Cataclysm Healers (and Healer Fanatics) GTFIH

How many main healers are in beta tweaking and testing with the talents and spells? Let's talk!

I'm a PVE oriented healer 100% so if you're looking for PVP related stuff, I do not follow!

Just got done messing with druid, priest and paladin healing specs.

General Notes:
Seems like everyone is getting a consistent heal for around 200 mana and about 2 second casts, slightly more or less based on the haste. I was using the premade toons which were equipped with ilvl251 gears. I had no glyphs on these toons as well so things would have been slightly different.
Priests - Heal 200 after talents
Druids - Nourish 200 after talents
Paladins - Holy Light 260 after talents
I've hoped for more decision based spell usage rather than keep spells on cooldown and spamming everything that drops below 90% HP. It looks like Blizzard kind of fulfilled my wish and twisted a bit of level 60 healing style into Cataclysm with some slower spells and a bigger variety of things to choose (I'm looking at you, holy paladins!). I'm very happy with some of these healing changes as they are less spammy on a concentrated amount of spells.

I'm just going to assume Cataclysm is going to have less AOE oriented fights based on the spells I skimmed through and played with through the three classes. I didn't get to spend any time on a resto shaman, so if you did please share some more information.

Druid notes:

• Fury of Stormrage (talent) bugged, getting instant Nourish and Healing Touch casts for the entire duration. Seems to be good for PVP only, not needed so far since it procs free instant Wrath.
• Wild Growth costing 1.8k mana feelsbadman, looks like this will be spammed a lot less.
• Tree of Life is still nice for burst but I am still sketchy about them making it a slow moving target again. But making it a 5 minute cd for 15% more healing seems kind of low. I would like to see this a bit more adjusted. I don't think I saw any mana cost reductions either.
• I'll enjoy being able to look and enjoy the tier 11+ armors on my resto druid while healing now instead of looking at a treant 120% of the time. Rejoice!
• Even with some Wild Growth nerf, Regrowth gets a little aoe hot through talents when it crits or something but I didn't get to use it in an instance yet, I was just selfcasting in the city. If you've used it, how does it play out when AOE healing is possibly needed?
• Spamming Rejuvenate is probably still going to be around but you can't spam
• Lifebloom anymore since it's single target at a time and a lot of druid players are raging over it. Looks like a good tank spell again and it is cheap on cost at 175 mana @ lvl 80.

Priest notes:

• Smiting for Evangelism and Archangel is like spamming paladin Judgements to get the haste bonus. I kind of like how this keeps priests busy while healing to get some buffs up.
• Power Word: Barrier -- Wow! Very nice spell, if it was just slightly usable more frequently it would be awesome too. But I guess that would imbalance PVP a bit as well. The radius that you can cast this on is a little smaller than I had expected.
• Chakra---Heal the bonus is nice passively. The HOT off Radiance for this also depends on which heal/greater heal you follow up with and it adjusts accordingly. For example I was getting 95/sec with Heal and threw down a Greater heal and it went up to 185/sec HoT and it refreshed to full duration, a Heal following up after that would bring it back down to 95/sec with refreshed duration.
• Chakra---Renew; not a whole lot to talk about but it's just nice to be able to spam a bit more.
• Chakra---Prayer of Healing; 10 second COH cd feels bad. This proc lightens it down to 7.5 second cooldown for the Chakra's duration. I'm okay with some aoe healing nerfs, making it not that delicious to spam and focus more on picking out the right spells to heal the right targets at the right moment. Oh, I have to note, Prayer of Healing costs just slightly more than Greater Heal and Flash Heal, around 1.2k each.
• Holy Nova heals nicely for a small fee. Feels good when to use sometimes.
• Surge of Light, since it doesn't proc a free Flash Heal anymore and just Holy Nova and Smite, might still be worth using if you are going down to pick up Archangel at 85. Might even seem like what a high end holy priest would take for bonus regen and healing too.

Paladin notes:

• Holy Shock costing less than 160 mana (again, only lvl 80, it should be more costly at lvl 85) after talents makes it pretty attractive to use on CD for sniping targets.
• Holy paladins gonna get hit with a taste of reality--hitting more than 2 buttons. Looks like Holy Light gonna be base heal spam, which topping off with Holy Shock, Flash of Light, and big healing with Divine Light which heals for 12k in 251 gears @ lvl 80.

Looks like all of this is gonna be VERY interested when they reduce talent point spending.

Holy Priest PoV

My first love is Holy Priest so I spent my time level 80-82 as such and must say I had an absolute blast both in the dungeons as a healer as well as the random solo leveling.

The concept of DPS-to-Heal has proven itself to me a very viable and 'fun' manner of healing. Not only does it provide a way to maintain mana and buff my own healing capacity but it embraces my random smiting I've been doing for years. The one thing I am not overly fond of however is the placement of a broadened book of healing spells on top of this concept. I feel that with add-ons I may not feel the brutal re-engineering for all my keybindings to accomodate it but at the present moment it's encumbersome.

I do feel that there are a few things I would like to see happen to smooth the spec out a little. I still feel that heal is going to be under-utilized by anyone who is not in the early levels. I feel that heal needs to be better incorporated into the other talents.

Serendipity, or Deliverance as it is currently named in Beta, is a talent that when stacked up to 3 times reduces the cast time of your next Greater Heal or Prayer of Healing by 9%. I desperately think that Heal needs to to be included in this talent. I also feel that this talent puts unneccessary weight on the same old cast sequence of FH > FH > FH > GH rather than utilizing heal at all. It is a talent that is either completely useless in most cases or needs to be re-engineered.

I personally favor the DPS-to-Heal method and would have no problem at all with Heal being something only cast when you're so OOM that you can cast nothing else. I am enjoying the emphasis being placed on renew as a holy priest though holy nova still feels weak.

The other Holy Spell I feel still needs to be re-engineered is Lightwell. The poor dead horse the priest forums are constantly beating down hoping that one day we'll get what we QQ for--a spell that does not require our foolish stand-in-fire DPS to actually click it to utilize its effect.

Holy Nova I'm still not sure on. I've used it mainly as a DPS tool instead of a Healing tool but I can see its utility in a raid situation.

Discipline Priest PoV
Granted, not as much of a disc priest as I am holy and I did not spec my 2nd tree until I was already nearly 82. I have to concur that Barrier has the opportunity to be an absolutely wonderful spell but unfortunately the cooldown makes it less than optimal. It feels like only a slightly better spell than Lightwell given its shared CD of 3 minutes that like its holy-tree brother if not placed correctly will be completely useless.

The Disc tree has way to many talents at the bottom and we know which one is the dodgy one.

Grace has got to go. The pure presence of it and its necessity is just ugly. Spec into it and you can't max out one of Divine Fury(ain't gonna happen), Empowered Healing(hmmmm....flat increase of bonus to most single target healing spells except Penance, no ramp up), Inspiration(yeah, sure) and Improved Healing(flat decrease of your bread&butter direct healing skills when mana is at a premium).

This is a bit dodgy. Especially when Divine Fury is more or less mandatory since we are expected to use Heal. Speaking of which, Divine Fury should be baseline. There still is quite a bit to get rid of.

Hey shaman can heal too...

Don't you have like 45,000 mana at 81+? wouldn't 200 mana heals make regen completely useless because you'd never spend that much

Good Holy Paladins have always used more than two buttons. Bad Holy Paladins will still only use two buttons.

Blizzard actually took a button away from Holy Paladins, about which I'm completely shocked. There's no more Divine Guardian/Sacrifice for Holy Paladins, which means we lose one of our biggest raid-mitigation cooldowns. I'm not happy about it, but the changes aren't final, and, either way, I'll just have to accept what is. It doesn't make Holy Paladins less viable as healers.

Cleanse also loses some utility which has to be made up for in talents. Sort of a cheap way to make us spend some points, but, I think it was a justifiable nerf for cleanse.

I'm curious how Holy Paladins will be made to "feel" like Holy Paladins upon entering the tree, considering all of their Tier 1 talents are passive modifiers. We do get Judgements of the Pure in Tier 2, but that really feels weak until you get Enlightened Judgements, due to it forcing you to stand in melee all the time. This was something that I found impractical for Holy Paladins when I was leveling. With the way that pulls are setup, a lot of mobs did nasty silences and interrupts in melee range. To top it all off, depending on how your tank was pulling, you had to heal before you could set yourself up in range to melee for a judgement proc.

Enlightened Judgements should probably trade places with Inspired Judgements, or even possibly Unyielding Faith and simply be readily accessible in that tier.

Anyways, this is the build that I looked at tentatively. There's some wiggle room. You can take out movement speed and grab some more talents from the Holy Tree. But, on the whole, I'm rather disappointed in how Blizz has looked at Holy Paladins and do expect that they'll end up changing things down the road. This will certainly be my blog topic for the week.

So, today they reduced the talents to a 31-talent tree. I finally got in late last night in a stable enough environment to check it out and try running a dungeon....that is after staring at the talent tree and trying desperately not to vomit.

All the excitement and giddyness I felt two days ago has vanished into this horrid state of despair with some sort of internal plea for an indication that they are planning to do a MUCH larger overhaul of the talent trees again. I honestly don't feel that what they put out should ever, ever make it to live Cata. I feel they are sorely missing the mark as far as what they were aiming for.

The thought was to get rid of "useless" talents and "obligatory" specs but I feel they have solidified this more dutifully than ever before.

5 Talent points per tier is still required meaning that you are forced to take at least something in the early tiers to unlock ones below it. You cannot skip useless items because to do so means you cannot get to the juicy talents below it.


The skillbook I had from my spec is no longer possible. I hope they revert back.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by decimoo

So, today they reduced the talents to a 31-talent tree. I finally got in late last night in a stable enough environment to check it out and try running a dungeon....that is after staring at the talent tree and trying desperately not to vomit.

All the excitement and giddyness I felt two days ago has vanished into this horrid state of despair with some sort of internal plea for an indication that they are planning to do a MUCH larger overhaul of the talent trees again. I honestly don't feel that what they put out should ever, ever make it to live Cata. I feel they are sorely missing the mark as far as what they were aiming for.

The thought was to get rid of "useless" talents and "obligatory" specs but I feel they have solidified this more dutifully than ever before.

5 Talent points per tier is still required meaning that you are forced to take at least something in the early tiers to unlock ones below it. You cannot skip useless items because to do so means you cannot get to the juicy talents below it.


The skillbook I had from my spec is no longer possible. I hope they revert back.

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Could you be more specific? You haven't referenced a single actual thing or even mentioned what class you are playing.


I'm actually enjoying the new trees quite a bit (allowing for the first-pass nature, and that some of the classes have been specifically mentioned as "not as far along."). The only things that have stood out to me so far as things I would see adjusted are:

1.) Holy Priests, I love the tree, but I'm not gaga over the passive spell you get being Desperate Prayer. It feels a bit iffy as a "signature" spell for Holy Priests. At the same time, I couldn't think of another that would fit well. Circle of Healing makes sense, but it may be a slightly more niche spell for differentiating between group and focus-centric healing if the trees were designed for that potential. I'm still mulling that over.

2.) Discipline Priests, though not mentioned as such, has the somewhat ungainly feeling like the other "behind" trees as having too many things I want to get to the same ends, and not well-distributed among the tiers so I feel like I need to pile point into the bottom of the tree.

3.) Resto Shamans feel pretty good, though I really wish I could, in good conscience, pick up the full Enhanced Shield without sacrificing some of my other niche specifics like fully buffing Chain Heal or Earth Shield.

4.) Holy Paladin tree feels like I said above, a bit ungainly, though definitely with some fun toys. At the moment I'm unsure of whether or not I actually want Aura Mastery badly enough to get that *and* Divine Illumination, with the tighter points. It feels like an awkward way to bottom the tree, like I'd want something a little more interesting for the cherry on the sundae. Selfless Healer is a cool idea in that healing other people is specially buffed sort of idea, but in function it seems a little wonky. It really seems more meaningful used against the Paladin in PvP than anything else.

5.) <3 Resto Druiding. I'm still not thrilled about Tree Form being a bursty CD for healing, but the tree feels kind of nice. I'm just really happy to have stuff like Efflorescence stick around, I really like the idea of a heal like that. I think the only room I have to complain is that my level 85 build in the current tree leaves me with 1 somewhat random point to place.

Everything will get molded, rather nicely I expect. But seeing this all as a first draft, I'm rather happy with the direction we're headed in. Feedback is the order of the day, so I want to try and get some opportunities to play with the stuff and let it set in so I can give Blizz something good to go on.

The priest trees for instance look only half finished.
This is a preview that's just a bit closer to the finished thing than the last preview.

Considering they consider healing one of the biggest challenges I dare say we will have to wait a bit longer.
The sky is clouding over but it has not yet fallen.

Count the talents and talent point in the trees and you will see they still have some fluff in them.
Yes, I intend to be that specific.

I love the new Druid talents also but I have a bad feeling something is going to change in it. With how it stands now there is no problem with picking up every useful talent plus a few fillers. Maybe I'm just used to either picking a tank healing spec or a raid healing spec and am spoiled by being able to go with both.
Crossing my fingers that I'm wrong though.

It really looks like Blizz is trying to make the relationship between Regrowth and Nourish a lot more interesting.

I think the TOL form cooldown should really be in the realm of 2 mins. Plus for god's sake get rid of the slow.

If Disc has to spec into Inspiration it will be very, very annoying. We'd have to give up 4-5 significant points to get it 3/3.

If we don't then Disc is the cleanest, best spec in the game at this time. Putting points in may not be "fun" or "exciting" because it's so intuitive but the results are amazing. 3/3 Divine Fury + all of the Disc tree [minus Imp. Mana Burn, Reflective Shield, Focused Will]. We get the fast Smites [and heals] from Holy plus all the important stuff from Disc.

Resto Druids getting Swiftmend and then having to spec into it? LOL, Blizz, good job. That's an oopsy! I'm sure they'll figure it out right quick.

Talents: Disc seems fairly clean, Holy is still fairly clunky. Why is Inspiration a 3 point talent? Shammies get it for 2 points and I think 1 point makes more sense.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Satorri

4.) Holy Paladin tree feels like I said above, a bit ungainly, though definitely with some fun toys. At the moment I'm unsure of whether or not I actually want Aura Mastery badly enough to get that *and* Divine Illumination, with the tighter points. It feels like an awkward way to bottom the tree, like I'd want something a little more interesting for the cherry on the sundae. Selfless Healer is a cool idea in that healing other people is specially buffed sort of idea, but in function it seems a little wonky. It really seems more meaningful used against the Paladin in PvP than anything else.

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I'd be very surprised if any end-game Holy Pally didn't take Aura Mastery and Divine Illumination. Aura Mastery was more of an optional talent in WotLK, but most end-game Holy Pallies took it, because it was simply too good to pass up, if you knew how to use it, and use it often. Divine Illumination wasn't really optional, and I doubt it will become so in Cataclysm where mana matters that much more.

But I'm with you on the whole thing feeling a bit meh. Divine Illumination is nice, but it doesn't really feel like an awesome, 31-point talent. Maybe because it wasn't the 51-point talent before, I dunno, but it sort of feels like we're getting ripped off by having it put there. On the whole though, with Holy Paladins being dubbed "vastly unfinished, DUE for MAJOR changes" I'm sure we'll see all of that change.

Not sure whether I should feel afraid or excited.