Feedback: Oracle in The War Within

[Maziodyne-malganis]

I like the idea of having more support-oriented options in concept. However, as someone who mains Holy primarily because of how straightforward and smooth it is, this is antithetical to anything I want to be doing.

My gut reactions as a casual keypusher:

1. Micromanagement

• With the shorter cooldown, syncing with DPS cooldowns is going to require more micromanagement and stress in already high-stress environments.
• Cycling during combat feels needlessly stressful and adds to cognitive load.
• Cycling seems like it will deny us time to play our primary spec, as we’ll need to hold back on casts to cycle.

2. Increased burden of knowledge

• Because we need to micromanage which buffs go where, Oracle will require more out of game knowledge about other specs and keeping track of changes in the meta surrounding these specs.
• Even if we do not put in the time, discussions on who gets PI can already be contentious. More buffs means I’m going to get linked more spreadsheets and graphs while my DPS squabble. Please free me from this future.

3. Balance concerns

• As a priest player, I already feel as if decisions are made about my spec in relation to what others can do with my support and not about what I can do as a player. This isn’t fun.

4. Disc vs. Holy

• Node choices seem weirdly weighted towards Disc. Instant-cast Radiance and longer atonements are much more impactful than longer Renews or instant-cast Prayer of Healings.
• 10% damage reduction Pain Suppression is more impactful than 2 seconds of Guardian Spirit.

5. Capstone

• The capstone node of this tree, the ultimate potential of the spec, is a low chance proc. Other Hero Talent trees have a straightforward power increase in their capstone.
• I feel uncomfortable at the idea of being balanced around the low chance that at one point I might do something cool.

Tl;dr I just worry that, especially with such a low cooldown and the cycle mechanic, I’m going to spend most of my time playing Oracle buff bot and not playing Priest.

[Caffeinism-tichondrius]

There is a very long list of immediate concerns regarding premonition. I will go over a few of them as I don’t want this post to be extremely long.

1. Cycling buffs creates a list of problems on its own, but imagine this scenario in an m+ pull:

• I hit premonition with the intention of buffing my mage who just used combustion, but I have to wait for the spell damage buff to cycle in.
• While premonition is cycling, people start taking damage.
• I start to heal and the spell damage buff cycles past me and I miss my opportunity to buff the mage because I was having to press other buttons.
  -By the time it cycles back, combust is either over, or he gains very little from my premonition with what’s left of his cooldown window

2. We will be entering micro management hell by having to watch this buff cycle and use it on the appropriate targets at the right time. At the very least, it will simply create the need for another weak aura to use it optimally.

3. If I use an external cooldown on someone, I want it to work right away. Having to wait for the 25% healing buff to cycle in when someone is getting murdered by a mechanic will not feel good and may not be available by the time said mechanic has finished attempting to kill my friend.

4. If I don’t have a melee damage dealer on my team and my tank deals mainly magic damage, the attack power buff is mostly wasted. The same is true for the spell damage buff if I don’t have casters in my group.

5. We’re giving up PI for this and it’s not going to feel good in its current form.

I have concerns and questions about other the other talents, but if the cornerstone ability behind this entire hero tree is this bad, then I don’t see a reason to work on anything else until that’s addressed.

I hope we hear back something soon.

[Ansim-hakkar]

Combine the buff into 1. The cycling idea is bad. No offence, but we have to get on the same page early.

There is no need to have physical an magical damage separately.
10% increased damage dealt.
Some specs deal a mix so this is really the minimum to make it not super bad for some specs.

The Capstone needs to be deterministic.
Not being able to set it up with the team makes it useless.

PI is good precisely because you stack it on the person’s CDs. Only for the initial pull (raid) or boss pulls (M+) DDs use CDs together. So getting the proc on 3 DPS when only 1 uses CDs will feel incredibly bad and useless.
Therefore you need to be able to have it deterministic and sync it with your team, otherwise it might aswell not exist.

The Capstone and Keystone have auch glaring issues. Same with the Haste/Mana thing. Just make it 5% resources and the haste combined.

Please.

[Caithyra-bleeding-hollow]

Here’s my take on how to improve the tree.

Left Side Pathing (Healer)

Preventive Measures -

• Casting PWS creates an additional absorb equal to 8% of the targets hp.
• Your Echo of Light (Holy) creates an absorb shield equal to 15% of its healing (stacks).

Assured Safety -

• Casting PWS creates an absorb equal to 50% of its amount on a nearby target. This can only apply once every 3s.
• Casting Holy Word Serenity also creates an absorb shield equal to 33% of its healing.

Grand Reveal -

• When your Power Word: Shield is fully absorbed it reduces the cooldown of Premonition by 2-3s. Casting PWS also extends all active Atonements by 1s.
• Casting a Holy Word reduces the cooldown of Premonition by 2-3s. Your Holy Words also cooldown 8% faster.

Middle Pathing (Mobility/some heals)

Preemptive Care -

• Casting Smite increases the duration of a random atonement by 1-2s. (Same as the current 2 piece).
• The duration of your Renew is increased by 3 seconds and each tick reduces the cooldown of Holy Word Sanctify/Serenity by 0.33 seconds (1s cooldown).

Vault of Heavens -

• Leap of Faith instead causes you to leap to your target, and has 2 charges. Casting Leap of Faith also removes any root effects.

Divine Feathers -

• Your Angelic Feathers also applies its bonus to the party/raid when cast on yourself. This can only occur once every 20s.

Right Utility Pathing (Utility/heals)

Miraculous Recovery -

• Power Word: Life now has two charges and can be cast on targets at 50% or below hp.

or

Prompt Deliverance -

• Reduces the cooldown of Purify by 2 sec.

Foreseen Consequences -

• You can channel Divine Hymn while moving with a 50% movement penalty. Divine Hymn also heals for +300% more while not in a raid.
• Casting Pain Suppression on another target also applies 50% of its bonus to yourself.

Divine Providence -

• Casting Symbol of Hope also provides a -15% damage reduction for 6s to all targets it applies too.
• The cooldown of Luminous Barrier & Mass Barrier is reduced by 30 seconds.

[Sparkleheals-burning-blade]

Not a fan of Premonition “cycling” through the various buffs and having to wait until the one I want is available to hit the button again. It feels fussy and micromanage-y. But in practice I’d probably deal with it using a Weakaura so meh.

Overall I’m not really interested in playing more of a Support role. I tried Augmentation but didn’t like it – I felt like I couldn’t see or feel the impact of my actions. I play Holy Priest because I enjoy playing a more reactive healer (“healer” being the operative word), so I guess I’ll just cross my fingers that Archon aligns better with that playstyle.

[Kiwî-whisperwind (Kiwî)]

My feedback is mainly that since I know a lot of other people hate PI ( I’m indifferent about it personally. Its a tool that helps make things die faster, that’s all. If the game is balanced without it, that’s fine), I think it might be fun to have Oracle be more themed similar to the Fae Guardians ability from shadowlands. The precognitive aspect can be tied around the cooldown reduction that provided, as well as having similar effects to a lot of the PI related stuff in the rest of this tree.

That being said, I do love the flavor of “seeing the future and using it to help your allies”

[Hooyahs-bleeding-hollow]

Remove dps externals from the game to include ebon might prescience pi etc. Attempts to correctly reattribute damage have failed and makes players concerned about their performance miserable.

Externals could stay if you can strong arm warcraftlogs into making no externals the default for logs and not count them when ranking parses.

[Ahaux-thrall]

I thought these trees were going to be shared between the 2 specs moreso. So the new spell replacement would fit my idea of how this tree works (not that I agree with its ability) and the power word shield / prayer of mending intertwining would fit my idea on the tree (though I think it should give both buffs to both specs imo because why not really), but the rest of the tree is almost completely independent of one another. I think with a little more creativity the classes could have more intertwined abilities which for me, at least, would add to it

[Conscriptor-kelthuzad]

Is Premonition a choice ability or is it random? If it’s random you could easily proc physical damage in a party that’s all magic or visa versa.

[Conscriptor-kelthuzad]

Grand Reveal

Do I have to cast PWS 150 times for this to proc? Seems like a lot

[Saeshal-kiljaeden]

Feedback, and I’m trying to put it as nice as I can:

I honestly thought that Oracle was going to be Holy/Shadow. “Seeing visions of the future” much better fits Shadow (given that we just had a whole void slipping in and giving fake perceptions of the future and Shadow is about psychic/mind affecting abilities" and that Archon would be Holy/Disc (since the term “Archon” to me evokes a being of radiance/divine being.)

The whole schtick with oracle being holy/discipline is “peering into the future to protect allies.”

But there is almost no representation of this at all in the tree.

We’re given talents all surrounding a glorified damage buff (will elaborate further down) that, thematically, has nothing to do with protecting allies because of a divination, which really makes me feel like “Oracle” (something I had been looking forward to) is being thematically wasted. Aside from the title of the talents, there is almost no flavor within the talents themselves, the majority of which are providing flat buffs to existing abilities.

Premonition pt 1: There’s just so many issues I have with Premonition already that I am not sure where to begin. At the moment (and correct me if I’m wrong), there is no smart targeting for the buffs if you have a Clairvoyance proc. Brilliance will not be used. Sorry, but a ~1 minute cooldown to restore 5% mana to a healer vs giving someone bonus damage will likely not be taken into consideration during a raid unless it’s absolutely last minute resort and you coincidentally have the cooldown available to do so.

Premonition pt 2: Having the ability shuffle through buffs every second without being able to lock a buff in or hold onto it is just straight up a terrible design choice. During fights where people are healing, we don’t have time to be waiting for a randomized buff (granted the order is static) to gloss over a specific single buff out of 3 (or 5 if u take Versatile Divinations) to go through and to make sure that we have the right one before we activate it on a target (likely a dps).

Grand Reveal will see infinitely more use by a holy priest than a disc priest unless PoM is somehow tied into disc’s rotation where it provides a benefit other than stacks. Holy will see 7 stacks (counting +2 PoM jump talent) per single use of an ability while disc will only see 2 (Pw:S and Assured Safety), especially considering PoM is integral to Holy rotation.

Also, it shouldn’t have needed to have been pointed out to you guys during that interview that the mini-twins effect with the priest receiving insight will have minimal effect on Hpriest’s throughput.

I’m sorry, blizz, but y’all kinda crapped the bed on this reveal. Believe me, I want to provide some possible solutions you guys could employ, but the issues are just so numerous within the tree as it currently is that I’m not sure if it would be worth it, much less that it would possibly get the tree to where it needs to go.
I am hopeful that you guys will fix it given that we’re still months out from WW release. But the only thing from the Taliesin interview that made me think “thankfully that’s a good decision” was that Premonition is off of the GCD.

Yes, I will readily acknowledge that hero talents aren’t supposed to have a huge impact on gameplay. But this ability and its associated capstone are about as exciting as Shadow’s capstones.

[Biggusdíckus-gurubashi]

So. Why are you not listening to the community? I was so hyped for the reveal today but now i´m just sad and angry.

Healingwise from a Holy PoV, it´s pretty much garbage. I was hoping for some mobility or other things that might fill in our missing toolkit blanks.

How many times did you hear Priests say “I love PI, what a great spell”? Almost every priest hates this button. And now you are doubling down on this cursed spell. Please, pretty please let someone else design priest, it´s time. After your (imo) failed Augvoker experiment you seem to try to make Priest more supporty. I hate it tbh. Like, the full tree. Some minor “well, that´s not complete garbage” but nothing i´m the tiniest bit hyped for.

One should think we either go to more dmg and maybe shadow modificators for existing spells near shadow and maybe stronger shields, something like a reverse atonement (healing on Target x does dmg to surrounding enemies for example) near Disc. But what we get is doubling and trippling down on PI and more stuff nobody wants or is hyped for.

Like, is that 15% manareduce a joke? On Radiance, maaaaybe, it´s a strong button that applies atonement. But for PoH? Really?

Don´t rework this tree, i beg you. Throw it in the trash where it belongs and start from scratch.

[Cererin-zuljin]

@Caithyra-bleeding-hollow

Grand Reveal -

• 150 absorbs on PWS to trigger this? Holy heck. That’s almost impossible.
• 150 PoM bounces for a free PI? That’s a bit extreme here. We don’t need an extra charge of PI.

You know this one is divided by 2 right. Cause of the other one in the lane.
Assured Safety -
If u cast one you cast the other for free. So one cast give 2 point each time

[Oreboros-dawnbringer]

Looks and sounds cool… I wonder how Shadow Priest side fits on these too.

Can’t wait.

[Zarathiel-sargeras]

The best thing I can say about it is that Preemptive Care, Waste No Time, Miraculous Recovery, Preventative Measures, Assured Safety, and Prompt Deliverance are all perfectly boring and and perfectly fine.

Premonition (and every talent attached to it) and Divine Feathers are a humorous reinforcement of elements of priest design that ranges universally from indifference to hostile negativity. Listening to the dev interview about Oracle really drives home how out of touch Blizzard is about Angelic Feather when they listened to people talking about how priest mobility is so bad that everybody macros Angelic Feather to be self-cast and they had nothing to say about it in response.

I recognize feedback like this is unhelpful, but I have nothing positive to say about any part of this tree and have zero interest in playing Oracle upon release if these talents retain any resemblance to this current iteration.

[Providennce-tichondrius]

As long as Power Infusion benefits both the healing Priest and the allied target equally, PI will NEVER be a healer’s cooldown.

In every form of group content, PI’s best use is never for a healing priests’ benefit. Disc and Holy priests do not get to decide when to use PI as the cooldown does not belong to them- it belongs to the DPS who stands to gain the most benefit from it- it just so happens to cost the Priests’ GCD instead of the DPS’s.

This is fundamentally why Oracle sucks. When news about this new talent tree came up, the DPS in my guild were more excited about the hero talent tree than any of the Priests were. If I wanted to play support, I would be playing Augmentation Evoker. If this tree makes it to live, healing priests everywhere will be pressured to spec into a talent tree that primarily benefits another class, and not the priest themselves. This might as well be considered the Demonology Warlock Talent Tree number 4.

If Blizzard wants to double down on this Premonition idea, it has to be designed in a way that makes the cooldown belong PRIMARILY to the Priest casting it. If it’s a Priest talent tree, it only makes sense that it should benefit the Priest first and foremost.

[Zarathiel-sargeras]

That’s still ~7 minutes into a fight with S3 gear if you’re casting PWS on cooldown.

[Cererin-zuljin]

Its still too much I agree. The effect shouldnt just be on cast but on heal for Mending. Cause if you have 5 charge it would still proc 1 shield which is kinda sad. Would also help with the timer a bit

[Cyl-thorium-brotherhood]

Nailed it. This is the perfect feedback. Excellent. BLIZZ! Just go off this, and you’re good.

[Zelladria-stormrage]

PI Minigame every minute: Thanks, I hate it.