Cooldown possibly coming to CoH, Wild Growth
by Eliah Hecht 
Nov 7th 2008 at 7:00PM
As a player who recently fell in love with Circle of Healing, this news hits me pretty hard: Blizzard is considering adding a six-second cooldown to CoH and its Druid analogue, Wild Growth. Basically, they're not happy with the fact that CoH often provides upwards of 70% of the healing done by a Holy priest in a raid. The design, according to Ghostcrawler, is for Holy priests to be versatile healers: we have a fast heal, a slow one, a HoT, and several group heals, as well as a couple of unique tricks. But the new, smart CoH sort of blows this out of the water, making Circle the answer to almost every situation, and making AoE healing Holy's de facto speciality (GC's phrase is that it makes our other heals "look like poo").
I'm not sure what I think about adding a cooldown to CoH as a solution to this, though. Initially, I hated it; it looked like Blizzard brute-forcing us to play the way they want us to, instead of making it more attractive by buffing other spells or pushing less AoE damage on us. On the other hand, there is talk of reducing AoE damage necessary. And the more I think about it, the more I think a cooldown might actaully feel good. I do sort of miss my other spells; I don't think I used Greater Heal more than a dozen times the fist raid I did after getting Circle. With a cooldown I could save Circle for when I really needed it. I do like the skill involved in selecting the right spell from our arsenal to deal with the incoming damage - it helps keep me awake during those late raids, and it brings an element of strategy that is missing when I'm just spamming CoH three out of every four GCDs.
Reactions from the blogosphere include Matt's "No comment, stabbing myself in the eyes" and the Dwarf Priest's "CoH is fine," so it looks like I'm in the minority in actually not thinking this is necessarily a terrible idea. I do like the idea of making Prayer of Healing raid-wide to compensate, which is suggested by the Dwarf Priest and acknowledged as a possibility by GC. Groups being mostly irrelevant in raids right now makes the limiation on PoH feel archaic.
Holy does have a history of our top-tier talents being mocked and considered useless (Holy Nova, Lightwell, Circle of Healing; even the new Guardian Spirit has received its share of skepticism). Would a six-second-cooldown CoH still be useful? Yes. Would it be worth its spot in the talent tree? Maybe not. It does make me think of one interesting idea, though: put a cooldown reduction on the beleaguered Divine Providence. If DP reduced the theoretical cooldown of CoH by 30%, bringing it down to 4 seconds, as well as its current effects, it would be an excellent talent, in my opinion, and the Holy tree would be in pretty good shape (albeit with a very different play style than we have now).
Druids: apologies for the Priest--centric nature of this post. I've never specced Resto, so I don't have any basis from which to speak about Wild Growth. But I am very interested in your perspective; what is this cooldown going to do to Resto, if it happens?
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 4)
Justin Nov 7th 2008 7:08PM
Meh ... Probably a good thing, But I specced Disc in 3.02 just because I wanted to mix it up.
After all, if I had wanted to heal by pressing one button i would have rolled a Paladin.
draeth Nov 7th 2008 10:59PM
i take offense to that, paladin healing is harder than it looks! sometimes i have to move, and even click another button! and the rezzing! oh the rezzing, it never ends!
Deadly .Off. Topic. Nov 10th 2008 10:20AM
I also specced full Disc on my priest. I enjoyed it alot more than Holy which seems boring. COH wasn't worth me speccing into other talents that I didn't enjoy just to get it.
I will say this though, I do miss Desperate Prayer. Before they stole it and made it holy only - that was my OH CRAP! Button.
Vlatch Nov 10th 2008 11:09AM
I approve the cooldown as a a resto-shaman. However, I am completely biased, because we received an instant heal with a HoT - as well as some great abilities to make our single-target healing much more effective. To be honest, the change to WG and CoH will make Shaman the kings of AoE healing again, but at a cost.
I think there's a better solution than putting a cooldown on it, maybe making it much more mana inefficient so that the spammers will be called out quickly and forced to work it into a reasonable rotation.
Omnishinzui Nov 7th 2008 7:10PM
I fell in love with my wild growth as a very, very nice raiding healing tool. I would be sad to see this go, only healing 5 around me every 6 seconds? I dont see a point. Wild growth got nerfed a lot in the PTR realm, and there is really no mana efficiencywhen spamming it. Increase the mana, lower the healing. But making a CD on it will make it completely worthless. Its like situational at best for 5man if it comes down to that. Youve got me to stop spamming lifebloom on the entire raid, and involved rejuv/wild growth. I feel currently the resto in PvE healing is fine atm.
Cysgodi Nov 7th 2008 7:10PM
Initially, in Beta, Circle of Healing did have a cooldown of six seconds. Because of the public outcry, though, the Devs agreed to change it back and said that they would reevaluate it at a later time. It looks like they're settling for their original decision.
Matt2233 Nov 7th 2008 7:20PM
Although these changes sound quite harsh, they were necessary. The reason being that these spells are much better then chain heal, and as shaman are quite weak single target healers but excel in aoe, there was no reason to bring one to a raid.
I would have much rather seen Resto shaman buffed then CoH/WG nerfed, but i guess the devs felt otherwise.
memzer Nov 7th 2008 8:38PM
I'm not arguing that something shouldn't be done here; CoH and WG in level 70 content are definitely borderline OP. But I hope blizzard takes into consideration some of the problems with our spells:
- GHeal & FHeal are slower(!) and less efficient than HL & FoL
- Renew ticks slowly and is less effective than the array of druids HoT stacking on a target
- The heal effect of Prayer of Mending, while undoubtedly good is out of our control;
- Prayer of Mending has a long cast time and unless the entire raid is taking large amounts of damage CHeal will generally have targets topped up anyway.
(No complaints about Power Word Shield & Disc Healing; I don't think that there's an accurate benchmark for the effectiveness of a Disc healer yet [Dmg Absorbed + Dmg Mitigated + Healing?] - I've healed heroics with no trouble, but in a raid environment everybody just points out the meters of course)
The problem is that if:
Shamans are great AOE Healers;
Paladins are great Single Target Healers;
Druids are great HoT healers;
You leave priests being able to do a little of all but excel at nothing and we know exactly who will be the first healer to be cut. It was exactly this way for priests in the burning crusade before late BT & Sunwell where raid-wide damage ramped up and we got a chance to shine.
Matt2233 Nov 7th 2008 9:17PM
Mezmer, what you said is extremely true.
I think blizzards design philosophy on Priest's healing is full of fail, like the design philosophy of mages. In a raid setting, Priests will be replaced by healers of expertise, unlike 5 mans where priests shine.
I think Blizz should introduce a new healing mechanic that priests specialize in. Disc's preventing damage is a nice start and has a lot of promise.
If i was to change holy, i would design the tree to be able to do two things at once. I mean like Aoe healing and applying hots at the same time or Healing a single Target and Aoeing at the same time.
If priests don't excel in one area, they need to be able to do ok in 2 areas at once to be viable.
(PS my highest lvl priest is 10, so forgive me if some of my input is off)
Debelak Nov 8th 2008 8:20AM
memzer, while what you say is true, just remember that if Greater heal and Flash heal were as efficient as HL and FoL there would be no reason to bring a paladin since that is all they have. The same is true with the other healing classes. So as Matt2233 said, if they want to avoid the jack-of-all-trades-master-of-none effect they need to introduce a new specialization that is different from the hybrid healers specializations.
Kitinan Nov 7th 2008 7:18PM
CoH doesn't need a cooldown. Just because bad Priests do nothing but spam CoH does not mean that CoH is the best method of healing. In order to be really effective and not just scam the healing meters you need to be able to use a variety of moves.
Changing this spell is dumb, it works fine as it is now.
Dustybrown Nov 7th 2008 7:18PM
Not honestly sure I like the idea of DP removing the cooldown myself. It seems a little lame for us to have to talent in to still make CoH worse than it was in TBC. DP is a crappy talent anyway, even with the ProM effect it smacks of "we're giving you more +heals because we can't think of anything else to give you".
I don't like the idea of a CD can you tell? :)
Neodarkmatter Nov 7th 2008 7:20PM
Sorry if this is a little off topic but is Wild Growth as smart as the Priest CoH? I heard the CoH heals the people that need heals, does Wild Growth do this as well or is its targets purely random?
Evelinda Nov 7th 2008 10:12PM
It certainly seems to... admittedly i've only healed 10 mans with my druid, but wild growth always hits the people who have taken damage from what i've seen. As long as theyre in range, of course :)
mensrea Nov 7th 2008 7:21PM
Terrible decision, really. They'd have to buff the hell out of the coefficient for it to be even remotely worth the using if they added a six second cooldown to it.
A 6 second cooldown means that instead of casting CoH 4+ times, you now cast it once. Reducing the output of the only decent AoE heal by 75% doesn't make the priest a more "versatile" class, it effectively removes AoE healing capabilities for all intents and purposes.
The strength of CoH comes from its spamability because, let's be honest, one cast of it is weak as hell. Dramatically upping the coefficient, increasing the number of targets hit and the range, or something like that would help but if they want priests to do something other than spam CoH, they should create more dynamic encounters where CoH is less valuable... or is useful during certain phases.
Get creative, folks. On top of making healing more fun, it would provide another spot that highlights the skill of the person at the keyboard rather than the iLevel of the items being worn.
Zoisite Nov 7th 2008 8:14PM
I am svery much in favor of this "nerf." CoH was a lovely spell, I used to spec it before I switched to IDS, for the good of my guildies. However, the numbers don't lie, CoH became very overpowered with the recent tweaks.
Pre-patch, among my regular raiding friends, I would usually be among a tight 1st-3rd place on the healing meter, one competitor being a pally, the other a CoH priest. Our gear is roughly equivalent of each other
The raid right after the talent tweaks, I took IDS again, knowing all of my priest friends would go CoH. Our next 25-man resulted in me struggling to keep 6th place on the meters, with the other 4 priests in the group doing more than double the output, and over 80% of each of their heals were from CoH. Priests who were still wearing blues and gearing up in Kara were out-shining me, and I'm Hyjal material. My overhealing shot through the roof, since even with +10% haste, instant casts will always beat out a Flash Heal. With 4 people spamming CoH over each other, I was lucky if any of my renews got more than one or two ticks per cast.
After a while, I gave up on healing, and resorted to DoTs and Lolsmiting. It was better use for my mana.
As far as it being "weak as hell", requiring several casts for it to do much good, consider this: PoH is for that kind of stuff. If you have time to cast CoH3+ times, you could have cast PoH in that time and done just as much healing. Yes, it's a 41-talent, and it needs to get a little love for that. That love comes in that it's not group-based, is a smart-heal, and an instant cast that can prevent things from hitting the fan too fast, not to mention that mana-wise, it's really not bad, either.
This cooldown isn't to say "No one use this ability!!" It's to prevent priests from just spamming til the cows come home. The CD will prevent it from being abused, but won't stop the spell from being useful! At level 80, I have every intention of getting CoH, six-second CD and all.
mensrea Nov 7th 2008 8:50PM
Have you considered the possibility that you're just bad?
One of a few things is true here.
Either you're talking about AoE-damage-centric fights where CoH priests SHOULD be doing lots of healing, you're not properly taking into account roles (the tank healer is going to have less healing than the raid healer no matter what specs they are) or you just don't know how to play a disc priest.
Now, disc in a raid is going to under-perform compared to holy, even in the same gear, it's SUPPOSED TO, but if you're in Hyjal gear and getting out-healed by such a large margin by players in blues/greens on fights that aren't predominantly AoE damage... then, I'm sorry to say, but you just aren't very good.
Maybe, instead of QQing about how awful it is that you're so low on the healing meters (as if that, itself, even matters... roll a rogue if you want your e-peen stroked), you should go l2p.
I've raided as both IDS and CoH... and, yes, taking the "support" spec hurt my numbers and my "rank" on the healing meters... but nowhere near the level you describe, so either I'm phenomenally good (doubtful) or you need to work on your skills.
That said, *A* nerf and *THIS* nerf are two different animals. 2-3s cooldown? Okay, not terrible. 4-6s cooldown, but hits 8-10 targets? Fine. 4-6s cooldown but does 2-3x the healing per cast? Tolerable.
This particular nerf removes priests from AoE healing almost instantly. If your only viable AoE heal can only be cast once every 6 seconds and heals for such a low amount, you're basically worthless. Totally not worth a 41-point talent... 21 point, maybe, but not so far down the tree.
Zoisite Nov 7th 2008 9:39PM
I love how your first response is to assume I don't know what I'm doing. Rest assured, I am well-loved on my server, precisely because I'm damn good at being a priest. Alas, as far as rogues go, my rogue is most assuredly the worst one in the guild.
I also never mentioned Green gear, I said blues and Kara gear, and pre-patch, I outhealed these players easily. For the sake of laying the facts out, I have no Hyjal Gear, I'm just geared enough to do it. However, have you ever run with 4 other priests spamming the new CoH? As previously stated, a flash heal just isn't as fast as instant casts.
Heal-meters normally matter very little to me. I know I'm Disc, I expect to heal less than a CoH priest in matching gear; as long as I do my part, no one dies, we're all good. But four CoH priests who previously averaged about 70%-80% of my heals should not suddenly be doubling my output. How does that make sense? If that's all anyone has to do to heal, why not *everyone* go Holy & spam? There is no reason to use any other spell, with how OP this is now.
feelthevibe Nov 8th 2008 2:05AM
Basically, your in T5 gear doing sub-par T6 content, supposedly one of the best priests on your server, and your asking for a CoH nerf. Blizz pls don't listen to ppl like this. Until your farming BT and well on the way to seeing off Kael I'm not sure you have a leg to stand on. Binding heal was OP in Ramps! blargh
Linkage Nov 8th 2008 12:53PM
Ok, you're saying that a person has to be at the verge of killing Illidan and Kil'jaden before they can even give an opinion about one of their spells or abilities, right?
Look, even a priest going through Karazhan can tell that CoH is doing too much. Priests were never meant to spam the same spell over and over again.
"Binding heal was OP in Ramps! blargh"
You know, I have not used Binding heal at all since the patch. It's actually been better for me to throw a CoH in that situation.
I hate it how so many priests hinge their usefulness on one 41 point talent spell being spammable. Look, even if there is a stigma concerning T6 content, this won't matter in 5 days anyways.
I believe there will be a spot waiting for me at level 80, and that's because I trust my guild to not base my going on the fact that ONE of my many healing spells can only be cast every 6 seconds. If your guild does go by that basis, maybe it's time to find a better guild.