Hey guys, hearing mixed reviews about having a Holy priest in a raid.
Would like to hear your opinions on whether it is better to go DC priest or holy... Or SPriest.. for raids
-
Member
Disc or Holy priest for late game PVE
-
Field Medic Moderator
Which is more desirable will depend on the boss fight and what your raid comp looks like.
I personally carry both specs around so I can switch as needed, or whichever I feel like playing.
Discipline is significantly easier to play and it has more value to noobs because your shields give them more EHP (effective health points), which often times leads to pugs preferring Disc over Holy. However, when the raid comp allows, Holy performs better than Disc on the majority of fights. Though you wouldn't know it unless you know what you're looking for, because Holy performs better on those fights at keeping people alive while Disc is insanely good at meter-whoring but doing jack for the raid in the process.
Playing as a Holy Priest is also annoying when a Discipline Priest is in the raid, because it is difficult to use Body and Soul (talent) utility whenever you need it as the Disc likely has Weakened Soul on most targets.
-
Member
Don't listen to Mercy, totally biased with her holy. It's like religion for her. You know those people who knocks your door with "Do you know Jesus loves you" That's her. If you seek fair opinion just wait for responses.
-
Forum Veteran nº 69
Eh, people say that crap all the time and yet somehow I can't log my priest without being asked to join a raid. Must be because it sucks, right?
They also said don't stun the trash for years.
-
Member
I don't know, not playing wow.
-
Forum Veteran nº 69
I'm sure the OP is going to appreciate your lack of advice then.
Speaking of advice, here's a couple tips for holy priest aside from the general healing concept.
If you're going to play serendipity spec then you need to practice knowing when damage will come, it's similar to a paladin or shaman if you're focused on raid healing.
If you're going with the renew play style then literally do it like a druid but practice your reaction time and leverage the fact you have instant heals more so than hots. Reaction time literally makes or breaks this play style, it's the difference between top or bottom of the heals for every fight in my experience.
In the end if you want to play holy it can be good and it can be desired in raids but you're going to have to work for it. More people like disc because they've seen more people who can play it. Personally I have all 3 specs and still generally run shadow/holy.Edited: August 25, 2019
-
Member
Shadow is a DPS spec so I'll leave it out of the comparison.
The Disc healing style brings a very unique flavour to the WotLK healing paradigm. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that it's the most unique healer by a margin - because you're more frequently putting up protective buffers against incoming damage than you are actually restoring lost health. Every shield you put up on a person is functionally equivalent to an instant 7-10k (or whatever amount) healing. A good Discipline priest will save plenty of lives with strategically applied Power Word: Shield buffs, which should be thought of as temporary EHP increases, sort of like mini-Last Stands.
Holy Priest healing on the other hand is conceptually similar to that of other healing specs, where the essence of what you're doing is restoring lost health.
While there are fights where a Disc Priest might be better off going Holy, there are also plenty of fights where the reverse is true. There are encounters in this patch's end-game that make a Discipline Priest virtually mandatory, like Lady Deathwhisper and Lich King. I mean you could bruteforce these encounters without a Disc just to show that you did, but the Disc toolkit here is vastly more invaluable than what any other healer offers. By contrast, Holy Priests are much more replaceable. For example, couple of years ago there were a number of bugs in place (like this, or this, as well as a number of other smaller things that added up) that very adversely impacted Holy Priest performance, yet guilds got on more than fine by substituting them for other healers. In comparison, the impact of not having a Disc Priest would generally be much greater, particularly in an ICC environment.
One other reason people might favour Disc is because it has much better single target spot-healing (and also better tank-healing). You might find this very helpful in PUGs. Power Word: Shield and Penance are fairly powerful pick-me-up spells for low health players, and on top of those you have the remarkably potent Divine Aegis talent supplementing the spot-heals you put out. Holy Priests on the other hand have the most miserable single target healing in the game.Edited: August 25, 2019
-
Field Medic Moderator
Sure, I love Holy, but if you think I'm saying "Play Holy, not Disc" - I'm not. Any player who is committed to playing a healer Priest should have both specs at their disposal, imo.
These silly call-outs don't do anything to help OP.
-
Member
This depend on the Holy Priest talents. Serendipity HPriest with talents in greater heal has way better single target healing than disc (although mana hungry).
Hpriest is the most versatile healer in the game. It trully excels in burst aoe healing. (engame fights lack this dmg pattern, so hpriest doesnt have much space to shine) You can choose talents for every possible situation.
-
Member
Most serious end-game ICC Hpriests will default to Serendipity anyway, simply because the massive Haste buff on PoH (or GH for that matter) is a large driving force of the rapid burst AoE healing delivery that you'd want to bring the class for. Without Serendipity, your burst healing is only reliable when the incoming damage is completely predictable. So I tend to assume it as a given.
About Empowered Healing:
Even with 5/5 Empowered Healing it's tough to mount an argument against just Divine Aegis alone. Not only is the latter essentially an extra 1.3x multiplier slapped on to your crits - so your crit heals do 1.95x their regular amount, and you will crit a tonne as disc - but the fact that you get that boost in the form of an absorb which won't overheal makes it far more useful. Think back to when you have to sporadically tank-heal as a Disc Priest. RS phys. realm comes to mind. Every 2-3 Flash Heals you're sticking something like 3-4k worth of absorbs onto your tank that buffers them against the next hit. And if they avoid the next hit, the Divine Aegis cushion will just keep piling up. It's basically a permanent Val'anyr proc - with the twist that it only procs on crits instead of all heals, but the absorb amount is 30% rather than 15%.
This also disregards the several other useful spot-healing talents in the Disc toolkit, most if not all of which are taken by default in most conventional Disc builds, unlike a Holy Priest for instance that would have to take a hit in another area to afford the hefty 5 talent point investment into Empowered Healing.Edited: August 25, 2019
-
Member
I am not disregarding divine aegis or anything. I am familiar with both disc and holy (did a few LoDs on both).
All I am stating is holy is not necessarily weak on single target healing. (I used to sacrifice all mana regen talens to get improved GH, because I found it worth it and learned to get by wit hymn, fiend and pots.)
If you need one quick cast than GH does about the same or more healing as shield + penance, but full power arrives faster. (when you have at least one stack of serendipity) If you need to heal heavy dmg for longer time, then holy just outclasses disc in raw throughput. (It can compete even with hpal single target as long as it has mana.)
Disc is more mana efficient, and provides useful absorbs, but it also has lower maximum HPS. It's much easier to reach your maximum potential as disc because absorbs are consumed first, hiding value of other healers.
Curious you choosed halion as an example. Because I think holy is actually always better there since you just don't have enough target's to shield most of the time as disc.Edited: August 26, 2019
-
Member
Thanks that's the impression i got. Coming from playing only Cata + as a resto sham it was always cake finding raids and going through them.
But WoTLK heard is a different ball-park with raids and really want to take into account every little variable that comes into play when choosing the specs.
Thanks for the tips
-
Member
Try both specs. Holy is a bit more gear hungry, since your mana pool will suffer with lack of spirit whereas disc can overcome this by playing around rapture. Reason you don't see holy more often is because a) it does have a tougher learning curve than discipline and b) most priests are pressured to play discipline early on because of PuGs and their guild.
Imo, disc is so beneficial to have on like 90% of fights, that it becomes almost mandatory -- not even including infest, think of pungent on fester, melees exploding from putricide's green ooze, bonestorm -- these are mechanics that can kill squishy / badly positioned and careless raid members. A good discipline gives other healers that much more reaction time to cover the raid. And there in terms of covering the raid, you have the holy priest -- anyone can renew spam like a resto dudu, but mastering well timed circle and prayer of healing nukes is what makes a good holy priest. The spec is kind of like resto shaman/druid hybrid with a massive toolkit, so fight familiarity is important. As far as tank healing goes, both specs leave a bit to be desired when you look at it alone -- disc has a big pick-me-up in penance, but once it's on cd, you're stuck spamming weak flash heals on the tank, while holy can greater heal and can keep renew on the tank, but lacks the burst from penance and raw crit + divine aegis that disc has. Neither are great, but you are mostly support at tank healing -- both specs have very good tank cooldowns (Pain Suppression and Guardian Spirit) and provide 10% physical damage reduction on the tank.
Touching on shadow priest, they are very good to have in both 10 and 25m raids. They're able to soak mechanics like no other class -- they can not go inside during big bang on Algalon; they can soak orbs on ToGC valkyrs, kite anub spikes; green ooze on PP can be avoided being stacked on if an spriest is the target, provided they have dispersion up (this does require good coordination); they can soak vile spirits and are very good inside frostmourne to kill the spirits; they can avoid stacking for fester spores; they can reduce dmg from UM. They can keep their group stable due to the heals from vampiric embrace. It's just a great class with respectable single target DPS and excellent cleave damage.
Go priest, it's a great class.
Keep calm and power word: shield.Edited: August 26, 2019
-
Member
Discipline is easy and good at same time, bouth are good actually, in my oppinion holy is best (but if you get the val`anyr, and low without)
-
Member
The underlined bit suggests to me you have an exaggerated view of the spellpower coefficients behind each Holy Priest spell.
Even ignoring the extremely pertinent factor of mana longevity, the inherent difference in HPS between a Hpally and Hpriest is definitely there. 3x Flash heal/Binding Heal and then 1x GH on rotation just don't pack as much punch behind them as a sustained stream of Holy Light casts.
The Serendipity mechanic - wherein you're forced to put out 3x relatively meager heals before your big heal becomes worth using - is also another major bottleneck in Hpriest tank-healing. This is something that also presents a major obstacle a lot of the the time - the single target healing you're putting out is just not consistent. In a meta where bosses can reduce a tank's HP from 100% to 0% within the span of ~4 seconds with auto-attacks alone, this will end up limiting you in the area of tank-healing. An end-game Holy Priest will often find himself in situations like queuing a GH because an auto attack just took his tank down to 60% HP, but then right after his tank is topped up, the very next auto attack brings him down to 60% again, so now they have to make do with 3x Flash Heals or Binding Heals until their next GH becomes worth using. Every other healing spec brings more consistent single-target healing that is not only sustainable mana-wise, but also much less adversely affected by some kind of mechanic like Serendipity.
"Hides value" can possibly be taken to mean that the absorbs are just padding the meters a lot, but what must be kept in mind is that by and large, absorbs are in fact more helpful than the same amount of healing thrown out as a stray direct heal instead. They're literally temporary EHP buffs that are guaranteed to be effective to some degree (unless your tank goes 8 seconds without tanking any damage).
This is one reason Val'anyr is so amazing, which goes back to my point about Divine Aegis serving almost as a perma Val-anyr proc. It's always there passively on, supplementing most of your direct heals with a considerable absorb cushion.
You don't have to constantly be shielding raid members to be valuable as Disc.
In the physical realm, Disc Priests are great by simple virtue of their higher sustained tank healing. The two biggest healing challenges in the physical realm are 1) Sustained Damage on the Main and Off-tank (especially if another healer has the debuff, or while the big add is up), and 2) overzealous DPS suddenly pulling a tonne of Little add aggro and plummeting really low on health. Most of the time the Disc toolkit is more suited to both these situations, especially when it's two tanks you're healing and not just the one. I don't think Guardian Spirit, as well as anything else Holy has to offer sufficiently offsets the setback of not possessing Divine Aegis, and having your sustained HPS limited by a mechanic like Serendipity. This is something that's also reflected in the choice most guilds make to have a Disc Priest outside rather than Holy.
