I really hope the new Archon spec gives Holy Priest a viable pure DPS option. I know it won’t, but I really do miss the old days of 1 shotting players with a Holy Fire build. I think a light based damage dealing spec on Priest is absolutely needed.
Some talent options for Archon that I think would be really friggin’ cool.
- (KEYSTONE) Power Overwhelming (replaces Power Infusion): Only castable on self! 1 minute cooldown. For 10 seconds Smite and Holy Fire are now instant cast. Smite’s damage is increased by 200% (can also stack with Surge of Light Talent). Holy Fire’s damage is increased by 400% and also rains down pillars of fire on up to 5 additional enemy targets without the damage bonus. All damage done during Burning Inquisition is also evenly split and heals up to 5 nearby allies within 40 yards of the target.
- Holy Prism: 30% of all healing is converted to damage within 10 yards of the target.
- Wrath of Xe’ra: Your smite’s have a low chance to convert your enemy to fight by your side for 10 seconds instead dying. Upon upon expiration, your minion dies and explodes for Holy Damage within a 15 yard radius.
- (CAPSTONE) Teachings of the High Templar: Power Overwhelming can now be cast on an ally causing 20% of their damage to heal allies within 40 yards, in addition to granting the Priest Power Overwhelming.
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I don’t see Archon being a Holy/Disc turning into a pure dps thing because all it does is compete with Shadow (and it’d be just like Mages where one spec is basically only going to be meta for raid). Given Blizzard obsession with all things PoM related for Holy I’m 100% sure it’s going to be something involving PoM because they can’t think outside of the box.
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As much as I’d like to see something like that, can’t happen until mastery isn’t dead dps stats, and the heal converted to damage sounds fun but … a divine hymn into a salvation would be an absolute broken nuke
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They’re not going to covert a healing spec into a DPS spec with a hero talent tree. It would take far more than that and then would shoehorn everyone into playing oracle, which almost nobody wants to do.
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Correct, hero talents only change one ability…
Which leaves me scratching my head on what they’re going to do with Holy/Shadow because they only share Flash Heal, SWP, SWD, Purify, PI, Leap of Faith, and PWS
Archon isn’t holy / disc to begin with
It’s holy / shadow
Correct. I’m just pondering what ability they’re going to use between Holy/Shadow unless they’re just making the talents completely different between Holy/Shadow.
I made a post about it in the oracle thread. They could do stuff like this, but not sure if any of it sounds interesting to anyone else though.
- shadowfiend now grants 5% leech to you and 4 nearby allies while active
- halo or divine star add renew or shadow word pain to targets hit (maybe that’s op?)
- shadow word death grants a charge of surge of light or whatever the name of the shadow talent that makes mind blast insta cast
- casting shadow word pain casts renew on a nearby ally or casting renew casts shadow word pain on a nearby enemy
- you can now cast damaging spells while in spirit of redemption, or you can now cast helpful spells while in dispersion
I don’t think they can design Archon to NOT have at least 1 if not more talents that do things completely different pending if it’s Shadow or Holy picking it.
I would have in the past say I would be pleasantly surprised if they did somehow manage to avoid making talents altogether that are spec specific but I have simply lost any faith they are capable of doing just that without it becoming a complete and utter disaster.
That being said, I think the Archon Hero Talent tree will be the utmost difficult Hero Path Talent Tree to create. So if they can somehow make that good, then that bolds well for all other Hero Path among the class/specs.
When you look at the other Hero Path talent trees and specifically Frostfire and Dark Ranger, you can see how the talents interact with your normal playstyle and just add more.
What you’re suggesting is just extra stuff that doesn’t really make you better at what you already do.
This is the issue and difficulty with the Archon Hero Path as you not only got 2 different roles that need to be bridged, but you also got entire different spells and abilities in both name and style/theme in that it doesn’t make sense for Holy to use Shadow and Shadow to use holy to a degree that would be required for them to coexist within the same Hero Path Talent Tree.
At least with the Paladin Lightsmith Hero Path, they have the common link of Holy powers and it’s using the central theme of buffing your team which both Holy and Protection Paladins already do to an extent.
With Keeper of the grove, they centered around Treants which yes that does make sense from the Keeper of the Grove hero in WC3 but is not so well received with the Druid community and as such, finds itself to be in a difficult position to build a healing spec with a DPS spec talent tree that works for both… yet they still share a lot of similarities with nature magic.
Which is a very foreboding clue as to the difficulties they will have to tackle when it comes to Holy and Shadow priest as it need to work for both healing and DPS all the while using opposing sources of magic/cosmic alignments.
I’m both intrigued and wary of what the Archon Talent tree will end up looking both in its 1st pass and what it will eventually settle on being.
One thing I’m at least hoping for is a Holy Priest talent tree overhaul for the next expansion because were well overdue.
I’m not overly impressed with the Oracle talent tree so the bar is set pretty low for Archon.
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What’s both sad and funny is that I think Voidweaver is going to be the simplest Hero Path to build as it’s obviously going to focus on Shadow and since Discipline and Shadow do damage as part of their normal gameplay, it can just expand on that and then it will most likely have a lot of central focus on Mindbender (I’m nearly 100% sure on that) since that is now a massive point of connection they both share in talents.
But in saying that, I’m sure once they come out with Voidweaver and it does in fact have a massive impact to Mindbender, both Discipline and Shadow priests will be in an uproar at once again being funneled into playing mindbender lol.
So regardless of all the Priest Hero Paths, they each are riddled with issues.
Funny enough, I did figured Oracle would be the easiest to built in concept because it’s just using Holy/Light magic to heal better.
Yet here we are lol.
Well, here’s my 2 cents…
Having a whole set of hero trees that just beef up healers even more ends up just making healers already stronger than they are. In raid we overheal around 40% and Blizzard has resorted to spamming one shotting mechanics because we have enough raid healing cds that it’s almost impossible for the raid to die.
If anything I’m not going to be shocked if healers/raid cds get nerfed down a lot next expansion so were down to more realistic 20% overhealing and you might need to 5 heal some fights. That puts the emphasis on the healers instead of spamming the raid with one shotting stupidity.
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So what direction do you think would be most beneficial for Oracle to take?
Is it heals but only if they nerf a lot of healing going into TWW?
Or is it utility spells like Dispelling?
Or is it gimmick spells like Power Infusion nonsense?
Or something else?
I can’t really say what is the right/wrong direction on Oracle without seeing Archon. Archon could be a legit healing tree for Holy for all we know because Oracle atm is pretty bad.
Is it heals but only if they nerf a lot of healing going into TWW?
Or is it utility spells like Dispelling?
Or is it gimmick spells like Power Infusion nonsense?
Or something else?
I’m expecting they’re going to knock down everyone’s AOE heals a bit. The current damage pattern in raid is the damage comes out in 1-5s and then you have 10-20s to top the group up between the next round. Literally the whole raid gets hit to <50% hp and they’re back to 100% pretty fast.
The dispel mechanics this raid tier are EXTREMELY annoying. You have to interrupt your healing to waste a global dispelling somebody.
I’m expecting raid healing cds are going to get trimmed/nerfed down. There’s so many in a 20 man raid that you can realistically cover almost every major boss mechanic with 2-3 abilities.
They did say they wanted a class to feel like a class and not a spec to a degree coming into dragonflight.
While holy can only really access 4 shadow spells, they’re still using them and they’ll have to find some way for them to interact with our kit.
The reverse is the hard part for shadow. I’m really not sure what they’ll take from our kit to use regularly.
It’ll be challenging I’m sure, but I’m interested to see what they come up with.
That sounds like an opportunity for improvement.
Perhaps make dispelling heal as well or apply healing spells or vice versa have healing spells also dispel?
The suggestions I was making was reducing the cooldown on dispel (well Purify to be accurate) when you use your rotational spells like Prayer of Mending or Power Word: Shield.
Or make Mass dispel apply healing effects and have (Purify) reduce the cooldown of Mass dispel by a decent amount (15 seconds). Doing this will make the added cooldown on Mass Dispel less painful yet it keeps shadow out of that completely so only Holy and Discipline can have true mastery of dispelling and since we have Mass Dispel and the best dispel in classic, it fits in terms of compared to all other healers.
Make it good enough and it could make up for not having an interrupt mechanic imo.
Archon’s probably going to add a new ability, most likely Cascade, and then use the rest of its nodes to improve it and also have some small buffs to both spec’s spells mixed in.
Not really that hard.
They definitely aren’t making changes that large with hero talents…
If they ever added more specs, a Holy damage-based DPS spec could be cool- and I’d vote for it to be a Priest spec, and not even just to spite the wannabe “Shockadins”
Surprisingly enough I played a “smite Priest” in PvP way back during Vanilla. You could kill people in 4-5 Smite/Holy Fire casts and when they added Surge of Light there were tricks involving it.
Build up a Surge of Light, Inner Focus Holy Fire, and instant Smite. If Holy Fire crit there was a 0.1s delay and you could get another Surge of Light immediately after the instant Smite. So it was Holy Fire + 2 instant Smites in a row… did about 80% of most peoples hp.
Only thing keeping Smite priest from going into the big leagues was you only had a 50% bonus on crits instead of 100%.
It all changed in BC when they made everyone’s hp pools bigger and healer damage scaled way down.