Luminous Barrier is a really cool ability. The issue is that it doesn’t and probably will never compare to Power Word: Barrier which is a 20% AoE flat damage reduction. PW: Barrier is also considered Discipline Priest’s signature spell. This node doesn’t really feel like a fair competition.
The changes to raid and party cooldown coming in The War Within are a great start, but I would propose that one of these things needs to happen:
Remove Luminous Barrier out of the choice node with PW: Barrier, then move LB to the bottom of the tree as a competitive choice with other powerful abilities. (The bottom nodes of the Disc tree are very weird in my opinion compared to other classes that typically have powerful abilities toward the bottom.)
Or
Lower the cooldown on Luminous Barrier from 3 minutes to 1 minute. As it stands, the absorb amount isn’t all that powerful really for such a long cooldown. Also, the fact that it only lasts 10 seconds feels bad being simply an absorb. I would raise that to around 15 seconds if the absorb amount stays the same.
Or
Massively buff Luminous Barrier’s absorb amount if it is to remain a 3-minute cooldown with a 10 second duration. It would need to be massively buffed to even begin to compete with Power Word: Barrier as LB currently stands.
If anyone has any other ideas, I’d love to hear them. I love the idea of a raid-wide shield absorb spell which Luminous Barrier tries to accomplish, but as it stands it’s just never really worth using over PW: Barrier. Mage has Mass Barrier on a 2-minute cooldown (max 5 players can be shielded total though) that does this job better than Luminous Barrier on an actual healing spec, and that just kind of sucks.
I hope they continue improving the Priest trees going forward. Really loving the Phantom Reach (increased range on all spells) talent coming in TWW which should assist with Priest being a bit less mobile than other classes, though I do wish Phantom Reach was higher up in the class tree if I’m being honest.
From my understand, LB was not intended for top end usage where barrier is more useful. LB was intended more to help disc in 30 man content where disc can not normally cover above 20 players with Evangelism. Especially in a pug environment where cds are not assigned
Not saying you’re wrong, but my impression was that it was for encounters where Disc was effectively short a raid CD because there was no opportunity for the raid to stack in a Barrier. I do see your point about it being more helpful in large raids.
It’s still fairly good healing in large group size and MOSTLY it requires 0 coordination. I dunno how many people have played in just heroic pugs, or very casual guilds, but it can be picking teeth to get people to stack in any fight that isn’t like the most OBVIOUS stack fight. And Luminous is great there.
Also if you’re just not super good at the game, it’s a way easier cooldown to plop down than barrier is.
All true, but in the same token, talents and spells shouldn’t be designed in a way that makes them practically unusable in anything higher than a heroic dungeon. I don’t think we should see a talent in a class/spec tree that sucks and say “ah well, it’s an okay talent if you’re just really bad at the game— but practically shooting your leg off if you don’t take the better choice”.
And who gets punished here for poor group teammates with bad positioning in the end? The Priest player. We should have a tool that’s not just a dead talent sitting in the tree.
I’m pretty sure Blizz themselves said that they want to make every talent option to feel attractive. Right now it’s like I keep saying, the talent is no competition against PW: Barrier.
I dont know… i dont see an issue with something that less skilled people who do lfr normal etc can use and feel good. What they have done in recent times is to try and take disc from the least played spec and allow more people to play it. This was one of their ways in my view
Until you’re in VERY high keys PW:Barrier is a talent that can be totally skipped or replaced with luminous if you want. It’s barely even going to hurt you. Barrier’s just really not great in pug keys. You’re not really shooting yourself in the foot unless you’re getting pretty high up there.
In raid content it’s king, but you CAN clear mythic without it. Is it advised? No, especially since you’ll probably be on discord with your raid team so you can coordinate. But could you? Yeah its definitely possible.
Could Luminous be buffed? Yeah probably by a bit. But at the same time, giving the class access to a party/raidwide shield that’s very potent and is near the level of every other class raid-wide CD is already probably too strong because shielding is inherently better than healing. But ALSO having PW:barrier alongside it by splitting the choice node is pretty obviously too strong. Unless they wanted to nerf the rest of our healing while they were at it.
There’s also just… way more concerning talents in the tree. Expiation, Borrowed Time, CONTRITION, the 3 points after ultimate penitence, sanctuary…
Too me thats the main one. I have no idea why its still around. I would like to know from a high lvl pvper is it even used there but if not should just go, not buffed, just gone.
I mean I did technically add 3 different things that they could do to buff Luminous Barrier in my main post. If you have any different specific ideas on how the talent could feel actually competitive with PW: Barrier, please let me know. Thanks!
I guess I missed the memo where I’m only allowed to discuss the problem talents that you wanted to talk about. If you want to make a post on these please do. We’d be better off with more discussions on all problem talents on the class. You know, to hopefully have that feedback heard for Blizz to make it feel better for us players.
I don’t think it should from a high level player’s perspective, is what I’m saying.
Barrier is % damage reduction and is fairly long. It’s stronger than just about every healing CD in the game in any mythic fight that has a period of prolonged damage that you can stack for, it just doesn’t show up on meters, so low-mid level players don’t really think much about it.
But there’s a reason damage reduction is insanely valued for RWF every single tier and for Disc to be out of it requires either the most spread fight design in the world for a wall boss or Disc to actually be doing a considerable amount less than everyone else. And almost every boss has a moment where stacking makes sense.
If Luminous Barrier were to actually compete with barrier in those fights it would have to be a ludicrously large shield. Because realistically, Luminous Barrier has way more use cases than PW:B does. Spread fights, disorganized fights, fights where the damage is largely spaced apart so barrier can’t pick up a significant portion, fights where a few players have to go drop things, fights where you need 2 separate stacks most the fight that can’t all take the barrier, etc. Not to mention Luminous Barrier would scale with gear where Barrier doesn’t.
It could use a buff to its shielding, especially in party based content, but any buff that makes it a real choice in most Mythic raid fights for top level players is probably going too far. Because it means shielding everyone for like 70% of their health bar during prog.