Just a couple of thoughts as Oracle and Archon are very underwhelming, I haven’t seen too many people excited about either.
What if Oracle didn’t make us play whack-a-mole with rotating spells, but still played into the whole “seeing the future” by instead reintroducing Spirit Shell, or something akin to it? If the Shell is deemed too strong, do something like giving a buff that would allow all heals to build up a certain percentage for a period of time and then echo next time the player takes damage? It still plays on that fantasy and brings back in spirit (pun absolutely intended) a spell that many liked.
Likewise, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people clamoring for Cascade to return. Halo is such an uninteresting spell to have Archon centered around, bringing back Cascade as the triggering spell would be exciting!
I know things are pretty set now and we’re unlikely to see many changes before launch, just wanted to get it out there.
Spirit shell really needs to stay out of the game.
It’s never been healthy any tier it’s been relevant. They just tried to revive it in SLands and it broke everything again until it was nerfed into irrelevance.
Yeah, I know it was broken, but a similar ability that delays healing for a period of time rather than building up a shield may work better. Just would need to be tuned correctly. “Stores max. 15% of player health” or some such. Have it trigger after a period of time or when they next take damage. I think there are ways to make something like that work.
Spirit Shell was bad for the game when the damage patterns were basically 20-30s of no damage and then the raid takes a massive hit. It made double Disc Priest basically a meta when you had 1 minute Spirit Shells to mitigate two abilities a minute.
When Blizzard shifted away from bursty raid patterns to rot auras (which they still use today) it made Spirit Shell basically worthless.
Archon - Cascade be cool for Holy and Shadow, that be awesome and so visually pleasing.
Oracle - honestly I cannot see any hope for this Spec, Spirit Shell or Shields is thematic as your predicting and preventing damage before it occurs but like mentioned it may be impossible to get right, I’m not sure how to make Oracle even playable.
There’s just no way this take is correct in the slightest. Damage patterns didn’t go from full burst to full rot; the vast majority of fights nowadays feature some combination of the two and rarely one or the other.
And even for a fight like Nymue where you could argue is basically just rot and no burst, using Spirit Shell right before each set of lines go out or right after intermission adds are killed would make the fight significantly easier.
Now I’m thinking Premonition capstone should basically just be Tyr’s trinket from DotI. Prepare healing in advance; when someone hit’s threshold boom - healing auto-fires.
In all seriousness I don’t have strong opinions on how they do it, but if they’re going to keep the name as ‘oracle’ I really do want the tree to center around rewarding some preemptive gameplay.
I’m one who advocated for SS to return, as it’s last state made it worse than evangelism, not to mention SS had 2/3 of evangelism power with legendary (3 sec extension + no GCD), so it would not be better as evangelism FOR HPS only, but, any shield, as much as I love, is bad for the game if it can be applied to 20 at once and be strong.
Luminous barrier is the best we can get, the problem is they just didn’t put the CD where it should be. The shield is good enough for it not to become mandatory or broken, the only thing is that it’s CD should be lowered by half, or perhaps to 1 minute, so it could be really useful in a way barrier can’t and not negate much damage as to make a mechanic negligible.
I get that Shell was broken, hence why it was removed. I’m talking about a thematically similar spell.
Now I’m thinking Premonition capstone should basically just be Tyr’s trinket from DotI. Prepare healing in advance; when someone hit’s threshold boom - healing auto-fires.