A Look Back at Holy Priest in Dragonflight & War Within Wishlist – Editorial

With the sun setting on Dragonflight and The War Within on the horizon, our Holy Priest Writer, AutomaticJak, offers a retrospective highlighting Holy’s journey in Dragonflight and shares their hopes for the spec’s next evolution with a War Within Wishlist.

Holy Retrospective & War Within Wishlist

Holy Priest has received a small/moderate amount of changes to its spec tree during Dragonflight with some substantial changes for the spec with the release of the expac. They have fully moved away from the Single-Target focused raid-healing of Shadowlands into a very Holy Word and Prayer of Mending centric style in Dragonflight.

Holy Priest’s Overall Gameplay

Holy as the blueprint “fantasy healer” is supported by Holy Words and supporting spells that reduce their cooldown. Holy Word: Serenity is a massive single-target heal that is reduced by Flash Heal and Heal. Holy Word: Sanctify is a powerful circular radius AoE heal that is reduced by Prayer of Healing which is a targetted light-AoE heal. Dragonflight very heavily pushed the power of those Holy Words to make them feel powerful and impactful which is a welcome return to the spec’s modern roots when Serenity was revamped and Sanctify was created in Legion. In Shadowlands these abilities existed but were out-shined by the power of the legendary system where the Flash Concentration legendary dominated the space. Refocusing the spec on the power of Holy Words has been extremely welcome, though almost too-much strength has been focused into the passive healing of Prayer of Mending, I believe, at the expense of active spells like Prayer of Healing in a raid environment. Leaving the latter to feel weak, making it just a tool to use for light healing and farming cooldown reduction for your spells that actually do healing like Holy Word: Sanctify.

Mythic+ over the years has not always been kind to Holy Priests. Shadowlands recently lead to an extremely dominant form of the spec playing with the Flash Concentration legendary and Night Fae Covenant Fae Guardians ability. Before this however, the spec struggled with high mana costs tied to single-target abilities and infrequent Holy Words. Transitioning away from the Shadowlands legendary system and into Dragonflight talents has lead to an abundance of Holy Words that make the spec feel like you are very actively pushing up health pools with your ability casts, unlike in raids where your spells are more split between passive effects and active spells.

The spec historically has been the flexible and versatile healer that can always fit well in any healing composition. In the past, using stances in Chakras to adjust how you heal to best suit your team. In Dragonflight, while the Holy Words do grant some versatility you are hard-locked into certain talents like Miracle Worker that prevent over-capping Words and provide such high value that other talents cannot compete with. Lightwell, Lightweaver, and Divine Word in particular have all had moments of excitement for their situational uses but have been overshadowed this expac as development for Holy has stagnated in providing a variety of talent options for competitive play.

Holy Priest Throughout Dragonflight

The spec has not had a rework throughout the expansion, nor has it necessarily needed one, and has focused on maximizing Holy Words while generating new Words as efficiently as possible through mana-cost savings with talents like Surge of Light and Prayer Circle. That being said, the spec itself has leaned too-heavily towards passive healing which is saying something considering our Mastery: Echo of Light is just that. Aberrus in particular heavily pushed the passive healing of Prayer of Mending to new highs, taking a large chunk of the specs overall output and tying it to a largely passive spell that decided most of its healing on its own. Thankfully, this did also result in good gameplay practices thanks to the Answered Prayers passive which provided windows of increased Holy Word generation that you play around which then fed into more casts of Holy Word: Salvation. This created large incentives for good gameplay, preparing and maximizing your Apotheosis procs to farm that extra raid-wide cooldown to do great healing.

The raid playstyle today is straightforward, with good opportunities to play efficiently to expand the skill ceiling. Unfortunately to rein in the cooldown and defensive strength of many specs, Holy Priest in Season 3 received some large nerfs to both Symbol of Hope and Holy Word: Salvation which pushed the spec out of the World First healing composition for the majority of raid encounters. As damage/healing intake are undoubtedly looked at entering The War Within I would hope that Holy Priest (and ever healer spec’s!) utility and raid cooldowns are given another look to properly balance them in line with health and damage. Symbol of Hope for example is insanely powerful at 60-seconds of cooldown reduction when the majority of raid mechanics are super bursty. So having your 20-30% damage reduction back again for a raid hit is insane. If raid fights once again become more about damage over time effects, then having that personal again could be good, but not necessarily overpowered.

Mythic+ also maintained a straight-forward playstyle throughout Dragonflight with the new S3 bonus providing greater access to Holy Words, further bolstering the strength of Miracle Worker and Holy Word: Serenity. This has resulted in almost doubling the amount of Holy Word: Serenitys that can be cast throughout a dungeon, making it substantially easier to push up health pools and counter the heavy burst damage that Season 3 Mythic+ dungeons feature. Holy still maintains weaknesses with spread-burst healing profiles though the spec provides excellent overall damage (which was recently buffed!), Power Infusion, and priority target healing with top players chesting +30 dungeons this season in line with other high-end healer specs.

Potential Holy Priest Changes for The War Within

Hero Talents offer an interesting opportunity for Holy Priest to further modify the flexibility of its healing profile depending on the needs of the team. I will say that the Hero Talents I have seen thus far look to be more button bloat and I hope that Holy Priest does not go down that route. Resto Druids recently have spoken about their Hero Talent that was previewed as further reinforcing a playstyle they feel locked into and particularly when there is synergy with a high value talents the talent nodes on the tree feel less and less like a choice. Holy in Dragonflight has not needed a revamp and has not been in dire straights but I believe an additional expansion with minimal talent shake-ups would be a mistake.

I would first start with having a clear purpose to how these Hero Talents add to the Holy Priest specialization, particularly when both sister specs are damage-oriented in one way or another. Holy Priest absolutely does epic damage in Season 3, but that really is not a part of the spec’s identity and is moreso there for competitive purposes. The spec has iconic abilities in Lightwell and chakra animations in Divine Word that have been under-used in Dragonflight and finding unique ways to bring these up as competitive options would be great to see.

With these needs in mind both for gameplay and for healing profile assistance I have a few proposals in mind for Holy’s Hero Talents. First of which would be to see Holy Priest receiving a short-term version of Disc Atonement for example to provide mana-efficient, passive healing during downtime while adding damage, potential pet-gameplay from Shadow/Discipline that could be used to store burstier healing to help with difficult situations in Mythic+ environments or even more active healing in Holy Words and Prayer of Healing to be brought back up for the spec as a real heal.

Closing Thoughts

While it can be a fine line to tread between playing a spec adjusting medicore talents and revamping gameplay I do think Holy should receive updates to their base Dragonflight trees to encourage some talent diversity and make the talents feel like real choices each time. Having a choice that is always the best for Raids or Mythic+ will naturally happen (Holy Word: Salvation/Apotheosis) but having a talent that is always selected for PvE no matter what in Miracle Worker feels like the illusion of choice. Holy has a great foundation going into Dragonflight and by making adjustments to talent diversity, improving active healing abilities like Prayer of Healing, while drawing down the excessive output of passive healing like Prayer of Mending would go far to improve the gameplay of Holy Priest as we enter The Worldsoul Saga.

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