So I have an 80 disc/holy priest raiding ICC 25 that I'm really falling out of love with. She is over 5 years old, extremely well geared, easily one of the most respected healers of my faction on my server (not actually this one) - and on the verge of being shelved for my resto druid alt. The only reasons I haven't done it yet are purely sentimental.

But I don't want to get into that here, and I really don't want this to turn into a massive priest QQ thread.

If you are currently unhappy with the state of priests, I agree with you - for a wide range of reasons - but you're not who I'm looking for input here from.

I would like to hear from priest healers doing t10 raid content on their priests who also have a geared healer of another class that they heal the same content on, and who prefer the priest over the other class(es).

I would simply like to know exactly why you prefer your priest. What is it that the priest does better? How does your gameplay shake out in a way that makes the priest more enjoyable? Is it is question of style, strength, versatility? Plain and simple fun?

If you love your priest but haven't also raided endgame content on another healing class, sorry, and I mean no disrespect, but your opinion isn't what I'm looking for. I am also not interested in hearing from players with no priest experience who think priests can excel in some way that their class can not. I think it is very easy to have a "grass is always greener" mentality, so I'm specifically looking for the input of people who've actually been on both sides of the fence (or 3 or 4 sides) - people who have an actual, meaningful choice of which character to raid on and who genuinely prefer priests and/or think they are the superior healer.

And I would like to know why.

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Q u o t e:
It's comments like that which make it really hard to believe they understand priests. And the T10 set bonuses. Oh and the PoH nerf... because that was necessary, right? Those damn Holy Priests with 5% of their total healing coming from PoH. Good thing they nerf'd it or else we might be getting something like 6 or 7% healing from PoH!

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Please. This isn’t a gotcha moment. The question was why Greater Heal doesn’t have much of a use and my answer was that Flash Heal does the job well enough that you don’t feel the need to go for Gheal’s longer cast time but larger throughput. If you disagree with that, feel free to point out why, but in this case I think you’ll have a hard time supporting that argument. If tanks had more health, then all healers would care a lot more about HPM as well as the risk of overhealing. If you aren’t using FH or Gheal, then chances are you’re in a role where CoH or Renew spam is keeping everyone alive. But when you want to single-target heal someone quickly, neither of those is going to be very attractive and in fact neither is Gheal.

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Q u o t e:
ITS OK GUYS! CATA WILL FIX IT!

GC only reads the Damage Dealing forum anyway. :(

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I read all of these forums. I just don’t feel like I can contribute much to discussions where a particular class or spec just wants to preach to the choir, as it were. I get a lot more out of discussions with a little back and forth.

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Q u o t e:
I would LOVE to see an educational video of GC playing a healing priest in a raid, and explaining how he does it, what he likes and dislikes... and dismissing complains by demonstrating visually that priests are fine. Devs and players are not in sync, I don't have the feeling we are playing the same game anymore !!

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I won’t give you a video, but I’ll explain to you how I do it.

Disc: PoM on cooldown. PW:S as much as you can (esp. on the Arcane mage until 3.3.3). Use Penance often when you need burst. Resort to PoH if a lot of people need healing at once, especially in 10-player raids where you don’t have a lot of other healers to pick up the slack. Keep Pain Suppression and Divine Hymn for emergencies. Use Power Infusion on a mage or lock if you don’t need it.

Holy: PoM on cooldown. CoH on cooldown if there is any raid damage. Renew to handle the rest of the raid damage. Flash Heal if someone is still low after all of that. Save GS and Divine Hymn for emergencies or timed boss cooldowns. I tend to use Binding Heal a lot more than most priests because it makes me feel smart, especially when globals are in question.

What I like: Feeling smart when I mix the right tool with the right problem. Saving lives when someone thought they were dead. Sitting there at full mana halfway through a fight because I didn’t heal when I didn’t need to. Penance in general. Body and Soul. Borrowed Time. Serendipity.

What I don’t like: Using CoH so much. Dealing with Weakened Soul (esp. as Holy). Lightwell. Seeing priests die. (In all honesty I don’t die a lot, but I see Spirits of Redemption constantly. I guess as a sweeping generalization, priests have the stare-at-Grid syndrome worse than other healers.) Blowing 3 candles every wipe. Looking like a mage if I pick the wrong gear.

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Q u o t e:
We can all probably agree on the point that it has been too long since we have had any feedback on these issues. They probably feel that commenting on them would result in a large QQ -fest. Healers in general are the least commented group, but no one has addressed priests in a long time.

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Please don’t make this a competition for forum posts. I don’t make any effort to make sure I’ve made my warlock comment of the week or whatever, and if you ask me to do that, you’re just complicating my ability to make posts at all. The easier it is for me to slip in to the forums and make an occasional post, ultimately the more I will be able to make.

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Q u o t e:
Bliz's description for priests: masters of healing


that is almost laughable at this point...

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The shaman description says they can tank too. You used to be level 60. Onyxia and Bolvar used to stand in Stormwind. MMOs change.

As a general strategy, I would steer against any post that is going to lead to smart players dismissing your thread as QQ and moving on. Those are the exact players you want posting in your thread. Don't scare them away.

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Q u o t e:
I'll be honest here, I think the devs understand pve balance very well because it's much more possible to balance a serious casual raiding guild with work/life/dev stuff. I doubt, however, that many are hardcore pvpers and that's probably why there's more balance issues in that area than otherwise. To be fair, it would require someone who spends far, far too much time in game pvping to get a comprehensive feel for every class. And even then you're subject to bias.

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Much of the thread was on PvE. I would be happy to provide my PvP healing strategy too, though it's more of a prioritization and less of a rotation. :)

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Q u o t e:
Where we differ is renew. Even with my 6 talent points in renew I find I tend to use it solely on tanks and occasionally any players that may get a debuff causing damage over time but not much elsewhere.

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I also have a lot of experience as a Resto druid, so I am probably just partial to hotting lots of folks. Still, it works for me. The encounters have enough going on these days, that just focusing on the biggest heal per GCD can be a mistake. If you hit a situation where you have to run or are feared or whatever, the buffer even from Renew can be a life saver until the healers are back at 100% output again.

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Q u o t e:
Also, you say you don't like using COH so much, but that's really what Holy is built around, and I rather have it up more often. Holy is still fun an interesting, but it feels really clunky with the CD on COH and POM.

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See, I like PoM because at least you are making a choice about who to put it on and sometimes you might even recast if it's sitting on someone that won't take damage again. (Story: Once back on Archimonde, a priest and I had both been doomfired or something and he pulled me aside and said "Just let PoM bounce between the two of us just for a sec." I was impressed.)

CoH is good. It's so good in fact, that it's usually a bad choice not to push it when it's on cooldown. This means playing Holy is really about what you use your other 4 casts or whatever when you can't CoH. I'd rather use CoH less often and other spells more often. I think Holy needs the talent and it's really tree defining. I just want to use some of my other cool toys too.

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Q u o t e:
Why did you come into a seven page thread and not reply to any of the good posts in it? There have been a lot of problems that priests, specifically holy, have had with their class lately, many of those problems being reiterated in this thread, and you didn't address any of them?

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I get to decide what posts I reply to. I mean, who knows if you'll be available the next time I'm ready to make a forum post? :)

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Q u o t e:
Here, I'll list them out for you.

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Since I took a cheapshot, I'll answer them, but you're not going to like the answers.

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Q u o t e:
1) Holy's single target throughput is laughable, and can not be sustained for a reasonable time, and it has been this way since 3.1 when you gutted Holy Concentration and removed Imp HC.

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I don't have mana problems. Sorry. On the rare times I do, I use the fiend. No, you don't have Holy paladin single-target throughput. Nobody does. Does that mean you're useless as a healer? Far from it.

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Q u o t e:
2) Combined with our abysmal single target healing, upwards to 30% of our effective healing comes from a spell we don't even really get to "use" as it's smart targeted. If your idea of a fun healing class is "press this button every 7 seconds and win" then I think you need to find a new job. PoM'ing isn't a "smart situational choice." It's just something you do. Every 7 seconds, you PoM the tank.

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Sometimes you PoM the tank. Sometimes you PoM something else. Like I said above, I think PoM is fun. It doesn't have a ton of layered gameplay the way Conflagging an Immolate does, but given what else healers have to do, I find it an interesting spell. Now CoH I tend to agree is a little too brainless....

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Q u o t e:
3) Pidgeonholed into our 2 piece tier 9 because PoM is so much of our effective healing (before any armory bashers come in on me, yes, I know I dropped the 2 piece. I did it because when you're not in a raiding guild your single most important stat becomes your Gear Score, because that's the number that's going to get you into PUGs, not how many pieces of tier 9 you're wearing)

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You're going to have to make the choice about how long to keep your old set bonus when you have access to new gear. In my experience, players tend to put too much emphasis on set bonuses. We aren't trying to have a model where you always take every tier set when you can. I pug quite a bit just to try and stay in touch with what's going on and I don't think I've ever been denied a spot as a priest. Usually they're just grateful to get a healer. If number of T9 is how they decide who to invite, I think I'd find another pug.

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Q u o t e:
4) Our AoE healing isn't anything astounding compared to the aoe healing of a shaman or druid. If our tank healing is going to be so atrocious, shouldn't we at least be the clear-cut "AoE heal the hell out of your raid" class? Most of the time I don't even feel like my CoH is doing real effective healing, I feel like it's just sniping a druid's wild growth, which leaves our real aoe healing spells as PoM (again, a spell we don't get to "use") or PoH, the only non-smart targeted aoe heal in the game.

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Holy's AE healing is fantastic. If there's an "I'm the AE guy!", it's supposed to be the shaman, but even then I think that categorization is too narrow these days. Healers have different abilities that make them better or worse for certain situations. "I'm the AE guy!" belies the nuance that the 5 healers actually have. Stop worrying so much about your character being the missing puzzle piece that completes the raid. The "they can't raid without me!" mentality is best left behind in BC. A raid needs X number of healers, and ideally they're a mix of healers, and then you're good to go.

P.S. I'll admit that paladins as the best MT healer is still a little bit of cruft left over from the older model. Unless we were willing to really nerf the crap out of them and reduce everyone's mana regen, it's going to be hard to dislodge them too much from that role. Really though what we're going for, and what we'll emphasize even more in the future, is "bring healers" not "I must have a priest."

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Q u o t e:
I think for me one of the most frustrating issues being a priest is how having more than one priest in a raid is counter-productive, even if they are holy and disc. As a holy priest, if I dare to throw a shield around someone who's about to die I get chewed out because I have just taken over the territory of the disc priest and they will not be able to put a stronger shield on that person till the debuff wears off. ProM overwrites constantly when raiding with another priest and someones healing takes a nose dive, and you have no control of where it bounces after you coordinate the first hit.

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I think Holy and Disc work together okay. Disc and Disc definitely collide, but it's not the worst thing in the world to be asked to bring 2 of the 5 healers. As Holy, I would generally leave the shielding to the Disc priest, but if dude was going to die, then you did your job and the Disc priest was just too slow. I wouldn't worry about PoM collision. More PoMs tend to just provide more healing.

Now in general I wish there was a little more coordination among healers, but the current damage model we have just doesn't really allow it. I remember when tanking Molten Core, that the priest would say over vent "Big heal coming on the OT!" as he powered up a Greater Heal. You don't have that luxury these days. One of our designers was watching an old Illidan video recently and remarked how everyone was at 50% for so much of the fight. Now days someone is at 100%, will hit 100% in the next couple of GCDs, or will be dead. In that environment, you'd get "Big --" out of your mouth before it would be too late. Players need more health and heals have to be a little more expensive.

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Q u o t e:
So how is your mana if you try and match the raw output of a paladin in tank healing or a druid in raid healing? Not to mention priests can't even match either of them in those 2 areas, but even if you try you will run out of mana quicker than either of them

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I don't run out of mana. I tend to out perform them on healing Deathwhisper and Saurfang (as Disc). The druid does better at Marrowgar. The paladin does better on Festergut. Your mileage may vary.

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Q u o t e:
Is the holy tree more of an example of what you want in cataclysm where we have choices?: IE lightwell (even though it is currently made fun of), Body and Soul, Renew specs vs. single target specs, test of faith vs. blessed resilience.. in sum talents that save mana vs. talents for throughput vs. utility talents (GS is obviously one of the greatest cooldowns in the game being the only castable "you will live" button in the game (AD on pallies isn't castable)). (poorly worded question hidden)

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Both Holy and Disc have really great deep talents. The ones we'd consider pruning are stuff like Spiritual Healing, Empowered Healing and Divine Providence. Borrowed Time and Serendipity are clearly healing boosts, but they do it in an interesting way.

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Q u o t e:
Its ok for paladins to be "required"

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You misread. I was acknowledging that it feels like that now, but it's not okay. (No offense to the paladins.)

Lightwell isn't okay either. We don't want to turn it into a totem, because the class already has plenty of spells that require little interaction. We're not entirely sure what we'll do yet, but we still like the basic idea (creating something and it does the healing) so we aren't going to just scrap it.

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Q u o t e:
CoH is too brainless? what are the other healers doing? picking the right spell for the need? when we look at logs for our raids, non priest healers are generally spamming one spell, priests are not. (sure it depends a bit on the priest)

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True, but many of those spells require targeting. Even PoH requires targeting. I'm not a big fan of the way Wild Growth has turned out either, but at least its hot prevents it from being the "nobody dies from AE" spell. Again, they are good spells, and they have their place. I wish there was more of a decision of when to use them instead of always on cooldown. I realize part of that is encounter design. Part of it may be that they are still too good. (But we aren't nerfing them anytime soon.)

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Q u o t e:
It reminds me of your infamous "I know a guy that heals Thorim just fine as a resto shaman!" comment. :P

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I understand that it's not fair for me to bring up purely anecdotal evidence without any data for you to poke at, but that's the way it has to be. We can't out our characters. At the same time, I don't have a horse in this race. You can choose to believe me or not to believe me and the game design will be the same. If you have a concern or feedback in general, by all means bring that up. In this case, someone brought up a concern ("Priests have mana problems") and I disagreed and said we had evidence to the contrary. That doesn't need to end the discussion, but I would offer something more than "We don't believe your evidence. Prove it." The burden isn't on us to convince you to let us design the game the way we think it should be designed. (But again, don't turn that into us never listening or I wouldn't be here.)

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Q u o t e:
The fights are designed so that if one person dies in the first 90% of the fight, then its a wipe (unless the raid is overgeared).

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Fights are designed to be hard (to a degree). If you have a proposal for how they can be hard in a different vector, please share. Running OOM is a tool that we lost and want to regain, but I suspect that will lead to a lot of "Healing isn't fun anymore" responses.

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Q u o t e:
This is really the first time in what feels like forever that a blue has taken the time to address healers in general and priests in specific

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I've been busy. It doesn't mean I don't love you guys. Please don't make such a big deal about feeling neglected or ignored or hated just because we get busy sometimes.

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Q u o t e:
As holy, we don't use GH because its too mana inefficient and too slow.

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AKA, Flash Heal does the job sufficiently. That's what I've been saying.

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Q u o t e:
GC, you say you don't have mana issues, by saying this I know you are a bad healer, or you are being extremely carried by your other healers.

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I was pwned. Headshot.

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Q u o t e:
I want to hear from priests who have also healed endgame on another class and who still think that healing priests are fine.

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This is a place players come when they want to complain about something or fish for buffs. You don't get many indifferent posters posting that they're indifferent. You don't get many posters who are pleased as punch, because the motivation usually isn't there. I wouldn't try and infer anything from quantity of posts (on any topic on the Internet). Not all players, nor even smart players, play the forum game. Forums self-select for a very specific type of player. That's one reason we don't base our decisions solely on forum feedback.