Just a complete unwillingness to even look at the spec’s mechanics. Our mana use in Apotheosis is not the problem.
7 Likes
Did holy words use to cost 0 mana or am I imagining that?
1 Like
Yes used to be free during Apotheosis (back when Surge procs were also free). Was nerfed during I want to say Undermine and never put back.
5 Likes
Blizzard… You are going to have a mob of Holy Priests at your Digital Door with Pitch Forks and Torches. This NOT WHAT WE WANT.
Don’t want to look at the Spec Mechanics, Spec Utility, Spec Viability in M+ or Raid. Like I am ready to start throwing hands with them. Like we know they are in here looking at some of the feedback, but the amount of work that other classes are getting to address the fundamental flaws of thier specs, and the solution for us is:
”Oh lets go ahead and give them another Aura Buff! 
“
At this point, I am just going to keep quoting this, every single time I start seeing a general Aura Buff with out a Developer Note. This is becoming ridiculous that other specs can get mini reworks, but Holy Priests have to be stuck with unrewarding gameplay and a TIER SET THAT IS BASED AROUND A PRUNED SPELL.
This has been brought up so many times, but it is like talking to a wall at this point.
7 Likes
Another aura buff. What is that 5 since the start of Midnight? Might be more. Can’t wait for another one 2-3 weeks into the patch when we’re still behind!
5 Likes
We have gotten 5 bullet point changes alongside the live buff to serenity and sanctify, which nobody plays sanctify since you are more or less forced to put talent points into it, then forced again to take ultimate serenity as a capstone due to its tuning, sanctify only was healing for about 20,000 most of season 1, and the "listened to feedback” regarding the ridiculous choice to give us haste as a tier set bonus to give us instead Critical strike.
Extremely boring tier set, Extremely poor quality of development for holy priest. Especially when other classes have had talent node reworks, literally paragraphs of changes and development notes. They are basically saying holy priest is not worth our time to develop play another specialization or class.
3 Likes
This is starting to feel like it is proving a point that I may have posted some where, but has definitely been on my mind more recently. Not including anything Pre-Cataclysm, Holy Priests have only ever been a Meta Healer when there is a crutch to supplement their toolkit.
And I am starting to think it is becoming a class problem. Priests are the only spec in the game with two healing specs. And Holy has been treated as the black sheep/red headed stepchild in almost every single expansion after Cataclysm. But there is no reason as to why we can’t have both of our healing specs be on even footing.
This idea that you play Holy to get the basic priest fundamentals down, only to “graduate” into playing Discipline Priest is rather short-sighted, and frankly disingenuous to Priest players. While I do enjoy both play styles that Holy Priest (Archon) and Discipling Priest (Oracle) offer me, I should not feel that I have to ignore the spec that got me into playing priest (Archon Holy Priest), to be competitive in Raids or M+.
5 Likes
I posted this in the other feedback thread, and I’m posting this here too.
This doesn’t make Apotheosis a fun spell. Mana cost reductions, as desperately as they were needed, are not the solution here.
We need a choice node.
Give me something so I’m not pigeon-holed into the terrible gameplay of Apotheosis.
Shaman can choose between Ascendance or Healing Tide Totem.
Druids can choose between Tree of Life or Convoke the Spirits.
Evokers can choose between Dream Flight or Stasis.
Paladins can choose between Avenging Wrath or Avenging Crusader.
Monks can choose between Invoke Chi-Ji or Invoke Yu’Lon.
Hell, our OTHER SPEC gets to choose between Power Word: Barrier or Ultimate Penitence.
We are literally the only healer in the game without a cooldown choice node.
Why are you forcing this terrible cooldown on us??? What part of “spamming spells faster isn’t fun” don’t you understand?
Once again, I will reiterate:
- There are no angels associated with The Light in the Warcraft universe. Why do we turn into one?
- Why does every other healer get a choice between two powerful cooldowns, while we’re stuck with “yeah just spam harder”?
Give me Cascade or some other new spell. That’s it. That’s all I want.
An expansion with a million and one new spells and particle effects for the Light, and we get zero. Not even an update to our old spells.
I’m so done with this spec and class. It’s infuriating watching these insulting band-aid Aura buffs every patch. Nothing meaningful has been done with Holy in years, and I’m just over it.
/rant
1 Like
I agree with you, we do deserve better cooldown choices. And i am right there with you when it comes to the Aura buffs. That’s all we have gotten since the release of midnight, and 1 mana reduction patch notes.
Nothing to address the Well of Eternity sized hole in our spec mechanics, spec utilities, or viability in M+/Raids.
But i am sure 3 or 4 more Aura Buffs will make everything better! /sarcasm
3 Likes
Honestly. Just what does it take to get through to these devs? All the feedback they could ever need is ALL HERE, its been here for YEARS. They’re just choosing not to look at it, and any suggestion to the contrary is blatant denial.
At this point blizzard just come out and say it. You hate priests. That’s literally the only reason that you A, point-blank refuse to adopt any of the MANY solutions that are on here. And B, gave holy priests everywhere the biggest middle finger you possibly could have with this 10% aura buff.
You know holy sucks. You don’t want to do anything about it. So you laugh at us instead.
Well so be it.
At this point, I feel that it is going to take all the classes that have not recieved meaningful gameplay iterations to come together and do something.
And unfortunately I don’t know what that something is.
Yes, we can unsub, but is that a strong enough solution?
Do we craft a multi-faceted thread with multiple people highlighting the design disparities?
Like I feel that we all have done that at some point and still hasn’t been enough for Blizzard to admit that they need to put in actual work to the specs.
But it can’t be just a few disgruntled voices anymore. It has to be whole communities of Holy Priests, Resto Shamans, Feral Druids, Dev Evoker(?), etc. And on top of that the response has to be methodical.
It can’t be some expletive highly volatile rant. There has to be hard data to back up every single claim for each spec that decides to answer that call.
Sorry for ranting on in a response to you, but you are right at this point. It shouldn’t take so long for classes to get the love and attention they deserve.
3 Likes
It has been so disheartening this first season of Midnight seeing the “Ramp” healer specs get actual attention because their output wasn’t enough or “Oh this talent interaction was working incorrectly but we gave you a buff to compensate for our mistake, teehee!”
Meanwhile the “Triage” specs, Hprist, Hpal, and RSham receive the typical X% Aura Buff crumb, with a minor handful of changes since launch.
After seeing the initial 12.1 drop and basically zero meaningful changes to any of those three neglected healers I decided to re-roll to a DPS. Absolutely baffling its going to be another season of MW spam.
As some feedback I can say, Holy Word: Salvation needs a comeback. I personally loved this button as it felt so powerful to pop a large heal plus a raid wide PoM and renew. Also bring back Renew as a button, especially if the tier will revolve around it. Healers and RNG are two things that should be as minimal as possible (looking at you Deeply Rooted Elements).
HPriest and RSham are pretty similar in a few aspects for pain points. For one our “Big Spec abilty,” PoM for HPriest and Riptide for Sham, have sooooo many talents to improve it, but they do little to no healing and are something that just fuels other aspects of our specs respectively.
Secondly: our CDs give us a lot of problems. It is fair to say, Yes Shaman gets to choose between Ascendance or HTT, but its a fake choice due to how good chain heal is compared to the rest of the kit. This leads to default Ascendance where we really only want to spam CH, 24/7. Similar to HPriest with Apoth and vomiting a Holy Word every other global.
Thirdly: mana, mana, mana and our relation to haste. We are the only two healers where haste is undesired due to that fact that we will just oom ourselves if we could spam due to how expensive our main spells are.
I hope I’m not stepping on HPriest toes too much with my RSham perspective. I haven’t played HPriest since Aberrus, and, other than Forgotten Experiments, that was a fun tier for Holy. The recent tuning shows some more positives, I’m sure Hpallies must have been excited with more than one line of changes, but its not enough. Our “Triage” healer niche needs a solid look at. If not extensive rework to be relevant against all these ramp healers.
5 Likes
We close the Discords and re-roll Ret Paladin.
It’s because Blizzard has balanced Chain Heal in a poor way, and this is the result. If Chain Heal actually interacted with the kit instead of “Just a big AoE heal”, then it would be easier to balance where you want to mix other spells in.
ie. It only heals 3 people, but each stack of Tidal Waves heals an additional ally at full strength so you’re actually incentivized to cast other spells. Then they could make it more powerful. Not saying this is how to do it, just giving a an example of interacting mechanics.
Every other heal spec at least has a choice. Ascendance is only chosen because Chain Heal is busted when spammed (see above). Healing Tide Totem is not only just undertuned, but redundant because of Spiritwalker’s Grace, but I digress, that’s a discussion for another time.
Holy Priest doesn’t get that luxury.
- We don’t get a choice node at all
- Apotheosis forces us to stand still to make use of it
- It incentivizes you to spam spam spam, which not only is bad when it comes to gameplay, but just tells you to burn through your mana quicker
- Thematically, it is a horrendous visual and makes zero sense
The bare minimum they could do to make Apotheosis feel decent would be “While in this form, you are immune to ground effects.”. Wow, all of a sudden it’s not so bad. The gameplay of it still sucks on the level of Rune of Power, but at least you could get the most use out of it.
Give us a choice node with a new spell.
Ret Paladins are having their own tizzy with these changes, yet not to the level we have had over the years but nonetheless. If we could get discord leaders behind that, It would be interesting to see, but I highly doubt they are interested in it.
I have seen Clandon make a post on this PTR Forum, albeit for Disc Priests, but nonetheless. It is going to take the communities of the ignored specs to come together, and find a way for Blizzard to finally listen.
Whether it be a massive thread where a representative of each spec, lays out the history of the spec and shows the class design disparity in full display, or somehow we get the writers at WoWhead, and other popular streamers to start blasting critiques and R.I.P. messages. I mean it worked for Holy Paladins, which still landed on the undercooked side this expansion, but again, it just kind of proves my point. Drastic actions are apparently all these classes have left.
1 Like
Numerically I think our tierset will be decently strong - stronger than the current one, even.
From their stated goals of wanting something engaging, it does seem like a bizarre choice.
Regarding today’s changes, I’m glad our apex talent crawled a little closer to good. I still can’t believe 2&3 apex talents are aura buffs.
Nuke that 12% and give us one or two of the spells or interactions we’ve been asking for for years. Lets us boost HP as an effective DR or make Inspiration apply to more than just physical damage. Give Oracle something iconic (cascade?). Make Restitution and GS no longer a choice node. Give us back the ability to sacrifice our life in SoR form to battle rez. Let us move while channeling Divne Hymn. Make sanctify good numerically and no longer ground targeted. Make our 13 PoM talents actually interesting, so PoMs do more things than just stack higher or heal for more, or alternatively make spells cast on targets with a PoM do more things.
Hell, get really wild. Bring back lightwell redesigned as the old Well of Existence azerite essence but make it trigger automatically a la Echoing Tyrstone. Give us a talent that lets guardian spirit intervene and sacrifice itself to remove a DoT. Give us Holy Ward back but for PvE and expand it to include knockbacks, forced movement, and roots. Let us acquire a counterspell talent, to remove void-based heal absorbs. Let Levitate prevent damage from ground effects.
You have two talent points that are basically worthless outside of the aura buff they convey. Snip them and make changes - something actually good - that adds up to 12% of our healing.
2 Likes
So I see that we are addressing the Mana Issues slightly. This still does not address Holy Priest’s inability to regain mana during a raid encounter or boss encounter in M+. Not that you have done anything to improve Holy Priests viability in M+ either.
I still question the reason we have our Tier Set Bonus surrounding Renew.
This is going to become a point of contention within the community.
You have a tier set by all means and measure, is extremely unpopular because what we are going to have to worry about is a spell’s uptime that we have no control over, and have to invest a chunk of Talent points into, in order to have a functioning tier set Bonus.
While I appreciate the mana changes, this doesn’t solve the root issue of mana management, a tier set that is completely based in RNG Healing factors unless you Talent appropriately to make a guarantee, nor does it address Holy Priests Viability in M+.
With only so many weeks left, I don’t forsee you all making any meaningful changes to the spec. Which means I will be marching my Holy Feet into the 12.1.5 PTR forum and continuing to advocate for Holy Priests, which honestly have deserved a lot more effort than you have put into it over the years.
Thank you for responding and I will expand upon my post that I made in your feedback thread with the feedback you provided.
While it may be numerically sound, which it very well may be. It just seems to be a step down from our current tier set. Which I know I may be in the minority when it comes to that, but the current tier set at least benefits from spells that we can actively cast and have in our spell book.
This just brings us to a pain point as well because Prayer of Mending, has yet to receive a meaningful buff to make it worth investing in when it comes to Archon. While we do invest some talent points into it, Oracle Holy Priest fully invest into it. So it creates some friction or even some weird talent choices as Prayer of Mending is supposed to be the other way we spread renew outside of our Holy Words. Which makes me look at the bottom 3 rows and wonder how we are going to nickel and dime ourselves to be proficient with this tier set. Again this is more of how it looks on Paper. I have been trying to get in and test, but life has been rather busy on my end at the moment.
Though I do agree, the flat Aura buffs in two out of our 4 talent points is rather insulting. I would rather see more interaction with the base kit over flat aura buffs, but I don’t see how we are going to get to that point without major changes, which they have seemed to be extremely reluctant to do for the Holy Priest Spec.
2 Likes