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.