Oracle for Holy Priest, Dummy edition

Classes Priest
1

Are you interested in trying out Oracle but you are daunted by having to track what each individual buff does with weakauras and/or addons?

Do you dislike having to memorise the increased complexity in rotation for each of the different Premonition buffs?

Fear not, there’s a simple way to play Oracle while avoiding all of the above:

Only use Premonition when both charges are up, and always use both charges at once, starting with Insight:

Premonition rotates between Insight(cd reduction), Piety(overheal redistribution), Solace(absorb+dmg reduction on next single target heal), then finally all three before going back to Insight and starting the cycle over.

By only ever double tapping Premonition starting with Insight, you know there are only two possible scenarios:

  1. Insight and Piety
  2. Insight and Piety, and two charges of Solace

This means you don’t need any weakauras or addons to track which Premonition you are currently using: you always know it’s Insight and Piety, and you only need to memorise one specific rotation.

You may ask, what about the second scenario with the double Solace buff, don’t we have to play differently? The answer is No, and the “why” is explained in the rotation below.

Rotation

Whenever you double tap Premonition, just cast in this order:

  1. Prayer of Mending on your active tank
  2. Prayer of Mending on any two other targets that aren’t the tank in step 1, preferably ones that are actively taking damage
  3. Guardian Spirit on yourself if you have it off-cooldown
  4. Holy Word: Serenity on yourself if it’s available
  5. Flash Heal/Heal on yourself if you don’t have Serenity available

You don’t have to worry about wasting Solace because the first charge is always put on the active tank, and the second charge is on someone that’s taking damage.

The rotation is exactly the same regardless of which combination of Premonition buffs you got, as long as you remember to always start with Insight and always double-tap Premonition when you use it.

Oracle talent tree

The two important choice nodes are

  1. Prophet’s Will, which increases your Flash Heal, Heal and Serenity self-healing, which multiplicatively stacks with Guardian Spirit for additional overheal redistribution.
  2. Fatebender, which should guarantee your Prayer of Mending has a 0 second cooldown unless you somehow manage to have almost 0% haste.

Another small point of min-maxing you can do is by casting two Heals first before Flash Heal in the rotation to take advantage of Waste No Time, which makes the first 2 Heal casts instant and cost slightly less mana.

P.S.

This obviously only accounts for using Oracle from a pure healing perspective, and ignore the possibility of, say, using Insight on Holy Fire for dps when healing isn’t necessary etc. But at that point, you really aren’t the target audience of this guide.

5 Likes
2

Thanks for the tips. I’ll try to keep this in mind. I’m really not liking Oracle honestly, and I don’t want to go Archon since it requires Halo and I don’t raid. It’s to the point where I might spec to Disc instead, or just bench my healer priest altogether.

I just really do not like the design of premonition. I didn’t like the Night fae ability for paladins either. I don’t like revolving buffs and having to keep track of which one I’m on and which one is coming up.

6 Likes
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Honestly when they do this revolving buff thing it should have very unique icons for each buff to make it easier without needing addons to track it.

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That’s mostly why I came up with a simplified playstyle for Oracle, just in case Archon gets hard nerfed or Oracle gets turbo buffed that I am forced to use the latter to stay relevant on output.

I picked up Holy because the spec has a low cognitive overload, at least compared to other healer specs, so Oracle was initially out of picture, but figuring out that Premonition has the potential to play exactly the same when treating it as a 2 minute cooldown does open up the possibility of maining it over Archon in the future.

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For me personally, my specific problem is keeping track of which buff does what and when is the optimal time to use it. I constantly run into issues where I’m like, well I’d love to have Solace right now but I’m on Insight. I’d like Insight right now but I’m on Piety.

It does help that there are two charges to cycle more quickly, so I will try to stick it out until 80 and see how it goes from there. I’m just not a fan of the style of it.

The visuals are also cool, but clash with my priest’s mog. Wish there was an option to turn that off.

2 Likes
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That’s also my problem with Oracle initially because I have a huge problem with multitasking in general(doing both good healing and mechanics at the same time), which is a detriment in a mythic raiding environment.

And also because I am lazy. But mostly because of the aforementioned multitasking thing.

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Once you get the flow of it (and the Premonition Tracker by Greymatter WeakAura from Wago) it really isn’t that hard to use.

The CD reduction leads immediately into PoM or holy fire spam, Piety (or the everything talent is really what matters, allowing for disgusting amounts of self-healing->overhealing to be redistributed into effective AoE) and the big shield talent can be applied to the tank even with PoM (which is odd because it’s not what I’d call a single target heal, but whatever).

The “everything all at once” Premonition can seem overwhelming at first, until you realize if you start from the tank(s) down applying PoM it ALSO applies the big shield DR to the tank and then you can just go into self-healing->overheal for the Piety aspect, no additional thought required.

I do definitely need the WeakAura to know what’s coming up but thankfully the decision-making is simple, and you don’t have to use multiple charges at once.

I guess the bigger concern is I don’t see how this is well-designed (or powerful) for raid use, though, all the talents seem to uniquely lend themselves to dungeons.

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In PVE it’s defiantly a buff that is going to scale directly with dungeon and encounter knowledge. The more familiar and experienced you are with it the more you will be able to line up specific buffs a min/max the run and make it that much easier.

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That’s the point though, quite a few people who don’t want to use Oracle cite the requirement of addons and/or weakauras as one of the main reasons for rejecting the hero tree.

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If you can decipher the half-alien, half-Hebrew premonitions and identify them with their functions without the help of a WA, more power to you!

For the rest of us, I’d say a WeakAura like Greymatter provided the community actually is required. To say that you’d be playing sub-optimally using the premonitions at random without knowing their timings would be a huge understatement.

Just failing to realize you have, e.g. the big shield/DR cooldown (Solace?) available and insisting on waiting for a second charge could easily be the difference between wiping or not in harder content.

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In my experience, you get used to it.

I still don’t like how similar they are (that was a mistake) but it IS something you start to just get used to the flow of. You start to learn the order and play just off memory.

Weakauras makes the learning curve like 20x easier if you don’t mind having it on your screen though.

12

Hpriest is already nipping at the heels of rsham for excessive number of keybinds. I’m gonna reject Oracle based on that alone.

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3 problems with this statement:

  1. For dungeons, maybe? For raids, definitely not. Solace is not the reason why you would ever pick Oracle over Archon in raids; it’s about whether Insight+Piety on a 2 minute timer is worth more than having super Halo on a 1 minute cooldown. And even for dungeons, if Archon is more than viable for healing mid-high keys, then not using Solace to the utmost, fullest potential isn’t going to be a deal breaker when the former isn’t the best at single-target healing anyway.

  2. You also underestimate how even in so-called “harder content” people can easily get away with outputting less than 60-70% of the potential of any given spec as long as they can do the mechanics of an encounter and don’t wipe the raid/group.

  3. And all of the above also ignores how the player that is trying to min max the last 5-10% of the potential of their spec for “harder content” patently isn’t the target audience for a thread that explicitly says “Dummy edition” in the title; much like a brain surgeon looking to improve on their surgical skills isn’t the target audience for a book called “medicine for dummies”.

Ultimately, this guide/thread is aimed at holy priests who are unsure about Oracle to give Oracle a try in more casual content to see if the gameplay jives with them more than they expect. And if they like their first impression, maybe they might start to run the necessary addons/weakauras and do their due diligence to min-max Oracle from there.

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Premonition had a bit of a learning curve, but after playing it for a few days it became second nature to me.

Oracle just requires a higher skill gap and knowledge to properly play because you need to basically know when to use each premonition and for what (which involves preplanning). It’s definitely not something recommended for a beginner.

Archon in comparison is literally just push 1 button every minute.

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Soing this limits dps potential with insight, and apotheosis with piety. And solace doesnt need tonstack with clairvoyance since you probably dont need two giga shields. Not sure double click is the play.

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Does the higher skill gap pay off in the end? Or is it just more work for similar output to archon?

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Piety just flat out lets you cheese healing checks because for 15s you just spam single target heals on yourself and burst heal the group from 20% to 100% in a couple of casts. The only downside to Premonition is that Piety is spread out over a couple of minutes. 4 instant PoMs and Solace aren’t on the same level of power as Piety.

The difference on Archon is that when you use Halo you get back-to-back Surge of Light procs and a healing taken increase on the group so you can still top people off pretty fast. You also get faster Holy Word resets if you min-max the SoLs with Apotheosis.

So the TLDR is that from my personal experiences only doing +6-8s is that Archon and Oracle can heal every dungeon. There’s 2 overtuned bosses atm: Stitchfest and Splicer. Stitchfest requires you to be doing 1mil hps and Splicer is a defensive cd check because every 30s the boss is bursting the group hard.

You should look at Archon and Oracle as two different sides of the same coin instead of different specs like Disc / Holy.

1 Like
18

I’ve always loved watching my holy words reset during apotheosis thanks to surge of light procs, which happen a lot more frequently now. Even better during a raid when it procs and you have enough sol procs to reset serenity with enough time left over to reset all of sanctify as well.

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That’s likely why they balanced the hero talent choice between 40% more effective premonitions or 25% CD reduction.

Obviously you don’t have to be a math whiz to realize 40% >> 25%, but if you balance that against more frequent Pieties that goes a long way to explaining why they set up the choice that way.

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Oracle with Insight makes the last boss on Siege easier because you can use Insight to remove 2 dots back-to-back.

You can go Clairvoyance + Insight to clear 2 rounds then use Mass Dispel for the 3rd. Piety is up for the 4th and after that you’ll be a bit stretching it until Insight and Clairvoyance come back up.