ISSUE 1:
Grace, by nature of its design requiring melee to function, is inherently more dangerous to use (especially in chaotic ORVR combat) as a healer than Salvation. Too often a Grace Warrior Priest is required to sit back, out of the fight and unable to output healing, due to the current fight being too dangerous to jump into. Combined with Divine Fury (and often Fanaticism), which provides much needed healing throughput for life-taps (and added survivability in the case of Fanaticism), a Grace Warrior Priest cannot lean back on casted healing abilities due to their vastly reduced casted healing effectiveness from Divine Fury/Fanaticism. Furthermore, with the lack of a Righteous Fury-generating off-hand book, a Greatweapon-equipped Warrior Priest will be hard pressed to generate enough Righteous Fury to even output enough casted heals to matter. This leads to a snowball effect where if a battle is simply too dangerous to jump into melee range, the Grace Warrior Priest outputs little/no healing, which then makes the battle even more dangerous for the Grace Warrior Priest, which reduces healing output etc etc. To a Grace Warrior Priest, healing is survival and survival is healing.
A spec which I personally have found success with (and also made very well aware of its own weaknesses) is a hybrid spec forgoing the traditional dip into the Wrath tree (which picks up Intimidating Repent) for a dive into Salvation, picking up Divine Light and Pious Restoration. I also then opt out of Divine Fury/Fanaticism and instead take Discipline/Exalted Defenses, which allow my casted healing abilities to remain effective despite being Grace and therefore helps reduce the glaring shortcomings of Grace. Again though, this carries its own shortcomings:
- A Grace/Salvation build is much more vulnerable compared to a Grace/Wrath build because it lacks the additional parry from Fanaticism and the AoE detaunt from Intimidating Repent, both of which are critical for surviving in a melee deathball.
- The lack of Divine Fury/Fanaticism reduces the damage output of a spec designed for hitting things in melee combat, which directly feeds into the efficacy of healing via life-taps, and requires a heavier-lean onto casted heals, which themselves will be sub-optimal compared to a pure Salvation build due to equipped Strength/Parry-Strikethrough gear.
The 8-point Grace tactic, Leading the Prayer, has always been seen as a very lackluster or "win more" tactic (e.g. it doesn't help you do better when you are losing, and only helps you "win more" when you are already doing fine). The tactic needs an additional effect to be more appealing for use (especially in solo play where it is currently worthless, and compared to every other Warrior Priest tactic), and ideally a buff to Leading the Prayer could encourage the use of Prayer of Devotion as an alternative to the ever-popular Prayer of Righteousness.
Leading the Prayer is therefore the perfect home for any proposed buff to Grace Warrior Priests.
PROPOSAL:
Provide a buff to the tactic Leading the Prayer, to include the following effect:
Your healing abilities will become 25%** more effective when equipped with a Greatweapon.
**The intent of this buff is to counter-balance a single instance of the "your healing becomes 20% less effective" effect from Divine Fury/Fanaticism. Through testing Exalted Defenses combined with Divine Fury, it can be seen that buffs and debuffs to "healing effectiveness" from tactics are multiplicative, so a 25% increase to healing effectiveness is needed to counter-balance the 20% decrease to healing effectiveness (100% * 80% * 125% = 100%).
REASONING:
In either build (traditional Grace/Wrath or hybrid Grace/Salvation), Grace Warrior Priests will benefit from increased casted heal output which will make them feel not-as-useless/more competitive when unable to safely enter melee combat. They also will be able to increase their own survivability by self-HoTing, allowing them increased health regeneration and thus a longer up-time in combat (and more competitive healing output as a result).
Ideally, a choice would be created with a change like this, not only in the requirement of choosing to slot the tactic itself, but also in what other tactics you slot next to it. A player could continue to spec both Divine Fury and Fanaticism, and not suffer as terribly for it with their casted heals. Or, a player could not spec Divine Fury nor Fanaticism, and see a benefit to casted heals (obviously sacrificing life-tap efficacy and some melee survivability). OR, a player could take either Divine Fury or Fanaticism, and enjoy a 100% effective casted heal and forgo the benefits of the other tactic.
As a side benefit, this buff may see the long-pointless "Willpower Greatweapon" start to be used among traditional Salvation Warrior Priests who are looking for an alternative to the meta off-hand book build. At a cost of 8 Mastery points (the same cost as the popular Wrath tree Intimidating Repent), a Salvation Warrior Priest could trade the book off-hand for a Greatweapon, swapping Intimidating Repent and Righteous Fury-generation (combat sustain) for Leading the Prayer and more burst healing out of the 250-point Righteous Fury pool (depending on Supplication to regain Righteous Fury).