I’ve never complained about it. Each class getting little niche tools for situations isn’t a problem. Not having a kick or interrupt is an essential part of gameplay especially the higher you get in keys or solo content. Try again.
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I dunno man, I don’t know if the tone you have been taking on (imo) is really gunna do much to combat any negative feelings Priests have about the pruning. Negativity vs negativity generally isn’t going to make people go “hmm, maybe I will try to take a more positive view on this because someone was mean to me about my opinion” Just my feelings on that. It isn’t working on me, but I’m just one person.
I understand what you are saying about the Priest usual gameplay loop not being altered in the most general sense, but I don’t think it is fair to say that “only facts matter, not feelings” in a video game people are playing to garner the -feeling- of FUN. If having fewer options FEELS worse, and makes you have LESS FUN, while playing the class, then that is a valid criticism of the choice to prune away so many buttons. If people say that “Spells that I used to cast that really made me feel like a Holy Priest are now baked into other abilities and I don’t get the FEELING of pressing them and casting it myself and that FEELS bad” that is a valid criticism because people play the game to feel good and that is what felt good to them. If that isn’t what rocks your world, and you don’t care about it, then that is a fair opinion for you to have for you.
I said before, I doubt I will know how I TRULY feel about the actual full situation until Midnight is here and I can get into it fully, but right now, setting up my bars and seeing so many things that I associate with being a priest poofed outta there, was upsetting and made me feel bad. I felt bad, playing a video game, that I pay for monthly, that I play to have fun and feel good. I felt bad. Therefore, I express that.
Imo, the better choice here would have been a middle ground of removal of some of the buttons that were yeeted and uptuning of others that are IMO, Priest through and through. Seeing them ALL gone, was crushing, but I could have lived with a happier middle option where we made smart meaningful changes to underperforming spells that are iconic to the priest lexicon and kicked out some of the perhaps, overly conceptualized micro-spells that didn’t have a good identity outside of “look, another button that says heal”
BUT WHAT DO I KNOW, I am still nursing the depression of Cascade being removed. :^)
Also, side note, I wouldn’t celebrate another class losing something of theirs. Priests were upset that they were being passed over for things because we could not provide it as effectively, which I think is fair. The choice ending up being remove it from everyone, was well, a choice. I’m unsure the correct one or not.
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The problem is that no one is going to agree on what is “iconic” priest spell versus bloat. I personally felt good about the pruning because I had to use a razor naga to PvP as holy priest, it had so many spells and abilities that needed macro modifiers. With disc priest not only did I not need the naga, it actually had empty slots for my keyboard binds, and yet the play style of disc in raid and PvP is far more complex due to how many globals a single ramp takes and needing to accurately gauge incoming damage to use all of it’s mitigation tools.
That seems wrong to me. Holy priest, which is conceptually simple should also have a simple kit.
I also just find it so incredibly odd that through all the anti-prune posts I have read, almost all of them talk about non-issues like shield, heal, renew, when Premonition was actually what made Holy priest more complex going into TWW. It’s like we’re not even playing the same spec.
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Almost like there was more than one way to play the
versatile healer who can reverse damage on individuals or groups and even heal from beyond the grave.
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I mean……
I think I would say that if that is the majority of where the complaints are…perhaps you answered your own question. The spells that made people feel like Priests, that we learned at the earliest levels, that have existed for Holy Priests as castable spells until this point, are probably what most people are talking about and what a lot of people are missing. I think the answer for these spells were perhaps tweaks, meaningful changes, but not baking them into other skills.
I think you are running into Holy vs Disc Priests and while a lot of people can play both, not everyone ENJOYS both. I hate being a disc priest, I will never play one. I do not like doing it, I never have in any iteration of their evolution. I -LOVE- Holy. For me, I press button, button do thing. I find it satisfying to see someone’s health bar go down and I press a button and it goes up bc that spell made it go up that amount.
I think a lot of Holy Priest mains, perhaps, at least to me, it seems very clear that people enjoy the act of pressing buttons and casting differentiated spells that cause differentiated spell effects to happen right when you press the button. They enjoy the choice and building of their playstyle and that their choices of which of their varying toolkit for that moment, cause bars go up. Sure, some are more optimal but I don’t necessarily believe that deleting everything is better than making meaningful change to things to CREATE more optimal choices.
All this baking heals in, the behind the scenes nature of it, being doubled down on, is icky to me and I don’t like it. It feels distinctly NOT Holy Priest to me. I raided (when I raided a lot), with a Resto druid healing partner, we are still best friends, he made bars go tick tick tick and I made bars go BOOM. We supported eachother’s playstyles and nothing has ever felt better. This is what I personally (but I think maybe other Holy Priests might agree with), feel like is being lost. That, I know you will hate this, FEELING is gone.
I said it before, it seems as if I am being resigned to being NPC Priestess Ishanah, forever casting Flash Heal (hers was Greater Heal) onto weak Draenei paladins who are forever dying on the fields of Argus, stuck in her NPC loop waiting for a champion to speak to her for her quest. I love that lady, but I don’t want to BE her.
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While it may be true that there’s a lot of misconceived understandings of the game, its lore & gameplay — along with much doomerism upon the forums, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s ALL invalid …
Because ultimately:
Some things are genuinely shared frustration amongst the majority community and ARE in fact valid in the expressed concerns of what problems such causes - whether for objective, subjective, trivial, major, short term or long term subjects and the like & so on.
- For just one example: As others have pointed out, having several long held abilities that have existed for years or over a decade being removed — is fairly understandable to make players feel like they’re missing something … Especially if they have OCD and preferred having X ability in a certain location on their spellbars
My biggest irk, personally, along with quite many guildies & friends I’ve spoken to across discord → is that we all feel the amount of removal and outright change (eg. reinvented Oracle playstyle & removal of premonition + greater heal) was simply outright overkill.
Having so many share likeminded opinions, concerns and frustrations in a short span of time does in fact speak volumes.
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No one in their right mind would miss this spell. The majority of WoW damage now is group damage not single target, it was made a PvP only talent for many, many expansions and holy priest still underperformed with it outside of the last season of BfA when it became the ultimate cheese tool with 80% haste.
It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder why people don’t just go play classic if they want a slow paced game where you press one of 5 different spells that all the do the same thing with a different cast time and spell power modifier.
There are at least 9 million people playing this game, we’re 0.1% of that population. Your guildies and friends are 0.000001% of that population. It proves nothing.
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And yet they do. lol
And we have aoe healing spells for such 
Group damage simply existing doesn’t mean that single target damage doesn’t
Plus — Greater heal was good for incoming tank-buster hits and also PvP.
Additionally – with Oracle’s premonition spell, it could be instant cast & at times also add quite a large absorb, which made it even more viable.
It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if people play anything outside of just one gameplay aspect and don’t just go play classic if they’re so absent minded to the various different situations that different abilities & class utility can be used for.
Something tells me you don’t play holy priest or healer very often …
Should’ve followed Darth’s advice when they said to you →
as for the commentary of
Coolstorybro, that could be said about literally anything and anyone on the forums.
The fact of the matter is, if the uproar is abundant on:
- The forums
- Discord
- Social Media
- and other forms of public outlets
– especially in such a short time-span, then it’s fair to say there’s significant numbers amongst the playerbase that have concerns and feelings on such matters.
Likewise:
There are at least 9 million people playing this game.
and millions of those numbers don’t share their thoughts even when they are upset with the game.
So your counter-argument there is ultimately worthless It disproves nothing.
Overall, it’s as Evangele stated:
with so many spells removed that’ve existed for several years or more – To many the feeling of the class’s spec is gone.
To add on to that statement, given the magnitude of those years and amount spells removed, it’s hardly by any means going to just be a small portion of priest players who feel the same. lol
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Damage sucks, dps toolkit sucks- I live in warmode and that’s done I will accept that.. but also heal toolkit is one dimensional. Yes we need to share our voice now for any possible changes by expansion release. Blizzard worked with us a lot last expansion fixing the premonitions then eventually giving oracle life. Doesn’t mean things will change, but they can, so we may as well try.
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Again, you’re living in a totally different decade. There’s no tank busters. The reason why holy priest struggles in M+ is because ST healing isn’t a good match for the damage profiles the game puts out. That’s why they are making serenity capable of cleave healing.
You don’t seem to PvP at all, so it seems like you’re deflecting. Not sure how you can talk about greater heal in PvP when you have no experience with it. I do. I got duelist in BfA on holy priest when greater heal was the meta.
The only reason it worked was because of corruption. Once corruption was removed, holy instantly went back into dumpster tier. You can’t sit and cast a multi-second spell in a game mode about interrupts and CC.
The new holy priest did incredibly well in TWW and it’s still very good in Midnight. Redesigning away from casted heals to PoM and high mastery allows holy to cast infrequently enough that having a single spell school doesn’t hold us back.
Asking for greater heal back shows a fundamental lack of understanding of how priest is designed and how it’s evolved over the years. You’d make us go backwards and be worse off for it.
I don’t have to prove anything about how people feel, the burden of proof is on you. If you’re going to commit the logical fallacy of
Argumentum ad populum
without proper data, then you’v proven nothing.
Every class forum seems to have some mentally deficient dumbass who thinks they’re the ultimate correctionist. They’ll create conflict constantly, troll every complaint, and generally just be a contrarian dick to just about everyone.
And the funniest thing is, they’re obviously and objectively wrong. But too busy ego stroking to see themselves as anything but correct and superior. Meanwhile back here in reality, most are wondering how it’s even possible to be this stupid. Ugh.
With any luck, this worthless piece of garbage will dissappear from the priest forum sooner rather than later.
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As far as I know, Holy doesn’t have Purge. What you can do is skip the Holy Fire option and stick with SW:P, but then you lose access to Psychic Scream.
In this case, the logical choice would have been to replace SW:P with Holy Fire and make it instant, since it ultimately serves the same purpose: dealing a bit of damage and applying a DoT.
That said, it’s true that the Empyreal Blaze options would need to be adjusted
Holy does have purge. Purge is one of our strongest PvP spells.
Blaze is what gave holy real damage, and made it much better in PvP. Without some sort of tradeoff, there’s no way to pack damage into holy fire and make it spammable. Take away blaze and make holy fire function like SW:P, and now we are back to hard casting smite for no damage, getting kicked on holy and not being able to heal anyone in PvP.
The main job of a healer isn’t to keep dots up or tag mobs or keep people out of stealth, it’s to do things only a healer can do, heal + dispel. When you aren’t healing you want every global to be high value. Chastise is high value, it can stop CC, stop a go, or chain into other CC. Blaze holy fires are high value, they do real damage and put out pressure in the small windows holy has to do damage.
SW:P was not high value for holy. It didn’t contribute to healing like it does for disc, and it doesn’t contribute to mastery like it does for shadow. It was just a small damage tick that you would have to waste N globals on where N is the number of enemies that you can reasonably dot.
Not having it means not feeling forced to maintain it, and opening up more globals for the high value spells - or critically - the spells that get you those high value spells faster, smite and holy nova.
Great so you asume all of us play with warmode on?
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Nothing I just said has anything to do with war mode. None of these things are PvP talents. Purge is available to all priest specs in all modes as is blaze.
The same issue of wanting high value globals and an interrupt between healing still applies to m+ and raid.
Maybe we’re playing two completely different games, because as far as I know, Holy Priest doesn’t have an ability called Purge. I don’t play PvP, so I assumed you were referring to a PvP ability, but after checking my character’s talent kit, I don’t see anything like what you’re mentioning.
They’re talking about Dispel Magic. It’s called a “purge” because shaman has purge which does the same thing. It’s a general word for what the effect does, which is that it “purges off a magic effect”. It can be used on targets regardless of whether or not they have a purgeable magic effect.
I actually like the idea of instant cast holy fire. It would need to keep the cooldown on it so it didn’t just feel like “smite 2” though. I also think in general holy priest (and other healers) could use a DPS boost on their abilities largely.
aaaaa 
, you can always learn something new every day
Warmode is very different than PvP. Swp /catharsis quite strong solo warmode. It (was) a completely different game.
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As much as i hate playing Shadow, Chakra was infinitely worse. It should never even be mentioned again.
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