Intro:
We currently occupy the top 3 positions of specs with the most 2 point talent nodes. Holy has 10, Disc and Shadow both have 8. Regardless of your opinion on how the spec plays or what the performance of the spec is, Blizzard has shown that they understand how bad an abundance of 2 point talent nodes are. The community wholeheartedly agrees with this position as well and you can see that with the previous Enhance Shaman feedback, which led to them reducing their 2 point nodes from 9 to 6 in the last beta build. I keep complaining, but instead of just complaining, now I will be doing and giving some ideas and giving alternatives to the current talent tree. I’m going to talk about the different sections of the tree and work my way from left to right. Also these are just my spitballing ideas to try and make things more interesting and they may not perfect and fix everything.
I can’t post links, but I have spreadsheet showing the 2 point talent distribution among Specs and I will try my best to describe the capstone area redesign through text. Had to reupload because I forgot how to use markup and needed time to fix formatting.
1st Area:
Right off the bat, Prayer of Healing should be baseline. I think that Circle of Healing should be an option for Holy Priests to play in Mythic +. It feels very bad to want to use it, but you need to functionally invest 2 talent points into it and get Prayer of Healing, which you will never press. I don’t know how many people remember this, but Heal used to be the 1st node in the tree and it had the same problem, but they fixed it by making it baseline. They would have to add a talent node here to replace Prayer of Healing. This could very well be where Prayer of Mending should be. It would suck to lose a point in the Spec tree, but as far as I know no other Priest Spec wants to hit Prayer of Mending, so it’s a bit odd for it to be on the class tree. I think Revitalizing Prayers is bad. I also think that Sanctified Prayers isn’t that great. I think that having the window idea is in general a good idea to have that provides some more engaging gameplay. Could this not just be a talent to make it so that Serenity amps Flash Heal and Heal, while Sanctify amps Prayer of Healing. Cosmic Ripple is so boring. It’s so passive and doesn’t do that much healing that you don’t notice it. What if this did like double the healing after every 5 resets and gets a bigger animation for it. The goal for this one would be to try to make the benefits more tangible and it doesn’t even need to do that much healing as long as it looks and feels cool. The Guardian Spirit choice node just isn’t a choice at all. There’s fundamentally very little scenarios where having 2 of them out to proc the pseudo cheat death every 3 minutes is better than having it every 60ish seconds. I think that baking in the reset into the core spell and then providing another alternative choice node would be a much better idea. It could be something as simple as you get more HP when the cheat death procs. This one I haven’t cooked that much on, but it could be anything that would allow it to be a reasonable choice vs having the self Guardian Spirit. On the topic of Guardian Spirit, I think that the spell should have some sort of animation to let both the target and the Holy Priest know when the cheat death was proc’d. Maybe the wings fold in on itself with a little flapping motion like it is giving the target a hug. Holy Priests damage rotation feels amazing now with the changes that they’ve done in making Empyreal Blaze so much more fluid. However, correct me if I’m wrong here, but I don’t believe other healers have to invest so many points for their damage. I know Disc and Monk have some because they convert damage into healing, but it feels a bit excessive that we have to invest so many points when the other normal healers don’t. I think it would be a lot better to bake the power of Burning Vehemence into the base Holy Fire. A 2 talent point investment for Chastise and Empyreal Blaze feels a lot more reasonable. Removing a talent from this area isn’t that bad, since most trees don’t have 14 points worth of talents in the first area. What I do have a problem with is the Chastise stun talent. In general, I don’t think utility should be in the Spec trees. Look at Boomkin or Shadow Priests to know how they feel about this issue. It feels like a PvP talent and I feel like it could be baked into the base spell anyways. However, it is way lower impact than Solar Beam or Silence and it is easily dodgeable, so this is one of the least problematic talents.
2nd Area:
Prayer Circle is good, but could it not also work for Flash Heal and Heal. I don’t mind hitting single target spells in raid or even playing a spotheal build if it was good enough. That’s why I would like to see some of these Circle talents not be completely dead with a different build. Healing Chorus is fine with more Renew applicators, like our old tier set which I will get to later in this post. Orison is great for raid, but sort of wasted in Mythic plus because it makes Circle if Healing heal 6 targets. I think this would be a great spot for a choice node that makes Circle of Healing even better on 5 targets. Holy struggles at AoE healing, so this could be a good option to make the spell more powerful on 5 or you get more coverage and uptime on 6 targets. Prayerful Litany is just extremely bad. It also leads into a dead end, without actually being one. I would probably just replace this with something else, anything is better than this. Crisis Management is fine, but a little boring. It’s also a 2 point node, but I think that this last row before the capstones works fine as a 2 point wall. Trail of Light should only ever be 1 point. It’s so bad with it being 2 points and it’s also required to do any AoE healing in M+. Especially with the other changes that I made earlier making the left side of the tree more appealing to M+ players, that point will be able to find a good home. I personally hate Everlasting Light. It gets so much better being able to take Lightweaver, but a conditional healing amp, that isn’t even that much, based on the amount of mana left is just bizarre. I think leaning into the Trail of Light type of gameplay would be better by providing a smaller amp if you target someone who was not your previous target. It could also be some sort of Trail of Light choice node. Trail of Light could replicate healing on your past 2 targets for a little less healing or function the same as it is currently for more healing. Tuning would have to be good on this, but it could allow the Flash Heal/ Heal playstyle to have a little more variety in the type of profile necessary for the dungeons. Divine Hymn was buffed in beta to be better in M+. I’m super excited for that change, but I would like a choice node where Gales of Song is. I feel like an 8 second base channel makes it super reasonable to ask for an option to allow us to cast it while moving. Even if we move at a snail’s pace, it’ll help in those moments where you barely cast and then have to cancel again or get hit by something. People will say, then you just have to know the fights better, but I feel like being able to see 8 seconds in advance is hard to learn and sometimes incredibly RNG. Prismatic Echoes to buff our mastery great numerically, but incredibly boring. I would remove Enlightenment. I think it is not a great point and this spot under the healing amp on targets with renew is a perfect place to put our 2 piece tier set from Amirdrassil. Those extra Renews were really nice and I plan to add our 4 piece into the talent tree in the capstone area. Instead, if you feel like Holy Priest needs more mana, then make Symbols give Holy Priest 2x the benefit. This kills 2 birds with 1 stone because it gives Holy Priest back some tankiness that they lost because of other more problematic defensives while also making the mana you gain feel more planned instead of just a small passive benefit. 60 seconds of CDR on Desperate Prayer and 20% missing mana seems pretty good. Benediction is good, although boring and passive, while Holy Mending is bad, especially because you won’t have a high amount of Renew uptime. I’d just remove Holy Mending. Prayers of the Virtuous is probably my least favorite of these 2 point wall talents. It feels mandatory because of how good Prayer of Mending is and I feel like it should just be baseline into the spell. The max stacks on Prayer of Mending is 14 or 2 casts on each target and it’s just obnoxious to not take this and have to cast Prayer of Mending 2 extra times before every raid pull. You already have to manually reset all your Holy Words, so adding this on top is annoying. My cook for this 2 point is to put Holy Mending here, or something incredibly similar to it. By putting it at this key point, then you can actually give it the power it needs to be good. You could make it so that instead of just healing extra on targets with renew, that it instead consumes some amount of duration from that renew to burst for more healing. This would make Salvation be able to be a bit more frontloaded of a cooldown and lead to less overhealing. Divine Service is fine, but it’s hard to quantify how good it is. Instead I would just move Say Your Prayers for RNG Prayer of Mending bounces up to this position.
3rd Area:
I made the whole capstone area 1 point. This part of the tree has always been the most gameplay affecting portion, but it is limited by the wall of 2 point nodes. On top of that it was mandatory to get both your major cooldown in Apotheosis/Salvation and Miracle Worker. If you take it a step further, then another 3 points were required to path to Divine Image. That didn’t really leave you many choices and that was getting worse with both Hero talent trees incentivizing Answered Prayers. Archon because you are stronger in Apotheosis and Oracle because the CDR reduction from the Insight effect lets you spam Prayer of Mendings and effectively get more uptime on Apotheosis. With the layout of 1 pointers you are only able to ever get 3 capstones. That’s more than we have available to us now, but I think that even if it requires a slight nerf in terms of output, the gameplay will be a lot better. The exact layout and talents available are obviously subject to a lot of different opinions and variations, but I think this one is a good start to show how much more freeing it is to be able to choose from these while keeping all of the same talents.
Far Left:
Pontifex
|
Resonant Words
|
Divine Word
Middle:
Apotheosis Miracle Worker
/ \ / \
Light of the Naaru Answered Prayers Sacred Revenance Voice of Harmony
/ \ / \
Lightweaver Divine Image Restitution
Far Right:
Epiphany
|
Desperate Times
|
Lightwell
On the left side is the classic Pontifex/Resonant Words combo because they both play off of this weaving style really well. Divine Word is here because it makes sense for both a Prayer of Healing and a Flash Heal/Heal build. However, please rework Divine Word: Sanctify because the Sanctuary ground effect is extremely lackluster. Then I put Apotheosis/Salve leading into 2 separate branches. The isolated branch is for Light of the Naaru and Lightweaver. If you want to spam Flash Heal and Heal to do Lightweaver gameplay, then it makes sense to have that give you more CDR on Serenity. Apotheosis/Salve leads into Answered Prayers because it makes natural sense when Salvation automatically procs Apotheosis. Then that of course to Divine Image. The other way to path to Divine Image is through Miracle Worker, and then our old 4 piece, Sacred Reverence, that gives extra charges of Holy Words based on a proc per minute system tied to Renew. I think the effect is a major quality of life that feels really nice, so the middle is a good spot for that. Miracle Worker also leads into Voice of Harmony and Restitution. Voice of Harmony is one of the more feel good one point nodes to have and then you always have an easy way to cheat death if you really need it. This right side is honestly my least favorite part of the tree. Epiphany makes sense near the Prayer of Mending stuff, but it also can feel really bad when it procs close to when Prayer of Mending was coming off of CD. One potential fix they could do is implement something like a 2 charge system for Prayer of Mending, so that it makes you less likely to feel bad for proccing what should be a good effect. It could also just be an implementation of the Aberuss tier set where you have a percent chance to cleave and “multicast” Prayer of Mendings, so the effect is always positive. I don’t like Desperate Times that much, but it makes a lot of logical sense being the path to Lightwell. Lightwell heals when people are under 50% hp and Desperate Times increases your healing to those players. If there were talents to lose in this area, then I think Epiphany and Desperate times could be them.
There is 1 significant flaw with this current design, in that you can get Lightwell and Divine Word with Divine Image. If that is too strong or too many cooldowns, then you can just make Resonant Words and Desperate Times 2 point nodes to alleviate the issue. There’s also the issue where this favors the Single Target build too much. I would recommend making Lightweaver function with buffing Prayer of Healing in the same way it does Heal. The benefits outweigh the flaws though. This enables people to play Lightweaver, Divine Word, and Divine Image, which combos well together. There’s also a build picking your favorite cooldown in Divine Word/Lightwell and then also being able to pick up Restitution without sacrificing Divine Image. Now you aren’t taking as substantial of a throughput loss by going for the cheat death. It also lets you play more of those middle points which have built in synergies with each other. After choosing your capstones, you can pick and choose which 1 point will work best for your build or the profile necessary for the fight.
M+ Sidenote:
This completely leaves out the issues we have with our class tree and the mandatory defensive/throughput nodes. It leaves us with little options for actual utility and the utility that we do have is extremely niche. That means that basically any choice for utility we have comes at the cost of either throughput or defensives. This is a problem because we’ve been given this excuse that Priest already has a good kit and doesn’t need anything else. Yet we are the slowest class in the game, one of the squishiest classes, Healer Priests are the only specs in the game to not have an interrupt, and our utility is continuously nerfed because of other people. PI got nerfed for ourselves because of its interaction with other classes and the negative feelings that players get when their class does not receive PI. Mass Dispel got nerfed to be 2 minutes instead of 25 seconds because it was so problematic when designing dungeons and raid encounters. Dominate Mind is incredibly broken for a few weeks and mandatory until it is fixed and patched out. The PI change would’ve been fine if they just nerfed the Twins of the Sun Priestess interaction and gave the Priest full benefit, while giving the other player the new reduced effect. The Mass Dispel change was good because it wasn’t fun to hit the button that often anyways, but why did they have to get rid of the cast time reduction talent. Dominate Mind is also incredibly unfun to use because you have to spam it every 30 seconds and whenever the mind control drops, you are at threat of getting 1 tapped by the mob. The only good unique utility we have is niche, but it’s sort of been replaced by another character’s ability. I’m talking about Rescue and Leap of Faith. Leap of Faith is 30 seconds cooldown longer by default, and it only moves the ally you cast it on. It also isn’t able to be used as a defensive cooldown like Rescue because it doesn’t have a talent supporting it. This makes it way more niche to actually need Leap of Faith, and in some cases like Fyrakk, Rescue works on adds that Leap of Faith doesn’t work on, the Big Trees. It’s really hard to speculate how to change a class tree because Blizzard will know exactly what they are willing to give Priests and how they want to make a tree that incorporates 3 fairly unique playstyles in Disc, Holy, and Shadow. One thing that for sure needs to change is the idiotic decision to have our disease dispel locked behind Dispel Magic. It makes it so that you have to waste 2 points to get a conditional dispel instead of 1 point like every other class, except non-Restoration Druids who have the same issue.
Conclusion:
I don’t care if Holy Priest is meta or not. I just want to have options with the builds and for the gameplay to feel better. We are one of the few classes like Disc who specifically got changes going into Season 3 Dragonflight because of the upcoming tier set. Our Holy Word: Salvation CDR from using Holy Word: Sanctify and Serenity got halved because we were getting a ton of free Holy Words from our tier set. What I want to remind people is that we are going to be a lot weaker losing that tier set and losing a bunch of stats going into the next expansion. It’s not only raiding that is hurt, but M+ too. That tier set was a huge quality of life in being able to keep the group alive and letting you use Holy Words a lot more liberally. So the gameplay in general is going to feel worse because we have a longer Salvarion cooldown in raid and a worse healing profile in M+. On top of all that, we have one of the worst hero talents, Oracle. It is unfortunately in pretty rough shape right now compared to Archon for Holy and Voidweaver for Discipline. All the power is in the button and the rest of the nodes are lacking in throughput. However, we could of course be hilariously overtuned and the best healer somehow, which people will always find fun despite all its issues.