A day in the life of ..

[castille]

<complete speculation>

They will make GHeal channeled

</complete speculation>
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This has been my suggested fix for Greater Heal since I heard they were looking at it. It only makes SENSE. We have five billion heals that are cast, but there is not a single channelled heal spell save tranquility. Everyone says 'well, you'll just have priests channelling that all the time on tanks' -- like we're not just spamming flash heal or greater heal on some fights, as is.

[Tal]

This has been my suggested fix for Greater Heal since I heard they were looking at it. It only makes SENSE. We have five billion heals that are cast, but there is not a single channelled heal spell save tranquility. Everyone says 'well, you'll just have priests channelling that all the time on tanks' -- like we're not just spamming flash heal or greater heal on some fights, as is.
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It would annoy me greatly to be in the process of dropping a big heal on a tank and have it be stuttered after 200 hp because a mob broke wind in my general direction. Especially since it means I lose the mana.

[Pesmerga]

It would annoy me greatly to be in the process of dropping a big heal on a tank and have it be stuttered after 200 hp because a mob broke wind in my general direction. Especially since it means I lose the mana.
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It would annoy me even more, because I'm not what you'd call the greatest of healers....

[Kevin]

It would annoy me greatly to be in the process of dropping a big heal on a tank and have it be stuttered after 200 hp because a mob broke wind in my general direction. Especially since it means I lose the mana.
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It's annoying when that happens to my druid with the only AoE heal that I have, though barkskin prevents that. Self shielding to make sure you can get the heal off would prevent that too. It also gives more use to the focused casting talent.

I would imagine if they did this there would be talents to help avoid the interruption that would make going down the holy tree more attractive as well. It would also be hugely powerful in raids now where you don't get aggro all that often.

I think it might be a fair fix and put some more use back into greater healing. Of course now druids will be able to land heals since they won't have priests flashing all the time and then priests will waste the mana because half the channel was wasted. :)

Since I seem to be in the huge minority in thinking that greater heal isn't all the broken now, but I grew up learning to heal with a druid and a paladin where 1.5 cast heals that did something didn't exist and just AoE healing the other people in the party wasn't an option (even with the druid since tranq was essentially an AoE taunt and you couldn't avoid casting interrupts).

<complete speculation>

They will make GHeal channeled

</complete speculation>

Just qouting oldmandennis there so that people know where this stuff is coming from.

-Fade - In PvP combat, use of the fade ability now causes any unit that has the caster targeted to lose target, much like if the caster were to stealth. The caster can be aquired again by retargeting, as is intended.

If this is true they need to make the warriors taunt skill do the same thing. Have it force the player to target on you but let them switch back right away. Gives improved taunt some more use in BG's too. Or just let the improved taunt talent do this but not for other warriors. Of course prot spec does have some nice toys for PvP as it is, but I want my taunt to work. :)

Oh well we'll see. I still hope for priests sake they get the hunter and druid devs to redo the skills not whoever did the paladins.

[Quark]

It would annoy me greatly to be in the process of dropping a big heal on a tank and have it be stuttered after 200 hp because a mob broke wind in my general direction. Especially since it means I lose the mana.
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Assuming Greater Heal is the most mana efficient, time efficient heal, why not have it channeled? Sure, in some situations it becomes dangerous/unusable. How is that any worse from the current situation where many priests simply don't use it at all?

Remember the key to the end-game: Spikes kill tanks. A channeled greater heal would reduce spikes, just like Flash Heal does.

A channeled Greater Heal would take time to get right. You'd have to learn when it's safer, when it's more dangerous, and try to gouge using it versus not using it. It would make priests more dynamic at healing.

In the current situation, you can spend 3.3 seconds casting Greater Heal, see the tank's life go up to full, and interrupt it just in time (via yourself or mods). Sure, you saved the mana. But you just spent 3.3 seconds doing nothing. If Greater Heal is channeled, in that case you lost the mana (bad), but you were still healing the tank and helping prevent spikes (good).

Please, don't think of only the bad things that could come with a channeled heal. Think of the good also. You get the mana efficiency and the smoothed out tank life at the same time.

Also, don't forget the nature of a channeled spell: it isn't destroyed when you're hit, it's shortened. If you're only 10 hp into the heal and take one hit, you'll still heal just as much as if you were 1000 hp into the heal. Edit: assuming you stop getting hit.

Finally, Priests currently have a talent that reduces chance to lose casting time on Flash Heal when hit. Mages can get 100% non-shortened Arcane Missles. Who's to say a talent reworking wouldn't have a similar idea for a channeled Greater Heal?

This idea may be completely out of whack compared to what Blizzard has in mind for improving Greater Heal. But don't forget there can be many good effects that come of this too. We can't think of this in our current healing paradigm. Healing tactics would completely change. Good group interaction becomes even more favorable, while bad group interaction could hurt even more.

[Lissa]

<complete speculation>

They will make GHeal channeled

</complete speculation>
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More interesting, IMO, is the change to Fear Ward. No longer is it a Dwarf racial, but the end talent for Discipline (who knows where Divine Spirit will go).

[MongoJerry]

Please, don't think of only the bad things that could come with a channeled heal.  Think of the good also.  You get the mana efficiency and the smoothed out tank life at the same time.

That's the thing. In large raids, it would be grossly mana inefficient, because there would be a lot of times when priests would be stuck channeling their heal when the tank's life is full. Allow me to illustrate. A tank takes a hit and five priests start a Greater Heal channel on the main tank. After a second, the tank's life goes back to full, but the mana has been spent, so the priests keep on healing for the next couple of seconds and doing basically no healing. You've just reduced Greater Heal's mana efficiency by a third.

A better system would be the one that I understand EQ healers use -- using real healer rotations. Let's say that Blizzard makes Greater Heal only a three second cast spell and that it's mana efficiency is boosted to the point where it is clearly the better spell to use than Flash Heal. Then, you could have a set of three priests each starting their heals one second after another. That is, priest #1 starts casting, one second later priest #2 starts casting, one second later priest #3 starts casting, and one second later priest #1 starts again. In this case, you would have large mana efficient heals landing on the tank every second. In a fight with a large boss, you could have two or three suck teams working at once. That kind of a system would definitely keep a tank up and would require skill and coordination on the part of raid members. However, to encourage people to use that kind of system, Greater Heal's mana efficiency would have to be boosted significantly from where it is and its cast time shortened.

-Fade - In PvP combat, use of the fade ability now causes any unit that has the caster targeted to lose target, much like if the caster were to stealth. The caster can be aquired again by retargeting, as is intended.

If this is true they need to make the warriors taunt skill do the same thing. Have it force the player to target on you but let them switch back right away. Gives improved taunt some more use in BG's too. Or just let the improved taunt talent do this but not for other warriors. Of course prot spec does have some nice toys for PvP as it is, but I want my taunt to work.

First, we need to emphasize that these "patch notes" are fake and are only a speculation or a wish list on someone's part. Regarding this idea, the trouble is that there are already retarget mods out there that automatically retarget the previously targeted mob if the target gets dropped. They're a standard mod to have installed on hardcore PvP'ers computers to make sure that when hunters feign death that people don't lose the target on the hunter. So, adding this feature for priests doesn't really do anything for them. Oh, sure, the priest might interrupt an enemy's spell cast, but the priest also had to spend a global cooldown period casting that Fade spell, so the cost balances the potential benefit. I'd rather have Fade give a four second invisibility with all snares removed on cast (like a four-second Vanish).

-Inner Fire - The attack power and armor bonuses for this ability have been removed and replaced with a moderate increase in all spell resistances and a 5% increase in wand damage. These changes should make this ability more favorable to priests.

This item in the list makes me wonder if the person writing it had ever played a priest. Maybe it was a rogue or warrior who wants to kill priests faster. The armor bonus is a huge part of a priest's damage reduction against physical attacks. It's massive in both PvP and in solo grinding. The only change I hope they make to Inner Fire is making it last longer than 3 minutes.

[Quark]

Funny how you can have a healer rotation using the current GH, but not a channeled one.

[oldmandennis]

That's the thing.&nbsp; In large raids, it would be grossly mana inefficient, because there would be a lot of times when priests would be stuck channeling their heal when the tank's life is full.&nbsp; Allow me to illustrate.&nbsp; A tank takes a hit and five priests start a Greater Heal channel on the main tank.&nbsp; After a second, the tank's life goes back to full, but the mana has been spent, so the priests keep on healing for the next couple of seconds and doing basically no healing.&nbsp; You've just reduced Greater Heal's mana efficiency by a third.

1) It seems from the Blue posts that a lot of the end game content will be moving to smaller dungeons. If you are 5manning a boss, having the priest spend most of their time channeling very efficiently and at a high HPS on the tank, and the shammy tossing LHW in after a crit or on the rogue after a cleave sounds like a fantastic idea.

2) For raid encounters, just plan it better. If you can organise a EQ style rotation, you could orgainse something like - Priest 1&2 channel continuously on the tank. If he gets full, he will get hit in the next 2 sec, so its not like you are wasting all of your mana. Priest 3&4 keep their mana topped up, casting an occasional flash if you see a big crit. Switch when the first battery is at 20% mana.

Weather or not these notes are complete nonsense, changing one of the direct heal spells to something else sounds like it would make things more fun for the priests. Does it have to be the only option in every encounter? No, but if it's good enough to make you think about what your choice of healing spell is, it makes the game better. Or if you really don't like it, give it to me in place of HW, I'll take it :)

[Concillian]

If this is true they need to make the warriors taunt skill do the same thing.&nbsp; Have it force the player to target on you but let them switch back right away.&nbsp; Gives improved taunt some more use in BG's too.&nbsp; Or just let the improved taunt talent do this but not for other warriors.&nbsp; Of course prot spec does have some nice toys for PvP as it is, but I want my taunt to work.&nbsp; :)
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I like this idea, but I'm not so sure they'd ever do it because of the way the combo point system currently works. Rogues would lose all combo points, doing this would make them cry very loudly, and Blizzard knows it. Though if it were on improved taunt only, perhaps it would be viable since there aren't a ton of PvP protection spec warriors.