Paladins and Druids to get a Lift

[MongoJerry]

The major problem with the entire tree is it appears to be mostly geared towards using greater heal, and priests barely use that spell in my experience.  If you're specced holy, you can heal much better... "druid style", with the big slow heal. You'll also last forever before going oom.  Going holy does make you a much better healer... if you heal in that style.

BUT most encounters you just can't afford to make a 3.5 second cast.  It's just asking for trouble, playing ping-pong with the tank's health like that.  I think it's a developer oversight they never really bothered to correct (read as: if they fixed holy to make us heal better with the heal we actually use, flash heal, it would give holy an advantage in MC and the like, so they won't do that)

Yep, exactly.

Regarding Holy Nova, there are several things wrong with it, but first of all, let me say that at one time Blizzard had the right idea of what to do with Holy Nova and then went astray. Back in the beta, Holy Nova was a damage spell rather than a healing spell. It had a 5 second cooldown rather than a 30 second cooldown and could deliver a small amount of damage while also reducing aggro. I didn't care about the aggro reduction, since I had fade for that. But what was cool about it was that finally for the first time ever, priests actually had an aoe damage spell of their own. Players who are used to playing characters with aoe skills may not appreciate the predicament priests find themselves in by not having an aoe spell. Those bugs in Tanaris that release those little bugs with little health but who deal good damage and stutter spellcasting? Devastating. Know that a rogue is nearby but you don't want to waste your psychic scream on a guess? Too bad. Prior to the introduction of priest talents with Holy Nova, I dreamed of having some modest aoe spell to use, and this Holy Nova talent that came in was the first thing I wanted above everything else.

Well, it turned out that the damage was really really small, but I did figure out that I could wear a bunch of +damage items to boost the damage dealt. At the time, the damage added directly to spells and wasn't reduced according to (roughly) the cast time of the spell. So I managed to pull together a +damage outfit and got to the point where I could do a fair amount of damage with Holy Nova. It wasn't up to mage arcane explosion level, but I'd say maybe a half or one-third of that. Still, it made things really really fun. At that time, Blackrock Depths was the big instance, so being able to aoe in the Lyceum (the room with the ten billion dwarfs) was fantastic. I had a ball with it.

And what's more, Holy Nova added a new dimension to the holy priest. The holy priest wasn't just a healer, he or she was also a character who could play a supporting aoe damage role like a shaman's totems or a hunter's volley. This made the holy specialized priest different and unique. The shadow tree allowed a priest to be a single target dps character, while the holy tree allowed a priest to be able to aoe for a modest amount of damage. It was a great tradeoff.

But then Blizzard whacked Holy Nova off at the knees. The first thing they did was make +damage items scale according to (roughly) the cast time on the spell. This was a necessary balance change or otherwise spells like arcane explosion would do obscene amounts of damage. But Blizzard didn't compensate for this change by increasing the damage that Holy Nova dealt, so Holy Nova became for all practical purposes useless because of how little damage it dealt. People left the holy tree in droves.

In an attempt to revive Holy Nova, Blizzard then went the completely wrong direction. Instead of making it a useful damage spell, they suddenly made it into "yet another healing spell." Like priests really need yet another healing spell. We already have an instant cast healing spell in PW:Shield. We already have a much more powerful group healing spell in Prayer of Healing. We don't need another spell like this. Yes, I suppose once in a blue moon the stars align and a party can be saved by a spell that heals them for 360 damage once a fight, but for some reason in over 18 months of playing a priest, I have never once thought to myself, "Boy, I wish I had a spell like that!"

I'm sure Treesh can come back and list off a dozen times where Holy Nova saved her party, but then we get to the next problem with Holy Nova: the opportunity cost of getting it. If I were to go back to a full healer spec, no way would I get Holy Nova. I'd get Inner Focus, the 21-point Disciplline talent that makes the next spell mana free and adds 25% to the spell's chance to crit. I had that talent for the longest time, and I'll tell you, it's the talent that's saved my parties' butts so many times. I used to love to be able to throw that one last desperate mana-free greater heal on a tank in the hope of pulling out the win or by far my favorite was to hit Inner Focus and then cast Prayer of Healing. A mana-free critical Prayer of Healing? Now, *that* is a spell that saves a party! And the beauty of Inner Focus is that not only does it give you a free spell, but also because your spell doesn't use mana, your mana continues to regenerate right through the cast so that by the time you finish casting the spell, you'll often have enough mana then to cast a flash heal. Now, that is a talent that I want and miss with my hybrid build -- not that Holy Nova one.

And then finally, the problem with Holy Nova is that it also means that you have to spend a full 30 points in a largely gimpy talent tree in order to get it. There are only three talents in the Holy Tree that I really want and yearn for -- Improved Renew (increases effectiveness of Renew by 15%), Spiritual Healing (increases amount healed by healing spells by 10%), and Improved Prayer of Healing (reduces the mana cost of Prayer of Healing by 20%). I can get the first two with 10 easy points. The last one, I miss, but I'm not going to drop 10 other points in the tree just to get it. The rest of the talents in the tree are kind of bland. It's not that they're useless, but they are blasse -- as in, yeah, I'll take them, but I'm not going to cheer about it. Inspiration (increases target's armor by 25% in the event of a critical heal) is kind of neat if you're going full healer spec, Holy Specialization (increase the critical chance of holy spells by 5%) is fine if you don't have anywhere else to drop points into, and one should probably drop points into Subtlety to reduce healing aggro if you don't have Improved Fade. But there's not really much there to the tree. There's certainly not much there that would make me a significantly better healer after I spend the first 10 points in the tree. I might as well spend the rest of my points in the Discipline tree to maximize my mana and maybe get some of the toys like Mind Flay and Silence that the shadow tree gives me.

So, in essence, Holy Nova is a ho hum talent that one has to give up far more powerful and interesting talents in order to get. I won't say that it wouldn't ever be useful, but is it worth a 31 point investment in the Holy Tree? No. If it only required a 21 point investment in the Holy Tree, then maybe it could be interesting on some level. But it's by no means a 31-point top-of-the-tree spell. Now, if its cooldown were reduced to 5 seconds and it went back to being a modest dps aoe spell, then that would be interesting. But sadly, it doesn't sound like that's going to happen.

Regarding the rest of the tree, you've nailed the problem right on the head as far as the problems at the top of the tree -- that those talents expect a person to be using greater heal rather than flash heals. That's just totally ridiculous and the Holy Tree should be reworked just for that problem alone. Regarding Holy Fire, its problem is simply that its damage isn't enough. It's supposed to be the openning salvo spell like a mage's pyroblast or a hunter's aimed shot, but it does little more damage than a Mind Blast does. It's damage needs to be upped by around 50% to make it a more interesting spell.

I saw a post a while back, I think it was here, about a priest that was going to try and use greater heal for most of their healing.  How did that work out, I wonder?

You're probably thinking of my mini-guide to healing that's posted in the strategy forums, but I never said that greater heal would be used for most of my healing. I said that I could see maybe trying to make it about half my healing if things worked out right. But that statement assumed an investment in Improved Healing, which reduces the mana cost of Greater Heal by 15%. But, since I play on a PvP server and do a lot of PvP, I've had to abandon that idea and switch to a hybrid build. Silence and Mind Flay are just too important to give up in PvP, and without Improved Healing, there's no benefit to casting Greater Heal over Flash Heal. One might think that there's still a slight mana cost benefit to Greater Heal, but in reality overhealing and the inability to take advantage of critical heals reduces the mana cost savings significantly. I don't remember the last time I used Greater Heal. It's been a while.