Oracle -
It feels almost cruel to pick on this spec at this point. The rotating spells are too much, and the static spells aren’t fun. Being forced to push a button (or 2 for disc’ case) to be competitive with other specs is not fun. What I mean by this is oracle isn’t going to be 5% more powerful than other specs, it will be balanced (as well as possible) to the other specs in the game. So why are we forced to push a button to do that when others are just made that way. The support aspect of it originally was the ‘hard to balance’ problem. Now it’s a “press button or be 5% weaker than other specs”. In a spec like disc which has 20 seconds of exact button pressing or holy which is reactive, the 5% healing buff rarely comes up.
And i keep bring up this button of the 3 in particular because the other 2 are pretty meh. Cooldown reduction on PoM or mind blast might be pretty useful, but not gameplay changing. ST heal is rarely useful unless your tank complete stuffs up. If tank healing is something that’s suddenly coming back this expac, than I retract this statement, but I feel like that is not the direction the game is going in.
This is all to say oracle needs a huge rework, as cruel as it is to say, this tree doesn’t work. It needs a new base ability to work off of. I suggested in another post that maybe giving the healer priests access to a spirit walker’s grace type ability would be great and blunt the difficulty of the healer specs. But honestly, oracle just need to be something else. Voidweaver is great to play, and after seeing how great Archon looks, I cant see either Holy nor Disc ever touching Oracle, and that makes it a dead tree.
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Well now we have seen Archon for holy I think seeing a holy Oracle priest on a non dispell centric fight will be a solid sign that the holy oracle is an idiot with no math sense. I can’t see how they can ever buff the current design of Oracle to compete with what Archon brings to the table.
I am somewhat interested to see if Archon tips the scales enough that all builds of Holy(myth+ and raid) take Apothesis considering how well it will line up with PI+every other Halo. Napkin math says this is quite likely.
Archon is so much better than Oracle it’s not even comparable. Let me just lay down the perks…
Archon
- Halo pulses 3 times in total spread over 15s. Targets hit by each Halo take +10% increased healing for 5s (so 15s in total) and you get a Free Surge of Light proc each time.
- Surge of Light makes Flash Heal do nearly as much healing as having Lightweaver.
- +6s longer Apotheosis that can be extended by an additional 3s is way more powerful than the Premonition buff. Answered Prayers would be 15s in total. This is a lot of extra Holy Word generation.
- Halo itself will do as much healing as casting a Flash Heal on each target being hit. This is great for Holy who desperately needs some more passive group healing to counter pulsing damage auras in 5-mans and to top people off who’d you normally dump a Flash Heal on.
All the healing bonuses from Archon are active (i.e. you have to use Halo on cd to min-max) while Oracle is passive (PoM, renew, etc. bonuses). Archon overall in hps will clap Oracle, but I’m expecting Blizzard is going to nerf Halo’s baseline healing and make Apotheosis generate less Holy Words per cast.
Holy can never get any actual ‘buffs’ without there being some negatives attached. New tier set bonus? They nerf Salvation and our overheal healing. Talent tree revamps? -7% hps nerf.
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The return halo can hit the same target as the expanding one. It’s six halo hits not three, but three procs of FoL is correct.
Yup, and when it gets back to the Priest you do an extra AOE heal. If we use the current #s ingame Halo could easily do 2.5-3mil a cast (same as Divine Hymn)… so I’m expecting they’re going to nerf Halo’s healing by a lot (50% or more) or make its cd a lot longer. Or they’re going to tune Holy around it… reduce the baseline healing across the board by like -10%, but compensate it with Halo’s healing.
Currently Halo is 1 minute on the beta (up from 45s).
God Bless Archon
Altho thematically nothing in there screams “archon” to me but maybe I’m thinking too much SC. I’m not super up on my wow lore as to what an archon is
Well at least Disc has an excellent choice in Voidweaver, and Holy a good choice with Archon. We can simply ignore Oracle until they rework it properly in say 11.2 or 12.0.
Well to be fair the Oracle tree isn’t actually completely done. There’s a lot of wip talents and I’m expecting them to rework Premonition imho.
Yeahhh… Oracle will see no play with the current premonition and Voidweaver and Archon being just simply better. You guys really need to scrap the idea and come up with something better. That was the general consensus before the rework and you’re still trying to shoehorn it in.
I think maybe the best way to sum up the weakness of Oracle is just comparing it straight to Archon, which is actually pretty easy to do now that Premonition and Halo have the same cooldown.
I don’t think any of the Premonitions can stand up in either cool factor or effectiveness to what is straight up 5 extra Halos per Halo. It’s a lot easier, it’s visually much cooler, and it’s much more noticeable both for me and the people I’m playing with. I can’t think of a situation where I’d want Premonition of Piety over five free automatic Halos.
Main issue remains that premonition mini-game doesn’t belong in a WoW class. The game doesnt need this kind of ability at all.
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Indeed, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. You also have the rather nice interaction of Manifest Power > Empowered Surges > Surge of Light > Improved Flash Heal > Binding Heals > Resonant Words(if you have) which turns your spot and self heal up to 11 for a bit. Oh and +10% healing for 15 sec after every Halo.
Oracle just can not compete with that. I am not even sure that a permanent version of Premonition of Piety would do the trick, much less the 10 second version.
On top of that the abilities just have no guts to them even if you got all 3 at once each press it would still be a whole nothingburger of a cooldown compared to what the Halo stack gives you. Nothing feels like it matters with the 3 lackluster options and the visual is, by hero talent standards, kinda trash.
I cannot see any way you can linearly buff the current abilities to come even close to the synergy of the Halo stack. They have to create new abilities to rotate through to make it desirable to bother casting.
They also need to scrap the whole pick one of three on a rotation. I would honestly prefer the button bloat of 3 separate buttons with a shared cooldown as at least then I can hit the lackluster ability I want when I want it rather than hoping my other casts have done put me on the right one.
Any hero spec where the first reaction to a defining ability is “Write a weakaura to micromanage it” has some fundamental design issues that no amount of graphical pizazz or numerical buffage can solve. As I said before the current oracle design requires the player to be the oracle with foresight of the future needs rather than giving a feel that the character is the one with foresight.
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As an entertaining thought exercise and to give you an idea of just how bad Oracle really is, apply Archon to Discipline. Even with only 6 of 11 nodes working for Disc at all, it would still outperform Oracle by 70% or more.
archon halo is good , im happy to get another aoe healing cd for holy , feels like baby hymn, healing in waves , plus surge of lights for spot healing
all the new heroes specs gonna be like that , hell some hero specs gonna need like 3-4 auras lol
Not even remotely
There’s a difference between a required aura and optional auras. Using the mini game would be insanely harder to track without an aura, making it near, albeit not completely, required.
Most hero trees out right now don’t have anywhere near the same level of tracking requirements
Not really, some will need several mandatory WAs to work like Fatebound and Oracle(note that no one really likes those), some WAs will just help track stacks(Frostfire) or which effect you have up(Horseman, Diabolist), and some will not need them at all(Voidweaver, Archon, Templar) as the effects are baked into abilities and controlled by your rotation.
I posted extensive feedback in the previous Oracle thread about how the abilities worked. The priestly community and I were overjoyed about not playing Slot Machine Healer when it was retracted and a rework was announced.
Then the updated tree came out.
By Velen’s glorious silver beard, were we not clear enough that the rotating buff is obnoxious?!?
Rubs forehead to destress
Just give us a renamed Inner Focus from classic, and call it a day. The competition from Holy Hula Hoop Archon, and Tactical Void Nuke Shadowweaver will just leave Oracle dead, and Holy priests sad.
Please, something not this.
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