In Raids, it’s up against Halo - an objectively better tool for dealing with a lot of players all over the place with predictable windows of big damage.
In frenzied Mythic+, where it should shine, it’s up against 2 guaranteed return talents (for Holy and Disc), Purge the Wicked as well as Benediction. Both of these are very easy to use and have very noticeable impact - even in situations where Divine Star should shine, it’s a tough trigger to pull.
Yet, Divine Star is probably my favorite Priest spell. I love the manual aiming, the short cooldown and it’s so satisfying to hit a big group of allies & enemies.
Can we make this one baseline so I can use it more?
Divine Star is actually really good for raid on some fights where the group is clustered together. It does about double the HPS than Halo if you’re consistently hitting the group with it. It can be your #2-3 heal easily if you’re hitting 10+ people all the time. Halo itself is just very underwhelming. It’s healing should be doubled if anything because it’s on a 40s cd. Benediction is still good if the groups spread.
Divine Star probably should be baseline though. It’s our best AOE damage spell for M+ and it also heals the group.
Yeaaaah I think this is best as a talent. Honestly in the Holy Tree it’s GREAT. There’s reasons for picking all three, there and it comes mostly down to preference.
In Disc it’s a little strange because honestly I think Purge the Wicked should be the baseline spell there. (And Shadow Covenant reworked to be non-holy damage, rather than shadow damage)
I want them to bring back the pre-legion prayer of healing. Where it healed based on group, and you could see the incoming healing on everybody. Now I can’t see incoming healing on my raid frames and it annoys me to no end.
I mean, realistically, since we don’t have an instant-AoE DoT applicator like resto druid has, it is asking a bit much to juggle SW:P, Holy Fire, Chastise, Smite AND the covenant abilities in between procs and keeping FC up, since DPS time is mostly downtime on holy. And of course it’s worse on disc.
There’s a lot of things I’d want baseline or added to both priest specs before a very niche ability like Divine Star. Feel like baseline abilities should either be reliable bread and butter abilities for the spec, or else extremely flavorful. Divine star I’d say is neither.
I mean, they took away PW:S from holy in BFA. It in no way improved hpriest, and generally as weak as the spell is it’s at least better to have some absorb available than none at all. If nothing else it’s useful QoL in a lot of content.
They should make it more interesting either with a Rapture option for hpriest or making self-shielding more of a reliable defensive CD (balanced appropriately, of course) but it was annoying when they just flat-out removed it and replaced it with… nothing.
You’d have a point if Sunfire was all resto did for its damage - it’s not even close to what they have to do to do meaningful damage in a dungeon environment. We get more damage for just hitting Dstar off CD than they’ll get from refreshing sunfire. So your point doesn’t really make a lot of sense. If anything I think you’re emphasizing DoTs way too much. You should refresh them when you can and the target’s not about to die, but like… Just getting some out while the pull’s happening is all you really need to do. Dstar and Boon does the rest.
Dstar really isn’t niche at all? It’s high damage on grouped mobs, and high healing on grouped allies. If things aren’t grouped, Benediction is a good passive healing increase, and Halo is close to even with Benediction, but does damage too. That’s the difference between the talents. If your group is going to be stacked a decent chunk, or mobs will be stacked, you always take divine star. If you’re looking at a spread fight, you take Halo/Benediction depending on if you want the extra damage/burst healing from Halo, or if you just want the passive Benediction healing for Rot damage.