I have only mained my holy priest since I started playing back when Pandaria launched. I ditto every thing you have spoken to, even if I don’t have the play style you do. The Holy Priests were the bomb back in the day, every other healing spec was a wanna be. Just so I don’t appear toonist, I also actively play Druid healer as well. I do not understand why someone would think that taking away all but one individual healing spell is the way to succeed and be a flexible healer. Apparently life examples for people growing up in this day and age lead the thought processes to believe that more for all is the way to go, and trust me, when your tank is tanking literally and being bludgeoned to death, all those wide and joyfully shared spells are not cutting it. I am so very glad I did not spend the money for the pre purchase of Midnight. No amount of housing is going to sweeten up the total crushing disappointment that I felt when I logged into my two favorite classes, Holy Priest and Frost Mage to find them so stripped of the core abilities that makes them a joy to play gone. I am a 69 year old lady who used to love this game, now I am heartbroken one of the last joys of my life is not worth playing any more. When are you people gonna learn, don’t fix something that is not broken!
I can’t believe how boring the spec is now. We at least need the option of complexity and depth as talent options. I’ve been playing Holy Priest for 15+ years and what they’ve done in 12.0 is a travesty. Bare minimum we need another core rotational ability to break up the brainless monotony of flash heal/prayer of healing spam (via circle of healing or empowered renew). I regret pre ordering Midnight and as of now am unsubbed due to the butchering of the spec.
In terms of fun, disc is horrible now. A shell of what it once was.
I’m not here to tell you Holy Priest isn’t a mess (it is) or that it hasn’t been badly damaged by pruning (it has) or that you should buy the expansion (do what you will), but in regards to this…
And I can’t even begin to describe the horror at having to continually target the floor just to get a speedbuff when I could have just spammed my shield (with the self-cast feature enabled).
There’s a basic macro that will make your feather just autodrop on top of you. You lose the ability to target it to other people binding it that way, but quite honestly no one needs my feathers more than I do.
I’m not finding holy less mobile in Midnight (more mobile if anything, since of my stunning three button core rotation two are instant casts), just more dull. I push out fine healing, but it’s not terribly engaging. Even little things like losing my mana regen cooldowns just take away that second to second decision making. And if I wanted extra fluff in the tree, like Chastise for a kick, I have to lose SW:P. Just horrid tradeoffs everywhere.
Shifting over to Disc for most content, I think, barring massive changes (there won’t be massive changes).
The thing I hate about these kinds of posts is that they are always feelings based and never provide any reasoning or details we can actually debate or agree with. It’s easy to say, I play X, X has been gutted I can’t believe it, how could they remove my utility, damage, healing, etc. without going into the specifics what utility, what damage, what healing was actually removed. And how do you know our throughput is tuned for maximum ilvl? It’s prepatch, you’re not even in the realm of the next expansion’s beginning ilvl.
As for “Holy is the beginner healer” how, when every healer was pruned, did holy get more shafted than the other healers? Holy has the same simple core identity - cast PoM and reduce the CD of holy words. That’s been the gameplay loop for years now, nothing about that has fundamentally changed.
so please, elucidate us. Give us the facts. What did you actually lose that is removing your agency and rebranding holy priest?
Just because that’s the design philosophy for Square Enix doesn’t mean that is the design philosophy for Xbox Gaming. If they’re looking to eventually port this game over to their Xbox Live service, which I believe they intend to do there’s no reason it’s going to follow the same format of the Japanese company that runs Final Fantasy.
We’re taking about the same company who decided that Clippy and Windows ME were all good ideas here.
Just so you know, “/cast [@player] Angelic Feather” means you don’t have to worry about targeting it anymore.
I have one for utility: Removed prior to this but being able to battle rez as Spirit of Redemption. Essentially sacrificing yourself to bring a tank back up to successfully finish the encounter when everybody else thought it was going to be a wipe.
Damage rotation is basically the same but the numbers are significantly lower.
Here are some answers for healing: Power Word: Shield (castable on the move), Renew (castable on the move), Circle of Healing (castable on the move) [removed prior to this expansion], Shadowfiend (instant cast-and-forget heal over time to whoever needed the most healing), Power Word: Life (castable on the move [severely undertuned but had amazing cost/benefit potential as a talent if properly tuned]), and the change to Holy Nova was significant. I may have missed one or two others.
I think the whole PoM “identity” was a recent thing. I don’t think Holy Priests care about “gameplay loop”. They were reactionary. They saw a situation needing attention and reacted to it with the best appropriate option. We, at least I, don’t want to do rotational healing. I don’t want to just spam Flash Heal until Ultimate Serenity is up and then cast that and press Apotheosis when big damage windows come out just to spam Flash Heal and Ultimate Serenity all over again (because of the Benediction or whatever they call it now). If that’s the way it’s going to be I could create a castsequence macro and just spam a single button for all of my healing the entire time. The only things left are disspelling and my two cooldowns.
I’m asking legitimately, for you personally, when did you start playing Holy Priest and at what point during this 20 year old game did you decide what the “class identity” of Holy Priest was?
I don’t play Holy, but I used to heal with them back in OG TBC as Resto Shaman. Gotta get Holy Priest back in the green being a powerhouse healer before March. Keep up the good fight!
It’s hard to read these kinds of posts when people exaggerate for effect. There’s more than 2 buttons just for the normal rotation, and then you still have CDs and utility on top of that.
ALL classes got pruned so to post about the pruning of holy priest as if they were singled out isn’t a fair complaint. Complaining about pruning in general is understandable but it shouldn’t be phrased like devs specifically targeted holy priest.
The thing I hate about these kinds of posts is that they are always feelings based and never provide any reasoning or details we can actually debate or agree with. It’s easy to say, I play X, X has been gutted I can’t believe it, how could they remove my utility, damage, healing, etc. without going into the specifics what utility, what damage, what healing was actually removed. And how do you know our throughput is tuned for maximum ilvl? It’s prepatch, you’re not even in the realm of the next expansion’s beginning ilvl.
As for “Holy is the beginner healer” how, when every healer was pruned, did holy get more shafted than the other healers? Holy has the same simple core identity - cast PoM and reduce the CD of holy words. That’s been the gameplay loop for years now, nothing about that has fundamentally changed.
so please, elucidate us. Give us the facts. What did you actually lose that is removing your agency and rebranding holy priest?
Okay, as other folks have stated the number of abilities we have lost. But here’s the big thing: You stated a feeling based opinion that “Holy has the same simple core identity - cast PoM and reduce the CD of holy words” and you don’t seem to understand one of the fundamental cores of a RPG:
Not everyone plays the same way as you.
Case in point, PoM was my LEAST used spell. In terms of healing done on a run, Renew was #3 and in terms of times cast, #2 for me. I could double tap (Shield-Renew) a DPS and not break rhythm dropping Flash on a tank. Why could I do this? Because I eschewed “the standard” for Priests, built my talents and my stats my way. And why shouldn’t I? I was paying the same rate to access the game, and doing it my way was fun and enjoyable. Folks didn’t die unless I let them (because I refuse to heal under certain conditions). But I always had the power to drop a big heal when it came to it.
Now as to why you think PoM is the core identity of a Priest…let me point something out to you. PoM MAY be a useful spell. It, however, is statistically not a GOOD spell though because it has a critical flaw in it that I understood all too well and made sure to avoid as a healer. The critical flaw in PoM is simple enough: it is pure RNG. You can cast it and from there it’s up to RNGeezus to decide where it goes. As a healer, if I have to rely on RNG to win or lose an encounter, I accept that we’ve already wiped out and are dead on the floor. That’s why PoM was the last spell I would cast, if at all. Renew went where I wanted it when I wanted it.
So yeah, I would readily trade in PoM for Renew and Shield. If they wanted to make it a talented choice, I’d be all for it. You’d likely find me being the outcast Priest who has Renew, and I’d show you my style by outlasting folks who went out-of-mana because I had used my varying heals efficiently and kept folks alive. Because again, I was paying my money to play the game I wanted to play. Naturally, I’ve lapsed my account for now, and made sure the “survey” knew exactly why. Hard to convey that in 500 characters, but I think they got the message. Though if anyone from Blizz is reading this, by all means, do send my registered email a further contact and we can discuss it in more detail. Or even post an in-depth explanation here in the Priest forum explaining to us why you felt Priests need to be the way they’re going to. It might be an interesting read, even if you don’t allow comments.
Honestly, I think people often overstate how weak holy is like every season. It truly is never top of the tier lists, but it’s usually in a state where it’s kind of fine to take outside actual cutting edge dungeons.
My issue now is just how far they pushed their design to easy approachable healer.
The spec is probably one of the most boring I’ve played in WoW in a very long time because it’s just been pruned down to nearly nothing.
In all content the playstyle is:
Cast Halo if Archon
Still hit PoM on cooldown.
Cast Holy Word Serenity so you’re never wasting stacks.
Cast Flash PoH if you have lightweaver + there’s AoE to do.
Cast Flash Heal.
Apex talents don’t even improve this in any way, because we get an apex based off the totally passive Cosmic Ripple healing we do. And like sometimes flash heal becomes kinda better flash heal.
There’s really no nuance to anything you do with this class anymore. You don’t need to set anything up, you don’t need to be careful with PoM at all, you don’t have utility to worry about.. It’s just those 4 things. At least previous iterations, while they were very easy (besides maybe PoH being a trap of a spell) there were fun interactions to play with.
I get what they’re going for, and I understand they want it to be easy. But I think Holy now FEELS like the class they pruned the most for some reason, when it was already fairly simple for a healer. Could be that holy sees a popularity boost for it, who knows. But I really don’t want to play it in Midnight really lol.
After a couple of days to think on it, they made Holy Priests into Healadins-without-armor. At least I guess they have, I haven’t checked my Healadin yet. But the idea is very similar: cast a spell and charge up a second spell (Word of Glory or Radiant Dawn for Paladins).
Guys just reroll into resto druid. I doubt any other healer will compare in mythic plus. Whoever reworked resto actually had a brain. I mean it SINGS compared to holy. They don’t even need to place efflorescence anymore, you can just take a talent that attaches it to a hot and it moves the circle with the target. The damage they can do is amazing, they can sunfire/moonfire and do a full balance rotation or go melee and do the same. Meanwhile, we can’t even cast shadow word: pain anymore. Also I hardly had to drink, I never went oom. Go give it a try! Compare and see how badly they’ve ruined Holy.
what utility, what damage, what healing was actually removed
It isn’t even about what utility and all is removed at this point for priest as well in general.
Some of the worst defensive options in general of healers and dps (if we include shadow).
-Fade is just sad. Sure its low cooldown but 10% for what? needing to spend three talent points for a 10% damage reduction when we already are fragile outright?
-Flash heal yourself to get a bit more damage reduction via a talent choice? How is this good? You have to do a hard cast for a defensive preemptively? The payoff also is very small for the defensive benefit, if you want stronger defensive you have to use a GCD AND a cast?
-Desperate Prayer? A deep tree option for a relatively long cooldown heal?
-Are we calling Shield a defensive now or is that just part of kit?
Some of the worst utility in the game
-Dispel and Mass Dispel are extremely specific and unless blizz suddenly fell out of love throwing poison as one of the common and painful debuffs well this doesn’t really go a long way (or just flatly undispellable things that certainly seem magical as hell)
-Fort buff is effectively garbage, the gained HP is nearly negligable in overall survival.
-Power Infusion? Is that basically why we suck in every other regard?
-Lifegrip is incredibly specific utility and arguably situational at best.
-Mind control? That’s been nerfed so much for us (but DKs seem to get the better version for some reason) it is vestigial at most.
-Psychic Scream or Tentacle root? PvPers might like them some?
It isn’t an issue with things being removed as much as there isn’t anything there that makes priest shine and stand out that other classes don’t do as well or better. We had a bunch of baseline stuff shoved into the class tree or talents added to do what we did with maybe one talent additional (see Fade being effectively 3 talent points now to just get the 10% damage reduce)
We don’t bring useful utility, we don’t bring more standout healing or defensives than any other class, we don’t bring damage above any beyond any other class, and we generally are more fragile and less flexible.
So even the small pruning that was done, and giving nothing, feels even worse. Holy also even looks like its just stripped to its basic essence, which it always was but even more now with things like Renew gone from active cast. “Sit there and wait to heal” is the name of the game.
Even speccing down deep you pick up a single ability. Everything else is very baked in. You either Flash Heal or prayer, or word. Thats it.
Unfortunately the game hasn’t been designed like this for more than a decade. Everyone has easy access to information now. It’s not a question of whether casting PoM on CD has higher value than casting shield. We know numerically that’s the case. We know that casting shield and renew is worse than any number of other spells.
“I want to play in my own odd suboptimal way” is fine, you can do that, but you can’t expect the game to be designed around it.
What utility does mistweaver bring that’s so much better than priest’s utility. What about hpal? There’s a few high utility specs like druid, but the question is compared to what.
There’s no more interrupts for the other healers so you can’t complain about that. That was actually a huge buff to priest. Also you take that back about lifegrip, lifegrip is amazing lol. You also forgot we have mind sooth for skips, we can early pull because of fade on shadow, and mind control is the most powerful CC spell in the game because it has a bug that literally DCs people. Doesn’t get much stronger than that.
Quick list of what monk has comparatively and why its far better.
Defensive abilities
-Yulon’s Grace grants more overall survival against magic AOE damage than fading normally did up to 10% of max HP value means good active scaling as gear improves and is constant, no GCD needed.
-Passive talent up to 50% damage reduce from physical, for a hit but if its a single physical AOE, and again, no GCD needed to be spent, just accumulates.
-Passive healing by just standing away from mobs grants much more survival.
-Heal for 3% of all magical damage taken talent (stacked with Yulons thats better value than fade and flash heal give, and again, no GCD or cast spent.
-Fortifying Brew, Increases HP, Reduces Damage, and Gives Stagger. When coupled with the others is a potent cooldown!
Utility
-Point blank AOE stun is fantasticly more useful than a fear.
-Ring of peace can actively disrupt enemies for several seconds depending on placement and corral the enemies, or mess with mechanics
-Revival can remove most all debuffs from EVERYONE IN A GROUP OR RAID AT ONCE
-Fantastic mobility overall via roll and removing snare via roll
-Dispel removes Magic, Poison and Disease
-Mystic Touch doing any damage causes enemies to take 5% more physical damage.
-Paralysis while it breaks as easily as any other sort of thing thats not a stun can be used at range for disruption every so often
-Tiger’s Lust, remove all roots and snares from a friendly target and make them run fast.
If you think I really need to list out all the things paladin brings to a party or druid that is leaps and bounds better utility wise then I have to even ask do you even know what you’re arguing for?
It is rather blatant if you play around with the other healing classes they bring more useful utility abilities, and survival wise are also much easier to manage than priests.
Defensive abilities
- Yulon’s Grace
cool absorb but its literally a slow stacking magic shield (1% max hp every 3 sec up to 10 stacks) priest just has more “nope” buttons like Desperate Prayer on demand + Spell Warding for flat magic DR and then the big ones like Barrier dome for the whole group - Passive 50% physical DR for a hit
that’s basically Dance of the Wind stacking 10% every 4 sec and it drops when you take a physical attack so its cute on paper and way less cute in real pulls priest just prevents the scary hit with shields or straight up external DR like Pain Supp - Passive healing by standing away
standing away to live is not a win con lol priest can just press Desperate Prayer and keep moving + shielding - Heal for 3% of all magical damage taken
healing back damage you already ate is always worse than just not eating it priest has Spell Warding for magic DR plus you can cheat death someone with Guardian Spirit which is way more “actually survived the mechanic” than drip healing - Fortifying Brew
brew is strong yeah priest just has more layers: Desperate Prayer + Fade stuff like Spectral Illusion to bait mobs + Disc having Barrier / Pain Supp / shields and Holy having Guardian Spirit
Utility
- Point blank AOE stun > fear
fear is still an instant aoe stop and cast break and holy can literally turn Chastise into a 4s stun with Censure so you get a ranged stun AND the panic button stop - Ring of peace disruption
ring is good but priest has the most illegal utility button in the game: Life Grip you can just delete someone’s mistake
also Mind Soothe is aoe now for skipping/clean pulls - Revival mass debuff wipe
Mass Dispel is the actual raid cheat code, clears harmful magic and rips immunities like Ice Block / Divine Shield that’s way more “we bypass the mechanic” than a cleanse button - Mobility + roll snare break
priest has Phantasm so Fade clears snares and Body and Soul gives speed off shield/grip targets plus again grip is mobility for your teammate whether they want it or not. Our speed boost isn’t a poor mans freedom, it’s tied into our core rotation - Dispel removes Magic, Poison, Disease
poison is the only real monk edge there sure, but priest brings Mass Dispel for the “everyone lives” moment and normal magic/disease tools exist too - Mystic Touch 5% physical
and priest brings Power Infusion which is basically “pick a carry and make them a god” plus Fortitude for the whole raid every pull - Paralysis ranged disruption
priest has Mind Control / Dominate Mind for actual cheese value not just a short cc you can’t touch - Tiger’s Lust
Body and Soul speed on shields + interacts with grip so yeah monk can freedom someone, priest can freedom them AND reposition them out of the fire
Let’s also consider for a moment that the external defensives of disc priest are so good, they haven’t been bad in mythic raid since mythic raiding was a think. Priest is always strong in PvP as well. Monk’s have to play by their port and get CCed all game. Priest has had THE BEST ANTI-CC toolkit IN THE GAME. Gfade, death sheeps, holy ward, sotr, we’re actually insane
Do please back up your “feelings” about how the game was designed with actual statements from Blizzard that “We intend you to spam PoM” for the last 10+ years. Because every statement over the last 20 years I’ve seen from Blizzard has said “We want to enable players to play their own way.” And yes, since it’s your assertion, you are obligated to provide links. That’s what adults do when they have healthy debates.