DF had a short beta like this.
They’re treating the game like a live service now.
Class design used to be a one-and-done process at the start of the expansion, but now they’re pushing class overhauls into minor and major patches.
Features that would normally be there at launch are being milked out over major patches.
The main reason? They’re trying to keep people subscribed for longer.
I judt quit after first month ends up being bad and return ether by last patch or pop in one more time in between.
But pretty much they just making me quit.
Well the much hated solace has been changed from increased healing to placing a shield on the target which is much much better.
This is coupled with a bunch of numerical buffs around the tree and overall moves Oracle up to a very mediocre C- grade for me.
Despite Solace now being -15% damage taken and a shield(making it 4-5x more useful than it was)and Insight/Piety being buffed by ~40% I still can not give Oracle anything better than an D-.
The rotational nature of Premonition is a dealbreaker. You simply can not rely on it being there for when you need it. It NEEDS to be based on the next spell you cast. Until then you have no guarantee that your expansion level class feature will be functional when you need it.
Addendum: More than even fixing Solace, the -7 second CD from insight makes for some very interesting PW:R possibilities. 3x Radiance with 23 seconds till the next 2x is ready, or 2x 15s 2x seems pretty nice. But then you are stuck fiddling with Piety and Solace in between.
It almost seems like the “correct way” to use it will be on a 2-1-1 CD cadence. You would basically always need to “double tap” so you have insight-piety on 1st usage, then Solace whenever before charge 2 refreshes just to get to Clairvoyance. At least for Disc in a Raid setting(which would likely be using the -15s CD node to get it to line up with 1.5 minute ramps as opposed to the +40% power node).
I think this is a huge drawback, too.
It would be good if they’d make it more deterministic like they did with Fae Guardians in Shadowlands (or something along those lines).
Premonition was never referring to the Priest itself, it was always for the player: To use this ability properly, you have to have a premonition IRL to know what’s coming up so you can use the ability in a way to align one of its uses to the situation you’re seeing in the future…
/s
Yeah, quite the pickle. Even with the Oracle buffs and the ability to see the future you would still be unable to match up to Post-nerf Voidweaver or Archon.
But that’s precisely what it is. Premonition, in its current state, has a good skill ceiling: the ability to know the particularities of every trash pack and boss, as well as when you’ll need Insight, Piety and/or Solace for each one, will set a good healer apart from the rest in keys.
It’s not too unlike Blessing of the Season in its current DF iteration for Holy Paladins, except it’s on a much more lenient rotation – two charges, one (or less, if talented) minute cooldown, a charge which will activate all Premonitions at once – compared to the HPal example.
It’s not random at all; it requires you to seek knowledge about the content you’re running, which is a good concept.
So you are saying it will be almost useless in raids you don’t have on farm, and mythic content that is actually challenging. This stacks up against Archon and Voidweaver in what scenario?
I suppose that part is true, as any good Disc or Holy priest will pick ‘not oracle’.
…proceeds to throw a bunch of weird assumptions about things I explicitly did not state.
I have not touched upon the subject of raiding because, well, I don’t know how you expect me to have tested raids already. Nor do I know how you can assert that it will be almost useless in prog, without even having done prog in the first place. LOL
I think you may be forgetting this other aspect of the game that many people take part in: PVP.
It’s ok if you forgot about its existence; Blizzard appears to have done the same.
The visual for oracle is amazing .
But I hate rotating skills like this . Please fix it and give it a little more dps output.
Something like when you or an allies shields expire because of an attack, you shoot a shooting star at the enemy who broke it.
Just imagine a big aoe attack from the boss and all these shooting stars come shooting out of you.
Also adding the shooting start theme to oracle … #chefskiss
Please listen to me!!!
I think you may have poor reading comprehension skills, because on the post above I made it clear that I did not mention raiding because I haven’t gotten around to testing raids yet. You may extrapolate from that and conclude why I haven’t mentioned pvping either.
You’re awfully pedantic about something I had originally said with indicated sarcasm and then a statement I made about PVP in jest.
I’m sure without testing you can extrapolate for yourself the reason having a rotational CD with multiple different effects in an arena match as a healer is not a great idea. But maybe I put too much faith in the people engaging in a feedback thread to have a basic understanding of the facets of game play in wow.
What even would be a good way to deal with something awful like Prem in arena. Burn Insight before the match starts to get the cycle going in the hope that you can get to Solace before you get an assist train ran on you?(I haven’t arena’ed in a long time so not sure what you crazy kids call that nowadays :})
Dealing with it’s poor design is about all you CAN do because it’s never going be an ideal CD when you can’t consistently plan ahead for its individual buff use.
You can consistently use it in line with enemy offensive CD’s (if we’re talking 1m cd’s, and obviously you can ‘save’ charges for 2m cd’s or whatever you’d like) but even then, you’re going to run into situations where something like Piety is going to be a less effective CD compared to others. Not to mention that cycling through all the buffs to get Clairvoyance will take a few mins even if you burn your Premonition charges early to get to something that has bigger impact.
Ideally there shouldn’t be this sort of cycling CD based ability in the kit, but we don’t exactly have a choice for Oracle. So it may come down to the tree being used less in pvp, or further changes make it more enticing after whatever delayed balance patch comes out.
At the end of the day, Blizz doesn’t focus on PVP design/balance primarily, they focus on what the majority of the player base plays and that’s pve-related content, so if PVP is your primary focus, you’re kinda used to being in these situations where things just don’t put much thought into the effects on PVP. About 20 years now and counting.
Right now Oracle is dead in the water unless Blizzard massively tones down Archon Halo in raid.
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports/BkfDMVL3N1PzT9Rj#fight=3&type=healing&source=13
A single cast of Archon Halo is 10-12mil healing with 60%+ overhealing.
And that is not even counting the rather meaty(and totally free) flash heals, the extra ~8% average +healing for 18 seconds, and the bonus to Salv/Apoth. That is even with you only using it 2 times in a 3.5 min fight.
Blizzard would have to make cuts across the whole hero tree of about 50% to make it ‘match’ Oracle, and even then it still be better because it synergizes well with itself and has no half-baked rotating mechanic.
From the streams I am seeing VW is just as strong Archon so even with major buffs Oracle is going to be the abandoned spec.
Oracle’s dead in the water anyway, I think. The tree is just too weird and disjointed.
I do see Archon getting large nerfs though. Ironically enough, Cascade would have been a lot more balanced.
I’m honestly surprised they released Archon Halo like they did, but my only assumption on why they didn’t nerf it is probably because they have some Priest changes in the pipework.
If it’s not nerfed by -50% or more this week I’ll be surprised.
Even with a busted Halo, Holy isn’t touching the hps output of Mistweavers and Hpals.