So disc priest needs some love.out of all the healers , we are the only healer with a tree insanely rigid and expensive,playing 1 build in pretty much all content.
Disc suffers from having any meaningful healing only inside pet windows. Outside pet windows we can’t do anything, especially in 5 man content where we frantically spam smite in order to reset bender and do any healing at all. In tww rapture becomes very bad and no way to avoid it, shields are so weak and we need to spend so many talents and buttons just to make only 1 shield do something.
Uppies is neat but insanely expensive ( practically noone ever talents the extensions) and its a ticket to certain death more often than not. I really like uppies but if only i could move while it channels…
Disc priest suffers from identity crisis and being the actual pet where the main character of the build is mindbender.
Edit: after beta testing the oracle tree in m+ , and without mind bender talents , by essentially picking all the left side capstones , disc does no healing at all. there is literally no healing even throwing out 4 penaces, having all 3 permonitions up , shielding etc. the only healing window you do anything above 100k healing is with ultimate penitence
Thats the problem im talking about. The mindless frantic smite spam to reset mindbender is not fun gameplay. You can effectively ignore everything thats going on and just spam smite so you can do any healing at all
I dont want to reset bender so often as a playstyle. I want it to function as a CD but i also want the kit to have power or if i wish to choose another path on the spec tree so be it. Atm its non - viable. Not talking about optimal, talking about non viable. You cant heal anything
Don’t let that person make you feel like you’re in the wrong. Everything you said is objectively true.
While tuning is sure to come on the beta for Priest (I hope…), Disc is heavily pigeonholed into the shadow side of the spec tree and has turned into a pseudo-pet class. In my opinion, Shadowfiend and Mindbender should have remained on its original “longer” cooldown (no CDR), and stayed as a mana button. I hate that its identity was changed. Shadow Covenant being an active spell on its own was not bad at all as it was before.
Smite spamming for CDR is boring as sin, and we have lost our identity as a sustain and damage mitigation healer— completely transforming into a burst window healer.
No longer can we effectively triage heal or rely on a Power Word: Shield to withstand a chunky damage event. Divine Aegis is laughably weak for being such a cool passive. I really wish Blizz would make the left side of the tree’s holy talents more powerful again.
Left side of the talent tree’s holy talents could have a more traditional Disc gameplay experience as a sustain/damage mitigation healer, and keep the right side of the tree, the shadow side, a bursty healer like it is now. And actually tune these accordingly so they can both feel viable.
Something has got to give here. The one viable build we have had since the season 3 DF “de-work” is not going to cut it forever. And I’m honestly surprised more people haven’t gone into an uproar about this. (Probably since all the healers quit and switched to DPS…)
I already pointed this out in the beta section, but Disc is still too attached to stacking damage/healing modifiers even though the point of Disc’s revamp was to remove them. Before the revamp you had Schism, Shadow Covenant, and also TE with needing to weave 4 Holy/Shadow spells for Harsh Discipline.
Post revamp it was Mind Blast for Schism and spamming Smite to reset Mind Bender for Shadow Covenant as fast as possible because of the S3 tier set bonus. You either go from Mindbender to the next one or there’s 5-10s gaps while it’s down.
With the WW the new gimmick is keeping a high uptime on Voidweaver’s new Mindblast mechanic. I think it’s even worse than the S3 tier set bonus because while that and Shadow Covenant are on cd your healing throughput drops by like 50%.
I don’t think Disc is lacking in identity. All things considered in a side-by-side, Disc is way more stacked than Holy in terms of healing and utility. With Rapture and Luminous Barrier being buffed: those two abilities will be incredibly strong for damage mitigation in 5-mans. Holy literally has absolutely nothing other than Divine Hymn and Guardian Spirit. Once Holy loses that S3 tier set bonus as well that’s a lot of on demand throughput healing vanishing.
The changes to rapture although in theory good for 5 man, in practice the current beta tuning is abysmal. Atm its better to find a way to path out of rapture. Luminous barrier is ridiculous,its severely undertuned
Wanted to highlight an issue in TWW: the discipline spec flavor text mentions that we shield our allies. That part of our identity is very weak on TWW beta to the point that is unplayable.
After testing thoroughly on beta, and picking all the left side capstone talents , without taking the shadowfiend talents on the right side, and picking oracle as a specialization, i was unable to provide any meaningful hps in m+ beta. There is no power in the healing kit atm and shields are so weak that basically its a grave mistake to press them.
After testing mistweaver monk aswell, i came to the conclusion that monk has much more powerful shields than discipline priest( the original shield class)
They have life cocoon on a short CD, nizhuao powered enveloping mists shields which apply a very good 5 man shield and they proc quite often and reliably, and the big 5 man shield when you activate celestial. Also when you press conduit of the celestials you get again shields.
How did it end up that another class has much stronger absorbs gameplay very smoothly baked in the rotation while we cannot provide that kind of shielding?
Priests are the only class with two healing specs is why. It’s also easier for me to compare apples to oranges since I did a couple hundred keys in both specs this expansion from S1-S3. Having expertise in both areas allows me to offer better constructive criticism in order to improve Holy in particular.
Yet: all that seems to be going into deaf ears because there’s literally zero talent changes to any Priest spec on the beta.
In the WW everyone has about +40% more stamina then they do now so people are going to spend more time until <100% hp then what were currently used too.
Also, the reason our numbers look so low is because they have not tuned our heals yet which is a byproduct of there being no Priest revamps yet. When Holy Paladins and Mistweavers got revamped on the beta their baseline healing was increased by +20%. That’s why if you look at the logs both those specs are miles ahead of everyone else in hps.
Post launch there’s probably going to be heaps of hotfixes and changes because Blizzard is rushing these betas now.
I just pray they do even a slight revamp for Disc AND Holy in any capacity. I honestly believe the trees have major flaws in them that tuning alone can’t fix.
We’re really running out of time for the beta here so I’m pretty concerned. I do hope they don’t just rush any Priest reworks though in the same vein. I’d rather wait until a bit after the expansion launch for a well done rework rather than a quick mish-mash of fixes just to get the product out the door.
This. At this point, I just want them to completely avoid touching priest in beta at all. Nothing good has come from it in the past when they’ve thrown something together real quick, take one week of feedback, address maybe 1/20 of the feedback, and ship it.
They should just do nothing with priest for the remainder of beta, get every other class as polished as they can, and then spend 11.0 working on priest for 11.1.
I’d rather see them delay the expansion a month then to rush out a half-finished product. I sure as heck am not resubbing if there’s no major Priest talent tree revamp before launch.
i dont know whats going on. we are going forward with basically 1 hero tree. Oracle has so many issues , is so numerically behind that its gonna be dead on arrival. Like i get what they are trying to do , but cmon blizzard you can do better. it doesnt suit what a priest should do . i really hope they dont become stubborn and keep on this tree
Holy actually plays out really smoothly, the problem is mostly a numerical one that can easily be rectified by bumping their healing by 10% across the board. Or 7% with a revert to Salvation’s nerf when it went from 30 to 15 seconds reset per holy word cast.
Disc however is the actual problem, you can’t just bump their numbers up by x% across the board and call it a day because it doesn’t actually address their binary issue of having basically 0 hps with no ramps and 5 million hps when they ramp.
Healers having niches is fine and good design, like holy priests and rshaman being better at stacked healing while rdruids, pallies and mistweavers can spread heal better, but taking it to the utmost extreme where a healer cannot do anything outside of their niche is bad design that is frustrating for players.
Disc doesn’t need 5 million hps during their ramps to be the best burst healer in the game, lower it down to a more reasonable ~3 million hps and move that power budget elsewhere so they can actually do something meaningful between ramps.
I fully agree they should delay the expansion, probably even more than a month, but we know they won’t. I also won’t be buying the expansion until they do a fundamental priest rework, and it’s increasingly looking like that just means I won’t be playing TWW.
The shaman post has nothing to do with us, but the tone of the post shows what priests could be experiencing instead of years of feedback fallen on deaf ears and silence punctuated only with PW:GFY.
I saw that the Shaman honor talent “Traveling Storms” is coming to the PvE tree for them and I was lowkey very upset to see that. Not because I don’t want them to have nice things, but because…
Shaman already has way more utility and crowd control compared to Priests, and this just reminded me of when they took Shining Force away from us. Really disappointed about that still. Super annoying how Psychic Scream and Void Tendrils are melee-ranged crowd control on a cloth caster class. Not to mention Void Tendrils was nerfed to a shorter duration recently.