzard can give Priests the option of a play style where they can do some modest amount of healing while in still regen. One way to do this would be to re-use the 8-pc T2 set bonus mechanic: make some spells (perhaps just GHeal) grant a HoT for free. The idea here is to give the class something that can hold the fort a bit longer and let them spend a bit more time in FSR regen before being forced to heal again.

Blizzard could also simply buff Meditation or just generally increase the amount of regen Priests get from Spirit, but passive buffs like these are very boring because they don't involve any action or skill on the player's part. The interesting thing about FSR regen is that it gives an opportunity for a player to extend their mana efficiency by proper spell selection and good play; instead of continuously spamming spells, players can use the tools they have to sneak a few seconds of FSR regen here and there and greatly increase their longevity.

So if I had to boil all of this down into concise suggestions, it would be (1) give Priests a play style where proper use of the FSR would make them the most efficient healers in the game, and (2) take the basic concepts that made downranking popular and design it into the class, within the parameters of the desired game design.

The problem with that suggestion is that it's completely against Blizzard's philosophy is that mana is something that has to be managed, and there's a very real threat that if not managed properly, you'll run out before the boss dies.

Downranking is gone. Forever. For good. You'll never see it again. Anything resembling down ranking will likely not be implemented.

How Holy Paladins and their (nearly) infinite mana figures into this I don't really know.

I would agree the best fix would be to make Disc priests = holy paladins in healing abilities, but have Disc focus on Prevention, and a paladin focus on Healing spells.

And Holy be able to rival a raid healing shaman, but differently, somehow. Maybe large burst AoE healing, where as shamans are slow, steady, dependable healing.

Make it so your either one or the other, not both, no way priests should be the "best" healing class hands down. This also fulfills blizzard's vision of versatility for the priest class.

They need to fix the hymns to something useful in a raid situation; Make Hymn of Hope a mini raid innervate with a debuff like Sated that targets you and four other people with low mana, in range, in the raid.

Divine Hymn I would like to see lower all incoming damage by a %, long cooldown, and be unstackable.

This would fix priests, paladins, and shamans, but perhaps then Druid would need something; their only forte would be healing multiple tanks through silences, healing kiting players, being able to help with anything the above three classes are doing. They would also have some utility with Rebirth and Innervate, perhaps that would be enough.

I think the biggest issue with downranking was it allowed for us to gear/gem/enchant purely for throughput; which probably annoyed Blizzard.

You know? Why spec into the endurance tree when you can spec into the throughput tree and then downrank to increase endurance?

It came to a point where the hpm of my greater heal rank 1 was so incredible no amount of spirit/mp5 could of allowed me to sustain greater heal rank 7 to the same degree AND I had the added flexibility of up-ranking everytime I needed more throughput.

Don't get me wrong, I would much rather that. But I can understand why Blizzard wouldn't. It's sort of a pigeon-hole, even if it is one we're currently enjoying. (Think of it this way, if one stat was so superior then it's all we would focus on. But items become more interesting when we can choose from different items. With downranking we essentially had the problem SPs/Warlocks had in early TBC; they only needed/wanted spellpower and crit/haste was useless. It made for very boring itemisation and little to few choices).

In terms of HPM and converting throughput to endurance; don't expect anything like downranking to return. In terms of healing granularity, maybe there's hope.

Disclaimer: this is written from the perspective of a holy priest. Any time you see "priest" insert "at least 41 points in holy, healing priest". Sorry to the Disc folks out there; you have your genuine complaints, and I respect them. I just don't feel qualified to argue them, nor do the issues directly impact on this nerf. Again, sorry.

Philosophy of Healing & Cooldowns
The important thing to realize about anything said by a healer is that we are not dps, and not tanks. We don't think the same way, and our raid role is dramatically different. Where a tank is fine with a short-cooldown high-threat ability (think Shield Slam, Consecrate, etc.), and a dps is fine with a short-cooldown high-damage ability (think Mind Blast, Sinister Strike, etc.), healers are not fine with similar abilities.

DPS classes naturally gravitate to a rotation. This is a sequence of abilities, used in a similar fashion, over and over to obtain the highest sustainable dps. As a great example of the underlying idea, think about TBC-era Arcane mages. They could not simply spam Arcane Blast because the mana cost would drive them OOM rapidly, and then they'd do 0 dps. Instead, they did some form of rotation, mixing their high-mana spells with lower-mana spells to achieve some form of mixture that allowed them to sustain high dps for a period of time, typically equal to the length of the boss fight.

In WotLK, almost every class has a rotation. Shadow priests keep their DoTs up, use Mind Blast on cooldown, and Mind Flay in-between. FFB mages keep Scorch up, spam FFB with mixed-in Living Bomb, and use Pyroblast on Hot Streaks. Affliction warlocks keep all their DoTs up, spam Shadowbolt, and use Haunt on cooldown. No-one expects anything different from this, and it seems to work.

But consider the life of a dps class. What do they have to do in a raid, besides watch these cooldowns and use their abilities in the right order? Obviously watching some extra timers is important: things like long-cooldown racial abilities, potion availability, etc.. On top of that, if they're smart raiders they're watching boss and add HP levels, watching for raid cooldowns (like Churn on Sartharion), watching their environment (uh oh Void Fissure, better move), and generally trying to stay alive. Most DPS don't run a large GRID or any form of raid HP tool, as it's unnecessary for their job, and generally just gets in the way. They focus on their HP/mana and the boss' HP/mana, along with the ground under their feet.

However, when you move to healers, the world is dramatically different. On top of our similar watchings: our own HP, our own mana, the environment, our cooldowns, the raid cooldowns, the boss HP (for enrages/etc), we also have to watch the raid's HP/threat and especially, the tank's HP. It's an extra level of complexity added on to the situation, and makes healing a different role than dps.

Additionally, there comes the problem of spell selection. You can replace spell with ability if it makes it any easier, but effectively, how do we compare what things a healer spends their time doing with what things a mage or rogue spends their time doing? If I'm a tank healer, I cast spells. They make pretty yellow colours around the tank, and his HP bar goes up instead of down ... down ... down. If I'm a raid healer, I do the same thing.

But what spells do I use? If you ask a shadow priest at any point in his or her rotation what spell comes next, they'll know. It's a very small logical construction: IF (MB is on cooldown) AND (DoTs are up) THEN (cast MF) etc. (with ELSEIFs for the DoT refresh situation). Try to compare this to a healer's situation, even in the simple case of a tank healer.

We have to consider which spell to use, whether it be the high-healing long-cast-time spell, or the medium-healing short-cast-time spell. Sometimes, we use our instant casts because we need healing Right Now Please. If there isn't actually enough damage to cast a direct heal, we might put up a HoT (for the classes that have them). If you're a druid, you're watching timers to see what duration your HoTs have, refreshing on cooldown, and using Regrowth in-between. A paladin might be watching for Light's Grace, or checking to see if he can afford to re-judge to get his JotP effect back up. We have a lot to consider for every single spell we cast.

Adding cooldowns to our abilities is a bad solution to a very real problem. How does Blizzard encourage/force us to use all (or more than one) of our abilities? They encouraged holy paladins to judge in a raid situation (instead of merely doing so once and letting the ret paladin roll it along) by introducing JotP. Carrot vs Stick. They encourages shamans to cast spells that didn't start with "Chain" by not scaling CHeal in the expansion, and introducing a number of mechanics that interact in a way to encourage using Riptide and LHW. Tidal Waves is a perfect example of how to encourage players to mix and match their spells. Druids had their 1-spell-focus removed by simply making other spells scale as well as Lifebloom, so there was no need to be a monkey spamming LB on multiple targets.

But then we come to priests. What abilities do we really have that are usable in a raid setting? Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Renew, Prayer of Mending, Circle of Healing, Power Word: Shield, Binding Heal, Prayer of Healing.

What relationships do we have between these abilities? Effectively two: Surge of Light and HC/IHC. Surge of Light gives us an instant-cast non-crit Flash Heal (chance) after we crit. The most effective way to proc this ability is to use CoH, because 6 targets gives a significantly higher chance to proc than 1 (or 2, in the case of Binding Heal). IHC, on the other hand, isn't actually a way to encourage changing spells, since it takes crits from FH/BH/GH and gives you a proc that works only on those three. It's really a throughput tool, not a spell-switching talent.

Conclusion: cooldowns is a bad idea for healers. It forces us to watch yet another thing in a raid setting, when we're already overburdened. It forces another UI mod down our throats as the base UI support for cooldowns is somewhat limited. And in the end, it is a ham-handed and hack way of encouraging healers to use other abilities.

If Blizzard really thinks that holy priests are using CoH too much, there are a multitude of ways to solve the problem. Introduce a Tidal Waves talent in place of the mediocre Divine Providence talent that encourages an interaction between CoH, PoH, and Flash Heal/Renew. Use an Arcane Blast-type debuff system. Do anything but introduce another cooldown that we're going to have to watch.

How We Use CoH
This is a small section in support of the above argument for not introducing cooldowns to healers (at least beyond what we already have, and suffer with). Why is CoH so good?

• Instant cast; can be used any time, even when moving
• High HpM
• Smart targeting
• High HpS
• Multiple chances to proc Surge of Light
• Front-loaded healing

Of these, I believe Blizzard is nerfing CoH because of the first and third, with small emphasis on the 6th. CoH is instant cast. As such, priests can get it off before anything else has a chance to heal. When raid damage happens (especially if the priest is paying attention), the CoH can be cast before the raid bars even show the effect of the damage; smart targeting means at least the 2nd-through-6th targets will get the healing. It snipes heals from other healers, and gives priests high overall healing for the course of a raid.

In the end, if you can sustain it (which, btw, you can't; despite being high HpM, one of the fastest ways to go OOM as a priest is to spam CoH with a bit of haste), it's one of the highest possible healing throughput situations in the game. However, it's still less healing throughput than a paladin using Beacon of Light. So it's not obscenely high.

And yes, priests just mindlessly spamming CoH is a bad thing. But there are situations where having a 6-second cooldown is going to dramatically harm our ability to do our job, namely: keep the raid alive. Consider any effect like Malygos' Vortex. It does ~ 20k damage to every person in the raid while the raid is swirling in a vortex and no spells can be cast (only instants). When we land from that vortex, inevitably most of the raid needs to be topped up. Now, we are able to cast one CoH per priest, and hope it's enough, while moving! (if you don't move, you die ... Malygos almost inevitably casts Arcane Breath as he lands, and anyone who didn't move is instant-gibbed).

In situations like this, smart priests typically cast 2-3 CoH, then switch to single-target heals to get the rest of the targets topped up. Because of the instant nature of the spell, we can "front-load" the healing by casting 2 heals in the first 1.4 seconds of the phase; non-instants deliver their first healing anywhere from 1.3 to 3.0 seconds after the start. And time really does matter.

Having a mixture of the spells (CHeal, WG, and CoH) was a good thing. The priests would land the CoH instantly, getting the first little bit of top-up healing done; the WG would start at the same time and begin ticking. The shamans would come in with their CHeal ~ 2.0 seconds later (haste), topping up 4 people to the limits of the spell. In the same time frame, priests would land another CoH, and the druids would toss a HoT on someone or be most of the way through a Regrowth.

Front-loading is a good thing. It isn't necessarily something we're doing to "spam" the ability; effectively, when we need to use CoH (vs when we randomly do so), we need it a lot, and cast it 2-3 times. It is these situations that will be hurt the most by this nerf, and unfortunately, these are the situations we actually need the ability in.

Most of the time, we can live with the cooldown without any real issues. Sapphiron, for example: we rarely spam the ability during ground phase. It's just not worth it. But on collapse, as a Blizzard runs over your non-party-specific raid members standing beside you behind a block? Wups, you get one CoH ... better hope you can figure out who's standing beside you quickly and target them for a single-target heal, or they may die. Or Malygos' post-Vortex, as mentioned above. Or Kel'Thuzad Ice Block chaining. Or Heigan post-dance, when he diseases the entire raid and everyone is dropping fast. All of these situations are occasions where a priest could validly use 2-3 CoH in a row without it being overpowered, heal-sniping, or in any way a problem.

Nerfing the spell because it heals mediocre damage too well, and removing our ability to use it on real damage, is very short-sighted. It will be extremely difficult to design a WotLK version of Felmyst or Twin Eredars with a cooldown-based WG/CoH. If it is done, it's just promoting shaman stacking again ... and we were promised that wouldn't happen. Regular, periodic, raid-wide damage is not something that works well with primary raid heals that have cooldowns.

Suggestions for Fixing the Era of CoH-with-a-cooldown
There are a number of things that can be done to lessen our inability to deal with the above situation(s) [need AE heals, NOW], and also to fill in the gap left in our raid-healing rotation. This is by no means a complete list, but it does contain some interesting suggestions.

• Introduce a priest version of Tidal Waves, so every time we do use CoH, we get a proc for another spell (suggestion: either a reduced cast-time on PoH, or a +healing proc on Flash Heal)
• Double the healing and mana cost of CoH, while leaving the 6-second cooldown. This helps prevent gibs in the "need it right now" situation, while still forcing us to mix/match spells. It also makes it less likely that CoH will be used on every cooldown, as the mana cost will become prohibitive.
• Change Surge of Light to be a 50% chance (2-point talent) to give an instant-cast non-crit Flash Heal after every CoH. This is how we use CoH/SoL now anyway, so it fixes the problem of reduced SoL procs due to the nerf.
• Buff Renew in a large way. It needs to at least be more efficient than Flash Heal, assuming 4/5 ticks are non-overheal. Tie it to Rejuv (druids) and most priests will be happy. Possibly change the talent to extend the duration by one tick instead of scaling the healing, and buff the baseline healing.
• Fix our Hymns. We know this is on the books anyway, but seriously ... fix our Hymns. Use Divine Hymn as a shorter-cooldown effective raid heal, and just get rid of the incapacitate effect. 1-minute cooldown, ~ 4k healing over 10 seconds to 10 targets. At the moment, it's effectively useless. It heals for too little, too rarely.
• Directly on the topic of Hymn of Hope: make it a Discipline spell. It's ludicrous that this got out of Beta, but Koraa ignored our posts about it. Shadow priests have to leave Shadowform, channel for 8 seconds, and re-enter Shadowform, for a net gain of ~ 200 mana for themselves. Ridiculous.
• Possibly change Hymns to be an aura-like ability, similar to paladins, where each Hymn provides some form of raid buff. This gives priests more raid utility, which seems to be a very common complaint post-CoH-nerf.
• Optionally: fix the two-tree-spec problem (Meditation) so holy priests can put points into things like Test of Faith, and possibly a new talent (in place of Blessed Resilience) that does interesting things to force interaction between CoH and other spells.
• Fix Discipline. The list of things that needs to be done to do this is almost as long as this entire post, so I'm not touching on this. The CoH nerf directly hits holy priests, not Disc. I respect the plight of their tree/spec, and I acknowledge that it needs to be fixed, but it doesn't directly impact what I'm writing here.
• Make Prayer of Healing a group-targeted channel-based heal. Keep the 3.0 second base cast time, keep the amount of healing done, but allow it to be targeted like the original Circle of Healing was. This largely solves our problem of what to do when 80% of the raid needs heals, but CoH is on cooldown.
• Fix Power Word: Shield. Why does it have two cooldowns? It's an effective raid-damage-prevention tool. Let us actually use it.
• Add Binding Heal to Serendipity.
• Make Holy Nova useful in some way, shape, or form.
• Fix Lightwell. It's actually worse now than it was in TBC, somehow. Don't make the user lose their target, and don't make it attackable by mobs.
• Fix Prayer of Mending so it actually procs when people do self-damaging abilities like Life Tap and Judgement of Blood. It's damage. It's supposed to proc off damage. Fix this.
• Give Shadowfiend more HP than an anemic chipmunk. It dies far too easily.
• Add a self-only poison-removal to Abolish Disease. Priests should not be the only healers unable to remove poisons from themselves. It's contributing to the lack of balance in Arenas and BGs.

Not all of these suggestions are directly tied to the CoH nerf, but they are tied to the following statement, that most priests seem to agree on:
We didn't get any shiny new tools in WotLK, while everyone else did. Our one shiny that we got (smart targeted CoH) just got nerfed, hard. Give us something fun to play with.

And with all respect to Ghostcrawler, a 3-minute cooldown Guardian Spirit is not a shiny. It's a nice tool, and it's very effective for what it is. It is not, however, game-play-modifying. It gives you a cooldown to use. That's it. It's not Judgement of the Pure or Tidal Waves or Gift of the Earthmother. Sorry. To be a new and shiny tool, I need to be able to use it, and feel the effects of it. Often.

I'm going to post the above. If Snowy sees this, feel free to lock the thread now. We had some great discussion, and hopefully something comes out of it.