(BETA) Dragonflight Priest Talent Tree Feedback Thread

Daketh-frostmourne · July 5, 2022, 2:07pm

There lies your issue. Renew in DF DOES look like a spell you might want to cast. Same as PoH was last xpac but not this xpac and renew was in WoD when you could binding heal to refresh the duration.

Maybe not. But its a priest spell and if it does buff off atonment and you have your 20 atonements out and its pinging away, its not a bad thing

edit:

Thing is. who knows what build someone thinks up next xpac in keys. Someone does a build where renew is used and buffs off atonement and gives a buff to overall healing on that target (renewed faith) . Lets let someone try it tho hey

Thelarias-zuljin · July 5, 2022, 2:14pm

Sure, let’s try it out! I’m not against trying that at all. Different xpack usually means different numbers. And current renew/PoM arent going to be DF renew/PoM for sure.

Still, it feels a bit off in regards to shadow. For disc it could work depending on numbers, but I feel that a section that would focus on making pw:shield relevant for all our specs instead of baking holy tools in would be better.

That is, as of current numbers. Maybe DF will prove me wrong

Daketh-frostmourne · July 5, 2022, 2:19pm

I know bro cause your one of the buff pws people. I get that. But in SL i thought we were getting PoM back and we didint. I was unhappy we didnt and now we are. I have heard some rumblings that some spriests are happy that they can do some off heals. So we will see how that ends up. If pom drops shadow out of Sform then it wont be used.

I agree shadow needs some work tho. But buffing pws is not the way i see it going and i really dont tink blizz will do it.

Velfina-gnomeregan · July 5, 2022, 2:29pm

Its 3s silence is a DR category.

Thelarias-zuljin · July 5, 2022, 3:01pm

Not really, I’m fine with pw:shield being what it is for disc, but if it stays like it is right now, its kinda meaningless for both holy and shadow.

My point is, instead of adding a new spell that might not see use for disc/shadow, why not empower a spell that has been baseline for a while and is mostly useless for 2 specs out of 3.

I’m not against PoM coming to disc, but I already have a lot of stuff on my action bars. I feel like the options on the right side of the tree are a lot better, even if I don’t pick SFP. Again, it’s all a matter of number tuning. We’ll see. But I still find the left section to be trash for shadow.

I feel that the priest tree is great for holy (edit: minus for crystalline reflection), the choices seems to be really meaningful for that spec and will likely be picked depending on content. Disc and shadow are kinda left behind though, which points to a problem.

Is the pw:shield solution better? It could better fit the 3 specs. If you add the empowerment that being shielded gives (See other talents in spec trees) and other goodies, it could become an interesting choice vs the fiend tree. Have like fae guardians be implemented with multiple talents in there for example and have a way to increase dmg done so that it’s not a complete no-brainer for shadow to pick the right side…

Aneurysm-nerzhul · July 5, 2022, 3:19pm

This is another reason why I was trying to come up with “Word” interaction mechanic talents for the class tree in my post above.

Either effect directly to Power Word: Shield or you can have that or other word spells or have multiple talents that affect a variety of word spells.

The idea is to reward cross play between spells that normally you would think is a waste of a GCD.

Problem is balancing… or is it?

My ideas that Mind Blast effects a Word spell means that it can’t be abused spam.

But a Word spell effecting a Word spell can. That’s why I put in a stack limit as to make it a bit more random so it’s helpful but you can’t abuse it that easily.

Since shadow uses SW:P & SW:D, can’t buff those too much because we already have shadow specific talents buffing those.

I am sure the same can be said for the Holy Words for Holy and the Power Words for Discipline.

But the key thing is that they all use “Word” spells that are just begging to be class talents for… to me it just makes sense as it’s a no brainer lol.

Deos-thrall · July 5, 2022, 7:17pm

Echoing Void needs to collapse on corpses.

Caithyra-stormrage · July 5, 2022, 9:20pm

Here’s my feedback of the General Tree from a Holy Priest perspective:

Top Rows:

Purify Disease should be a baseline class ability. It’s already a mandatory talent pick because you need it to unlock Body & Soul and Angelic Feather. You can simply just move Body & Soul up to where it is.
Holy can take Shadow Mend: how exactly is this going to work? Will it replace Flash Heal like with Discipline Priests? Also, isn’t it a bit o.p. for PvP because you’ll have two spell schools to kick for Holy to stop them from healing.
Improved Smite should not be a talent. You literally do 50% less damage as Holy or Disc without it and I’m sure Disc would be unhappy about doing less Atonement healing.
Says Your Prayers needs to be buffed (extra PoM charges would better) and should branch off of Benediction instead of Renewed Faith.
I don’t think Enlightenment should be a talent.
Power Infusion should be a baseline class ability imho.
Twist of Fate seems overpowered if it increases your healing by +20%. This means that at end of boss fights Holy Priests will ramp up healing a lot.
Taming the Shadows is a useless talent.

Middle Rows:

Holy Nova is a garbage AOE ability and needs massive buffs. I would much rather have access to Mind Sear than Holy Nova.
Leap of Faith, Mass Dispel, Mind Control, and Shackle Undead should be baseline class abilities and not talent picks. They’re literally class defining abilities and you’ll be forced to pick these talents depending on what scenario you have to use them on.
Cleric’s Armaments and Tools of the Cloth need to be removed and replaced with something else. An extra +10% smite/holy nova damage while under PWS is so laughably bad.
Clear Mind needs to be buffed a lot to like 50-60% mana reduction to be a worthwhile pick.
Dominant Mind is one of those abilities that sounds fun on paper, but in practice it’s pretty useless. The mind control only lasts 30 seconds and if you’re in M+ you want to kill the trash: not take one mob away you have to then kill 30s later.
Improved Shadowfiend should be replaced with Puppet Master instead.
Twins of the Sun Priestess is a nice addition. I approve.
Throes of Pain sounds like it’ll be incredibly broken because getting 10% of your mana back every time a mob dies with your SWP is effectively infinite mana…

Bottom Rows:

My #1 complaint in the entire tree is summed up with Unwavering Will. It’s a near 100% mandatory pick for any Holy Priest as you effectively do 20% less healing and damage if you don’t take that talent.
Blessing of Renewal is really bad. +5% renew healing and mana cost reduced by 10%? That’s it? It should be like +15% and 20% to actually be impactful. Or replace it with something else.
Holy Word: Life is a terrible ability. Consider swapping it with Boon of the Ascended instead.
Charitable Soul/Lights inspiration/Crystalline Reflection are utterly useless talents for Holy.
Translucent Image should be moved further up in the tree IMHO. It should also be like a -10/20% damage reduction as Holy Priests lack damage mitigation.
Tithe Evasion is probably the single most meme talent in the entire tree. It’s extremely rare a shadow priest SWDs themselves to death. Replace it with something else…
Mindbender - Does this replace Shadowfiend is my question? Also, with a 1 minute cd it’ll be really strong for mana return.
Shadowflame Prism - I’m curious how much extra damage this is going to do.

Either way the TLDR of my major sticking points:

Baseline the following class abilities and remove them as talents: Power Infusion, Leap of Faith, Mind Control, Mass Dispel, and Purify Disease.
Remove or replace Unwavering Will. You literally do -20% less healing if you don’t take it.
Work on the middle and bottom rows the most.

Capslockfury-area-52 · July 6, 2022, 12:14am

Problem is Atonement doesn’t play well with PoM. Unless renew or PoM apply some level of atonement, you can’t cast it during your ramp, and you can’t cast it during your burst.

Even if renewed faith affects it, Disc priests are already doing such insane healing in that window that they’re overhealing, so 10% literally doesn’t mean anything for that window.

And in dungeons, keeping a renew AND atonement rolling on people is going to quickly get tiring. One of those, “hey cool, this works and my atonement feels pretty good!” that becomes “This is so annoying how can I NOT play like this?” in a few dungeons.

What it would be is a spell you use off CD between your ramps to keep some HPS rolling. Benediction PoM is very good at that, to be fair. But that’s realistically its only possibly strong use and it’s hard to say if that’s good enough to justify the points. There’s gonna be a lot of mathing this out eventually. But chances are it’s not gonna get favor over other talents.

Capslockfury-area-52 · July 6, 2022, 12:24am

I feel like a lot of your ‘this should be a baseline class ability’ or ‘this shouldn’t be a talent’ feedback is just not considering what the new talent trees are. Every class has this “problem” because it’s how the talents were designed. Tier 1 talents and some Tier 2 talents are about unlocking what were normally had before - talents are both your level progression and borrowed power. Any things you would have gained passively during leveling have been relocated to the talent tree for every class. That’s why imp. smite is there, it’s why purify disease is there, etc.

I’m actually VERY surprised Blizz put something as powerful as Benediction in T1 and I have some thought that it’s going to change.

This seems to be absolutely deliberate, so I don’t think they’re going to change any of it.
I agree with almost everything else here, though.

Also to add on - I think the more confusing talents that exist right now are ones like Tithe Evasion - talents that you can grab without ever taking the spell it modifies. I think most classes have these SOMEWHERE in their trees, and priests have it a couple times but it feels very strange that they would ever make talents like this. These almost feel like oversights.

Arlifrex-moon-guard · July 6, 2022, 12:53am

They’ve said that it’s possible to have “bad” builds. Like the old days before mop.

Autai-moon-guard · July 6, 2022, 1:23am

I was thinking that instead of Lightwell, maybe they should make the end talent the Fae Guardians from the Night Fae covenant. Rename it to something more inline with Holy. Then shielding an ally is relevant.

Capslockfury-area-52 · July 6, 2022, 1:40am

There’s a difference to me between ‘bad build’ and ‘actively harming yourself’

Bad Build:
Wow these things you took have no synergy. This talent does way less for you because you took another one. Why are you increasing your PW:S if you’re not even using it? etc, etc.

That is what pre-MOP bad builds were. In classic, TBC and even WOTLK you couldn’t just take talents that weren’t relevant at all to you. You could take talents that buffed spells you never used, but you still had the spell, etc. I didn’t play a ton of Cata, so maybe it’s different there.

Actively harming yourself:
You literally don’t have this spell, but you can shove 2 points into something that increases its damage, sure!

Old talent trees - if a talent had a dependency on another, then it would be attached to that talent in a linear line (similar to the Shadow Covenant line in Disc, for example). They didn’t just shove things in completely different parts of the tree.

Daketh-frostmourne · July 6, 2022, 1:41am

I didnt say i was going to be that creeative bro. I was drunk when posting last night haha But i will def find the gcd for PoM. I already have my tree picked out and linked it and its all right side of priest tree. im just saying some genius in keys may think of something. Raids no

Capslockfury-area-52 · July 6, 2022, 1:43am

I already thought about using renew in keys. Renewed faith would be rather nice. But I did immediately write it off because using 2 globals that don’t help that much otherwise for your buffed heals sounds like a way to quickly get mad at my own playstyle. At least when you’re shadowmending you’re refreshing duration on your atonements. Renew is just… not gonna feel good to keep up when we already do that with atonement.

Arlifrex-moon-guard · July 6, 2022, 2:16am

As someone who doesn’t play priests, or m+, this is my haphazard attempt at creating a build

Daketh-frostmourne · July 6, 2022, 4:43am

Tongue in cheek… but… steal the holy ability back in the day of refreshing renew… Shadowmend refreshes renew duration

Navanya-thunderhorn · July 6, 2022, 4:58am

I know that any of the current pick one nodes are only two options but I REALLY would have liked to see one at the end of the priest tree with four options where you could only pick one and they were the four different covenant abilities. Different ones have different uses and it would be useful switching it up based on the content that you were doing. I’m really not loving that the only one they kept was mind games.

I also feel that there are a few talents that could have been consolidated such as cosmic ripple and piety of mana - that is 4 points (although I’m not sure that cosmic ripple is supposed to be 2 or if that was an error when it got posted), either way it would have been nicer to have them combined and cost two.

Kaldemic-frostmourne · July 6, 2022, 9:08am

The worst thing about the current build is that you have to lose damage to get core defensive abilities. Why not move all those utility talents over to the Priest tree and swap with all the shadow damage picks. As it is I’m not picking silence, dispersion, psychic horror or vampiric embrace in favour of picking more damage talents.

The shadow tree overall is a mess, things linked that have no gameplay connection at all while more logical connections are on the other side of the tree (or even the base priest tree instead).

Shadowflame prism should not be a 100% lock for the spec (by being alone on the base priest tree it certainly is). SFP for me at least is a massive pain to play with, you overcap insanity and can’t do anything else during the shadowfiend duration, on live it’s actually better to keep void bolt on cd just to spam mb’s and sw:d’s more. SFP should be somewhere on the bottom left of the shadow tree.

Just delete StM already, if it somehow is viable it will just get nerfed again.

Void Torrent seems a little outdated, especially if SFP is going to be a permanent feature it just seems out of place (the damage is also pretty lackluster), maybe change the cd to 45sec and combine it’s effects with Damnation + increase the damage of the channel. It would make it a great opener cast again, because at the moment I’m not sure it beats out getting the SFP rotation going earlier.

There’s just way too much crap in the last tier of the tree, with the idol’s being obvious things to want to go for, you aren’t even left enough points to get halfway to the other side. I feel like you should be able to get the powerful talent and then explore towards the other side a bit (but obviously not have enough to get both sides powerful options). In the 3rd tier pretty much all of the talents other than the idols look god awful, either boring or not powerful.

Reworking the trees:
All non damaging abilities (self shields, silence, dispersion, vampiric embrace…etc) should be on the base priest tree, while all shadow damage talents should be on the Shadow tree.

Shadow Tree
First tier should be about aoe choice, move psychic link and shadow crash up here. Void Eruption should be the last talent to link to the next tier.

Second Tier left side could be more based on apparations and shadowfiend, the shadowfiend talents should go where shadowcrash is. The middle is about mind blast, shadow word: death and void bolt. Right side should be more dots and channel based.

Third tier should continue the trend from the second. The idols need changing around with Yogg-Saron swapped for N’zoth. SFP should lead into the left idol, Void Torrent leads into the right and Mindgames the bottom center.

Base Tree
Removing all the mandatory shadow damage picks opens up the tree for some interesting choices, I won’t go through every tier but Dispersion and Vamp Embrace should be the final options at the bottom right rows.

Overall this looks like a very very early draft and I’m at least glad its out there early to get this kind of feedback because it definitely needs it.

Thelarias-zuljin · July 6, 2022, 11:21am

I’m actually happy to see damage talents in the priest tree. Healers need those. I look forward to SFP as disc.

I’d be more interrested to remove healing habilities from the priest tree and have holy dmg or self buffs that even a shadow priest might want to pick… Right now the left side has a bit of both but is more focussed on healing. Which makes it less interresting for both shadow and disc in my book.