This is just me thinking out loud and sort of pining for the spec that never quite was. I’m not complaining or hating on the class or the game. I’m just rambling.
It just seems thematically wrong for priests’ only offensive option being shadow…aka the Void. TWW would be an appropriate time to change that. A faction of priests that aggressively reject the void and wield the light as a weapon against it.
There’s a lot of lore precedence for the light being used offensively, and I’m with you I’d love to see this brought to players.
I think it’s weird that we only have one “holy” dps spec in Ret Paladin. There should definitely be a holy dps caster too and I’d be really happy for that to come around as a Priest spec.
While I’m writing a wish list, I’d also like a fourth spec for Shaman where it focuses more on the voodoo heritage of the class. Hex / Rain of Frogs are really cool thematically and while elemental magic is neat and all, I’d really love to see the other side of Shaman spellcasting get a chance to shine.
Yeah I really miss the DPS stance that Holy had back in the day. Stance dancing in dungeons to swap between buffing your damage then back to healing made for compelling gameplay and really helped with soloing. I understand it went away when you could change specs with a button press instead of a trip to the trainer and 50+ gold but it would be cool to have it back.
Priest still have something like this. Holy has chastise that activates crushing holy fires.
Disc has some good damage, based around their whole design.
I understand what you’re talking about though. But we do have the ability to blast from time to time.
The closest thing we ever had to a proper smite spec so to say was during the MOP prepatch when atonement was first introduced. Atonement was up at all times and it had smart heal capability where it always healed the lowest health party or raid member when you cast smite. You could literally just stack haste and crit and go to town with smite spam and no one would ever die. It was shredding people in pvp while keeping your team alive at all times. I was running heroic deathwing with it and it was the most fun I think I had ever had on my priest in over 15 years of play. but they nerfed it into the dirt after about 2 weeks. Atonement has never been the same since.
It was fun while it lasted.
I haven’t paid much attention to atonement.
But I thought Discipline was the Bubble Absorb healer all throughout till the end of WoD and only going into Legion did Atonement outright replaced the entire Absorb aspect.
Did atonement actually exist in MoP and WoD? Was it just not that prevalent or noticeable?
Atonement was introduced to the game during the Mist of Pandaria prepatch at the end of Cataclysm, and It functioned as I stated before it got aggressively nerfed into the dirt before Pandaria went live. Since then it has manifested itself in multiple ways within the disc spec.
Gotcha.
Yea last I seriously played Discipline was 10 man heroic Morchok in Dragon Soul Cataclysm. Had to have 2 healers for each copy.
I had to bite my tongue and get it done so I could go back to Shadow for the rest afterwards lol.
So I’m out of the game a bit for Discipline.
I was running holy in Cata up until the MOP prepatch went live and then switched to disc just for atonement. It was beyond fun. It made me so mad when they nerfed it that I uninstalled the game and didn’t return again until BFA.
Yikes.
Blizzard was never able to balance the different chakhra stances, because they had a cooldown. If you had to dip into your single-target healing to top off the tank and you were in AoE mode, 25% penalty to your ST throughput. If you had to dip into AoE healing when you were in ST mode, 25% penalty to your AoE throughput. You would never actually use the dps mode in raids, since it was a 25% penalty to all healing.
There would be actually be only one, at most two fights per expansion where damage phases lined up with Chakhra’s cooldown. Outside of that, you just picked AoE and stuck with it (the only exception being if you were sent in a diffierent phase with a tank and there were no other available healers), and just ate the 25% reduction on your ST spells because the 25% penalty to AoE spells was a much larger loss of throughput than the penalty to ST spells.
The current system is more than 100% better than stances.
Not sure what you mean by this? Like a dps spec that uses holy spells/smite rather than shadow spells? I think that would be a bit redundant and hard to accomplish when you have both disc and holy priest that do a lot of damage using smite very often as it interacts with both of their main abilities.
I can see the want for a light based dps spec though, could be interesting but I do think holy/disc fulfill that role really well outside of being an actual dps spec so idk. Smite is used heavily as hpriest to contribute to damage in multiple ways, it reduces the cd of chastise which gives you 2 free instant holy fires if you are specced into all of holys damage nodes, and holy fire does insane damage+aoes. It feels really good, not sure they can make a separate spec without taking away from what makes holy unique.