Circle of healing does NOT need a cooldown

#0 - Nov. 7, 2008, 7:36 a.m.

Circle of healing is very great for fights that introduce continuous raid-wide AOE damage.

Circle of healing is good for healing the entire raid granted they are close enough to each other to warrant AOE heals.

How is introducing a 6 second cooldown on the spell going to solve the issue of priests only using one ability? All this will do is make the continuous raid wide AOE damage impossible to heal. It will not affect other fights where constant AOE damage is not being taken.

Think of it this way. If I am healing 5 people taking constant damage (like on Bloodboil), circle of healing is immensely powerful. But as soon as that damage stops, it's virtually useless, and I should focus on other heals. Adding a cooldown to CoH will just make Bloodboil unnecessarily harder while not affecting the off-period where there is no AOE damage. We generally don't spam COH 3-4 times in a row when that AOE damage is not coming at us, so why make those fights THAT much harder.

Of course this is all assuming you keep fights like Bloodboil, Malacrass, Void Reaver etc. in WOTLK. But if you are doing away with the nasty raid wide AOES, then why bother making the change at all?

My two cents.

#61 - Nov. 7, 2008, 4:45 p.m.

I feel like a lot of people are starting new threads without actually reading my comments, which means we keep having the same circular conversations.

Q u o t e:
1. I was under the impression that Holy was supposed to be the versatile healer, not the best at aoe, HoT, or direct healing, but capable of all. If you put the 6 sec CD on CoH wouldn't we be on par with Disc Priest casting PoH thus bumping us out of raids?

You are correct that Holy is supposed to be the versatile healer. CoH is preventing that because Holy priests are using it for a gigantic percentage of their healing. A priest who used only that spell and a priest who used their whole arsenal probably would not have a significantly different effect on group survival. That's a problem.

Q u o t e:
2. If this nerf takes place people won't spec into it and holy we'll get another lolwell or lolnova.

I doubt that would be the case. If it's worth casting 10 times, it's worth casting once. Some may opt for other talents as well, but I think plenty will stick with CoH.

Q u o t e:
3. It seems to me that since we can't downrank now spamming CoH would oom any healer too fast so how can this even be an issue?

Making spells very expensive generally isn't received well. Players tend to blame their gear for not providing enough regen in order for them to "Spam CoH in order to remain competitive." We still do it sometimes, but it always requires a lot of explanation in order for players to understand how all their tools are intended to work.

Q u o t e:
4. If we lose CoH (My personal favorite spell) what puts us on par with other healers. It seems to me this would decimate the holy tree.

Holy priests are designed around versatility. A Holy priest can be assigned to a tank, or to a melee group, or to general raid healing. While it's possible for a spec in that niche to become the jack of all trades, master of none, we think Holy priests have actually been strongly desired healers throughout most of the history of WoW.

You have fast single-target heals, slower ones, hots, group heals, shields and smart heals. Currently we believe a lot of those other heals look like poo because, to quote myself from another thread, Circle of Healing looks like the solution to every encounter challenge.