I’m not even a priest main (my preferred alt is priest heals), but the class feels like its lost its identity after all these changes. They don’t want you to focus on dps so they take away some of those abilities (Shadow-word pain), but then they remove core healing abilities (Heal/,Renew) or group a bunch together so that you don’t have to heal (press buttons) as much. How does having everything micromanaged make a class more enjoyable?
7 Likes
Yeah, whatever gameplay changes made to be “most optimal” are irrelevant if the class doesn’t FEEL fun or enjoyable to play for the majority masses of the priest playerbase.
Personally, spells I’d love to see return on Holy for pure enjoyability – are:
- Heal
- Premonition (for the hero-spec of Oracle, returning it to its previous incarnation)
- Power Word: Life
- And yeah, Renew — even if was a thing that double-stacked on the passive renew we were given, to sort of emphasise the manner of greater healing potential for heal-over-times on the target.
To me at least, those alone would feel revitalising and relieving to the class to play to make more interesting.
Power Word Shield felt great to press too when it was tied with the Body and Soul talent, so I wouldn’t have mind that return too – However, I’d much rather the listed above be prioritised …
Overall:
As most have expressed on these priest forums, the Holy spec doesn’t really feel quite as fun to play for us anymore.
Someone can protest to that with objective statistics to the new passives and bluster the benefits of the changes all they want — but if the class doesn’t feel fun to play for most players — then it’s really missing the overall point of the game … To have fun, lol
4 Likes
Except removing Shadow Word: Pain let’s us do more damage because Shadow Word: Pain hit for nothing, required multiple globals to make it valuable, and didn’t reset Chastise for our hardest hitting DPS ability, and allowed those spell coefficients to increase to offset the loss of pain. Not to mention it didn’t proc SoL.
Heal and renew were not core healing abilities. Renew was a thoughtless I must maintain this at all times for the buff spell that Blizzard called out in their OP about the rework. Heal was highly situation and thus couldn’t be called core. Core spells would be your high priority PoM, SoL FH, PoH and your Holy Words which were all kept.
They’re actually removing micromanagement and focusing on letting players just do the critical thinking part. Instead of every pack casting a few SW: P and renew on the party and then making choices, you just make choices.
I miss the days of having to coordinate between flash heal, heal, and greater heal when estimating damage and mana use.
5 Likes
That’s why I liked ‘Heal’ to be honest. 
Flash heal felt better to me when it was prioritised as a quick-emergency-heal for a tight situation or time-grizzly mechanic / damage incoming scene. The FEEL of the playstyle, felt better.
1 Like
Even better - using greater heal for its HPM, but with differing mana costs per level. FUN!
Personally I do not like the classic preset gameplay loop of wanding enemies for hours on end, and casting downranked versions of the same spell and spamming simple heals and find it boring and archaic. But I’m glad Classic allows us both to have the gameplay experience we both want.
Retail holy priest still offers all of the same choices of using different sized heals and maximizing efficiency without six spells that are actually the same spell with a different spell power coefficient, and providing challenge through difficult to heal encounters rather than easy healing that just locks you out of playing for not using the most efficient coefficient for a certain bar size.
The spec feels bad and the worst part is the whole xpac they’ll be “working on it” while we wait for the next xpac for them to try again to fix it. Will get some kind of band-aid here soon but its w/e at this point with the it being so close to release.
From my understanding they had good feedback on these issues in beta….
2 Likes
started playing my resto druid again and wow, it plays exactly the same as before since it got barely pruned. just having moon fire to tag stuff has been huge since atm, dps are one shotting mobs before i can get a HF, smite, or being close enough to hit it with a holy nova before they kill it. not only that, resto druid produces way more hps too. finally rdruid is 100x funner to play. i think someone(s) at blizz just hates priest.
edit. tuned up my MW and again, it plays exactly the same as before pre-patch. in fact it’s better as well, both hps wise and mechanically: the ability to channel soothing mist while moving again is so godly. why did they cut holy so hard when other classes barely got touched? it’s so incredibly unfair.
2 Likes