I went into the xpack believing all of the people on beta saying how broken and bad and terrible the class is.
What a fool I was for listening to the melodrama. Priest is great, loving everything about it and I want to thank you all for freeing me from the forums. I now realize how full of it most of you are, never escaping the cancer.
Have fun sulking in your toxicity, I’ll be enjoying the absolute blast the class is without looking back. Blizzard did a great job with this expansion. Every thing is great except the AH that’s being fixed, and bearded women but I don’t need to make one.
The negativity isn’t unique to priest. All class forums tend to be places where people come to complain. Sometimes for legitimate reasons, sometimes not.
Fight well in the light my friend. You’re in good company.
I don’t think that was the general vibe in the forums (beyond the usual bias everyone has for their main) - it was the almost zero feedback and minimal development changes compared to every other class that filled the vast majority of complaints, plus of course the fact they’ve never balanced the game for lack of utility in M+.
No one ever doubted they could make the class viable in most content with some number tuning, that wasn’t the issue.
I personally love my healing specs, but Shadow feels awful right now to me. So much casting and so little mobility. It feels awful in both dungeons where everything is dead before you can ramp, and in pvp where you’re forced to hard cast into 100% uptime enemies.
Most of the negative feedback was about issues in M+… I don’t think anyone was saying it was going to struggle in Heroic dungeons or even the raiding side. I can understand that being bombarded with the same negative feedback over and over can make it look worse than it is but I think that’s more of a repetition effect…
To paint an example if we were to give it numbers I think what people were trying to say when tallking about Priest being “Bad” is that Priest was maybe a 6.5 to 7 out 10 while every other healer was between 8 and 10… But repeted feedback on Priest being bad might have lead people to believe it was more of a 5/10.
Edit: Also about that last paragraph I’m talking towards the end of beta where I’d rank it like that, but it was way worse for a long time, not only tunning was very bad initially but also had a lot of bugs.
Now, Priest has been getting some nice buffs the past couple of weeks so if we were to stay in those same metrics I’d probably grade it as an 8/10 going into Season 1… It will be viable for most content as we all expected it to be when proper tunning happened and I think for the most part capable enough in terms of troughput as long as the group handle interrupts and stops well because you are mostly a zero there.
In any case, I’m sorry if you got the wrong message from the Beta feedback we provided… But also I don’t think it’s toxic at all to give feedback in the “Beta Feedback forums” and voice out our concerns with the spec.
Also one more note I want to make and re-iterate… All of those rankings and feedback were beased on M+ testing on Beta… I’m not sure how to explain how far these Heroic dungeons are from what we experienced there.
Yeah, I think there’s a lot of people who are taking Blizzard’s words for “Heroics are the new Mythic 0” as true.
It’s not.
M+ was MUCH higher damage. We have nothing in the game right now that is anywhere near that level of healing check. Several pulls took 1-2mil HPS on just trash.
Right now the only way you’ll ever need 1 mil HPS is like the last hallway of Stonevault + boss or the last room of Priory if you go nuts and pull everything.
That said, I still didn’t think Priest was all that bad. More just bad for pugs because they still lack interrupt/stops and this season is the absolute WORST for their dispel utility. Everything is poison/curse right now.
The issue, at least for me, isn’t if the class can be viable, that is really just a matter of number tuning. The issue is an over all lack of coherent design and or enjoyable playstyle and more and more the class as a whole plays less like someone sat down and designed a class to create an enjoyable experience, and more like they just gathered scraps from each expansion, removed the themes or core design of those expansions, and just carried a piece of it through.
Surrender to Madness was freaking sick and created a awesome feeling of risk vs reward. It’s gone now and instead Voidform is just a generic DPS boost CD that tries to imitate what it once was with Surrender to Madness and instead just feels clunky and out of place with many even calling for elements of it like Void Bolt to either be reworked to removed.
Legion gave us a high DPS healer that could actually provide strong through-put and DPS while lacking utility, a fair trade. We instead now have a glorified healer CD for a spec to use in raids with the core concept of being a high DPS healer completely removed and turned into being a healer who just so happens to do DPS.
Cata holy gave us forms that allowed, and forced, holy to pick what it wanted to be strong in with a mechanic of switching on the fly. Instead of actually refining that it was removed and the holy words have been smashed into a generic healing kit.
More and more our class is just a junkyard of abandoned ideas that really isn’t fun. This is the first expansion that I have returned for that I actually have stopped leveling this priest and instead just abandoned her as a whole. Blizzard has no idea what they are doing with the class when it comes to actually creating a coherent and fun design. They have had some decent ideas in the past but instead of refining those ideas they have gutted them and just left us to work with the scraps.
I never personally stated that Priests were unplayable.
The underlying complaint during the beta is that Priests received no updates to their talent tree. That’s the first time in the entire games history where Priests did not receive any major changes between expansions.
So the Priest-class you’re playing now is literally the same Priest class from Dragonflight with the new hero talents added on. The hero talent trees are just like putting a bandaid over the Priest spec and hoping it stays together.
Disc and Holy were both balanced around the tier set bonuses in DF S3 and with those bonuses gone: their performance has suffered quite a bit. Disc in particular has performed exceptionally bad throughout most of the beta and has just received two rounds of big hps buffs.
Holy and Shadow are also going to lag behind the other specs for raid as well for the same reasons. Holy/Disc were 10-20% behind most of the other healers during the beta.
So yes: you may be having fun now, but this is basically a repeat of the start of the DF beta. We had a janky beta in DF with a rushed talent tree like in TWW and Shadow, Disc, and Holy all received updates in other patches.
The TLDR is that Priests are fun to play, but their performance isn’t as good as you think it will be. Expect a lot of buffs over the next 1-2 months.
You enjoying the class =/= it desperately needs reworks and changes. Priest forums are probably asking for the most changes right now, with nothing currently being done.
Sure, you can enjoy the class. I still enjoy the core aspects of a lot of the class, and the visuals.
But if you literally go through any forum post and look at feedback, and changes people are requesting, and DON’T read something while thinking, “wow, that would actually be a really nice change” then idk what to tell you, you’re just a different breed
I say this from as someone who is playing Oracle Discipline Priest… I’m really enjoying it.
Yes it’s harder to play having to manage Premonition but once you get it you sorta know how and when to use it… like a real Premonition
The versatility feels great with big CDs to my abilities, pump up healing while I funnel overhealing to an injured ally and that big shield + DR have saved many runs for me.
Priests needs tuning yes but it’s no way as bad as I’ve heard out there.
When kneejerk reactionaries make value judgements based off their experience in content that people can clear with their eyes closed half the time without either a tank or a healer for the most part.
I am actually curious as to what OP’s reaction would be when pugging difficult content that’s M+10 or higher as a priest, given that they don’t seem much of a people’s person.
But then again, it might forever remain a mystery because they aren’t the type that would admit other people were right all along when they find their pedestal crashing down like a house of cards.
The spec is perfectly capable in +10 keys. IDK why people keep talking about +10 as this mythically hard thing. It feels like there’s two things happening right now:
People are overestimating the challenge of heroic and trying to evaluate their healing there.
People think that mythic is going to be this insane completely bonkers change where suddenly the tier lists will all make 100% sense and the bottom classes will feel worthless and the top will feel great.
The answer is both are wrong. For one, heroics are way too easy. You can’t evaluate healer strength at all in them, they are a breeze and if you’re struggling in them you’ve got something seriously wrong playstyle-wise or you’re coming into it with gear from level 70 and have 0 questing gear or normal ilvl.
For two, Mythics are about to be a huge slap in the face for every spec in the game. The top specs are also going to feel it, the spec isn’t going to carry you if you suck either. But also, it’s not so ridiculously hard that you can’t clear it outside of meta spec. Keep in mind, beta keys were locked to heroic ilvl. Nobody could get better gear. Priest was clearing +10s in this. I’ve cleared +10s in this.
Realistically we’re going to see priests clearing 18s, too.
If your concern is that your class will be so bad you can’t play it, then it’s unfounded. You’re going to be able to play priest to everything but cutting edge M+. You basically can go until the skill level is high enough that you get gatekept for being off meta. But if you want to climb that high, you have 0 chance outside of a meta spec anyhow. Any player aiming for that has had their class chosen for them at the start of the season, or with giant balance shifts that rarely happen during a season.
