I love the direction they are taking the tree, with it having great potential for giving Holy more opportunity to play with proactive healing than the reactive healing our kit favors. It’s not that I’m not having some fun with it, especially after playing Archon all of TWW, but it just feels a bit…empty. Rather than considering preferred playstyle, I find myself asking “is there anything Oracle is doing that couldn’t be accomplished in Archon?”. I don’t even find any talent necessarily “bad” in that tree, but it just could stand to have some more “zip” added for Holy specifically (and maybe even in general).
I notice that it modifies less of our for Holy than it does for Disc (Prayer of Mending vs. Penance + PWS), which could be a place to start. I love spamming PoM, but I don’t think that there is enough there to feel the value added. I would love to see some more benefits for appropriately pre-empting damage with PoM or see some other core skill be highlighted (my vote is Smite or Holy Fire). Just something to offer more to do or think about beyond firing off PoM whenever it’s off CD.
I might be missing something, so feel free to share your thoughts.
For smite and holy fire, the engine is already vehemence + empyreal == big reward for smiting/novaing a lot and getting as many holy fires off as possible. You don’t really want more than that because we get no healing value from our damage.
As far as the tree goes, ultimate serenity has improved the tree by adding a playstyle altering capstone that can be played with oracle or archon. The rest of tree is just going to be kind of obvious because if you’re playing archon you’re going to take all the PoM talents full stop. At this point PoM has a shield and renew baked into it, and tons of ways of generating extra charges. It feels like Oracle vs Archon is now the choice between simple vs complex in terms of buttons you actually have to press. Feeling less engaged with Oracle is going to be super normal since it’s literally just spam PoM and Serenity and consume SoL procs.
IMO the only thing I wish was different is lightweaver should be better positioned to be taken by Oracle, because it feels so good to make PoH a button worth pressing.
Got my priest to 236, tried oracle and archon. PoM just does not heal enough. If Prompt Prognosis wa changed to increase PoMs heal when it triggers vs cast on a target, Oracle could be viable in mythics. I played 5 dungeons running oracle as holy and was forced to switch for the last boss in blinding vale, it just was not healing enough. Archon is just better until oracle gets tweaked. Oracle for disc is pretty insane though.
I think it goes further than just a choice of simple versus more complex. Arguably, Archon was the easier pick back in TWW, but it still managed to have some impactful reasons to pick it as an option: from much higher uptime on healing CDs to double fear bomb to more frequent SoL procs. I think that the new Oracle tree could use just a little extra “hook” to set it apart and lets it interact more meaningfully with the core Holy tree.
For example, when I referenced Holy Fire in the OP, the idea in my head was a tweak to Preventive Measures to cause Holy Fire to grant Surge of Light (moving the healing increase to PoM to another talent like Prompt Prognosis). That could add an extra layer to that Empyrean Blaze/Burning Vehemence engine that makes it more attract to an Oracle vs. an Archon. Another was a choice node on Foreseen Circumstances that modifies Divine Hymn in some way. Just some 1-2 extra knobs to consider when selecting the tree without interfering with the core gameplay too much.
Definitely agree with you on Lightweaver. I think there is even an argument to be made to have Prayer of Healing moved to baseline because of it. I like that there are talents that are clearly more attractive to one Hero over the other, but as it stands, Oracle just isn’t getting enough out of that talent (same can be said for Divinity).
I enjoy using PoM as well, but I do find that while playing Oracle, one of two things happens.
It stacks up so fast during low damage windows that 3 (sometimes 4) people in the party have almost full stacks.
I go to toss it on someone like the tank, then all of a sudden another active set jumps to them. Suddenly they’ve gone from 0 > 12 > 14 stacks, and I’ve just basically wasted a PoM cast.
Oracle really should’ve also increased the maximum stack count that PoM could hit. Alternatively, maybe something like “If an ally takes more than 10% of their health in one instance of damage, Prayer of Mending will use an additional charge for every 5% thereafter”.
This way, if someone takes 10% of their health in damage, it’ll use 2 stacks.
15%, it’ll use 3 stacks. 20%, it’ll use 4 stacks, and so on.
Something that does actually have some kind of impact for large burst damage.
Also, I really think Apotheosis doesn’t fit Oracle very well. It feels a little bit out of place to me… I wish we had something better.
The issue is really that Oracle does not play well with how they changed it + the rest of the spec.
Before, premonition was allowing a lot more flexibility and we had better passive healing coming from other places. Prompt prognosis as a tier set was kind of a band-aid on PoM in dungeon content where ST healing was fairly important, and we could never actually cast PoM because there was no initial heal before it.
They took prem out to simplify, but what’s left is not super great - we can’t use 4 PoMs back to back for ST healing, and we can’t play with the CD reduction for holy words really because we don’t get 3 extra PoMs or empowered renews every minute, nor do we get double dispels anymore without mass - which has a longer CD and only hits magic.
We also don’t have the fallback to cheese through AoE damage with self healing on piety anymore because the piety value is too low.
Basically it puts Oracle in a spot where it’s still solid for raid healing coverage, but in dungeon it’s pretty lackluster.
Oracle playstyle surprised me and feels better than I expected in dungeons as there is almost always something worthwhile to cast. I’ve tinkered a lot with the trees and have a couple presets I prefer now. But I wouldn’t mind a couple small changes to help power as I can understand why it may feel like a struggle to keep up, tho my last couple tree specs felt much more comfortable. Also it Feels like everyone has renew on them always which is pretty nice passive heals.
I’d love to see something similar to the talent we had in TWW that gives a burst of healing when PoM jumps to a target affected by Renew, but instead switched to being targets already affected by PoM. Maybe if PoM jumps to some a targeted affected by PoM, a portion of those stacks are instantly consumed to “make room” for the incoming stacks.
We have a taste of that already with the Divine Service talent, but I think we could up add another layer there.
