Yeah, but I think with the big tuning changes it’s pretty obvious to most players divine star is the dungeon talent.
And I don’t think hunters and priests have to worry about becoming memes in DF, because far and away the most annoying class will be these Evokers zipping around, jumping to new packs way ahead of even DH tanks and actually abducting people Godzilla-style and flying them wherever they please…
That is going to get OLD very quickly, I predict. Haha.
Fair point!
My biggest feedback i can give right now is very short, simple, and new.
Flash heal is not doing its job on replacing shadowmend. Shadow’s heal feels way worse now. Pretty bad. The maso replacement talent is also worse wwithout the Overtime heal.
If it wasnt for the bug on PTR, i would pick the other one100 percent of the time.
A couple very early comments on the PTR patch of 9/21/22:
Single Target:
Psychic Link - using a complete Mind Spike build - this was my second overall damage on a 3 target dummy cleave. Seems solid.
Mind Sear - Somehow still feels extremely awkward to use. The way it chunks your insanity feels odd. As far as tuning, definitely ineffective on 3 target cleave, but that’s not surprising necessarily, I expected it to be used for larger aoe so I can’t comment on that yet.
Idols - I like the idea of them all occupying capstone places. Idol of N’zoth placement makes no sense to me being AoE centric but being cornered by single target pathing in front of it. All idols remain either undertuned or bugged: Yogg-Saron still takes 5 minutes of solid target dummying to summon a single one and he does terrible damage. C’Thun didn’t proc a single time in close to 6 minutes on a dummy. Y’shaarj is still completely fire and forget - select the talent and then never think about it again. Well, honestly aren’t they all sort of like that still? None of them alter our playstyle, as far as I can tell.
Mobility - no comment at all about this in latest Blue feedback. Definitely a bummer and makes me think we lost some mobility, in relation to what I see other classes gained for Dragonflight. We really needed some kind of boost/escape mobility like Door of Shadows.
Dominate Mind - the new change to reduce this to 30 seconds. So now being a really effective and unique cc that can help a group get past a really dangerous m+ pack, this talent is now more focused on which mob does the most damage for me that I can carry around the entire dungeon? I have mixed feelings. This could be good…on the other hand I didn’t really want to be a pet class. Yea, mixed feelings. I think maybe I liked it better before with the longer cooldown.
Pw:S - Jak on beta forum mentioned for Holy having the cd on this spell increased in order to prevent it being constantly interwoven in Holy’s rotation. I’m not remotely qualified to comment on Holy and it’s issues, but I just want to mention an increase in the cd means Body and Soul becomes even less effective and our limited mobility becomes just a tad more limited than it already is. That makes me sad. I hope that won’t happen.
Appreciate the changes to Mind Soothe, so now priest can be reliably counted on to help skip a patrol in some select dungeons. I’m grateful for the increased utility, if it indeed plays out that way in Dragonflight.
While I appreciate the changes to Halo so it won’t forever ruin shadowpriest reputation in LFG M+, I’m not 100% the spell plays into Shadow’s kit or is going to useful, maybe this is a Disc thing?
Its even bugged right now, second rank of talent does nothing.
But I’m just tired of playing SFP at this point.
Agreed, would be nice if Idols were offering a solid alternative.
So this AoE version of Mind Soothe, does it blind an entire pack of humanoid/dragonkin enemies?
As Blizz said Mind Soothe was “quite niche” when you had to find mobs with one outlier to sneak past to use it, but that sounds like it has a lot more potential, even just for basic QoL or questing, even if they still won’t let you skip too much trash in M+.
And I’m assuming (maybe wrongly) there should be a LOT more dragonkin enemies in DF.
The tier 1 pathing on the shadow tree is still a joke. I strongly recommend switching to a 10 node tier with 4 must pick throughout talents and 2 throughput talents that are not difficult to skip if all 4 utility nodes are desired. Additionally, allow pathing around disperse and silence to pick up psychic horror or mental fortitude.
Healing priests would LoF their best friends into the void to get these things and you want to… path around… them?!
It has a targeting reticle now with a decent sized radius. It’s on a 5s cd but the mind soothe lasts 20 seconds so you can tag multiple groups without much issue.
Would you sac your healing spells in your spec tree for it? To make your healing 10-15% weaker for it?
Saw the latest blue post on priests and I gotta say I’m really glad to see what they’re doing with void form. Also still sucks to see that shadow mend is gonna get removed
You know, unfortunately that’s not a theoretical question anymore. Everyone seems to be glossing over it but holy priests are in fact being presented with a stark zero-sum tradeoff: to sack many different throughput options for more DPS and (some) utility.
The trade-off is less severe for disc since of course they translate damage into healing, but yeah, the choice is there.
Specifically for dispersion and a silence, yeah if I got back into raiding again I might sack 5% or so for dispersion and if I started running higher keys I might trade another 5% or so for a silence. Unfortunately we don’t even have the choice but we might, some day, and it’s going to be a tough choice depending on what content you’re doing.
What? I’m talking about from a spriest pov, I have no idea how holy priests work, so I can’t talk about that.
So yes, 100% of the time we’d sac one or the other for the sake of BIG NUMBERS.
There are times that psychic horror is preferable to silence and I can imagine scenarios where mental fortitude is more useful than disperse.
This is my first attempt to repath our tree without modifying any talents apart from number of points required.
I need to reiterate once again, these idols need to change to impact gameplay more than they currently do. Their new positions and the absolute lack of tuning or bug fixes on this pass has me copeful that this sentiment is not falling in deaf ears.
For sure. And that’s the curse of a lot of priest utility. 99% of the time Shackle Undead is a complete waste of space, but if there’s a necromancer casting “You Die Now” and the DPS are rolling their faces across the keyboard it’s a life-saver. And 100% of the time that necromancer is an elite and laughs at you for trying to fear him.
(Side tangent: I think WoW really could/should take a look at its rules for which abilities work on elites and which mobs should be considered boss-like elites, because I think that’s gotten messed up pretty badly over 20 years of development as well).
Still, in general, the cases where a 75% DR on a big raid AoE or a silence on a kill cast are way more common.
For sure. It’s nice to have the option to pick 2 of 4 given that we are cursed with 4 utility options. The case might only come up 1% of the time, but that doesn’t mean the options shouldn’t be there.
I think Priest has some serious growing pains to get through before any of the specs really feel good again. I doubt that happens in this beta cycle with the painfully apparent hand-off from one dev to another with different ideas for the class without the time to iterate upon them or flesh out their second and third order consequences.
Disc is now a strange spec that is halfway built around weaving both Shadow and Holy spells with talents like Twilight Equilibrium and Shadow Covenant and From Darkness Comes Light but in reality the spec doesn’t function like that or reward the dual school playstyle at all.
Shadow Covenant no longer serves a purpose at all because it doesn’t have any shadow spells to heal during it. Twilight Equilibrium no longer has a shadow spell to weave between Holy ones for direct heal casting and From Darkness Comes Light now buffs an incredibly weak and spammable spell instead of strong short CD one.
The whole spec is a mess of short term changes intended to solve immediate problem X without considering problem Y and Z which the changes cause and until the full transition away from shadow spells and “button bloat” is completed the spec will feel like it constantly has one foot in and one foot out of its fantasy and functional gameplay loop.
Holy now has more Holy Words that serve the same function with Holy Word: Life doubling up on it’s niche with Serenity but it has to be ham fisted into the class tree for other specs so Holy suffers with underwhelming capstones. The spec tree is a smattering of talents that focus on hard casting spammable spells and leveraging Holy Word power through them with other talents that focus on the short term CD spells Holy has. The result is a spec that is built around spammable spells that you don’t spam because you’re constantly using your short term CD abilities that aren’t strong enough on their own and thus require spamming more spells between them.
Shadow somehow has more buttons and options than ever before but manages to feel bad because they’re all competing for the same GCD’s and none of them do damage. Spells that cost huge amounts of resources do no damage. Interactions that require multiple casts to setup and have short durations like Auspicious Spirits and the DoTs themselves do no damage. The gameplay loop feels like I’m frantically maintaining DoTs, using my short term casted abilities on CD while building and spending insanity as optimally as possible all for none of it to ever feel impactful. I have to check details to see if certain abilities are even hitting or doing damage. The removal of Shadowmend has also eliminated any feeling of being a hybrid at all. Casting 5-8 Flash Heals on myself to top my health back up and spending all my mana doing it feels awful. It’s a spell balanced and created to be spammed by Holy Priests and now it’s what Shadow has been left with without the mana bar or Holy talents to support it.
Then there is the issue of the capstone talents across all three specs. Priest has by far the least impactful capstone talents of any class I’ve tried on beta. Half of them are passives you forget about or do a whole dungeon without ever using. The other half are so poorly numerically balanced that I get more benefit by avoiding them all together and spending those points further up the tree.
Somehow with all the iteration in the last weeks for Priest, I feel like the class has taken huge steps backwards and would prefer the Priest we had at the end of Alpha to the one we have now. What a mess.
Yeah, it all still feels a bit muddled. For hpriest I think they’re relying on all those single target passive buffs to keep Lightweaver (which is by design weaker than FC) in contention for single target healing with pallies and monks. But who knows if that works out?