Since our talents will be wiped and re-designed tomorrow and there any sample builds available out there for when it all goes live?
AutomaticJak might have some disc/holy builds. Either check the past videos on twitch or wait a bit till he updates the wowhead.
Not sure about shadow
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Publik is a great shadow priest who posts a lot of testing results and builds on the Priest discord. I highly recommend checking that out. Should be in the “pinned” message section of the different spec specific chats.
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Thanks! I’ll check him out. I focus on Disc primarily (for pug dungeons; I don’t do mythic or raids) and shadow second for all else.
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It might be a good opportunity to try making your own build and learning what each thing does because until we are allowed to level up to 90, whatever talent tree you are able to use now will be incomplete and suboptimal.
It’s my opinion that from now until the leveling starts the only things we have to do with our time is some housing stuff and playing around with new talents.
So play around with the talents.
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I just want to add that I believe, especially for healers, that oftentimes building your own talent tree can sometimes be better than whatever is listed online. And, even if it’s not, it oftentimes makes your unique playstyle more enjoyable.
Since I started playing in Dragonflight I have encountered at least two times where the recommended build was not the optimal build and I could prove it mathematically. It’s a lot like the BIS lists that people chase without fully understanding why those items are selected or what exactly their secondaries are good for. Those lists assume max level Myth gear that 99% of the player base is unable to obtain.
I explore you to check out the talents and try them out yourself. If you’re severely underperforming a month from now you can either go with the recommended build or take the time to compare what you’re casting compared to what others are casting and see where you may be able to make improvements.
Also consider that there may be a difference between a build optimized for maximum HPS output without overheal, builds that maximize topping the meters, and builds optimized for ensuring the success of the raid even though they might not top the HPS charts.
For dungeons you may need to tune your build a bit more than what they suggest because you may be dealing with people who make mistakes whereas their builds are built around flawless runs at extremely high key levels.
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Thank you for that suggestion and encouragement, Efi. I have to say, however, that navigating and making sense of the talent trees and how the various talents intersect is like trying to solve a rubiks cube, something I’ve never been able to do. And I would hate to underperform in a dungeon with others depending on me to keep them going, and I’ve done at least acceptably well with copy-n-paste models in TWW (hardly anyone ever died!).
I started with a piece of graph paper and laid out every spell with cast time and output. I ignored mama cost. That comes after the fact.
Plot each spell by cast time and healing done and a few will stick out as must haves.
You’ll have to do some deep thinking about situations after that but when I was doing it I would find ones that really stuck out even without talents. For the cast time PoM offered the most healing for the shortest cast time. Therefore, airways cast on cooldown. Don’t forget to add in your Crit, Mastery, and Versatility bonuses to each spell.
Then you would need to do some more in depth thinking about things.
For example…. Earlier seasons the guide would want the Apotheosis extension talent but the fact if the matter was three instant cast PoH plus 10% increased overall healing during Apotheosis was the highest output and was NOT what the recommended build wag.
Find the spell that offers the most healing for cast time. That is the best choice to cast for filler when you don’t know what else to cast. Build off from there. It’s all math. PoM is likely top but I anticipate that they may suggest Flash Heal afterwards whereas Prayer of Healing might actually be mathematically better.
You will find it if you’re wrong when you start doing comparisons to other healers and when you find out why it’s wrong and fully understand why it’s not doing as good as it should be you should be able to make informed decisions to change to something different.
When you start to understand the math behind it you’ll see that a lot of the talents (at least in the past) a 2.5% increased output but how that output was applied made all the difference depending on the content. 2.5% extra direct healing on a show cast spell isn’t as good as a 2.5% increased shield. Going further getting an extra 2.5% for your Mastery might be better than 2.5% slow cast direct heal when raid damage is constant because you’re overhealing but picking up the numbers with your Mastery.
It’s a math problem at first and then after you play and understand the healing profile of fights you can use that same math to optimize given that new information. I think it may have been undermine where the guides said to play Oracle single target build but what actually ended up being best was Archon, overhealing, PoH, and letting your Mastery dominate.
Please note that this is the first season where Critical Strike is truly better than an other stats. Prior to this 1% Haste, Critical Strike, and Mastery all increased healing by 1%. The only difference was Haste that caused you to run out of mana faster. Now that we have a bonus to Critical Strike that’s probably going to result in the highest overall output.
Just think about it all. Try to understand how it all works. No published build for the next month is going to be correct for a healer and it gives you an opportunity to learn the secondaries and how you can optimize based upon your particular playstyle and content level. The guides are written for the top tier players and I’m 99% sure that anybody reading this isn’t in that tier.