It makes even veteran players hesitant because this is the first expansion ever where classes weren’t completely overhauled inbetween expansions. Holy never played the same in BFA, SL, or DF, but in TWW it plays exactly the same as it does in DF.
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For what it’s worth, I think the hero talents are fine.
I personally hate rotating buff buttons (hence why I’m not a big fan of Oracle and think it would be better suited with a larger overhaul), but right now what they do is OK.
For Holy, Archon is the ‘play the same as you were before but with one super amped button’ and Oracle has super juiced moments with piety and can make some fun plays with Insight.
For Disc, Voidweaver is the ‘play the same as you were, but with one super amped button’ versus Oracle which seems to be positioning itself as the ‘get away from the shadow side of the tree and play mostly direct healing’ tree.
My problems with oracle disc is that there’s parts of oracle that are pretty fun - but its need to be a rotating buff that changes how you play each time just doesn’t jive with the Bender playstyle, but Disc’s power is almost entirely built into that bender playstyle so it feels super awkward for them unless they play VERY weirdly and do no damage.
I think if you’re pretty casually playing though and you don’t really mind your damage or trying to climb to super high keys, Oracle is actually a fairly interesting tree to mess around with, and IS going to vary your playstyle.
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I had to think about this but it’s really true. Legion featured the total redesign, BFA stripped a heap of borrowed power from the legendaries and introduced insane WoD-level pruning, SL was the ultimate borrowed power expansion so it was all new, and then DF ditched all the borrowed power to go back to the future with skill trees again, so it was all new too.
And then TWW comes along and it’s… crickets…
Holy in BFA spammed PoH with stupid amounts of mastery and azerite traits that fed into an insane amount of echo of light healing. It was like 90% echo of light healing, 10% PoH healing. In M+ Holy was straight garbo… imagine SL Holy without Flash Concentration.
SL brought in the Flash Concentration playstyle for better or worse. It was our bread and butter for all forms of content. Night Fae and Kyrian were pretty strong for their respective areas of content. Nothing really much to say here other than Holy was at its best in regards to being a single target pumper.
DF got rid of Flash Concentration and pushed our healing from direct casted abilities like PoH or Flash Heal/Heal to cooldown based abilities in raid like PoM/CoH/Holy Words. Holy changed a lot in DF in regards to talents like Divine Image and our AOE dps being overhauled 3 times.
TWW is the same Holy as in DF, but Halo is now a big gimmicky mega raid heal every 1 minute, and Holy has to rely more on healing cooldowns to heal people in M+.
Dear Blizzard,
An entire priest hero tree is locked behind an optional spell (Halo) I don’t have.
This basically locks me into a single tree, which I also don’t like for different reasons, but at least it’s a tree I can use.
This takes away my agency and it feels bad, as it feels like Blizzard is dictating how I play. It feels like I don’t have a choice, especially given that the entirety of the minitree will be consumed.
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I’ve been mucking around with Oracle and Archon.
Oracle
Oracle feels pretty solid for solo questing and dungeons. Fatebender is probably the best choice for it because it reduces Insight’s cdr by 10 seconds, allowing you to chain cast Holy Fires and Prayer of Mendings without an awkward 3-second delay.
I think the biggest drawback of Premonition, though, is the constantly rotating buff that often doesn’t align with what you need at the moment. Insight is pretty strong for firing off a bunch of instant casts back-to-back, but it’s not game-changing.
Beyond just Premonition, you have a ton of passives working for you, like Power Word: Shield on Prayer of Mending, a longer duration on Guardian Spirit, and a stronger Power Word: Life.
Archon
Archon feels better for dungeons to me for several reasons. The first is the passive healing from Halo, which is significant, consistently ranking as my #3 heal. This translates to needing to cast about 50% fewer Flash Heals on the group throughout an entire dungeon run, which adds up to a decent amount of mana savings.
The damage on Halo is pretty decent, around 25-30% of my overall, and bigger pull sizes definitely make it stronger. It’s also passive damage, so in healing intensive situations you’re still able to keep dealing out damage.
Surge of Light is strong with Archon because it also reduces the cooldown of Sanctify by 4 seconds per cast. Apotheosis is much stronger with Archon, and you definitely want to run Answered Prayers, and with Sustained Potency you can extend the duration of Apotheosis by +6s. When you’re in Apotheosis and have Surge of Light procs, you can reset both Sanctify and Serenity pretty quickly. This helps feed into an Epiphany loop, allowing for more frequent Prayer of Mending casts.
In summary, I have a lot more Holy Words available with Archon compared to Oracle, which makes me feel more capable of reacting to damage patterns.
Archon also feels more mobile than Oracle because, when using Halo, I can move with the group, and the constant Surge of Light procs allow me to keep Flash Healing while on the move.
3 Likes
Thanks for sharing your perspectives.
I just hate the RNG aspect of Epihany. I’d rather it be a 10% chance to get an extra charge than a 25% chance to reset. Resetting with like two seconds left just feels bad.
Funny part about this is as we get more haste, fatebender will get less useful for this since our CDs will get hasted and prem is a flat CD reduction.
My feels are pretty much the opposite though. Oracle just feels better than Archon in near every way on Holy dungeons. Way better group healing with both prems (and there’s quite a few places where PoM has value actually). The place it’s lacking is that Archon makes your Apoth window strong, but the ability to cleave overheal onto the group is ridiculously good in 5 mans, and it’s easy to hold with the charge system. Increased Holy Fire damage contributes better than Halo damage, etc.
Granted, I haven’t done many of the normal dungeons because they’re all too easy to get an opinion from. But in beta my feels were pretty much that Oracle beat it out in every way the harder that keys got.
Though I also think any Oracle build is going for ST healing boosts (Weaver/Resonant) and Archon builds are likely to be going for CoH with the old DI/DW.
Right now I’m sitting at 9% haste so it feels pretty miserable RN. It won’t be until were in Mythic iLvl gear before our secondary stats start to look halfway decent. Getting back to 20%+ haste will feel so gewd.
I’ve been messing around with this build here:
This is similar to a build I used during DF w/ the Trail of Light talent. I’m not entirely sold on Trail of Light and will need to test it on real keys because I might want to get Divine Hymn/Divine Service instead.
The healing output from CoH after the recent +30% buff is actually very good if you’re consistently rolling Renews on the group. It’s been almost neck-and-neck tied with PoM in some of the dungeons/delves I’ve done so far.
So CoH is decent now huh? I may gave your build a trip. I’ve been having a hard time giving up Desperate Times. Is PoH still trash too? Haven’t touched either since SL.
Well to put things into perspective… I ran a heroic priory and the group was getting smacked around hard like it was mythic and I had to put some work in.
Flash Heal - 36.16 mil (14.1%)
Echo of Light - 35.31mil (9.9%) ← Only 26% overhealing here which is kinda impressive it used to be 50%+.
PoM - 24.88mil (9.77%)
Holy Word Serenity - 23.20mil (9.1%)
Halo - 22.64 mil (8.9%)
CoH - 20.77 mil (8.1%)
Holy Word Sanctify - 17.55 mil (6.9%)
With having so low haste (10%) its pretty hard to keep stacks of Renew rolling, but if you add up the healing from Archon Halo + CoH… thats a lot of passive healing.
If I didn’t have CoH and Halo I would have to manually cast more Flash Heals to cover most of that healing.
I hate Oracle…
Tried it and the spell effect is annoying to be always active on my character.
Also hate to be micromanaging a spell to get what I want… idk it’s just an annoying spell tbh.
I know it can be strong in M+ specially but it’s just too obnoxious to play around it.
Maybe if it could work like Divine word like you activate premonition and depending on what you cast you get the buff? idk it would be also annoying to have a second spell that needs another spell to activate it.
2 Likes
How do you think the build you listed would work with Archon? I’ll try it out today. I am pleased with the performance of CoH, like the results you had. I too found CoH&PoM very close to each other. So much so that CoH feels like an extra charge of PoM, which is nice!
The build I listed should work with Oracle or Archon. Oracle would be able to generate more stacks of Healing Chorus because Renew lasts +6s longer.
Also, I noticed the build I posted was for Oracle. I updated it to archon.
after having played on my priest a good bit now…Oracle feels awful.
I dunno man Archon just gives me another power-button to press. I send out a bunch of damage and healing. It’s just something I add into my rotation for way better throughput.
Oracle is just a couple buffs that are just impactful enough to not want to waste them, but not impactful enough to not make sure it’s on cooldown as much as possible. Often I’ll find myself popping the “7 seconds less cooldown” one and just letting it sit there because I don’t actually need to be using any of my longer cooldown abilities at the moment.
At least on holy, it just feels bad. Why use a mediocre cycling self-buff when I can just hit halo and blast out 4 halos that hit 2 times each and guarantee 4 stacks of infusion of light
2 Likes
IMO, because this is really boring to me.
Hitting Halo and getting a brief period of passive healing isn’t very engaging to me. I get that people like it, and honestly I don’t think it’s horribly designed, but it doesn’t mesh well with how I like to play dungeons.
Oracle on the other hand, absolutely does. Don’t have a need for the CD? Then spam holy fire for a ton of extra damage and use the CD on that. Piety is a better tool than most healers have for group healing scenarios. Solace is the only ‘meh’ premonition, and it’s still incredibly good shielding with DR, which can either keep a tank alive from lethal tankbusters or just keep us alive through a ton considering how squishy we are.
Oracle holy is mostly great IMO.
flat stats you have to hit a button for and have to cycle is more exciting to you than blasting out 4 waves of fairly powerful healing energy?
To each their own, I guess.
If Oracle is ‘flat stats you have to hit a button for’ then Archon is also flat stats you have to hit a button for.
the halos give stats too!? sweet jesus!
More my point is:
Insight can be used in more than one way - it doesn’t have one answer. You can use it for damage, too.
Piety gives a healing redirect that incentivizes direct overhealing. You can use it either in conjunction with a cooldown, or you can GA yourself and blast overhealing to the group.
Solace is a DR with a giant absorb that you can control.
And Premonition overall is off the GCD.
None of these are “flat stat bonuses” except for piety’s 25% healing bonus. If you’re going to count any of it as a flat stat bonus, then Halo’s passive healing and damage is just a ‘flat stat bonus.’ It just doesn’t make sense.
Archon is the spec for people who liked Holy as it was and just want a more powerful version. Oracle is for people who want something to mix up gameplay. They’re both pretty good designs conceptually now, IMO. I still think Oracle would have been a better Hero spec if it didn’t have 3 different buffs and focused in more on one of them making it a more focused spec. But as-is, I think healer priest specifically actually got pretty sick hero trees.