I’m genuinely sick and tired of fighting priests who simply summon copy after copy of ‘ Convincing Infiltrator’, giving it revive, ‘when it dies summon two copies, revive 3 of your minions that died, add a copy of a minion that died to your hand, etc etc etc ETC! It’s utterly ridiculous how common and OP that card is because it synergizes So well with priest cards. Has Blizzard tried addressing this issue yet? Personally I wonder what can be done because it feels Terrible to play against, because you know it’s the Only minion they’re going to be using for the entire game…
What if minions that died could only be revived once? It’s just a thought, but I just fought a game about 15+ on that One minion, and it’s So dumb! I quit after playing a ‘ Scrapyard Colossus’, desperate to keep the enemy minions at bay, but then they cast ‘PSYCHE SPLIT’ twice and it’s like, wtf even is priest? It’s felt HORRIBLE to play against for years, and it’s never properly nerfed. This isn’t even in Wild!
Hopefully the rotation will give priests more options. corrupt priest and tempo priest are very fun. They just need a little push to get them over the hump into Tier 2 status.
I kind of thoroughly extremely doubt that Corrupt Priest will be seeing any support passed this point. At best it’ll get some removal. They’re not going to go back to the gimmick of the previous expansion, the final expansion of this coming year. 6+ months from now.
The corrupt mechanic won’t make it into rotations (at least not any time soon). It’ll still be available as the core of a deck for quite a while.
Priests do NOT need more options! They need to be rebalanced. They’re excruciating frustrating to fight against because they have these crazy card combos that feel akin to cheating.
They ABSOLUTELY need more options. A viable tempo / aggressive archetype would mean they could do something other than constantly resurrecting large taunt minions.
I play a tempo version whose only resurrection is Rally, which can’t possibly pull back the things most priests like to res. There’s no RNG in it at all. Even Rally wouldn’t be necessary if priest had usable card draw.
I also play a corrupt priest with no res at all (unless you count Y’Shaarj, which is similar but not actual res). The only “cheating” in it is Y’Shaarj. that’s something that all classes have access to and many can utilize better.
Neither deck is good enough to want to try and climb with in ranked mode, which means if I wanted to play ranked with priest I’d have to do it with the same boring combos we’re both complaining about.
I agree about resurrection mechanics are broken today. But, if you change resurrection, you need only change for priest and let the other classes free from this nerfing.
It would turn the things “complex” because, resurrection should split in two new similar words with different rules.
The major problem too is how copies work … I guess … I’m not sure about it.
Priest Crazy Card Combo: Design your entire deck from the ground up to only include a couple of high value minions so you can resummon them. They have to be mainly defensive, or else you lose before you can resummon them, creating a deck that operates at a glacial pace. Balance Priest minions to have low attack stats.
Warlock Crazy Combo: Just play a card that costs 7 or more and then you can summon a 6 mana 8/8 that burns 1/6 of your opponent’s starting deck size. Then for 10 you can play a 10/10 and an 8/8 and burn another 1/6. Sacrifice nothing but deck slots.
Demon Hunter Crazy Combo: Deal infinity damage to your opponent’s face from hand. Sacrifice nothing but deck slots.
The difference is that Priest can’t draw into it’s crazy combo and the other two classes can do it easily. 
Priest needs a total rework because it can’t win from hand, it can’t win on board (minions too small / no Tempo / no Draw / no Reach), and it can’t even win with value at this point (Rustwix Warlock). It can’t contend with OTK decks because 30 health isn’t enough. Priest is the class of doing Cuh-Ray-Zee Card Combos that other classes can do with half the cards and plenty of draw to piece their moves together (Enrage Warrior).
Like, the leading archetype for Priest by stats is Highlander Priest, and it wasn’t even designed to be one of the Highlander classes in the League of Shadows expansions. That’s where the class is at right now. The best performing deck is an accident.
Priest doesn’t need tempo to win, not right now anyway. Priest just Eventually wins because they just resurrect the same OP minions over and over. Eventually they’ll win, since they also have Very powerful healing cards and removal cards. Their board control is spectacular. Priest is a popular choice because of how powerful it is! I’m not good with priest, but if I test a deck design people just forfeit at the start of most matches because they don’t want to waste their time fighting a priest. Everyone claims priest is weak, that they need an edge, and I call foul! They’re clearly powerful, and they’re popular, and more than most other classes they scare away new players. I’ve tried introducing friends to this game and they all say playing against priests is Not fun.
Expansion after expansion I see people claiming Priests are weak, but they’re also the ones running around with gimmicky decks that feel busted and broken. Isn’t the point of good game design to avoid giving players ‘that one card that’s super strong, because then that’s all they’ll use’? When was the last time you fought a priest that wasn’t using ‘Convincing Infiltrator’ and reviving it non-stop?
You must be talking about Wild because I haven’t seen a Res Priest since the first week of Darkmoon. Although, even in Wild, Highlander Priest is better. Res Priest did jump back into relevancy with Darkmoon in Wild, though.
In Standard, Res Priest is T4 trash.
To be clear, in case that was directed at me:
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I’m not saying priest *needs new options to win. * I’m saying they need new options in order to diversify around the one viable archetype they have now.
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I’ve never claimed priest is weak. They’re “only” tier 2 right now because there are so many tier 1 decks and Alura is warping the meta. They don’t need more power. They need more archetypes.
True. It’s funny that it’s such a great counter to Alura but otherwise very lackluster.
It is the way of the Priest, after all. It can build to beat one thing, and exactly one thing.
I’m not talking about Wild, I mean I fought in Standard against a guy who summoned about 15 Infiltrators. You’re focusing on weather priest can reach the top of the competitive ladder, but in the ongoing effort to make that possible it’s ruining the game for a lot of us. The priest doesn’t need More options so they’ll diversify, they need their outlier, OP abilities nerfed so these cards are inline with the other cards. Priests are gravitating towards specific, extremely powerful cards, and finding ways to maximize those cards to a ridiculous degree. When you fight a priest today you Know exactly what cards they’re going to play, and it’s not just predictable and boring, but increasingly frustrating.
But it’s not powerful if it can’t climb the ladder, and it’s fine to put a super high power level on a card that can only fit in very specific decks that are severely limited in the cards they can play. That’s pretty much the basis of Highlander decks.
Res effects aren’t run outside of Res Priest. They’re bad if you don’t build your deck around them. The deck that is built around them is barely viable on a competitive level. So the fact that the card does something powerful doesn’t mean anything, because of how much the overall deck has to be weakened in order to make it strong.
I get the “frustrating” part though, that’s why Blizzard designed the deck to be on the very edge of being competitively viable.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. Diversification has worked for other classes. Shaman has totems, evolve, burn. Demon hunter has face and combo. Druid has tokens, big stuff and spells. Warrior has enrage, bomb, and combo. Warlock has control and zoo. etc.
It’s been shown that offering more viable options makes deck choices more varied. YMMV
Then riddle me this… Is Priest is so weak, why is it so popular in competitive? I fight more priests in competitive than any other class.
According to VS priest is about 8% of the meta with the majority of those being highlander (which doesn’t run tons of resurrection). Maybe your pocket meta has more?
Because matchmaking is based on overall performance and not your current rank. I spent most of the year on a legend streak, I don’t run into a single Res Priest. You’re… wherever you are, you run into them all the time.
I’m mostly in casual and idk, silver 5 or something. I don’t bother with competitive because keeping my rank lower means it’s easier to complete missions that require I win in competitive. Still, almost every time I enter competitive, there it is, res priest, 80% it feels like, not fun.
Edit: How do you suggest beating one of these red priests? My regular deck has a lot of powerful minions and about 8 spell damage to face, 14 if I include minion only spells. I can’t kill anyone with Just spells, especially not a priest. I have to attack taunt minions and can usually kill this taunt in a single hit by any of my minions, but I can’t last forever.