Hello, I’ve recently returned after a long break, and back when I played in MoP I remember the Priest forums being a fun place to be - the community was enthusiastic about Priest and the lounge thread was always active. But now I’ve returned; the lounge thread is gone, and the enthusiasm I remember seems to have been replaced with dissatisfaction with the state Priest is in today. While I can’t expect things to stay the same, I have to admit I am shocked by how much has changed around here.
The Priest community from back then was one of the reasons I loved playing the class, so now I’m curious: for any forum veterans, what’s happened over the past couple of years? Did certain class changes drive Priest mains away? Did everyone move to Discord? Or is it just a simple case of long-time players moving on to new things?
The game has changed a lot in the last decade, and Blizzard has steadily eroded priest’s unique capabilities without giving priest access to new tools like they have done regularly for other classes. Blizzard has directly stated they don’t let priest have as broad a toolkit as other classes because they don’t want it encroaching on other class fantasies (but have no such concerns about other classes, particularly mage) and lean hard on the idea that priest sacrifices standard tools for unique tools that are situationally very powerful, but other classes have access to better versions of every “unique” tool priest has except for Power Infusion, some of which were stolen from priest and given to other classes that already had comparable tools to expand their already superior toolkits.
To make matters worse, priest was the only class in the game to receive zero updates for TWW (and each subsequent patch) despite having some of the worst talent trees in the game and launched with functionally two hero talent trees instead of three, reinforcing a feeling of neglect from Blizzard. The recent 11.1 notes also had fewer priest changes than about half of the other classes, almost all of which have already received substantial updates in every patch of TWW.
While the class is still my favorite by far, it’s almost painful how privileged you feel when you play any other class when you’re used to playing priest. The forums are a reflection of this feeling.
Everything basically moved to discord, I came around Slightly after that time but I’ve known several of the old old guard in my time during that transition. Most of the old TCers (Ashley, Twintop, etc…) have retired.
I was lurking on the wow forums back in 2005-2006 and people were complaining just as much as they are then as today. People actually drove the CMs crazy and we had the bus shock incident.