The fluorescent lights of Sunny Vista Retirement Village hummed, a soundtrack to the gentle clinking of tapioca pudding spoons. Agnes, 92, her fingers gnarled with arthritis, gripped her iPad with surprising ferocity. “Did you see the patch notes, Mildred?” she rasped, her voice a dry rustle. “Holy Priest. Buffed.”
Mildred, 95, paused her bingo daubing, her eyes widening behind her thick bifocals. “No! They actually did it? By the Light, I thought they’d forgotten us!”
A ripple of excitement spread through the common room. From the corner, Bartholomew, a spry 98, cackled, a sound like dry leaves skittering across asphalt. “Infusion of Light now heals for double in PvP? And Divine Word’s cooldown? Reduced by thirty percent?” He shook his head, a thin wisp of white hair falling across his forehead. “They’ve unleashed the beast!”
The air crackled with a newfound energy, a stark contrast to the usual gentle murmur of daytime television. These weren’t just frail old folks anymore; they were the Holy Priest mains, the guardians of the light, the tapioca-fueled terrors of the arena.
“Time to dust off the Shadowlands transmog,” Agnes declared, her eyes gleaming with a youthful fire. “We’re going to show these young whippersnappers what a real Holy Priest can do!”
The next day, the 3v3 arena queues on Azeroth trembled. Teams composed of bewildered rogues, mages, and warriors found themselves facing an unexpected onslaught. Healers with names like “HolyGran,” “ArthritisHeals,” and “TapiocaTank” descended upon them, wielding the Light with a ferocity born of decades of patience and a deep-seated love for healing.
“Divine Word!” Mildred shouted into her headset, her fingers flying across the keyboard with surprising speed. “Infusion of Light! Circle of Healing! By the Light, you’re not dying on my watch!”
Bartholomew, meanwhile, was weaving through enemy lines, his character a blur of holy light, his voice a constant stream of tactical commands. “Dispel! Dispel! Guardian Spirit! They’re focusing the warrior! He’s going down!”
The youngsters, accustomed to the fast-paced, high-damage meta, were utterly unprepared for the sheer, unyielding healing power of the geriatric Holy Priests. They watched in stunned silence as their carefully planned burst damage was effortlessly negated, their carefully laid traps rendered useless.
“They’re… they’re unkillable!” a young rogue wailed in voice chat.
“It’s like fighting a raid boss!” a mage cried, his carefully crafted rotation falling apart.
The recent patch, a cruel joke played on the already fragile meta, has transformed the Holy Priest from a shuffling liability into a nigh-invulnerable titan, a testament to the power of inflated numbers and developer oversight. These geriatric healers, their fingers trembling over their keyboards like withered leaves in a hurricane, now dominate the 3v3 arena, carried on a tidal wave of overtuned healing and laughable survivability. Their positioning, still glacial, is now irrelevant, as they simply cannot die. Their healing, a mindless spam of buffed spells, renders any semblance of coordinated burst damage utterly futile. Their crowd control, still clumsy and telegraphed, is now a mere formality, as their opponents are too busy trying to survive the onslaught of raw healing to capitalize on any mistakes. They screech into voice comms, “Did I do good, dearie?” after winning a 3’s match, unaware of the fact that they were carried by the patch, and that the only skill they demonstrated was being able to press the “Heal” button. They are the epitome of “carried by patch,” a walking, talking, overhealing monument to broken class balance.