Astrologian works because the class doesn’t need to pull the right card at the right time to AOE heal, they’re additional buffs. Can you imagine what a dumpster fire that would…OH. stares at oracle
I literally thought the same thing before!! Right on the money!
Out of the top 100 Logs for the first 5 bosses, all priests, there are exactly 2 Oracle parses. They are Holy Priests. They are recent and are on Bloodbound Horror, a meme farm boss. So there are 2 Oracles out of 500 Top parses.
During the fight the Priests use Power Infusion on themselves during Piety to cheese the healing effect. While this may be a viable strategy you will never convince any high end guild to let you do this on progression as they will always want you to use your Power Infusion practically on CD on the most critical DPS role to the fight. Also even if you did, this method of healing gives you 0 agency in who you are healing which is another critical failure of the spell. Meaning you could lose teammates to it just picking bad targets.
So basically there are two meme parses out of 500 of Top parses in Raid.
For Disc specifically (since that’s technically what I cited in my opening post) there is one parse, on Rasha’nan. It was logged after I made this post, there was 0 out of 500 at the time of the post. Oracle stonks are up literally infinity from 0 to 1 whole parse. The group is 5 healing it so it’s a high overhealing fight. AKA not progression. But yes, Oracle will do better when the content is easier, that’s currently where Piety works best, is sniping heals. So I’m not unsurprised to see it on a farm boss/reclear.
For Mythic+ there is literally not a single Oracle Disc Priest in the top 100 for each dungeon. If you do see one show up, it’s probably me cause I can’t restrain myself from trolling and +11’s aren’t that difficult. So I’m telling you here that it sucks and I would just be playing it for memes.
My 50% number was based off Disc Priest for the most part, not holy. But it seems fair to say that Holy isn’t doing particularly better given the lack of people playing it in Raid. Maybe it’s okay in M+, but buffs to its Raid performance are unlikely to make it too strong in M+ considering it is the lowest seed healer on WCL atm in M+. So it’s probably safe to buff Holy Oracle in raid without concern for the impact on its M+ performance.
For Disc, one Entropic Rift cast will net you about 50% more Atonement healing than an Oracle Priest doing their best, even accounting for their longer atonement duration. This excludes the fact Voidweaver can do that on a 17 second CD and it excludes Mindbender which you can use on every other burst for the most part and further buffs Voidweaver’s throughput by another 50%~.
I really don’t care enough to find the exact number but would absolutely love it if someone could provide the hard math and I’ll change my opinion if it shows otherwise. Perhaps there’s some secret talent choice or rotation that changes this (spoiler alert I’ve tested A LOT and couldn’t find any). Napkin math I would say it’s easily more than 50% behind though in a vacuum environment where there is no overhealing. There’s a reason no one is playing it.
For the record I’m not calling you dumb or anything. It’s good to question claims like that and it literally is just my napkin math. Legitimately if someone can find me the secret sauce for Oracle I’d be delighted because I want to play it in serious, not meme content. But right now I aint seeing it and I’ve tested long enough to give up looking for it.
Hello. I am a rare heals-focused Oracle Disc priest. While I am not raiding mythic on my priest (my current main is a Shaman), I am healing a casual group that regularly clears normal and is progressing in heroic. I am often top healing in encounters in my raid and I consistently purple and orange parse in healing logs, at times pink parsing. I’m down to share a few thoughts on the state of Oracle Disc.
Yes, I realize that heroic parses mean nothing to a lot of people who gauge spec power based solely on the most cutting edge content, but this is the best I can provide
From my perspectives Orcale Disc is doing okay. I have no problems keeping up with other healers including Archon Holy Priest and I regularly do over 1 million HPS in raids at ilvl 609. I think part of the problem is that people try to play Oracle Disc the same way that Voidweaver Disc plays - which is to say, by stacking haste and abusing Atonement healing via Shadow Covenant. Oracle’s strength is focusing on heals and only using Atonement through Smite during periods of low damage. My stats are Crit → vers → mastery → haste with my top heals being Power Word: Shield, Power Word: Radiance, Contrition, Atonement, and Penance (often in that order). My burst healing with Ultimate Penance combined with Contrition is massive - it bursts for well over 2 million HPS during the window and there have been times I neared 3 million (granted this is based on how many people are in the raid).
Obviously, I am giving up the whole Voidweaver DPS kit doing this playstyle which I know is a deal breaker for some healers, but in terms of meeting HPS requirements I have no issues.
Oracle’s Strengths and Weaknesses
All this said, I am not saying that Oracle is in a perfect spot. I do have my criticisms with the hero talents that I think could be tightened up.
Premonition of Insight is very strong for us as healing focused Disc relies heavily on short cooldown abilities: PW:S, PW:R, and Penance. My favored uses with Insight is to blanket the raid with Radiance and then throw out multiple Penances.
I am also quite happy with Preventative Measures. It’s a beefy boost to PW:S and it keeps Smite relevant as a filler.
Preemptive Care, Assured Safety, and Premonition of Piety are pretty mid though. They’re not terrible, but definitely a bit underwhelming.
Assured Safety would be more interesting if Prayer of Mending did more for Disc Priests, i.e. if it also applied a mini bubble every time it bounced. Currently Mending does about 3% of my healing.
Preemptive Care is fine because a 3 second boost to Atonement is solid enough. My only complaint is that the 3 second boost to Renew is just totally worthless - Renew just does so little healing for a GCD that honestly I always prefer Flash Heal instead. I’m personally of the opinion that Renew should be a Holy Priest only ability.
Premonition of Piety is basically just a mini CD that increases healing by 15%. Not bad, but nothing really to write home about. It’s good when combined with Ultimate Penance but otherwise I don’t really feel it.
The real losers in Oracle right now are Premonition of Solace, Waste No Time / Miraculous Recovery, and the fact that Divine Providence is eating up a talent point when it should just be baseline.
Solace feels bad to press - real bad. The damage reduction isn’t enough to really be worthwhile except only in the most extreme of circumstances, and the absorb is basically just a Power Word: Shield. It does about 1.5% of my healing and that’s just sad. I feel like this ability either needs to be totally reworked or changed to automatically apply to 5 targets instead of just one.
Waste No Time / Miraculous Recovery are largely do-nothing talents. Mana isn’t an issue for us at all so the mana reduction is worthless, and the instant cast portion is fringe at best but doesn’t apply any sort of meaningful benefit. Power Word: Life is cute but is currently in a poorly tuned state given its healing and cooldown. Even though this talent makes it much easier to use PW:L, it just doesn’t see much use and ends up being like 2% of my overall healing.
As stated, Divine Providence can easily be baseline. We already have Fatebender / Perfect Vision as our Premonition based talents. Blizzard should just give Premonition 2 charges baseline and give us a new talent in Divine Providence’s place.
Overall, I’d love to see a few tweaks but I think Oracle is better than a lot of people are suggesting. I think a lot of players don’t give it any chances because they just read ‘okay, go Voidweaver and stack haste’ on class guides. I am curious what the math-crunching theory crafters have to say though, as I am not familiar with how Disc is simming Voidweavers vs Oracle.
I respect your opinion and it’s cool someone has decided to dedicate themself to this idea. I’ve already personally thought about the same thing and played with it. I tested the idea on the Beta a lot, where the cost investment wasn’t real, and discarded it when the game went live. Politely though, you’re just handicapping yourself. For example, defensive penancing in Raid just net heals for less than using it on an enemy. The breakpoint is as low as like 3 Targets because Contrition is tuned so poorly. It’s situationally useful in M+.
Believe me, I’m not that person. I have played countless Oracle keys, and raid bosses on the Beta and live. I wanted it to work.
I think it’s cool, what you want to do and what you’ve tried. Regrettably it’s at odds with other parts of Disc. The lack of synergy means you’re just playing on hard mode. You could be doing a lot more.
Quick just testing out on dummies, right now I am doing:
600k total healing on Penance (150k per bolt).
64k total healing via Contrition (16k per bolt).
232k total healing via Atonement, which would be 116k in a raid (58k / 29k per bolt).
With 5 Atonements out:
Defensive cast would be 600k penance healing + 320k contrition = 920k healing
Offensive cast would be 580k atonement healing.
With 10 Atonements out:
Defensive cast would be 600k penance healing + 640k contrition = 1.24M healing
Offensive cast would be 1.16M healing.
At 15 Atonements:
Defensive: 1.56M
Offensive: 1.74M
So yes, as Atonement targets go up, using Penance becomes better and better HPS wise to use offensively, but Contrition seems to be working well for me at lower Atonement counts. There’s also the fact that at times people become health critical, in which point I often prioritize triage over raw group HPS.
This is very napkin mathy though so results in a raid may differ slightly.
To be honest it’s harder to test in raid so I usually don’t so fair point that the target count goes up. At 4 targets in M+ it’s usually better to offensively cast. But yeah, you’re right. That basically extends it up to the 10 area in raid due to the oft forgotten raid multiplier. That is of course assuming your penance doesn’t overheal at all… Which… Is very unlikely as large single target heals and triage heals are the most likely to overheal. Chaining it from a Harsh Discipline just makes it even more likely the last few bolts do nothing. But you’re not wrong, thanks for the reminder.
Edit: That being said. For traditional Disc the lion’s share of your healing comes from those 15+ atonement evangelism ramps. I’m not really sure that forgoing Evangelism for more inbetween healing really makes up for it at all. It’s sort of focusing on the weakest part of Disc and forgetting about it’s strongest part. Which I guess goes back to that anti-synergy I was talking about.
Havent looked at raids. I was looking at keys and 11 is considered high and you said they were no oracle disc at a high lvl hence my response. which was my response. You should have been able to tell from my response that it weas keys i was looking at We all know and no oine is offering that oracle in raids is good.
Im talking overall hps. If you looked at the keys, the overall of oracle and VW isnt far off., I tried to link a top 100 for CoT. Not many oracles BUT the thats due to played v the ability to do hps. We are not discussing the very very top cause thats a silly low percentage that doesnt make a good comparison
If each Premonition had a 1-min CD and Clairvoyance had a 5-min CD that reduced by 30-seconds with each use of Premonitions, it would feel really good.
You have 3 new CDs that you can hold for specific moments, and a Big CD for bursty moments.
Edit: I know its very Bloaty, but its better than what we have atm.
Yeah, I tried it and I absolutely hate it as both Holy and Disc. I would love to be able to pick our premonitions. Btw does Power Word: Life feel incredibly weak to anyone else? I didn’t play much of Dragonflight, but I do remember trying it and feeling like it was very strong, but now I really don’t feel like it does anything at all.
Going off of your idea. Instead of 3 new separate CD buttons on our bars, I wonder if there could be a way to make them passives.
—Premonition would be basically the old spell Inner Focus, you press it, and it would be a permanent buff until you press another spell to activate it.
Premonition of Insight: Activated by Power Word: Shield (Discipline), Prayer of Mending (Holy).
Premonition of Piety: Activated by Renew (Discipline and Holy).
Premonition of Solace: Activated by single target heal {like how it is now}. i.e. Flash Heal, Heal, Penance, Holy Word: Serenity.
Premonition would still have the same cooldown and 2 charges, but it would no longer rotate through each effect on rails, instead allowing you to cast a specific spell to gain your desired Premonition effect.
After 3 Premonitions have been cast (in any order and even back-to-back if you want), you gain Clairvoyance allowing you to use all 3 effects again in one CD. Then, it goes on cooldown, and you have to use 3 Premonitions again to reach Clairvoyance.
This removes the on rails “cycle” feeling from the hero talent, letting the player choose what spell to press in any given situation— while still rewarding the player with Clairvoyance to use all effects in one CD as a climax.
(Just something I’ve been thinking about on the fly. I’m sure there’s better solutions. Maybe even better spell choices to activate each effect. It was hard choosing which spells to activate each effect across both specs. It seems people’s biggest gripe about Oracle is the fact the Premonition effect is a forced cycle.)
Ahh… So you activate Premonition as a button - then based on what you cast give you the desired effect?
Didnt they try this with the chakra stuff in Cataclysm and it was awful?
You know, now that you mention it… that kind of seems like what Oracle is in a way LOL. Basically, a reskinned and tweaked Chakra system. Ironically with less control than Chakras too.
My hot take of what Oracle should be is Restitution/Spirit of Redemption on steroids, whereby you predict the untimely demise of you and your allies, and turn into an Archangel of Redemption in a desperate attempt to reverse your fates.
Something like:
Replaces Desperate Prayer and Spirit of Redemption
Active: Activate to turn into an Archangel of Redemption for 20 seconds, becoming untargetable, 50% haste and 50% mana cost reduction.(3 minute cooldown)
Passive: On taking lethal damage, turn into an Archangel of Redemption for 20 seconds, and when it ends, revive with health based on how much healing you have done during Archangel of Redemption. (10 minute cooldown)
Admittedly, something as ridiculously broken as this would never see the light of day, it would completely break meta at the highest levels of play.
I wouldn’t really over complicate it. Just let us use our damn spells not on a merry go round.
The issue is it’s already over complicated. Adding 3 separate additional buttons to our bars will do nothing more than make Priest feel even more archaic design-wise.
It’s way worse than that, actually, since Oracle gains a 40% increased penance damage that is multiplicative with POTDS and we gain +100% atonement healing in non-raid.
I’m pretty sure Contrition never competes with a damaging cast unless you NEEDED that ST healing.
These numbers just seem very wrong.
If you’re doing 232k atonement on one dummy, you’re looking at 232 x5 or 1.16m healing in a party, same as 10 man because your atonement healing is increased 100% whilst not in raid.
Also in raid, you should generally be higher than 10 atonements as Oracle, considering one of the better features of Oracle is having an abundance of PW:R casts with reduced cooldown.
Ironically, I think Oracle is way closer to being viable than people think. 5man Disc needs some damage amps, maybe a way to turn some of their absorb into damage. Basically a way to bridge the gap to their next prem. Its HPS is actually rather good in 5 man, but the damage is SO far behind and higher keys have tight enough timers that it doesn’t feel worth playing there besides to stress the group out.
I think raid Oracle disc is a bit hopeless for being meta considering how VW plays honestly. But it could at least be ‘playable’ there with some tuning.
Holy’s like… really close to there. It’s already very playable in 5 man, and some slight changes to spellpower, salv, and bigger PoM boost would make Oracle Holy on par with Archon in raid HPS.
I definitely expect they’ll be buffing oracle though.
oracle disc is just useless in all content but pvp.
sure you can say whatever and people can come here feeelycrafting that Oracle works for themselves, but they either missplay voidweaver( how can you do that ? ) or they are not pushing relevant content.
the gap between oracle and voidweaver is massive , insanely massive .
oracle needs a major rework to even start bothering with it.ALso priest needs a major rework altogether.
Thank god someone finally said this on here. I feel like I’ve been screaming this into the void on the forums, and no one seemed to care to reiterate this.
Oracle Disc damage needs to go up. The non-shadow, non-Mindbender talents need to be a viable build damage-wise.
This means the Preventive Measures hero talent that buffs damage (Smite, Penance, and Holy Nova), needs to be tuned up from 40% to something higher.
I’d probably start with a 10% to 20% buff to Preventive Measures to see how much better the damage feels and go from there. I bet you 10% would be a very noticeable difference. (In PvP I probably would not change the damage output of this talent unless it feels like it needs it).
Oracle Disc is much more challenging to micromanage than Voidweaver. The DPS shouldn’t be as far behind as it is now. Voidweaver is way more straightforward and gets the benefit of simply being the default choice due to its high DPS. Some people want the challenge of Oracle and the playstyle, but the DPS gap is holding it back so much.