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Q u o t e:


omg my trained ability is not better than priest 41 point spell...

dont worry blizzard is fixing this

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This is a stupid argument, you don't understand talent trees. While you're at it, please ask for a buff to Shadowburn (Fireblast), Riptide (Renew/PoM), Demonic Circle (Blink), Crusader Strike (Mortal Strike), Divine Storm (Whirlwind).. the list could really go on forever.

You can't directly compare abilities like that, since you have significantly more abilities than a Shaman. Please, you just hurt any points that intelligent Priests are trying to make with those comments.

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Q u o t e:


Chain heal isn't a very smart heal, it's nothing compared to CoH. Well over half the healing from chain heal hits the main target, so if you're just depending on the bounces to do the work, you aren't going to keep anyone alive.

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Maybe the solution is to buff chain heal? Seems to me that changing the healing lost on the bounces wouldn't be a terribly hard thing to do.

I'm not sure about increasing the bounce range. Being somewhat ADD, that might make me less functional in a raid setting. :-P

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Q u o t e:


This is the situation in a lot of trash pulls en route to bosses. Chain Heal does very good in those encounters, as you'd expect, but Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are also used a lot in those situations, almost to the exclusion of other heals.

If those spells are used on (1) trash pulls, and (2) fights with multiple bosses, and (3) fights with bosses with adds, and (4) fights with lots of AE damage, then the only time they are not used is on (5) fights like Patchwerk where only 2 tanks take damage at all. If Circle of Healing was not the answer to situations 1-3 also, then I don't think we'd have a problem.

With a cooldown, sure you'd still use CoH when several people were wounded -- a common occurence. But while waiting for the cooldown, you could also throw out another PoM, Renews, Flash Heals or Binding Heal.

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GC - Point of fact, bad healers use one spell only. My personal spell selection is a mix of all my instant HoTs - WG, Rejuv, and LB.

Is it Blizzards intent to have only one "pure" AOE healing class and the others just fillers? If so, why? As a raid leader I can tell you, when my resto shammy wanted a night off before - I cringed a bit inside at the loss of AOE healing - where with the changes and new spells (especially the addition of WG since we're druid heavy) I don't worry about it as much anymore.

I think something that needs to be looked at (and may be... sorry im not reading everysingle post) is how trivial raiding is right now. All TBC content and Tier 7 content is so simple and i think that is what is causing a lot of the problems. Unless raiding is going to go back to what it was when a lot of the TBC content first came out or SWP before 3.0 hit.

As of right now CoH is a smart heal, which in its nature is going to be OP. I think a simple response would be to change it back to how it was as a very good well functioning spell. If it has a 6 sec CD it is basically worthless because what will the healer do in the mean time. CoH is best in a situation where there is steady aoe damage (for example felmyst twins ect) in a fight like that a spell rotaiton would be what exactly? CoH, PoM, and then 2 more spells before CoH is active again. Maybe a renew or flash heal would be options but this is getting away from the pourpose of AoE healing, not to mention the fact that PoM has at least a 8 sec CD so it would not fit into a nice rotaition with CoH.

All of that would result in a healer assigned to be AoE healing and doing that job approximatley half of the time, which is clearly very innefecitive.

I strongly believe that CoH needs to be looked at in a situation of raidswith high difficulty and players of high skill before any real conclusions can be reached about it, but that being said i also do think that adding a GCD to it is the worst possible fix.

Responses to this are greatly appreciated especially from GC.

Screw this forum and eating any post that actually the poster bothers to spend time to research and look up their information.

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Q u o t e:
Screw this forum and eating any post that actually the poster bothers to spend time to research and look up their information.

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I ran into the same thing last night. I'm about to post something long that I did in a text editor first, and am just copying/pasting into the forums. Sorry, I would love to see any well-thought out, well-written post!

May be a dumb idea, but why not make the AoE heals generate more threat than they currently do? That would force people to use other spells as well as manage their threat, and you wouldn't have to lock anyone out of the AoE spells with a cool down.

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Q u o t e:
May be a dumb idea, but why not make the AoE heals generate more threat than the single target heals? That would force people to use other spells as well as manage their threat, and you wouldn't have to lock anyone out of the AoE spells with a cool down.

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The last thing I want to do as a healer is to look at MORE UI.

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Q u o t e:


This is the situation in a lot of trash pulls en route to bosses. Chain Heal does very good in those encounters, as you'd expect, but Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are also used a lot in those situations, almost to the exclusion of other heals.

If those spells are used on (1) trash pulls, and (2) fights with multiple bosses, and (3) fights with bosses with adds, and (4) fights with lots of AE damage, then the only time they are not used is on (5) fights like Patchwerk where only 2 tanks take damage at all. If Circle of Healing was not the answer to situations 1-3 also, then I don't think we'd have a problem.

With a cooldown, sure you'd still use CoH when several people were wounded -- a common occurence. But while waiting for the cooldown, you could also throw out another PoM, Renews, Flash Heals or Binding Heal.

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wrong....since w/o a real aoe spell your considered a MT only healer, so in between CoH cooldowns you will cast gheal and gheal only. And guess what, the majority of good healers will cast renew and PoH now.

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Q u o t e:


Those are all really cool ideas and definitely the kind of thing we want to explore with the healing revamp I allude to sometimes. They are beyond the scope of what we can do for Naxx, Chamber and Malygos raiding though.

The vortex phase of Malygos is what you end up with in order to challenge the AE healing possible in the game now. It's a cool mechanic, but we don't want to do that on every fight and for anything less, the healing just feels too trivial to accomplish. That's why we don't think the "just don't so so much raid AE" is the answer. Because whenever we DO want to do raid AE, we won't be able to.

In answer to another question, we haven't applied the same homogenization phiosophy of tanks to healers. Mostly that is because a raid needs 1 tank for several fights but never 1 healer for anything larger than a 5-player dungeon. And for those, we have tried to give you more tools to do your job. However, even in that case, a Holy priest, Holy paladin or Resto shaman should not be mandatory, especially for the 10-player versions. We don't think this change would change that.

Even if we wanted the Holy priest and Resto druid to be the best AE healers, which we don't, they would still be trivializing the content (by which I mean level 80 content) with their current tools.

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I realize it's not a matter of voting, but there are quite a few priests who agree that CoH is simply too good in its current form.

For a long while priests would bash on Shaman healing as EZ-mode. We don't want that for ourselves, and right now, CoH is far, far more effective than chain heal ever was.

My personal thoughts? Either:

1. Add a cooldown to CoH. This pretty much forces us to use other spells, but the downside is that it has us mentally thinking "SUPERHEAL! stay alive stay alive stay alive stay alive SUPERHEAL! stay alive stay alive stay alive etc." Basically our entire healing strategy becomes using CoH, then filling time with other spells until CoH is ready again.

2. Reduce the power of CoH, but also reduce the mana cost. This keeps the efficiency the same, but reduces the HPS, so while priests could continue to spam it through the entire fight, it won't output enough healing to keep everyone alive in every situation.

If you make druids have a 6 second c/d on WG, druid healing on aoe fights will be:

Lifebloom on five different targets, WG, lifebloom on five different targets, WG, etc.

Pre-3.0 I used lifebloom as a 7-person aoe heal on hexlord every time I fought him. It worked great. WG makes it easier, but good druids would just go back to the lifebloom on every target thing (and obviously deal with the mana issues that creates).

Therefore, why not just make WG have extra mana cost if its used more often than once every 6 seconds?

What you say totally backpedals to what BLIZZ has been saying for weeks. Blizz has stated that they dont want any one class to have specific abilities or buffs to where they are a required class for a raid. Well, by considering putting a 6 sec cool down on COH and WG.. You are making the shaman a REQUIRED CLASS for ANY AND ALL BOSS FIGHTS THAT DO AOE DMG. When i use COH, it for specific fights that we required a Shammy to be there for. if you put a 6sec cool down on it.... Sigh.

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Q u o t e:


This is the situation in a lot of trash pulls en route to bosses. Chain Heal does very good in those encounters, as you'd expect, but Circle of Healing and Wild Growth are also used a lot in those situations, almost to the exclusion of other heals.

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Here's a question?

Is there only one right way to heal? Or shouldn't it vary by skill, player preference, encounter demands and damage taken[that means the gear and skill of the people you are playing with].

Now I'm not a big fan of any priest that spams one type of heal only, BUT when you heal a high end raid encounter what spells do you use as a priest?

Because really for being assigned to AoE healing in a raid CoH is the the best way to go, a priest assigned to raid heals SHOULD be spamming CoH as long as there are 3 or more targets at a deficit.
If heavy raid damage is occurring then they should also be spamming CoH along with bouncing PoM off anyone they know is going to be taking damage while spamming CoH. This is an issue of required heal per second in order to keep people alive and heal per mana efficiency that flash heal just doesn't have.

On tank heals, Renew, PoM and Greater Heals are staples. Renew cushions damage, PoM helps build threat and sometimes acts like an emergency top off, and Greater heal gives anywhere from 4k-6.5k hp back to your targer(depending on gear) and roughly 10k on a crit.

There are situations that are exceptions. Sometimes a healer will be very skilled and have very good gear, yet their tank is not very good at holding threat and they can easily pull aggro. At that point Greater heals fly out the window and one has to use smaller less efficent heals in order not to steal aggro.

I really think you guys need to evaluate the content you create in order to penalize full time spammers, not people who realize because of their assigned role in a raid or because of the demands of a specific encounter must spam situationally.

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Q u o t e:

Also from the top of that same post: Yep that's the stated reason for them rejecting it. I can't say I agree with that reasoning either, but there it is. Also, I think that the debuff they went with would have been pretty sick anyway to the degree of doubling/tripling the cost per cast to bring it in line with their benchmark goal.

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Ok. I got to page 3 of this thread before I came across this post. I apologize if this has been addressed earlier, however, I need to comment on this:

How about a sticky at the top of the priest/druid forums with the pertinent facts about this debate, or a simple blue post explaining the basic concept and expecting the player to figure out the rest for themselves.

Or, if you're going to balance class mechanics around terrible players who don't understand very simple mathematics concepts(I'm talking like 9th grade statistics here), maybe you should just give every class an option in their spellbook to conjure whatever gear they want, since understanding your class well enough to raid is too demanding.

I, personally, would prefer the option to tank my mana efficiency if for some reason I need to pump out a large amount of AOE healing for a very short amount of time, rather than have the game decide for me that I casted CoH/WG too recently and need to sit down for a bit before I hurt myself. I play the game so that I can decide how to play the game, not so the game can implement artificial and stopgap limitations to prevent me from being a unique person rather than a computer script.


Note: I'm not yelling at you, Gayla, I'm simply yelling in response to the information you provided.

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Q u o t e:

In answer to another question, we haven't applied the same homogenization phiosophy of tanks to healers. Mostly that is because a raid needs 1 tank for several fights but never 1 healer for anything larger than a 5-player dungeon. And for those, we have tried to give you more tools to do your job. However, even in that case, a Holy priest, Holy paladin or Resto shaman should not be mandatory, especially for the 10-player versions. We don't think this change would change that.

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There is a problem with this though, you don't want to stack raids, so you're virtually requiring a specific set up of healers. X number of Shaman to Chain Heal (probably scaling with difficulty of the encounter), X Number of Paladins to tank heal, and X number of Druids and Holy Priests to try and fill in the gap. However if a Holy Priest and a Druid are not the best at anything, but the Jack of all trades, wouldn't the raids be better off by stacking shaman and paladins to gain comparative advantage? Also, what if my raid doesn't have X number of resto shaman or resto druids (or whatever), am I at a disadvantage for not having the specific healing set up you had in mind for the encounter? Tanks are interchangeable, DPS is interchangeable, why not healers? But you also don't want to give shamans and paladins the ability to do everything like druids and priests because then you're losing the originality of their rotations. With this negative feedback loop you could go around for hours. The only way to get rid of this crazy chain of logic is the hemogenization.

On the beta, it got to the point where shamans were not needed, since CoH and WG were just *better*. For Sapphiron, a fight with a frost aura and a decent amount of movement, WG/CoH were just better, since they were instant. For Loatheb, a fight where all 10/25 people needed healing, the cast time and base 3 bounces of CH meant that CoH and WG were better since they hit more targets. And then you hit Malygos phase 2, and CoH and WG are better since they are both instant, and they hit more people.

I agree that this was unfair to shamans, and that a CD on WG/CoH and a toning back of fights where the whole raid takes large amount of damage is the best way to go.

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Q u o t e:


Even if we wanted the Holy priest and Resto druid to be the best AE healers, which we don't, they would still be trivializing the content (by which I mean level 80 content) with their current tools.

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What is the role of holy priests in raids?

Discipline is our tank healing tree. And you say we shouldn't be best aoe healer either. WHAT IS OUR ROLE? You tell us...