Having leveled a priest to 20 in the beta alongside several other classes, leveling as a healer feels just as rough as ever. Given the Forever team stated this is a specific pain point they wanted to address, I think there is still a lot of room for improvement here.
Currently, even decked out in mostly dungeon blues, I find myself going oom after 1 or 2 mobs around my level. This was worse while leveling. Smite still hits like a wet noodle seemingly regardless of SP and talents, and when trying to take out mobs with spells I often had to drink after every fight.
The one thing that was keeping it from being totally miserable was the souped-up wand damage. I realize it was problematic and needed to be changed, but could we maybe get some SP scaling for wands, just reduced? That and/or add some to the wand specialization talent?
Given dungeon grinding has been removed as a real option for leveling tanks and healers, another look at how painful the solo questing experience is for some of these specs and classes would be very much appreciated.
I know, and it has always been very slow and tedious due to wands not remotely keeping up in damage. The wand sp scaling, while perhaps needing to be tweaked, did a lot to make things less painful.
I wanted to test spells in the beta to see if they were made more viable, but they feel the same as in classic, which is to say terrible. Even worse at low levels due to the base damage reductions.
If they really want to make leveling priests less painful, one or both of these issues need to be addressed. With dungeon grinding being removed, I am somewhat dreading leveling another priest at this point, which is sad as it is my favorite class.
The problem is that some folks from the past don’t allow this class to become something.
Priest might have depended on Wands, but that is because the class was not functionally correct. It is a Band-Aid to the problem.
I am not saying to remove dependency on wands entirely. I am saying to put it as an optional tool, not the focus of a class. This is priest, not Wands 101. We use light and shadow magic, holy and void. No other caster has this issue where their own kit cannot function to any degree.
How to resolve? Well … this is just an idea. could be good or bad but its something to think about.
1 - Rework Spirit tap
I love that shadwoform was given more attention and more juice. But honestly, we can do without the mana reduction. We can achieve this by reworking Spirit tap.
Spirit tap currently does not function if you do not gain a killing blow. In Solo gameplay, this is fine, but it quickly dies in group content and in end-game PvP and pve content.
Spirit tap needs to be redesigned in a way where we obtain mana back while doing damage, specifically Shadow damage. This way the other 2 specs can’t abuse it with the current mana regen talent in Disc.
Vampiric Embrace was given a Spirit tap function, but unforunately this disrupts how we want to use the spell. It forces us to use it to prioritize mana regen over healing the team in critical moments. They also nerf the spell unnecessarily. If they don’t want us to provide AoE heal, we can change it to a mana battery
Vampiric Embrace (swap it out with Vampiric Touch) VT is now a Debuff that allows Spirit Taps to supply mana to the team at a fixed small percentage.
VT does no dmg; it has no cast time, it’s simply a debuff that you apply to the target exactly how old Vampiric Embrace worked.
This brings a unique utility to the Shadow Priest that no other class can do.
Talent arrow to Shadowform has 1 more layer – Vampiric Embrace
Vampiric Touch now also heals the caster only for x (lets say 5% as for now) percentage of the dmg they do to target.
Shadowform.
Depending on how effective our mana regen is with the ST rework. We can remove the Shadowform mana reduction on shadow spells or shrink it to 5-10% only.
We can also allow Shadowform to further buff the Vampiric Embrace self-healing. If holy spells are cast, Shadowform breaks, of course. Maybe a little cd debuff to it.
Lets say self healing goes from 5% (from my example) to now being 10-20% instead.
The point of this is to make sure Shadowform gives a Powerful BUff to the class as its the theme of the spec.
So Shadowform “currently” increases dmg by 10 percent → reduces mana cost of all shadow spells by 50 → increases critical strike dmg bonus of shadow spells by 100 percent → reduces physical dmg taken by 15% ->but may not cast healing spells while in this form (or risk a short cd debuff).
Our change removes the mana reduction entirely or shrinks it to 5-10 percent.
Our change also further improves Vampiric Embrace self-healing talent to the caster.
For a little more balance, we can always put a little CD on shadowform if a priest dares to cast a holy spell, unless the big mana cost is more than enough.
For reliable damage.
Shadow Priest just doesn’t have a filler DPS spell that is baseline. I assume we don’t want the other specs to have free access to MINDFLAY (but i don’t see why not)
I’d say either make Mindflay baseline at lvl 10 or let us unlock it in talent at lvl 10.
Then we test from there to see if we need to do anything else
essentially, balance druid feels much better after the necessary dmg buff to wrath. This worked for them because this is their bread-and-butter filler. We can’t do this to priest because they don’t have a bread-and-butter filler baseline. (smite is just not it ) That is why I suggested the above. Quick fix, minimum change.
Interesting ideas. I do like the idea of being able to restore mana to the party. Would definitely provide some unique utility to shadow.
And I definitely agree, the fact that the best way to solo level priest (until level 40 when shadow starts to come online) has always been shadow word pain and wand spam is kind of ridiculous. We should want to actually use our spells like every other class. I was really hoping they would make smite priest viable at least as a leveling option, but it sadly just isn’t right now. Improving wands was at least better than nothing, but I would really like them to just make our spells more competitive early on.
Warrior definitely needs some help too. I have a friend who was excited to play warrior in Forever but is strongly reconsidering if things stay as they are.
That’s where I’m at as someone who’s been die-hard warrior since vanilla. But, warrior leveling has always sucked and the amount of crying out there about warriors is completely stupid. Especially since cap is level 20. Warriors never started getting good until after 30 getting the wwaxe. So, I’m being patient. I leveled a priest and hole-leee-crap is it so much more pleasant than warrior. Feels so good.
when i see warriors sometimes and i just start feeling so bad that i invited them and helped them a bit lol…
Again if they are this bad, they need to be adjusted. No class should have to wait soo long. The journey is the goal, then we must enjoy it all the way. Not partiallly…
It doesn’t work like that anymore. That WW axe won’t give you enough rage to MS on cooldown, let alone press any other button at all. That’s why we are upset.
How would you know? You’re theory crafting. Could lower levels scale better to feel better? Sure. But, this is generally how warrior has always felt. And from here I shall exit the conversation because it’s getting hijacked.
Priest leveling as anything that wasn’t shadow always felt awful, i’d say probably worse then warrior leveling have done both 8+ times. In era/vanilla/classic.
I thought the wand scaling spell power thing would have helped non shadow so much and I’m sad they nerf’d it. I hope they add it back to wand spec for priests as it would be huge to help their leveling pre 40.
As for the warrior thing, we know because we know how rage works now. (Blizzard confirmed it was intentional) and it doesn’t scale with weapons a white 2 hander generates the same rage as an AQ40 2 hander under the forever system with no variance.
I think they are afraid of this at high level because its holy damage. And holy damage doesn’t have any resist stats because of weird stuff where if it did you could resist heals with the way its coded. (unless that has been re-worked in this client)
I know it was an issue in the vanilla/classic client. I don’t know if they ever bothered to fix it though in retail.
There has been a reason mobs generally didn’t get to do holy damage in most places and they only ever added a single rank of low level holy protection potion. It would also cause weird things if you got holy penetration as a stat as well like other spells cause it would technically amplify heals if you could get it on a player.