Feedback: Oracle in The War Within

Classes Priest
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There is still a lot I am mulling over with this tree, but I want to give some feedback now from what I have read and listened to in the interviews. My general opinion is that it is fine to build around PI as a concept, but I do have some critiques regarding certain nodes in the tree. I’m going to go somewhat out of order because it is easier to talk about some talents if I discuss my thoughts on others first:

Foreseen Circumstances

I’ve seen some others mention this, and I have to agree that the 2 seconds added to Guardian Spirit feels disproportionately weaker compared to Pain Suppression’s 10% damage reduction. I think a lot of the problem stems from the fact that the 10% damage reduction has a very wide range of cases where that added amount will immediately translate into value, whereas the 2 seconds added to Guardian Spirit will very often add nothing.

Off the top of my head, you probably would be better off just giving an even bigger buff to the healing bonus instead. It’s not exciting, but the values of the two perks would be more in line with each other. You could also do something unconventional by reversing who gets the damage reduction bonus and who gets the extra length, but that could have its own balancing issues and be more work than it is worth for what should be a small talent.

Grand Reveal / Clairvoyance
These two I have grouped together because I find that their bits and pieces are good, but they are jumbled in my mind. I won’t go over the largely negative feedback I’ve seen already, especially regarding the capstone talent, but I think if some of the parts were moved around, you would have a more appealing design.

For starters, I would make the Grand Reveal effect way simpler - “Premonition has a second charge” - that’s it! But, I would then take its charge system and shift it to Clairvoyance, making that talent far more deterministic in nature. I would also consider then swapping the names (Grand Reveal feels to me at least more like a final talent name in a tree).

Divine Feathers
Plenty of people have given their opinion on why they don’t like this talent option. I agree with a lot of it. my suggestion as a middle ground is to make an empowered feather charge (some kind of internal cd) where when you cast the spell, it pops out extra feathers around the target. This allows you to keep control over how you use it (whether a personal or external buff on someone else) while giving a little more collaborative party flavor to the spell.

Prompt Deliverance
I just want to comment that I think this node is perfectly fine. It isn’t flashy on the surface, but it gives a lot of power to priests because of how most dot mechanics work in game. This not only is a large quality of life improvement, but in some instances will let priests just not care about what normally should be hard mechanics.

I don’t really want to give too much of my thoughts on any of the Premonition buffs because the range of changes you could make is so large that it really is up to the developers to decide. I will say that realistically, if I had to watch a range of 3 to 5 buffs every minute or so, tracking which is up and who to put it on, I would probably lean hard into playing whatever the other hero tree is - unless I am doing easy content. When you factor in the charge system later in the tree, an added rotational spell, and even random procs in the capstone, I would say this tree is overwhelming, especially if you are trying to play in a competitive format.

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83

Not only does the community at large dislike WoW’s take on “support”, but Premonition just sounds like a more annoying and clunky to use version of PI.

It’s a bootleg version of FFXIV’s Astrologian.

Hear, hear…

3 Likes
84

Just mainly want to provide feedback on the main mechanic Premonition. What is the purpose of having 3 buffs to rotate through? It does not seem to have tie-in in terms of mechanics or flavor/class fantasy. Class would function largely the same with 3 separate spells: Premonition: Solace, Premonition: Insight and Premonition: Glory that shares the same CD. Or even just applies a single Premonition buff to the target that gets used up based on certain smart conditions, such as applying Glory when a warrior uses a major class cooldown, or a heal + DR when a tank class drops below certain health threshold. In fact, this version probably embodies Premonition as a buff that is about to happen.

In addition, the buffs themselves could use some iteration to be more generally useful, considering the capstone also applies it to nearby targets as well as the existence of Twins of the Sun Priestess.

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85

Would you consider a slightly different approach to the clairvoyant theme. Rather than random buffs, here what I’m thinking:

  1. Visions of the future: summons Minority Report style minions that heal/shield, like rdruid treants.

  2. Lux style superbeam. A huge ray that heals allies/ damages enemies. Huge width and range like detestation evoker. Thematically, represents passing across time with an effect for players caught in the vision.

  3. Shields or feather effect off each PoM bounce. Representing the increased ability to understand each decision-making fork at each point in time. Could even do power infusion off each bounce.

  4. A blur/netherwalk/teleport ability: like imagine priests having professor Xavier movement limitation, but the Oracle is about to bend time to either move quickly or go into bullet time to evade.

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86

#DeletePI/Premonition

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87

I’m actually surprised a move like this wasn’t done many expansions ago. I am curious to see how this will affect gameplay in the endgame raids and Mythics. We already see certain classes being ignored because of their lack of DPS and/or Utility.
I would like to see classes get different variations of Bloodlust, what I meant by variations is instead of Haste, maybe increasing other stats.
I am excited for a change that I thought was going to happen a long time ago. Let’s see the other classes.

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quick and short.

I don’t like it.
I hate gameplay styles like this. I don’t want to stress over this spec.
I hate micromanagement, especially short buffs like these. I want to have fun and not stress over my char due to lame mechanics like this. The complexity this brings is just simply not fun to me.
PI i already hated, and i hate this one more.

if it never changes, i just won’t use oracle ever.
I am very concerned for holy and shadow’s hero talents. very concerned.

7 Likes
89

TLDR: An awful lot of work and complexity for something that is functionally, rotationally and throughput wise indistinguishable from an equivalent priest with no hero spec points spent.

Long version

As a Holy Priest overall I would rate the oracle as a C- or D+ with the general comments of unbalanced and overdesigned and requiring far too much micromanagement. I dislike the idea of building the spec around buffs but I will assume that is a personal issue and instead focus on the actual design.

More specifically as a Holy priest it is very obvious that someone had a cool idea for disc and then tried to shoehorn it in with things that they think holy would want without fully understanding how holy plays and what most holy priests are looking for from their gameplay.

This starts with the whole core concept of prediction and buffing allies which has never been something holy priests focus on. We do not focus on buffing players outside of PI and PoM as renew and shield are usually a waste of a cooldown. Secondly Holy is a reactive healer see damage  heal damage, we don’t pre-emptively set up healing like disc with attmonement and this whole tree is built around pre-emption and prediction.

You see the same issue in individual talents where 10% Damage reduction is amazing for Disc and 2 seconds more on guardian angel is going to matter less than 10% of casts and is trash tier a doubt you would find a single holy priest who could ever say these 2 seconds made a difference in their gameplay or the groups outcome.

Specific issues:

Premonition.
Replacing PI is not a problem in itself but the clunkyness of the choice mechanic and the time delay potential between deciding to cast it and the right buff showing up is horrifying. Potentially having to wait 4 seconds (if choosing versatile divinations) after initial keybind press for the desired option to show up is horrific gameplay even if the spell itself is off the GCD. 4 seconds is an eternity in modern PVE and PVP and to make matters worse it is actually a random 0-4 second delay so you can’t even accurately time it with external events or cooldowns even if you wanted to! This design currently screams weakauras mandatory to be even partially playable. Additionally it is horrible for solo world play against elites/rares and minibosses as it just adds a delay to your own burst compared to simple PI.

This 1 second buff rotation window is simultaneously too short for high activity periods and too slow to allow for maximally skilful timing of premonition casts.

Secondly the buffs themselves vary wildly in value depending on the buff and the target, Solace is always the wrong choice as that is what all the other tank/healer cooldowns are for so it adds nothing new to the encounter and group it is strictly worse on any target than casting pain suppression or guardian spirit on the same target and those are not going to have the random delay mentioned above baked in. Secondly the dps buffs should always be cast on mages, boomies, shadowpriests, and warriors as only these specs will get 100% effectiveness of these buffs as everyone else mixes magic and physical damage to some degree.

All this can be fixed by making it a simple X% buff to primary stat. The buff will still be wasted on a tank but it will give them some improved defence and allows all the mixed mode dps will get balanced boosts.

Clairvoyance
As the final capstone this is horrible and unfun as a low chance proc on a 1 minute cooldown means that most dungeon fights and many raid boss fights this capstone reward for reaching the level 80 will not proc the entire fight. Lets look at why I say this.

Lets assume that by a low chance they mean 20% chance which is about as high as this can go and still be described as a “low” chance.
Lets also assume that most boss fights last about 5-6 minutes and dungeon bosses average 3 minutes.

We know from cooldown management in raid and boss fights you should not be hitting clairvoyance on cooldown but timing them strategically for fight phases and co-ordination with other effects like bloodlust or personal cooldowns.

This means we will on average cast premonition 4 times on a typical raid boss fight and twice on a dungeon boss.

We thus can calculate that on the average raid fight we only have an 80% chance of clairvoyance happening. This is not good especially as RNG can easily happen were it will not proc for 2-3 attempts in a row but on the next attempt it procs twice. Does it need a real PPM mechanic but on a per fight basis?

It is even worse for dungeons as you have only a 40% chance of your level 80 capstone occurring in a boss fight!

There is also a major design problem here in that because of proximity you want to pick a group of suitable players close to each other all of whom would get maximum benefit but with low proc chance and having it give variable value because of the mixed damage modes it makes what should be an expression of player skill a worthless waste of time and mental bandwidth as it probably won’t happen.

This should be changed to a high probability or preferably on demand chance to smooth out raid performance over multiple attempts and make it more fun for the player.

Versatile divinations
This is symptomatic of the whole concept in that it is either always the best or worst thing to choose based on how the numbers work out. Right now the haste buff which turns it into a shorter less powerful PI is almost certainly the best option to cast every single time at the cost of exacerbating the time delay problem. If the number tuning on haste changes it will never be better than being able to cast the basic dps increases in a more often and in a more timely manner

Finally there is the whole twin suns issue as all the personal throughput power of the entire hero tree is tied to Premonition so if the twin suns personal throughput is not addressed well the Oracle priests will be personally far less powerful in all situations than priests in other hero specs.

Advice to devs summarised:

Simplify, simplify, simplify then simplify some more!.
Find holy focused benefits that match the power of the disc alternatives e.g. replace the 2 seconds longer guardian spirit with a 10% buff to one of our holy word spells

In Summary this hero talent tree is currently overdesigned, overly complex and unintuitive and if it is confusing and scaring veteran players imagine how bad it will be for newer or more casual players!

11 Likes
90

The more I think about it, the more, to me, this seems like taking one of the most contentious ability priest have and turning it into a more complex mechanic for no reason.

I don’t think we ever heard a reasoning why PI was being kept as is in game as an external instead of a personal priest CD, Oracle just doubles down on it regardless.

So I am now leaning on the side of; please just change the whole thing. I do like the idea of the divination type inspiration for Oracle, I think it fits priests quite nicely, but this ain’t how to do it.

Priest specs must be given the freedom to breathe, for a change, away from being chained to externals.

8 Likes
91

i wantt to piggyback to a comment that talked about communing with the divinities in the game – Elune, Naruu, Loas.

Instead of focusing on this weak attempt at fortunetelling in the form of micromanagement.

I think it would be more fun to focus on Oracle priest harnessing the power of these archetypes to enhance their abilities and support their allies. Maybe even summoning these entities for a brief period to assist in battle. As well as probably other unknown archetypes out there yet to be discovered etc…

reminder. Simplicity is better.
Look at Classic to WOTLK.
Simplicity is better.
Complexity doesn’t make things fun. Priests already have a lot going on with them. Make it simple, hold weight, and fun. Like i don’t play this game with addons. Nor will i be forced into it. At most , just another spec that is dead to me.

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make urgency give more upfront damage instead of haste, then make all that extra damage be attributed to the priest like blessing of summer. cheers

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  • people love theme base concepts
  • great idea crossing disc and holy with power word shield.
  • 1 min cool down is great, You can use the 2 minute for demon hunters or swap to this for paladins
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Make the 25% increase healing increase HP
And option to let fate decide “randomize” one of the three options
for people who don’t want micromanage the effect, for a bonus

1 Like
95

Ion said that they liked the unique design and considerations that PI brought to the game in an interview a few years ago.

Oracle is a perfect example of Blizzard disregarding the gameplay ramifications of their designs simply because they like the novelty of it. PI has had solely negative effects on the game and community since it was reintroduced, but that’s not the design intent so those problems aren’t relevant.

You can see this play out in PW:GFY where all hopes of having better mobility were shut down by claiming they wanted priests to be required to be exactly where they needed to be ahead of time all of the time. Our only mobility buttons are intended for allies. Divine Feathers is in this tree to encourage the priest to throw away their own mobility when the priest needs it so they be saved by Rescue more often.

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This one is really confusing for me.

I am going to start by saying that the vision here is neat and this would honestly be an awesome concept if PI/premonition were self cast only. I would be really interested in playing around with this tbh.

The reality unfortunately is that as long as PI is an external, we will never, ever EVER be in control of who or when we are buffing with it, and the same thing goes for premonition. I have played in guilds ranging from >1k ranking, not getting CE, to barely getting CE, to being near-HoF range, and everywhere in between since I started maining disc again. The common thread between all these experiences is that no matter how casual or hardcore a guild is, PI is a dps CD and is NOT a spell we are typically allowed to cast on our own accord - the most flexibility I have ever been given was in lower rank guilds where all that mattered was that I cast it on any DPS of my choosing during their CDs, but more typically both the person I cast it on AND when I cast it is prescribed and is something I must follow if I want to keep my raid spot.

This is the reason priests broadly hate PI as an external regardless of whether we care about parses or not - it is basically not even our own spell, and any benefit we get from it via twins (generally zero due to DPS often using CDs on pull + on CD, seldom lining up with big raid damage aka big healing moments) is just a coincidence and is seen as a cute bonus. In fact, the PI nerf made it even more rare for us to get any benefit at all by reducing its overall uptime, which has reduced the odds of it overlapping with our ramps to be even smaller than it already was. Premonition being even shorter just means it will be dramatically less likely to overlap with our ramps, and furthermore any buff that isn’t haste only would have impact on the damage part of a disc ramp, which lasts only for 6-8 seconds or so. Contrast this with regular PI, where if the buff does overlap any part of the ramp, it will give significant benefit, as haste is excellent for both the atonement application part as well as the damage part.

This tree also just widens the gap even further between the damage that disc brings to a raid, and the damage anyone else brings. Granted Holys damage contribution will be elevated as well, so really priests of either spec will blow every other healer out of the water. This is a big balancing problem that would only be worsened by this tree.

Frankly, I was desperately hoping PI would become self cast only in TWW so I could stop being treated as a buff bot as well as be able to use it for myself- so the first tree being focused on it is genuinely really disheartening, as not only does it mean another expansion of having a single external buff that I and almost everyone hates be basically my ENTIRE utility kit, it means shining force will not come back, it means we will likely be stuck without a kick again, and it means any hopes for cool new utility or mobility go right out the window.

What’s even worse than all this, though, is that unless voidweaver is MILES ahead for healing and personal dps, we will never get to play it. We will be forced to use Oracle if we want to keep our raid spots, the same way we are currently broadly forced to PI dps when its best for them no matter what.

While I could give feedback on some of the specific nodes that are problematic, I don’t think it’s worth the time it would take to write - this idea simply doesn’t work. It would if PI wasn’t an external, but it is. It really just seems like whoever made this simply doesn’t understand the way the game is played by the overwhelming majority of players, and just plain doesn’t understand that this tree will just end up being a raid dps increase while increasing the priest’s throughput by very little, and worst of all, being unfun to play AND effectively locking us into playing it, since healing throughput and healers themselves are constantly being backseated for the sake of maximizing raid dps - even in casual guilds. This is NOT just a problem for competitive players.

Healers don’t get loot, don’t get to use externals (besides innervate/spatial obviously), aug buffs, etc.

Please rework this idea entirely. I wish PI were self cast only, or were going to be. Having an assortment of high impact, short duration but shortish CD buffs available for me for myself could be super neat! Id be into this idea if it offered power or interesting gameplay! But unfortunately Premonition, as an external, offers us little to no personal power alongside what looks to be an incredibly dissatisfying gameplay experience.

This all is worsened further by my educated guess that voidweaver will focus on shadowfiend/mindbender - our pets (something it seems, at minimum, a majority of Disc and Shadow mains BOTH loathe) being made into the focus of the spec has been bad enough already - them being the focus of our only alternative hero tree to Oracle makes me honestly intensely worried about Priest as a whole in TWW. Dragonflight did us dirty already with the removal of shining force, multiple patches of being the worst healer, being the only healer with no ability to get a kick, the list goes on. Hell, feather is still on the damn GCD while pallies had pony taken off the gcd despite being 2.5x the strength of feather AND lasting longer (6s vs 5s).

The devs are saying that they are listening, so I am hopeful that this tree can and will be scrapped completely and replaced with something less problematic and divisive, something that actually gives the priest themself power, something that is fun to play…because this tree is unfortunately none of those things. :frowning:

Thanks for your time.

Best,
-Psyshadow

9 Likes
97

Hear hear

And yeah I think that’s the issue; something being unique doesn’t make it good or fun. We’d be better served with a Brez button instead, bridging the gap with other healers, and avoiding all of PIs issues.

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98

I’d play these hero talents IF, AND ONLY IF, you get rid of dungeon affixes completely. And while you’re at it, make a concrete decision about disc. You say disc heals too much for the amount of damage it contributes one week, and then the next week say you must nerf disc damage to be more in line with other healers. The level of miscommunication or lack thereof in balancing needs to be figured out BEFORE you start making things even more complicated for yourselves and the players. After reviewing the developer interview for Oracle, it’s blatantly obvious that the devs on this don’t play disc priest, pretty much EVER. Disc’s identity is that it’s a healer that heals via doing damage, our hero talents should attribute to that, not add 2 extra spells (is this why you got rid of Schism and Shadow Covenant? Because I’d rather have those back than deal with this buff roulette, smite spam, AND needing to taking Prayer of mending as a talent). Start over please.

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one big issue with this not being touched in this discussion is that there is no general throughput boost to the priests basic heals anywhere in this mess. Look at all the other specs previewed today - nearly every talent gives a direct boost to overall throughput. This includes the resto druid talents.

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If there’s good gameplay behind them, yes.

I see none of that here.

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101

Night Fae Guardians worked so well, that’s the format that should be followed, and some of the Torghast talents for Night Fae could be in the tree. This newer system just sounds so stupid, especially once you dig into it from the dev interview.