New test realm patch notes.

[Alarick]

Unless they put the cooldown back to 5 seconds the way it was in the beta, I don't see Holy Nova ever being useful. It was nice for a couple of weeks in the beta when I had Holy Nova and a bunch of +damange items.  I could help out the mages doing damage in the Lyceum.  Of course, I was doing about half to one-third the damage that mages could do, but it was nice to be able to contribute.  Then, they made it so that +damage items didn't help Holy Nova at all and then made the cooldown 60 seconds just so that they could make sure that no one ever used the skill, I suppose.  Now, +damage items help a little but still not much, and the cooldown has been reduced.  It's still not worth the investment to go all the way up in the Holy tree to get.  Get the cooldown back to 5 seconds, and I'll consider it, though.
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Yea, I have to agree here. Holy Nova was barely useful before the changes, and is less useful afterwards.

It suffers from a few limitations. First, damage is damage, and can break CC. A lot of times, that's dangerous, even if it is aggro free.

Second, the range is pitiful. I haven't changed my spec to try it out, but I know from experience with other spells how short the range is. It seems like it'd be rather difficult to get all of the people in range to make it as efficient as Prayer of Healing in a hectic battle.

Finally, and this is my own opinion, the top of the healing tree should not be an AoE damage and AoE healing spell. It needs to be something to make the healing spells of the priest the best bar none. Currently, I can see no reason to spec Holy over Disc because the small to moderate increase in the power of the healing spells is no where near as good as the massive increase in staying power one can get from the Disc talents.

It would take a large change in the entire Holy tree for me to spec back into it, but from the reports made by Fangtooth, it doesn't seem like that will happen soon, or even at all really.