Okay Priests, listen up! There’s a big rumor circling around right now affecting a little used spell called Prayer of Healing. The spell is rumored to be retooled come the expansion. How will it be retooled? It’s being considered to affect the entire raid instead of the party of the Priest casting it. Yes, you read this correctly. Prayer of Healing is being looked at being changed to affect the entire raid. Now, before you cream your pants, there’s more.
It would have a limit of 5 targets raid wide and heal the lower health players within range.
In other words, it will heal the 5 weakest players within a certain radius.
This is all the information I’ve been able to glean.
Speculation and guesses
This is the Priest answer to Chain Heal. *grin*
In any case, I suspect the cast time will remain the same.
But I also suspect that the mana cost will no longer be static. Instead, I have a gut feeling that a spell like this will have a cost equivilent to a certain percentage of your mana like maybe 6%. Again, this is purely speculative at this time. This would certainly help counteract the proposed nerf to to the Circle of Healing with regards to the addition of a 6 – 8 second cooldown.
Reliability of rumor
I’m going to take a page from Eklund on this one and create a similar ranking system on any unconfirmed rumors that I see happening around.
M1: Rumor is text only, 1 location (forum post, website,, unofficial patch notes that are unconfirmed, etc), no official comments
M2: Rumor consists of a screenshot or 2, or forum posts from blues
M3: Source consists of multiple screenshots from many different players with multiple angles and is considered too difficult to fake,
M4: Rumor is all but confirmed. It’s been generally accepted as something that will go through live with minor modifications, if any.
So with regards to this possible change in Prayer of Healing, I’m going to have to rank an M1 on this in terms of how reliable it is. If you’re crafty and curious enough, you’ll run into the source sooner or later. I have to be skeptical here because it is taken from an image (which I’m not going to post because I am one scared ass blogger) of a forum post (which could have been doctored).
Still, I simply can’t not report this and bring it to your attention. I’m not a reporter. I don’t have a list of devs or beta testers that I can talk to easily. I’m only reporting what I’m seeing from other places and piecing together what I think makes sense. I cannot vouch for the authenticity, reliability, and so on from these places. Therefore, the best I can do is tell you what I’ve read and what I think about it. I’ll tell you how reliable the sources are and if I’m able to, I’ll pass a direct link for you to evaluate independently on your own.
So with that being said, let’s get some constructive discussion going on here with a few talking points!
- Think I’m in the ballpark about the mana cost? Would there be any other drawbacks to casting the spell? (IE, a longer cooldown between use, cast time, or something)
- Is this a good or bad change for Prayer of Healing?
- What other spells would we like to see revisted in an AoE format to be made more viable as a raid spell? (Note, I do plan on doing a post in the near future about spells I’d like to see that would affect more people than just one.)
When I showed this to Wyn, she had a total nerdgasm on vent. It was glorious. I wish I had hit the record button.
1) I don’t think that they’ll put a cooldown on the spell at all. It would be too much – both AoE healing spells having CDs on a class known for our ability to do so? I think the reason the gave CoH one was because it was approaching CH too quickly – the same reason the coefficient was so small. However, a t6 priest with 2500+heal spamming it would effectively get two off in the time of one CH, and that’s 5 targets hit for around 2k-3k. So it had to be done. Putting a cd on POH would be a little overkill.
As for the cast time, it’s already very long comparatively, so I have a feeling it will be situational. I mean, look at GHeal to Healing Touch – .5 difference, but only one is “viable.” Also, just like CoH can only be used when many people are close together, this can only be used when there’s very little or no movement – a hard fight to come by nowadays.
However, I think that a smart priest using both PoH and CoH when cd’s up will be the AOE healer to beat. PoH puts out an insane amount of healing (I have my priests use it on Bloodboil rather than chain heals or anything) and the only limiting factor is gear and mana cost. If the mana cost is a static number, I think this will be a lot like CoH was – good for the higher tier, when you have more regen/mana, and not so good for the lower instances. But I forsee it being amazing. I would love for it to be a percentage base cost too.
2) I believe this is good for PoH. Barring one or two fights, the spell gets very little use time. However, it is a wonderful spell – I use it on Twins sometime, and I know priests who swear by it on that fight. Removing the limiting factor currently – 5 fixed people, long cast time, have to be in your group – will make it much more useful.
3) I can’t think of much right now. I actually used to like the idea of an AoE Renew, but it hardly sounds useful. Could you imagine AoE ProM? We’d rule the world! 5 ProMs bouncing all over…sexy….let’s make a petition.
Resto Shammies > Holy priests > Resto Druids > Holy Pallies
U STILL SECOND BEST
Why can’t you just love me for who I am :(.
If these proposed changes are made to PoH, I will be extremely impressed. It sounds like one of those “too good to be true” situations, but the fact that its even been suggested as a possibility provides some hope. The spell has needed a serious retooling for a long time.
Despite the fact that healing meters are by no means a reliable gauge of skill, how often do you see shammies topping the meters instead of priests? Chain Heal is an invaluable tool to raid groups. It would be nice if priests were given similar utility.
Lassirras last blog post..Target Practice: Leveling Your Weapon Skills
I read about changing PoH to this on the EJ boards. In that same thread it mentioned changes to making totems affect the entire raid also.
What’s interesting though is in that same post it was said that the Warlock curses should be combined into one single curse to remove the dependancy on having multiple warlocks for all three curses, and low and behold that changing is going through on the ptr right now.
Stops last blog post..Alpha Talent Calculator
http://www.wotlkwiki.info/index.php/Live_Alpha_Leaks
POST: It is possible we may also review Prayer of Healing, and we may be making this raid-wide also(maximum of five targets, lowest deficit within range). Actually it is one of the many party-only abilities that we are considering changing to be raid wide; other candidates are totems and warrior shouts. It would definitely make PoH better, while remaining different from CoH, since PoH requires the priest to be near their healing targets.
We’ll have to see how it turns out 🙂
To DocHoliday: I would say that depends a lot on who’s behind the buttons, and which fight we’re talking about 😉
If it’s not on the leaked site, it’s probably not true. And, even if it is, keep in mind that many alpha changes are made simply to test extremes. A lot of what goes into alpha does not even make it to beta (or gets changed in beta) because they simply want to see the numbers produced by two extremes before they adjust it.
For these two reasons, I think it’s a disservice to the WoW community to discuss rumors and speculations unless you present them as ideas for design. By discussing rumors and speculating, it gets the community’s hopes up in specific areas that might not even be on Blizzard’s table.
Sounds like a terrible idea to me..
If I wanted to play a shaman, I would play a shaman.
PoH has a greater range on your own party than chain heal can reach?
Currently, where you place your raiding holy priests in a raid is important. Generally you’ll have them in a healer group so that the healers don’t feel the need to heal themselves …
If this is in fact true, blizzard are taking so much of the skill out of this class with one swift move.
Priests have the monopoly on situational heals .. so why should we have PoH raid-wide? It would mean that we would DEFINETELY use binding heal A LOT less..
It is the Shamans job to heal groups of people who’re visually close together .. It’s the skill of the priest in picking which groups are clustered together well enough to receive your CoH.
A good priest wipes the floor with any Shaman in raid heals, purely because the skill-ceiling on a priest is so much higher.
A change like this makes our class way too imbalanced from a raid healing perspective.
Cheers
Pat
Luwin > Mallet even though Luwin is only T5 geared, LOL JAY KAY. But new rumored PoH sounds sweet, but Matt, you do realize you are going to be Shadow in Wrath right?
I think it would be a good change. there are times I have been in fights where eg my guild is doing aran the cheating way outside the door (mainly if one of the healers is enudirng lag and can’r run out of arcane explosion cause mmm 32 minute son one fight god help us all) — anyhow in this fight — people die, and doing it this way theres a fair bit of aoe damage — there are times when I’m the only healer up and say, there ate 4 other people but theyre in a different party to me. Anyhow it being SMART and picking the people with lowest health? That is just made of win.
I can picture people going CoH, Cd triggered, PoH, CoH as well.. i think that nerfing CoH almost asks for PoH to be improved — and putting it to a raid as well as party usage is nifty.
And — with spells like the Druid’s Flourish (AoE HoT) I don’t think it’d break priest helaing cf other classes healing.