Feedback: Priests

Kaivax · June 5, 2024, 7:08pm

In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Priests in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

The War Within Beta

All classes’ Hero Talent trees are available for testing. Please keep in mind that this is a Beta environment:

There may be UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI).
Some new spell visuals and audio may still be a work in progress.
There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus at this time:

Finish work on changes to talents, especially wherever Hero Talents still need adjustments.
Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

Working from Feedback

Alpha feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Now that we are entering Beta, our focus on Hero Talent trees is shifting away from reworks and design changes and towards tuning and refining. We want to thank you so much for all the forum posts, videos, and discussions all over the internet. Your feedback and impressions have been invaluable for bringing their identities to life and making them fit into what you love about the classes you play.

We are looking forward to hearing from more of you as you get a chance to try Hero Talents for yourself. We are specifically interested in feedback or impressions on these topics:

Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree. This could be due to damage profile, utility, defensives, or something else.
Hero Talent trees that you feel are either too strong or too weak in power level compared to other options.
Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.
Hero Talent choice nodes that you feel could offer more meaningful choices.

Again, Thank You

Feedback throughout the Alpha test was highly impactful on our design of the game, and we look forward to refining every class with you in the Beta. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

Aerindan-stormrage · June 6, 2024, 1:19am

Happy to be in the beta! I’m going to start off this thread what is perhaps a controversial statement - Disc is an interesting spec that, since Legion, has lost much of its fun factor. I doubt the current disc players are bothered very much, but there are tons of people - like me - that just can’t stomach playing as disc since the Legion rework. I’m going to post a few things below highlighting how the fun-factor of Disc has been lost, for me (at least).

AoE Damage
Disc has got to have possibly the worst AoE rotation of any spec in the game. Holy Nova is a nice ability have to use situationally but it feels HORRIBLE to spam cast in fights. And then purge the wicked - in its current form - cannot be relied upon as a true AoE ability (see the section I wrote on that below please). We need new abilities & effects to be added to our tookit in order to improve the fun factor of playing disc in AoE damage situations. I have a few suggestions below:

Buff the damage on Divine Star, and give us Cascade back as an alternate choice.
Implement Option A of the Purge the Wicked rework I mentioned below.
Give us a ground-targetted, channeled AoE (like the original Blizzard/Rain of Fire).

Attonement Application
The old disc, of the Cataclysm, Pandaria, and WOD had no need to apply attonements to targets. They worked by some form of smart healing. This made it really nice to weave damage spellls alongside your core healing toolkit - because yes, that toolkit mattered!

But now we apply attonements primarily by two spells: Renew, and Power Word: Radiance… and I strongly dislike this system because:

Spam casting Renew is NOT fun! You have to waste several global cooldowns to get attonements out.
Power Word: Radiance is annoying to play around. It’s cooldown is too long, and the 60% penalty sucks.

For the sake of fun factor, I’d much rather we return to the era of automatic attonements. But… my guess is that you’re not going to consider that at this point… so allow me to make a few other suggestions:

Reduce the GCD on Renew, to allow for quick attonement application.
Remove the 60% attonement penalty from Power Word: Radiance.
Reduce the cooldown for Power Word: Radiance.

Now, of course, these changes would be mean that Disc priests would be able to get many more attonements out in a shorter amount of time… and indeed, that is my hope! But I also recognize that could make us overpowered, so in exchange for this, let’s rework the way that attonement healing is done. Instead of healing a certain percentage for each target affect, the split the healing between all affected targets, with a slight modifier to the healing “pool” so that it scales up - a bit - with the more targets you affect. This still incentivizes getting out a lot of attonments, but keeps us balance.

Absorbs
I’m not sure what your plans are for disc & absorbs… but the current state of affair is not fun. Power Word: Shield should be a great healing ability to cast as a single-target nuke. It is not a fun spell to spam cast and that - in my opinion - make Rapture a terribly unfun healing cooldown. Please remove it and give us an alternative CD that we can use for Absorbs.

Core Healing Toolkit
I love the fact that you returned some of Disc’s core healing toolkit in Dragonflight - we are still priests, after all. But I believe we should lean further in to classic priest spells, with greater synergy with attonement.

Purge the Wicked
This ability is the epitome of the word “unsatisfying”. The spell GFX and SFX actually feel like a downgrade over Shadow Word: Pain. But more importantly, the whole spreading one DoT by means of Pennance… has always been very lame. I would like to see one of the following changes:

Option A: Pennance Speads the DOT to all nearby targets.
Option B: Smite also spreads one DOT to a nearby target.

Additionally, I would like see Purge the Wicked turned back into SW:P, graphically speaking, with a glyph that restores the purge the wicked GFX/SFC for players that prefer it.

Other Thoughts:

Sanctuary is rather boring and unimpactful. I’d rather you remove this so that you could assign more “power” to our abilities.
I miss having Holy Fire to break up the Smite Spam. Please consider bringing it back (with a glyph to turn it into Solace or some sort of a void ability, for the players that prefer that theme).
The new penance SFX and GFX sucks. It’s super unsatisfying to cast. Please give us a glyph that restores the Wrath/Cata/MOP/WOD-era animation.

Twittereboy-thrall · June 6, 2024, 1:32am

Copy From EU Forums for Visibility

Disc priest feedback
Hello im Discolanciz! Iv been a high end disc player since Warlords of draenor raiding on the world 40-50 level in Colour-Stormreaver.
Disc is seen as a harder spec and is very often seen as unapproachable by new players,this has a lot to do with the basic design of the spec and the path blizzard is choosing to go just adding more complexity even when their trying to ’’Dumb it down’’
Disclaimer:This post will be focusing on disc even though im aware holy priest also shares a lot of the baseline issues such as for example the bad mobility.

                             **Baseline Gameplay issues**

Discs mobility
Its not great while disc is also the healer that has to do the most complex rotation to get their healing out during heavy mechanical phases.

Fix
Provide us a proper mobility spell like maybe ’’Angelic flight’’ For 10 seconds the priest levitates above ground gaining X% movement speed and can cast while moving X min cd’’ This spell could replace feather and be a choice node with it so that you can either pick between a helpfull ramp tool mobility or normal feathers for more frequent mobility. Preferably not a higher CD then 1.5 min as its above 1.5min it is just fully desynced from our kit.

Lack of interrupt
Yes disc and holy are currently the specs without 1 and while i get that to much disruption can be an issue in PVP it feels very bad that neither healing spec has an option on this when it comes to high end PVE Content.

Fix
Provide an interrupt to both specs be it baseline or a talent that shares choice node with maybe mindcontroll so that you have to pick between 2 types of disrupts be it interrupt or mindcontroll. (Im aware Shadow priest can be a problem in this equation)

Lost Utility
Disc is lacking in the disruption department mainly when it comes to M+ but also raid because of a a sadly very bad bluepost argument ’’Other classes has that’’ that was made during the dragonflight beta. We lost Shining force for no valid reason and got given a terrible root (Void tendrils) that is fully un useable in all PVE content unless its bugged like it was for sometime during DF.Fix
Give us shining force back instead of void tendrils short and simple.

                                 **Talent issues**

Now this is going to be a long one because our talents are one hell of a mess but il just start from the top and work my way down row by row!
Row 4
Luminos barrier or shall i call it Luminos negative barrier. This spell was a great design goal to be a choice node with barrier allowing you to have a raid cooldown for spread fights and 1 for stacked fights. But this spell suffers from the spiritshell fiesta that was shadowlands where absorbs were unable to be tuned. This spell just dosnt do ANYTHING its a terrible button doing 60k out of our 1.3m hp pools and needs severe tuning to actually be a worth pick for spread encounters.

Row 5

Rapture
It has been an okey spell in raids mainly just as an atonement applicator that was a little bit better then renew. Overall the redesign sure its better for M+ but the changes has hurt the raid use a decent bit and its far from what we actually want the cooldown to be.

Its cooldown dosnt start untill after all shields have been spent meaning it desyncs from 1.5 min boss timers
The shield is still pretty weak
The 4 and 6 shields based on having a talent or not are just weird. Why does disc need to pick several talents to have 1 functioning cooldown? Why are our talents always split up in to several nodes? It just feels like a weird pattern that keeps going in the entirity of the tree.

Fix
So what do we actually want it to be? Well just a straight up stronger absorb cooldown. Pretty much what mages are stealing from our class fantasy a Mass barrier. It would be a very easy solution to just make Rapture a 1 press party wide mass barrier that could just be 1. a strong absorb or a 2. A littlebit weaker absorb that applies 5 shorter atonements. We do however prefer option 1 by far

Row 6

Now this is where the mess really starts to show with how the talent tree pathing is built and talent nodes we have to pick.

Contrition
One of THE most hated talents in our tree that somehow has managed to survive since BFA despite being absolutly usless in everything except pvp sometimes. It just goes directly against our entire core kit of dpsing to heal, Id very much prefer this talent to finally be burnt of the face of the earth.

Fix
A potential alternativ would be to make it the S3 PTR 2P which made Damage penance cleave a ST heal penance on to an allied injured target but tune it properly so its not a dead heal.

Revel in purity and PTW
Very big pathing issue here as we are forced to path through PTW and Purity to avoid Contrition to get down further in to the tree. PTW used to be a just straight up winner on Cleave and 2 target fights (When we picked between halo and PTW back in the old tree) it didn’t win on single target but now days this dot is just straight up winning everytime.

Fix
To fix this id love to see some pathing changes in this area and changes to shadow word pain so that PTW (Purge the wicked) keeps its winning in cleave scenarios but shadow word pain wins on pure single target fights to give us a choice to make. (This will also require shadow word pains baseline duration to be buffed to the same duration of Purge the wicked though)

Pain and Suffering
not much to say more then thats is a very meh tuned node that forces you to spend 2 talent points on it but iguess you need to have some low impact high-cost nodes.

Row 7

Borrowed time
okey talent overall but its a 2 cost talent thats just stuck in a weird place and we cant rly afford spending 2 points on it down there with prior pathing

Row 8

UPPIES Aka Ultimate pentience
Very cool and thematic spell connected to our core spell Penance but this thing has some fundamental issues.

The Z axsis constantly randomly killing you when up in the air. There’s no consistency in what swirlies on the grounds will murder you and which wont
As mentioned earlier our cooldowns are split in to several talent points and for some reason we are not allowed to just pick a talent and get the full power
Long cast time to activate it and locking us down when casting PENANCE. We can move and channel penance why are we not allowed to move while casting 10 penances?

Fix
So to fix Uppies id love to see these 2 changes mainly

Castable while moving! It would give us more Mobility passivly without even buffing our already terrible mobility and remove the Z Axsis issue.
Less talent point investment to get the entire cooldown. Its not fun to have to spend 4 points to get your 1 cooldown. If a middle ground needs to be reached atleast make Heaven’s wrath a 1 cost node even though the impact of doing so would be very minor its something.

Leniance
Very boring node on our tree that has an okey power but this thing is just not fun or feels good to pick in M+/Pvp content.

Void summoner
Now this thing is a giant criminal in disc gameplay atm ever since the rework. Smite smite smite smite smite smite smite this spells is in every disc mains nightmares. Having to just permanently smite to reach the CDR breakpoints is just not an enjoyable gameplay loop. Sometimes you even have to skip out in miniramp GCD’s cuz you have to reach the CDR breakpoint for your next ramp. When you get a few bad lava waves on for example Rashok so you miss the next cdr window cuz you have to dodge its just GG go next.
Void summoner with tier set is less punishing but its still a very punishing talent to have to play around and with the loss of tier you are going to have to play even better as you wont have the tier set buffer for more CDR.

Fix
Potential fix to remove the very punishing gameplay this talent requires would be to just make void summoner provide you straight up 1.5 min CD on fiend and 45 seconds on bender.

Row 9

Expiation
Terrible talent that just takes up space in our tree while being completly unusable ever since the rework in the amirdrassil patch.

Fix
Remove this talent and replace with something new that can function with our kit

Row 10

Aegis of wrath
Weak talent node mainly because of how weak power word shield is baseline.

Fix
Potentially if baseline Power word shield got stronger Aegis could get stronger but id much rather see this talent reworked in some way

Twilight equilibrium
Very bad talent that has only lead to issues this expansion forcing very awkward gameplay of trying to rotate holy-shadow-holy-shadow (Remember S2 disc rotation hell)

Fix
Rework the entire talent in to something new as now with all our spells being mainly shadow we cant even rotate effectivly anymore. (Especially not with voidweaver)

                                        **Hero Talents**

Voidweaver
Honestly not that much to say, it’s a solid tree with good disc benefits that works with our gameplay and doesn’t force us to track more buffs and timers that further complicates the spec.

The 1 issue
Voidweaver only has 1 issue which is that if you radiance before you mindblast THE RIFT will explode exactly a second after your rad atonements fall off. This is a massive problem for discs atonement healing.

Radiance > Mindblast with the 5 atonements get extended talent will work but it is extremly tight causing you to have to play awkwardly with your pet casting it before radiance and losing a ton of uptime which hurts M+ a ton but also all ramps in raids outside of evangelism ramps.

Fix
Buff Baseline radiance duration and this is instantly fixed

Oracle
Oracle on the other hand has some massive problems.

The buffs are usless on every level. Velens is the only good buff in this tree and you are just forced to use the other 2 that just doesn’t do anything for us.
Power word shield node exsist here aswell but 15% compared to 20% In voidweaver? It just feels weird that they are the same node but 1 is worse.
Divine feather is terrible. We already have bad mobility and now we have to try to give them to others? Using feathers on allies is very clunky and hard to make sure the correct person gets it so this node just feels bad.
Save the day yeah this talent isn’t saving any day. We never use Lifegrip this often in any PVE content and its just wasted utility in most scenarios.
Waste no Time gives us an instant radiance after casting the buff which rly doesn’t do anything for disc as we will use Velens for ramps after we have already used radiances so this is just a none exsistant node.

Fix

Honestly main fix here is to make Premonition Velens only and remove the disruptive tracking of yet another buff in discs kit. The 2 other buffs are terrible and will be fully ignored and insta pressed to get back to velens as fast as possible.
Id like to see the divine feather talent changed to be an actuall mobility increase for us and not trying to make us awkwardly feather allies.

                                   **Disc Priest tier set**

2p
Boring and lame set that’s just giving us back part of our nerfs in DF but at least it works for the spec
4p
Fundamentally does not work for the spec. We mindblast before all the stacking spells in a ramp using it as an applicator for dmg amps and to trigger IT from our pet. Also it will just be consumed by shields every single time as we always ramp with shield and use mindblast way later so this set does not work at all.Fix
4P is the thing that’s in need of the most changes right now. If you want to keep the same set id much rather see it swapped out to Penance being buffed by X% Stacking 3 times and the entire Power word shield thing removed or just made in to a baseline buff to Power word shield as our shields have been weak since legion.

Auld-mugthol · June 6, 2024, 2:41am

It’s really a shame that you are so unwilling to start from scratch on Oracle.

It has no use for questing or world content, and it has the same kind of obnoxious visuals that drove me away from Holy priest when the team refused to admit that Chakras were clunky and intrusive design.

I do not understand why the team could not let the holy/discipline hero talent tree be a holy and fire themed inquisitor.

Please do not make priests resort to shadow and void spells for everything except instanced healing content.

Aerindan-stormrage · June 6, 2024, 2:50am

This is something that Blizzard - unfortuantely - seems to continually overlook. Healers do world content too, and we deserve to do at least as much damage as tank. I shouldn’t have to pull my hair out over killing a mob. And heck - if I decide to damage the boss during a dungeon, at the expense of my healing - I should be rewarded with damage that can actually be seen on the meters…

If I’m a holy or disc priest, I don’t want to have to swap to shadow for leveling, story, or world quests… it ruins the class fantasy, and it’s just a headache.

Xippo-frostmourne · June 6, 2024, 5:46am

Holy Priest stands, at the moment, as the healer which has received the fewest changes going into the war within, sharing this dubious honor with resto shaman. This isn’t world ending. The general flow and gameplay priorities of holy priest are in a good spot. It is not in dire need of spec-defining changes. But we have seen very little variation in how we spend our talent points, particularly in the middle of the tree, so I’m going to focus much of my feedback on a few specific underplayed talents. Even a well designed spec can benefit from a bit of a refresh at the beginning of a new expac.

Everlasting Light has been underpowered since Dragonflight launched. It is a minor buff to a spell we only cast when playing a particular capstone, Lightweaver, which has not been a favoured pick for some time. Even when lightweaver does see play, EL remains a small, highly variable, throughput increase, which is still probably only taken because it happens to offer efficient pathing to more valuable talents.

The idea of doing more healing as our mana pool is depleted is solid, and one I’d be happy to see iterated on more. I just think this node is too limited in the spells it effects. I think the talent needs a buff, but I’d like see more spells whitelisted here, rather than the modifier simply being increased.

Prayerful Litany has seen its value increased from 30% up to 100% recently, a more than 200% buff to the talents value, and yet it remains unplayable. The reason for this is very plain. PoH occupies a space in Holy’s healing kit where it is almost exclusively cast to farm cooldown reduction on holy word sanctify, rather than for any healing that it actually does. For this reason, any talent that attempts to buff it directly is misguided. This is in large part due to how the spell selects targets. For those who are unaware, PoH heals your target and their four nearest allies. I’d love to hear some kind of dev communication about why the spell works this way, in contrast with every other aoe healing spell in the game, which prioritises injured targets. If its meant to be some kind of skill expression, then the pay-off simply isnt there. Any mental bandwidth spent trying to pick the optimal healing target for this ability would be better off spent doing literally anything else, because the spell does no healing.

On that same note the choice node of Revitalizing Prayers and Sanctified Prayers is extremely weak. RP saw some play for a while, but this came down to it being the least worst option to put our 20th point in to unlock the bottom of the tree. Sanctified Prayers meanwhile is a 15% buff, some of the time, to a button that has not done more than 5% of our healing all expansion. It is very underpowered.

Angel’s Mercy was nerfed coming out of Aberrus, which was warranted, but it has seen virtually no play since, which suggests to me that it may have been adjusted a little too hard. Part of this is that Binding Heals is so strong defensively because of how it interacts with Protective Light. This interaction is good, intuitive, and should remain, but it is clear Angel’s Mercy needs a little something more to compete. It should be a viable alternative for when a large defensive at particular intervals would provide more value than a smaller, consistent buff to survivability. Simply increasing the cooldown reduction would be the obvious choice (70s is a slightly unwieldy cooldown for a defensive, too.)

Guardians of the Light has a hard time going up against Guardian Angel. Maybe an additional effect, like its own, smaller, guaranteed cooldown reduction, or even a second charge, would allow it to see more play.

Healing Chorus has been enjoying a bit of a moment these past two tiers, but its strength is being heavily propped up by our current tier set applying renews on every holy word. Circle of Healing being a powerful button, especially in combination with Resonant Words, has been an enjoyable playstyle, and I’d like it to remain viable going into the war within. To make this happen Healing Chorus is going to require some adjustment to keep the talent evergreen.

Speaking of Renew - I’m a bit confused by its role in our kit. Renew is not a spell we cast, just a HoT that some of our abilities proc on the target. But this may as well describe our mastery, too. There’s a lot of conceptual overlap there that ends up making Renew feel a bit redundant. It’s maybe not the most pressing issue, but it does feel inelegant, and I think its problematic for new players who are likely to spend some amount of time trying to find a good reason to cast renew, when in reality there simply isn’t one.

Luckily, I think the fix is as simple as updating Renew to trigger Echo of Light (further distinguishing the two), and having a reason to cast it (not often, but maybe with some kind of proc.) If renew was a button we pressed, talents like Healing Chorus and Holy Mending would stand a chance going forward, too.

I think the nerfs to Holy Word: Salvation were heavy handed, and will be felt even more strongly with the loss of our current tier. At the time it was nerfed, there was a stated goal of reducing the power of healing cooldowns, and in that light I thought targeting its frequency while letting it retain its power was an interesting idea, but this stated goal has not really come to pass. It is now the longest cooldown for a healer cd in the game, but those other cooldowns are just as strong as ever, and Salvation doesn’t really feel like it stands out in a way that justifies only being castable twice in an eight minute fight. Please consider at least partially walking this change back unless you are serious about actually addressing the strength of healing cooldowns in a universal, even-handed manner.

5-man aoe healing has been a weak spot of holy’s for some time now, and the changes to Divine Hymn in 5-man settings were much needed, but Apotheosis remains poorly suited to the needs of the content. The ability to quickly reset holy words does not function as a burst healing cooldown in the way that Mythic+ often demands. Halo’s rework in the Archon tree might go a way towards addressing this weakness, but alone will probably fall short on boss fights that frequently demand a healing cooldown every 30-40 seconds for minutes at a time. For balance reasons, any changes to apotheosis could always be kept separate from the effects of Answered Prayers-granted version too, and there is already precedence for this in AP not immediately resetting the cooldown on your holy words.

Early notes on the Oracle hero tree

I’m reasonably excited about Oracle after the most recent set of iterations. Piety is a fun returning effect and a perfect fit for a healer-healer tree, but there’s definitely room for improvement on the other two buffs Premonition can provide. It is my sincere hope that changing the ability so you are no longer choosing your desired effect is not taken as a reason not to balance all three of the effects it provides. This tree can only be truly great if each buff is fun to press and interesting to plan around.

Piety is clearly the star of this tree, and my only real feedback is that I hope devs will be open to tuning it separately for Holy and Discipline. Discipline is capable of a a world more healing in a 10s window than Holy is, which stands to make Piety enormously powerful for that spec. There is a risk that a Piety which is strong for Holy will be completely broken for Disc, while an effect that is balanced around Discipline will feel weak and underwhelming for holy.

As a rule, I’m a big fan of cooldown reduction effects as a part of healer gameplay. Where as on a DPS spec the value of these effects often comes down to “does this afford me an extra use of this ability across the duration of the fight,” the importance of precise timing on healer CDs makes room for a little more nuance. Unfortunately, Premonition of Insight ends up falling pretty flat on a spec whose core premise is already generating very large amounts of CDR on our most powerful abilities. Five seconds off any holy word is less than we gain by casting our most basic filler spells and will barely make a dent in Salvation’s significant cooldown. In a best case scenario it is possible that 5 seconds off of Divine Hymn might be useful at some point, but its just as likely that we go all expansion without ever seeing a fight that makes this worthwhile. Unfortunately it is looking like the best use of this ability is for 5 seconds off short cd abilities here and there, equating to, maybe, one extra use of spells like Prayer of Mending, Divine Star, and Circle of Healing per fight.

As a direct point of comparison, one of the nodes in the Archon tree buffs Surge of Light to also grant 4 seconds of cdr on sanctify. There is more cdr in that one node then there is in this entire effect. I understand that hero trees are balanced hollistically and not on an effect-to-effect basis, but it does lend some reference to how underwhelming Insight is as it currently stands. While I think CDR should remain the focus of this node, I think alternative designs could also be worth considering beyond simple number tuning.

Premonition of Solace needs a serious looking at if it is meant to be in any way comparable to the other two buffs Premonition can provide. Even if it were just a better external defensive cooldown I’d be more inclined to give it a pass as having some situational value, but “increases healing taken” is very weak as far as defensive effects go.

There is one possibility worth mentioning here, which is that you might combine this effect with Guardian Spirit on one target, yourself, and then through the Piety effect you also gain with Clairvoyance convert up to 50% of your overhealing on that target into smart aoe healing, creating a sort of pseudo Smoldering Seedling effect, mimicking the trinket from Amirdrassil. With the option to increase our big single target heals on ourself by another 30% in Prophet’s Will , we can stack 1.25, 1.6 and 1.3x multipliers on ourself, which makes this starts to look like a pretty appealing option. The season one 4-piece effect stands to further push us towards this as a playstyle.

I’m not a fan of this kind of gameplay, and really would rather not see this kind of effect become a permanent part of holy’s healing kit. I don’t know for sure that this is actually something we will end up wanting to do either, but the possibility is there. Outside of this scenario, Solace risks being something we press only to move quickly back around to the buffs we actually care about.

Foreseen Circumstances buffs our external for both specs, but I don’t think a 2s extension is really the kind of buff that Guardian Spirit needs. In light of what I just outlined above, I don’t think it should further increase its healing amp either, though. Some kind of small DR might be a good fit, and I’ve even seen it suggested that the effects for Disc and Holy would be better off swapped. (Very rarely does someone with Pain Suppression think wow, this 40% dr is nice, but I could really use another 10%.)

Preemptive Care buffing renew by three seconds is another effect I’m pretty indifferent to given how Renew currently fits into the spec.

Overall I’m not sure the power is there in this tree to give holy a reason to ever play it over Archon.

Ryeshot-icecrown · June 6, 2024, 1:14pm

A Retrospective on Priest in Dragonflight

Priest has received virtually zero changes going to the War Within which means it will have the same positives and negatives that it does on live.

Having mained Priest at a semi-hardcore raiding level since Legion, this is the first expansion where I felt truly miserable playing this class. Brought on by decisions made during Dragonflight development, culminating in the most negatively received blue post I have ever seen, and nerfs to the class made throughout the expansion–I have felt oppressed as a Priest player.

The time between expansions is when the clear and present issues surrounding Priest should be resolved, yet as it stands there has been nothing so far.

Power Infusion

The Power Infusion problem needs to be addressed. A bandaid nerf was made to it going into season 3, but this should have been a temporary solution. I can understand not having enough time to change how Twins of the Sun Priestess works during the expansion, but there is now ample opportunity in the beta.

Ignoring the problem will not make it go away.

Utility

Not only did Priest not receive any utility from historical expansions, Shining Force, Mind Bomb, etc, our niche utility kit was repeatedly nerfed this expansion because it was finally useful in dungeons for the first time since Mythic+ was added.

This could be a result of a shift in dungeon design, but when that is the case Priest should be compensated for nerfs to its kit. Nerfs because of dungeons without compensation in raid makes no sense.

Having Shining Force for Fyrakk would have been really nice instead of being required to stand there and look pretty. I couldn’t even contribute to stopping adds because they were immune to Psychic Scream.

We’re also still the only class in the game without access to an interrupt.

Defensives

The redesign of talent trees brought on a lot of defensive creep, and there is a disproportionate amount of survivability between classes. Not to mention classes which received reworks somehow became more survivable as the expansion progressed (looking at you Retriburion Paladins), while Priest has only received nerfs in this category. Midway through season two Angel’s Mercy was nerfed to the point of no longer being picked, at least for Shadow, since it was already a heavy point investment.

Since the nerf to Angel’s Mercy, Priest has consistently been at the top of death statistics, with Holy Priest Spirit of Redemption somewhat skeweing this. This is going to be exacerbated even further when there is disproportionate defensive capability added to Hero Talents across the board, further contributing to defensive creep.

If defensive creep is going to continue, which is a whole different discussion, Priest needs to be held to the same survivability standards as other classes. And outlier classes need to be reigned in.

Mobility

After playing an entire expansion with only Angelic Feather and Body and Soul as our mobility options, I can confidently say this isn’t sustainable with current fight design.

Mythic Raszageth was a massive eye opener to the disparity of mobility options between classes, to where in order to survive my guild needed to do a cursed combination of Rescuing a Priest and then having that Priest grip another class.

There were a few other outliers this expansion with knockback effects which Priest is one of if not the only class that can’t negate them in Magmorax and Fyrakk phase 1.

Just like defensive creep, there has been mobility creep and Priest is falling behind. If fight design like Dragonflight is going to continue, then Priest needs its mobility kit modernized

One might argue that Hero Talents can be a means to address these issues, however this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Hero Talents are already exacerbating some of these issues with defensive and mobility creep, but this time they are also disproportionate within the class itself (2 seconds on Dispersion for Archon anyone).

Even if the Hero Talents for Priest were updated (read reworked) to address some of these issues across the board, that would require three times the effort.

Why not just address these problems in the base class?

Caithyra-bleeding-hollow · June 6, 2024, 3:18pm

So far Priests have received little to no actual updates on the PTR which leaves me either assuming two scenarios: there’s a lot of planned changes on the back end waiting to released or were actually not getting any changes at all come next expansion.

Either way: based on what’s present on the PTR I am going to highlight the current issues with retail Holy Priest that I’ve posted in other topics. If you’re interested in reading my topics the links are here:

Holy Priest - A Dragonflight Review (contains pre-10.2.6 info)

Holy Priest - 10.2.6 Review (post 10.2.6 thoughts)

A lot of the issues from my pre-10.2.6 post were not addressed in 10.2.6.

I’m going to post a short list of the current issues though

Issue #1: Too Many Prayer of Mending Talents
Holy has 8 talents dedicated to one ability that eat up a lot of your points in the tree. I don’t dislike PoM, but I dislike how many points I need to spend in my tree to make one ability stronger.

Issue #2: Too Many Forced/Filler Talents
In order to path down the tree you often have to take talents that are just there for filler: Cosmic Ripple, Everlasting Night, Prayer of Healing (you’re forced to take this if you want CoH even though you may never use it), and Enlightenment.

The same can be said with all the single target healing talents. On Disc you literally spend 0 talents on your single target heals and your Flash Heal does only slightly less than what a fully talented out Holy Flash Heal can do.

On Holy you need to put a steep investment into your single target heals and 2-3 of those points are just filler talent choices.

Issue #3: Holy Word Salvation
So what’s the long-term plan with this ability? Is it going back to a 30s reduction on Holy Word casts? Why can’t we just make this a flat 4-5 minute cd?

Issue #4: End-tree talent Issues
10.2.6 overhauled the end-tree on Holy, but created more issues than it solved. Holy has quite a number of end tree talents that are borderline useless in a lot of situations.

Lightwell - Can’t be moved after its placed and requires the group to drop below <50% hp to trigger which makes it borderline useless in M+ and in raid if the raids not dropping <50% frequently. This talent either consumes all its charges fast or it just does nothing at all.

Lightweaver - Still a very mediocre talent choice. The main issue is that it only impacts Heal compared to Divine Image which does everything (damage and healing). The second issue is you can only build up 2 charges. If you expanded the spell pool that it applied its bonus too and made it easier to build up charges + increased it to 4 then I see Lightweaver having some potential.

Divine Image - This talent is still a mandatory pick because its a passive 5-6% hps increase. I think you need to give it to the Miracle Worker treatment and make it not a bottom tree talent.

Answered Prayers - This talent is another mandatory pick for raid because of the frequent Apotheosis procs that feedback loop into more Holy Words = faster Holy Word Salvation resets.

Desperate Times/Epiphany - These two talents are fairly mediocre picks if you want to take Divine Word. Desperate Times is useless if the groups not dropping <50% hp and Epiphany is way too much RNG. Epiphany either procs back-to-back or you can go 1-2 minutes without seeing a proc. I’d like to see Desperate Times swap places another talent on the left side of the tree.

Divine Word - Pretty good ability for M+, but can be awkward to use in raid. Divine Word Sanctuary tends to overheal a ton, and can be hard to position to hit enough people. It suffers from the Lightwell issue where it’s either useless or useful depending on the conditions of the fight.

Issue #5: Renew
I was probably one of the few Priests who used Empowered Renew/Rapid Recovery and come 10.2.6 that talent was removed. It’s not the end of the world for me, but you can just make Echo of Light trigger off of Renew so Renew passively gets stronger as your gear improves.

Issue #6: Mobility Woes
Priests in general are lacking in mobility when it comes to this expansion raid tier.

S1 Mythic Raz - Priests literally had no way to counter the pushback from Raz waves without getting rescued by an Evoker. It took multiple nerfs and pixel perfect positioning just to make it so you could survive not getting blown off the platforms without an external.

S3 Mythic Tindral - Priests required externals to get out of the roots.

You either need to take fight consideration into account or provide Priests with a way to counter knockbacks and roots if that’s going to be a consistent mechanic going forward.

I don’t like needing to be babysat by other people in the raid to do the fight.

Issue #7: Symbol of Hope
Symbol of Hope was pretty much gutted with the nerfs made to it. Only getting a -30s CDR instead of -60s makes it borderline useless for M+ because before I could reset my own Desperate Prayers and tanks 1 minute defensives.

And you also only get 10% mana back instead of 15%. I think this ability needs to get the Divine Hymn treatment with being reverted back to its 60s CDR and 15-20% mana in 5-mans.

Issue #8: Mana Issues in M+
Holy has struggled with mana in M+ throughout the entire expansion, especially on long 4-5 minute Tyrannical boss fights. It’s jarring when I play Disc because with the S3 tier set bonus I get infinite mana… I literally mean infinite mana. I can walk into boss fights with 30% mana and never be at any risk of going oom.

On Holy it’s the opposite. You have to watch your mana very closely because you can oom yourself.

Issue #9: Holy needs some ability pruning
Holy has a button bloat problem and some abilities should be removed.

Heal/Flash Heal - I don’t see the reason to have two separate single target heals when the majority of Priests don’t take Lightweaver and primarily cast Flash Heal. You can honestly just get rid of Heal and nobody would notice.

Prayer of Healing - This ability has been a shell of itself since Shadowlands came out. It does low healing - far less than a single cast of Flash Heal at this point, costs a lot of mana, and can oom you if you cast it too often. If you gave this the Divine Hymn treatment and made it do 400% more healing in 5-mans than I see some potential for PoH. Outside of that: nobody would notice if PoH was removed.

Holy Nova Rhapsody - I think Rhapsody is a cool ability, but all it really did was add an extra button to my hotbar to press every 20s.

Issue #10: Cloth Woes in M+
This is a clothie issue in general, but clothies by default have less armor than other classes so we take 20-30% more physical damage. This leads to jumping mobs that do physical damage far more deadly against you than other classes.

It also made some bosses a nightmare to heal through because of randomly targeted abilities that did physical damage hitting clothies far harder than the plate wearers.

Issue #11: Utility issues in M+
Holy lacks pretty hard in the utility category for M+ compared to Disc.

On Disc you have Lenience, Divine Aegis, Rapture, Barrier, stronger PWS, etc. to lower the amount of damage the group takes. When you start facing up against bosses that start bursting out massive group wide AOEs in high keys the damage mitigation provided can prevent people from dying.

On Holy? You just have Guardian Spirit, Symbol of Hope (nerfed), and a dream. Holy really could use some kind of group wide utility that makes it stand apart from Disc. A battle res would probably help imho.

Issue #12: Lack of Playstyle Varieties
Holy in raid is basically just just a one trick pony. You cast PoM, CoH, and your Holy Words on cd while strategically using Rhapsody Holy Nova and Halo.

All of your non-cooldown based direct heals like Prayer of Healing, Renew, and Flash Heal are just filler spells that don’t do a lot of heal and punish you for chain casting them due to high mana costs. Your filler spells might only be 3% of your overall healing if that compared to PoM and CoH being a good chunk of it.

The only actual choice you have with Holy is just picking if you want Divine Star/Halo or Lightwell/Divine Word. I’d like to see Holy have actual different playstyle options available that focus on different aspects of the class.

You might have a stronger HoT based playstyle for fight 1, a Prayer of Healing focused fight for fight 2, and a more generalist approach for everything else.

Issue #13: Lack of Passive Healing in M+
Holy is currently lacking pretty hard in the passive healing department compared to Disc.

On Disc you can keep atonement up on the group with a 90%+ uptime with frequent refreshings of PWR and manually applications of atonement. Any targets that drop <100% hp will be topped off to 100% for free and you can dump a hard Flash Heal or PWS on them if they need some extra help.

On Holy: you have no meaningful passive healing at all outside of Prayer of Mending (which has charges). This means that every person in the group that drops <100% hp 9 out of 10 times requires a manual cast of Flash Heal or Holy Word Serenity to bring them to 100% hp.

This makes it more painful to heal through pulsing AOE mobs and bosses because on Disc you just raw heal through it with atonement, but on Holy you need to manually heal people one at a time with a single target healing cast.

If you look at logs of Disc vs Holy in M+ you can see that Holy Priests have to cast on average +40% more heals just to do the same hps. The main reason for that is due to the lack of passive healing.

Archon Halo does help with this passive healing issue because it pulses out consistent healing over 15s or so. Holy could imho use something else to help with that like free Holy Nova bursts or something interesting so you don’t need to Flash Heal somebody at 70% hp to 100% who isn’t in imminent danger of dying.

The goal should be to lower the amount of required casts in a dungeon which in term leads to better mana management and more uptime for dps.

Bunzato-hyjal · June 6, 2024, 4:52pm

My main feedback is about the Priest class tree from Shadow’s perspective.

There’s a handful of nodes on it that stand out as being either underpowered, overcosted or generally not useful.

Now I know in the patch notes we saw a note about how some talents have been shifted and moved to improve pathing etc, but that was not seen in the Beta build yesterday so I am working with what we have.

Improved Flash Heal - This is a second-row talent and I know I shouldn’t expect too much power from it, it just feels like it could be something with a bit more oomph.

Holy Nova - would love to see this get a visual (and name) adjustment when playing Shadow, would also be cool for Disc when they go into Shadow Cov.

Protective Light/FDCL - Protective Light is clunky. There’s no real other way to say it, hard casting a heal when at full or nearly full health to activate a DR feels bad to do. As for FDCL, I don’t see any world where this is ever taken over Prot Light. Increasing the stack rate and making the Flash Heal instant at max stacks would probably help though.

Spell Warding - 3% is very limited protection, especially for needing to go all the way over here on the tree, this could use a little buff, maybe to 5%, or maybe stick some stam on it too?

Blessed Recovery - really cool node but sadly limited to PvP, would be a great option it was adjusted to be all physical damage (tuned appropriately), giving us a choice against encounters where physical damage occurs would be cool.

Leap of Faith - this is a good spell but it is not nearly as transformative on the battlefield as often as it could be, encounters simply do not provide that, so giving a displacement mobility choice node here would be fantastic.

Shackle Undead - great on Incorp M+ weeks and not much else, maybe turn it into Shackle Evil so we can cc a few additional enemy types?

Sheer Terror/Tendrils - 99% a PVP node, would love it if these could be made more attractive for PvE.

Mass Dispel - So this was nerfed, with a baseball bat, to the shins. I agree the nerf was needed but the magnitude was certainly a lot. This could easily be dropped back down to a 1m cd, but if it needs to sit at 2m, can it dispel a few more allies?

Power Infusion - Everyone’s favorite spell to get (and hate if you don’t get it). Honestly, for Shadow, either bake it into our dps cd (dark ascension/voidform) or delete it, the friction sucks, the balancing around it sucks, it just needs to go, or be made self-cast only. If it needs to stay, can priests please get the +5s duration and +5% haste back?

Twins - PI shenanigans, as said above, PI needs a real hard looking at.

Void Shield - Main issue with this node is that PW:Shield breaks VERY easily, if PW:Shield was a bit beefier to start, or Void Shield could refill a depleted PW:S, this node would be very valuable.

Sanlayn - I’m really sad to need to take this to buff VE/Sanguine teachings.

Apathy - leveling/pvp node, again this could be made to be more attractive to all players.

Unwavering Will - maybe this is better for healers but man this node stinks for Shadow.

Angel’s Mercy - please, I beg make this -30s, a 1m 10s cd feels disjointed, also it’s just a massive nerf compared to what it used to be.

Mindgames - 4 talent points to gain a remarkably small throughput increase is nothing short of a crime. Mindgames can stay, just fold the other 3 points into it tbh, then it’s at least a decent value for 1 point.

Angelic Bulwark - at minimum, this needs shield gating, it’s possible to die without it ever being triggered, also 90s cd for a 15% shield is pretty weak as far as value goes. Maybe 60s for a 20% shield?

Yes, this post was long, I have a headache and didn’t feel like making it with pretty formatting. Thanks for reading (if you did) and have a nice day.

Duskspeaker-stormrage · June 6, 2024, 5:06pm

Please give shadow priests their set of shadow themed class visuals.

You have a whole Nya’lotha vfx assets to give them void shields in place of the outdated PW:S

I’m really turned off that our Shadowmend was removed to have a sparkly gold flash heal.

There is a huge thematic clash with shadow priest because they’re forced to use these awful sparkly holy spells like angelic feathers, PW:S, flash heal. Please give shadow priests their appropriate themed visual kits

I’ll also say, please remove Dark Ascension or move it to the Archon tree and make our Void Eruption our core cd and tune appropriately.

I like my void thematics on my shadow priest, and this random mix and match of undead plague and dark angel being forced on us due to DA being a stronger cd with double the uptime for the crit buff from the accompanying talent is a problem.

It also makes no sense to have Devouring Plague be named as such. We are not plague priests, we are not necromancers. Please rename Devouring Plague to something more void/shadow aligned, like “Perdition” or “Entropic Blast”, with a proper void themed visual.

Bankprobably-korgath · June 6, 2024, 7:07pm

Speaking from both a PVE and PVP perspective, and I know this is subjective, but even if the tuning for Oracle was dialed up to 11 I will never play it. That goes for both Disc and Holy.

Holy has a button bloat problem already, in my opinion, and disc has enough to manage as-is without this mini game being added into the mix.

It isn’t a fun button to press, and being ‘forced’ to use certain spells at certain times just to get to the ‘right’ buff doesn’t feel good.

It’s hard to believe we got rid of the Chakra system and then go to something like this.

Archon is fine for both shadow and holy, but it’s just not exciting. The pulsing halos are neat, they do a decent job of damage/healing, but it’s just…not exciting. It doesn’t feel like a hero talent track, especially when Voidweaver absolutely does.

I think, based on the description we were given before its reveal, a lot of us were thinking that Archon was going to be about enhancing Apotheosis/Void Form in some way, which I think would’ve been more fun.

As it is, though, Archon is kind just fire and forget, while having some bonus perks added in. It’s not bad. It could be tuned to even be the best, damage/healing wise for both shadow and holy, but even if it is best, I don’t see myself wanting to play it. Or Oracle.

As good as Voidweaver is, is how meh Archon is, and how badly I dislike Oracle.

I don’t know how Oracle can be fixed, other than scrapping it entirely, which doesn’t seem plausible at this stage of development.

Twittereboy-thrall · June 6, 2024, 8:25pm

From an Afternoon of Testing out Holys new Tier set and the new CDR interactions I have encountered a few bugs/not working interactions.

The Good

4pc Procs have their own independent Crit Chance
4pc does Proc at the intended HPS Value according to the tooltip
4pc works with our Mastery as intended
4pc Proc rate matches the listed tooltip
Apotheosis Works with the 2pc as intended
Apotheosis Works with the 4pc Procs as intended
Singular Surge of Light Procs that proc 4pc work with Energy Circle (Archon)

The Bugs

4pc Procs do not count towards Pontifex stacks
4pc is eating extra Surge of light Procs
(IE having 2 stacks of surge and pressing FH will cause both Surge Procs to be spent if that FH procs our tier; the Tier Set FH gains the 30% amp from Empowered Surges but this is a net loss as it is eating a free FH that does significantly more HPS)
Energy Circle DOES NOT scale with Light of the Naaru, Our 2pc, or Apotheosis
(I’m not sure if this is intended gameplay but it feels awkward since everything else is scaling properly with our CDR)

Voice of Harmony:

There was a change in the patch notes notating that at Rank 1 the talent provides 4 seconds of CDR for PoM and Holy Fire/Holy Nova for their respective Holy Words, However Rank 2 only increases the CDR for Circle on Sanctify by 2 seconds and provides no increase for Serenity and Chastises new generators. This talent could easily be swapped to a 1 point node or make the 2nd point actually further increase the CDR generated from what it is currently.

Ñatrysa-tichondrius · June 6, 2024, 8:33pm

So I think the atonement could be solved with a 5 min CD of applies atonement to 8-10 if talented for full duration, smart heal. Then given it the reduce CD effect with manual attornments applied. That way we have something to help our ramp, while making the spec not braindead like it was when automatic.

Second, I would sacrifice many goats if it got me cascade back. It was my favorite spell.

Purge the wicked’s effect is an easy fix, Glyph of shadow purge…brought to you by chipotle…sorry could not resist.

Fuso-living-flame · June 6, 2024, 9:51pm

Disc priest full mana after a 8 minute arena (no drinking), as much damage as an enh sham. May need to look into that.

Felrynpr-malganis · June 6, 2024, 10:25pm

Please consider making Shadow Crash and Void Crash for shadow priests a faster travel time. Currently it takes exactly two seconds to land which can often lead to frustrating encounters.

For example, if a tank is erratic with their movements, it becomes unpredictable to land those abilities. Yes, this could include the target locked one too.

It’s also annoying in PVP situations where targeting the ability on myself can lead to it missing completely since it takes two whole business days to land.

Please consider making the travel time one second instead of two.

Asfihfwirhwr-malganis · June 6, 2024, 10:34pm

Hello, I’m a Plunderstorm player and I’m trying my hand with retail WoW. I started testing Voidweaver and noticed that it’s basically built entirely around Void Torrent. As a new player it seems like I have to always incorporate Void Torrent into every build I try. Perhaps swapping Void Torrent with Devouring Plague or Silence talent slots? What if I didn’t take Void Torrent? Would Voidweaver talents just not work?

Also can’t submit feedback on beta because of lua errors but: The Deathspeaker talent is not working with Depth of Shadow talent. Unless that interaction is intended.

Fatespinner-arathor · June 6, 2024, 11:08pm

I am not sure if there is a bug or an update to the visual effects, but Divine Word + Holy Word Sanctify displays a faint circle where the healing is.
I checked my graphic setting increased them nothing. On live Divine Word with Holy Word Sanctify has a lighted rune element to it. On the beta, some of the terrain I couldn’t make it out, with the glowing runes is gone.

Shadowo-thrall · June 7, 2024, 12:53am

In a vacuum, oracle for holy isn’t THAT bad, but comparatively, it just feels bad for holy over archon. In dungeons, I guess you just use the CDR premonition on holy words, maybe PI if it lines up, but holy just doesn’t rely on low cooldown abilities or overheal much to make use of the buffs in keys. In raid, I can definitely see it being a bit better to machine gun out prayer of mendings or use the overheal buff on salvation. Is it fine if oracle doesn’t really have a place in 5 man content?

Thrymyrden-stormrage · June 7, 2024, 1:43am

Some feedback on Shadow and Holy.

Shadow feels good to me, I like most of the changes made during the alpha process so far. Voidweaver is thematically strong and visually great.

For Shadow, I would love to see Deathspeaker removed or made more optional in some way; it feels odd to stop your regular rotation (especially if you’re mid-cast) to press SW:D. I would love for it to go back to being a pure execute that doesn’t get used during your regular rotation, giving your other spells a chance to breathe.

I will also echo others’ thoughts on making shadow crash travel faster. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to shadow crash a pack of mobs, and the tanked moved them, or they were displaced for some reason. It’s very frusrating. I like the animation, so I get that you don’t want it to be instant, but please, make it faster at least.

And, people have been asking for this for YEARS now: CAN WE PLEASE have a glyph that returns shadow form to the old, pre-Legion look? I BEG of you.

For Holy: I don’t have much to say here, it continues to feel pretty decent, but I think that the spec tree continues to be over-filled with abilities and cooldowns, and it’s a bit like playing whack-a-mole at this point.

Dreadtendies-sargeras · June 7, 2024, 2:24am

I have my own feedback to provide regarding Shadow as a whole that I’m cooking up, but I just wanted to chime in and say that I HEAVILY disagree with this sentiment and would be quite upset if Deathspeaker was removed, even though it’s a talent we don’t currently run in Season 4 (so it’s very much optional right now).

Shadow Word: Death is a very satisfying button when Deathspeaker procs and said procs do a pretty good job spicing up what often tends to be a very monotonous rotation. Its variance can be a bit extreme sometimes (particularly in Season 3 when SW:D made up a considerable amount of our damage inside and outside our execute window so chain Deathspeaker procs would have a huge impact on our resource generation and damage output), but I think Deathspeaker and SW:D as a whole need to be expanded upon, as opposed to removed.