Heal and its cooldown.

[Kadar]

From the position of a SinX I can tell you that linked EDP SB will not kill a priest EVER unless they completely suck and it kills in 1 hit. Even with end game gears SB has a mandatory 2 second animation. That gives the priest 2-4 heals to tank the damage (depending on this or your suggested cd time) a priest should have a few items on them just in case so they aren't going to run out of sp nor be outdamaged 1k-2k at a time. I'm better off moving to softer target than wasting my time tying up the priest. Nobody wants to spend twice as much time killing a priest. Priests are also a much bigger threat than you make them sound to be. If that priest is a guild leader then they could use recall and screw you over. They also silence, agi down, and lex people if left alone. Not everyone who goes into WoE plans ahead and not everyone has endgame gears. It takes hardly any gears to build a priest that can tank almost everything while it takes tons of end game gears to kill them. Doesn't that sound a bit unbalanced? Priests won't be killing tons of people in WoE but they are a HUGE deciding factor in which guild is going to win. They don't die easily even with weak gears. A properly geared Priest is going to have a chance to silence, agi down, or lex people unless you have more than one WELL GEARED person attacking them. Being down one of your dedicated DPS allies puts you at a huge disadvantage. Gravity was kind and saw how overpowered priests were. That's why they added an effect TO NERF HEAL. Weapons which cut heals effectiveness in half. They wouldn't add that kind of thing if heal was as weak as you make it out to be.

It's a given that there are counters to every strategy in RO. The fact is that not every class can beat every other class in RO and that some are at a particular disadvantage against others but that is why every character class has a use. If you think that priests are replaceable with potion pitching then you are utterly mistaken. Priests offer buffs alchemists don't and while alchemists can heal more than a priest they die much easier. They cost more money and they are much more likely to run out of potions than a priest is to run out of sp. A lot of classes have a disadvantage vs other classes. If you come at me with an LK and Priest team I could easily kill you with a single Prof. If you then attack the Prof with a Sniper a SinX would do the job. If you send a Champ to kill the SinX a Pally will counter that. A Creator to kill the Pally and any agi Clown will kill the Creator. You can probably think of ways for those match-ups to counter each other but it's a given that it's gonna be a lot harder for one class to beat the other. RO is about teamwork no matter how you look at it. The fact that a Priest can live as long as it can against classes so greatly stacked against them shows how strong they really are. You compared a rather average Priest build to end game DPS. That DPS better be able to kill the priest and I would hope that the Priest would go down even faster considering the gears it was going against. Heal is really strong just the way it is. If a priest is dieing because his heal wasn't high enough then that means his whole team is already dead and they were bound to fail anyway. Gravity knows what they are doing so let them make the game mechanics and you can think of the strategies to play in it.