Feedback about CoH/WG

Ok so I've never raided in beta but I raided pretty much everything but 2 bosses in the entire game so I think my experience about the matter is unnegligeable even though it could be more solid.

GC I have to agree with you that, as a holy priest, I would like to press other buttons than my CoH key however I think the problem does reside in the fact that CoH/WG are designed the way they are but in fact somewhere else.

If I understood well (and correct me if I'm wrong) you folks at Blizzard have started introducing heavy raid damage for a few reasons :

1.Mana was not a problem.
2.Healers were not challenged.

Now if we take a look at those issues we can understand why they were happening in the first place. Mana wasn't an issued because downranking + raid regen (spriests, mana tides, chain potting with or without that overpowered alchemy trinket and already very strong regen mechanics innate for all classes) was simply allowing us to chain cast without ever running out of mana. I know how it was, chain casting low rank GHeals on 15 minutes fights like council with my 2 pieces of T5 would allow me to stay over half mana for the whole fight without potting, talk about trivial.

Downranking was made impossible, raid regen was kind of nerfed but not that much, innate regen stayed about the same or increased a little.

Healers not being challenged is a whole other world of an issue considering many factors can lead to it. Of course if on person in your whole 25 man raid (AKA your tank) and you have 7-8 healers just standing there waiting for him to take damage there is no way the healers are going to be challenged. Solution to that problem : "hey let's introduce raid damage".

Problem with that is that good healers can adapt and output a LOT of healing per second so the answer was to introduce incredibly high amounts of aoe raid damage leading to fights like Eredar Twins (AoE raid damage fest), M'uru/Entropius, etc or even add a "constant damage over time to everyone" component to fights that weren't all about AoE healing in the first place (like Felmyst for example that is all about control in design in my opinion).

Now here's what happens :

I run into a fight where all my raid takes 1-2k damage every 2-3 seconds. Some healers are assigned to tank healing and all that good stuff so we have let's say 6 healers assigned to raid healing. Now consider that I have many spells in my arsenal : CoH, GHeal, FHeal, PoH, PoMending, Renew. Basically I'll PoMending every cooldown since it's a cast and forget heal which is very efficient, easy to use and heals for a very decent amount.

Then i have what?
GHeal : would basically heal 2 out of the 25 people taking damage before being outdamaged by the sole raid damage going on.

FHeal : just like GHeal but very mana inefficient.

PoH : heals only my party and has a long cast time so I can't reach the other parties and mine gets healed by the smart heals like CoH and CH before my PoH finishes casting.

Renew : Is stacked on at least tanks and other members of the raid to top them off but it's not what is going to keep my raid alive.

And then...there's CoH.

an instant cast heal that heals 5 people in the raid for 1.2 to 1.8k, procs SoL post 3.0, chooses it's targets and isn't very inefficient. I DON'T want to spam it but it's just clearly the best and only answer to what the encounter is throwing at us, priests are all about being versatile and adaptable healers and that is just our best tools to adapt to these kind of fights.

We're not just mindlessly spamming our one CoH button or binding that spell to all our keyboard rolling our faces on it but some encounters just force us to do so to be competitive and useful. Want a proof? Here are some fights on which I will NEVER use CoH some of which can still be challenging in a way (pre-nerf at least)

1.Supremus : okay not challenging at all but due to the whole raid being spread out and volcanoes and such gogo PWS and renew and GHeal.

2. Illidari Council : due to the mechanics of this fight and the huge spreading out GHeal is again the heal I use the most with FHeal, PoM and renew.

3. Illidan : again I'll mostly single target heal except on phase 2.

4. Blooboil : perfect example of a fight making awesome use of PoH.

5.Reliquary of Souls : no healing in phase 1 means gogo PWS, phase 2 makes awesome use of renew and phase 3 is perfectly taken care of with PoH/renew.

6. All of Mt Hyjal considering the spreading out and the mechanics of the fights.