[PTR class change posts without mention of holy priests: 4/9]
[PTR class change posts since mention of holy priests: 1]
[Extent (number) of changes to holy priest talents/spells/tierset: 9]
Holy Tree Feedback - new changes
Mana Management
I appreciate the additional decrease of the cost of our filler spells. I think this signifies a good understanding of where our pain points were. By making our “filler” spells cheap, it helps with the undesirable situation we all too often find ourselves in - casting fillers on people with full HP just to get our required CDR for our Holy Words. Having cheap fillers is the only way to make that loop less punishing.
In an ideal world, I’d like to see, oh, another 5% removed from PoH and flash heal’s base mana cost, and the two mana efficiency talents added in Midnight (Efficient Prayers and Healing focus, which are -15% to PoH and flash heal respectively) removed from the holy tree. The talents don’t feel good - I think Blizzard has tacitly acknowledged this - and there’s a huge variety of talents we could get instead which would be substantial quality of life increases.
(To replace those talents, they could separate out some of our choice nodes that don’t make sense to compete against each other because they don’t alter the same spell. They could add another DPS node so when holy fire’s DoT has enough accumulated damage to kill someone it goes off and kills the mob. If they want to keep a mana regeneration talent (Enlightenment), maybe change it to a mana regeneration talent tied to something we can actively press. And that’s just some of talents I’d love to see that don’t make any changes to our healing spells, since that list of talent changes is, uh, it’s own post.)
Apex Talent Changes
I approve of the changes for a few reasons:
- Having Apotheosis upgrade flash heal into benedictions led to extremely confusing gameplay priorities (for Archon) that could only be solved with a calculator.
- Moving a little power outside of apotheosis into our fillers is nice. Given every other flash heal will still be a benediction, it’s not a large nerf, so shouldn’t wildly change the balance.
The main drawback
PoM proc’d Benedictions are still completely RNG. Which means it’s extremely likely that the circumstances which cause us to press serenity (high damage) are also going to be when we get our PoM proc (as high damage bounces them). And the two procs are going to collide… and one be overwritten.
To address this, can we now have Benedictions stack? They time out on their own so it’s not like we can accumulate an unlimited and overpowered number of them - it just will give us the full duration of the buff to use them. Let our “affordance” increase as the talent function changes.
Holy Tree Feedback - Reiterating tuning changes that are needed
I’ve made a lot of posts about things that would help the spec feel more cohesive, reliable, and good to play (changes to the spec tree, changes to our hero trees, the ability to give temporary DR/HP in mythic+) and those were me being conservative, picking the issues I thought the most important, not merely my whole laundry list of nice to haves. But as we get further in the PTR cycle and it seems more and more evident we’re not getting the expansion rework most classes got during alpha (our “rework” consisted of two new spells and the removal of 11 of them) there are a few tuning settings that are still extremely askew.
I do have to say I 100% agree with and want to signal boost Fabulousness’s response, though:
Buffing Serenity via benedictions but not sanctify - when sanctify was already a worse spell in terms of ease of use AND a worse spell in terms of numbers, just makes an uneven balance even more uneven. At this point I’m starting to suspect the end-game goal is to remove Sanctify from the game in a the 12.2 patch because “nobody takes it” (because it’s terrible).
Tuning changes requested:
- Sanctify is currently way too low
- PoM baseline is tuned too low. Please bake the 15% of Radiant Plea into the baseline and give us a decent talent instead. Maybe bring back the “50 bounces of PoM triggers apotheosis” talent? Right now apoth is much stronger for archon than oracle, and that would balance it out (I think).
- Oracle needs an answer to the stack overcapping and munching which eats a good third of all the PoMs we have out during pulsing AoEs
- Oracle needs something to contribute to CDR for sanctify, if you ever want to see anyone Oracle’s actually running it. (If nothing else, how about Holy Nova? It’s a group healing spell in addition to a group damage one. No reason it has to only CDR Chastise.)