Just logged in after a few weeks afk and I saw my talents were reset. Maybe I’m missing something - but what happened to power word shield and renew? Are they removed from the game or something?
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Shield is gone unless you’re Discipline now. Renew has been “moved” into Prayer of Mending because Blizzard wants less things to cast or some garbage. There’s several threads ongoing about our general reactions…and most of them aren’t good.
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I’ve been playing a holy priest since wrath
This is unbelievably disappointing news
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Check out this thread. You’re not alone in this disappointment.
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Not even remotely true.
Power Word: Shield still exists for holy, it can be talented to cast on every PoM which is one of you most pressed buttons and saves you a global.
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If you were using PWS as holy you were doing it wrong.
Renew is still there but gets applied by other spells.
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PWS is an oracle only for Holy and has lost its agency as a stand alone option. Yes it’s a loss if you go archon.
Renew was baked into Benediction and lasting words talents.
Both are a POM off heal adders bringing down real choices. This is why it feels bad. It’s a way to excuse the prune by pointing to these awful interactions and saying… see it’s still there.
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they need to do something about pom. everything is tied to it. a shield, a regen and speed boost if you talent inb4 a cleanse lol…and it’s so boring to play. i acutally hate this spell more then poh and that feels really bad to use too lol
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Agreed. My priest was my main in classic since beta, though I moved to druid, I still love my priest. I am really unhappy about this change.
(not sure what character this is.. some random alt.. sorry)
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That’s literally how every class works now. Flame shock now has prim wave baked into it. Tentacle slam applies all three priest dots. The new theme for most classes is stack management, which what Oracle holy priest is.
If you hate PoM then there’s absolutely nothing that will make Holy Priest fun for you. Holy priest has been built around PoM for multi expansions now. Some people don’t press it, but it’s because they’ve never had a holy priest guide and they’re doing less than half the healing of someone who keeps PoM on CD. If you keep PoM on CD and never cap on holy words then you have mastered every conceptual skill needed to play holy priest since like BfA.
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Preach it priest
I’ll agree with this. The only time I used pw:s is running to the next trash pack in a raid and throwing them to the stragglers with body and soul.
Not for anything particularly useful though.
Yeah I don’t understand how h priests could run without PoM, it’s such a core staple ability and now with the Oracle talent that prevents it from disappearing if you don’t take damage (just loses two stacks and jumps to a different target) there is literally no reason not to press it on cooldown.
If you realllllly hate PoM you can play Archon and use other spells more, but PoM is the most mana efficient heal we have for the mana cost to healing output ratio, so you’re going to run out of mana quicker on Archon builds that focus away from PoM.
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that’s what i’m saying. i’ve already tried left side only-ish just to see what works. i’ve tried yesterday to do flash heal mostly with all the talents. it is pointless, the mana gets ate up too quick and none of the talents help at all. i almost wanna say just get rid of it since you got all these other spells that reduce cd on serenity especially with pom stacks, i almost never really have to use flash heal but to reduce seren stacks since seren had like 3 things going for it for me. (heal, regen, and the aoe holy sanct thing talent)
basically as i said other places, hpriest are pom bots and it sucks. they need to do something to make flash heal more interesting or something, i miss greater weave heal tbh.
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Well I mean the Benediction apex talents in Midnight do play to vastly improving Flash Heal, funny enough they proc mostly off PoM healing though so it still requires PoM cast on cooldown to trigger them with any regularity.
Honestly, I think renew and PW:S was quite useless for Holy Archon Priest. I saw these as a waste of a GCD because I could get more from just using Halo and surge of light.
What really irks me though is that they took out heal and now i’m only stuck with flash heal. This is tooooooooo bland. They dumbed down holy too much but it’s still harder to play than a resto druid because the mobility still sucks.
As a resto druid, I have almost everything instant cast and a nice Efflorescent aoe heal that I can just slap down and forget along with more instant cast options like Nature Swiftness and Swiftmend.
Basically they thought by removing more buttons from Holy, that they’d make this spec more easier to access, but they didn’t address any of the underlying problems that holy has been having since day one.
The thing that the flash heal, renew, PW:S doesn’t understand about game design is that you can’t pack large payoffs into spammable abilities. If you do that then the optimal way to play is to spam one button, and that’s exactly what happened during Vanilla to a lot of specs. We’ve evolved since then.
In modern design if you want payoff you have to work for it. PW:S isn’s a button you just press on disc. You have to wait for penance to come off CD and then use it to get weal and woe, and THEN you can press PW:S. You don’t just press flash heal, you wait for a SoL when it’s instant cast and free, or for the apex talent to trigger so that it’s upgraded.
This is why heal was removed, because it has no payoff, renew was removed because it was a setup for payoff, PW:S is gone because we don’t have weal and woe to give it payoff, and SW:P is gone because holy fire has setup for payoff and can therefore pack the punch to make it worth pressing. It’s all about builders and spenders and having less buttons doesn’t reduce complexity if those buttons are causing builder/spender interactions.
Disc priest is a famous example of a spec that has very few buttons and is still intellectually complex because it is extremely punishing if you mess up building up atonements and then don’t spend that big buildup using damage because you stepped in bad or got stunned etc. or even if you just wait too long or forget a rad or aren’t in range and only half of your raid has atonement.
There is a higher level of complexity than just having lots of buttons to press.
What does Power Word: Shield do for Shadow Priest? (asking genuinely because I do not know)
Shadow keeps PW:S because for them it’s a low payoff “don’t die/keep moving/press during lockout” utility spell instead of a core ability, and more importantly there’s the issue of them not having an obvious way to trigger body and soul without it given it needs to be a target self spell and be instant cast to have parity with disc and holy.
With disc and holy body and soul doesn’t make sense on PW:S for holy because it’s not your core rotational button like it is for disc. As a disc priest you’r pressing penance and shield all the time just for healing. As holy you’re having to spend GCDs pressing PW:S OR pressing the higher priority PoM to actually heal. Without body and soul holy’s PW:S becomes a spell you never cast since it’s strictly worse than any other button as it’s not a builder and without weal and woe the shield is trivially small.
But it doesn’t give payoff for Shadow, so it doesn’t necessarily have to give payoff for Holy, either. It is Discipline’s focus spell.
For Holy, and particularly for Oracle, Prayer of Mending is a very important cast. Using Prayer of Mending for Body and Soul (I generally do not spec Body and Soul unless doing high level boss fights in Delves because I prefer Angelic Feather) becomes a bit of a contested cast. If you use PoM purely for movement, you’ve sacrificed a charge of Prompt Prognosis that could be critical , especially since we know that , going forward, rot and unavoidable damage are going to be much more prominent to make healers heal (and reduce the need for one-shots to provide challenge).
Again, this isn’t to say that Power Word: Shield needs to be a button in Holy Priest’s rotation. I’m simply saying that it’s not wrong that it could be a button of last resort for Holy, because the justification that “it is this way for Discipline, therefore it’s unnecessary for Holy” ignores that it’s only that way for 1 of the 2 specs that have it.
In higher keys, Prompt Prognosis becomes very important. I was very worried that our tier set was going to set us down this path, and , sure enough, this is where we are. I like Prompt Prognosis , but it is now the case that PoM has contradictory use cases. It is your best answer to respond to damage when Holy Word: Serenity is on cooldown, because most Flash Heals will require being still and a cast time. This avoids the double-tap situation of someone barely surviving a mechanic, and then rot-ticks finishing them off. You’ll want to have those charges for that.
Perhaps a compromise here could be that Protective Light could have a choice node: Flash Heal yourself for 10% DR, or, regain Power Word: Shield as a separate button (because Power Word: Shield becomes Prayer of Mending now, and it made my PW:S macro look like PoM but I “““fixed””” it by putting a specific icon on my PW:S macro to get through these trying times 
) and get 10% DR that way. I also just really have it in for Protective Light . It doesn’t have its own visual, that I can tell. Maybe if it gave the Power Word: Shield visual, I’d feel a smidge better.