While I do agree in principle about waiting to see archon, this is a dead tree as it sits now. Blizzard needs to have this bad design called out and reconsider. I like the theme, but Premonition as it sits doesn’t fit the theme.
I cast my own premonition to see no one will take this as it stands here, unless Archon is irredeemably worse. A high bar, but, well, we remember shadowlands XD
My honest question is what is the point of hero talents? Why did Blizzard invest so much time and effort into creating a new talent tree system for Dragonflight to then not simply add new rows the next expansion. If they did that we’d get 5 points in the Priest and 5 points in the spec tree going from 70 → 80. That’s enough to fill out another row of talents.
Adding this whole hero talent system sounds like they didn’t learn their lesson about borrowed power systems.
Because what is the expansion after the TWW going to have? An EXTREME HERO CLASS Talent Tree? And after that? The ULTRA HERO CLASS TALENT tree?
Archon is Holy/Shadow, I know it’s a typo just thought I’d mention it, but here’s hoping it’s better. Personally i feel like I’m already juggling so much especially in M+, I really don’t need to add to my plate, so as of right now Oracle is a no go for me but changes may happen.
Voidweaver is going 100% Shadowfiend/Mindbender focused for Disc/Shadow which is disappointing if it is, especially for Shadow, Archon I’m not too sure, which is intriguing.
Also want to mention Clairvoyance in M+, god I’d hate if I was that 5th person that rng made sure I never got the buff, that’s going to feel absolutely horrible. It most definitely should be changed to “your Target and 3 Allies” at least for M+.
Why are you guys so insistent on PI being a thing? Almost nobody likes it, Shadow is balanced around it so they will never truly be able to compete with other casters like Lock, and now with this, it adds an extremely annoying mini game that Disc and Holy have to play during a raid or M+, where they already have enough going on with healing and doing mechanics. Also, as someone else pointed out, this new buff is disproportionate when it comes to melee vs casters as almost every melee class does a mixture of Magic dmg and Physical dmg, so those melee specs are never going to be considered for physical bonus, and why would you give the magic bonus to a spec that does 60% magic dmg when you could give it to a caster like mage or lock that does 100% magic dmg, and if you can choose which buff goes out, you will just do casters almost every time. Plus, with how broken log hooks are right now, this is just going to make it even harder for you to tell how much dmg you are actually doing since there is no way to separate these things in logs now, and this is not about holding dmg over someone, this is purely about people who look at logs to improve their play. They won’t be able to tell if they are doing well or not because of their play or because of an external from a priest or aug.
What is the goal with this tree? It has nothing that Holy and Disc has been asking for, and actually promotes something they hate. Its just as bad, if not worse then the San’layn tree for DK. Which What is the point of these hero talents in the first place? All they are seemingly doing right now is doubling down on play styles that classes and specs hate. The only one I have heard anything positive about is Mountain Thane for warrior and even then, there’s still some pretty big concerns there, which makes people ask further, what is the point?
The hero trees that have been revealed so far give me no hope for the others, matter of fact, each time a new one is revealed, it makes me more concerned for War Within.
Themes of this thread so far:
PI isn’t liked to begin with, should be a Priest personal CD only, and Premonition is just a worst version of that that triples down on everything disliked about PI.
Overall idea and theme behind Oracle about divination related abilities is cool, Premonition and this entire hero tree just isn’t good for that.
Guess that sums it up pretty well right
Frostfire and Dark Ranger are well received overall, and are what more trees should strive toward imo. San’layn was huge miss, similar to Oracle here.
Premonition and all its associated talents should be scrapped entirely.
Doubling down on a controversial buff like PI is a mistake that can still be fixed. When I first read the talent(s) I immediately thought it would be extremely unfun to use, even without trying to maximum its effect. A lot of people I speak to are concerned with how taxing this button would be, especially during higher end mythic+ and raids.
If anything, drop PI from holy and disc and replace it with something healer-centric. Then expand on that through these hero talents and viola. I could even see a button like Power Word: Life becoming the central talent (although it would likely have to be modified and moved in/from the base talent tree).
Don’t over complicate this.
This has honestly been one of the things I’d like to see most. The vast majority of specs have become very convoluted in what they do, and how.
Assassination rogue, for instance, has a 30 second opener, which is a lot of steps when you’re trying to dodge all the stuff added in instances. A good goal for design should be to simplify the specs while not having them lose depth. I think 90% of specs would be very happy with that outcome.
Plus, frankly, a lot of the talent trees are bloated enough that a simplification would avoid talent bloat as the world soul saga progresses.
Indeed I do, and since we paid the PI tax in nerfs, without PI… yeah it sucks for everyone involved
Seriously just remove it completely from Priest as a class, all specs, then properly tune the class rather then tune us around “boosting others”.
Obviously I’m not clairvoyant myself unlike the Goal of this Oracle Hero Path talent tree.
But my guess would be that once this system is established and works, then once they build onto it in future updates/expansions, they will be able to build horizontally instead of vertically.
So basically, just add more themed Hero Path options across the board. Perhaps those won’t have a 2 spec restriction and all specs can be it or only one spec etc.
But if they went that route, you can realize more class fantasy exploration without adding bloat and extra complexity to what has already been established.
Or I am totally wrong and they will just add another feature below the Hero Path section in the talent trees as they mentioned they have space for in case they need it during blizzcon.
This hero talent will probably be abandoned in a xpac or 2
Noone wants a random roulette to manage mid-fight. Also just merge the spell and physical damage buffs since this makes many hybrid damage type classes poor choices for either buff.
Making it 1m also makes it line up with less burst windows. Why not leave it as 2m and buff it further, perhaps make it PI but groupwide.
Nah they should just nuke this hero talent tree, nuke PI while they are at it back to a personal CD, and make it something actually fun and interesting.
Yeah I’m repeating myself on this thread, but I think its worth repeating… we been saying this for years
Man, it’s like they took an idea an intern wrote on a napkin and then posted it just to get something out the door.
It’s pretty clear the whole tree is designed with Disc in mind and Holy just tacked on, tying to PoM just so it’s not all that impactful.
But I don’t get how this could be a Disc tree and yet gives yourself absolutely nothing offensive. A healer designed to heal by doing damage, has a tree that completely side-steps their core identity.
All they really did was design a covenant ability and then threw random crap on a “tree”.
This doesn’t look good, although i have basically no experience from a healer prospective.
But at a glance i would say this is definitely the weaker tree in terms of design of the ones we’ve seen.
I’m on the side that actually likes the option of support class features, in theory. I loved symbol of hope back when it gave a useful amount of defensive cds back. That said, I strongly dislike power infusion because of the myriad problems with it, and expanding it into the central feature of a support class does not have me thrilled. So, lets talk about the problems with power infusion, why many priests hate it, and why templateing our support abilities off of it would be a terrible move. Because Power infusion is a lot of work to use at it’s highest potential.
Problem one: the target problem.
If you want to use power infusion optimally, you can’t just throw it on someone and call it a day. The best target to PI depends on class. Never PI the DH. Except it also depends on specialization. Never PI the assassination rogue but do PI the outlaw rogue. Oh wait, it also depends on content - PI the warlock on trash, but swap it over the the mage for the boss fight. PI the DK on pull for the eight minute army cast, but otherwise throw it on the BM hunter. And the priority changes with every patch - and sometimes with a hotfix. This is a long running problem that’s never been addressed. For years, there have been various spreadsheets to let you know who gets the most out of out PI, and you’re expected to consult them regularly. Needing to rely on out of game simulation calculations to keep up with a core class utility smacks of poor design, and I do not enjoy having to do out-of-game homework because the answer cannot be derived intuitively ingame.
But wait, it gets worse!
Problem two: the timing problem
You’ve got your spreadsheet bookmarked. You’ve checked who in your current mythic+ run is getting the goods. Now you have to make sure it’s actually getting sent out to them during their burst CD window. Which means finding and installing the right addon or weakaura and periodically making sure it’s up to date. (Oh look, more out-of-game homework.)
Which leads to…
Problem three: your cooldown isn’t your cooldown
Because maybe as a healer you really want to save the extra 20% haste when for when the bleed damage or the burst AoE damage goes out, and you’ll be needing the bit of extra oophm so you can top everyone back up quickly. But the DPS popped their cooldowns to get the totem down in time so you can’t save it without missing out.
Leading to the final reason priests hate it…
Problem four: getting nerfed when other classes are too powerful.
It’s hard to describe the sheer, clenched fist, rage-inducing disbelief when you learn that your core talent is being weakened because another class is too strong. Why that wasn’t reworked when it was deemed problematic was mind boggling, and the outcry of priests at the time merited some communications instead of the radio silence we got. They could have decoupled or reworked Twin Suns so that the effectiveness on priest and on the target was not identical. It sounds like this is partially being considered, but it needs to be a change baked into the core function of PI, and it needs to be done thoughtfully instead of a half-baked 'oh yeah, maybe priests don’t want to be able to do 10% more physical damage).
tldr:
There are a bunch of reasons why PI sucks. None of those reasons sound like they’re going away with prescience, and you’re stacking an extra (terrible) complex cycling mini-game on top of it. I’m all for some sort of extra buffing mechanic. I’d enjoy it. It just shouldn’t be a mechanic that takes all of the existing headaches and adds new extra ones on top.
(I’ll make another post on more generic feedback about individual talents later.)
Class fantasy that actually matches the name: I really really wish blizzard would embrace the ‘see the future’ aspect and design at least part of the tree in a way that rewards foresight.
Example: Why, in a tree named Oracle, is decreasing Purify’s CD the best idea that came up? We used to have a spell called Fear Ward which we could preemptively cast to absorb the next fear. We currently have a PvP spell called Holy Ward which can be preemptively cast to absorb the next stun/hex/CC.
The obvious answer if we want to do something with purify is not to decrease the CD, which is both unimpactful and utterly boring. It’s something like giving us “Magic Ward: The next magic debuff applied to the character will be absorbed by the ward instead. Lasts ten seconds.”
Similarly, while I’d mourn Spell Ward (the talent), it could be reworked into something like “negates the next single-target, direct-damage spell cast on the target in the next ten seconds.”
FOR ALL THAT IS HOLY PLEASE DELETE THIS PREMONITION BUILD! IN all my Years of playing the game since 2005 and only played priest, I DO NOT WANT TO BE A SUPPORT AUG TYPE SPEC! PLEASE FOCUS ON HEALING! Thank you 
Please get rid of PI, making it RNG is even worst! Please stop forcing PI, it’s so bad.
I’ve been thinking about it since yesterday, and still don’t like this new talent tree. It’s also very much not healing themed, which feels bad. My earlier suggestion also wasn’t that simple, so here’s my thought.
Swap power infusion in the talent tree to a personal only CD.
Make the new hero talents modify that to give priests half the effect on half the CD, and also:
“All party members get 15% avoidance, and their highest secondary stat is increased by 15%. Effects doubled when not in a raid group.”
Tuning is subject to someone more sane than me, but it addresses the issues:
Gives priests support value on a accessible cool down timer
Gives buffed targets what they actually want
Fits thematically with the theme of “seeing the future” by helping people avoid damage, and knowing what they need
Ends the spam of “PI ME NOW” macros
Actually buffs the priest when they need it.