Which 3 buttons do you have to press? PW shield, PS, Evang, PotDS or Harsh Discipline penance can easily save someone in one button press. ( unless people keep making mistake after mistake that leads to their deaths, or you dont know how to combine/maintain modifiers to make those spells go brrr in one button )
Atonement should already be on the person and you shouldn’t need to press that in crisis times, this is another thing Oracle does better than VW - you don’t need to babysit your atonements as often.
Adds shouldn’t be “glued” to dps. That is a tank issue. I know there is a bug going around that derps threat but unless you tank is really bad they should be actively looking for that and be ready to re establish threat.
I think our one evoker friend is the only person who consistently has issues with threat and it is just for one second on pulls because of his higher burst, thankfully the pug tanks have been usually good enough to notice and pick things up quickly. Ive easily saved him using any of the methods above, heck usually just a PW shield or defensive penance works, though that early into the pull you can also just have the single atonement on him and lay on hands them with Evang if you think it will happen.
The rare time Ive see him get any aggro and there was a train of adds running to him though he gets a PSupp and is usually safe because he knows to press his defensive, so I rarely need to even heal him much when he rarely steals aggro and gets smacked. Very predictable issue that isnt too hard to solve imo.
Hopefully blizz fixes these threat bugs/issues though.
In those cases PW shield saves live. Defensive penance WILL save a life. So will flash heal. Ive been running From Darkness Comes Light instead of the flash heal DR and the flash heal crits are HUGE and very much life saving. If you spread SWPains on pull and with penance it builds up very fast. Bbigger flash heal crits means bigger divine aegis shields also. ( effectively giving flash heal more power )
( I dont feel like I need the extra DR for 12/13’s because oracle is just so beefy already, in higher keys Id prob get protective Light maybe. I really wish they would split these talents up though, them being on the same node is silly for disc AND holy imo )
Premo Solace will save someone too, if you PW shield them when you have solace it’s like a full health absorb shield because both shields activate at the same time.
You also do have enough charges/ST healing to manage the scripted dots/ST damage going out on random dps if you are using them liberally and the dps aren’t sitting in bad 24/7. Though they should also be using their defensives/toolkit on higher levels to help out, potion if needed. The key is to not use all your tools in one pull and plan them out for tough pulls that are closer together, or find dps that actually do mechanics.
Ive never felt Oracle had unreliable healing or shielding this season, sure last season it had it’s flaws but right now Oracle disc puts out tons of reliable aoe and ST healing too if you know what you are doing and know how to use premonition/penance/PW shield. Even after the nerfs it still feels really good.
This anxiety goes away once you learn fights and eventually you dont need to worry/think about it as Oracle too, reaction time and confidence improves with experience.
I will add that Uppies is better on scripted aoe damage that you know is going to happen, or more specifically with piety. It is not best for saving lives instantly but if you know how to use it and when to use it is a valuable tool for aoe damage. It is also very good for pumping a ton of single target healing on someone. ( Tank eats too many stacking DoT’s and the fight is dragging on )
End of the day it is also a huge personal shield, even if you dont use it for healing and cut it off early. Sometimes you just need to cut it off early to PW shield that one dps who ate bad while the aoe rot was happening. It happens. Uppies is very good for times when you have a debuff/DoT on yourself and are expecting Rot AOE damage to happen at the same time.
Bonus tip too for uppies, after the cast/channel finishes there is one second BEFORE uppies starts where you can queue up an instant spell that will fire off. ( PW shield is good to use here because it will give you haste from borrowed time and speed up how fast uppies shoots bolts, you can also renew that one person who didn’t get atonement last second if you need to before uppies starts healing ).
You can also use Uppies with PI to make it faster. I agree it might need some tweaks though mechanically and you most likely want to pair PI with a dps’s cooldown but in pugs whatever works to get the job done. Lots of us wish uppies was instant and would start firing bolts faster.
My point though is that you get better at using the toolkit and uppies with time just like any other class, but I agree uppies isnt best for unscripted aoe damage where people are missing kicks.
Not really, not for PVE anyways. Daddy Jac already had his people figure out the best stats for PVE way before the season started and most guides do this heavy math for us peasants. Either way Mastery is good, Crit is good, some haste is also good, but not too much. Some vers good in very high keys if you need to be more defensive to survive. It wasn’t hard to really figure out alone though tbh.
Because it isnt a lot more damage as VW, and less healing is needed because “effective health”/shields become more powerful. It’s actually the opposite, the higher you go the more those shields mean more to keep people alive.
Oracle’s shields are already petty powerful for carrying newer players/pugs through content they probably shouldn’t be in but in any coordinated group that Ive done it was a million times better because they dont take a ton more extra damage or ignore mechanics. Either way we aren’t talking a ton more dps that VW brings. It’s like 100-200k more depending on the player and how hard they min max it. Effective health and DR’s to survive greater unavoidable hits is more valuable the higher you go and Oracle excels at that.
I think Id still prefer Oracle myself in either environment ( pug or not ).
I dont miss it. Oracle can still do mini raptures with Insight and Clairvoyance if we want/need. Spec feels equally or even more fluid than season one oracle did for me. We didnt need more shielding with premo imo, and I was glad to get a heal attached to Evang that I can use as a ST heal nuke or aoe group heal.
Tank usually doesnt need a PW shield if they have a pulse and push buttons at the right time, insight into 4 PW shields back to back is really nice to blanket the group and myself in if I want/need to use it that way for aoe checks. ( I do sometimes and it is still quite effective )
If people play good enough those shields last pretty long for Oracle, so they stay up until they are broken usually and you kinda get natural blankets on some people between unavoidable/rot damage phases if you PW shield on cd. I dont think Rapture needed to stay. For PVE anyways.
TLDR: IMO Oracle is better right now but it’s not that much of a gap and it only matters if you are a top .01%er right now. Most people can play either and do VERY WELL because both specs are in a good spot.
VW just doesn’t do enough extra damage right now to be better than the beefier/more frequent/longer lasting shields Oracle brings in like 20’s and 21’s. I think it’s also worth mentioning that we can use premo to get more dispels off if we need to and in this season there are some nasty dispelable effects we can trivialize this way.
TLDR: If you like VW that is fine. Both specs are in a very healthy place right now.