Priest 6.0 Transition Guide

[MEHager 0]

Did anyone else notice that Holy Priests cannot enter raids as DPS???  I'm just ready to throw it in!!  

 

I don't want to heal.  I always run out of mana and don't want to be the reason the group wipes.  Blizzard nerfed 11 specs - wasn't that enough? Now you can't even pick what role you want to play.

 

They didn't even change the look of my worgen - really just eviscerated the whole reason I played.

 

Thanks for the vent - really hating wasting so much time and money. :((

[Brewmonksta 157]

 

Did anyone else notice that Holy Priests cannot enter raids as DPS???  I'm just ready to throw it in!!  

 

I don't want to heal.  I always run out of mana and don't want to be the reason the group wipes.  Blizzard nerfed 11 specs - wasn't that enough? Now you can't even pick what role you want to play.

Not sure if troll or srs bsness...

 

Holy priests arent a dps spec therefore cannot queue as dps.

 

The sky isnt falling for most specs. Play what you find fun.

[Espiee 161]

Be really careful to extrapolate anything about healing in Highmaul from this month of pre-patch.

 

•  Our mana regeneration is more than double that of what we will have at level 100.

Our base regen is currently 4% per 5 sec, at 100 is 2%. Spirit is also available in much higher amounts now than it will be at the start of an expansion.

• Class balance rests more on the encounter design than actual class quirks  for healers.

The encounters in SoO are still spiky, there are still one-shot mechanics, Thok will still take a large amount of your health every other second. It's important to note that encounters like that, no matter the class balance otherwise, greatly skews healing towards absorbs. When there's loads of spiky damage, you want absorbs to increase effective health. It's much better to prevent that sort of damage from happening than healing it up afterwards because there is more burst damage just around the counter. That sort of damage pattern is rare if at all present in tier 17.

 

• We have loads of secondary stats

This is somewhat related to the other points, but need to be spelled out on its own. We're at the end of an expansion. That means you have very high levels of crit, mastery and haste available to you and so do your team members. Warlords healing is not currently balanced around this wealth of stats. This shortens fights and makes inefficient heals more spammable since you don't have to worry much about sustainability. When you enter Highmaul for the first time, you're lucky if you have more than 20% crit and your fights are much more likely to last 5-7 minutes than 2-4.

 

• Not every class has optimal gear.

Gear in SoO is not optimised for 6.0 that is balanced around gear available at level 100. The most glaring examples are mistweaver monks and holy priests whose attunement is multistrike. They simply cannot gear for their primary stat outside one, maybe two, trinket(s). Other classes have seen some changed to stat priorities as well which means they want different gear than what they have from SoO already to perform optimally. Discipline priests have not changed in this regard and our attunement of crit only serves to amplify the power of the gear we already have.

Edited October 16, 2014 by steve

[MEHager 0]

Not sure if troll or srs bsness...

 

Holy priests arent a dps spec therefore cannot queue as dps.

 

The sky isnt falling for most specs. Play what you find fun.

Not a Troll - that was rude.

 

MOP allowed Holy priest to queue for any role.  I've been doing pretty well with DPS for the past year and had the ability to help out healers when things got tight. I was just expressing my disappointment about being boxed in by with the new rules!  Kind of sucks when your primary methodology gets sucked away.

 

I'm not the only person who played Holy DPS>>

 

http://www.michaeloglesby.com/holy-priest-dps/

 

BTW - Sorry if this is the wrong subject for the comment.  "Priest - Transition" seemed like a reasonable place to discuss difficulties with the transition and see if anyone else had experienced the same issue.

Edited October 16, 2014 by MEHager

[Twintop 45]

Not a Troll - that was rude.

 

MOP allowed Holy priest to queue for any role.  I've been doing pretty well with DPS for the past year and had the ability to help out healers when things got tight. I was just expressing my disappointment about being boxed in by with the new rules!  Kind of sucks when your primary methodology gets sucked away.

 

I'm not the only person who played Holy DPS>>

 

http://www.michaeloglesby.com/holy-priest-dps/

 

BTW - Sorry if this is the wrong subject for the comment.  "Priest - Transition" seemed like a reasonable place to discuss difficulties with the transition and see if anyone else had experienced the same issue.

I actually held the #1 rank on Warcraft Logs for Holy DPS in Heroic Siege for about a month back in May, just for lulz. I actually used it successfully back in T14 on H: Wind Lord in HoF, and again on H: Empress because we needed just a little extra healing at times, but for the majority of the encounter I could just DPS.

While Holy or Disc might do decent DPS in instances, it isn't anywhere near Shadow and is more of a gimmick for anything other than leveling/dailies. Allowing people to zone in and queue as Holy or Disc for DPS was an oversight by Blizzard that has now been corrected.

[Gwenymph 414]

Here is what's open and available in UBRS with 6.0 launch, from Disc PoV.

 

[Espiee 161]

For those interested, two very dominant theorycrafters for healers, Hamlet and Dayani, published a podcast on the state of healing specs in warlords.

 

It's not priest specific, but it talks about priests specifically and within a larger frame of context:

 

http://iam.yellingontheinternet.com/2014/10/19/healing-discussion-podcast/

[Storm 426]

As much fun as I was having on my priest just running around in circles spamming holy nova and topping healing meters, I feel like it needs a bit of a nerf. The amount of healing for holy nova feels right, it's half the healing of PoH, but it's also instant cast, so you can cast almost 2 holy novas to 1 PoH. what does seem op though is that we regen mana faster than we can spend it on Holy nova so from start to finish on any fight you can litterally just spam holy nova on GCD and be the top healer by miles. I hope that changes by level 100. a 1 button mana efficient aoe healer doesn't seem like much fun. Holy nova needs it's mana cost to be like 3x what it is now.

[Espiee 161]

I made a longer comment on this a bit further up, but to reiterate: don't deduce anything about balance from this month of pre-patch healing.

 

You can't spam HN at level 100, nor would you want to since there are many mechanisms that prevent stacking up during encounters.

Edited October 20, 2014 by steve

[Gwenymph 414]

It reminds me of CoH in Karazhan. 

 

and Steve, I copied that regen response in the other Holy thread too.  ty again.

[Jenndawg 0]

So after feeling like an inadequate healer while running SoO and UBRS post-patch, I switched from Disc to Holy because of a suggestion from my GM. After trying to get some tips on the site (I haven't healed Holy since BC). I'm kind of lost because I have to change not only spell rotation but my entire healing style, as well as adapt to the patch changes. After reading I'm starting to think I jumped the disc ship a little too soon. I just thought that with seemingly endless mana, no one should die, ever. Raid healing seems easy but I have a hard time with 5-mans. OK, mostly the last boss in UBRS....I'm dual specced holy and disc right now because I'm not fully ready to commit to the change.