I feel a little lied to because I’m sure you also were sold on the fantasy of “jack of all trades” healer.
The Swiss army knife of tools still remains - the problem is it’s gotten awfully rusty to the point where half of them aren’t fit for purpose (or are largely duplicative) and no new tools were ever introduced.
I only ever felt like a “jack of all trades” healer back in Cata when we had Chakra “stances”.
I don’t miss the micro management of chakras especially considering we only ever sat in one. But I do miss the capability to adapt.
Pretty much this. People need to quit arguing with trash like this and put them on ignore. No feeding the trolls.
Interrupts and quick, direct movement are necessary mechanisms for everything character. Not including them adequately on priest, or any other class, is objectively bad design and needs to be changed. There is no legitimate argument otherwise.
I hope you all get it soon rather than later, but i dont know how much faith anythone can have in Blizzard at this point.
I would like to use PoH as anything but a spell I might use during apotheosis to reset the cool down on Sanctify. I have barely used the spell since coming back in Dragonflight after a 10 year hiatus. At least during Dragonflight it was worth resetting sanctify, whereas it feels a bit weak now and I’ll only do it if serenity is fully reset.
That’s a big difference I’ve noticed having to rely on single target spells to AOE heal, is that I’m finding the need for serenity more than sanctify, whereas in at least S3/S4 of DF I relied on both equally or even favoring sanctify and just for renew procs.
This might have to do with how powerful halo is, at least for archon.
I don’t mind being a cool down healer either though and can adjust my play style accordingly.
The 6% damage buff and 5% PsyLink nerf that we got for tuning, seeing nothing planned for 11.0.5 coming, along with no Dev responses for anything in the past 2 months and foreseeable future…
Giant slap in the face tbh
Im sorry guys but holy was never a jack of all trades. Holy was the traditional mmo healer who could do everything. Holy was just a pure hps machine with many tools to cover everything. I wouldn’t put it into jack of all trades, more like your healing bot( which was)
Haha, I think we have different definitions of “jack of all trades” (note I didn’t say “master of none”). A pure HPS machine, a pure glass cannon healer who could do everything, is precisely what I meant.
Ok we agree. Yes holy used to be that. Now its what? A single target healer with anemic aoe capabilities? And it doesnt even do the best ST healing…
Yeah, holy at this point is a bunch of healing tools, all doing completely different things and usually having zero interactions except for the thin Serendipity mechanic to reset holy words, which is basically a builder/consumer derivative.
There’s no theme, there’s not a lot of synergy, you just have spells that do things and hope that Blizz tunes them appropriately, and half of them they simply don’t for most content. It’s kind of a mess really, not a jack of all trades.
We’ve basically been reduced to playing whack a mole with our priority spells on CD as quickly as possible and ignoring the other half of our toolkit for most things.
I mean, you kinda described the theme and synergy though.
Holy Words and resetting them with Serendipity.
AoE healing is weak right now (I’d argue it’s pretty weak across all classes in the game), but Holy’s got a lot of synergy built towards holy words, and always has. And the new hero talents have a decent number of built in synergies.
Archon works well with lightweaver because it generates SoL procs, which when expended reduce Sanc’s cooldown, which means you’re getting 2 holy words reset as you go.
Oracle has good synergy with PoM (and Salv by extension), but also turns your ST healing into cleave.
The only place we really lack synergy is in trying to split up talents into AoE and ST healing at the same time. A lot of classes suck at this, to be honest, but we’re the class that has the biggest “split” here. We don’t really have any good options for a middle ground outside Healing Chorus, and CoH is so poorly tuned now after all the heal buffs that it doesn’t make much sense to take it.
The only button I really think is TRULY near-useless is PoH though. I really don’t understand why it even exists anymore if they’re doing nothing to help it.
Yeah everybody is confused why they felt the need to nerf spriest overall when it was already down bad.
Serendipity, which is a basic builder/consumer design (casting weaker spells to build up to consume for larger spells) can be an important mechanic, it shouldn’t be the entirety of the class design.
They’ve done synergy and design much better in the past. What is our mastery doing? It’s a HoT that heals when you directly heal, causing more healing and encouraging more healing to do more healing. That’s not a design - you could’ve just baked that into the spells themselves one way or the other.
An example of a real design, and one they’ve used in part in the past, would be to have certain direct spells apply renew (at the level of HoT of our mastery, not the ridiculous joke they’ve turned renew into) , then that renew synergizes to provide a substantial targeted healing buff and when it ticks sufficiently empowers bigger AoE heals.
There are certain talents that lean in these directions, but both the balance and the synergies are haphazard/weak and entirely inconsistent, and it doesn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way. One set of spells should flow into another and certain combos should empower a big payoff, that’s just basic game design, and it’s lacking and no, a basic builder/consumer Serendipity mechanic and buffing Lightweaver isn’t a substitute for actual class design.
Literally the only reason the spec works at all right now is because they’ve lathered on buffs to single target heals, and then for Archon they’ve made Halo a meme-like band aid, for Oracle they’ve given part of what should be baseline functionality back.
To me that feels like throwing bondo on a rusted out old fender and not even spray painting over it and calling it refurbished enough.
There are design pains, to be sure, as have been stated many times around the forums. But shadow is at worst, middle of the pack. It’s definitely not terrible numbers wise.
If 23rd best DPS number wise out of 26 is middle to you, sure.
What ranking are you looking at?
Heroic Nerub-ar Palace DPS Rankings - First Days of Heroic Week from wowhead.
Sure its 95th percentile which, if a spec is bad, will make it look even worse. But even sims put it very low.
The damage is very bad indeed brandy. I can read numbers and compute the difference between what my spell is doing and what my opponents spell is doing.
Truth be told, my guild has only cracked normal so far. But we’re chugging through.
I’ve been doing pretty well, but I’m seeing vastly different ratings on many sites. Sometimes shadow is near 10s sometimes it’s in the dirt.
I just hope we can settle somewhere decent.
What is shaman mastery doing? It’s just a bonus to people who have lower health. That’s not really a design, you coulda baked that into the spells.
What is Monk mastery doing? It’s just a bonus secondary heal when you use a few spells. They coulda baked it into the spells themselves.
etc.
Mastery is rarely spec-defining. It is quite literally all just flat bonuses. The only one that actually affects gameplay meaningfully is Paladin, but that just makes Mastery their worst stat, and they’ve given Paladin ways to make their mastery not as bad to play around in their talents.
I guess I fail to see how this is “real design” rather than just a design you liked.
On its face, it’s not any more interesting than Holy’s current Serendipity based design. Serendepity feels more than just builder/spender, IMO. You’ve got your big goal (salv), which gets reduced by your mid goal (Holy Words), which get reduced by your small spells (Heal/PoH/Renew) with conditionals to make your other spells move the cog wheels too. It overall does affect how you want to build/what you want to focus on.
That’s far more than I can say for Shaman right now - which is a class that has a bunch of random passive bonuses. Shaman feels strong, and I like playing it, but there’s really nothing cohesive about the spec besides their hero talents. Nothing outside the hero talents will affect your gameplay really besides maybe high tide? Primordial wave, I guess, but they removed the weird undulation bug that was making it so strong.
And it also just feels like we’re talking about tuning problems rather than design problems after that.
The spec works because Lightweaver is tuned well. The hero talents have much less to do with it than you’d think. If you took them out, we’d suck, but if you took out the hero talents for any class they’d suck right now. They’re not so much a bandaid as significant supplemental healing.
Evoker Engulf right now is doing like 6 mil a cast because of consume flame and like 3x their next spell. Paladin Dawnlight/Eternal Flame make up a huge portion of their healing. Shaman extra chain heals generated by totems and healing rain are WAY up, but we’re thinking Halo is a bandaid because it’s on top of our list while playing Archon?
If anything, I think the SoL procs generated by Archon Halo are the more interesting part, LOL.
Actually what Holy’s mastery is just a throughput stat. It isn’t designed to really effect your gameplay it just there to tune holy throughput.
It isn’t like shaman who can make use of bigger healers on lower bars meaning they can accept ppl having lower health than a priest can because they will heal more to cover the difference.
Some classes their mastery is just a tunning knob for blizzard to control their output, like Disc, for some it might actually impact how you play.
For the most part all of them are entirely uninteresting compared to what they where originally sold as.