Mind Blast and Mind Sear Gone for Holy

Classes Priest
1

Getting to play with Mind Blast and Mind Sear, both shadow spells that if interrupted via mechanics like quaking, or other players; doesn’t lock you out of heals felt really good. Being able to bring some reasonable pressure in AoE, and some short burst damage also felt really good. As a Holy priest main over the last while, I felt great.

Recently, Mind Blast is now replaced by Holy Fire. and Mind Sear is just gone. Dropping Holy priests representation in M+ once again, to the bottom of the barrel. Everyone’s primary concern with holy in higher keys outside of not giving the tank DR, was their Damage was horrible. It also greatly impacts Holy priests ability to perform tasks like Torghast, and mandatory world quest content, forcing it to take longer.

With their removal, I too will remove myself. Having that feeling of being at least in the ranks of being considered, to returned to the laughing stock of the Healers was well enough sign that Holy priest will never be considered for end game content. Outside of few exceptions, recently people have been using “Priest” as* a synonym for “Discipline”. The public perception of healing priest is so vastly skewed in favor of Disc, that holy is completely forgotten.

Good luck Holy mains in Shadowlands. I wish you all the best, and hope someday Blizzard will stop treating you like boring, basic healers, and lepers.

7 Likes
2

Can you show me where this was confirmed? Or is it a beta thing

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You can verify it on the PTR if you have access to it.

4

So we just have the two shadow words :frowning: rip mind sear/blasts

2 Likes
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(Assuming this is accurate, haven’t logged in to check)

Mind Blast turning to Holy Fire honestly doesn’t bother me. From a purely PvE perspective they were basically the the same thing with Holy Fire just being the better/stronger version. I was already planning to just merge them together in a cast sequence macro to reduce button bloat (assuming that’s still possible, haven’t done used cast-sequence in a long time).

If Mind Sear is gone that one does hurt a bit more, there’s some overlap with Holy Nova but they do have a few differences (long vs short range, usable on the move vs not usable on the move) I would have liked to see them maybe differantiate them a bit more instead of removing one (one could be target caped for example but do more damage in return).

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Even if Mind blast was a weaker Holy Fire, in situations like Torghast, having the ability to Holy fire into SW:P, Mind blast into a Chastise provided much stronger DPS on an elite mob.
The change now makes it
Holy Fire into SW:P, Smite into Chastise

But as you said, doubling up on Mind Sear being gone, you now have to stand in the pack of mobs in order to AoE. With Mind Sear, and being forced to chose between Damage or Healing as a holy priest. AoEing probly doubles in time duration when you’re in the melee and having to bounce between heals and damage.

Those 2 spells being removed are a massive, and I mean massive, nerf to Holy’s viability in group and solo content. And it seemingly is only justified by Blizzard being Blizzard and not wanting to loosen their strangle hold on what they think a class/spec should be. From my vantage, Blizzard think Holy should be a pure healer and only carry enough DPS to level. With the way the game is, they will never be considered competitive with Disc let alone other healers in late game content, as Blizzard refuses to budge on Holy never having DPS.

And let me remind you, Holy Priest were the ONLY healer in BFA who never got a single, spec specific DPS azerite trait. Not one.

3 Likes
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holy had more offensive tools than disc (the whole point of disc is to do damage). you really didn’t need MB. Mind Sear, kinda sucks cause its good for getting rogues, but hey.

2 Likes
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The whole point of Disc is to heal while* dealing damage, not to solely deal damage.
The way I have always seen it is
Holy: Higher Damage while Damaging, Higher Healing while Healing.
Disc: Consistent Healing while Damaging.

I think the whole break down is with community perception, and Blizzards response to the perception.
Saying Disc is to do damage, might as well fit every healer in the game except Holy Priest. In fact, it would be easier to say
The point of Holy is to heal and not deal damage.
Every healing spec has superior damage capabilities compared to Holy Priests. In fact, one of the major driving factors of Healers competitiveness is how much Damage they can deal when there is little to do Healing needed.

The community constantly putting holy in the D-tier bin every expansion because it lacks even short damage windows is a problem. It’s a problem because it’s mostly true they lack that damage, but it’s also a problem because it’s been this way for so long, that everyone gave up. Because no one is playing it, Blizzard see’s it as a situation in which attempting to fix it, would be a waste of time, because no one is playing it.

I worded it like this to a friend when I told him that despite pre-ordering Shadow Lands, I won’t even be playing anymore before it comes out.

“No one plays Holy,
because Blizzard doesn’t care about it
because no one plays it
because Blizzard doesn’t care
because no one left cares
because Blizzard doesn’t care”

It’s a never ending cycle of Blizzard sitting on their hands because of community perception, and community perception being created by Blizzards idleness.

That loop of stagnation was bad enough. But when they accidentally fixed the core issue of holy, by simply giving them a Shadow school juke spell, and a ranged shadow AoE spell; then suddenly took it away without explanation. That was the final nail. Even when they fix it, they can’t help but to un fix it. And destroying that hope, that hype and excitement, that’s more than enough for me to say gg. Dunno bout anyone else, and I’m not trying to encourage anyone else, it’s just my opinion based on history and observations.

6 Likes
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The other thing is priests have 2 healing specs. I understand what your saying but blizz may think if you want to dps heal then go disc, if you want to be a atypical healer then go holy. Priests are lucky to have that choice

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I can confirm on the PTR that Mind Blast was removed this patch and Mind Sear the patch before. They tried buffing Holy Nova to compensate, but I feel like we should have been given Mind Sear instead.

Mind Blast really wouldn’t have added much to our arsenal other than being a juke spell for PvP.

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Looks like I won’t buy Shadowlands.

It started out great, but then Torghast got capped, secondary stats softcapped, the Flash Concentration legendary changed to make it annoying for no reason, and now this.

It feels as if 3 weeks ago, the b team took over.

RESTORE MIND SEAR OR I WON’T PLAY SHADOWLANDS.

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Well, what they did with Apotheosis doesn’t change my life.
The fundamental problems of the spec are still present.

And also removing Mind Blast and Mind Sear, which were a great help to M +, doesn’t make sense either.

Time to go back to the mage I guess.

1 Like
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Have fun getting groups with that. There’s a DPS overload when I setup my pug groups (literal 3+ pages of stuff).

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I can confirm Mind Blast and Mind Sear gone in latest patch on PTR. Was very excited to play Holy Priest with the new dps arsenal and its potential inside Torghast. This prune was insanely destructive on Holy’s potential. /sad

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Yeah, this along with the nerfs to Salvation and Prayer Circle for no reason means I’m seriously considering switching to Resto Sham. And this is from someone who has played Holy purely since I started playing the game

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Luckily I don’t have to pug.
And when that day comes then … I quit WoW.

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Funny how you mention that you hope Blizz stops treating holy like boring, basic healers and lepers. In reality Holy is not even basic at healing. It isn’t the best at any type of healing, it can’t even compare to FFXIV white mage, which it should. Holy should have several utility tools and heals to make it “the basic healer” OR it should have the ability to deal out very high holy damage and healing, with little utility.

Right now its just an HPS cannon that isn’t really better than other HPS cannons.

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This is not “lucky” at all, this is actually the issue with being a priest. That it has 2 specs that are meant to be used in group content. When one of them is completely overshadowed by the other, it means you have a dead spec. You might think its the same as having a bad dps spec and a good dps spec, but it’s far from it. Even the worst dps specs still have something useful in terms of utility, pvp or unique gameplay.

Holy priest on the other hand has become nearly unviable in all forms of content simply because it does not have significantly better throughput than other healers at the only thing it can do well. It lacks all forms of utility (that disc doesn’t provide) and has nothing unique about it (it is the most basic healer) rolled into a spec that is only meant for group content (you are better off as shadow or disc for solo content and pvp).

It also means that Priest has no second viable DPS spec. Meaning that if Shadow happens to suck (which it frequently does) there is no fallback dps spec for you to use.

1 Like
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Not totally correct. Heroic raiding and apparently pvp

But i still disagree, there have been times holy has been the go to. We are lucky to be able to play whichever one is viable at the content we choose to play

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with the nerf to greater heal I assure you much of what was left of the holy priest pvp power is gone.

Heroic raiding is a form of content…i guess. But it might as well not be a point since any of the healers will be, for all intents and purposes, equally capable and more interesting to play.