Fae guardians is one of my favorite priests spells for flavor and play style. Could that find a place in the tree for dragon flight?
Elune and nature oriented priests really need the flavor.
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I’m a little surprised to see this one gone, yeah.
Mindgames was very cool flavor, but so was Fae Guardians.
Kyrian was a little clunky, and Unova was fire and forget, but these two had a lot of flavor, and FG specifically was very useful for each spec in a different way.
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I love boon, but it’s carrying disc healing super hard right now. It’s also super fun for PvP and gives a 3rd school a magic to cast from.
I’m ok with it being gone if the new kit will support it no long being there. It kind of looks like it does too, but we’ll see.
I wish it would be added to wickedness Halo to be honest. Kinda similar to Venthyr Cov is added to Consecration via Seal of mercy
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Replace Lightwell with Fae Guardians renamed as Light Guardians or something. It would actually give H Priests a reason to use HW:S.
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I would wager they will not add that spell back into the game. Fae guardians is generally not utilized by players correctly as it stands, and the mana generation for holy is too high with regards to the ability, especially when you will have the option to dip into shadowfiend, mindgames, and several other passives for even more regen if you need it.
Meaning what?
The problem child for mana would generally be Disc in a raid environment. They can burn mana into throughput more than pretty much any other class barring monk.
In an M+ environment, mana regeneration barely matters anymore since every +10 affix is coming with mana. Death throes as a talent also just won’t work for a large number of raid fights.
And I mean, I think most priests utilized the CDR and Damage Reduction cooldown - and you were kinda forced to utilize it even if you didn’t mean to, anyway. The only spec in which the other fairies were difficult to use was also disc, since PW:S and Shadowmend were both pretty core to their playstyle.
Fae Guardians worked for Holy because you could reduce your Hymns to 2 minute resets instead of 3 minutes. That and getting Salv down to a 3.5-4 minute reset gave Holy Priests a niche in terms of covering healing cds for the raid.
The only thing I did not like about FG is that Holy felt entirely dependent on the mana return faerie to actually not even OOM on fights.
The current alpha talent tree is a tad overloaded with passive and active mana returns though. Mindbender w/ the new mana return feature would be the new Fae Guardians mana return battery.
Fae Guardians was tuned around being a high flex ability with all sorts of possible targets in a range of situations. The end result for most players is very little of all that. The wrathful fairy, for example, had to be reworked in 9.0.5 to auto assign to an enemy probably because healers weren’t even triggering it on their own. Most priests used the cd reduction fairy on themselves in order to force their raid cds to come back quicker, and the damage reduction was either forgotten or defaulted to the priest because they lack personals as it is.
Let me also add that Fae Guardians creates non synergistic gameplay. For example, Let’s say I am disc, and I pop this cd to protect my tank in a bad moment with the damage reduction fairy. Power word: shield him, and then I go on to power word the dying dps - oh … the fairy moved. What if I am multi doting in a room, but i happen to not end on the target everyone is actually focusing on? How much mana do I lose as the fairy randomly jumps around as I multi dot? What if I want to flash heal an ally, but I wanted the cooldown reduction? All of these are examples of how this spell causes you do get roadblocked in trying to use it correctly while maintaining your normal rotation. Sure, you could say that is the point of the spell, but usually those sorts of spells/passives are big enough that you don’t feel punished using them, and more often than not your build already plays into that spell. These examples also reinforce my earlier point on players not utilizing the spell correctly. Many players avoid all these mistakes by not letting the fairys jump at all to begin with, ignoring half of the spell’s value.
While I agree that it’s far from a fire and forget spell like unholy nova is. You’re exagerating a lot and lots of people use it effectively. And as hpriest in raid its not a bad decision to reduce your hymn cd…
Plus, disc for pvp has been picking specific partners to put the cd reduction on as well.
First, that’s not how you save a dying dps as disc…
Second, as disc you have way better shielding mecanics in the base toolkit so you’re way more interrested by the mana or the cd reduction…
Third, this doesn’t happen because disc is balanced around the throughput of kyrian and venthyr and you don’t see discs in dungeon running NF because you’d be basically having crap dps and spamming rapture and shadowmend. It’s viable healing wise. But not dps wise.
Kinda a bad use of the cd to pop it while multi-dotting… for disc/shadow you open most fights like that and holy can do it most of the time as well… so it’s common sense to use the cd after those few innitial casts.
As holy you don’t just spam Flash heal randomly…
Most hpriest run FC with Surge of light and worst case you’ll need to insta cast flash heal on yourself to refresh flash concentration… Heal is better to save someone else with FC…
If you run harmonous then sure maybe you’d run into that issue. But there isn’t really much reason to use flash heal. Its costly and doesn’t heal for all that much.
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I’m not going to go through every point, but let’s just say broadly that you are too focused on an “optimal” rotation/build/behavior. Many of your examples are right, that there is a clear answer as to how to use Fae Guardians efficiently for each spec. But that’s the point. If I’m a holy priest, do I give my cd reduction to anyone else, thinking long and hard on who needs it right now? No, that would affect my hymn. You leave it, and only spam Heal, lol purposely overhealing yourself with free Flash Heal charges if you must refresh your lego buff. I don’t move the dot around for the mana fairy, that would be inefficient. Spend a global on a shield? Lord no, that would be an hps drop. The best way to play Fae Guardians then is to ignore most of what it does (and stand in the blue haste rune that for many is the real reason they are playing the covenant).
You then get into the very large world of people who aren’t playing “efficiently”. Some people will keep multidotting, remembering they need those dots back up because the guide said so. Or they might throw a shield on their friend, desperately trying to save them. If a priest’s power is balanced around having Fae Guardians, the devs create a compounding level of complexity and mistakes for most people, something that usually should be avoided.
Furthermore, from a developer’s point of view, Fae Guardians is a far harder skill to balance around than most. You have something that regens mana for 2 specs, insanity for another, it can work as both a personal defensive, and an external for 36 specs in the game, and it can impact major cd reduction for 36 specs as well. AND, you want to somehow weigh the value of mana regen, cd reduction, and defensives at the same time? Oh! And you’re weighing it against 3 other whole covenant abilities that do very different things! Honestly, this reason alone is probably good enough for why it isn’t in the tree.
As an aside, a lot of examples you gave all require thinking in terms of the current meta, which includes legos, tier, conduits, soulbinds, and covenant abilities that will no longer exist. The last three expansions are heavily dependent on temporary power that cause builds to go lopsided in one direction. This is depicted well in Castle Nathria for Holy where any 4 covenants were still playable (something rare even then), but by the end of the expansion, nearly all parses were Night Fae. This isn’t to say my thinking is any better in a post Shadowlands world, but we have to talk in terms of post Shadowlands when discussing what is being added to the trees.
Is there no world where Fae Guardians is seen again? Of course not. But based on everything stated, I’m doubtful. Who knows, though. Maybe it will be in the next build, have to wait and see.
The cd reduction on the fairy was something I put on my strongest cooldown dependant dps team mates. I didn’t use it for survivability.
I personally love kyrian and liked that it gave us another casting school.
I think the only one that wouldn’t “make sense” the most would be FG. But FG the mechanics of it are fine. We would just need a aesthetic change.
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No Lightwell is staying thanks.
Throw it in the early part of the tree as a dead talent option where it belongs.
Damn everyone hates Lightwell give it a chance.
I gave it a chance for since TBC. It’s dead to me like it was every expansion it was an option.
Lightwell was actually a decent spell when people utilized it.
No it wasn’t. It required folks to click a small object and when folks did, they were rapidly clicking to ensure usage. They would need to go out of their way to click it as well. The well was click spammed into non-existence. It’s a stagnant ability that when you place it, it’s placed. The HoT has always been weak. The times it was automated, it would throw the HoT on targets already HoTed.
It’s dogwater and doesn’t deserve to be the last talent option for H Priests.
Their attempt to even bring it back in their DF iteration still doesn’t even qualify as helpful.
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