My comments and suggestions about our focus.

Priests are the closest thing we have to a non-hybrid healer in the game of wow. We, like every class in the game, have a DPS tree. And some would say this makes us a hybrid as well. I would not because, like I just mentioned, it is par for the course; it is defaulted to us. Yet, in THE most important part of healing, we, warcrafts pure healing class, are one of the worst in the game. That part I am referring to is the holy trinity, used in role playing games for years. This is the theory that the tank holds agro, the healer heals the tank, and the dps down the mob unhindered. We, because of our less then average mana efficiency, are not as good at keeping the main tank alive during the longer encounters we see in the burning crusade.

Well, you may say to yourself, I heal fine. I am sure you do; However to progress to the next step of your ‘career’, you need to first reach a particular requirement to start successfully being able to pull your weight in the further encounters. This means that ‘healing fine’ is not really appropriate to say, because ‘fine’ is a relative term. If you can heal better, you can progress faster and easier.

Some of you like the current theory behind priests. Druids are better at healing the main tank. We are better at multi-target heals. Fair, right? Wrong. As I will point our all though out this post, multi target heals are not needed, nor especially helpful when doing 5 and 10 mans. The extremely few times when they do help us, does not make up for the major draw back we suffer for not having the ability to keep the main tank up for longer periods of time. This is especially true in burning crusades 5 mans, where battles are longer and more emphasis is put on these runs with the new heroic modes. Yes, we can eventually do these, but not as well as our hybrid friends and thus not as soon as I stated in the previous paragraph.

The examples I use in the bellow paragraph are of a level 70 priest with +1000 healing. +1000 healing is extremely easy to get at 70, it is even somewhat of a poor quality healer, however, group heals only get worse as healing scales up, and 1000 is a simple number to work with. Talent wise, this theoretical priest has improved renew, healing prayers plus your choice of talents to boost his +healing to 1000 if any.

The most common and efficient group heal is currently prayer of healing, not including light-well and prayer of mending of course as they are not relevant to this example. Prayer of healing gets about 1.3:1 heal:mana ratio on a typical level 70 priest with +1000 healing. At its very best, it will have all 5 members of your party in range and requiring heals. This gives it about 6.1:1 heal:mana ratio. At its absolute very best, in the worst of conditions, it still is only not quite equal to the efficiency of renew with its approximate 6.6:1 on the same geared priest. The absolute only reason a priest should ever use this spell is because of the need for speed. However, blizzard can not and will not add situations needing this kind of speed, as I will describe why later.

Blizzard has designed priests to be somewhat based around burst healing. We can unload our mana-pools fast on a large group of players; however, we do not have staying power like that of hybrid classes. However, they do not include content that needs this kind of healing. For us to be more desirable then hybrids, we need damage to not only multiple targets, but multiple targets with fast heavy damage; otherwise a druid with HOTs is much better, as shown in the above paragraph. Blizzard however does not want any class to be NEEDED. They want druids and paladins and shamans to be reasonable alternatives to priests. Thus they can not add this content. We all know the theory of heals and over healing. With healing there is no bad, good, better, awesome like there is with dps. There is only enough and not enough. Anything more then enough is over healing. This means that if a druid can keep a party alive, (and so far, there is no encounter he can’t), then he is doing enough… and he is doing it more efficiently to boot.

Hybrids are our allies in raids, but also our competition. In this crazy game of wow, all us classes want nothing more then to be balanced. However, do to some almost political issues; balance has managed to be ‘muddied’ some concerning hybrids. I think we can all agree that the druids and paladins ability to pay 50gp and make themselves a tank good enough to have warriors complain about it, is a pretty strong ability. Even in their healing trees, they do not do half bad at tanking so long as they bring the gear. Why then, do they expect to be not only as good as a priest at healing, but better at the most important aspects of healing? I can admit that do to healer shortages, healing is their usual place in raids, however, they picked hybrid classes knowing full well that they were hybrids; They now enjoy the comforts of not only being powerful healers, but also to switch at will when they desire it. Now all classes, priest included, has a DPS tree. However, we priests do not have nor expect the same dps as rogues and mages when we are shadow, yet they ‘get their cake and get to eat it too’. Heck, druids even get to take their dps and tanking spec at the same time. Priests have no such tanking spec. Now, to say that we would be stepping on paladin and druid toes if we were to become better at ‘main tank healing’ is unfair. I rolled the least hybrid of all healers, the one that should be the best healer so that I could in fact be the best healer. How I see it is that the hybrids are stepping on not only our toes, but a lot of toes such as warriors and rogues. There is no excuse why they should be better at healing then us.

My last point is only somewhat related. Holy tree is the tree that has been on the receiving end of some of the worst talent spells. You may notice that these spells are ALL multi-target heals. It’s no coincidence that these bad spells follow that theme. What blizzard seems willing to do for efficiency with multi target heals, and what we would expect to make them good staple spells, seems far off the mark. Some may say we shouldn’t get a staple spell, situational spells are fine. However, like any situation, healing situations such as needing to burst heal the whole party are easily avoided. In all the instances I have done, and I have done all the 5 mans and partial 10 man, I have yet to see anything which even remotely requires our specialty. I have noticed my mana pool does run dry on most boss encounters and have had more then a few wiped because my mana efficiency was not up to the challenge. I believe of these holy talent spells, any 2 should be removed and we should be given 2 spells which better help us keep the primary tank alive. As for the idea that this will pigion hole priests into going into the healing tree; I think that is a completely unrelated issue that should not be considered when balance is in question. Issues with guilds pressuring priests into a tree is between a priest and his guild, after all, no one is calling for sheep to be removed because rogues get pressure in less direct ways to reroll.
So, maybe you agree with me; what do we do to fix it? New spells, be it holy talents or standard spell set. Perhaps a channeled spell at the end of the holy tree, similar to Mind Flay. 4 seconds long to get the full use of our +healing gear, but with the same base mana:heal:time ratio. Being channeled, it could as a secondary effect have some sort of short term buff. Such as +10% armor while being cast, however this should not be added if it would mean taking away from the healing efficiency. Being channeled also means that you would not need to wait the entire 4 seconds before the healing took effect, making it a fair alternative to flash heal as well. Of course the downfall of the spell being loss of a lot of mana if you are disrupted, that goes with all channeled spells. This is just one example I feel is ideal, however, there are MANY ways to make our main tank healing better. Talents with % chance on heal to proc a pally shield, the ever dead horse of holy form if you want to ‘go there’, more spells or talents with mana regenerating effects, what ever. I’m sure blizzard could come up with something fair; the hard part is shifting their focus away from the situational spells.

While i'm sure some of you will disagree with what I am saying. Many for honest reasons and many for griefing reasons. I’m sure that many of you will also agree with what I am saying as well. And I hope both sides take something positive out of this post. I tried to be as thorough and clear as I could, but I am far from an English professor. This is what I see wrong with our class and what I think the focus of our class should change too. I thank you for reading this far and hope you enjoyed the read.