Dear QQing Priests,
Shut the hell up.
No, really. Quit your bitchin'.
O noes, they're nerfing CoH! O noes, we don't have clear and defined roles! We are made of suck and fail!
You want a clearly defined role? Take a paladin! There's your clearly definined role. I heal one thing really damn well. That's GREAT in raids, and I'm not even being sarcastic!
...unless most of your healers are paladins, a la last night's OS (2 pallys and one bad resto shaman who might as well have not even been there).
...unless you're healing a 5 man with aoe damage.
...unless that's all you can do.
Priests, when you look at their spells as a whole product and don't get hung up
on any one ability in particular, work great. ... Holy Priests are great
healers, and there's really no situation where they're completely
helpless. ... The fact that Holy Priests are so well-rounded means that in
situations where only one Healer is needed (such as 5-man groups), Priests are
fantastic. They have all of the tools required to excel in that format. There's
not really a single boss that can give them a lot of trouble. All of the Healing
classes have the tools required to get them through 5-man dungeons and Heroics,
but Paladins, Shaman, and Druids all have encounters that really trip them
up. Priests rarely have this problem. 5-mans are kind of their playground. They
utterly dominate.
And that, ladies and gentleman, is why I rolled a priest. Even a disc priest has the tools nessecary to cope with the varied situations that a 5 man will throw at them. My question is: how does this change in raids?
I don't think it does. In a raid, you can still AoE heal. You can still toss HoTs. You can still heal a single target pretty well. Why does this make you weak in a raid? If you have two holy paladins healing a raid, they're probably going to struggle more than if you had two priests. Now Macharious and I did great, but Mach and I are awesome, even if he is a cranky temporarily converted healadin. I imagine that some of the other healing classes are similarly limited. We can do it, but it's more difficult.
Priests bring versatility to the table. If you don't value that in a raid, you're a fool. What if your holy paladin healing the tank dies? Boom, priest can step in. What if a Shade pounces on you unawares in the middle of explaining a boss fight and half the group all is /afk? The priest is ready, despite being the only healer present and not staring at 4chan on a second monitor. What if you log on to raid and your holy paladin/reso shaman/tree isn't there? The priests can do it!
Problems start coming up when you increase the number of characters in play. Things start shifting from who has the most tools to "Who will heal the tank?" and "Who will heal the DPS?" In bigger raids. You stop looking for versatility and start looking for who's the best at what job. ... The issue is that you fill your niche roles first, and plug in the Priest(s) second.
Versitility should be valued even in a 25 man. I'd be unhappy if I didn't have a priest or two in my 25 man raids. I'd grab one just as quickly as I'd grab anything else. I don't think the problem, then, is not with the priest or with how they work. It's with how some people form raids.
I'd be okay with, as the Insider says later, giving the priests more of a niche...but please, for the love of all that is holy, don't take away their Jack of all Trade skills. Expand on the Hymns or spells like Power Infusion if you want. Those could all lead to fun, useful directions.
But I don't want a repeat of Ambrosyne's leveling process with Lyrandre, where there remain certain instances I just won't do without a lot of inner sobbing. I want to be able to walk through any instance portal and know that I gave the tools at hand to do my job-keep people alive.
Priests have a niche. I just don't think that they-or raid leaders-appreciate it enough.
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