I am concerned that removing shadow mend will make disc less fun to play.
Shadow mend pros:
- Makes shadow covenant more versatile and fun
- In PvP, shadow can be used to heal people giving you multiple schools of magic which was a very interesting benefit to playing disc that doesnt really exist for other healers, very cool RP aspect to this
- Feels much more distinct than holy school heals
- Having it as a cooldown already made it something to think about rather than just a spammable basic numerical heal.
Shadow mend cons:
- Takes up a button slot where the devs feel priest has too many.
IDK I barely post on here but I was very excited to play disc in DF the tree looked amazing to me and now its very meh. I have not heard a single person echo what blizzard is saying here.
2 Likes
Not to nitpick or anything, but just to be clear Flash Heal is a base priest class healing spell since Vanilla. It’s a holy magic school spell but not unique to holy priests. I think you learned it at like level 20 regardless of specialization. Flash heal was always (until relatively recently) a core spell for all priests.
It’ll probably feel better if they adjust the modifiers (the spec auras or whatever they tweak?) for shadow and disc casts of the spell.
i meant holy school in general it might as well be holy priest heal rn, shadow mend is just better for disc
When it’s tuned properly and with SoL procs I bet it’ll work out. For shadow it could be a straight win having a pure heal castable in shadow form and a different magic school from their DPS.
I wonder if they’ll also consider tweaking a couple of the disc talents to buff flash heal, similar to hpriest options.
1 Like
There’s also that it was our only strong spammable heal (in scov) and was stronger than the 15% increased flash heal by almost 100% spellpower baseline, before scov buff - and a full stack of the from darkness comes light buff is enough to bring it just under baseline smend’s heal.
So it’s just a major nerf to ST triage healing.
tuning doesnt address mine or many others’ concerns.
TBH. The way I see this working is just have Shadow Covenant convert Flash Heal into Shadowmend while it’s active, that would be enough for me.
3 Likes
Yeah, having played with both builds on PTR before and after the changes – the thing I am most struck by is that Priest feels worse to play.
This is especially noticeable in PvP, but not just because of the obvious drawback of having only 1 spell school. It’s also worse because deciding when to activate Shadow Covenant, and when to use Shadow Mend were interesting choices. It gave you stuff to think about and plan out. Now it just plays a lot like Holy but without the big heals that can top allies at will.
I think in PvE it filled a good niche too. You could keep Shadow Mend in your back pocket when you need a good single target burst heal, especially if you let it stack up from SW:P damage.
Finally, the change was made in the laziest possible way. They literally just did a find and replace on “Shadow Mend” in the existing talents, even though they don’t make sense for Flash Heal. Some obvious issues:
- You will never be able to stack up a fully charged Flash Heal from SW:P because you need to cast it too often, so that talent tier is probably dead (unless you want to tediously refresh Flash Heal on your self for permanent 10% DR).
- Shadow Covenant is once again a dead talent most likely in both PvE in PvP. It references shadow healing abilities even though none exist, and it’s a bummer because it was in a great spot prior to this week’s changes. And it’s a great flavor ability and a shame to see it be so poorly considered throughout this dev cycle. It finally had a sensible use case and immediately Blizz broke it again.
Overall I’m just disappointed to see that the whole spec was made to feel a lot worse for no clear reason. All of this just to remove (1) one button? Was anyone truly clamoring that Shadow Mend was a bridge too far in terms of their keybinding assignments? An ability that has been a core part of Disc kit since the flavor revamp in Legion?
The spec is IMO noticeably worse to play from a feel perspective and the problem is entirely of the dev’s own making. Some specs feel like they never quite came together, Disc is the only one where it was shaping up to be great and then changed to be worse based on questionable reasoning. And that’s without getting into the other stuff around interrupts, vault of the heavens, shining force, etc.
Overall really disappointing as I was the most excited I’d been for Disc in a long time and now I’m starting to lean towards maybe just playing Holy. Hopefully we’ll see some positive changes in the next few updates to make the spec make more sense.
6 Likes
Not if you play shadow. Shadow never used it. Either because it dropped you out of form, or it was simply unavailable (live) or more recently, because it doesn’t do anything. There is no healing for shadow priest using flash heal.
I’d rather spec into renew so I can keep moving and weave a bubble in than use this waste of a spell slot.
I expect most shadow priests will just take it off their bars because going OOM to get 50% of your hp back standing still over 10 seconds is not ideal. /s
2 Likes
I’m recalling it was the first season of MoP where shadow’s flash heal was practically as strong as hpriest or disc. And I think flash heal was just a much stronger spell back then, or it certainly felt like it was. It was totally worth casting at that point!
And then I think they nerfed it like 75% or something. Haha! But we’re not even talking about that, we’re talking about a self-heal castable in shadow form and if shadow has a chance to get free SoL procs or they’re shadow locked, it might just be interesting.
Right now the whole shadowmend drama hits hard for me personally. PVP-wise, the current flash heal sucks.
I generally am happy to have my heal off my shadow tree, but i loved having both iterations of flash heal and shadowmend.
The big issue for shadow though, is flash heal heals like a potato and even with shadowmend’s removal, it still heals like a potato.
Right now, it takes me a total of 7 flash heal casts to get me from 0 to 70 percent no crits. This also drains all my mana. How in the world will this work in PVP? the only benefit this has is putting me off on diff cast school. And even then, I find it not worth it.
The new maso talent is a huge downgrade overall as well. The loss of the heal over time further makes flash heal feel invisible when used.
Something has to be done to improve shadow’s Defense after this loss. as it stands now these are the current Nerfs.
Greater fade removed ( i can do without this)
Vampiric Embrace nerfed, but shorter CD at least. Takes two talents though to make it a bit stronger but not like Live SL VE.
Shadowmend Gone
Maso passive reworked and nerfed.
Flash heal is still bad to use.
As it stands, I def won’t bother play this class in DF PVP if I’m forced to spam flash heals for most of the game to get barely any benefits. I am getting so agitated the more i use this irrelevant spell in its current state.
Overall – the devs should have not removed the spell if they didnt apply any good compensation for the removal to justify it. Its pretty bad.
3 Likes
They probably think power word shield void shield thing and the shield overhealth is actually gonna be useful /s.
And now we get to spec into desperate prayer for 40% heal and decide if we want power word life or bulwark. I’m not very enthused overall.