Holy stuff

Classes Priest
1

After testing new Holy for a whopping 10 minutes, here are my quick thoughts.

  1. Ultimate Serenity removes the core gameplay loop of Holy – using certain spells to buyback a desired Holy Word.
    Solution:
    a. Remove Ultimate Serenity
    b. Replace it with a new talent called “Balanced Chakras” or whatever
    Spells that reduce the cooldown of your Holy Word: Serenity now also reduce the cooldown of Holy Word: Sanctify at 50% effectiveness. Spells that reduce the cooldown of your Holy Word: Sanctify now also reduce the cooldown of Holy Word: Serenity at 50% effectiveness.
    c. This fulfills Blizzard’s goal of giving specs a simpler and less punishing gameplay option without removing important decisions outright.
    .
  2. Passive Renew is basically identical to Mastery: Echo of Light.
    Divine Image is a near-mandatory talent that demands talent point investment in an already crowded part of the talent tree.
    Solution:
    a. Remove Mastery: Echo of Light
    b. Replace it with Mastery: Divine Image
    .
  3. Prayer of Mending is super spammy, but does not feel impactful at all. It has 15 potential modifiers from talents, which requires it to be kept weak at a baseline level (something Blizzard is trying to avoid moving forward).
    Solution:
    a. Remove a large number of these modifiers, buff the baseline spell, and increase its cooldown. Fewer casts, but a much larger heal for each jump.
    .
  4. Divine Hymn is (and always has been) a lame copy/paste of Tranquility.
    a. Swap it out for Holy Word: Salvation (something that actually interacted with the rest of the spec and wasn’t consistently hamstringed due to Hymn’s healing buff).

There’s some other thematic stuff to touch on as well, such as the return of Chakra stances, big animation spells like Divine Star and Cascade, some form of the o.g. Lightwell (possibly a proc similar to the new Jade Serpent Statue). Renaming Cosmic Ripple to Circle of Healing. And so on…

3 Likes
2

I was kind of hoping they’d make divine word into the apex talent and make it more powerful. Always loved that talent, it just couldn’t compete with other options as a capstone.

4 Likes
3

I’ve been playing holy for a lot more than 10 minutes and it’s a blast. I’m really enjoying the changes.

1 Like
4

As small things go for maintaining spec theme, this is a great one.

5

Hm I’m not sure if I as a non-draenei priest player would love to have the naaru as my actual mastery. If we could glyph it to change its appearance maybe.. I also think it would just be kind of a copy and paste of elemental shaman’s mastery: elemental overload. Where your spell casts are duplicated. Not particularly interesting to me.

Echo of light isn’t that much more interesting don’t get me wrong, but it’s been with the spec so long that if they were to change it, I’d want something really fun.

I agree there’s way too many talent points devoted to PoM. It almost seems like they don’t know what else to do in order to make the tree interactive. Like it’s not really finished or something. I agree renew as a passive and echo of light are too samey. I’d personally want active renew to return with the empowered renew choice, and trim away all the passive renew stuff in the tree.

I think holy spec generally has too much passive healing and splash healing like with cosmic ripple. Echo of light mastery should be the main “passive” healing the spec gives and lean more active everywhere else.

You didn’t mention it, but my own personal thing is that I think Heal should come back and its interaction with lightweaver. Heal was the one mana efficient spell hpriest had in moments where you could afford to hardcast or needed to hardcast just generally. Lightweaver was nice with Heal because your surge of light procs for instant flash heals then became lightweaver stacks you could sort of bank for fast Heal hardcasts. It was a fun loop. Main point is I think hpriest is going to miss the mana efficiency of Heal and I’d like it to return the most of anything. Even as a talent option (though I’d prefer baseline) maybe if they continue reworking the hpriest tree.

6

I still think an empowered spell would be great for holy and would be a chance to bring back a greater heal like affect.

7

Be Oracle.
PW: Shield, Renew, and PoM are ONE button now. The button is PoM.
Heal is gone.
There is only Flash Heal.
…
Bind Flash Heal to the V key.
Bind Fade to a mouse button.
Bind PoM to a mouse button.
1: Press PoM.
2: Press Fade.
3: Press PoM.
4: Spirit of Redemption.
5: Divine Hymn.
6: V.
7: Psychic Scream.
8: V.
9: PoM.
10: V until PoM.
(Bonus!): Mind Control.

8

Is it me, or is Oracle just unilaterally better for dungeons?

9

Oracle feels really good for dungeons, yeah.