(BETA) Dragonflight Priest Talent Tree Feedback Thread

I am fine with Flash heal, pom, and renew returning back to all spec’s roots.
These specs were able to do this before, and with the introduction of merging the specs back to the root, “the Class itself,” I think it’s a healthy thing to do.

I just want to emphasize that if we do this, then spells like Power Word Shield needs to be able to contest. In at least bC/wrath for PWS, its power rivaled the other spells and as I showed, was prob even a bit greater. Only Greater heal really outdid it.

As for button Bloat.

I think the devs should focus on making the core aspects of priests and their corresponding specs + spells to Feel good to press, rather than throw a bunch of throwbacks spells to make us feel happy for now as they buy time to really bring everything together.

Pretty much, I would prefer less bloat, as well as more power to the spell I currently have. The more spells you get, I feel like the more they end up powering down everything overall. Just look how Waterdown PWS and Devour plague is.

Just giving my thooughts. Core spells need to feel good for all specs.
Once we got that working, See what spells from the past can be kept, what can be changed/reworked, and what can be removed.

Not sure what direction they might take any spec into right now, but as long as they keep their individuality while working smooth, then i am fine.

I just don’t want something clunky because they either don’t know what they are doing or are too busy trying to please everyone.

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I really am not sure I understand what you’re even trying to get at with this?

Disc doesn’t have anything like this except one talent - and that talent’s not likely to be played around at all?

Also the spec didn’t change much like at all. All that changed was PW:S got replaced by Renew and became a slightly better shield at the cost of a cooldown - and Shadowmend can’t be spammed anymore (which you didn’t wanna do anyway). In SL they weren’t taken for mitigation, they were taken for extremely high burst healing, and in early nathria specifically that was done with Spirit Shell.

PW:S hasn’t been a main source of healing since WoD. And in legion, clarity of will was tuned terribly and barely even functioned - nobody that was playing Disc at a mythic level was even trying to use it, because it was like healing with greater heal on Holy priest - just bad all around.

The shift was because we ended with dead talents with this focus to a class driven talents.
Disc didn’t have use for renew, wich are in the class tree.
Holy didn’t have much use for shadowmend if was not for PvP interrupt or this new empowerement.
PW:Shield was undertuned for everyone and disc just used as an atonement applicator, to buff it for other specs to use, or even disc, it has to have this CD.
I personally dislike the shift from shadowmend to flash heal, but that left us with some empowerements we still need to see how will turn out.

They still are their own spec, really far apart. Flash heal and renew are not strong for any of them.

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So you’re implying that pw:shield and shadowmend are strong on live?

Having renew as an atonement applicator when you want to apply to someone who received damage makes a lot more sense. Pw:shield still apply it as well. And you’re basically just using flash heal instead of shadowmend (that becomes optionnal and stronger) it’s basically the same thing you have 1 new button baseline that is cheaper as well.

They are doing exactly what you’re saying they should by making the baseline stronger for all 3 specs. Pw:s is basically useless on live for holy/shadow.

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Well, if a dps takes damage, you pw:s him and atonement heal him up. If during the time you heal him up he doesn’t take any damage for 15 sec, that’s a lot of mana that goes down the drain for a shield that overhealed.

This happens more often than not. I’d rather put my shield on someone I know will use 100% of the absorb all the time.

I’m not advocating for renew but having a stronger shield has to have its implication and renew isn’t a bad idea although it’s adding bloat, sure. But what would you suggest otherwise?

For shadowmend I dunno yet if I like the idea. I’d just replace baseline flash heal and would go to HW:Life if in need of a big heal.

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But we are gaining less skills than we are losing, we just have to adapt.

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I’d remind everyone that disc in legion used to have a spell with the single purpose of applying atonement, called plea. This allowed power word shield to continue to stand on its own and be a big absorb that wasn’t spammable and had uses in dungeons and PvP.

This is the same thing. Shield back to being chonky and on a cooldown, and renew as the applicator replacing plea.

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Yes plea was soooo bad, it lasted as long as legion.
I only played with the calculator a little. I don’t see discipline losing more and one skill. Just shadow covenant, are they all in shadow. I can see 3 or 4 added.

Between BFA and Shadowlands, both Disc and Holy had their baseline mana cost on their abilities increased by 0.4-0.5% each. So for every 10 casts you’re consuming 5% more mana than you did the previous expansion.

This made managing mana a chore this expansion and it was almost exclusively balanced around using night fae on Holy. Other healers didn’t have the same level of mana issues like Shamans and Paladins who literally just laughed and were like “what’s mana?” for most of the expansion.

Basically Monks and Priests were in the same boat in regards to struggling with mana. I’m just hoping the new expansion finally looks into it because they stripped away the 2-3 other passive mana returns.

This really. Ive played the spec as it is since legion so am used to watching mana religiously in raid. I would be lucky to get even 1 innervate so i dont plan around it.

He isnt really wrong. Disc has been the burst spec since legion. Just cause it had some absorbs doesnt mean it was their identify. Their a job was to burst.

No i refuse :stuck_out_tongue: I dont think its going to get really tested until raid time.

Jak did a video and was unimpressed with pws

Yes but they got rid of plea because they wanted to make disc more accessable to the masses since it was under played, wanting to simplify it. Im curious to know what their thinking is adding renew and flash heal in if poeople struggled as it was. People go yay more ways to add atonement but that isnt peoples issues with disc really

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This is kinda what they’re doing by providing a cheaper ST atonement applicator and boosting PW:S though…

They are trying to unify the priest specs a bit more, I feel the renew change is a good one personally. It’s still a spell that disc had for a long time even if you say it’s a holy spell.

“Just tweak” isn’t really a suggestion. They’ve been “just tweaking” for a while and disc has been struggling a bit (even though it works) so things needs to move a bit.

Disc is still the healing through dps that we have on live… :man_shrugging:

PW:S was broken for 2 expansions (though really it was closer to 4). As was the spirit shell version in WoD/MoP. They tried to balance absorbs and couldn’t in the modern game and took efforts to step away from absorb based healing. on all classes.

The whole point of turning PW:S into a CD is to make it an absorb that feels more significant. Chances are it sees some sp buffs. This is the same thing as the legion iteration, except Renew is better than plea was.

Why would this make Disc play like holy? Disc played more like holy in WoD when they had PoH and had to spam it for absorbs. If anything, adding a CD to Smend and PW:S push the spec to rely more on atonement and its applicators - which is very very different from Holy.

Being good faith, I think the idea is to make PW:S a better baseline ability for the class. To do that, they need it to feel good for other specs to hit. To have it be that strong an absorb, it can’t be something that Disc can just spam out there, so they need a new default atonement applicator (renew).

Smend didn’t need the change - but to me how I see it is they want all the talents to feel like a choice you might make. Disc wouldn’t TOUCH the left side of the tree with a 10 foot pole if they didn’t want to cast Flash Heal ever - and Smend being on no CD eliminates flash heal use. So they put it on a CD and gave disc flash heal so the left side is a more interesting set of talents with SoL.

At least that’s my guess as to why they went this direction.

Holy in high level play has to use damage spells all the time - casting damage isn’t exactly hard, and Disc actually became a lot better at passive healing now that they have renew ticking and ways to heal out of combat.

I’m not trying to say you’re wrong about how you feel, here, but I just am feeling like what you’re saying isn’t actually what’s happening to Disc. I don’t see any big shift towards holy’s playstyle or anything.

Renew is significantly better than plea because it’s passive healing at a flat mana cost and a HoT (which bolsters up atonement as a pre-emptive heal). Plea was a flat heal and expensive beyond 3 targets at that. Managing Disc in early legion was very difficult. It was powerful because atonement was really, really good for the most part - but man was atonement application a pain.

Plea was a nightmare because of the mana cost increase. It would not have been all that bad if it weren’t for that.

The current changes do very little to change how difficult the spec is. Mostly it adds two keybinds, which is possibly not a good thing - but Disc had less keybinds than holy to begin with.

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I am kind of curious how this hybrid approach is going to work with Disc.

PWS and Shadowmend now have a cooldown so that leaves casting Renew outside of Radiance to spread your atonements around the group. If you have a Resto Druid you’re pretty much competing with them on the hot healing department and overlapping roles. The more Renews you cast the faster your PWS cd resets as well with one of the talents.

I will say comparing the Disc to Holy tree: the bottom of the Disc tree is a lot cleaner. Also, Disc gets Mind Bender and Shadowflame Prism, but boy is it a hassle to get those talents.

I think their point is more on how many talents in the disc tree are giving fillers CDR on more important spells, which is the core mechanic of holy’s holy words.

I’m personally not a fan of how much cdr disc is getting between fiending dark, train of thought, and protector of the frail.

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OK, that makes more sense. Perhaps I don’t see it as a problem largely because I don’t think it ever makes a real change on playstyle for Disc. All those talents seem more like bonuses than anything to actually play around. Train of thought is the only talent that’s really doing that to a core spell, and I don’t think anyone would randomly apply atonement to get the PW:S CD down or smite specifically for penance CD.

Holy words feel like a core mechanic, the spec is based around them often granting bonuses to holy words or followups - and the CDR is significant. Wheras fiending dark is really just a cooldown decrease on mana regen. It translates to throughput sure, but Shadowfiend/Bender aren’t going to really reverse a damage event on their own.

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I really want atonement removed from the root node as disc so it’s damage can be buffed. Add mind flay to shadow covenant. Let me cheat on queue times for random bgs by playing a “healer” when I want fast games.

As always, your posts are well written and nice to read man… I couldn’t have said better. I wish I was as good in english as I am with my native langage so that I could explain as clearly as that :slight_smile:

That’s the feeling I’m getting as well. Although I feel that right now I’d avoid a lot of things just to avoid bloat…

There are a few things that overlaps I feel. That can be fine because it’s the whole point of the tree, to chose.

  • smend vs hw:life → Kinda feel like the same niche, in the same tree as well. A bit weird I feel…
  • mindgames vs light’s wrath → While I like both, and tuning could change things, I feel that both these spells are overlapping with mindgames bringing more utility overall with the mana return + reverse damage/healing. Maybe light wrath is going to be better in raid, with tuning, we’ll see.
  • Solace, never been a big fan of it even if I played a lot of it… I’m always debating the gcd every 15 sec or a more passive way or getting mana back. Maybe it’s counterpart will be fine with shield being less frequent so it might be fine.
  • Shadow cov vs Vampiric embrace. I feel these 2 overlap as well. And while shadowcov could use some help with the new tree, VE is still far behind in my book…

We’re basically removing mind sear in favor of renew, and everything else that isn’t baseline is a choice.

There are probably a few buttons that I have as keybinds that aren,t used that much or will be only picked contextually… Holy nova comes to mind as a slot that’s freeing up (at least for me right now)

I’m curious to see how some weeks will play out, like grevious…

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One thing to note about Mind Games restores 4% of your mana and there’s a talent that each Holy Fire + Smite cast reduces its cd by 2s a cast. Just soloing it’s going to be pretty strong…

Mind Games is very likely going to be a strong to mandatory pick for raid healing and M+ for healing priests because it’s healing and mana return is leaps ahead Holy Word Life.

Holy Word Life is probably going to be borderline op for arenas as it does the same healing as Serenity at almost no mana cost.

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I am real excited to see the changes to shadow. As for all the water carry for discipline. Y’all sound like you are applying to be on the CC. None of what blizzard is changing is going to fix the core problems we have had from legion. Chock it up to one more casualty of Ion.

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Omg I feel you so much. I speak brazilian, what’s your language? Curious

From a super emergency heal, HW Life is better, less mana and more healing, a better CD as well, 10s past the threshold.

That’s exactly the point. Light’s wrath is basically a large group heal, Mindgames have more uses and it is available every ramp/mini-ramp.

They could finally tune the counterpart, I hate using solace on CD. Or it could have it’s CD and mana return improved.

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