Okay, that’s how I thought it worked, until Cait made me reread the wording. That’s less awesome.
Does Insight ‘stack’ with Apotheosis? If so, you could kinda use and Guardian Spirit + Apo → Insight+Piety → 4x serenity to push a rather decent amount of M+ healing every 2 minutes when Apo + 2c of Premonition are up. Little less bursty when GS is down, but you could still throw down Divine Hymn as an alternating +Heal%.
40s CD reduction per insight charge when in Apo sounds decent, but I don’t play much holy.
Damn, they keep buffing Oracle to try to make it “too good not to take” despite being a fundamentally flawed/annoying design with the cycling and uncontrollable premonitions.
The death blow for this expansion for me will be is if they nerf Archon to make it unusable just to try to make Oracle shine, and I fear that’s where we’re going to end up. Which will be another 9.0 and 10.0 situation where they leave us in very bad shape we have to hack our way out of.
1 Like
If you’re asking if it turns 7s into 21, no it doesn’t.
Even if it did though, I don’t think this would really ever be useful in a dungeon setting. This would be a thing you’d play around in raid for Sanc resets if anything.
Though TBH what I think is absolutely godawful about Oracle is that ideally you’re popping it as often as you can to filter through them and get clairvoyance which is what you’ll want to time with your big healing moments. But that playstyle just sounds awful.
It’s actually just having Pally’s blessing of seasons. Except you can only bless yourself, and also every blessing is Spring. What fundamentally sucks about oracle is that it doesn’t live up to the fantasy in any way but on top of that the mechanical gameplay of it just doesn’t feel interesting. It’s a bunch of 1 minute self buffs, only one of which would realistically change what you do in any given moment, but for some reason all of them are different?
Like, totemic shaman doesn’t change up your playstyle at all really and it doesn’t add a huge visual to the kit either, but it DOES alleviate a pain point in the resto shaman rotation, and gives them a mana save, and it DOES empower all your totems in the tree which is the selling point “flavor” of the hero spec. So it’s not that it needs to make a wild change to gameplay or needs to be visually stunning - but if it’s not going to I’d way rather something that shores up an existing weakness to the kit or at least FEELS like a gain. And if we can’t have that then bare minimum is something that actually feels like the word “oracle”. But I honestly think it fails at all of those metrics.
Also it’s got visuals that you’ll barely even notice anyway because it’s a tiny thing near your head, so you don’t even get like really satisfying visual payoff for it either.
1 Like
Good, so it isn’t just me that finds the gameplay to be dog poo.
I was just hoping there might be some kinda silver lining for Holy-Oracle. It really should work with Apotheosis from a mechanical standpoint.
Although you are right to say that that wouldn’t make it any less of a colossal annoyance and burden compared to nearly every other hero tree. It also misses the whole ‘class fantasy’ almost entirely… and is not visually appealing… and is just a crappy rehash of seasons… boy the more I talk about it the worst it gets.
I kinda wish they would just un-murder VW, go through and put some effort into smoothing out VW and Archon, and put Oracle in a NYI status till like TWW s2 when they finally have some good ideas to redo it.
2 Likes
I still don’t understand why you are so enamoured with the idea of massive Archon nerfs.
Sure, purely from a balance perspective it “needs” to be nerfed in order for Oracle to be competitive at this point, but the question is why do we need to be forced into picking Oracle when the gameplay experience is utterly miserable for most players?
Just feels like a situation of “they were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should”.
2 Likes
After Archon nerf in first ID, 3% per buffs every 2 weeks until end of patch when we are still bottom in output. Feels like Dejavue.
1 Like
Because halo’s healing per execution time is currently obscene and to make any of the actual core spells meaningful it’s gotta come down. It’s not about making oracle good as much as making the holy spec itself good.
2 Likes
It definitely is worm while looking at. In a world atm where there is lot of damage and stops needed oracle may allow some flexibility that void weaver does not. Less flashy but maybe more useful for an actual healing style. Xtra 10% to pain sup, large absorb shield, free pom and a 15% dr and the overhealing spread is worth watching closely and toying with
1 Like
It’s for a number of reasons.
- Holy atm is tuned around Archon Halo so you’re front loading a lot of your healing into one ability on a one minute cooldown at the expense of all your other heals barely doing much. Holy atm is about -20% behind a lot of other healers on the beta.
- Archon Halo makes Oracle not competitive for raid healing simply because Archon does 2x the raid healing potential.
Making Archon Halo weaker does not = making Holy weaker. It means pulling back power from Halo and putting more back into your core raid heals (Sanctify, PoM, CoH, etc) so overall you do the same hps with a more smoothened out experience. If Archon and Oracle do roughly the same hps then it really comes down to personal preference and skill level to min max Oracle.
2 Likes
That’s pretty much my stance on it. You could macro Premonition into a random spell and, while it would be suboptimal, you wouldn’t really notice much difference. Insight is the only one that wants you to change how you play.
I think what they wanted for Oracle from the jump was for players to anticipate what buff they’d need, then cast it, without just giving them 3+ new spells that share a cooldown to hotkey. And honestly that feels like it could be pretty thematic, if they’d found a way to make it work. The problem was they couldn’t, or at least they couldn’t while making it fun to interact with. I remember thinking they could try keying it off specific spells (so PW:S would queue up Insight, Flash Heal for Piety, etc.) but even that’s just an annoying middleman between me and the buff I want. So it just fell back into BoSeasons, which works, but doesn’t fulfill the fantasy.
If I was tasked with building my own version of Oracle, I’d play around with the ideas of time and cooldown manipulation. Give players an ability that swaps between storing up time and burning through it. When you’re storing time, your CDs are slower or your haste is reduced, maybe it could be a toggle that you can keep up for as long as you want. Once you’ve stored some time, it’s the opposite, faster CDs, more haste, and either the duration could be longer or the haste/CDR could be increased based on the amount of time stored. For something purely meant for healers, I think that’d be pretty fun. There’s periods of time where I don’t really have anything to do and other times where I’m overwhelmed, so having the option to trade some seconds from one to the other is very appealing.
Maybe a lot of flack is the consequence of Blizzard trying to shoehorn 1 hero spec across two different regular specs. I’m not much of a Holy healer but the sentiment I’m seeing, underneath the general complaint, is that Oracle does not jive with Holy.
Not a reason to toss it entirely, though.
With Disc, at least, Argen’s got a point:
Premonition isn’t really a rotating buff, not in practice. It’s a simple 2 minute cooldown.
You’ll pool Insight and Piety together; pop Solace any time within a 1 minute window; then Clairvoyance. Every 2 minutes you’ll have +15% healing and 3x 7 sec CDR, needing only a minor maintenance of popping Solace, probably for the insta-Radiance.
The charges greatly help flexibility, and if you want to pool Piety/Solace, or stagger Clairvoyance/Insight, or use Premo for the insta-Radiance, well that’s a skill expression and rather flexible, compared to a lot of other Hero specs.
Go look at Hunter Sentinel. That’s applied automatically, triggers automatically, deals damage automatically, and literally does not change your gameplay at all.
If Oracle still doesn’t appeal to you- well, Blizzard’s decision doesn’t look so bad, as you’ll have one other hero spec to go to.
I think it’s the complaint shadow has with archon as well. Oracle doesn’t do anything explicitly holy or add its own independantly tuned healing elements, it is just buffs to existing stuff.
But the existing stuff sucks, so it sucks on top of that.
Most of the like… actually good hero trees add new spell IDs, even if they’re not player casted abilities.
It wasn’t the only problem.
The only way this hero spec would work as a “pick your buff!” type of spell, is either every buff would need to be perfectly balanced (which has never happened), or applicable to completely different situations (which they’ve struggled with outside party/raid being the dynamic). It basically needed to be a rotating buff or you’d be aiming for one buff every single time.
And I guess I don’t really agree it would fit theme. Since ‘oracle’ kind of implies some kind of divine insight or foresight into a situation. Not really bigger healing. Insight is probably the one blessing that does.
I truly believe it needed to go back to the drawing board entirely right from the get go. It feels a bit like they made the tech/visuals in production for the 3 separate buffs back when it was a power infusion support-based tree, and when that got a ton of push back, they wanted to salvage the tech/visuals they were building and zombified out a really odd hero spec because of it.
I don’t think it really jives with Disc at all, and from a disc perspective most the cool things about it are things that could exist irrespective of the premonition spell it’s built around. If you changed “premonition” to instead be a quick CD that plopped out a healing AoE circle, for example, you’d still get the skill expression of insta-radiance and all the passive bonuses.
I even think it would be a better hero spec if the only blessing was Insight. IE: Premonition no longer has 3 buffs, Premonition is now just insight’s effects, and the rest of the tree and passives are built around building that CDR based gameplay up. That’s cool and unique, gives you that feeling of planning out your casts, feels way more predictable and you would never run into situations where you’re just casting Premonition just to cycle it because you want to hit premonition 4 sooner. It would deliver way stronger theming, add something to the gameplay, still allow skill expression and eliminate half the bad feeling of the tree, while still being useful to both specs and allow room to juice up the premonition, or juice up the spells you cast during it for the capstone.
I don’t really see where Hunter comes into this, but I’d PREFER something that barely changed my gameplay if it felt like it did something to shore up the kit, or expand on it in a satisfying way. Again, that’s essentially what both shaman healer hero specs do, but they’re also way more interesting to me.
Disc and Marks are my two mains, so I was using Sentinel as an example of a hero spec that literally does nothing noticeable outside of your damage log.
I don’t feel like I disagree with anything you’re saying, and I wouldn’t be bothered if they reworked it like how you proposed. But I also don’t dislike it’s current implementation either. If Premonition was nothing but Insight on a 90 second timer (which it basically is), I’ll be happy. As long as the numbers are there.
Disc has bigger problems, and it’s called Shadow Covenant, and I think that needs more urgent attention than Oracle.
Yup I can agree with that.
I liked Shadow Covenant being buffed and the GCDs moving around so that it was easier to get into and didn’t require a whole new cast. I disliked that the rest of the tree was left where it was - which was not a healthy spot.
Some of the Oracle talents for Holy are similar to Conduits we had in Shadowlands. Premonition itself is a reworked Fae Guardians.
New build.
Abyssal Reverie got cut in half, 5% generic damage buff across the board to compensate, Preventative Measures is up to 40% increased damage on its spells, which might be overboard and they should look into baking some of that damage in baseline. Void Blast got another nerf. Time will tell if the numbers work out.
Manipulation, Surge of Light, Contrition, and Heaven’s Wrath are 1-pointers.
I do like the Abyssal nerf, in line with smoothing out the healing yo-yo with Scov and balance between shadow and holy builds. Still no mechanical changes or other needs addressed, like interrupt or mobility.