Who has ever cast one CoH in a raid damage situation ? The whole point of the spell was to spam it. I think it does need a cd and 6 seconds sounds reasonable but it has to heal for about twice what it currently does in that case for holy priests not to be outshadowed by shaman.

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Disc and Shadow don't even have CoH.

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Give it to mmeeeeeee. Disciples wants its.

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I guess a matter of perspective, let me pose this to you, (Utility aside since its value can be argued) in the area's of Single target, AOE, and regen, where does the shaman have the advantage?

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You're missing the point. This isn't a vacuum with 2 healing classes, there are 4. If a healing class has nothing they're best at, and doesn't do anything positive for the raid itself, why bother using one? All along they've said we don't get stacking raid utility because we have a variety of spells we can use, and now they say we're using one too much so they want to kill it. Well, if we have a bunch of heals, and we don't use them that much, what does that tell you? You could argue CoH was too efficient for it's own good, which is all well and good, but to take something away without giving something back, it's like what's the point? Now instead of CoH CoH CoH CoH and the priest being 1 or 2 in healing, they'll be CoH flash heal, fsr, CoH ProM flash heal CoH fsr, and do that and be dead last in healing output. What's the point?


Renew is neat but isn't strong enough and like all of our other spells costs too much mana. Flash is the beefiest fast heal, which is also why it's mana consumption is enormous. ProM is very nice but it's something we have no real control over, while also being on a cooldown. Gheal is a nice beefy spell, but again, a lot of mana. Binding Heal is horrid mana-wise and is only used instead of casting 2 flash heals(one on your target and one on you). Holy Nova is useless in every stretch of the imagination. Prayer of Healing is wonderful but has a big wind-up time and only hits 5 people in a small range around the healer(mana cost also means it's only ever really used in conjunction with inner focus).


Yes, a lot of heals, only 3-4 see common useage, so that's different than a few other healers how? Stop using this "WE HAVE SO MANY HEALS ZOMG" excuse, it's not funny and no priest buys it. Now, if there was some kind of knowledge that with a nerf like this some meaningful class changes would happen to bring us in line with other healers in a raid setting(GIVE US SOME STACKING RAID UTILITY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!), the outcry wouldn't be so bad. Don't forget, in TBC we had a long period where CoH was still bad and encounters weren't designed around it's use so it wasn't useful, and most raid guilds brought 0-1 holy priest as it was. Make our other spells more efficient, make us pay attention to our FSR, not a freaking cooldown. Unless you really want us to do nothing but throw a CoH every 6 seconds to make use of the FSR.

I'm not saying this is a terrible idea, but it's really very easy to see that CH is going to dominate unless it's nerfed in some way. Having the only AE heal that isn't on cooldown is going to be such a huge advantage that you simply won't bring priests to AE heal anymore. If more single target healing is needed you'll bring more paladins or druids to fill that role, and only shamans to fill the AE healing role.

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If it needs to be, yes. We're not sure it will need to be since we actually want to lower the AE damage coming into the raid in the situations where it blows away every other spell (except WG).

I know it's natural for players to consider only their abilities compared to the difficulty of the encounters. That makes sense because your context is always how you can improve your character. But we have access to all the knobs -- we can change the encounters around the class design as well, and we do it all the time.

In answer to another question, this is a difficult problem to buff our way out of. It's not just a matter of improving shaman, paladin and Disc AE healing. We would also have to increase single-target damage on tanks and others so that that part of your arsenal competed with the AE button, which in turn means tuning tank gear and health pools and probably a lot of other changes.

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The underlined part - that you'll tone down the incoming AE damage - doesn't that already help tone down CoH and WG usage? Incidentally, I do agree that a cooldown may help in CoH's case.

On the subject of making ProH raid-wide (but of course, limited to a number of players healed - hopefully a number higher than 5, since it currently heals pets within the party as well), I think Holy Nova could also use the same treatment for the healing component. Making them heal the closest 7~10 players/pets, without adding the smart-heal-the-most-damaged logic makes sense to me.


(disclosure: I have a 70 priest)

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I'm gonna go ahead and call BS. An enhancement or elemental shaman cannot cast chain heal in spell power gear and have it heal for anything. Look at resto's talents if you want to know why. Saying "shamans don't have to spec for it and we do" is dumb.

Right now, priests significantly outheal shamans when it comes to raid healing. That's broken. They're fixing it. I don't really see the issue...

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You obviously don't comprehend what I said. Do you deny that this expansion is homogenizing class roles so that no singles class has a single role? Do you deny that shaman get their AoE heal baseline? Do you deny that priests have to spec for their AoE heal? The point is, as priests, when we choose to be healers we have to choose whether or not to be AoE healers (holy) or single target healers (disc). Whereas all resto shaman are aoe healers.

You're right CoH significantly outheals shaman when it comes to raid healing. That's why I said it needs to be nerfed. However shaman shouldn't be outhealing holy priests when it comes to aoe healing too. Shaman will be doing just that if a 6 second cooldown goes in (and it should go in). This just means that we have to have our aoe healing buffed elsewhere. Buffed to be equal to shaman, not greater. Understand? Making Prayer of Healing worthwhile spell is the obvious and easiest choice.

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You obviously don't comprehend what I said. Do you deny that this expansion is homogenizing class roles so that no singles class has a single role? Do you deny that shaman get their AoE heal baseline? Do you deny that priests have to spec for their AoE heal? The point is, as priests, when we choose to be healers we have to choose whether or not to be AoE healers (holy) or single target healers (disc). Whereas all resto shaman are aoe healers.

You're right CoH significantly outheals shaman when it comes to raid healing. That's why I said it needs to be nerfed. However shaman shouldn't be outhealing holy priests when it comes to aoe healing too. Shaman will be doing just that if a 6 second cooldown goes in (and it should go in). This just means that we have to have our aoe healing buffed elsewhere. Buffed to be equal to shaman, not greater. Understand? Making Prayer of Healing worthwhile spell is the obvious and easiest choice.

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But Shaman and Priests are not homogenized, Shaman have worse mana efficiency and the entire resto tree is built around Chain Heal. There are only a handful of talents that only affect other spells. It'd be fine if Shaman/Priests raid healed and single target healed the same. It'd be fine if Priests raid healed better and Shaman single target healed better. Unfortunately, neither of those are the case right now.

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The difference in this case is that we agreed Chain Heal virtually *was* the Resto shaman. It was one of their most signature abilities, like Mortal Strike for the Arms warrior, Windfury for the Enhancement shaman or Frostbolt for the Forst mage. While you might like Circle of Healing, and I know it's a fun spell, we never designed the entire Holy tree around it. Our intent for Holy is that the spec uses lots of spells -- Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Renew, PoM, Binding Heal, PWS, Lightwell, PoH, Guardian Spirit and CoH. It's hard to find niches for all of those sometimes, and CoH had crowded out a lot of those others -- even if you were pushing those other buttons, the actual outcome was that many of those clicks did very little compared to CoH.

Resto druid were in a very similar situation -- lots of tools, but everything looked like a job for Wild Growth.

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You got rid of downranking? I used rank 1 GH and flash heal more than i did CoH.

I miss downranking, don't drudge it's corpse up or I'll cry.

By the way, I consider my opinion the least biased since this character has been deleted (along with many others) so that I'd be less likely to return to the game. Thus, I'm obviously not lobbying for buffs to my class so that I am more powerful.

I do still enjoy posting on the forums though. It might even be worth 15 dollars a month.

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But Shaman and Priests are not homogenized, Shaman have worse mana efficiency and the entire resto tree is built around Chain Heal. There are only a handful of talents that only affect other spells. It'd be fine if Shaman/Priests raid healed and single target healed the same. It'd be fine if Priests raid healed better and Shaman single target healed better. Unfortunately, neither of those are the case right now.

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You mean if we healed and buffed and anked the same? I still see group based totems as a plus, maybe i just dont get it, but i currently set up my group in the raid to get mana tide etc :)

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If it needs to be, yes. We're not sure it will need to be since we actually want to lower the AE damage coming into the raid in the situations where it blows away every other spell (except WG).

I know it's natural for players to consider only their abilities compared to the difficulty of the encounters. That makes sense because your context is always how you can improve your character. But we have access to all the knobs -- we can change the encounters around the class design as well, and we do it all the time.

In answer to another question, this is a difficult problem to buff our way out of. It's not just a matter of improving shaman, paladin and Disc AE healing. We would also have to increase single-target damage on tanks and others so that that part of your arsenal competed with the AE button, which in turn means tuning tank gear and health pools and probably a lot of other changes.

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If you lowered the expected number of healers in an instance, gave them multiple AE heals (of various sizes), and then varied the amount of multi-target damage, you might well be able to buff your way out at that point. Does it really matter much of a single-target heal is competing with a multi-target rather than a few multi-target heals on one person are competing with each other?

Fewer healers expected in an instance also has other advantages given what the realm populations seem to be like.

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But Shaman and Priests are not homogenized, Shaman have worse mana efficiency and the entire resto tree is built around Chain Heal. There are only a handful of talents that only affect other spells. It'd be fine if Shaman/Priests raid healed and single target healed the same. It'd be fine if Priests raid healed better and Shaman single target healed better. Unfortunately, neither of those are the case right now.

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Ok, so how about this... Let shaman and priest have equal raid healing. Let priests have better single target healing than shaman. And then let's have resto shaman bring tons of raid utility and buffs, while holy priests bring almost zero raid utility and buffs. Sound like a fair deal?

We can't have everything exactly the same, or what would be the point of different classes?

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You guys should chill on the "Shaman QQ caused us to get nerfed." We decided it was a problem based almost entirely on numbers coming out of Naxx. CoH and WG were doing the heavy lifting on almost every encounter. They were easily the top two heals for many parses. CH wasn't. Your individual raids may vary, but that is the overall trend. If we go ahead and make this change and see CH then completely fill the void left behind, then we would nerf CH as well. If we listened to any group, it was the Holy priests who were telling us they just wanted to be able to hit another button to heal (again, individuals may feel differently).

We don't like the stacking mana cost solution in this case, though we did talk about it a lot. We suspect that would actually lead us to the land of priests saying their mana regen sucks because they have to spam CoH to be competitive, and I'm not sure we can count on all you guys to be around to explain the logic when that happens.

We don't want to just nerf the healing throughput on the spell because then it won't be able to do its job. CoH was in this state before when Holy just ignored it.

A cast time might work, but the instant nature of both spells is part of what makes them so useful in emergencies.

We're not crazy about reverting the smart heal aspect, though that is still on the table. Having too many spells that favor party over raid forces you back to having to worry a lot about your raid composition. "Oh, sorry hunter, we can't bring you because we need another melee for our melee group or else CoH won't reach you." PoH isn't as big an issue, because honestly it's just not such a big contribution to total healing. Though we could consider pushing it raid wide.

Cooldowns are a reality of a lot of damage rotations and they generally work as long as the system isn't too complicated. You typically have the spell you really want to use in a given situation and then the others you fall back on when the favored spell is on cooldown.

We haven't always announced changes like this that we're considering so far in advance. Our hope was to stimulate some discussion on the matter. The "Now we'll never get invited!" replies and the "You have no idea how to design our class," replies aren't really what we're looking for, and are the kind of thing to make us less likely to pre-announce in the future. There are some very intelligent replies though, including some of the discussion of PoH and its role for the priest. Please keep it up.

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Honestly GC, just take a moment and consider. Here we are less than a week before the launch, and the very best thing for a Holy Priest is going to get nerfed. Surely you must understand how that really takes the wind out of the sails of those of us who took what you gave us, and made the most of it.

My talent spec was based on what Blizzard had said CoH was going to be. And with it I have done well. Now I will need to adapt and I will. But think for a minute how we feel. We speced and gemmed for it and a week before the launch we get spam QQed by the Shaman, which there is no denying was done, and then when we are disappointed over it you say you will keep it secret in the future.

I think we have probably over-reacted, and we will adapt. But I think you might be a little understanding of the disappointment this is for us.

KK.....so you are going to do it, and we will have to adapt. Its only been a few hours and you gave the pallys days to get over it.

I think it would be fair to refund the priest talent points since this is being done.

For me it would be helpful if you could elaborate a little on how Blizzard sees the role of a holy priest. I could swear I saw Blizzard say we were meant to be strong aoe healers, but I probably was wrong.

Are we supposed to just be backups and fill ins for the main healers now?
Pallys are main single target healers
Druids are main HoTs healers
Shaman are main Raid/AoE healers

Priests are the second string for each role, but able to do more than one role better than any other?

I am disappointed, but already recovering and will adapt. Some guidance on how Blizzard sees my class role would be appreciated, but if that is too much to ask, I understand.

Just understand please that its a disappointment at a time when were so looking forward to the launch.

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The difference in this case is that we agreed Chain Heal virtually *was* the Resto shaman. It was one of their most signature abilities, like Mortal Strike for the Arms warrior, Windfury for the Enhancement shaman or Frostbolt for the Forst mage. While you might like Circle of Healing, and I know it's a fun spell, we never designed the entire Holy tree around it. Our intent for Holy is that the spec uses lots of spells -- Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Renew, PoM, Binding Heal, PWS, Lightwell, PoH, Guardian Spirit and CoH. It's hard to find niches for all of those sometimes, and CoH had crowded out a lot of those others -- even if you were pushing those other buttons, the actual outcome was that many of those clicks did very little compared to CoH.

Resto druid were in a very similar situation -- lots of tools, but everything looked like a job for Wild Growth.

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This may be what you intended, but it's not how it worked out. Priests were brought to BC raids for CoH, and good single-target healing as a bonus. Now, if you take away CoH's usefulness, that leaves us in the position of being good single-target healers. But pallies are better single target healers--so where is the priest's niche?

Yes, we have a formidable arsenal of spells, but if they don't allow us to do anything that makes us more desirable than another healer in at least some situations, we might as well only have two or three crappy ones.

CoH is overpowered.

CoH + 6 sec cooldown is underpowered. I think you would need to raise the amount healed or it would go back to not being worth speccing into.

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The difference in this case is that we agreed Chain Heal virtually *was* the Resto shaman. It was one of their most signature abilities, like Mortal Strike for the Arms warrior, Windfury for the Enhancement shaman or Frostbolt for the Forst mage. While you might like Circle of Healing, and I know it's a fun spell, we never designed the entire Holy tree around it. Our intent for Holy is that the spec uses lots of spells -- Flash Heal, Greater Heal, Renew, PoM, Binding Heal, PWS, Lightwell, PoH, Guardian Spirit and CoH. It's hard to find niches for all of those sometimes, and CoH had crowded out a lot of those others -- even if you were pushing those other buttons, the actual outcome was that many of those clicks did very little compared to CoH.

Resto druid were in a very similar situation -- lots of tools, but everything looked like a job for Wild Growth.

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This looks like a job for Wild Growth! the heal spec thats less effective on 1 person than a single stack of lifebloom thats left to pop after 7 seconds

Druids use tons of heal spells. they constantly keep up Regrowth, rejuv, lifebloom, on the tanks/ and some on people taking damage and then they got Swiftmend for when hots dont cut it.