Big Last-Minute 12.1 Healer Changes!

[00:04] play, Blizzard has just answered all of your prayers or absolutely has no idea what they're doing. The 12.1 patch is coming closer and closer and we are actually seeing the probably largest sets of tuning today in the same week as

[00:20] the one that we just had like two days ago. Again, from Blizzard this time addressing healers. Healers and tanks are kind of always a little bit on the last parts beats. Tune since you know, it kind of has to do with how how the

[00:32] content is scaling. If the dungeons and raids are buffed and nerfed, then the adjusted as well. This is why we're seeing the tank the healers right now. I wanted the tanks to be this week, but it seems like not. But we do have

[00:46] almost every healer addressed except maybe one that should have been addressed, but hey, listen. We're not here to judge. We're here to report. So, let's see if your healer of choice is saved or cooked.

[01:03] >> We're going to start it strong with the one that I just recently tested restoration druid. And let me just go into the changes, then I'll give you my honest, very inexperienced opinion that I know has you holding your breath very

[01:18] tightly right now. With restoration, abundance increases critical strike chance of regrowth by 60%. Previously was 50 and reduces cost by 60%.

[01:30] Previously was 50. Regrowth healing also increased by 25%. Now, these are from where I'm sitting with my experience looking at buffs and nerfs, really big buffs for restoration druid. And I have to admit, I was

[01:45] feeling a little bit stressed out when I tested it just earlier yesterday. After discipline priest that was just absolutely easy. So, with restoration druid it was just way more difficult. Now, depending

[01:59] played resto druid, abundance has been changed in 12.1. And now, for as long as you have five rejuvenations out at any point in time, your abundance kicks in and buffs the critical strike chance of regrowth and reduces the mana cost.

[02:14] Which obviously pushes regrowth's build and regrowth to be your go-to heal in case of emergency, which is exactly what's going to be happening in the next season. As much as I tried to play very heavy into the tier set where I just

[02:27] spam rejuves as much as possible to get that Genesis to proc, it just felt like I could only really keep people up whenever I was stacking big fat make that better. First of all, that just means you're just going to be able

[02:40] to hold people alive, which is the most important part when you are playing a healer. But it also means that the tier set is looking in the community as well to kind of gauge their opinion. It's still a

[02:53] little bit early, so the whole of the testing hasn't actually completed cuz we're just reporting this less than a day after it was announced. So, we don't know how it will play out in the end. And we know for sure that Blizzard does

[03:05] not like it when you have to ignore your tier set because it's just too weak. Likely, it's going to be that they are going to be buffing the tier set. And we're off of just reporting that the tier set has been changed just 2 days

[03:18] ago where Genesis can be procced by tranquility instead of Ironbark, which is probably worse because Ironbark has a shorter cooldown. You could have played Ironbark and just get more Genesis. But probably the main issue is that Genesis

[03:32] is just particularly weak. And especially if you're going to be incentivizing spamming rejuvenations, at least in dungeons, rejuvenations don't really have a lot of healing power to keep people alive through burst damage

[03:44] because you might be surprised to hear this that despite them increasing the HP pools of everybody, it turns out that if you increase the damage everybody takes, understand some of the top healers can just do this perfectly fine, but from

[03:59] somebody that's healing plus 12s and has had almost no issues with discipline priest, I can honestly say burst damage is still incoming to everybody else. And if you are unprepared with resto druid, which is probably shaping up to be one

[04:11] you're not able to resolve that burst damage almost at all and you're caught with your pants down. So, regrowth being buffed is uh basically what we needed. Yay! I can actually play more restoration druid and

[04:27] actually play more restoration druid and I cannot wait. now and it's been doing like some crazy,

[04:39] crazy damage to boots. I had the experience to see it for myself and it's been attacked because I think preservation evoker has historically been better on beta and PTR servers than it has been on live. I'm not saying it's

[04:53] a bad healer, okay, but I'm saying I feel like this is the exact second PTR cycle of preservation being good and then it's being nerfed. I I don't think I don't know if it's nerfed enough to be bad once it's released, but I remember

[05:06] healers in the beta for midnight once mythic plus started testing and then and ever seen preservation in your high key pushing? I don't think so. But what has changed for preservation? Well, we have developer notes to shed some light on

[05:21] this experience. We'd like to reduce preservation's raid healing as it has eclipsed other healers by a significant margin. At the same healing through verdant's embrace and

[05:33] dungeons where they are not over performing. This is actually great preservations were just absolutely cracking, but maybe I wasn't pushing Dream breath healing over time has been reduced by 25%.

[05:49] Merithra's blessing healing reduced by 10%. Living Flame healing increased by 30%. Verdant Embrace healing increased by Reverberations causes Verdant Embrace to heal for 40% over 8 seconds down from

[06:04] the previous 60%. Class set will trigger Living Flame at 100% effectiveness. Previously was 150% and Life Spark increases healing and damage of Living Flame by 100%. It was 50 before and this should pretty much

[06:19] cover all of it. Once again, it's great to see dungeon healing for preservation because to be honest, in raids, it was always not not necessarily a bad healer. I wasn't uh seeing any guild in my area of of skill level pushing very hard to

[06:33] preservation has always had like decent raid type healing with the way that its cooldowns work. We can only see if this actually plays out in Mythic Plus because preservation just has a weird

[06:45] kit for Mythic Plus where if the Evoker kit is necessary for Mythic Plus, then Augmentation. This has been the history so far. It would be interesting to see a season where you do take preservation and it does become a meta healer because

[06:59] I have made one and came out and I was sad to only be broken in raids.

[07:11] background context here because I did enjoy a lot of Mistweaver in the past and I'm not an expert Mistweaver. I've read some of the Mistweaver comments from more experienced Mistweavers as well. I think Megaset also posted on

[07:24] well. I think Megaset also posted on Twitter or X about the changes. And essentially, all I know that ever since we started doing guides for classes and specs, Mistweaver's mastery has kind of been pretty poop. And we're

[07:37] getting buffs. To all of the healing that Mistweaver's is is reduced by 8%. I was lying to you. This is actually a nerf. But, the buff comes to Mastery Gust of Mist healing being increased by 50%. This is pretty

[07:50] much a consistent negative change that I have seen for Mistweaver and the community seems to also believe so. To my knowledge, Mastery has never really been a really good stat or a good stat or any kind of stat whatsoever for

[08:03] this is from the experience of us communicating with theorycrafters, analyzing logs, and keeping up with class changes just to be able to give fact that they're pushing Mastery buffs is not necessarily surprising because

[08:17] Blizzard has been pretty on point with wanting to make sure that specs don't have dead stats, especially when it comes to Mastery stats. Mastery and crit changes in the last couple of years for

[08:30] a lot of the specs. So, this is not a surprise. Now, I'm not sure if 50% buff to the Mastery is going to be enough considering that I've never really seen, heard, or noticed Mastery doing any relevant amount of healing, but it would

[08:44] Mistweaver had more stat diversity to play with. I'm not sure the main Mistweavers would enjoy having Mastery as a focus, but as it stands right now, it feels like Mistweavers are being unheard. It feels like these changes

[08:58] absolutely do nothing outside of just being nerfed by 8% and nothing. I'm curious to see how this evolves by the time the season launches because Mistweaver has been very strong in season 1, and if we follow the

[09:12] in season 2. And that doesn't really bode well with anybody, especially Mistweaver Monk playing in season 1 being disappointed in season 2 is not really how you keep your community happy, I guess. I'm

[09:26] keep your community happy, I guess. I'm not a game designer. What do I know? a much better success story. Again, depending on where you're sitting. Just

[09:38] to go first into the changes, just two, but they're very important. Holy Shock mana cost has been decreased by 11% and Holy Shock healing has been increased by 50%. Now, once again, Holy Paladin has not

[09:53] been playing Holy Shock almost at all in the PTR so far and has been kind of ignoring it, not that successfully, but still ignoring it in season 1 way more than it has ever in the past. Then of course, now we're seeing buffs to Holy

[10:07] styles that Holy Paladin has been engaging with in the PTR for season 2 Light, especially with the tier set where Holy Light has a chance to proc one being Holy Shock. Holy Shock builds have been vastly underperforming the

[10:24] really recommending you even press Holy Shock whatsoever and these changes are almost competitive to the point where you might not be able to tell which great. That's exactly the situation that you want to be in if you want diversity.

[10:41] melee-centric Holy Shock, although the melee-centric is a little bit stretched. Holy Paladin isn't really melee-centric anymore. Or you might want to play the caster version where you just probably never really interact with Holy Shock at

[10:54] all and you just cast Flash of Light and Holy Light as well. Specifically with the current tier set where you can get Infusion of Light with these spells on how they eventually change it. And that's a great situation to be in. I

[11:07] know a lot of people have been seeing pushback or have been doing pushback against the Holy Light play styles after years of asking for the caster build to be back ever ever since BFA. So, the Holy community seems to be a little bit

[11:20] that. Martian is one of the people that likes to play the caster build of Holy Paladin, while I particularly don't mind either one of the two and it seems like I'm the lucky one cuz I get to choose whichever one I want and be able to play

[11:34] whichever one I want at least in raids so far. We'll see how the Mythic Plus ends since we just had raid testing with these changes just the other day and over the course of the week with the Mythic Plus changes.

[11:53] with discipline. Really quickly, Penance damage and healing has been increased by 15%. Grim Deliverance now increases Shadow Mend healing by 40%, previously it was 30%, and increases its cast time by 0.3

[12:06] seconds, previously it was 0.5 seconds. Atonement healing falls off more sharply when healing more than five targets, mostly in raids obviously, and we have some developer notes to shed some light on this. For example, when healing

[12:20] exactly 10 targets, atonement healing would be 7% less effective than it was before. It's not a big drop off, but it is probably significant drop off that might be hard to ignore. And Void Shield absorption has been reduced by 10%.

[12:36] discipline priest exclusively in Mythic Plus over the over the last couple of weeks and more than anything exclusively Archon. But first of all, I kind of like like that's a unique thing that only discipline gets to do, outside of

[12:49] atonement of course, but nowadays you press Spinning Crane Kick on a atonement healing just under a different name. Now, it does seem like this is the atonement healing, at least outside of raids. Obviously, raid tuning is

[13:03] or just before a lot of the raid or probably wanting to see exactly how they First that we're going to have in about, I don't know, less than a month maybe, maybe even less than a month. We'll see exactly when the

[13:17] patch launches. We assume on the 11th of August. strong, so strong that if you just press it on cooldown, people just survive. I to keep on people alive with restoration druid, but not so much with just

[13:30] spamming void shield. And I love that type of healing. Obviously, not the within, but it is a better version. And if I can choose to also play void weaver and have relevant amount of throughput, that's also really good cuz I love

[13:44] little bit more. I'm I'm an atonement guy. I like to send out damage. I hardly ever press penance defensively, which is my main issue as discipline priest. I'll I'll be the first one to admit it. But that's great

[13:57] changes on paper at the very least. I'll have to play exactly to see how they perform. And last but not least, holy priest is getting a prayer of mending healing buff by 20% and for Oracle, prompt prognosis

[14:13] well. These are pretty big buffs that holy priest is getting. Once again, holy priest is usually one of those healers that is very hard to make it shine above this, I'm talking about the type of tiers that we're making because we're

[14:26] just looking at the very top top top players. Obviously, holy priest is a very good healer. We also have a holy priest in our community and she's doing 20s, 21s, 22s right now and just absolutely destroying content. It's

[14:38] really good. The problem is that holy priest is kit is just raw throughput. It's not a bad kit. It's a good kit. It's a it's a fun kit. It's a unique kit to just work on health bars, just chunk those health bars back to full. However,

[14:50] that translates a little bit poor poorer in mythic plus and in raid content, mostly mythic plus because there are a lot of things that promote damage reduction, damage absorption, damage prevention of most kinds, which holy

[15:03] priest is probably one of the healers that's the worst at if not the absolute particular [music] thing. Cuz we still have resto shaman, but not on this list. We don't have resto shaman on this list because I guess maybe healing rain has

[15:17] just been buffed recently and we reported uh on that in the other video, which you can check right here because this week has been one of the biggest weeks in terms of buffs. We thought last week was the

[15:29] biggest ever, but this week we're getting two different iterations on class tuning. So, if you ever thought that the devs don't really care about example can you have than what's going on this week?