Holy Priest
Every tank is going to want a Fae Holy Priest in their group real soon 🚀
this is only in reference to holy priest in dungeons cause if you think I’m actually going to spend more than five seconds writing “press heal” you would be very wrong
The Role of Holy Priest
I have been asked by many over the years months, “Hasty, what do I do as a Holy Priest? There are simply too many buttons and I have no idea what is going on.” To this I reply, “Open your spellbook, go to the Holy tab, and check the name of spell 1,2 (or spell 0,1 for the hopeless nerds).”
Of course, this is referring the the spell, Heal. This is the only important thing you have to do as a Holy Priest. If health bars remain above 0, then eventually the enemy is guaranteed to die. Whether or not it dies within some given time limit is an entirely different problem, but that time limit should be of literally no concern if you are unable to keep your team alive through the trials and tribulations of queueing for a weekly 15 keystone.
If you are among the few gifted enough to keep your comrades alive while simultaneously feeling bored and wishing for more globals to press then other buttons may be considered. Among these dozens of players one may see spells such as smite and divine star leave the spellbook for the first time in decades, achieiving the damaging of foes and the healing of allies concurrently.
The remainder of this discussion is dedicated to and for the brave souls who want to complete their 15 keystones even faster, such that they can log out of the game until the next reset as soon as possible. For this purpose, cobwebbed spells must be forced from the ancient reliquary of a spellbook that exists solely in the mind of the Priest.
The Holy Heap
Uttered in hushed tones in healing communities is the idea of there being a “rotation” for healing classes. This has been shunned by contemporary players in favor of a dynamic playstyle well-suited to the reactionarily-directed environment of mythic keystones. However, when considering the maximizing of utility and damage provided by a healing class, it is only possible to see all choices when not needing to consider your group. For this purpose, a theoretical dps-maximized heap can be constructed to illustrate a spell-priority akin to a rotation.
This chart is assuming that the Holy Priest reading is not a coward and is concerned with maximizing their own dps over any concerns of keeping their group alive. This is possible as high-IO groups (>2500) that push into high keys (>20) play the game much more carefully, resulting in less needless damage taken. This gives the Holy Priest the ability to be more aggressive and run legendaries such as Harmonious Apparatus. The heap does not represent an optimal dps rotation, as it would be incredibly difficult to convey the small-scale choices that have to be made in a rigid structure like a max-heap.
The spell that is used is always the root of the heap, and uses represent an Extract-Max() operation. When an ability is no longer on cooldown (or global cooldown in the event of spells with no cooldown) they inserted back into the heap with the same expected damage value. When considering other factors such as time to live, set-bonuses, legendaries, and covenants the heap actually becomes useless and was a huge waste of time to make.
Considering these conditions that will impact decision-making, an APL can be made for simulating Holy Priest damage with the SimulationCraft tool.
Simulating Holy In a Vacuum
Apart from going in circles very quickly, Holy Priest can be simulated relatively will when no factor except the number of enemies is considered. The main issue is that SimulationCraft does not and has not supported Holy Priest damage simulations (or any healer damage simulations) for the past few years. Thus, the Holy Priest module is severely out of date and requires manual tweaking to fix and to implement the current set bonus. I have fixed most issues with the Holy Priest module, but since I am fundamentally unable to write things in a coherent way I will not be attempting to contribute to the main repository for SimulationCraft.
The sims have told me that Holy Priest is actually a healer and is not meant to do DPS. Attempting to do so is an affront to God and will result in penalties not limited to a descent straight to Hell upon death.
If Holy Priest is played by anyone with an ethical bone in their body, a breakdown would look similar to this.
This was achieved with the following APL, which uses Harmonious Apparatus.
actions.precombat+=/holy_fire
# Executed every time the actor is available.
# Default fallback for usable items: Use on cooldown in order by trinket slot.
actions=use_items
# Pot if high haste moment is inbound or value will be lost
actions+=/potion,if=buff.bloodlust.react|buff.power_infusion.up|target.time_to_die<=20
# Apotheosis is a dps gain trust
actions+=/apotheosis,if=talent.apotheosis.enabled&cooldown.boon_of_the_ascended.remains>=10
# Use a racial if its actually good to use
actions+=/call_action_list,name=racials
# Self PI baby wahoo
actions+=/power_infusion
# holy fire > divine star single target
# conditional: if we have a holy word up *right* before holy fire comes back up, we use it to buff holy fire w/ 4 set
# (in the sims, this is essentially mostly chastise, which is very unrealistic (like this entire APL))
actions+=/call_action_list,name=hwords,if=cooldown.holy_fire.remains<=gcd
actions+=/holy_fire
# booner
actions+=/boon_of_the_ascended,if=!buff.apotheosis.up
actions+=/call_action_list,name=boon,if=buff.boon_of_the_ascended.up
# Give it up for the best spell in the video game
actions+=/divine_star
# keep it chaste
actions+=/holy_word_chastise
# keep sw:p up please
actions+=/shadow_word_pain,if=!ticking
# death is kinda only good if the target is low (thanks glizzard)
actions+=/shadow_word_death,if=target.health.pct<20
# abuse pandemic window
actions+=/shadow_word_pain,if=refreshable
# use smite on up to 2 targets
#,if=spell_targets.holy_nova<3
actions+=/smite
# actions+=/holy_nova,if=spell_targets.holy_nova>=3
# if cannot do anything else, pain (not really a thing in the sim that will be performed)
actions+=/shadow_word_pain
actions.boon=ascended_blast,if=spell_targets.ascended_nova<10
actions.boon+=/ascended_nova
actions.hwords=holy_word_chastise
actions.hwords+=/holy_word_serenity
actions.racials=arcane_torrent,if=mana.pct<=5
actions.racials+=/blood_fury
actions.racials+=/berserking
actions.racials+=/lights_judgment
actions.racials+=/fireblood
actions.racials+=/ancestral_call
actions.racials+=/bag_of_tricks
Findings
For one, this class does no damage.
For two, this class really does no damage.
Lastly, for pure damage the stat priority in general scenarios of a mixture of AOE and single-target can be summarized as follows:
Intellect >> Critical Strike > Versatility > Haste >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Mastery
If critical strike is stacked to a large-enough degree, the Xy’mox trinket can be considered viable, as the bleed effect can do similar damage to the Dausegne trinket at the cost of significant intellect loss. This can be a net DPS-gain, but will make all healing less impactful.
Conclusion
this class is beans how do people enjoy this just press heal
Addendum: The True Role of Holy Priest
The shadow organization looming over Blizzard Entertainment since its inception have been playing an incredibly long game ever since the Priest class was added to the game circa 2004. They have successfully herded every submissive-personality types into one class. This is a part of their long-term goal of developing World of Warcraft into an e-dating service known as Looking For Gamer (LFG). This is similar to the division performed in communities such as Healsluts, but is done so without the knowledge or consent of the player. Whenever a Holy Priest applies for a keystone, they are undergoing a selection process not too dissimilar to swiping left or right on Tinder. Given the non-consential direct messaging system of whispers, the applying player is actually afforded less agency than would be provided by a similar dating app. An unexpected but welcome aspect of this is a non-flagging method for LGBTQ+ individuals to seek others of a particular type. As research1 and research2 have shown, this flagging occurs unconsciously and often disadvantageously. As my studies into this phenomena continue, I am interested to see if the Evoker Preservation specialization will shake up the submissive meta that has been cemented in World of Warcraft for nearly two decades.
Stay tuned for my commentary and guide on the Diablo Immortal Monk class.