It’s Saturday and I’m on a massive sugar crash so I figured why not.
Lenience - a 3% damage reduction in the final talent tier? Really? I’m not entirely sure how the math works out but a passive damage reduction to something I’m doing anyway is extremely boring. It doesn’t change anything, it doesn’t make anything feel good to press
Spirit Shell - this is a ‘best of the word’ scenario. I actually like the design of the ability, but it’s a huge issue that it replaces Rapture. I like using it and all in all it feels pretty good, but it feels awful that it replaces Rapture. And while it may allow me to stack nice absorbs, it doesn’t really add anything - I just keep doing what I was already doing, except now I don’t have to worry about overhealing.
Evangelism - Nice, I can extend my maint. buff by six seconds. This doesn’t change my rotation it all, it just makes me do…more of what I already do. It doesn’t feel particularly strong to press, either.
In short:
- Not particularly impactful on rotation. Adds additional effects but otherwise nothing changes.
- Do more of what I was already doing
- In the case of spirit shell, nice but has too beefy of a downside
Since I try to give actual feedback and not just complain, an example of a skill I like…Holy Word: Salvation. It:
- Feels powerful to press. The absolute CHONK behind this button press. A chunker. A beefy hunk.
- It doesn’t really change my rotation, BUT it FEELS like I have some sort of impact/change with this skill because if the cooldown reduction mechanic rewards me for using my skills efficiently to get CDR on my other holy words which feed into more CDR for Salvation. That’s a very nice…how to say, chain of impact? That’s not to say it’s perfect, because it doesn’t actually change my rotation and it looks kinda obvious that Blizz put that in there so they could bump up the cooldown and add that ‘feel’ (as opposed to just making it like, 3min CD or something, they just bumped it up so that during normal play your casts would reduce it to an average cooldown regardless, but still).
What I want:
- Press power/impact/feel. Something that feels good to press because I press THAT button. It’s kinda ‘meh’ when I press a button that only works with other buttons.
- Some sort of change/feedback: What decisions does pressing it or not pressing it have me make, how does it impact my other skills? Does it add ‘something else to do’? How do I know I ‘did good’?
Okay, so what roles are these trying to fill and how could they be done better?
Both the 3% damage reduction and spirit shell are of the reactive utility/dmg reduction sort - applied before damage to reduce incoming.
To a certain extent evangelism is…basically that, too - further empowering proactive buffing w/Atonement So they all do kinda the same thing but sorta differently and I don’t like any of them.
My suggestions:
- Mush 'em together. Spirit Shell increases current Atonement durations by x seconds and converts healing/Atonement healing into absorbs on targets. Nerf the duration of Spirit Shell so it can’t be stacked up to absolutely absurd levels or some other limitation (cooldown increase, higher cost, w/e).
- The priest designates a target. Any DPS attacking that target gains x seconds (low duration - 1-2 seconds, maybe 3). Priest damage done to the target is increased. Limit the number of allies who can benefit, decrease atonement healing, lower duration, etc if needed (I’m not sure how the timing works out and what would give 100% uptime for a constantly attacking DPS, or how that’d work out for casters who don’t have AAs). 2-3min cooldown. Disable some skills (like no more Power Word; Radiance, and other skills no longer apply Atonement) to spice it up (similar to how Shadow Cov disables all non-shadow skills to help balance it). Goal here is to up priest personal damage, lower atonement percentage a little so their atonement healing isn’t bonkers (could scale the damage boost based on allies who hit the target, simialr to how Sins of the Many works, to keep it under control)
- Iunno. Drawing a blank here. I wanted a low, medium, and high cooldown skill. This is the ‘low’ one, so like 30-45 sec. Something like, deal x damage to a single target and apply a debuff for x (low duration, 4-5 seconds) seconds. For x seconds, hitting the target with the debuff applies an absorb that negates x outgoing damage to a single target. Heck if I know.
So! In summary…
- A medium cooldown skill that helps mitigate a burst of damage depending on the amount of prep done. The intention here is to make it a raid-ISH cooldown that, if the priest wants, can become beefier if they want to burn a ton of mana to get the absorb that high.
- A long cooldown skill that is healing, not an absorb, and wouldn’t help the raid survive a big burst but could be used to help SUSTAIN the group and let the priest contribute more to damage. This would be good in fights where there’s like…a DPS race where the group takes increasingly large ticks of damage and it’s a DPS race between them and the boss.
- A tank cooldown with a damage component. This would let them put a chunk of damage negation on the boss to help save the tank from a hit. Something something tank healing. I just really miss Smite’s damage-absorb-debuff it used to do okay.
Anywho, if you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading. I’ll be honest, those are all probably varying sorts of terrible/OP ideas that are badly thought through, but I don’t like giving ‘this is bad’ feedback without ‘this is how I’d fix it’. These are from 5 minutes of sugar-crash thinking and the main issue I want to address is how boring disc priest’s lv50 talents are. The usual yadda yadda disclaimers, I haven’t bothered to check how disc priest is doing performance wise and probably never will cuz I imagine legendaries and sudden more changes in SL will abruptly obltierate sims over and over, but hopefuilly this goes somewhere, somehow.
o7 Hope y’all are doing well. Enjoy Halloween.
Edit: I don’t know why but I totally forgot Power Word: Barrier existed. But still.
