Priest felt pretty good in TWW - actually no - it felt good full stop. Disc was king for much of the xpac, holy was #1 in arena and bg blitz, shadow was insane in pvp and decent on cleave fights. But most of all, it felt good to play. So really I didn’t have much to complain about. We even had fairly viable hero talents across all three specs which was kind of unheard of.
Based on what I initially heard about the pruning, I thought priest was going to get brutalized, but I think most of changes were positive. To be fair, priest had a huge amount of buttons. Surprisinly, holy priest - which many people deride as the “easy” healer had the same button count as shadow which I think had the most buttons out of any spec besides resto sham. Disc priest was honestly fine.
Priest is the only class where I have more macros than can fit in my character macro page, and it’s what made me buy a razor naga. Stuff like:
- Macro to set PI target and cast PI in priority order
- arena123 for chastise, silence, psychic horror
- cancelform on angel so I can fade or death a trap
- help/harm for dispel, heal/damage because again, too many buttons
- @cursor for all the reticule spells
So I wasn’t against any pruning, but I do think that like a lot of people, I am attracted to specs with complexity, and to me that means lot’s of situation buttons.
Overall I think they did a good job. Every button you lose, you can always make an argument that it was “essential”. No one likes to lose stuff. The question is how does priest play now, and out of all the stuff they could have removed, where was it in the ranking of all the thing. Here’s my thoughts about what they took away.
First, the things I think are really tough to lose:
- Void shift: The priest version of lay on hands, given how spiky and one shot recent seasons have been, this is a big loss. It’s also one of the few big wins that shadow brought to the table. I think it thematically made no sense for holy priest to have it, but I question the decision to remove it from shadow. There are other specs, such as shaman that lost big externals so I think across the board we have to see how it plays out.
- Premonition: I can’t believe I’m saying this because I really hated rotating spells going into TWW, but I think premonition was awesome and added much needed complexity to holy priest. Based on their stated design goals I understood why it had to go. Not a huge loss.
- Renew: Mostly for the holy buff, not because I thought renew was fun to cast, but holy needs more interaction and buff management. Plea is fine as an atonement application though (but it needs to not cost as much mana).
On the fence:
- SW: P - It just sucks that it’s so iconic to the class, but I felt the same way about rapture. The bigger issue is - ok - holy priest shouldn’t get to cast shadow stuff - but they still have SW: D. Mechanically, I don’t think it’s a loss. Holy priest has dot upkeep, and they have a death, which was likely kept in because it’s preprogrammed to break a lot of CC. So - I could take it or leave it.
Then the stuff that was less tough
- Dome choice node: Never liked ulti pen or HW: salvation. They’re just giant kick me buttons in the worst case that do some sort of automated thing, or you press them at a very obvious moment in the best case and they do all the healing for you. No active management. Glad I get to choose dome that requires positional awareness over terrible bugginess that gets me killed in floodgate.
- Halo/Void torrent: I’ve never really liked casting halo, but I did enjoy archon gameplay - it finally made halo feel like it did something. Same thing with divine star. Both of them always felt like they needed more umph. Having only torrent or halo on shadow is also fine, because the hero specs always made one of them feel worthless to press anyway.
- Divine asciension: Degenerate avoid playing the game gameplay. Again, holy already had too much of that.
- Holy Ward: It’s kind of insane stacked on top of sor and gfade. Unfortunately holy priest needs another pvp talent now, it feels like they have half the talents of other specs. It’s also interesting they took that away instead of sor which has less counterplay.
- symbol of hope: Good riddance. Boring spell that’s a worse innervate for the priest that has to sit there and hard cast this 4 second spell.
- Lightwell: Super boring, 0 interaction cast on CD spell. Just cognitive overhead that adds nothing to the gameplay loop.
- Heal: Never pressed it - holy never really hard cast with fol anyway, it’s mostly a trap spell.
- Bender - I love the bender so I hate saying it was useless, but it really wasn’t great flavor for all three specs, and shadow was the most bloated out of all the specs. It’s again, mostly a think you press in a sequence of spells with no interaction and no thought, so I’m cool with it.