I want to re-iterate a point I made earlier and many have since, Archon is boring for Shadow. Looking across the best hero specs of all classes, the first choice should enhance your general game play. It doesn’t necessarily 100% change the class, but it refocuses it in an interesting way. Spec like San’lyn add spells back into the regular rotation, Spellslinger adds a new damage channel for Arcane, Hellcaller changes central spells in a Warlock’s rotation, and Voidweaver takes an already important spell and uses it change the base rotation in an interesting. Archon doesn’t do that for Shadow (I can’t speak for Holy).
Upping the visuals would be nice, but I just don’t think Archon will be a compelling choice for Shadow. Halo is on a 1 minute cooldown, which while it lines up nicely with cool downs, basically taking a hero spec for ANOTHER cool down is not particular fun. It doesn’t mesh well with an aggressive shadow play style in my opinion. You can’t use to engage enemies, so it is never going to be the first thing you cast, when ideally you would want it as early as possible for multiple halos. Finally, I don’t actually USE it when I am out leveling and soloing. With voidweaver I am constantly watching the cooldown on void torrent, making sure I have my MB charges and DP insanity. With archon I have to remember what it does, and I hit it, and the combat is basically almost over anyways so I don’t get the kind of feedback I want with a hero spec.
Holy and Disc seem to be struggling in the new raid with low hps (about -25% lower than Hpals and Mistweavers).
Archon Halo on Holy is also a massive contributor to Holy’s hps. It’s averaging around 10-12mil healing a cast which is 7x what Divine Hymn does.
Most of Holy’s healing is too frontloaded into Halo which makes us feel weak outside of that. We definitely need to see less power in Archon Halo and more power put into the rest of our heals. There’s a 0% chance Oracle would even touch Archon Halo on hps.
In this post I wanted to highlight the known bugs for Shadow Priest on Beta. I have categorized these into a few categories to indicate severity. These have all been reported in game as well but I wanted to provide more visibility.
Impacting Gameplay
The following all have significant impacts towards gameplay that actively impeded our ability to test things.
A Holy priest prospective on the new talents that were put in to replace Mind Games.
Cauterizing Shadows: The limitation seems like a high bar to ask on most mobs, I feel most mobs will die before the shadow word pain pock meets it trigger. I think that if the dot doesn’t expire it should heal, maybe have more healing depending on the time left on the dot. It would be nice to have the holy fire dot trigger this for holy as well.
Manipulation: This is extremely weak for where it is in the tree and putting two points in it for a 2% DR with this conditional is a poor rate of return. You get a 10% DR when you cast fade and that takes one pt and it a tier above this one. This need be reworked to give more DR and remove the two-point investment.
Phantom reach this is a band aid to the real problem of our class which is mobility. Giving 15% more range is not enough we need speed. Melee range was just normalized in the start of the beta, now our spells will have variable range depending on our talent load outs this will cause some problems and I can see it now. (Mind sooths range was increased)
But if this is to be placed in our tree it would server us better to be a higher tier so more can speck into this.
Chastise range was not increased with this talent not sure if this was intentional.
There’s two couple of issues with SWP and Holy that need to be looked into as well.
SWP is a low priority damage ability because Holy Fire, Rhapsody Holy Nova, Archon Halo, Smite, and Chastise do 50-100%+ more damage than a SWP cast. Smite is a higher GCD prio since it resets Chastise which feedback loops into the more AOE damage.
Holy lacks a way to spread SWP around like Disc/Shadow. This makes Throes of Pain frustrating to use since those GCDs spent tab-targeting SWP is less damage than just casting your other dps spells.
If Holy had a way to spread SWP around like Disc then I can see Cauterizing Shadows/Throes of Pain being viable. Just pull some of the power out of Empyreal Blaze.
PWS
PWS has so many modifiers and still doesn’t feel too good to press from the perspective of triage healing: Tier Set, Weal and Woe, Hero Talents, Rapture.
Even with all these modifiers and having a “the stars have aligned” moment it still feels weak overall and there are a lot of hoops to jump through to get PWS to a reasonable level. The fact that its a single target shield on a CD feels like it should absorb for a higher amount. This feedback is mostly focused on non-raid healing.
Haste/Stats
More than other healers Disc requires large quantities of haste to smooth out the gameplay due to how long our ramp is and the sheer quantity of different CDR talents we have. We go through this every expansion and I wish we had a way to mitigate this via talents to either increase our haste we get from gear (like Fire mage with crit) or make atonement application easier in some capacity. Love the spec, just don’t love trying to apply 20 atonements with super low haste. I feel like we shouldn’t have to wait till the third raid in the expansion for stats to scale to a point where the gameplay is not a pain. This is even more true relative to live where the gameplay is very snappy, quick, and fun.
M+ Feedback
Healed a few dungeons and noticed that there are a lot of packs that have multiple abilities that are chain casted. Would love to help the group with this but 1) no interrupt, 2) no CC outside of fear. This especially does not feel great when every other healer has both a kick and multiple stops.. The changes to affixes are interesting, too bad I can’t interact with any pack in a meaningful way. Its very much a “passenger” spec in dungeons, in a not so fun way.
Healing felt pretty weak overall, more than just because of large health pools. Our spot healing is lacking with no talent options to spec otherwise. Feels like we need some sort of “Number of atonements is capped at 5, but increase damage by X%, absorption by X%” type talent. If we can’t have CC or Kick, feels like high damage would be suitable niche for us.
After being abused during Dragonflight development and tormented during the entire expansion where’s the deserved Priest changes? What we’re getting is paltry compared to other classes and far less than what Priest needs.
Cauterizing Shadows triggering on mobs dying is good, it could use a 5x buff though…
Manipulation is still a horribly low value for 2 talent points, it should either be reduced to 1 point or increased to 2/4% DR for the 2 points.
Plink now works with Phantom Reach, thank you.
Priest passive survivability and mobility still need to be addressed.
As for Void Blast, it was a bit strong yes but the way everything works really makes voidweaver unpleasant to play (we need to pool mindblast charges going into every torrent)
The 25% nerf to Void Blast was not needed. Disc is already falling behind other healers in output and would need to be buffed in other areas to bring them up to speed, especially in M+. Also, Voidwraith is still not triggering atonement from its Void Flay attacks.
In terms of output relative to the rest of the spec’s kit it probably was, what’s needed is buffs to the baseline spells across the board so we don’t just end up carried by a single button on a hero talent tree.
Possibly but do your really expect to see that happen? I would love to see some buffs to penance or turning up sins of the many again to boost the M+ damage/healing output. It seems they created the Sins and Atonement tuning knobs with the purpose of adjusting raid output without affecting M+ but are way too hesitant to use them.
Please replace one of these low value 2% bland talents with door of shadows as a capstone, please and thank you.
Also reiterating, it feels really bad and anti-thematic to be using golden sparkles and yellow effects as a shadow priest. Give us our shadow mend effect back for healing and give us our void shield from Nyalotha appearance for PW:S and do something to make Angelic Feathers appear like Mawsworn feathers or something more thematic to Shadow.
And revert Void Torrent to its original animation if it won’t get its powerful ground swirl back. The current animation feels anemic compared to the original one.
Well, another week and this summarizes the Priest talent tree changes so far.
Bottom right Shadow-section of Priest general tree was updated.
Shadow gets Void Crash/Shadow Crash on the same node.
Are we going to get any feedback or updates on anything that’s being worked on at all? Or is it going to be like the DF beta where we get our launch talents 2 weeks prior to launch?
I’m scratching my head on why Archon Halo doing 10-12mil healing w/ 60%+ overhealing is actually fine as well.
I don’t think that would be much of a problem with void torrent being castable on the move and the myriad weak auras and add ons that already warn the player of avoidable aoe to move from.
In any case, Blizzard can always make aoe/ground effects that overlap/pverride player animations or make them bright enough to notice.
I just want my cool void torrent animation back, this one feels like you’re slapping the enemy with grape Kool Aid.
But if there is one thing I want urgently gone, it’s the annoying golden sparkling animations of flash heal, angelic feather, and PW:S.
The void blast nerf was totally justified, but hopefully we’ll see penance and mind blast and other heals/damage spells brought up to make up for it.
As it stood it was a dps/hps loss to cast penance if void blast was available. It just healed and hit that hard. Like any other button was a mistake, which didn’t feel great (outside of seeing that it was actually, significantly moving health bars, which did feel good).
Power of the Dark Side or Schism should be buffed for penance to make up for the loss of void blast’s oomph. Penance just feels bad right now being so weak. It really should feel like our best heal, since it’s iconic at this point after like 17 years of it.
Void blast hopefully won’t become “same damage as smite but does more atonement healing” because even if it’s more effective that way, it’s just not going to feel good to press.
I believe they can find the balance here. But all healers are feeling weak right now. Presvoker is an outlier, but I think that’s overturned.
void blast nerf is acceptable,but I need to mention there is a bug for smite reduce the cd of mind bender. Now 1 smite can reduce 4s, which makes disc is a OK healer but if you remove the bug you have to use Mind blast without mind bender 1 times, which will make Disc become weaker than all other healer in M+, when single target healing is already the weakest one. Pls buff all all other skills or make cdr of mind bender to 4s
