4.0.1 "Heal"

[Roflonic]

Hello all,

I was doing some randoms on the PTR to test my new Holy spec and abilities,
but I had some trouble using heal. The cast is about 2 seconds and non-crits for about 4.5k, whilst flash heal has a 1.2 seconds cast time and non-crits for about 9k.
I know about the low mana costs of heal, but I just don't get people healed up with it.
So I think I am doing something wrong here.

Thanks for your help

[Fetzie]

You are supposed to use flash and greater heal to "mix it up", heal is not designed to be "the heal". Given your spell name I'l assume you are a priest.

USe chakra-heal to boost single target healing, this is the bread and butter chakra right now-AoE chakra costs too much mana and the renew one isn't really that good for 5 mans in my experience.

[Tomehere321]

pyrea is right about renew not being very good for 5 mans. i believe blizz themselves posted somewhere that they foresee chakra renew as being used more in raids, and chakra heal strong in a 5 man situation.

[Eressëa]

You might be interested in a video I made about my healing experience in the Cata beta.

But yeah, Heal is more like a... maintenance spell. It also refreshes the renew hot which is quite nice. One of the major motivators for Blizzard with all of these changes is that they want us using more spells, so you'll be using flash heals, hasted greater heals, SoL procs, your Holy Word: Serenity proc, renews, PoMs, PoHs, CoHs, Binding Heal, Divine Hymn, and even lightwell, on a more regular basis.

[Mr.Winkle]

Great video erresea, holy priest healing looks a lot of fun.

[Pesko]

after a few instances, with Flash Heal spam i figured that it could not be true with so fast oom, so i precasted renew on the tank, and Chakra heal the rest of the fight, with CoH spam (more or less on DPS)

But great video

**On Beta that is**

[Roflonic]

Thanks for the nice responses, and the nice video which helped me a lot as well

It's indeed like you said in the video: you have to get used to it. I've tried it again and it works fine , and priest healing as holy is (even more) fun now.

Only uncertain how good it will be in raids and in cata since there seems to be quite some damage, especially in hc's (like in the video).

But I also came up with another question:
Does prayer of mending benefits from the AoE-heal chakra?

thanks again for the nice responses and the video!


(sorry for my bad grammar/spelling)

[Pesko]

unfortanly, no PoH, CoH and Holy Nova :/

[Skiderion]

I just ran ICC 25 for the first time last night since the patch. I have mixed feelings about the changes but I am sure most of that comes from being in a less familiar place than I was used to.

I do think "Heal" is about as lame as it gets but if you are healing a tank then it makes sense to use it in between things and pop Chakra to match it. The additional instant cast heal you get in the "Heal" Chakra state (assuming you took Revelations) was clocking in right around 11 to 12 K for me so mixed with the cheap (and dreadfully slow) Heal, PoM, and occasional flash heals (and maybe a greater heal or two) plus having renew refreshed for free it seems to work pretty well. The only change I wish they would make is to add "heal" as a means to charge up greater heal via serendipity.

I spent most of my time using the renew chakra as it was easy to keep up all the time and quite frankly with all the buffs via talent, glyphs, etc. Renew is just too good. In a wierd way I almost feel like I am playing disc and simply replacing PWS with Renew.

I did like the AOE chakra for some very specific situations such as the decimate ability you have to deal with when you are killing Precious or even better on Stinky. Just have everyone stack nice and tight inside the serenity AOE and go crazy. It drains mana fast but those fights tend not to go that long. Besides its fun to watch your entire screen fill up with green numbers.

[Clementine]

I find the Cataclysm healing model to suit my playstyle pretty well since it's kind of a throwback to level 60 cascading healing.
Chakra is a nice touch of depth to healing and making decisions to adjust to the right situations.
I like the Renew and POH chakra the most but not so much with the Heal chakra.

I would like heal to proc serendipity as someone noted but I won't lose sleep over it.

If you really do need a big and quick heal, Flash heal does the job, and if you need to turn the notch up one more, you would have Serendipity stacked and a Greater heal in the pipe ready to launch. Not to mention with Echo of Light, you'll have a nice HoT to fluff up the meters while you're casting too so the Holy mastery Hots a nice touch.

I DO kinda feel like I have the jack of all trade feeling again playing priest and I haven't even touched my Disc tree that much yet, I'm still deeply rooted in Holy spec.

By the time we get 85, it's gonna be one helluva ride.

[Maèl]

Yeah, but seriously. I used FH, Penance, Shield, ProM, Binding Heal, PoM and I'm seriously running out of key binding real estate. On top of PS, the Hymns, Holy Fire, Smite, Fade, Holy Nova I've got also PW:B and Archangel to juggle.

Who in his right mind really thought a Priest would need another healing spell? Did they confuse us with Paladins? I had to kick Devouring Plague and SW: D from my keybinds to make room for the new awesome hotness and I still need to find a spammy place for "Heal". This is becoming stupid. I only have a finite number of fingers.

I'm seriously contemplating to give Heal the old Heroic Strike treatment. Bind to mousewheel.

[Skaterjoec55]

Lol priests aren't the only ones suffering from this problem. Druids lost one of their emergency heals. Before the patch came live I was able to cast Nourish with 1.0 seconds, but now its 2.2 seconds. So now druids have no choice but to spam rejuvenation and regrowth and wild growth, but we got to be moderate with the regrowth since its a pretty hefty mana cost but we can just sub in Swiftmend instead, but I do belive priests are having a huge issue with the "heal" spell but we never know if Blizzard is going to change that.

[Bashal]

I do belive priests are having a huge issue with the "heal" spell but we never know if Blizzard is going to change that.

I have a disc priest, which I don't play nearly as much as my shammy. It could just be a gearing issue, but "heal" seems disproportionately gimpy compared to my shammy's "healing wave". It could be a balance issue.

[Skaterjoec55]

Yep we never know, but I have a feeling a lot of people are crossing there fingers.

[Eressëa]

Yeah, but seriously. I used FH, Penance, Shield, ProM, Binding Heal, PoM and I'm seriously running out of key binding real estate. On top of PS, the Hymns, Holy Fire, Smite, Fade, Holy Nova I've got also PW:B and Archangel to juggle.

Who in his right mind really thought a Priest would need another healing spell? Did they confuse us with Paladins? I had to kick Devouring Plague and SW: D from my keybinds to make room for the new awesome hotness and I still need to find a spammy place for "Heal". This is becoming stupid. I only have a finite number of fingers.

I'm seriously contemplating to give Heal the old Heroic Strike treatment. Bind to mousewheel.

I know how you feel! I use a Naga mouse which helps a bit - I have Chakra, Holy Nova, Mass Dispersion, Arcane Torrent,
and other stuff bound to those side keys. I also have my heals bound to my mouse (and scrollwheel) with shift/cntrl/shift+cntrl modifiers.

I am a big fan of vuhdo, so I have hostile spell mouse bindings set up too. I'm not sure if I can explain it well.. but I have a separate vuhdo panel for tanks that also shows their targets. My hostile spells for those are left-click smite, wheel-click shadowfiend, right-click holy fire, etc. So I can very easily go from left-clicking a Heal on the tank to moving my mouse over to the right to their target frame and left-clicking a smite, or sending in my fiend to attack.

[Maèl]

I'm using mouseover macros and seriously, my priest is using up all of his macro space and the general macro space.
Currently I'm arguing with myself if I really NEED GH as a keybind. Then again I'm pretty used to using GH even as Disc.

I could sacrifice my SW:P keybind. But getting rid of DP and SW was painful enough.
Why do I really NEED another spammy heal? In ICC I found myself spamming Smite which was fun, unreliable, hectic and pretty mana efficient.

"We felt healers needed another healing spell...", indeed. Taking a look into my spellbook I can't really say I second that notion.

I had thought of using a Naga but I found the thing was built for midgets. The whole thing simply vanishes under my mitts.
It can't be the goal that as a Priest I have to have both an NT52 AND a Naga in order to bind all my keys.

[Mr.Winkle]

Just finsihed a few heroic runs and a voa with my priest. OMG....compared to my Holy Pala (which is my main) the priest is just all kinds of hotness. Heal underpowered? Are you kidding me? Combined with Chakra you can pump out around 5000HPS for literally nothing.

Really liking Holy Priests atm, feels like such a nice well rounded package.

[Brigandy]

I find my disc priest to be working quite nicely these days, even got used to the holy fire/smite while healing. I did notice however my bubbles are not as potent as they used to be, even with 14% mastery to boost absorbtion effects. I still don't use the "heal spell", I find that attonement/smite heals for more and wastes like no mana at all. I save my penance and flash heals for heavy dmg portions of fights

[Reev]

I'm really enjoying the style of holy healing so far. I'm feeling a little lost at times, and I forget some of my spells, but I think as I become more comfortable with it, I'll be better at using my full arsenal. I like the whole Chakra thing and how you can choose what's best for a given situation. Good stuff.

[Felycitas]

My solution to the 'not enough room on the bar!' issue was to make 'help/harm' macros.

FRIENDLY TARGET: Renew
ENEMY TARGET: Shadow Word: Pain