There are some cool disc / holy hybrid builds you can come up with but they’re only going to be good for PvE because of the extreme cast length on Holy Fire + Smite, would be cool if the talents to reduce their cast time were stronger. It’s not like these abilities are remotely broken anyways, and the proc-rate on Searing Light is extremely low for how hard it is to get 3 second Holy Fire off and then wait around for procs with it’s duration being so short (10 sec debuff duration). Would just like to see the potential build viability open up here to take a cool leveling build into BGs and stuff and at least feel like you can try to cast a few abilities!
5 Likes
Hell i’d take a 20 second cooldown on holy fire if it could be a 1.5s or 2s cast after talents. At least make it worthy of putting on the bars.
Unfortunately the devs thought ‘smite’ was too overpowered when paladins were around, which I know we were all planning on carrying a paladin around in our pocket starting from lvl 1, so completely reasonable. /s
(time to remove both from our cast bars)
Holy Fire is intended to be cast more than once.
On Era from level 20 I use the rotation; Holy Fire, Smite, Smite, Holy Fire.
Though Forever changes things up with Searing Light.
With the second cast of Holy Fire, there’ll be more procs.
Yeah I know but the issue remains that the debuff lasts 10 seconds (for a 3 second cast) and is extremely difficult to get off in PvP. It’s also not remotely strong enough to merit spending that amount of time on a cast, so you’ll end up dead weight 99% of the time. It ends up being too easy to LoS or out range the tail end of the cast on purpose or by accident (or interrupt it) - relative to its actual strength. This could be fine if it was a really strong spell (pyroblast, soul fire etc.), but it’s not.
You’ll be lucky to get one Holy Fire rolling in a BG at a time, not to mention that in order to follow through on those procs, you then need to run into melee range… the problem is the debuff lasts 10 seconds so now you ran in… got your holy nova (which is quite a weak spell even on 4+ targets, but would still feel good as-is if you could get a moderate number of procs rolling), assuming you can even get back out, you now spend more time running all the way back out to keep Holy Fire rolling from a safe cast distance because it will be impossible to do in the front line of the fight etc.
It’s just a very messy rhythm which makes a very cool build non-viable. If they only intend this to be a leveling build then I guess I understand, or it simply becomes a SUPER haste-dependent build. I just think it could be tweaked to either be STRONG and difficult to play, or MID but playable in terms of being able to press your buttons. I actually prefer the latter. Currently it’s weak AND totally impractical to play unfortunately.
Potential Fixes (not all at once): debuff is undispellable (kind of fits with the idea that Holy damage is pure with no resistance stat for it), lasts much longer (not necessarily OP due to how weak it is), Searing Light gives you a brief movement speed buff for 5-10 seconds (engage, disengage to utilize Holy Nova). Holy Fire is immune to interrupts or ignores LoS for X seconds after applying a renew or shield to yourself, etc.
2 Likes
As a Holy Priest in PvP, your one job is to heal other players.. not wasting mana on attacking players.
Oh thanks, you should tell the developers about that so they remove offensive talents lol.