Going from my Mage to my Spriest its brutally noticeable how little active mitigation we have and how in certain pulls its “Pray” you dont get targeted with some ability and pray the healer can react.
Spriests are in a similar state to hunters before blizzard touched them with a bunch of new survivability tools pre TWW.
Hunters got SO much good stuff, its silly.
Hunters have 2 charges of 30% damage reduce,
a 30% instant heal (that cools down faster with primary resource use)
A complete ‘immune to incoming attacks’ with a 30% reduction attached (that talented can remove two kinds of debuffs)
Feign death to stop a cast on you?
And gets 4% leech just from having the ‘damage’ pet out. (We have to talent for that!)
I swear hunters got handed just about the ability to address anything in the game with their kit.
Mages don’t have as much it feels like but they have much more up front on demand damage and EXTREMELY high mobility/control tricks to avoid getting hurt and other tools to prevent damage more actively.
Spriest damage mitigation in general kinda sucks for what it is. Every time someone is like “But you can flash heal for mitigation too!” its like…so stop and hard cast an ability to get a little mitigation with fade? What?
I’m going to be honest, the last thing priest needs is another micro defensive. What we really need is some burst mobility or a defensive that doesn’t take us out of the fight.
Between fade, protective light, angelic ward, and PW:S we have too many micro survivability effects. Individually each of these are underwhelming, but together they help keep us alive (angelic ward is a passive, but still not terribly beefy)
The issue is having to take several GCDs to stack them. At the moment we are bloated with micro defensives but lack singularly powerful skills to actually keep ourselves alive.
That’s not to say priest always feels weak or defenseless but the bloat is already present without adding more.
Honestly I think Focused Will is a huge reason we don’t get another defensive. For Shadow it is effectively a passive 5% magic damage reduction and 15% physical damage reduction during pvp, the issue is that in pve it may as well not exist. Perhaps what they should do is just give us a 1-2 minute CD that let’s us manually activate Focus Will which would be decent in pve but meh over all in pvp since it’s almost always up anytime we are the focus target in pvp.
Bro
How many more buttons you think we need
It isn’t that we need more buttons, but literally all of them you mentioned are not new, and some are not even buttons just passive modifiers to abilties we have had for a long time. I am simply trying to think of a way in which Shadow can get something beneficial to help address a pve issue without impact pvp.
It’s worth noting that Focused Will and Dispersion healing is essentially a PvP only ability, that DoT heals are getting nerfed by ~80% in Midnight, Halo heals are nerfed by 75% in Midnight, Void Shift is removed in Midnight, and Desperate Prayer requires wasting talents for shadow in Midnight.
Priest is statistically the least durable class in the game in PvE and it’s having its already terrible durability nerfed extremely heavily in the next expansion.
Dispersion silencing us is extremely outdated in a world where paladins can have full immunity without damage loss and mages can have 70% DR with a sizable healer without damage loss.
We used to have Dmg reduction while in Shadowform, which I’d like back.