Priest Misinfo Spread by Wowhead

Classes Priest
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They’re classifying in this article: " Patch 10.2 Class Tuning and Changes - Massive Nerfs to Mass Dispel and Power Infusion"

with the subtitle or introduction as: “Blizzard has posted class tuning for the first Patch 10.2 PTR build which includes a massive nerf to Mass Dispel and a small nerf to Power Infusion.”

which strikes me as so far outside the realm of logic and reality to be actively misleading. why is it the community must once again remind these 0.1%'ers or 0.01%'ers that mass dispel is actually not that strong in most situations. in the life or death situations, that virtually no one but the most die-hard no-lifers pushing the tippity top of keys are doing, sure mass dispel will in select situations of multiple magic debuffs going out to the party, make the difference between success or failure.

but for way over 99% of the rest of us, it is possible for other healers to simply heal through this damage, with or without cooldowns. this means that for way over 99% of us, nerfs to this spell are nearly entirely meaningless.

in the real world, where most of us are, the nerfs to power infusion are much more significant. its so weird how a spell that existed in vanilla, now 20 years later gets this line from the devs: "oh a buff that goes on other classes to make them more powerful, makes them more powerful, because that’s what burst damage tools tend to do. how could we have foreseen this? so we’re nerfing it so its more like “steady-state” damage dealers, whatever that is, since this is the first time they ever publicly used that phrase. i guess suddenly burst cd’s are supposed to line up with baseline damage? what?

cause that kind of seems like the only reason they’d need to invent a new phrase, “steady state” because equating burst damage, to baseline damage, is clearly too ludicrous even for blizz to say out loud. so now the mental gymnastics begin.

meanwhile, they aren’t even touching the 1min tank external paladins get that lasts for 30 seconds, its as if they don’t live in reality, and are instead taking all their buff-nerf cues from a certain very small population of the playerbase… … … … …

its like that meme, tell me you don’t play your own game without telling me you don’t play your own game. doing the healing “job” is expected. beyond that, shaman and evoker are brought for heroism/bloodlust. druid is brought for brez. monk is brought to play the game on hard mode. priests are brought for PI. paladins are brought to play on easy mode.

and while there’s a little more nuance based on what debuffs need dispelling in what dungeons - i.e. you’d be a little crazy to do underrot without a disease dispel, generally speaking that’s how it goes. and in that list, priest and monk are lowest on the totem pole by far. it just does not look like priest is in a precarious spot, but they are on the knife’s edge.

these power infusion nerfs are way bigger than anyone is seeing

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If you weren’t commonly using Mass dispel, even in lower keys, you’re just not playing well.

And I mean, that’s fine if you weren’t, but let’s not pretend that the nerf to Mass dispel wasn’t incredibly significant. There are a LOT of effects in dungeons that go party-wide and are very difficult to heal. Even if you could potentially heal through it at the level you’re playing at, why would you?

Hell, we were commonly taken on bursting weeks to let groups go faster because we could dispel it consistently. These changes ensure that we can’t do that anymore.

A 5% haste nerf is really not that bad in comparison.

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again, nobody’s going to notice the mass dispel nerf dude. you’re living in a bubble. nobody even cares. you’re just making it obvious to everyone you never do pug groups. the amount of healer who don’t even use their single target dispel, has got to be close to 50%. to say nothing of the healers like shaman or priest or druid who also bring a single target dispel or soothe. if you find a healer who both defensively dispels and offensively dispels, congrats you just found a unicorn.

power infusion is the spell everyone knows. its the “cool” spell. the “feel good” thing that priest brings to every party. and there are definitive breaks between the territory of good, and not even good, and power infusion has just entered this very fuzzy area between good and not even good.

what this means is that its very possible some segment of the community may end up deciding PI is not even good now. and that could lead to a snowball effect where people think PI is not even good anymore. we’ll just have to see how it plays out. but the PI nerf is way more relevant in the real world, and it is what will actually determine priest viability in this game, for most people playing it

also its 5% less haste with 5 sec less duration. you could at least be accurate =p. because if it was just 5% i might even agree with you. but the duration nerf is significant.

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The Power Infusion nerf is more impactful to Shadow because they uses it as part of their dps rotation. Overall it’s not that big of a deal for Holy/Disc.

The Mass Dispel nerf is big because on Mythic there’s raid mechanics where its beneficial to use it. If you take a boss like Mythic Forgotten Experiments where you have 4-5 DoTs out… I have no idea how you’d do that boss fight without having 3-4 Priests.

Encounter design matters more than anything. They can simply design dungeons and bosses where you don’t need to use it or you die.

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I’m really not, I’ve played this game at the ‘can’t pass +10 threshold’ and remember it well. Ironically, starting to use the tools your class has at their disposal is how players start getting better at the game. So they might not notice it, I suppose, if they’re just not using it. But that doesn’t make it less of a nerf. It’s still incredibly significant.

The vast majority of my groups are pugs early in a season until I start raid logging and just helping guildies.

It’s kinda wild to me that you think ‘healers just never dispel!’ but somehow think that low level priest healers touch their PI button at the right time. The vast majority of them just randomly rip it - sometimes use it just on themselves - and sometimes never touch the button or ANY of their cooldowns for that matter. Anyone who’s ever tried to help a healer get better knows the pain of “why are you holding onto your cooldown?”

PI will still be good as long as it can enhance a CD window. Is it worse? Yeah. But PI’s been one of the best things in the game for a while, so :person_shrugging:.

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i can only agree that mathematically speaking, on paper, the numerical changes to mass dispel are large.

i was doing keys up to 15 in legion and bfa. nothing special. but i distinctly remember nobody caring about priest mass dispel on bursting weeks. i was generally aware of it, and of course used it myself, since priest is one of the class i play. but the mentality did not exist in the playerbase back then, of priest being necessary to do bursting weeks. of course like any heterogeneous group, some pockets of that line of thinking could well have existed in individuals or small groups here and there, and i feel fine saying it most certainly did. there’s a variety of opinions all the time.

but mass dispel from priest has never been as relevant as it is right now in dragonflight, even though the spell itself has not changed much over the years. what has changed is people. the “end game” or “min max” mentality is what has become more pervasive. and in a world full of people like that, success and inclusion to the group is often all or nothing. so what i’m saying is people did just fine without priest before, and there’s no reason to think they wont do so again, just as soon as priest falls into the “totally worthless” category, which the point of my post is trying to communicate this idea, “totally worthless” is only short 2 steps away from “must have in every party.”

maybe i’m wrong? but is this like the only raid fight all tier that requires dispelling at any level that can be classified more than the bare minimum? most fights don’t have strenuous dispel requirements. so you’re cherry picking? looks rather disingenuous if you ask me. like a potential gold medalist in mental gymnastics.

i wont say encounter design doesn’t matter, but mythic raiders are going to bring whatever comp they need. for everyone else, you can’t really mandate more than 1 (possibly 2) of each class, and that’s an unofficial rule blizz made for themselves with 4 differing raid difficulties and flexible raid sizes. everyone knows that mythic raiding is different. so its not really even relevant what mass dispel does, or what nerfs or buffs it gets.

do you see? mythic raid will be mythic raid. blizz has to design it to be defeatable - even if its only defeatable with 20 priests, which is just crazy to imagine but my point in bringing this up is i am trying to communicate my point - only mythic raiders would ever field such a team and blizz knows it. but they usually have enough sense to design bosses which aren’t impossible to defeat for everyone else, so on heroic difficulty and below, there are alternative strategies.

what alternative strategies amounts to varies on a case by case basis but usually means a healing cooldown can replace a mass dispel, on heroic difficulty and below. therefore i don’t think you have by any means disproven my point that for over 99% of people doing m+ keys, the mass dispel nerf changes nothing, has zero relevance. i’m strongly inclined to believe that anyone saying the mass dispel nerf is the bigger one, is doing very high keys where the use of MD spells the difference between victory or defeat. but that content is pointless, because its way higher than lvl 20 keys where the final rewards are. m+ is an infintely scaling system. class balance inevitably breaks down at some point, due to damage scaling beyond any intended function. mass dispel’s relevancy there is an anomaly in the gameplay experience of virtually everyone who plays WoW

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The problem with Mass Dispel in M+ is because they designed bosses, an affix, and trash mechanics where you get DoTs that punish you very hard for not dispelling them. Those dragons in HoI truck really hard on fortiifed weeks and then you have two bosses in Uldaman that put DoTs out and then immediately do heavy group damage.

In Mythic Raiding: they make Mass Dispel mandatory for certain bosses as well. Another example is Mythic Sark who puts 2 dots that knock you back when it’s dispelled during P2 and P3. Dispelling both simultaneously with mass dispel knocks the entire group in the same direction. If you don’t do that then you have to dispel one person at a time and bounce all over the map.

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Love how m+ affixes are dictating my MD’s CD in PvP, and because PI buffs too well in raids it’s getting nerfed while still being purgeable. Really well thought out designing. Could really use an except when engaged in combat with enemy players addition to those changes.

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yeah i recall a boss in sanctum of domination was like this also. i think mythic remnant of ner’zhul. honestly its just bad design and they should stop doing it. idk if people have noticed, but in the past 4+ years they seem to be relying more and more on forcing movement on players as a cheap shortcut for actual creativity. can’t think of a cool mechanic? oh just do a knockback on everyone. it disrupts dps rotations, disorients healers, and causes RNG moments that increase the # of attempts required to down a boss in a reliable fashion.

they’re doing this a lot lately. i think it is a rather brain dead way to inflate the difficulty of any encounter, or at minimum, a zero-fun way.

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you are comparing a defensive external to a dps external that is the subject of infamy and balancing turmoil

keep in mind that despite being nerfed, pi still is big enoguh to be warranted for big burst classes.

not to mention not using mass dispell because you “want to heal” is just inting in any key level. your gonna tell me to my face that you rather heal 5-6 stacks of bursting instead of using mass dispell?

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The mass dispel nerfs beg the question; Why are dungeons being designed in a way where Mass Dispel is the only answer?

Having mechanics that only a priest can deal with is not a sign of priests being overpowered, but a sign of poor dungeon design.

Priest utility has not changed in like 3-4 expansions, and yet we’re all the sudden OP?

No, Blizzard designed these dungeons poorly and probably forgot about how priest utility would interact with them because they usually forget priests.

Blizzard is nerfing Priest utility because they designed their dungeons poorly

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MD nerf is absolutely class altering change in pvp. Even with the pvp talent.

And if you gonna sent the usual “i dont play pvp” “i dont care about pvp” etc… then i think youre the one that actualy lives in the bubble.

And if youre not using md often enough, you play bad.

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I think dratnos etc said MD was like REQUIRED in at least 2 dungeons and was used in about 5

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These disc priest changes that are reported on WoWhead sound terrible for PVP. Mind blast having a 45 second cool down??? WTAF? We’re supposed to heal through atonement every 45 seconds now? With Smite being nerfed for Disc, but not holy, this doesn’t make any sense. The changes to mas dispel and PI are taking away Disc’s viability. And without solace, we’ll be going oom like crazy. Meanwhile, let’s buff mistweavers and resto druids.

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you have badly misrepresented my point, and i dont know if that is intentional or just a severe inability to see a perspective different from your own.

i’ll try to make it easy though. there are multiple healing spec in the game. most of those are not priest. so those “MD-necessary” situations are actually not MD-necessary at all, because non-priests have to be able to heal them, or the game would be fully broken. so healing through these situations in most key level ranges is not only possible, but a necessary alternative that most healer must take.

for Priest, MD has long been a convenient option, but rarely so necessary as to be used like it currently is. the fact it becomes mandatory in the highest m+ dungeon keys that a ridiculously small number of people even bother with doing, does not indicate a problem with the spell.

instead though, you try to say this whole thing is about me as a player. that is just missing the point so badly i struggle to understand how you can spell words properly, put them together into sentences, and yet fail to make the final step of comprehending the words you read that are writtten by someone else. it makes no sense. you clearly seem to possess the requisite intelligence to achieve this understanding.

most people in the game, priest or not, do not do the highest lvl m+ keys where using mass dispel is a life or death situation. in virtually every situation in this game, for virtually every player, the spell is nothing more than a class convenience, the way rogues can stealth through places for easier xmog runs, or death knights can block the occasional knockback, or warriors can sometimes leap past certain obstacles. just about every class gets some bizarre perk that cannot be replicated.

this is probably the first time in the game that mass dispel’s functionality has become so desperately “needed,” in a section of the game that isn’t even designed to be balanced in the first place, and the complaints are all originating from people who essentially bash their heads against the wall of this unbalanced content in an almost pointless fashion.

it does not seem possible that any fruitful game design innovations could ever result from these situations, just continual watering down of The Next Most Useful thing, because once a few rounds of nerfs go out, something else might now become the most useful thing to use at the “high end,” although by high end i just mean this senseless content that offers no reward and cannot in any meaningful sense be distinguished from literally wasting one’s time, and so whatever the Next Thing is, that too will eventually be complained about as being mandatory in this pointless content, and what do you know, more nerfs are likely to come in, because this seems to be the precedent now.

Like the act of doing the highest keys itself, the only result of this process seems to drain all the fun and cool and interesting things out of the game, for the sake of pleasing a crowd of people so small, at the expense of everyone else, you’d think they were some sort of evil political leaders or billionaires.

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MD did not dispell bursting until 9.0 bud so you definitely weren’t using it to do that in Legion and BFA

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I think a lot of people would appreciate it if you stopped calling high end M+ “pointless content”. To you, or even a majority of the player base don’t care past +20 (if they can even do it/want to do it) which is totally fine. I get it, the game does not give any rewards past that point, but have you ever considered that some people enjoy the challenge that comes with hunting for more IO? The difficulty of pushing content and your abilities to the limit? Just because it doesn’t award anything doesn’t mean the content is pointless. People do this stuff because they find it FUN (myself included), which is kind of the point of the game.

I’m not naïve enough to just assume that people won’t apply the meta/arguments for the meta in lower keys where it really doesn’t matter at the end of the day.

I’m sorry I’m kind of shooting the messenger here for a rather common community perception of higher end keys, but please keep in mind the content is fun for some people and we are only asking for things to be balanced appropriately so we can do the content we enjoy.

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I feel like Priest is doing a lot of load bearing for the ‘issues’ in the so-called ‘God Comp’ that Blizz is so hot to nerf right now.

Also, what is that justification behind dropping us to 1 Insanity per 3 DP’s? Isn’t it enough they just nerfed the coeff’s on our DoTs by 25%?

And what the hell did Holy do to get nerfed? Like literally no one has been talking about Holy being too good or any kind of problem.

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This. The MD nerfs are significant in pve and pvp. We are going to have to throw a pvp talent at making it a 60 second cd.

Sadly I do not think blizzard really cares about pvp given how little of the playerbase participates in it.

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ya, i don’t mind if you have fun, but at what cost? i even addressed this in my last post, where i said: “the only result of this process seems to drain all the fun and cool and interesting things out of the game, for the sake of pleasing a crowd of people so small, at the expense of everyone else, you’d think they were some sort of evil political leaders or billionaires.”

so you are here representing that apparently catered-to 0.1% elite or something. and while you have chosen to feel insulted, you have allowed your emotional response to distract you from a very important question in game design: to what extent should balance be maintained? just how many dev resources should go into time and attention and programming paid to each class, each spec, each ability, which will all require tuning, at every key level? its common knowledge that nearly every spec in the game can complete +20’s and get their portals. that’s what i hear around here all the time.

the elitists are quick to remind everyone, “just play what you like. for almost everyone in the game, your class is balanced well enough for all the content you are likely to do.” and yet m+ is an infinitely scaling system. try not to ignore that fact, because the longevity of WoW as a game, and blizz as company, its entire existence, can be said to rest upon how they handle issues like this, which can potentially drain infinite resources, and detract from new stories or other content being added to the game.

at some point, some classes will pull ahead of others. in order for classes to be unique, abilities, passives, one-of-a-kind utility, all have to exist. otherwise everybody would be exactly the same. but because of that needed diversity, eventually, in an infinitely scaling system like m+, some classes and spec will just fall off. they wont be needed anymore, because they cannot handle an environment where damage and health of enemies scales toward infinity.

some tools will just be less good at dealing with the pressure. so how much work should they put into scaling all abilities? to key level 30? 35? how many people are even doing keys at lvl 26, 27, 28? is it for these people that so much time and money need be wasted? to what end? we’re all looking for fun of course. but there should be reasonable expectations on all sides.

but to me it looks like elitist players, many of whom are, i’d willing to bet, figuratively in bed with the developers, are selfishly extracting as much advantage they can from their privileged positions, and tugging on invisible strings as much as they can to get the game to be designed specifically for their preferences. m+ health and damage scaling per keystone level has already been increased to account for this - to basically make it so the ceiling is not so high, i.e. the realm past which there is any useful, or logical reason to do a key, can be achieved.

that design decision was a hint, with insight we can see its the enthralled devs pleading for elitist 0.01%'ers to get off their back.

that is an extremely specific point which i feel virtually nobody would recall - except perhaps someone with just 1 forum post, freshly made to deliver such urgent information, and yet even if it gives you some satisfaction of being historically correct (i daresay it must have you shuddering with incomprehensible pleasure), i have the clear feeling it only reinforces my point of how Mass Dispel was always this niche utility spell that people never really paid any mind to, because of how seldom it was needed for anything, and even for the instances in which it was useful, it was not so useful as to swing the temperature on priest desirability far enough to ever warrant any nerfs because of it. therefore most people would not have recalled the fact because it just does not matter.

my original point was calling out the horrible misinformation of trying to label mass dispel as some game changer utility that’s always existed in the game and so this huge nerf is like “big news,” but it isn’t, its a knee-jerk reaction that does not address the real problems with the game, namely aug-evoker, and a raft of dungeons specificaly designed with an abundance of dispellable effects, which of course at some keystone level will overwhelm any healer, which will always happen at some point of infinite scaling.

i don’t mind mass dispel nerfs in terms of the spell in the game, what i do mind is this awful mis-allocation of mental space to wrong ideas about where the problems are actually coming from in high level m+ (its not originating with priest spells), and also the horrible mis-allocation of labor spent on “fixing” non-issues, all which appear to me, to spell doom for the long term health of the game, as it represents individuals who can neither properly identify, nor remedy, the actual source of the problems.