And it would be trivially easy to implement. Just add “and roots” to Phantasm, and make Leap of faith/vault of heaven a choice node(aka the shadow crash treatment). Tada, most of priests mobility problems are solved.
The reason we can’t have these nice things is mainly because of PvP fyi.
Midwit take on my part, but I am surprised Blizzard didn’t base Oracle on buffs to secondary stats, such as avoidance+ for the party, dodge/parry for the tank, and/or crit against a mob. Perhaps too insane to balance over the course of the xpac and/or mythics.
The issue with Oracle is more that it just doesn’t feel like it has a proper place.
Voidweaver on Disc is way better than Oracle. You cast Mind Blast and it’s like having a second Shadow Covenant for 8-11s. There’s so much synergy with talents that boost your healing/damage from Shadow abilities its a no brainer.
Archon on Holy just absolutely blows Oracle out of the room with its massive raid healing. You can min max Oracle all you want… you’re not going to touch Archon’s healing output. Even in 5-mans, Archon Halo does a respectable amount of damage/healing.
Oracle would probably only work in arenas and for solo leveling/questing/delves. The +15% passive damage boost is better for killing single targets.
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Even then I would say that only applies to holy, and only in situations where you are fighting 1 at a time.
Entropic Rift easily beats the added smite/penance damage without even counting smite->VB on single. 3 or more targets and either Archon or VW trashcans Oracle.
Edit: I have not arena’ed in years, but if AEs still destealth, then Archon would likely win there too. Pulsing catroguefish finder.
I’m pretty sure they disabled Halo from doing that. It used to tag creatures out of combat as well which made using Halo in dungeons an instant kick.
At this point I wished the developers just stopped with the oracle tree and focused on the Talent trees.
The development cycle of making the hero talents before the talent trees was a bad idea. It was just putting the cart before the horse.
The problem was oracle was a boat not a cart, and we spent important time trying to convince people it was not what we want/need. Then they put the boat on a trailer and said that close enough.
And now IF we get our talent trees out will they be balanced? Will they improve our specks? Time is running out I have a small amount of hope after the Shaman announcement that Priests can get something out rework/fix so we can give some feedback.
At this point I personally have righten off the oracle speck as anything I will use unless something major happens in the coming weeks.
From a designers PoV they do need to iron out the Hero Talent trees first imho because they fundamentally change how you’re going to tune the base class. The hero trees are designed to look fancy, but in reality they’re just equivalent to adding 2 new talent rows to the existing talent trees.
The current situation is a chronic problem Blizzard has: a lack of communication. It only takes <1 minute to type up a response saying were working on it or this is how it is.
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This is all absolutely true, and I’m glad they took a big swing with a hero tree. I just wish they’d considered what they should swing for before diving head-first into designs they know are (almost) universally reviled.
They know that PI is the most hated ability in the game.
They know that augmentation was extremely disruptive.
They know people don’t like random/unreliable effects.
They’ve known these things for years, and then decided to dedicate their entire priest development budget to a set of talents dedicated solely to designs they know people hate and, as far as we know, that’s resulted in priest as a class missing out on the attention they promised it during DF beta.
Again, I respect that they were trying for something wild, but oracle is a completely unforced error on every level and it really sucks that what little attention priest is getting is going to oracle when we all know that TWW is shipping with essentially two hero trees for priest and, increasingly likely, bringing every other class design into 2024 while priest remains in 2007.
Add “Does not apply to PvP” to the Tooltip. Done.
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I look at things more in the perspective that Blizzard is actually learning from past mistakes and willing to change. Old pre-DF Bliz was pretty much a wall and they refused to change on most things which is why Shadowlands tanked so bad.
They thought people would be excited with the initial Oracle with its PI focus, but probably gulped at the backlash they got. PI to me is just a button I press on a macro every 2 minutes in raid and in M+ I just use OmniCD to watch peoples offensive cd usage. It’s so inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
Without PI you leave Priests with a fundamental utility gap that would have to be replaced with something else. Were already kind of bare bones and the biggest issue with Priests is they all share the same utility kit. So when Shadow is meta, nobody wants Disc/Holy Priests. When Disc/Holy is meta, nobody wants Shadow… etc.
We had 2 seasons now with a hard Shadow Priest meta in M+ and 1 season with a Disc Priest meta. Although Disc wasn’t really a hard meta because Mistweavers were competitive.
The issue with Augs (and really a couple other classes) is a consequence of Blizzard doing mid-expansion class overhauls, especially in the middle of an M+ season. You don’t get enough time on a PTR to test everything so what happened was you get Aug Evokers, Fire Mages, and H-pals all releasing incredibly busted all at once.
People only remember the Aug Evokers, but I sure as heck remember the H-pals doing +50% more damage and +20% more healing than every other healer while having crazy absorb shields. They also dropped Blessing of Summer on the overtuned Fire Mage who got PI from a Shadow Priest and bursted out 1mil+ dps. Keys instantly dropped 2-3 levels overnight.
Blizzard took a hammer to Hpals and their HPS performance is awful currently. Augs are also a shadow of their former selves.
After that Blizzard has been incredibly conservative on class updates mid-expansion. Holy ended up getting a 10-12% hps nerf for a tier set bonus and then another -7% for an end tree talent update. Our hps performance was so bad they nerfed all the top performers to get them down to our level instead of buffing us up in S4.
There was less gives and more takes.
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That´s why we need a rework. It´s laughable what Pallys bring to the table in terms of toolkit. We bring… Guardian as external, situational soothe which is basically nothing and the nerfed MD. It´s just nothing. On top of that we have the worst toolkit for healing. Just healed another Beta Key, a +5. It´s so freaking horrible with Lightweaver.
The worst thing is - we excell at nothing. It´s not like “Holy has a bad toolkit but can heal through any dmg”. We plain suck for now.
If we would not have PI, they would have to give us more utility. PI needs to go. Nobody wanted it since it´s re-introduction in DF beta.
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I don’t understand why people hate Lightweaver so much. I actually love it and it reminds me of original gameplay from back in the day without being clunky.
If anything, Blizz should put Heal in the Holy tree as a talent choice like Resto Shaman has Healing Wave in their tree. Maybe somehow bake the spell heal into Lightweaver so it doesn’t take up a new point. Trim the fat elsewhere to make this work.
This way, people that hate the gameplay of Lightweaver could play completely without Heal. Since certain playstyles hardly ever even press Heal, this would remove button bloat as well.
I specifically, hate it, because of the rest of our toolkit. What to we have for strong incoming burst Dmg? With T-Set you could bank proccs and top 4 ppl in 4 globals. DP for yourself, guardian for someone that might die and we gucci. Now you are back to not having it instant and way weaker. Also with way more hardcasting, it´s just horrible when mechanics come into the mix. No instant and you gotta move? Well, someone dies. It is clunky af. Like you said, it reminds you of original gameplay. Classic Priest gameplay in todays Keys, especially with our healingpattern is a baaaaad mix.
Add to it, that especially in S1 we will not have too much of haste, which makes our bread and butter spell we have to cast all the time, if we have the time while dodging and the player is still alive, even more horrible.
This is going to be our problem come TWW launch - priest will not be updated like every other class, or will be quarter-baked at best if it is, and Blizzard kick us down the road again without making good on their DF beta promise to fix the talent trees they threw together in ten minutes two years ago and then spent five minutes revising each DF patch. And we’ve been down that road every expansion - they kick us down the road so far that we’re not part of beta development at all and are forced to make do with minor adjustments that leave a third or more of our talent trees completely unworkable for months or years.
PW: GFY gave us a great picture of the role they want priest to fill: essentially a piece of terrain that does big healing/damage and nothing else. This was strongly reinforced by priest utility finally being valuable one time in the history of the game before it was swiftly removed. It feels like they’re trying to make oracle fix that problem (for healer priests only), but that has one guaranteed result: either archon or voidweaver will be reduced in power so dramatically as to be completely irrelevant, or oracle will be so insanely busted in its tuning that it needs to be reworked again.
I agree that they’re demonstrating willingness to learn and change, but their (presumably) accidental class favoritism is warping their progress on that front. After DF, they needed to just keep it to basics and fix the class rather than devoting all their energy to a misguided creative endeavor that fails to resolve the core problems the whole class suffers from.
The best feeling anyone has expressed about oracle has been apathy. Blizzard just needs to take the L, stop development on oracle, nerf it into complete uselessness or remove it entirely, work on priest as a whole, and revisit oracle in 11.1 or 11.2 or 11.3 or whenever they have priest up and running properly. I recognize that hero talents are a selling point for the expansion but oracle has only inspired responses from dry heaves to indifference, and I’m not sure those responses move units.
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I think Blizz is specifically looking at Mythic+ mechanics/affixes that stop casts and create this meta issue of caster gameplay interruption/disruption for the next expansion. This to me seems like a mechanics design issue more than a class design issue as far as Priests needing to hardcast more. I also think that Blizz even before all of this have said that they want casters to cast again, like when they trimmed down on the instant casts Shadow Priest could do in mid-Dragonflight, and how they are making Demonology Warlocks cast more again in The War Within etc.
I’m in the camp that not everything should be instant cast tbh. I enjoy being a caster. I think fight mechanics and affixes really are making being a caster that casts way harder than it should be. Losing the Serenity tier set bonus feels terrible because honestly, it’s such an overpowered effect. That’s how a tier set should feel. Losing this effect is supposed to feel bad because a tier set is a noticeable temporary bonus until we get a new one. That’s how the feeling of progression is maintained in games like this. If we kept this Serenity tier set bonus into the next expansion (or powerful instant casting in general) it would just compound into power creep.
Even melee classes are getting a change in design philosophy with many melee classes losing the short-range increase on many of their abilities, so it’s not like casters are the only ones “suffering”.
I’m not sure which hero talents you’re running on the beta, but from what I’m hearing, Archon is doing insane healing. Like top of the meters level healing with Halo. So, anyway I think they’re more focused on the balance of hero talents right now unfortunately rather than the problems that definitely exist in the Priest (Disc/Holy) talent trees.
On the beta the current health pools relative to player healing power is a lot bigger: equivalent to people having 30-40% more stamina. The main issue in DF is that healers were too strong and we overhealed a lot around 40% in raid and 50% in M+. On Holy this ends up making our Mastery weaker because a good chunk of that Echo of Light is being wasted.
If people spend less time <100% hp that means you’re getting more value out of Echo of Light so you’re not actually needing to do as many casts to get people to full hp. Also, the only way to start challenging healers when healers are too strong is to constantly slam the group with spiky AOE damage.
This was the issue in S3 M+ where the majority of bosses did nothing but burst out big AOE damage every 20-30s. Healing was easier, but the main challenge on high keys was just having the defensives to survive massive hits on higher keys.
With DF S1 they just off the bat ramped up the healing difficulty to max level on the bosses and trash because people complained healing was too easy in Shadowlands. This was more where Blizzard stepped back and toned down the healing requirements for M+ and gave us stronger single target heals.
Blizzard wanted to nerf healers in DF, but they couldn’t. They tried twice with 2 stamina increases, but with the backlash from M+ in S1… they were in a box.
In regards to WW S1… we still have 8 weeks until launch and probably 6 weeks of actual beta updates. In-between now and then they need to tune the actual numbers because the majority of classes are still using the current modifiers from DF. They’ll still be tuning after launch because Holy in particular plays significantly different from DF launch compared to S4.
In regards to Haste: you can still get to 20% haste and feel good. It just feels awful initially when you’re coming in with blues/early purples and have like 10% of every secondary stat.
Re: Voidweaver vs Oracle output:
Disc is currently heavily built towards Shadow burst. All the way down the right side of the tree is Schism/Scov synergy, all devoted to pumping a tight rotation’s numbers ever higher. And then the spec itself is balanced around those numbers. Void Weaver comes along and 66% of that spec is devoted to pumping Shadow further, for free, no extra buttons or talents or GCD commitments.
The left side of the tree is just a hodge-podge of various talents that do nothing with each other. They can’t actually fix this with band-aid solutions or buffs, because Scov builds still have the freedom to wander over and pick the best talents, making it even stronger.
The individual parts are good. I like Penance, and Rapture, and PW: Barrier. Shadow Covenant, Schism, Mind Blast and PW: Death are popular and good. But there is no balance between these parts. Everything is synergistically funneled into a single playstyle, and that makes it feel constricted and leaves us with dead talents and gutter-tier builds. Oracle is partly the victim of its own design, but also victim to favoring the dysfunctional half of the tree, rather than the functional half.
It’s a pipe dream to wish for a three style spec, where left side synergizes holy/triage, right side synergizes shadow/burst, and center synthesizes both, maybe as the consistent output (non-burst window) Atonement style healer.
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The existence of talents like Contrition is a clear sign that the developers have not actually looked at that side of the tree for the whole of DF. As you mentioned, the total lack of unifying theme and synergy is what makes the left side a junkheap, which is even further emphasized by by just how bad some of the leftside talents are when compared to the right side.
Pretty much everything on the left that is not Radiance or purge needs moved/replaced/buffed or all 3.
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Absolutely.
I think they could do better to bring the “light side” talents on the left up to snuff with the right “shadow side”.
I miss when Disc felt more like a sustain/damage mitigation healer. Now it’s so deep into the burst window Shadow Covenant side with Shadowfiend/Mindbender that it seems like that’s the only way they want Disc played anymore.
I don’t hate the shadow burst style, but I DEFINITELY hate the lack of viable build diversity.
Don’t even get me started on how boring Smite spamming for CDR is. I also really wish Shadow Covenant wasn’t tied to Shadowfiend/Mindbender honestly. Shadow Covenant would have been just fine as its own button, but now we’re forced into this pseudo-pet build which I really don’t love. I digress.
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