Priests should also be able to remove Poisons, similar to Paladins. Both classes are thematically aligned with the Holy Light, so this would make sense. Comparatively, Druids and Shamans, who are aligned with nature, can dispel both Poisons and Curses.
Alternatively, let Priests dispel Curses. This would also be logical because Priests perform exorcisms, and possessions are conceptually similar to curses. For instance, I often think of the quest in Hellfire Peninsula where a Draenei Priest helps exorcise a human male in the inn. This could emphasize Priests’ specialization in dealing with the supernatural.
Both options are reasonable:
Allow Priests to dispel Poison, like Paladins.
OR
Give Priests a unique dispel profile—Diseases and Curses.
Currently, Diseases are too rare for our dispel ability to feel very impactful.
I know this will have pushback but I would much rather prefer that all Priests regardless of spec can dispel all magic effects be it buff or debuff without incurring a cooldown.
Priests have been the only class that can do both since the beginning and then with BC adding Mass Dispel granting Priest the only class to be able to dispel a group of targets of magic effects imo solidifies Priest as the ultimate Magic effect dispeller.
Imo I don’t see Priest having unlimited access to dispel magic effects as being too overpowered or intrusive. Make it cost whatever mana is needed to balance it so you can’t spam it non stop but still allow the Priest to be able to dispel Magic effects unhindered by a cooldown so that they can use it without restraint as they need.
Imo for many years having a spammable magic dispel on both [harm] and [help] targets was a core defensive feature to weaken enemies and to bolster our defenses and now we lack a lot in the defensive aspect which leads to why Priests are so immobile since we are unable to remove magic debuffs consistently.
If anything make it so you can choose to modify Dispel Magic so that you choose to not have the cooldown on the defensive version but it no longer dispels ALL magic debuffs but instead only dispels up to 2 magic effects.
Also, not many Disease effects in the game which leads to Removing Disease effects with Cure Disease not very valuable. So they could add more disease effects from more classes and raid encounters? But somehow I don’t see that happening.
Edit:
Here is how I would do it…
Purify Disease (Becomes baseline)
Dissipate Magic (Replace Purify Disease location): Dispel Magic removes 2 beneficial magic effects on the enemy target or 2 harmful magic effects from a friendly target. (Replaces Purify)
Doing this allows the Priest of any spec the ability to have control on up to 2 magic effects be it harmful or helpful and no longer restricted to a cooldown while the trade off is not being able to remove ALL magic and Disease effects from Purify as that is replaced by Dispel Magic instead.
You also get Purify Disease baseline.
I think having to spend an additional talent point to gain this effect is enough justification to allow unlimited use of Dispel Magic as you have to spend more GCD’s to remove a lot of magic effects instead of all magic effects form friendly target but incurring a cooldown.
This kind of completely misses the point of my original post. You’re asking for more powerful Magic dispel capability, whereas I want Priests to just be able to also dispel either Poisons or Curses on top of Magic and Diseases.
Seems like you’ve been stewing on this idea for a while now, but I wanted to make it clear that this is not what my original post was asking.
You want more dispel options. But why? Because in comparison we lack dispel options that other classes have as aside from Magic, we have Disease which is very limited as I mentioned.
Your solution to address this imbalance is to add additional types of dispels.
My solution is to just embrace the Magic aspect of dispels since we already have in the past, a dominance in that field.
I vote to return priests to be the masters of magic effects as that both makes them a unique pick in that area compared to other classes and it bolsters our weaknesses since for so long having a defensive magic dispel solved many issues regarding movement issues since you can remove lots of slows and snares without being restricted from a hard cooldown as we have now.
So when Dispel Magic was charged and split between itself and Purify, it actually reduced our effective mobility due to being a lot more suspectable to slow and snares since we were unable to spam dispel ourselves and with our already lacking displacement utility, it severally torpedoed our already limited mobility.
So you have your opinion and I have mine as to the direction in dealing with what dispels effects should be taken.
This just seems like a really convoluted and roundabout way to excuse Priests from not just getting a displacement ability added to the kit.
I’d rather look forward than backward when it comes to class design.
At risk of changing the topic from the original post too much, I will say that I agree to disagree with your idea. Dispel variety is way more beneficial and versatile to a class than just doubling down on 1 effect (Magic).
You could always make a forum post of your own since your idea seems pretty unique and pretty far removed from my topic! Thanks!
You have to understand that out of Magic, Curse, Disease and Poison effects, it is Magic that is the only one that is both a Buff and a Debuffs where as the others are ONLY debuffs in regards to being able to be dispelled as you are not able to remove an enemy Rogues Poison weapon buff which is already built into the mechanics of all the spells that remove Curse, Disease and Poison effects because they can only be used on solely friendly targets.
But Magic is a doubled edged sword if you will. You can remove negative magic effects from friendly targets and positive magic effects from enemy targets.
This makes Magic act as 2 different types of effects removal as it is both offensive and defensive and Priests are the only class in the game that can do both simultaneously… Well they were but now at least Shamans can also do it.
So when you count Magic, you need to count it in both aspects of offensive and defensive and taking that into consideration, Priests have a total of 3 effects they can remove. Those 3 effects aline with most other classes that can remove these various amounts of effects aside from Shaman being able to remove everything except curse maybe? If they are restoration spec.
So instead of giving Priests a 4th type of dispel option in Curse or Poison (Would be overpowered) I rather just have more capability in the Magic aspect as we had that in the past and if we were the only class that can take care of any magic be it buff or debuffs then that is a big reason to bring a Priest vs something like a paladin for defensive dispel magic and a mage for offensive dispel magic.
Tl;Dr
You need to treat Magic Dispeling capability differently to other effects as it’s generally used more often and it is both defensive and offensive which carries a much bigger power weight compared to the others.
Offensive dispel is not the same as defensive dispel. Offensive dispel is way more noticeably powerful in PvP scenarios. Shaman can already do Greater Purge. Demon Hunter, Hunter, Mage, Warlock, Blood Elf Racial, Evoker PvP talent can all remove Magic offensively.
Are you saying it’s okay for Shaman to get the best of both worlds on top of the mobility they have, the interrupt, the many forms of CC? Priest just isn’t allowed because we have to double down for some reason? Or look back to “what Priest is good at” because you would rather talk in circles around the fact Poison or Curse dispel would massively help Priests in most scenarios?
Of the class/specs that can remove magical buffs on enemy targets, they are limited with a cooldown and only 1 buff at a time for the most part as for example, a mage can spam spell steal without restriction aside from mana drain.
Of the class/specs that can remove magical debuffs, they are all limited by a cooldown. Because of this cooldown, it removes ALL magical debuffs instead of a set amount.
So both offensive and defensive magic Dispeling for the most part have restrictions to some degree.
So if Priests were granted the ability to remove a cooldown restriction and remove 2 magical effects each use which can then be spammed, you can remove CC effects often like polymorph which pretty much negates that effect in its entirety when you have a priest on your team or flat out completely if you have 2 priests. Then you can also remove an enemy targets stacked up magical buffs quickly (twice as fast) as the next fastest class/spec that can do it.
Priests would become the undisputed champions of magic dispel and be a force to be wreakened with in both PvP and PvE when magic buffs are present.
Regarding Shamans, I think they have too much dispel effect utility.
But they had access to both Poison and Disease since the begining on top of an offense dispel magic with Purge.
But it seems every healer now needs some sort of defensive magic dispel.
So it’s difficult to remove one of Shamans dispel effects.
But the answer is to not provide more variety in classes.
Ideally I would think Resto Shamans need to pick either an offensive OR defensive dispel magic effect… Not have both.
Yeah, I mean they would simply never let Priests get a spammable 2x Magic debuff removal. This is why Greater Purge on Shaman got a cooldown.
Also, Dispel Magic on Priest (which isn’t what my main post is even talking about anyway) already does have a spammable application, it just costs mana which is the limiter. You need a limitation on offensive dispels or it would be broken. For Priests that limit is the trade off of keeping your mana for healing or using it on offensive dispel. For other classes, it’s a small cooldown.
Another thing I’m not understanding from your post is that Purify already does remove all Magic effects (and all Disease effects) from a target. It has an 8 second cooldown to stay balanced, but I don’t know why you keep saying they should dispel 2 magic effects when it already dispels all of them in one press, right now. Having a no cooldown 2 magic defensive dispel would mean our dispel would be limited by something no matter what you say. They would make it cost a large chunk of mana. There’s no way on god’s green earth they would ever let Priests spam a defensive magic dispel like it was Classic WoW again. Sorry it’s never going to happen.
You’re very dead set on what we used to have or the way classes were back in the day. I played old WoW too. It was an imbalanced mess. I do not really care frankly how classes used to work and find discussing how they used to do things a bit of a dead-end conversation. I prefer looking forward.
Why not?
I agree that it will be powerful but my question would be… Why is that a problem?
Why not allow only Priest the ability to remove Magic without restriction?
What problems would arise that are so egregious as to cause so many problems that the only solution is to revert such a change that was a major aspect of the game for what? 3? 4? Expansions?
I just don’t see a justification as to why we are not allowed such utility in the modern game… Even more so when they keep adding so many other things to deal with in the game that a magic dispel wouldn’t make a difference in thwarting against.
I mean paladins have Freedom that makes them immune to slows and snares for good duration. I don’t see a problem for Priests to be able to spend a GCD to remove similar effects. Why can’t priests be slippery against magic effects?
I look at problems and ways to fix them.
As it turns out, many problems only started to become apparent once we lost something that we had in the past that prevent that problem from becoming a problem in the first place.
So I see things that worked in the past and instead of reinventing the wheel to solve the problem of not having a wheel… We have a perfectly well working wheel that if used will once again prevent the problems that becomes louder and louder the longer we are forced to go without said wheel.
I notice a lot of things missing since Priest is my primary class for 20 years. But when I compare other classes, I find it quite difficult to find something that they need that they once had access to in the past. It seems to be only a priest issue in the modern game of lacking many things that our class had baseline for years prior to all these problems growing louder and louder with each passing year.
Do you play or watch PvP ever? This would functionally break many classes. Even right now, I hear all the time how annoying dispels are in PvP. PvP has turned into a PvE zerg-fest where you hardly line up CC anymore, and just blow all your big CDs and try to melt a target as fast as you can.
Removing even more CC from the game mode with Priests would break the game even worse than it already is. This would just exacerbate an already present issue.
Also, there is a reason Blizzard slapped an 8-second CD on dispels. It would be completely brainless and take away much thought in a PvE encounter if you could spam it on everyone. Also, there’s a pretty high chance the spell would be given a huge mana cost without a CD, so in the end, you’re not really giving Priests anything useful. I’d much rather wait the 8-second CD than be punished by losing a quarter of my mana bar. Mana is way more precious in the long run than waiting 8 seconds.
So if that is so egregious even now then… Sounds like having a Priest present isn’t going to change much of anything.
In the past, you counter by applying your crowd control affects to the Priest since he can remove those effects unhindered from its allies. So then it becomes a game of timing your Shadow Word: Deaths to break CC or simply ignore CC and bum rush instead.
It worked just fine in the past, I see no difference now.
So it’s strong?
But also balanced to prevent from spamming or it also comes across as weak as it wouldn’t make much of a difference?
So it is strong or weak or negligible?
You have opposing views as to the strength of having undisputed access to magic dispels.
The best you provided was a broad brush of it makes things worse than they are now. Worse for whom? The priest? Or the opponents of the Priest? I thought priest is the one that struggles compared to most classes. So why is it a problem if it makes the priest struggle less?
I would be willing to accept a SELF only dispel so that it can’t be abused in team play. So that the Priest can only spam dispel himself and NOT dispel teammates.
Would that change your opinion of an unrestricted self dispel? If so, why would that be a problem then?
I grow tired of the walls of text you keep producing to be honest with you. I feel like my eyes are glazing over. I’m going to agree to disagree again, and excuse myself from the conversation. I simply to not like the idea and already explained why numerous times— I mean no offense by it. This whole thing has grown way too far into another topic territory, and you really should have just made your own post for it instead of co-opting my original topic with your own random ideas.
Just like you have the choice to disagree and leave a reason why without formulating an entire post of your own within my post. Would be much better off starting your own discussions with such vast ideas methinks.
But in terms of Dispeling utility, Magic is so powerful as I already explained that simply ignoring it as your opening post seems to have done causes the core point of your post in being weak in the realm of our Dispeling utility to be short sighted since it doesn’t take into consideration the magic aspect and how much weight that carries Priest compared to other classes.
