I think one of the biggest issues with Oracles is how you would have to cycle between 3 different buffs. This will almost always lead to you not having the one you need up when you need it or sitting on the third one to gain all 3 buffs. I think the obvious solution is to make it a single buff. Not 3 you have to cycle. I am not sure what that should look like, some combination of the 3 currently. But as it stands, No one likes it, no one wants it and it is clearly not consistent enough to compete with Archon as bad as it is.
3 Likes
In practice, Insight and Piety will be pooled together, and Solace used whenever within its window, with Clairvoyance at the end. Effectively, you’re getting a 2 min cooldown that boosts healing by 15% and gives 3x7sec cooldown reduction. Cycling to get to the CD you want will be more niche/skill cap sort of issue.
you say niche/skill cap. There is no skill cap to it. you are literally going to be sitting on the cd. It is just lame. Almost every class spec in the game has a level of consistency associated with their hero class. Even Archon (for better or worse) is out right consistent. You know what you are getting.
With Oracle it is literally a crap shoot where you have to blow cooldowns even if not needed just to obtain 1 buff needed. That isn’t skill cap. That is just poor design.
So you are literally just using a non existent “hero class” 75% of the time while you sit on a CD knowing you are going to need it eventually and you likely won’t be able to cycle to it with such a long cooldown.
This is a massive CD bloat issue where as both holy and disc are already gated behind very long cooldowns. Be it holy words, ultimate penance, you name it. Healing as a priest is quickly turning into a “blow your load and then be dead in the water” situation. There is nothing sustained about it anymore for either Holy or Disc. this is especially painful in pvp where you are faced with less consistent damage burst windows. Literally being dead in the water for long periods of time or being forced to dump your entire manna bar within seconds just to force a holy word back around is crippling enough as it is. Last thing we need is a long rotating cooldown that doesn’t even do the same thing every time it is used.
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I can’t foresee a situation where you’ll be using CDs purely to cycle. The charge system gives you a 60/45 second window to use any given buff, Solace can always be used for a Waste no Time Radiance. Solace is incidental to the Insight/Piety combo at any rate.
Just scrap the whole concept and bring back Fae Guardians and throw on the other passive buffs in the background.
It really feels like they want to remake Fae Guardians but it has to be “new”, which in this case has meant needlessly worse.
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Yeah, it’s a weird concept that no one asked for so it’s strange why they would push it this hard, even after the overwhelming negative responses to it. At this point, I agree, if they just straight up changed it back to Fae Guardians I would chalk it up as a win. I have not heard or seen a single person saying they want Premonition.
As others have said it’s a logistical nightmare in most environments. Not viable in raids, not viable in Mythic+ and in PvP it’s just borderline useless. All because you can’t control when to use each “buff” and adapt to the situation, it’s not really a premonition but a straight hinderance on your performance.
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Yea I thought about using it in pvp just for the other somewhat useful tallents like PW Life getting buffed and what not but I feel it will be too much output lost trying to manage premonition.
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They’d have to nerf the buff if it gave you all 3 at once guaranteed every 45s.
I’m sure if they polled players they’d be happier with a weaker but on-demand, reliable buff over a stronger one cycling through buffs you may not prefer.
It reminds me of another MMO I played years back, The Secret World, where they tried to make fighting more interested by shoving in dumb mini-games associated with each weapon. They had little or no synergy with the weapon/“class” theme and just needed to be “handled” efficiently for the sake of handling them.
That’s how Oracle’s current design is always going to feel to me - like a separate mini-game I didn’t ask to play on holy priest.
2 Likes
It’s not a mini game anymore because Premonition only changes into the next buff after you use it.
It always goes Insight → Piety → Solace → Capstone (all 3 at once) → repeat.
The problem with its usage is that it doesn’t always align with what you need. However, it stacks up to 2 charges so you can just sit on Solace and then do the Capstone after. You can give 2 people a -15% DR at the same time.
You can even do the Capstone and Insight after so you can get 6 casts off in a row with a -7s CDR.
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Oh it does? I hadn’t seen that since really I’d written off Oracle from its first iteration. That’s a substantial QoL improvement. Suppose you could just dump Insight off on PoM and two holy words or something and track when you have 2 stacks for the other buffs…
What happens if you cast Insight and then use a spell without a CD? Do you lose that CDR?
Only a spell that has a cooldown receives the CDR.
You have the choice between Fatebender (+40% stronger Premonition effects) or make Premontion a 45s cd instead of 1 minute.
If you take Fatebender its a 10s cdr so you can literally chain cast PoM and Holy Fire back-to-back without any delay. With Disc you can chain fire Penance’s or short CDR Power Word Radiance / PWS.
2 Likes
No, you shouldn’t lose the CDR- if it’s not bugged (Insight has had a lot of bugs on Beta).
The danger is probably wasting the CDR on non-useful cooldowns, like Ultimate Penitance (-7 seconds does nothing for it) or too short (Purify).
And yes, the 2nd charge makes Premonition extremely flexible. You can save any two consecutive buffs to use at once, or hold onto one buff to use in a timely fashion without wasting the cooldown of the next.
A skilled Oracle will flex these out to adapt to the situation. That might seem scary but I think high-end players will really be able to show off.
For normal players, you don’t have to think about Premo as a rotating ability. You can pool Insight and Piety together, Solace whenever, then hit Clairvoyance (all 3 together). That effectively makes Premo a strong, consistent 2 minute CD.
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The additional min-maxing with Holy is that if you use Insight your PoMs also create a PWS on the target so you can cast 4 PoMs and PWS 4 people before a big AOE hit goes out.
Oracle and Holy is more of a high end min-max player kind of thing because I think for the general casual Holy Priest that wants to cruise control through M+ they can just use Archon.
Oracle isn’t touching Archon for Holy in raid anytime soon though.
That wouldn’t be so bad if Oracle was the go-to choice for dungeons and Archon for raid if the gameplay was otherwise fun. With the stacking buffs and a clever WA I can see Oracle almost approaching fun, I guess…
Both hero talents are just missing that little bit of identity to give the class a bit of that new car feel, you know?
Holy atm is tuned around Archon Halo for raid because Halo is 20%+ of your overall healing. It’s physically not possible for Oracle to do the same amount of healing every minute. I don’t like that design because you should be able to play Oracle or Archon depending on what the fight needs.
The only way you’re going to fix that problem is by nerfing Archon Halo and/or buffing up Oracle’s passive healing massively. Oracle would have to increase PoM and CoH’s healing by like +100% just to be relevant.
For M+: the gap between Oracle and Archon isn’t that big and some dungeons might favor one over the other.
It’s worth mentioning that Oracle for PvP, specially arenas is going to be quite opressive.
You get 3 free insta Holy fires (25% extra dmg by being oracle) + 2 insta Holy fires from doing chastise + apotheosis into another 2 insta Holy fires. That into a burst window is massive
Also you can get insane healing onto your teammate by just healing yourself with the premonition that transfers overhealing, DRs and extra movement speed.
Also worth mentioning the extra Leap of faith.
Buffing oracle at this point is putting a risk into pvp balance which probably will make the hero talent getting nerfed
No offense, but PvP balance should be their lowest priority. Worst case they can make something dispellable. They need to get the sub-spec in a functional state first.
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PvP can really shut down cool stuff for some specs and now hero talents.
They made restitution a capstone solely because of PvP and we lost a really cool interaction with afterlife for the spec because of that. I mean… you can still go for it but you will be losing a lot of healing or dmg in the process.
Oracle, after the last buffs, has insane potential of being op in Arenas, no kidding about this.
I see Oracle receiving some nerfs for PvP, but one thing that you need to take into account is the rotating buff, and arena matches are usually <5 minutes long.