Dear Blizzard. Holy priest deserves better

Classes Priest
1

Holy priest have all spoken. Its clear as day that the devs have utterly failed us. In every fashion. Why should we renew our game time or buy TWW? Why should we give you our money. Why should we be forced to throw away one of the oldest and most beloved class specs in all of warcraft history? Why are you so set on keeping us so far down the bottom of the list that there is an endless feeling of dread among the players and most are looking to play something else entirely.

We should be excited for hero classes. Everyone else is. SO why is Holy priest getting shafted so hard? Why has every decision the design team has made since the game rework when shadowlands launched tageted Holy for a complete and utterly unbearable nerf. I haven’t enjoyed playing my 20yr old main since BFA. it is part of the reason I am only averaging 1 season of game play per expansion now. this has gotten beyond pathetic.

What is our gripes? let’s start with Archon. How poorly designed it is. How it is still the better of the 2 options even as bad as it is. Building the entire kit around an optional talent. One that doesn’t even see an abundance of use in general. One that is so weak that even with building Archon around it, It just looks lacluster and more problematic than anything.

Do I even need to mention oracle? a complete rng train wreck gated behind 30 second intervals where you can never get the buff you need when you need it and have no way to cycle them to do so. Lackluster talents all around such as adding more watered down utility to a prayer of mending that is already nerfed into the dirt. It isn’t making it any better. Not as long as you gate any climatic use of prayer of mending such as Answered Prayers behind 50-100 bounces only to receive enough Apotheosis to reset 1 or 2 of your holy word charges. There is nothing viable nor exciting about Oracle or building around prayer of mending in general. Maybe if Answered prayers had it’s bounce time cut in half (Yes half. 50 bounces by default, 25 if you take the extra talent point) And made the Apotheosis full duration but half effect or something. I honestly don’t know. the route is just bad in general

And where to begin with manna management and endless 1 minute cooldown gating stressing the manna further. Serenity and sanctify need reduced to 30 second cooldowns and the recharge from POH and FH cut in half to make it more consistent and less stressful on manna to have to bring them back around. This is so long past due. even having 2 charges is not enough with the fast based burst centric meta. It forces people to have to spam POH and Flash heal, eating away all of their manna just to be able to have anything that can keep pace available leading to Holy priest becoming the picknick priest, as they are always found sitting on the ground drinking while their team dies.

Manna manna manna! Why take rupture off of baseline and make it disc only? Why replace our manna hymn with symbol of hope? Why make the Ai for shadow fiend so bad that it stands around doing nothing half of it’s very short and useless existence? Why do Holy priest have the worst passive manna regen in the game of all healers?

WHY?

These are deal breaking assessments of the state of Holy priest in the year 2024. After 2 expansions of neglect and a third that looks to be even worse than the rest. As everyone else gains leaps in power creep from Hero classes, we are left holding the bag again with nothing of use, no fix to preexisting design choice failures, and complete silence from these useless devs that can’t do their jobs right clearly.

Why should I pay to play this game when the class and spec I have used for 20 years is endlessly getting left behind and even worse, endlessly nerfed into the dirt for no good reason at all?

6 Likes
2

Disc priest agree- the priest dev is incompetent.

1 Like
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Can we please mske it priests deserve better instead of just holy? Im a disc aswell and i feel severely neglected

5 Likes
4

I’ve been advocating for all 3 specs. I play both Disc/Holy so I’m well aware of both specs issues on the beta.

8 Likes
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Priest in general, in dungeons priests have chastise as one spec, but no other form of cc.

I dont care about anything else, all that mumbo-jumbo is tuning - hero talents whatever. Just give a baseline interrupt, cc cd and dispel poison and ill be fine. Just two things, thats all I ask.

1 Like
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I think the biggest problem healing priests in general face is too much divergence between holy and disc to begin with.

They’ve certainly dialed it back from the extremes we reached in Shadowlands where they felt like two entirely different classes, but there should still be more overlap between the holy and disc toolkits. If they did have more in common that would mean less development time and balancing, and more room to explore the relatively few talents and passives that (should) distinguish the specs.

7

Thank you for making these posts. I have literally filled out suggestions on some of the mentioned problems to blizzard over and over and once again, priests are literally going into the dev dumpster.

  1. We have 2 talent points, dispel magic and improved purify. If we have to spend 2 talent points for this, why can’t one of them also dispel poison or be a curse dispel? It would be so simple and make us viable for dungeons?
  2. They took away shining force because it was too strong in PVP. But literally left us with no interrupt, knock, kick and it leaves me useless when I think of all the other classes that have several ways to deal with interrupts.
  3. We have no lust to bring, we have no brez, we have literally no interrupts, and based on the new dungeon pool, we can’t deal with the debuffs.
  4. So why even bring a priest to keys? We don’t have anything valuable besides fort buff that can be added by bringing a shadow priest. We have PI, which can also be brought by a shadow priest.
  5. With all the recent changes to healer output and tank changes, like Holy Pally, Resto Druid (yet again), Mistweaver, etc. we will most likely see a meta again that will be more dungeon specific based on interrupts, dispels, curses, etc. which blizzard was not supposed to be in support of based on their past posts, but priests will not be found in any of those.
    Final thought: I appeal to the Devs to revisit not only the lack luster hero talents for holy, but also the utility priest can bring into mythic plus. At this point any bone you could throw our way would be much appreciated to your priest player base. Thank you.
5 Likes