To preface: I am completely in support of removing some bloat and button count, especially with temporary buffs we have to keep track of. I love that Renew is gone as a castable (and don’t even get me started on Festering Wounds and Malefic Rapture lol).
HOWEVER. As it looks currently, Oracle seems to be completely gutted from a class-fantasy point of view. I understand Premonition is/was a complex spell to work with, but simply boiling the Oracle Hero tree down to “Prayer of Mending is better” rubs me the wrong way. Not because of the complexity it removes, but because of the fantasy.
What even is Oracle if all it does is buff PoM? Sure it looks good, but Hero Talents are supposed to do more than just buff a spell I already have, you know? It just seems like in this specific case, there is too much flavor and class-fantasy lost here, in my humble opinion.
Anyway that’s all I have right now. Keep up the great work, Blizz!
I totally disagree. I think the twinsight addition carved out a great niche for Oracle.
Premonition as a button was a boring aura to track. It wasn’t that cool in my genuine opinion. It was like breathing to press it. It was something you just did. Glad it’s gone.
I think Prem of Insight should stay as the only premonition.
It’s the funnest one to use, and it feels like they acknowledged that by giving PoM an extra charge, but it’s definitely not going to feel as good as the current tier set’s version of premonition. Who cares about an extra charge when your goal is going to be blast it off CD anyway?
What’s fun right now is you don’t have to engage with prem much. You just use it like it’s free insights, and pay attention when you’ve got a piety version because that can work into some damage events. But in raid, you’re barely even doing the latter.
Splitting piety off into its own talent node is a good idea, but I do just think losing insight and getting a second charge of PoM/Penance is just straight up going to be less fun. We’ll see when more talents come in, though.
As a player that just returned from a Dragonflight S2 → TWW S3 break, my perception of Oracle is that it’s complicated to the point that the set bonus was dedicated to dumbing it down and is considered to be a really good set bonus as a result.
I don’t think that’s good gameplay design and I don’t think variable spells like Premonition are good design either. Healing needs to be more accessible if players want more healers.
The problem with oracle has always been that it was trying to be some big-brained version of healing priest, but what it was in practice was nothing more than pressing Premonition on or near cooldown for any given damage event for two reasons: you want access to Clairvoyance as often as possible and the only fun part of Premonition was Insight.
Insight was very fun and powerful. Piety was powerful, uninteresting, and sometimes problematic in raid. Solace was okay and uninteresting.
They kept Insight, they kept Piety but removed the raid problem from the ability, removed Solace, and removed the problem of only having the fun part of the hero class every 90 seconds.
10/10, no notes. Hopefully they finally iterate on voidweaver and archon so that they can progress past their TWW alpha iterations.
If they did this design would actually be very cool.
What they did was give another charge to PoM/Penance.
Problem is that these are spells you want to keep on CD. You’re never going to ‘bank’ PoM, and while you MIGHT bank penance for like a second or 2, you’re probably not going to just hold onto 2 stacks.
Also keeping in mind that oracle fully loses multiple dispel insights - which were commonly used in high key for both Holy/Disc on the double single target debuff bosses. Even aside dispels - Disc was not using insight for penance only pretty much ever. PW:S and Radiance could both be tossed into insight windows for different benefits. Holy pretty much WAS only casting PoM in that window, but you could be cheeky last tier and use it on empowered renew, too (which is gone now).
We haven’t seen what the 3 final talents are, I suppose, but that might turn things around if there’s some kind of way to reset stacks to full or something, which would give ‘budget insight’ feeling.
They gutted it, really. I think I’m most mad at the Waste no Time change.
I’m not married to the idea of a rotating cooldown, and wouldn’t mind Premonition going away entirely. I never truly payed attention to the Piety and Solace effects. But Insight and Waste No Time made the spec feel special, reactive, proactive, capable, FUN. This season I’m almost exclusively popping Premo for those two effects.
Losing them is going to cripple me. The extra charge of Penance and Evangelism change don’t do nearly enough to make up for it. I’m at an impasse here, where Blizzard seems to have targeted every ability and mechanic I like for pruning, and doubled down on every ability and mechanic I despise.
All fair, but I think it’s a good shift regardless.
Blizzard has demonstrated they don’t want any classes to have outlier abilities like Mass Dispel. Insight was an outlier ability, so restricting its use to Penance/PoM is completely in line with their vision.
I also think that what they did was very predictable. Blizzard’s favorite thing is to get creative with priest and then smash that design to bits rather than make their jobs harder and make more classes like the new design.
Oracle had exactly one fun element. It’s somewhat preserved. The unhealthy aspects of oracle have been removed and Blizzard maintains its long, proud tradition of wasting all of its expansion dev time for priest on a something that is divisive, probably unhealthy for the game, and will be removed at first opportunity.
Speaking from a pvp perspective I’m not a fan of seeing the oracle change as a whole. The premonition buffs were great and situational for pvp that opened up some plays I really liked. CD reduction was great for spot applying shiels like a mini rapture or making consecutive dispels, piety is whatever, and solace was a nice unpurgable shield that when couples with PW:S could be a great preemptive play if you knew CC was coming. I like the current iteration in TWW so hoping they find a better balance. Pruning for the sake of pruning doesn’t feel great imo.
Biggest letdown of the expansion thematically. Nothing about the shadow or holy version feels like this ultra powered up archon version of itself. I would’ve leaned into apotheosis and void form, do something with those. Halo? Most boring hero theme to lean into.
Yea, Oracle is the laziest and worst of the healer hero talent trees so far.
Two charges on the most important spell each spec has which is used on CD as highest priority is a 0% buff.
I think the dev or intern responsible doesn’t understand the difference between 2 charges and resetting CD. As Oracle currently stands, their Hero talent will give them exactly 1 extra Penance or PoM on a 3m fight or 10m fight.
Archon slipped out of Blizzard the last week of TWW alpha and went live with zero iteration. Voidweaver was present in earlier alpha along with oracle, but it also received zero iteration. Priest itself received no changes at all other than the removal of Mindgames and replacing the three associated nodes with a bunch of garbage that healers didn’t need to care about and shadow took because it had nowhere else to spend the points.
Literally every single moment of development time priest got in TWW went directly into oracle. Archon got whipped up quick and thrown out the door without a second thought - there’s no other way you land on “you cast Flash Heal/Mind Flay REALLY well” as a fun concept.
Premonition was a problem from the moment it was shown off. Blizzard knew it was a problem and said they showed it off early because it was a problem and they wanted to make it as little of a problem as possible, but there’s no way to make Premonition a stable ability in the way WoW works.
I’m actually really excited for the Oracle changes in Midnight. PoM is my favorite priest spell, but I find premonition to be challenging to optimize in M+.
Kinda sad to see Premo go away in midnight for my Oracle Disc in favor of boring passives. Some that will no doubt be nerfed as the expansion goes on.
Like someone mentioned above extra penance charge only really helps us at the very start, no one will be banking a second charge on an ability you use on cd. Hopefully they add in the Oracle tree something that allows us to generate more charges or just a generally faster cooldown for penance. 2 charges on paper sounds great, but when you analyze what it does and how often we press penance, it’s bad. Just re add Premonition of Insight back on a 45-60s cooldown.
Piety being a passive direct 20% heal redistribute is wild to me because it has the power to be OP, esp as expansions go on. I wonder how it will work too with atonement if say you have 5 people atone’d and only 4 needs to be healed. I guess atonement healing gets stronger in that case on the 4 people who need it? Interesting.
Other healers will hate us but the meter padding will be glorious. I can forsee this being nerfed frequently if it makes it to live tbh.
Im not sure assured safety is giving us an okay PoM back as disc, the talent is misleading for me and I cant check alpha, kinda sad to see casted PoM go if so.
In all I can see where they want to go with removing premo but I dont think this is it. These are extremely boring replacements that cause other issues for us and the dev team imo.
As for the holy side, this could be neat. That piety passive is most likely going to still get nerfed hard as the expansion goes on though. Having a Velen’s Future Sight baked into the class all the time sounds extremely good for holy lol. Would not surprise me if that 20% redistribute slowly gets nerfed over the expansion down to like 5%
Ultimate penitence needs to apply the 10 atonements if it stays as a 4 min cd. If not it needs to be a 3 min cd at the very least. ( even then it will be hard to compete with a proper Barrier drop but 4 mins is gross ).
I like premonitions and wish they were still here. If they had to simplify it, they should have just simplified it to one premonition only, the cooldown one, and made the cooldown effect only work on prayer of mending and penance.