I just want to start off with saying thank you for listening to our feedback because it was a bumpy road throughout the beta and the last few patches with the lack of feedback.
I’m just going to give my initial feedback because I need to see what the talent tree looks like and also test the changes myself on the PTR.
To start with everything looks to be in a step in the right direction. Filler talents removed, abilities consolidated, 2 point talents trimmed down to 1, more end tree talent options, more interesting talents overall, and more playstyle options.
Initial thoughts: areas that were missed
No root removal or mobility - This is a Priest wide issue that effects us in Mythic raiding. We have to get rescued and get externals just to do Mythic fights. Raz, Tindral, and Queen are prime examples. You have to P2W with the Dracthyr race just to get out of knockbacks.
Divine Hymn - No talent option to cast while moving, no self-absorb shield like Disc’s uppies, and you’re forced to choose between having it on a 2 minute cd vs making it stronger. It’s pretty frustrating when you have random RNG floor swirlies and have to cancel your Hymn. Also, I think it’s pretty much a no brainer having it on a 2 minute cd is going to be the only logical choice for raid.
Renew - Renew’s baseline healing is incredibly low on retail and Empowered Renew just increases its healing to do the same as a Flash Heal with a 12s cd. You can’t build a gameplay style around hardcasting Renew when you can only cast it every 12s. If that 12s Renew casted it on 4 other people then yeah: go for it tiger.
Symbol of Hope - Symbol of Hope needs to be buffed back to 1 minute for M+ imho.
No M+ utility - Holy is still lacking heavily in the utility department compared to Disc. Disc has Barrier, Rapture, Lenience, more damage, and stronger absorbs overall. We need something to give us some oomf.
Flash Heal and Heal - You removed CoH and consolidated it into PoH so why do we still need to have two separate single target heals?
Shadow Word Pain - Holy has no talent or ability to spread SWP around like Disc and Shadow, SWP does less damage then Holy Fire w/ Burning Vehemence and Smite, and it doesn’t CDR your Holy Words. I think you just need to chuck SWP out the window or make Holy Fire spread it like Disc does with Penance.
Holy’s dps is low compared to Disc. This is mainly a tuning issue, but I can do 100k+ more overall dps as Disc then Holy.
Oracle is still underwhelming for raid healing and it needs massive buffs to compete with Archon.
First I wanna say I agree with most of the OP’s points above.
LACK OF MOBILITY — giving us DH on the move would help a LOT, even if it keeps it’s original cooldown.
RENEW BUILDS — I completely agree that building our output around RENEW is a big, big mistake. Holy priests are not traditionally HoT healers, let’s keep that power at the DRUID which needs more uppage on that side of their house.
CIRCLE OF HEALING — removing this isn’t helping our situation in M+ and certainly does not help the MOBILITY problem ONE BIT. We need better group healing and this… (below)… doesn’t cut it.
Instead, put CoH back and increase its healing throughput slightly and having it apply a renew. And then REDESIGN Prayer of Healing to be one of our Holy Words, let’s call it “Holy Word: Prayers”. It’s now an instant, working similarly to Holy Word: Serenity, with 2 stacks and applies to every party member within 100 yds. You can regen the stacks by casting Flash Heal.
HEAL — this spell is unusable (for me) with the cast times it has and our lack of mobility, even when spec’d into Lightweaver. Flash Heal is better and makes Heal redundant. Remove that and keep CoH as outlined above.
SWP — definitely rework this for holy and make HOLY FIRE spread as OP says above; remove its CD.
Holy DPS — reduce the cast time of Smite; when it crits, it applies Holy Fire dot as above.
ORACLE — completely agree with OP that it’s underwhelming but I wouldn’t sacrifice Archon for it. I’d rework Oracle to synergize more with GROUP HEALING for M+ viability, and keep Archon in synergy with AOE RAID HEALING.
Spirit of redemption is an iconic ability from the priest toolkit. It’s been the icon of the spec for a long time. So far the ability has had low to no impact at all in modern wow, restitution is the only thing since it’s introduction in legion as a legendary a way to make it into something more interesting.
But locking restitution as a choice node with such an important talent like Guardian Angel it makes losing too much for something that should be integrated into SoR and the spec in general.
Holy priest has almost no defensives, in fact, the worst healer in terms of defensives. Having SoR as a baseline self brez should be a core aspect of the spec, considering it’s description says “A versatile healer who can reverse damage on individuals or groups and even heal from beyond the grave.”
I can understand nerfing the rez from afterlife (Eventhough I think thematically it was perfect for what holy priest represents) but consider just upgrading SoR into having added Restitution as a baseline effect.
On other side, as these changes are welcome and it actually opens up the gameplay for holy priest to not be that repetitive and boring, it doesn’t quite hit the mark in what are the biggest problems the spec has.
Personally, the spec still lacks heavily in Mobility, Dispel profile, Defensive and most important… utility.
The talent tree is up for the PTR so I’m giving my thoughts here:
Restitution or Guardian Spirit is a very hard tradeoff choice to pick and I like it.
The left-side of the tree is all PoH talents and ends with Dispersing Light/Trail of Light which are single target heal talents.
Everlasting Light, Enlightenment, Divine Service, and Cosmic Ripple are still filler talents, but you have more options to pick around them which is good.
Seraphic Crescendo is basically the guaranteed pick for Holy in raid because it makes Hymn a 2 minute cd. Gales of Song feels like it’ll have a lot more play for M+ because it’s 30 stacks of PoMs being launched out while you channel which should trigger Answered Prayers.
Empowered Renew is bad and needs a redesign.
Top and middle of the tree are A+. I have so many more points to spend now on talents that feel meaningful and impactful
The bottom of the tree has the most issues: 2-point talent point bloats and Miracle Worker and Holy Celerity are both mandatory talent picks. You really should just combine these talents into 1 or make them baseline
Answered Prayers is a raid mandatory talent as well and it’s all the way on the bottom right of the tree.
Trail of Light should NOT be a bottom tree talent. Make it a choice node with Holy Mending in the middle of the tree imho.
It is impossible to make a build that takes Lightweaver, Divine Image, and Answered Prayers. There are some serious hard gives and takes on the bottom of the tree and it’s terrible for player choices. You need to redo the whole bottom IMHO.
Restitution in a position where we can actually justify taking it.
PoH getting added to Lightweaver, so there’s now a possibility that casting the spell that heals five people will actually be the appropriate thing to do when five people are taking damage at once (tuning pending).
Lasting Words - Love this new talent - I’ve wanted this back since dragonflight ended. Not sure I’m sold on it being a capstone talent. but I like being able to get a bunch of renews out quick.
Dispersing Light - makes a good contrast to trail of light for mythic+/triage versus AoE raid healing. I like the added flexibility.
Divinity - three instant-cast Heals should be a huge help for Oracle’s mobility on movement heavy fights, giving them access to the similarly vital three surges of light Archon gets.
Voice of harmony - it being moved to where we can take it with our other damage talents makes our DPS rotation feel 100% smoother.
Power Word: Life - now getting tied in closer to the actual holy tree makes it feel like a more integrate whole, although I expect the actual HPS impact to be small.
Divine Hymn being five seconds is great for mythic+ where being able to stand still for five seconds is often a rarity during high damage events.
The good but sad:
I’ll miss salvation but it’s probably a good thing it went away from a balance and tuning perspective.
It’ll feel odd to not be casting CoH in raid, but there was always the question of what it’s niche really was supposed to be, given we also had so many other group healing spells. I can see the argument for removing it.
The bad:
Holy Celerity feels like it’s either going to be required-but-resented, or avoidable and dead. It’s boring. It’s basically Light of the Naruu and Voice of Harmony and our current tier set, but from the other direction. (Getting more holy words faster). Doesn’t feel good, doesn’t interact in any interesting way, just fills space and eats a talent point.
Afterlife now feels far too weak after removing the combat rez from it. I hate losing that rez, but I’m guessing it’s being removed for PvP-balance reasons. Still, if you don’t buff it somehow, it’s just going to be a dead node. Maybe replace Afterlife with Restitution instead of making Restitution a choice node with Guardian Angel?
Everlasting Light still hasn’t been moved directly above lightweaver, which is where it belongs since literally the only time you would use it is when you are spec’d lightweaver.
Empowered Renew is bad numbers wise. If you want to add a CD to our only HoT, it’d need to be doing something more like twice the healing of Heal to justify it.
We still have (-starts counting-) two PoM talents in the class tree, seven PoM talents in the holy tree, and three PoM talents in Oracle’s tree. Having twelve PoM talents in itself isn’t bad, that so many of them are bland HPS buffs is more of a problem. Baking half of those talents into the base spell - even if that requires another 2% aura nerf - opens up more flexibility.
Example one: right now, renew talents have no coherency and are scattered throughout the holy tree left, right, and center, (as well as mid and bottom. If you’re going to provide a renew-centric playstyle (which I support and am eager to see!), removing the PoM talents clogging the lower right side of the tree and consolidating the renew talents there would make that feasible. Maybe even swap Empowered Renew for Answered Prayers positions. Empowered Renew - tuned correctly - would change the playstyle of the spec. That feels way more capstone-y than an additional Apotheosis proc.
Example two: Nine talents were removed. Seven talents were added. However, of those seven new talents, five are choice nodes. Getting rid of some of the PoM bloat allows for the choice talents to instead just be talents, letting us play with our shiny new toys and opening up new potential pathing options.
Note: Renew not benefiting in any way from our mastery seems likely to hold back any renew-centric playstyle.
Things I’m hoping to see worked on in future 11.1 PTR iterations
Archon not having any mobility benefit despite the stated intentions of hero talents being "every hero tree should have a mobility and defensive increase).
Oracle’s rotational nature of premonition still feels overly complex and clunky compared to it’s benefits.
Symbol of hope needs some love (and a tuning pass on what gets CDR’d).
If we have to keep Epiphany, it giving an extra charge of PoM instead of resetting the CD would be a QoL increase. You can decrease the probability of it triggering to maintain current power levels.
Some changes to our class tree to address QoL issues, including:
Some way of dealing with roots, knockbacks, and other movement fight mechanics where priests currently spend their time being rescued. Despite Blizzard’s apparent long-held belief - demonstrated in our legion artifact quest chain - being saved [from roots] by paladin’s isn’t actually our class fantasy. Nor is being quite literally carried through fights (by evokers). I’ve long campaigned that levitate should prevent us from being rooted but it doesn’t have to be that. Just… something. Please.
Healing priests being literally the only people in the game without an interrupt is starting to feel… kind of personal. Not having an interrupt is one thing, but being the literal only ones in the entire game not to have it? Feels more like persecution.
Power infusion continues to be somewhat problematic, requiring both out-of-game meta-knowledge (homework) and addons/weak auras to use to its best potential.
Angelic bulwark is terrible, useless, and terribly useless.
Oi, can you PvE nerds stop lumping us in as your excuse to justify unpopular changes? We don’t even take this talent in PvP and never have in any serious capacity.
Restitution should not be a choice node with Gurdian Angel.
Let spirit of redemption self rez be a core and unique aspect of holy priest gameplay and class fantasy. Shamans do not have to give anything in return for their ankh.
Bottom part of the spec tree feels restrictive, too many mandatory talents which reduces the feeling of choice:
IMO prismatic echoes should not be a bottom talent, for M+ is not worth it but it is right there in the middle between capstones so its veery problematic.
I would like to try Lasting Words in M+ but there are too many mandatory talents like Trail of Light and Light in Darkness that without them you are pretty much unviable.
idk, Bottom part of the tree feels VERY restrictive in player choice.
Top and Middle part of the tree feels great,
I dont like typing huge long paragraphs and putting my ideas to words doesnt work out well… But they need to do something about the class tree. its next to the worst and lots of dead talents. My hope is they will do it once they have testing on the other side.
Even with the buff to prayer of healing and all of its modifiers active, it will still do less healing than a flash heal/heal with all of its modifiers because of trail of light and binding heals.
It needs to be buffed more.
Renew also needs to be buffed more, but I’m curious if the renews that proc from talents also benefit from the new empowered renew talent, or if they’re just bare bones renews.
Just gonna put some additional positivity in this thread and more specific feedback when the Blue post comes up , because I’m guessing there’re some lovely things going on for Shadow’s 2point nodes and the Class Tree… I’m very happy right now. While it’s sad to see spells go, that there’s a push to open up more of the spec’s spells to regular use and make them work with one another (I lovePower Word: Life).
I’d personally like to use most of the active capstones (I like buttons), but it’s a bit difficult with Light of the Naaru. LotN is fine, but there’s this lovely new Holy Celerity talent that kinda makes it not as compelling (which is great). Essentially, I can get everything I want1 except Lightwell for M+ .
Also stoked to see what the visual effect is on Prayer of Healing targets.
I was sitting down and fiddling with the talent tree thinking to myself, “I wonder if i can leverage Divinity into a bunch of free, instant Heal or Prayer of Healing casts by cycling Holy Words as quickly as possible via a combination of Say Your Prayers, Light of The Naaru, Holy Celerity, and Epiphany.” https://www.wowhead.com/ptr-2/talent-calc/priest/holy/archon/DAAAPVFBRFRFVVFUgFQQBEEFVVUBQ
Then I remembered that the wording of Divinity specifically says “casting Apotheosis causes X” and Answered Prayers is simply “After X, gain Apotheosis.” (IIRC Answered Prayers doesn’t give us the Holy Word resets it ought to) so it probably wouldn’t work but it could create an interesting play style of going after high Apotheosis uptime which is what the unloved Sustained Potency and upcoming Eternal Sanctity talents are pushing to do.
The problem with the tree currently is there’s some serious hard give-and-takes on the bottom of the tree. You lose far more then you gain compared to the current tree.
We have 2 less points to spend by default because they need to go into mandatory talents like Holy Celerity and Divinity/Eternal Sanctity. Light in the Darkness is another mandatory talent as well because it’s a large hps loss losing -40% healing on Serenity and Sanctify considering the new feedback loop is to keep a high uptime on Apotheosis.
Circle of Healing: The removal of this and Healing Chorus talent pretty much makes Lasting Words lackluster as the reason we wanted to apply many Renews was to build up healing Chorus. With this change, Lasting Words should be higher in the tree rather than a capstone.
Lasting Words: Due to no longer having Circle of Healing or Healing Chorus, Lasting Words should be higher in the tree rather than a capstone. Might be debatable pending testing.
Empowered Renew: I like the idea, the 12 second cooldown needs to go. You can give it absolutely 0 cooldown and realize that if people spam it 6 times in order to get another HW:Sanctify, that’s still a considerable time that almost no healing is given out. An alternative is that healing bonuses should apply to any Renew given out from other sources like Benediction and Lasting Words and the cooldown is still triggered from hardcasting Renew itself.
Talent Capstones: I love that you listened to feedback and most everything feels so good to take. I love that I’m making some hard decisions in what to take because I actually want everything. My only gripe is point cost balance and this may be a problem of current placement of talents. Ideally, somebody should be able to comfortably pick up 3 capstone talents. There are 4 talents in the second to last row of the tree all of which are 2 point cost. I’d be biased in asking for Prismatic Echoes and Desperate Times to be 1 point cost, but some of them do need to be a 1 point cost talent.
Either that or allowing far more crossover talents like Light in the Darkness also branching into Lightweaver or moving Holy Celerity Down 1 spot and branching into Answered Prayers.
All in all, I like what I see so far and can’t wait to test.
The numbers on prayer of healing still seem quite bad. Heal at a base line costs half as much mana and does more numbers thanks to binding heals (which you gain for essentially free).
I am rather confused about empowered renew - it seems really weird to delete coh (iconic holy priest spell mind you) to promote renew into the same design space as a rotational button for holy word cdr.
overall changes seem largely ineffective because prayer of mending and prayer of healing are largely very bad compared to heal, which has only improved in strength this patch thanks to buffs to trail of light, and increasing the value on holy words. If you want people to consider pressing prayer of healing, especially when it costs 5.5% of your mana bar per cast, it needs a very large numerical buff. That or Lightweaver needs to be a more central part of the gameplay to promote more passive usage of both heal/prayer of healing.
Yeah, but the healing meta seems to be built around dmg mitigation and massive amounts of HoTs being applied before big damage to soak up the missing HP. Reactive healing seems to be a dying breed of healing. What I see as a holy priest is being useless because other healers have their HoTs heal the whole raid before I can even get a cast off. The only spell that I see carries a Holy priest hard is Halo.
I think a “rock-paper-scissors” dynamic is healthy for overall game design, but I understand how this could be frustrating. As a countermeasure, it’d be nice to see Leap of Faith on a choice node with an alternate version of itself that pulls the priest to the ally.
I think Blizzard needs to re-examine all channeled raid cooldowns, particularly when so many circumstances when they’d be sorely needed are also moments when movement is mandatory.
I think more heal-over-time mechanics should behave like Renewing Mist, jumping to injured targets when its current target is already at full health. That alone would address tons of issues with many healers (Resto Druids in particular).
Holy Priest has tons of utility and its healing style is different from Disc. Damage mitigation just happens to generally be more efficient that raw healing or HoTs that don’t jump to injured targets.
I agree that multiple single-target heals is hogwash design. All healers could do away with this. The button bloat isn’t necessary nor is the gameplay decision revolving around it any fun.
With Disc Priest giving up Purge the Wicked, can Holy have it instead? Better yet, turn Shadow Word: Pain into the Holy Fire DoT instead to help introduce more synergy between Holy’s offensive abilities. Having the Holy Fire AoE talent also spread the Holy Fire DoT to multiple targets would be perfect.
I personally haven’t experienced this myself (particularly when talenting HARD into DPS while in Holy Spec), but Holy can’t DPS while healing either, so… ?
Archon’s theming around Halo are going to almost always have it come out on top in comparison to pretty much any other raid-wide option. If Halo had a target limit, that would change things but also ruin the fantasy around the Halo ability.
Hello and thank you for putting the notes up early so we can give some feedback. I am looking forward to seeing positive changes in the future priest development.
Thank you for removing some of the button bloat for priest but I feel that there is a few more that could be taken out of our trees or merged into other talents.
Until I get a chance to test things out on PTR I will hold back judgment on holy priest AoE healing, but from what I can see it looks like prayer of healing is trying to fill that role, but I don’t know if the numbers will work outside of some magical Christmas land where I have all the buffs going on.
Oracle still feels weak in comparison to Archon ultimately Oracle just needs a full rework.
Restitution it nice it earlier in the tree but can we get a self res button like shaman have?
If the group is wiping and you auto res it will just feel bad to be out spirit of redemption/afterlife talent for 10 mins.
Also, can you make sure we don’t get hit for a durability ding, a death count on a mythic+/delve if we die and come back with restitution.
It’s not healthy needing to be babysat by other specs just to do the fights. On M Tindral and Queen if you don’t remove the roots you’ll get killed by one shotting mechanics if the group can’t break the roots in time. They just need to make Phantasm remove roots and the problem is solved.
In regards to mobility: Priests are one of the slowest classes ingame and it doesn’t feel complete unless you play Dracthyr. You can glide out of Queen’s knockbacks and get around the map a lot faster then all the other Priest races because your base movement speed is equivalent to having a 100% uptime on feathers.
Reevaluating the patch note and class changes: Disc is getting smacked down pretty hard with nerfs and Holy is getting a 45s cdr on Chastise reset and a longer duration Apotheosis so Holy should in theory be able to outdps Disc.
Currently? Same dungeon, same gear I can do 100k more overall playing Disc then Holy.