Did 11.0.5 Forget Priest?

Swift Responses? Blizzard hasn’t posted in the Priests forums since Feb.

Not expecting Daily… but maybe once a month? Is that a hard request?

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That’s a definition of mission impossible for him. You are talking about a guy who if the two of you where outside under a clear blue sky and he accidently said it was green he would jump through every imaginable hoop to try and avoid saying he was wrong.

It’s about the only consistent thing about him and it happens so often I wonder why anyone takes him serious at all.

We had feedback in the Dragonflight beta:
https://www.bluetracker.gg/wow/topic/us-en/1279512-feedback-priests/

They specifically made a post saying were not giving you these things because of x, y, and z. Every class had 6+ blue posts minimum. Some had upwards of 14. This expansion? Literally 0-1 posts for the majority of classes in game. Also, the alpha/beta cycle was 2 months shorter then in DF. This is the first expansion in the games history where you had classes/specs not receive overhauls.

So that leaves us stuck in limbo. Why did we not get a revamp in the beta? Nobody knows. Are we getting a revamp? Nobody knows. This is what frustrates people the most: the blatant lack of communication.

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I think I specifically said beta forums were generally the only chance of communication. I was also IN those beta threads, and in TWW I was in the very first alpha thread talking about how bad Oracle was power-wise and how voidweaver was blowing stuff up.

And I think we all know that TWW was very quickly made. More than one content creator has talked to death about how fast it came out compared to previous expansions. And it was obvious considering the timeline of the last 3 expansions vs TWW’s. And, you know, they only ever responded in regards to new hero spec issues. Healing priest also got this in the form of a few large changes to Oracle during the alpha/early beta. Shadow priests got some initial response, too, though they made no changes I think any Spriest wanted, and didn’t really address the feedback they were responding to.

But let’s be real, you’re saying exactly what I am on this. “Literally 0-1 posts for the majority of classes in the game” means it’s NOT a priest problem. It’s not that priest is getting ignored in some tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about the class being persecuted against. It’s just Blizz not responding to things, and there’s an elephant in the room here in that they got bought by MS with a big portion of this expansion already done and had a ton of layoffs. It’s not super surprising that we’ve had near-zero communication and all of it has been through CMs.

Is it a good thing? No. But it’s also not a priest thing. It never has been.

I never said it was just a Priest issue.

The only scenario for the no-changes is (get your bingo card):

  1. They thought Priests were “fine” and didn’t need any changes.
  2. All the time wasted on the Oracle debate detracted away from changes to Priests.
  3. They didn’t have time for Priest updates.
  4. They’re trying to hire a Priest dev.

Starting with Dragonflight, Blizzard shifted towards drip feeding content and class updates over patches. This helps keep people subscribed longer because every 8 weeks you have something new.

Stuff like Dracthyr being available for all races, Paladin general tree updates, etc. should have been at the expansion launch, but they need to build hype for the next patch.

With how rushed the beta was: 11.0.5 is really like the real expansion launch because it has the extra 8 weeks of development time that we would have gotten in a 6 month beta.

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There are multiple people in this thread saying it is.

That’s what I was responding to initially, sorry if that wasn’t clear (genuinely, not trying to be snarky though I know this post kinda sounded that way :sweat_smile:).

I don’t love this argument given the person who was interviewed for oracle as one of the developers responsible was Talbadar.

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When people are frustrated, they generally act out of emotion rather than logic. “Blizz hates Priests” is just an easy defense mechanism. #priestsdeservebetter is a catchy phrase that at the end of the day didn’t work in Dragonflight so I don’t know why people thought it’d work in TWW.

Either way, I think everyone universally agrees that Priests need an overhaul. For me: the beta felt like it was a complete waste of my time because people spent hours writing constructive feedback, making videos, etc., and it all got thrown out the window.

I was reading the WoWhead tier lists, and they even pointed out the issue that Holy/Disc were attached at the hip to tier set bonuses that are gone, and that directly impacts their performance.

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I remember them posting almost daily back in the day. Now its radio silent and its frustrating. Atleast have some communication about whats going on. Transparency is key to keeping a happy community. Look at Diablo 4, those devs do it constantly.

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Literally all that feedback from beta was like ot never happened. What a waste of time to beta test priest or write anything

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While I do agree with you, Blizzard did fuel this perception with the PW:GFY post during DF beta. Every class was getting old abilities back, often just because they were fun, or having existing abilities increased in power, like Banish, for no apparent reason, and the way Blizzard approached that for priest was Gene Wilder’s “you get nothing!” rant and talked about how they didn’t want to homogenize classes but then took a bunch of priest tools and gave better versions to mage, evoker, and shaman.

Blizzard doesn’t hate priests, but they certainly don’t seem interested in working on them at all and seem perfectly happy leaving the class in the brainstorming phase of development even after promising to revisit all the things they admitted were unfinished, poorly implemented, and ill-conceived.

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While I have faith we may see Priest changes (Historically, shifts in plan have happened during a patch’s beta), I must admit? I’d honestly rather they just do the simplest solutions. Shadow doesn’t need a full rework - it just needs its aoe component to be reconsidered, and every priest desperately needs a mobility button.

Those, to me at least, are the primary complaints. Shadow Crash feels bad to press - and I’m not actively opposed to Psychic Link sticking around, but doing literally anything to improve our dot spread would be a blessing.

RE: Mobility, you’re all priest players, you know what’s up.

Lastly, maybe not as pie in the sky as hoping for a mobility spell, but dear god I hope we get some visual touch-ups, I want to puke every time I see something like metamorphosis and apotheosis side by side.

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Shadow’s current tree has no reason to exist, which defeats the purpose of bringing back talent trees. It’s just the nodes you are structurally required to take (like Dispersion), active abilities that are functionally mandatory (Void Torrent), and then a collection of passive damage boosts that have zero implications on gameplay.

As broken as holy and discipline’s trees are, they do technically present options even if the half the options are horrendously weak. The class tree is almost as bad as shadow’s, which is part of why priest getting a ground-up rework is constantly being brought up - if the talent trees are the classes, then doing a full pass over every talent is a rework. Priest hasn’t had a pass on its talents for any tree since halfway through DF beta. Every “rework” has touched only 3-4 talents at most.

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You mean, him being very antagonistic and trolling? Everyone was “Down with Ghostcrawler!” starting in Wrath through cataclysm. That’s what you miss? Sounds like rose tinted glasses.

“I like long walks on the beach, drinking gin, and nerfing paladins.” -Ghostcrawler.

This what might be what Blizzard sees?
Paladin – 13.1% (-0.2%)
Druid – 11.0% (+0.1%)
Hunter – 10.2% (-0.4%)
Warrior – 9.2% (-0.3%)
Shaman – 7.9% (-0.1%)
Death Knight – 7.7% (-0.4%)
Mage – 7.3% (no change)
Priest – 7.0% (+0.3%)
Demon Hunter – 7.0% (+0.3%)
Warlock – 6.6% (+0.1%)
Monk – 5.7% (+0.2%)
Rogue – 3.9% (+0.1%)
Evoker – 3.4% (+0.2%)

According to Icyveins priests are tied with demon hunters in class representation highest upticks. Which might signal that the player base is happy with the class overall.

I’m not saying I’m happy mind you, but numbers might say something else.

A ton of people are playing priests because they literally carried the main antagonist around for an entire expansion. If blizzard can’t figure that out, then they are dumber than I thought.

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I just want to point out a couple things I discovered while digging through logs. Keep in mind this is based off of limited logs and only for Normal since its the most accessible and has higher parses available.

  • Shadow Priest Ranks
    – 18th of 26 for Average DPS (466k)
    – 25th of 26 for Highest DPS (684k)

  • Top DPS Ranks
    – Average DPS: Arcane Mage (567k)
    – Highest DPS: Fury Warrior (1.07m)

  • Difference:
    – Average DPS: 101k
    – Peak DPS: 323k

The gap is huge - this doesn’t come down to gear or skill. This is raw imbalance.

At least we’re not Fire Mage I guess… which is 26th in both. :person_shrugging:

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Oooh, ptr patch notes update…they didn’t even bother putting the priest in this one.

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This is what happens when management doesn’t hire enough people and creates an unrealistic work schedule.

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Might as well copy/paste my complaint here.

Shadow is a Frankenstein of outdated talents and abilities that don’t fit in modern wow.

-Our talents have no synergy, Shadowy Apparition needs to go away forever.

-Our only source of AoE is locked outside a 20 second cd, just merge VT into SW:P and make it AoE baseline for shadow. There’s no reason for it to be 2 diferent spells anymore, it’s a relic from a time when dots were powerful and VT needed a cast time, now they exist only as a debuff to trigger procs, gain mastery and use psychic link. No other class with AoE dots has such restrictions and yet we are the only ones who require our enemies to have dots on them for our class to simply “function” at all…

-Turn Shadow Crash into an AoE spender that deals full mastery damage and can proc a free cast like mind sear used to but in this case it’s instant so no chance of getting interrupted. Put Shadow Crash on a choice node with Psychic Link.

-Void Weaver needs to be redesigned for Shadow so we get consistent damage, we don’t need another cooldown window that competes with Void Eruption.

-We have no mobility, pvp is a hellish turret punching bag, perma interrupted and locked out of shadow spells.

The Devs don’t understand that buffing our damage doesn’t fix our disastrous class mechanics, especially in short aoe fights and pvp. I’m tired of raid damage charts being used as a metric to argue that Shadow Priest is doing fine.

I’ve given up on my priest after 3 expansions, back to Frost DK for me.

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