Saw the Druid writeup on Wowhead calling out the issues with their class tree. Any chance we’ll get that for Priest soon? We have a whole expansion’s worth of feedback for them. Particularly to point out:
Mobility / Lack of a Displacement Ability
Lack of Interrupt
Utility in Spec trees
Amount of 2 pt nodes in all trees
Loss of Shining Force
Undertuned Lower Row talents
Phantom’s Reach as a capstone
Dead talents such as:
Twilight Equilibrium
Ultimate Penitance
I’m sure there’s many more objective issues without getting into personal preferences.
It’s an idea that’s being kicked around. The major difference though is, besides holy nova for shadow, the way all 3 specs path through the tree doesn’t lead to anyone picking something up they literally never use, which was the major argument against the druid tree.
Still can’t believe no one is complaining about the utter lack of manna generation for holy in pvp compared to literally everything else in the game. disc has rupture (was base line for both but devs are wack) shamans have manna tide totem, mw has manna tea (extremely over tuned especially if you spend 1 talent point to bolster it) Disc has rupture (shield discipline) and upgraded shadoiwfiend (mind bender) and what do holy priest have? a crappy raid buffing channel that returns less than 10% manna (2 flash heals every 3 minutes…) and shadowfiend who can be kited, cc, or just bugs out half the time. Not like it returns crap for manna anyway. If you get 2% every 3 min from shadowfiend you are doing good.
Holy is absurdly manna intensive to reach the same output as other healers yet they have no viable means of clawing manna back.
I can live with the hero classes being crap for the most part as the holy kit is good in general but it can’t be good with such poor manna management. mainly the fact that flash heal is such a monstrousdrain on manna and is an absolute in order to bring the absurd cooldown of serenity back around.
DF is the worst state I have seen holy in pvp as far as output and TWW is about to only amplify that thanks to manna generation not even being an afterthought.
Make rupture baseline again. If it is good enough for disc, it is good enough for holy. As it has always been for over 10 years now.
for those newer players, Rupture is now renamed to shield discipline and returns manna when your power word shield breaks. It is completely nerfed into the dirt even for disc now but is better than nothing.
There is one more thing we have that all 4 of our trees share. Rows 1-6 are largely ok, need some work, but relatively average.
Then you get to Rows 7-8-9-10. These are an expensive, non-cohesive disaster on all 4 trees. It looks like(and may possibly be) that whoever was doing Priest trees stopped at Row 6 and then an intern had to finish 7-10 in a week. Add to that the fact that they have not done anything with said mess for almost 2 years and we are far worse off than Druids.
Finally for the Kidney stone cherry on our poo sundae our 3 “hero” trees consist of a Dumpster Fire(oracle), something that works but no one asked for(Archon), and the poor horse that has been beaten into glue(VW).
Shadow is largely “acceptable collateral damage” in their disc-priest targeted VW nerfs.
Also mystifies me why they chose Mind Blast to have VB replace, when the better play would have been to have VB be a Proc off of casts of Flay/Spike/Voidbolt so that it doesn’t mess with your rotation as much.
The SI proc and Blast pooling issues have been around since the start, it just took a while for people to fully get their head around how bad it was going to feel.
The only reason I can think of why the tree are mostly 2-point sinks is because they’re trying to make the choice options feel more nuanced at the expense of flexibility.
In any of the Priest class trees I can only pick 2 end tree talents and 5 talent nodes which gives me 7 talents to pick from. On my Prot Paladin I can pick 4 end tree talents and 6 other 1-point nodes for a total of 10 talent choices.
Also, a lot of the talents on Disc/Holy don’t feel like they do much to improve your overall gameplay. Disc in particular has talents that were pre-10.2 overhauled designs that still haven’t been updated and most of the end tree talents are pretty weak. You can easily go a Disc build with only take 1 end tree talent and still be fine.
Holy has mandatory end tree talent issues. Miracle Worker, Divine Image, and Answered Prayers (for raid) are all mandatory talent options. Lightweaver, Lightwell, and Divine Word all have issues in regards to their utilization. Lightweaver only works on Heal, Lightwell requires people to drop <50% hp to work and can’t be moved, and Divine Word Sanctify just massively overheals.
Bit of a side topic/rant. Are priests (holy at least) the only spec that didn’t have their talent points reset? All of my alts had theirs totally or partially refunded. Priest? Business as usual.
Speaking of end talents: if things stay as current, is Mindbender still mandatory without the S3 tier set? Never cared for it and it’s an expensive 4 point dump that I’d rather drop elsewhere.
Much less mandatory than it was. It is nearly(read practially) impossible to get it down to 30s without S3/4 4 piece, hard to fit 15 smites into a 30 second window even with high haste.
You are still stuck with Void Summoner however, because fitting 22.5 smites into a 90 second window is quite doable. That lines up much better with 90s CDs.
Also had an idea to make Oracle more tolerable:
Premonition starts as locked in to a particular buff.
On use, it looks at the last eligible spell and locks in the next Premonition buff based on it.
E.G. You have Insight locked in. You press PW: Shield, then Premonition. Insight fires off, and then your next Premonition, 1 minute later, triggers Solace, based on PW:S.
A little clunky, but it would give you flexibility to pick the buff that suits you, and plays into the theme of Oracle by making you predict which situation you’ll be in one minute later.
Shoot, the majority of my feedback I provided on the 10.2 PTR feedback thread back in the beginning of November 2023 and just adding more and refining it/making it more concise ever since and reposting it each time a feedback thread was created lol.
I know others did as well.
So they had plenty of time to sort out the direction to take Priest in. They either chose not too or they quite literally have no idea what they are doing when it comes to Priest and just can kick down the road thinking once they deal with the easier problems of other classes then they can dedicate more time to Priest to figure them out but ah gee shucks… ran out of time again lol.
I’d be tickled pink if they’d shore up some of the Prayer of Mending bloat talents. Aren’t we still at like 5-6 possible talent points into that one spell?