Feedback: Oracle in The War Within

Classes Priest
485

It’s not because of Assured Safety.

If you’re going Oracle on Disc (you shouldn’t, this tree is so much worse than voidweaver for them, which I’ll get into), you’d take Prayer of Mending and you’d cast it. Basically gives us both our regular PW:S casts, but also each PoM cast also casts PW:S at a lower value.

From disc POV of Oracle 2.0

This is just a terrible tree in comparison to Voidweaver. Voidweaver buffs all of our core spells - it makes all Shadow Covenants more powerful by just giving us a shadow AoE during it, it turns smite into a shadow spell like our tier set, it gives us a more powerful sfiend/bender, it makes SW:D proc fiend/bender (which means more Scov), etc, etc.

Oracle gives us pretty much nothing.

Premonition sounds like it’s still kinda clunky to play around. If it’s not off the GCD it’s pretty much a non-starter. The bonuses it grants disc are to PW:S, which isn’t BAD, but isn’t great, and it gives us access to PoM - which we’d previously never want to cast.

But that’s about it.

The different premonitions aren’t even great for disc besides piety maybe:

  • Premonition of Piety
    • This sounds OK, but honestly our burst heal in raid has traditionally been high enough that I don’t think this would grant us much, since we tend to be overhealing everyone. It’d definitely be OK, but honestly I doubt it’ll help much.
  • Premonition of Insight
    • This is again, OK? Really what this would grant us is like, double penances or double PW:S/PoM? This is a FAR cry from just getting the Voidweaver’s entropic rift though. We don’t have any short CDs that this is super useful for because our gameplan is to reduce the CD of bender anyway.
  • Premonition of Solace
    • This is pretty much terrible. I can think of few times I’d want to be ST focus healing as a disc priest outside of an emergency, and I’m not about to drop a 1 min CD to make it marginally more powerful.

That said, what I really want to highlight is JUST HOW BAD the comparison between both options are for Discipline

So:

  • Power Word Shield
    • Oracle buffs this spell by 10%, and allows PoM to proc it at much lesser strength. It also lets PW:S proc 1 stack of PoM.
    • Voidweaver buffs this spell by 20% baseline, and after you use a mind blast, and additional 80% buff.
  • Atonement
    • Oracle gives you a 1 second duration increase. You can also spread it a bit more efficiently with Waste no time, and if you have piety up the overhealing will distribute itself.
    • Voidweaver buffs atonement by 25% for 15 seconds after using mind blast (so 60% uptime).
  • Premonition/Entropic Rift
    • These aren’t 1 to 1 comparable, but it’s worth considering that every time Entropic Rift is up, it is doing Atonement healing for Disc (and increasing it by 25%) Wheras Premonition’s best case is redistributing overhealing.
    • But that’s not all! Look at their uptime:
      • Premonition is up for 10s every minute. So ~16% uptime.
      • Entropic Rift is up for 15s every 24s. So ~62% uptime.

In a PvE setting, for a Disc priest to ever consider this tree, whatever the under construction talents are (the t3s) would need to be very attractive.

In PvP I also don’t think this is super great either, FWIW.

486

Ima be quick with this one because honestly, it’s still no different from before. So the same reasons why I wouldn’t say I like it still apply.

I still hate it.

Just scrap this idea already. Please do not take too long like Dragonflight or we will not have time to have a proper design layout before release again. Please let it go.

1 Like
487

I believe that Holy will see some major changes. It’s still the initial release of the alpha and we’ll probably have 4-6 months total of the entire beta testing process so there’s a lot that can change.

488

Whoever is in charge of designing Oracle is bad at their job. And I don’t want to say that, I would much rather enjoy being delighted by the future prospects. But this new Oracle tree is hardly better than the last one.

The best changes I can see from last time is now it doesn’t overwrite Power Infusion, its just a new spell, and you can take the right side talents to make it so every time you use it, you gain an instant cast PoH, Heal, or PoR, at 15% discounted mana. And also a 2nd charge. So basically cheap emergency AoE heals in the best case.

But teh buffs from Premonition itself are all incredibly weak. Honestly weak hardly begins to cover it. Piety = 5% more healing basically. Insight = seems like Prayer of Mending > Circle > Prayer of Mending combo at best, even so 15 seconds of CDR seems uninspired. And then Solace is just a very weak Guardian Spirit.

Who wants this? How is any of this like “an Oracle?” What’s oracle suposed to be anyway? When I think of it, I think of fortune telling or future telling. Either preventing a bad future, or saying a prophecy. In that light, only Waste No Time which gives an instant cast AoE option when using Premonition seems to fit into an idea of subverting a future fate, but that’s a subsequent talent and not Premonition itself.

Personally, I’m not sure what an Oracle should be, except perhaps like that one DotA talent. “delay all damage and healing done to a target for X seconds. After X seconds, apply all damage and healing but the healing is increased by Y %.” Except I am pretty sure this talent alraedy exist in WoW as part of some class’s pvp talents options.

Please give this designer something else to do

edit: honestly, if i had to say what i might like better than this, with a quick and dirty simple solution, even the Cataclysm Disc talent Inner Focus, which is able to be found on the cata classic talent calculator on WoWhead. 45 sec, off the GCD buff, allows next cast of Heal, Flash Heal, Binding Heal, Prayer of Healing, to be 100% reduced mana (free) and have 25% bonus crit. Simple. Satisfying, Wonderful spell graphic effect and sound. Why can’t we have good things anymore…

2 Likes
489

I’d be surprised if Holy itself saw major changes because it got some big ones very recently. It’s still possible they put some changes through - just look how druid keeps getting edited over and over - but I would wager the class tree is probably where you see the most possible change. Something like deleting the Halo/Divine Star node (tackle button bloat) or improve unpopular talent nodes like Void Shield.

As for the Oracle rework, I think it is a better direction than before. I can certainly still see issues, but I don’t want to get too deep into it until I see those other 2 missing nodes finished since they could change a lot. Regardless, this tree is at least something we can work off of and polish in my mind.

490

I mean between this and Divine Word, which I personally don’t like to begin with, how many buttons do we need to ‘enhance’ our basic buttons…

It’s just a boring tree now.

491

All 3 Priest specs play pretty distinctively different every expansion so I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s another revamp.

Holy in BFA spammed Prayer of Healing in raid (which did immense healing because of Echo of Light Azerite Traits), but had a pathetic toolkit for M+.

Shadowlands gave us the Flash Concentration playstyle which was our main legendary for all forms of content. FC turned us into single target healing pumpers. Also, we had Fae Guardians for raid which cut Hymn down to a 2 minute cd, and gave us a tank DR. For M+ Holy had amazing single target healing and dps when you could double Kyrian lego.

Coming into DF they snipped the Flash Concentration playstyle and put more of our overall healing into Holy Words and PoM/CoH. We didn’t have Miracle Worker in Shadowlands so having 2x Holy Words changed things up a lot. We have a lot of cooldowns and procs to play around so you had to preplan ahead of time what you’re using for what. That’s for raid.

The flip side of the coin is our “filler” spells like PoH, Flash Heal, and Renew do like 1/4th the amount of healing as our cooldown abilities compared to Shadowlands where 5-stack Flash Concentration heal did more healing than any of our other abilities.

So yeah: TLDR is that Holy will change. It always changes between expansions.

3 Likes
492

thxs for the response! yea 4-6 months is a pretty good amount of time for changes and stuff

493

I am going to hold back judgment on those developing Oracle till we get an actual hero talent preview. Who knows maybe the developers are working on something else and this is some mockup that was toss up so people can play holy on the alpha with at least a hero tree.
But if it is not then well, I would be disappointed. All I can say is it looks like a copy and paste job of the previous tree with the addition of Premotion and with a down shift of tier 3 talents to our capstone with two unfinished talents. I don’t think those two talents can save the tree unless they break the game, and I wouldn’t want that.
All I can say is I hope it is a place holder if not looks like I am going Archon.

1 Like
494

With Ion’s comment, “you can just blame Shadowpriest’s for not putting down the dagger”, any thoughts on them actually doing something special with Shadow for the added abilities.

lol, sorry, can’t believe I actually finished typing that with a straight face. We all know the spec will get nothing special and will continue to be a slapped together mess of button bloat and a mash the buttons really hard and as fast as possible.

1 Like
495

I’m scared because if Archon isn’t good, it’ll kill my desire to play my holy priest.

There’s 0 chance I play oracle if it resembles what’s on the alpha in any way.

496

My only guess is that the data-mined Oracle is just a place holder. Just replacing the foundation node with a crap version of Fae Guardians is not ‘redoing’ the tree. No Dev could suck that bad and still have a job(at least I hope).

Voidweaver at least gives Disc a way out, as no Disc player will even look at oracle in the state it is now.

Hopefully Archon is good so all priests can just forget that Oracle exists and the 0% utilization forces them to totally redesign Oracle like they claimed they would. At least if this datamined version is even close to what actually launches, that is.

5 Likes
497

Ya the only good talent is the one that lets you use power word life below 50% HP.

They’d have saved themselves a lot of grief if they said this was a placeholder tree, if that’s even the case.

498

Ultimately it just comes down to which hero talent tree “maths” out better than the other.

For Holy… Oracle is…

  • +10% healing boost to PoM
  • Casting PoM creates a +20% PWS on the primary target (so a minor maybe 2-3% overall increase to PoM).
  • +3s Renew duration (don’t know how this works, is it added healing?)
  • -2s off Purify…
  • PWL usable on targets <50% with shorter cd (makes PWL way more powerful - it’ll be a very strong heal for M+).
  • +2s on GS (good for M+ w/ 1 minute cd).
  • Premonition stuff is just kinda how you use it… minor healing increase for 10s. The most value would be Premonition of Insight because you could in theory make PoM a 7s reset (which would feed into very fast Answered Prayers procs).

At most all of this is maybe a 4-6% hps increase… and were going to be tuned around this.

Healers are already overpowered (40%+ overhealing in raid) so I’m not going to be shocked to see major healing nerfs across the board next expansion so were down to a more realistic 20% overhealing.

1 Like
499

To math it a little further: before getting into talents, each PW:S cast represents 2 stacks, each PoM represents 6. Measured over time, PoM is a little less than twice as effective as PW:S is for generating stacks (0.5 stacks/second for PoM versus 0.267 stacks/second from PW:S). Rapture, Premonition of Insight, etc. will change it a bit, but it’s an uphill battle.

I think just for parity it’d be better if Assured Safety generated more PoM stacks when applied by PW:S but maybe healed for less in return, or tie it to Penance in some way. Unless the goal is to encourage active PoM usage by Disc, in which case…eh? I think Premonitions would have to feel more substantial, such that another one is a big deal.

The Premonitions are an improvement over what we saw before, but they’re not really sitting right with me. I like the ideas of Piety and Insight, being able to utilize overhealing is nice and reduced CDs are always helpful. The problem-but-not-a-problem I have with them is they feel like they’re just appropriately balanced for a one minute cooldown. They don’t strike me as particularly meaty or fun to sink your teeth into, just some kind of okay, nice to have, occasional benefits. Maybe that’s the ultimate balance goal for all hero talents, but based on a lot of the revealed bonuses, it feels out of line with what we’ve seen.

1 Like
500

It appears as though this is not the case. There’s a blue post going over a lot of things from alpha and nothing in there stating that oracle is in a placeholder stage, just that it’s available for testing.

So this is it…for now.

501

FWIW even if they go oracle, I don’t think a holy priest would be hardcasting PW:S much. So we’re geting 2 different globals that rotate it.

Oracle also seems to favor a healing method that is much more about hardcasting, too.

I just don’t think it would actually work for Disc in general.

502

If Oracle is going to be cumbersome to play and not be visually or thematically appealing, at least make it easy to play and powerful. I sincerely do not think I’d main priest if I had to play 1 hero talent for the entirety of an expansion for both healing specs :expressionless:

503

Well you may be in luck! :rofl: Voidweaver(at least for disc) is so much more powerful than oracle that it is not even a choice. Since they would have to actively try to make Archon more of poop-mess than oracle you will have 2 choices: Voidweaver when you are disc, and Archon when you are Holy :stuck_out_tongue:

On a more serious note, looking at Vw I am almost convinced that they will be removing Shadow covenant. The combination of void heart, void blast, void infusion, Collapsing void together basically creates a superior version of Sc with vastly higher uptime. At the same time the retirement of DF S3/4 will push Sc and bender back to a much weaker position, so what better time to decouple them.

504

I don’t think Scov is going anywhere, because there’s not much to replace it anyway.

Entropic Void will get nerfed, and it’s gonna be pretty heavily nerfed in the disc aura, most likely. It’s currently tuned to pretty ludicrous damage values.

Unironically it’s “Your mind blast causes an AoE to appear that hits harder than your mind blast every second for 15 seconds. Also you get +25% atonement, your next PW:S is huge, and sometimes you’ll randomly proc bender (and Scov)” This is easily like double any other spec’s hero tree in terms of contribution. If we’re not getting nerfs, everyone else is gonna get giant buffs.

I wouldn’t put too much faith in the balance numbers. They care more about the feels than anything else. These just are not gonna hit live in this state.