Feedback: Oracle in The War Within

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6 Likes

Here’s my feedback: delete this support-styled Hero Talent tree. And while you’re at it delete Augmentation, Evoker, and Dracthyr.

61 Likes

Off to a great start! XD

Repasting my feedback here…

Premonition -
This looks to be like Blizzard is trying to “rebalance” Power Infusion. I have no idea if you can only pick one thing at a time.

  • Having to manually pick which PI you cast on somebody is too much extra buttons.
  • A +25% healing increase for 10s is very underwhelming. Guardian Spirit is +60% for the same duration. Make it damage reduction instead and it’d be good.
  • Not sure how Insight and Glory compare to just a flat haste bonus, but it really limits on who you can cast PI on.
  • 1 minute reset is a bit too much. It’d greatly favor some specs over others.

Preventative Measures -

  • Basically just a passive stat increase

Assured Safety -

  • PWS bonus is decent for Disc. It’s free healing just like Crystalline Reflection
  • PoM bonus is okay. Why does Blizzard keep trippling down on PoM talents??

Grand Reveal -

  • 150 absorbs on PWS to trigger this? Holy heck. That’s almost impossible.
  • 150 PoM bounces for a free PI? That’s a bit extreme here. We don’t need an extra charge of PI.

Preemptive Care -

  • Decent for Disc.
  • Renew bonus is nice, but is it a healing increase or is it spread out over the duration?

Prompt Deliverance -

  • Interesting choice on -2s reduction on Purify.
  • Divine Feathers is very mediocre. What the heck is this? We need more mobility than this. We had no way to get out of M Raz waves in S1 or roots in S3 M Tindral.

Waste No Time & Miraculous Recovery-

  • So casting PI gives you an instant cast Heal, PoH, or PWR. Seems kinda of mediocre if its on a 1 minute cd.
  • PWL change is decent. It’s basically PWL getting unnerfed after the CDR reduction.

Foreseen Circumstances

  • Basically the Covenant ability from Shadowlands coming back.

Divine Providence & Fatebender-

  • 2s longer PI is well, okay.
  • So Fatebender is forcing the Priest to have to rotate PIs around… getting a bit extreme here with the micromanagement requirements.

Perfect Vision & Versatile Divinations-

  • 10s reduction on PI is a lot.
  • I’m so confused on what Versatile Divinations is supposed to be. If Twin Suns works do you get mana back from casting PI?

Clairvoyance -

  • How low is a low chance? Also, randomly casting PI on people seems a bit odd.

Final Thoughts -
I honestly have no idea what Blizzard is doing here. Who was here asking for 10 layers of complex Power Infusion micromanagement as a hero talent tree? This whole tree is about making everyone stronger but yourself.

As a Holy Priest tripling down on PoM talents is infuriating as well.

46 Likes

Genuine question. What is the overall design philosophy of blizzard in regards to support style buffs? Why are we doubling down on PI and support style play? Can I just focus on playing my class effectively with the most challenging raid spec to heal (disc). The largest mental load available for any healer spec. Are we concerned about these choices?

15 Likes

I like the idea of support as fae guardians was fun imo. I don’t like the idea of cycling through buffs or waiting for some kind of cycle to happen to get to the buff I want. Having each buff attached to a spell you could cast on someone as a way of picking sounds amazing.

6 Likes

I didn’t like the concept nor the gameplay at all sorry.
Instead of using maybe something like Elune, Naarus or Loa of light concepts we get something weird as “someone who sees the future” Which really doesn’t feel like an oracle at all, only the names sound oracly but the whole gameplay actives and passives do not feel like that.

Premonition is just a spell with a weird micromanagement interaction of having to choose between a cycle of different spells that tbh look as a worst version of Power Infusion. I’m just already thinking on having to tune weakauras to know what spell I am supposed to use and select it before it goes away. Doesn’t sound fun.

TBH I’m just a no for this hero talent, it sounds boring and uninteresting. I really want to dip into a super light caster user, with tons of light and shine effects. This… is not it.

26 Likes

This isn’t a “Priests become a support class” change. It’s just PI being reduced from a 2 minute to 1 minute cast and making it needlessly more complex.

Fatebender:
Premonition’s effect is increased by 30% if the divined spell is different than the previous Premonition.

This here turns PI into a mini game for raid because now you have to juggle PI on two separate classes who probably have different alignments of cooldowns.

I can just imagine having to juggle PIs around the whole raid on who has CDs up instead of just casting it one target that lines up with the regular 2 minute PI cd.

I have enough to do with healing and dodging stuff all over the map.

35 Likes

Lots of hate and rage incoming in 3… 2… 1…

I love the support playstyle, I love Augmentation Evoker and this Oracle Priest Hero Talent tree is looking really good in my opinion. I’m hoping for more support specs.

Also, not like Priests aren’t a not-yet-fleshed-out support class already, at least Holy and Discipline. You know… Power Infusion.

4 Likes

Imagine all the fun you’ll have to try to maximize the PI juggling while in a heavy movement/ramp raid phase and being punished by not rolling the roulette right.

Please rework this. Keep in mind that people raid as well. This game is not M+ exclusive.

11 Likes

When I first read it I thought “am I going to have to bind all three/five spells?” In the interview they say that you press it once, and then it rotates through the options, each second for the next 12 seconds (timing is subject to change). I actually think I’d almost rather just have to bind 5 more spells.

This is a big yikes from me dawg.

22 Likes

Without getting into the argument of whether doubling down on PI is a good thing or not, I would like to point out a flaw in the Insight & Glory buffs provided by Premonition that wasn’t discussed:

  • Most melee deal a combination of physical and magical damage, while most range deal entirely magic damage.

This means that while ranged classes other than Hunters will actually gain +10% damage out of Insight, most melee other than Warriors won’t gain +10% damage out of Glory, creating a very apparent inequality between different targets of the spell.

7 Likes

All of these Premonition effects seem objectively worse than PI’s base function. I can only assume the difference is meant to be made up in increased frequency of casts with the lower base CD and extra charges from Grand Reveal, but this seems like at best a sidegrade at the expense of drastically increased cognitive burden.

But even if it were a significant power upgrade, I wouldn’t want to play this. The sheer degree of micromanagement involved here is already making my stomach turn to think about even trying to use it halfway effectively while healing anything above a crest farm.

All the non-Premonition talents look like nothing I care about, either. More PoM hooks? Duration extensions where I have no need of them? A tiny 1/minute effectiveness buff to a rotational heal? A 1/5th power application of a shield already so weak I never cast it, solely useful for proccing Grand Reveal?

What in this tree is anything that anyone actually asked for?

Please take this entirely back to the drawing board.

25 Likes

Hey there,

My two cents;

Remove PI baseline. Let Oracle be its own thing away from PI or any variations of it.

I should add; keeping PĂŹ as a priest personal CD would be the best scenario. Remove Twin is the play and stop with the external.

3 Likes

I don’t know why they can’t just bring back Fae Guardians instead.

That ability was perfect for utility during Shadowlands.

  • You PWS somebody and they got a -20% DR for 20s. Great for tanks in M+ and raid.
  • Your Flash Heal gave somebody a CDR on their offensive/raid ability. On Holy this reduced your Divine Hymn CDR. I think with Disc it was PWR. Shadow it was Void Form.
  • You got mana/insanity from attacking your target.

This is way more fun than playing a PI mini game.

15 Likes

This hero tree is wild, and I don’t understand what they were trying to do with it. IMO, it needs to go back to the drawing board.

The “keystone” talents are focused around PI, but everything else is dealing with PoM, purify, renew, etc. it doesn’t have any cohesiveness. With a tree name like Oracle, the idea should be that they are foretelling what is happening before it happens, so then the design idea should be centered around providing throughput before it’s needed. In a sense they are doing that with PoM, but it’s not a good enough ability to center a tree around. Purify literally doesn’t make sense because you can’t pre-purify crap.

It feels like oracle would make better sense being built around a spirit shell esque play style where prior throughput generates abosrbs or delayed atonements for disc and pre-ramped echo of lights for holy.

It also has counter synergy with its self because if clairvoyance makes it so all effects are hitting the target, then you can’t get a different premonition as the next one which would mean fatebender doesn’t do anything.

PI becoming a complex pick-a-card system that is randomized as the starting buff is too convoluted and not an enjoyable addition in my opinion. Additionally, it doubles down on the notion of PI being an external buff which most priests (and players in general) would prefer that it would just be a personal buff so that classes can be designed and balanced around their own tool kits rather than what they could do if given other buffs.

I also want to point out from the interview Rodney Pare and George Velev that there was a specific moment where Clandon pointed a specific point about “why would anyone choose 5% mana when you could just give 10% throughput to both the DPS and the disc”. The response was from George and he said “I can think of when I would really want it as a resto shaman…” This response is the exact problem with this tree. If your response on why a class should have a niche buff is that it makes other people happy and the response isn’t because it makes the class using it happy then the design is bad and needs to be reconsidered.

I sincerely hope this isn’t the direction that more hero trees are pursuing and really hope that this tree gets a complete rework.

20 Likes

Just some thoughs on a few talents…

Premonition:

  • seems like a worse PI in terms of strength and useability.
  • PI syncs perfectly with 2 minute cooldowns and therefore has a big impact with it’s value, premonition is “weaker” but more frequently available. I’d argue most people would prefer their very much stronger two min CD vs. a weaker buff every minute.
  • useability is significantly worse than PI. PI is a fire and forget button with macro/addon, this requires a very strict timing on the 1 sec cycle time
  • the healing and mana regen buff are pointless, you will never pick them over damage.

Clairvoyance:

  • just bad. big impact when it happens on the right time, frustrating when it doesn’t happen.
  • significantly more limited in dungeon groups, only got one caster? what’s the point of an magic dmg (or maybe intellect buff), so might not even matter at all when it procs

Versatile Divinations:

  • Adding more buffs to the cycle seems annoying
  • noone will pick mana over a dmg buff
  • why haste? i can go back to PI for that

Perfect Vision:

  • pointless, you sync the buff with CDs, which are a multiple of 60 seconds

Assures Safety:

  • a unique way to buff PW:S/PoM, pretty nice

Grand Reveal:

  • totally unrealistic number esp for PW:S.
  • PoM has a huge variance between fights. constant AoE dmg? You get a proc every 2 mins. No constant AoE dmg? Be lucky to get one every 8 minutes.
7 Likes

LOL priest healers in WoW will not be Astrologian healer in FFXIV. Only thing is Astrologian in FFXIV is cooler and better than this water down version of healer priest.

3 Likes

Is premonition RNG? Like I get a random one of the available buffs each time it is available?

If so, I think this feels bad for a number of different reasons. Namely:

  • Having healing related buffs on a support style dps buff feels bad (rolling mana regen when you really need a damage amp on a difficult m+ pull). I think it’d have to be all or nothing on dps buffs.
  • 10% physical damage is pretty weak depending on comp. Decent amount of specs use a mix of physical and magic damage. I think just turning this into a flat damage buff would be a lot cleaner.
  • Additionally, makes something like m+ feel super awkward if you roll physical damage when your comp is all magic damage (or vice versa).

That being said, I kinda dislike the support playstyle in general and would like to see a redo of this not focused on buffing other people. I worry there could be some degenerate applications where you stack premonition, PI, and ebon might on the same target.

It’s one thing to say that logs / parsing isn’t the kind of game you want to make, but it’s another to kinda undermine the entire log meta game.

2 Likes

This sounds way cooler to me than astrologian tbh.