Another week with huge changes
Not even a slight mention
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There is a lot of negativity around the priest community on the forums. Despite much of what is said, blizzard isn’t entirely inept. If they aren’t making note of sweeping changes incoming, there is meta data that is telling them something different from what the community espouses.
There are pain points for priest, as with any class. But for every video or post I see about priest failing, I see another saying they’re crushing it.
It’s still very early in the xpac. Data is still coming in, but what data there is, isn’t extreme enough to warrant immediate address.
It’s not a bad thing to be middle of the pack. Much of what people complain about as class imbalance is more likely attributed to personal utilization of the class rather than a numerical impasse.
Most of the complaints aren’t about numbers.
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The discussions and grievances are vast.
I stand by my original statement.
Yeah this is more-so about how the spec has received no changes or quality of life updates to bring it aligned with how starting a new expansion should feel.
This is about a lack of communication from the people we are giving money to.
I don’t care about numbers as much as I care about the flow, the ethics of a spec and the excitement/ engagement of playing a class.
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I’m confused by what you mean here. I’ve found Archon incredibly helpful in smoothing out a lot of what shadow can do. And Oracle has been a joy to play with both healing specs.
What does priest not have that other classes do that has you thinking “this isn’t how it should feel at the beginning of an expansion.” ?
- We were denied an interrupt because the devs “don’t want every class to have an interrupt”, but Holy/Disc are the only spec in the game without one.
- Holy/Disc can dispel the least amount of debuffs out of any healer, and Mass Dispel got a huge nerf.
- We had Shining Force removed because the devs “don’t want classes to be too homoginized”, then immediately gave the identical spell to Mages/Shaman.
- Both major cooldowns for Shadow require a cast time. The only spec in the game that has this.
- We’ve been denied a proper movement ability (ie. Door of Shadows) that requires other classes to save us in Mythic raids.
- Archon and Voidweaver use their opposing thematic cooldowns. Archon uses Void Form, while Voidweaver uses Dark Archangel.
- Voidweaver is worse than Archon in every single form of content. Voidweaver we nerfed a million times in Beta and is now left in the dust.
- Shadow AoE is arguably the clunkiest in the game because Shadow Crash only hits a limited number of targets and lacks a second charge.
- Tied to above. You miss that Shadow Crash, you’re now doing zero AoE damage because all our AoE comes from Psychic Link. We have no AoE spender.
- All three specs were essentially ignored entirely, while “the big three” (Mages, Paladins, Warlocks) received multiple reworks over the Alpha/Beta. This doesn’t even include the attention Hunters and Shaman received with additional ones.
- The devs didn’t once reach out to discuss any changes during Alpha/Beta. They heard feedback about Oracle and made it slightly better, but they didn’t do anything about our base class.
Need I go on?
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Several of the situations you list here are from dragonflight or before.
I agree interrupts missing from holy and disc feels bad.
Shining force being gone is a bummer too, but shaman has had thunderstorm since… wrath? It’s hardly new.
Holy got a major rework in dragonflight.
Disc got a less major, but still a significant change recently too. Making them arguably the best version of the spec we’ve ever seen from a design standpoint.
A new expansion doesn’t mean suddenly all class pain points are fixed at launch. We came out better than some with our hero talents and class trees.
Every class has systems or holes that their respective communities want addressed.
That makes the situation worse, you realize, lol
Right. But now you can cast it on allies for a knock-back or knock-up. ie. Literally Shining Force.
I would not call that a major rework. Holy has been pigeonholed into Lightweave since its conception. Not to mention, Priests as a whole have the most two-point Talents in the game.
There are 8 Talents that buff Praying of Mending alone before it even becomes a decent spell to cast.
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I used to main warrior. I could list several things warrior has lost over the years that feels bad or feels unfair. Every class experiences these moments. Every class has tools they wish were still around.
My original question was what is it about THIS expansion that feels lacking for priest? What new expansion tools are they missing that makes the OP feel this isn’t a proper new xpac?
There are plenty of threads listing the grievances of priest as a whole, but I’m interested in their specific example.
I’ve been playing a lot of holy this expansion and I love it. Take this with a grain of salt because I’m not a hardcore player, but I’m kind of glad we don’t have an interrupt because it’s one less thing for me to worry about.
I will also say you need to take the forums with a grain of salt as well. You go to every class forum and they’re complaining about their class.
Carrying over bad designs from multiple expansions doesn’t suddenly mean those issues don’t count for this expansion. It just means blozzard continues to ignore glarring and constant issues with the class.
Sad fact dispelling used to be the priest niche. Hell even in WoD when they came up with pvp talents they announced some dispel specific talents for priest “because being the best dispeller” was supposedly our thing.
Chalk up one more thing stripped from us and given out to everyone else like candy.
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I assume you’re referring to Healer interrupt and mobility here.
Priest has never had these. Adding them would be a fundamental change for them. One id like them to have, but its not as easy as flipping a switch to turn it on. Door of shadows doesn’t count as it was a borrowed power, we were never intended to keep it.
Every class has issues like these. Old talents missed, tools changed or removed. The current pain points we have are not fundamental to what makes priest bad. Especially considering they aren’t bad. At worst they’re middle of the pack.
It’s the beginning of the season. There is plenty of time for tuning. New talents and tools will hopefully come down the line. The best we can do is continue to advocate for why the desired changes are important.
Paladins received charger.
Shaman received Gust of Wind.
Warlocks received Gateway/Teleport.
They were just added out of the blue back in the day.
So… What’s your excuse for the rest of the Shadowlands spells every class received?
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You seem to be misunderstanding and conflating design vs balance. Tuning is irrelevant to design. You can have a well desogned, undertuned, character as well as a poorly designed overtuned character.
Design are the mechanics, gameplay loop, etc of a class. They have nothing to do with tuning.
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No class has received the neutral ability from any of the covenants. You’re thinking of the class specific abilities that some got, Priest being one of them.
If you read the bottom of my post I specifically say I hope Priest gets some new tools. I’m not advocating they stay as they are, my point is just that its not going to pop up out of nowhere. We’ll know about it well beforehand. Probably an X.1 patch.
I’m not confused. I addressed your statement regarding which tools we were lacking in our overall design. I then capped off my post with the fact that numbers can be adjusted to compensate for what we DO have until such time that we receive more fundamental changes down the line.
The issue is that numbers do not compensate for, they cover up which is the issue people are bringing up. Priest has had several design issues that blizzard has for multiple expansions now just swept under the rug via number tuning and balance changes.
We don’t need tuning we need design fixes.
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¿Por qué no los dos?
So just keeping things clear and accurate…
PvP talents was a feature with Legion. At best they were apart of the game yet not accessible in the Legion Pre-Patch. But they were not a feature in WoD.
Priest got only 1 which was Mindgames. The question should be asked as WHY we only got Mindgames? We got it because of its damage/heal reverse effect that fits thematically with Priest since we have similar effects like Mind Control reversing the damage to be done to the enemy instead or Void Shift swapping life with another target or Vampiric Embrace healing by doing damage etc.
But its reverse effect was severely reduced and changed instead into a more 1/2 up front damage and 1/2 dot damage similar to Devouring Plague.
But because it was in the class tree, the spec trees had absolutely zero interaction with it and so it was just a button to press because our lack of better talents in the class tree.
Going into TWW, it was moved out of the class tree and put into a PvP talent and as such I would see Priest as the only class that received ZERO carryover covenant abilities from Shadowlands.
They could have brought over Unholy Nova and make that work for AOE interaction for all 3 specs in adding additional synergy but as we can clearly see, they did not do that. They gave nothing interesting and just added boring passive barely noticeable talents in the place of Mindgames.
As for the other 2, they were both pretty terrible for Shadow and 1 requires you to be in melee to actually get full use out of it.
So needless to say that when it came to Priest covenant abilities, just like with DF and TWW, we got the short end of the stick with poorly thought and implemented half baked ideas.
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