(BETA) Dragonflight Priest Talent Tree Feedback Thread

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

Currently pretty happy with where Disc is besides Shadowmend going away.

Would love to see shadow covenant turn flash heal into shadowmend (and get the bonuses of flash heal). This would pretty much leave Disc in a perfect spot for dungeons IMO - they might need slight tune ups, but conceptually the class would be in a really good spot there.

Though, also, they need to tune up Smite on Disc at this point, come on. The spell really sucks on Disc specifically, meanwhile Holy priest, who have a 30% stronger smite baseline have more than one talent bumping its damage quite a bit in short windows, where all we really have is the tools of the cloth replacement.

Or we can invest the points to get a CAPSTONE talent, that buffs smite by 40% for a short period after Light’s Wrath. Still leaving it worse than a single Smite from Holy WITHOUT any buffs, and in a window we don’t even want to be smiting because Light’s Wrath should be your first cast (leaving penance/MB/possible mindgames behind it).

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please bring back shadow mend

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That post was a joke btw. Whoever is managing Priest changes now is as unserious about improving Priest gameplay as a Blizzard employee can be without being some random dude off the street. I 100% feel like Blizz could be paying me the money they are paying current Priest devs, and be gaining the exact same benefit they are from the money they are losing to whoever is coming up with these changes lately.

From the post: " Holy

Answered Prayers

This talent is designed to synergize with Prayer of Mending builds while simultaneously being an option to boost Holy Word cooldown reduction. While we’re excited for this effect, there are two interactions we’re preventing to balance its power. The first is that triggering Apotheosis through Answered Prayers will not reset the cooldown of Holy Word: Sanctify and Holy Word: Serenity. The second is that Casting Holy Word: Sanctify and Holy Word: Serenity while Holy Word: Salvation is on cooldown will not reduce the cooldown of Holy Word Salvation by an increased amount. The talent has been met with a great deal of positivity and we are equally excited, and we hope you can understand our reasoning for preventing these interactions."

First of all, huge BS here. I don’t believe for one second this talent was met with positivity when the previous incarnation of it granted Power Infusion. Secondly, even if that is true, the whole point of the paragraph is them explaining how they are removing all of the reasons people would have, to see the talent in a positive light. Oh the buff has mechanics? That are beneficial? Time to nerf / remove those.

Power Infusion was hands down the better choice, works with healing OR damage, and much simpler too, no wacky mechanics for Blizz to nerf cause it might actually have an effect apparently. These people are seriously ruining the class on purpose? Why I’m not getting paid Blizz? I could do this bad a job no problem. I PROMISE YOU, its way easier than you think to be this bad as what we are seeing from these devs. But I could be even worse, if you are so intent on throwing away money.

And to prove just how much they hate this class, look at what they decided to buff. “Hey guys Mind Soothe is AoE now.” Completely inconsequential. Who in their right mind thought this was ever a priority? Its not a bad change in a vacuum, but in the context of the other changes they are making, it is clear they want to drive people away from the class. Mind boggling, I swear Blizz ought to be paying me instead of them, I am definitely worth that much money they are paying these devs for this kind of product.

And then he follows it up with, “Oh yeah hey. Cascade. That was a spell.” LITERALLY SAID NOTHING, just nostalgia baiting people, and its sickening how many people are eating that right up. They didn’t promise anything, its just pure filler BS, trying to sound good or positive, but all it does is reveal how much he doesn’t care about this class.

How about some real changes dude? Cause the way you are doing it, I could do your job far better than you.

Yea I read that line and thought; excellent, we can now use PoM to proc Apotheoses and have no Holy Words to press during it. Awesome, I now have 100% reduced cost of Holy Words I can’t cast anyway. But I can waste mana spamming spells I don’t need to maybe reset the CD of a spell I might need before it would otherwise be up? They’re effectively making a round-a-bout, worse, random version of current Holy tier set bonuses.

It’s astonishing that a blue wrote a post about how they nerfed the hell out of a talent by making it proc a worse cooldown than it did previously and then that the worse CD is worse than the actual CD.

Up until today I expected the Priest developer to know that the majority of the power from Apotheosis is that it resets Holy Words on use. Now I’m hoping the dev doesn’t touch anything else because it’s obvious they’re oblivious to much of the nuance of the spec.

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It’s not as bad as you guys are suggesting. If you don’t have holy words up when the proc comes then being in Apotheosis resets them 300% faster so get spamming! If they are available, they cost no mana and can be reset that much faster.

Like, there’s no downside to Apotheosis. None. PI is actually pretty marginal by comparison because if it procs when there’s not much to heal, you can what? Blow your mana faster? I suppose get to smiting but that’s hardly some big win by comparison.

But I do think they could buff it slightly considering the talent’s location: say have it also proc cosmic ripple even without resetting holy words, e.g. The reasoning is the same for why they changed Apotheosis to reset holy words in the first place; as good as Apotheosis is having it proc isn’t in itself impactful and adding a little bonus healing to that proc would make the skill feel better.

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What are you, some kind of vanilla healer? Straight outta Classic? That is the simple elegance of Power Infusion, it works just fine for healing or damage. And the main reason I know you are wrong about this “marginal” benefit, and that Power Infusion was a far better buff to have than Apotheosis, is because they took it away.

What is 50 bounces of PoM on average anyway? 50 seconds? Probably significantly more. Honestly it is disgusting how short a buff, how infrequently obtained, and they still have to stomp on it a dozen times to ensure it is the most unremarkable, unexciting version of a benefit you can get. I guess it really is true, the only specs that get to have fun are the DPS.

I played Priest for 12 years, through the best versions it has ever seen, but honestly I think I’m out. You all can have the rotting carcass of what was. I had a lot of fun, that most of you will likely never get to understand, but for now I’m going to the dps crew. They won’t let people build or play support classes the way we want to. They are intent on screwing over every build so it is as unexciting, unimaginative, unrewarding as possible, compared to what has been in the past, or what could still be. They just only let dps have fun anymore, so that’s where I am going, sick of this.

Enjoy your Apotheosis procs and lining up all your shadow CDs for Shadow Covenant, har har har

The wording from Wraith doesn’t really sound like they would bring it back. At least not the Cascade we know and definitely not in the trees for 10.0 or 10.1.

I hope they don’t nerf this. This would be so extremely useful for questing, considering that quest mobs seem to be more brutal right now and Priest has always been extremely squishy and weak during later leveling phases.

True. I HAVE been excited about Answered Prayers, but now? Not so much.

For me it’s quite obvious why they did it. So they can further justify not bringing back Shining Force. I guess they want Mind Soothe to be our dungeon utility now, but right now I don’t see the useful impact yet.

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The fact they think permanent mind control / 30 second dom mind interrupt is less powerful than a single interrupt is, no pun intended, mind blowing.

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Ok that’s good to know!

Answered Prayers is more work than its worth at this point. The balancing point is Holy Word Salvation. If it worked like a true Apo your Holy Words would reset and for 8s you can probably get another 2-3 Holy Words out. That basically kicks down Salvs cd by a lot: especially when it’s a guaranteed proc when you use Salvation in a 20 man group.

Better off bringing it back to the drawing board or just making Salv a flat 3.5-4 minute cd.

Void Eruption seems absolutely useless now with the nerfs and buff to DA.
You don’t gain any dmg increase
You don’t gain an extra charge of MB
All you get is voidbolt and access to full mastery, which will be useless because even in AOE, psychic link is so good that you’ll just be doing a single target rotation when dots are up

Ya, it’s heavily watered down. Spriest in SL already has a a lot of abilities that don’t feel fun or are cool to press. All that’s left on voidform theme/mechanic is the visual explosion when pressing void eruption and hitting all the mobs.