I was under the impression this was something that was asked for in the past too because of how you couldn’t always use up the procs appropriately during VF windows. I know I eat those procs sometimes too, but it never felt as much of an issue to me. Just more of a “Huh, this probably could be smoother but it works anyway” situation. But that would have been others issues.
As for the SW:P part, honestly that’s the least annoying part since I have Pain on my bars anyway since almost two decades of playing the class and PVP has conditioned me to have it there even if I don’t use it often in PVE retail. For me the more annoying factor is having a self damaging ability being the primary focus of the new rotation. I am really not a fan of adding unnecessary risk to content such as M+. But it’s yet to be seen how much impact the change to death + the new 8% max health penalty will end up being by comparison. At least to me.
Okay, even if it’s not likely due to visibility or time etc. that my idea will be entertained. I want to share my revised idea for Shadow Tier set that I posted on the feedback forums.
10.2 Priest Tier set idea
Shadow
No Change: (2) Set Bonus: Shadow Word: Death triggers 2 additional times at 20% effectiveness. Triggers again 1 additional time at 20% effectiveness if Deathspeaker is active or your target is below 20% health.
!!!Change!!!: (4) Set Bonus: Shadow Word: Death spawns a Shadowy Apparition for each target afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain. Shadowy Apparitions deal 20% of its damage up to 5 nearby targets.
Basically SW:D becomes a spell that can activate/spawn Shadowy Apparitions and as such, can quickly spawn an army of them thanks to the 2 set bonus of multiple SW:D triggers happening often.
In addition, the Shadowy Apparitions can do a small AOE portion of damage on hit.
I think of those ghosts Gotenks uses from DBZ in that they explode on contact.
So what ends up happening is a massive army of Shadowy Apparitions will be spawning and do a bit AOE damage on top of that.
One of the things I love about disc is that there’s always something to press. Other healers can get boring fast because you have nothing to cast if you’re not healing someone. Now disc will be just like every other healer. At least leave us one healing spec that isn’t super simple.
PoM, CoH, Sanctify, Divine Star/Halo, Rhapsody Holy Nova, etc. all do 3-5 times more healing than a cast of Flash Heal, PoH, and Empowered Renew. When everything is on cooldown Holy Priest doesn’t feel very good.
In Shadowlands, Holy Priest did the bulk of its healing through direct casting via Flash Concentration. With this expansion… 90%+ of your healing is throttled through abilities that have cooldowns.
Talent choices outside of all the PoM stuff and Divine Image/Miracle Worker literally don’t have much of an impact on your overall hps.
I suggest reading this to see why the Tier set is pigeon-holing the spec, and how pervious nerfs will drastically affect its performance once we lose the current tier set.
Most recent patch notes. Probably balanced tweaks to already-looking-decent discipline, absolute radio-silence regarding the garbage state of holy/shadow.
Discipline
Developers’ note: We’re happy with Discipline Priest’s healing throughput in Guardians of the Dream, but their damage contribution particularly in raid encounters is higher than we’d like. As a result, we’re lowering their overall damage and increasing Atonement to compensate. In addition, we are slightly increasing the damage of Shadow Word: Pain and Purge the Wicked to ensure they continue to be used in single target situations.
All damage done reduced by 9%.
Atonement healing increased by 9%.
Purge the Wicked damage increased by 5%.
Shadow Word: Pain damage increased by 10%.
Rapid Recovery applies and it doesn’t reduce the duration either. For M+ Rapid Recovery might be worth a point, but I’m kind of hard locked into 2 points into Light of the Naaru for M+. For raid I can easily shift Empowered Renew to Rapid Recovery. Empowered Renew is only like 1.5% of my healing in raid anyway.
The 2-piece Renews also stack on-top of each other above the 20s limitation on Renew as well. You can get a 60s+ Renew rolling on a single person if you chain cast Serenity.
I have no clue how Holy is going to stand. All the nerfs look like they were done to balance us around our 2 & 4-piece bonus. The reduced Divine Image healing, Sanctify hitting -1 less target, PoM reduced healing, and more Holy Word resets on Holy Word Salvation is because were getting an extra 2-3 Holy Words a minute. Then you have the extra Renew ticks from the Holy Words.
You have to adjust your playstyle around the 4-piece because you can bank the free Holy Words. If you have 2 of them then you can literally quad cast 4x Holy Word Serenitys or Sanctifys back-to-back.
Holy’s performance this tier will basically live or die on how often the 4-piece procs and how much extra healing the 2-piece triggers. We get hit on our utility pretty hard so I’m not sure if Holy is going to drop off in popularity for raid. In M+ it’s already fairly low. I started raid logging for weeks and I’m still rank 6 on the raider io board.
Makes me wonder if something like holy mending will be a decent pickup if renew is going to be a larger part of our healing or if the talent is just too under tuned.
Healing chorus may end up being ok for m+ as well, but I’d have to play around with it.
Fixed an issue that caused Holy Word: Sanctify to hit 6 targets instead of 5.
Symbol of Hope now reduces the cooldown of major defensives by 30 seconds (was 40 seconds).
Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (4) Set Bonus – Proc chance reduced by 10%.
At this point I’m no longer asking for buffs to holy. Just please stop nerfing us. You’ve already shredded all our utilities. Symbol almost isn’t worth pressing at this point. I guess that way it doesn’t feel as terrible when we have to move halfway through channeling it and we lose half the benefit.
If we can’t balance raid with mythic+ can we just separate the two entirely?
And passing along the news for the other specs:
Discipline
Developers’ note: We are doing another damage reduction pass on Discipline Priest, as our previous change was not significant enough to bring Discipline closer in line to other healers. This should bring them much closer to other healers while still retaining the ability to deal reasonably high damage as one of their strengths.
Sins of the Many increases damage by 20% (was 40%).
Atonement heals for 40% of damage done (was 35%).
Shadow
Shadow Word: Pain damage increased by 17%. Not applied to PvP combat.
Shadow Apparition damage increased by 17%. Not applied to PvP combat.
Vampiric Touch damage increased by 25%. Not applied to PvP combat.
Amirdrassil, the Dream’s Hope (4) Set Bonus – Now increases the initial damage of your next cast of Shadow Word: Pain by 225% (was 200%).
I’ll have to log on the ptr and test Disc’s dps after the two rounds of nerfs, but I was doing holy levels of dps before. The buffs to Shadow brings its aoe dps up to where it was before the 2nd round of nerfs.
The nerf to Symbol of Hope makes it borderline useless for M+: only 10% mana and -30s on CDR. This just further cements me into playing Disc this coming season.
I’m not going to be shocked Holy drops off hard in raid this season and is replaced by Disc.
Spriest really got F in this next big patch. The tier pieces is so bad. Its the same as saying every class in wow should stop for 1 sec to use an instant cast dot. Like Moonkin "please moonfire every 4th starsurge to increase your moonfire dmg by 50%, or rogue use shiv every 4 shadowstrike that crits to apply a stronger poison by 20% dmg. Whoever designs these tier combo really need to go back to school. They clearly dont play games to know its a dps lost if you have to DOT then VT but it’ll just overwrite the dot.
The 4 piece bonus is roughly 4% with the changes. It’s still bad but acting like it’s not a DPS increase at all because it costs a global to use is insanity. Also it’s nearer once every 30-40 seconds outside execute.