My problem with Blizzard’s take on “Support” is that if it’s actually powerful, it will kill off the other options, and players will be peer pressured into using it. Same thing happened with Evokers. Augmentation literally killed Devastation. It’s a concept Blizzard fails to grasp, and it’s really annoying.
Stop. Doing. This.
The negative feedback around PI has been overwhelming, yet they double and triple down on it. Why??
They’ve very clearly failed at implementing Support into the game’s ecosystem. FFXIV did it well with Bard and Dancer, but Augmentation is an invasive species. That’s the only way I can think to describe it.
I like the premise of adding more skill expression to supporting party members. That said, I think the effort / reward with the current design of Premonition is way off.
As a baseline, let’s compare the current experience of playing PI to Premonition. With PI, I’m typically choosing a target once per key or once per raid boss, editing them into a macro or setting them as focus target, and hitting one button every ~2 minutes.
Premonition is a 50 or 60 second cooldown, with proc resets. It’s two or three button presses per use, depending on whether “choose” and “cast” are separate presses. It has RNG in the starting buff of the selection. It has state tracking requirements for Fatebender (which is cool, keep this!) and dynamic targeting decisions for each buff. It has a tight time window to actually choose the buff you want.
That’s a huge amount more work on every dimension - more buttons, more mental, and more reaction. And the payoffs are… weaker than a single PI. Higher uptime, but that doesn’t have the same satisfaction as a big flashy moment.
I think there are two ways to improve Premonition’s effort / reward: lower the effort, or increase the reward. Lowering the effort seems like it would water down the core concept of the spec - removing the targeting decision making or timing (by making the buffs smart or passive) doesn’t play into the fantasy.
So that leaves increasing the impact. Make Premonition a 3 minute cooldown, and tune appropriately that it feels worth jumping through all these hoops.
One more thought: don’t do proc resets or cooldown reduction. The satisfying gameplay of abilities like this is coordinating with your allies and seeing a big result from your combined cooldowns. Anything that pushes in the direction of “I need to send this so I don’t waste charges/CDR” works against that payoff.
If Premonition turned PI into a group wide buff you’d hear a lot less people complaining about not getting PI. It would be an issue with raid comp balancing though because a healer that gives the group +10% damage every minute would outclass every other.
This heroic talent-build concept is a huge example and the reason why I wished PI was just removed entirely.
if it was removed… we could have avoided this thought.
Why do classes all have to be built the same, balanced around an empowering buff CD…
Why does the priest one end up being the most annoying one to deal with <.<.
Can’t you guys just try for once and not mimic what other classes have in design?
Dont give me glimmer, nor blessings of seasons, nor micromanagement.
The issue with removing PI is you strip away one of the few utility buttons in M+ that Priests bring. Right now healers are weighed on their damage, utility, and healing.
If they do get rid of PI then give us a B-res and Disc/Holy an interrupt.
That was my point I reiterated multiple times by now; PI makes their target get nerfed for it. And it gets the priest have none of the common utility healers should have, like a Brez and a proper defensive CD
PI has to go back to personal CD or away for said utilities. They say they are listening but it’s been years we’ve been asking for this.
PI was only good as a personal for the healer Priests when it gave you -20% mana cost during its duration.
+20% haste for Holy/Disc doesn’t really do much at all. For Shadow it’s part of their Voidform damage combo so they need it more than the other two specs.
i rather lose it for shadows dps and get stronger hitting spells to compensate. its not needed nor do i want Shadow to act like every other dps with a 2m cd to burst ;_;.
Back in the days, we didn’t need big cd spells to make a class work. Why does every class need it now <.<
if external buffs that increased damage were more group oriented and not individual i think it would be different. Extrenal buffs that are strictly one person makes a mess of who to give it to and when.
I use PI as disc for my ramp, to pump out PW:shields and the rest of my atonements so I can get to dpsing faster. It’s also great for disc to pew pew more damage, thus heal more.
After thinking about the proposed Oracle talents over the weekend, rereading the tree again a few times, and going through the feedback in this thread, in my opinion it still feels like a bad tree that would require such enormous amounts of reworking that it would be better to just scrap it and start over.
I still like the concept of predicting or divining the future, but the talents don’t really seem to be thematically related to that idea, the Premonition skill still sounds like a very unfun and headache-inducing button, and I just can’t see myself ever actually wanting to choose this tree unless the other option is significantly worse somehow.
I understand that a certain amount of work has probably already been put into this idea and that developer time is a limited resource, but I sincerely hope that Blizzard recognizes the very legitimate concerns that have been expressed in this thread, along with the overwhelmingly negative reception, and goes back to the drawing board here.
I’m overall interested in the dev team exploring more supportive options for classes.
That said I think there are some pretty big satisfaction issues with the proposed iteration of oracle.
The current iteration asks the priest to take on additional mechanical/rotational complexity and spend several talent points to get buffs that feel even less valuable to the casting priest than our baseline PI. I can’t see myself willingly opting into this tree if I can get more personal power from another tree while still keeping original PI.
Would like the tree to be more about buffing the priest and their allies rather than a more complicated way of funneling dps to one person.
Exactly the opportunity cost of loosing such a powerful and well established button as PI is so high both personally and for the raid that for me they would have to at least double all the power in premonition to make me take it compared to whatever Archon gives me.
I expect Archon to play on void form and a holy form equivalent empowering your Hots and Dots with Voidweaver being built around mindflay/pennace
You do realize that with Archon and Blizzards obsession with Prayer of Mending talents for Holy they’re very likely just going to shoe horn some kind of PoM thing as Archon’s ability.
I’m already 99% sure of it because what we need now are 11 PoM talents for Holy.
The Oracle hero goes against the design goals you had right above the talent trees previewed. I would implore those who are gathering feedback to seriously look into the other options that were in development. I know it can be difficult to cut project when you put a lot of work into it but sometimes things like this happen. Below are a few issues I see for the oracle tree that goes against the stated goals at the top of the trees.
Each tree will offer or modify some class utility and include defensive bonuses that are useful to all specializations. We are aiming for all trees to be about equal in the amount of utility and defensiveness they provide.
If this goes live no matter what you put in it the other tree, this will be overshadow it with the unique utility this will bring. The other hero trees a holy and discipline have will not be able to compete with this. I also fear that this will push out shadow priest from some slots since they will not bring this utility.
Each Hero Talent concept must be appropriate for both of the specs that can use it. Some concepts build on overlaps in abilities or flavors between the two specs that can use it.
This tree has no overlap, at best we see new system, some buffs to discipline with some minor buffs to holy.
i. (Preemptive care: renew is really not a spell we cast, Foreseen Circumstances: two sec on Guardian spirt, Assured Safety gets a 20% shield.)
Your goal of “what you are, but more”. Is at odds.
Holy and Discipline are not a support class. Holy is a reactive healer; numbers go down I move them up. Discipline anticipates those numbers going down and mitigates problems with shields and well timed heals (I am holy hope I didn’t mess that up).
You “want Hero Talents to add new fun without creating new burdens, either in customizing or playing a character.”
Power infusion has a lot of problems already. But I feel not only will this make more of a burden for me and others too know what buffs to take and when, requiring weak auras and other addons.
Much has been discussed on the problems with this Oracle hero build on these forums, but during the interview with Tailesin; George Vekev, mentioned that if the Oracle was too divisive or complicated you had other variants. I personal would love to see these variants, and how they will approach the flavor of holy and discipline.