All in all, not the buff Holy or even Disc needs. How many HP have you gained in 10 levels? I bet more than you gained in 50-60. Our heals only went up pennies to the dollars of HP. It needs a major overhaul.

As a healer I have not had problems getting bumped by paladins. Esp now that they fixed that bug that gave paladins mana even when at full health, combined with more SP dps nerfing, there won’t be teams of Pally healers with SP mana batteries as much.

I don’t really see the controversy. As a disc/holy specced healer (30/31/0) I find healing so easy it’s boring. In fact, I stopped playing a month ago.

At the same time, Holy Priests fall behind Holy Paladins due to lack of mana efficiency (heals per mana), lack of fast spammable heals (heals per second), and overall raid utility. A single spirit specced priest is all you need to give nearly all the utility a healing priest can provide. Any extra priests are redundant.

The result is that any guild that is willing to min/max its roster (any highly progressed guild) is now running raids with a single holy priest, two to three shadow priests, and three to four holy paladins. Anything less and you’re gimping your raid.

I don’t know if the Paladin nerf was the right thing to do. I do know that it didn’t fixed holy priests. Holy needs to be reworked. The 11, 31, and 41 point talents are garbage and this is seriously holding back holy. If those talents were replaced with ones that increased efficiency or longevity and offered some sort of reduced casting time holy would be golden.

We still run into the issue where “holy” priests are forced to spec into two trees to get all the required abilities whereas all other healers have their abilities in one tree.

Why would anyone want the Paladins nerfed??? It doesnt address the priest’s issues. We’re already subpar compared to other classes in similar gear. Nerfing Paladins just means healing is harder all the way around. That makes no sense to me at all. I don’t know why Blizzard seems so relunctant to buff priests and fix that lame Holy tree.

“Illumination”: This talent now only gives 50% of the mana cost of the critical heal. It also now returns the correct amount of mana when used with ranks 4 and 5 of “Holy Shock”.

There’s a lot of other paladin stuff in there that’s meant to make the other trees more valuable. As a protection paladin, I particularly like

“One-Handed Weapon Specialization”(Protection): Now increases all damage caused by the paladin by 1-5% while a one-handed weapon is equipped.

There also appear to be some priest changes that are mostly buffs.

Now as a priest who has always been shadow, I’ll explain why I disagree with a few people’s comments about shadow folks switching items and healing decently well. The fact that it’s gear dependant is a mute point I’m glad no one brought up – everything in WoW is gear dependant. Yes it sucks to have to get a set of healing gear and damage gear, but whatever. It’s the game. Although being told I can’t get the healing mace from Kara until all the pallies have it does tick me off, but eh, it will drop for me eventually.

As a shadow priest you can do really solid damage. It’s not mage level, but couple it with the fact you’re healing and probably feeding mana at the same time and it’s damn impressive. Geared right, it’s sustainable for a decent period of time. However, you don’t really have the sustaining power to heal for long. There are several decent talents in the holy tree that make you more mana efficent, more mana regen, bigger heals, etc. Without those, even spamming the big heal will run you dry soon enough. You can Shadowfiend back some mana, but if the boss has an AE (and which doesn’t, these days), the pet dies in a round. Blessing of Light, Blessing of Wisdom, and the 100% back on a crit heal ability are small things that end up combining into much more.

The best analogy I can think of at this moment is post-release CoH and scrappers (which didn’t heal – I always abandoned the healer to the DPS machine). By the time a scrapper hit mid level, they had such a massive combo of abilities that they could easily solo dozens of npc’s at a time, and in fact it was even more practical to do so. The devs, not realizing that the players could set up a combo like that, nerfed them to heck, which made the players scream.

You know what would be an elegant fix to the priest/paladin issue? Multiple builds that you can swap between for free, given conditions. I know fellow bloggers have written about this before, and it’s something I’ve tossed around in guild for a while myself. I can do it now…why not waive the 50g and let me swap between two talent specs at a trainer every few hours? It would end the complaining.

I guess I wasn’t clear enough. Priests are *not* expected to heal every fight, no matter their spec. I’d say that about 1/2 of Priests are healing spec, and heal all the time. I’d say that about 1/2 of Priests are shadow spec and are rarely asked to heal. They are in fact desired strictly for their damage and utility (hp return, mana return, +shadow damage buff, etc). It’s rare that a shadow priest is asked to heal simply because their damage is so useful; but when needed, they can heal far better than a not-healing-spec Paladin. Currently, both healing and shadow priests are in demand.

[quote]
The second point I wanted to make was that I am kind of prejudice against paladins (I just reached new heights of nerd in this sentence). My feeling was always that paladins were not supporting correctly in raids and were far to eager to elbow someone else out to take a bit of the “limelight” as they saw it. Occasionally I would meet a paladin that was a genuinely great healer and one or two out performed any priests I raided with. Mostly the paladins I raided with were like some hormone driven teens with a hero complex though. Probably say more about my guilds than paladins as a whole I realise.
[/quote]

Paladins are currently facing exactly what Priests used to face before TBC came out: no one wants anything but a Holy Paladin because Paladins, even when specced and geared correctly, suck at the other two roles: tanking and dps.