Our guild finally began 25-man Naxx last night which just so happened to coincide with the release of patch 3.08.
The new patch brought with it, what I originally thought of as an innocent change being the 6 second cooldown to Circle of Healing. I thought, great! now those silly priests who just spam CoH all raid long and overheal like crazy will have to play properly like the rest of us! I always kept my overheal down only using CoH when there was masses of raid damage happening or at least 4 people who needed healing at the same time. But I think I underestimated my own useage of CoH.
It was during the raid with the new 6 second cooldown when I discovered that I was previously always using CoH twice in a row to top everyone off. To watch the whole raid take aoe damage over 20-30 seconds, made me feel so helpless and basically disabled only being able to cast CoH once every 6 seconds. I found I had to single target flash/greater heal people and bounce around prayer of mending with the futile hope it would bounce so much and people wouldn’t die. I think I even used prayer of healing for my own party. It was then, that I came to the realisation that priests are weak aoe healers now.
So, my thoughts are that if I am now meant to act more like a pally healer, that I’ll need to stack alot more haste than I previously had. I had favoured crit, spirit and int over stacking more haste pre patch 3.08, since I had enough instants that could get me through the difficult spots. But a small 6 second cooldown has really hit home that I now need more haste as well. I currently have 203 haste but will probably need closer to 400 going forward.
I’m not sure if it was circumstantial or not, but in the heal meters on recount there were very obvious divisions with classes in the amounts of healing done. Usually I’m sitting just after the pally healers but it went like this (top to bottom): Pally, pally, shammy, shammy, shammy, priest, druid. As you know druids have also had a cooldown placed on their CoH equivalent.
Tell me your thoughts on this topic and how you coped with the new cooldown. Maybe you even have some pointers for me?
I think it may be time for Blizz to remove their new cooldown, let priests do the job the class was created for, and have these other classes do what they were created for instead of healing,
I forgot to mention in the post that on one particular fight, I was beaten in heals by a shadow priest!
Granted he was 25 man geared, where I am fully 10-man geared, but still. Our evil counterparts can do more raid healing than holy. What is up with that?!