Here we sit 1 week out and absolutely nothing has been said by the devs much less any changes appearing in TWW beta even after the community has been screaming for months now that both Holy and disc has an absurd amount of talent bloat specifically in the bottom 2 rows of each tree.
They clearly have no interest in addressing any of this and tend to just let it ride again for yet another expansion leaving Priest in the toilet, locked behind gated walls of 2 point talents at the bottom that are near meaningless and locking us out of diversified builds.
It is a shame it has come to this. As if priest hasn’t been gutted as it is over the course of the last 2 expansions. Gated behind cooldowns that never existed before, stripped of utility, denied meaningful manna regeneration, and now this endless busted talent tree nonsense. over 15 years as a priest healer and I am just fed up with this all together and ready to just abandon the class. it doesn’t even feel like priest anymore to begin with because of all the gating. Reinventing the wheel on something that was never broken since vanilla and refusing to listen to the community outcry just because the devs don’t give a crap what we think. It’s their way or no way.
I agree with you on the talent bloat but you’re definitely being overly-dramatic. As much as you’re tired of the state of the class, I am just as tired of hearing the same threads exaggerating and forcing outrage over and over, and over year after year, expansion after expansion.
IF we were gutted and flushed down the toiled repeatedly for 2 expansions, how is it we were a dps meta spec for 3/4 seasons of m+ (yes I know PI is desirable), and a healer raid meta for 3-5 years depending on how you view it (yes I remember spirit shell).
IF they clearly have no interest in addressing any of this, why were we the ONLY spec to get one of its hero specs completely remade within weeks of its announcement (even if it was that bad, they still didn’t do that for anyone else / also apologized for it and went back to the drawing board. Yes others eventually had some rework, but still).
I don’t understand the “gated behind cooldowns comment” maybe you mean premonition? Perhaps clarify.
“Stripped of utility” is entirely farcical and I’ll even agree with you that the mind soothe change is something I do not like.
“Denied meaningful mana regeneration” I did struggle in s1 of df for mana, but with mindbender that quickly became a non-issue. I’ll meet you somewhat there in that other classes do have some better tools in that department, but I’d wager your going oom is more a problem with your party-mates than it is with you. We’re also the only healer that can restore mana to an entire raids healers.
Just because they aren’t doing the things you’d like them to doesn’t mean they’re not paying attention.
Unlike the vast majority around here, I don’t want an interrupt for our heal specs, I don’t think we need it.
Leaving out hero build specifics bc I haven’t tested them, your arguments really fall on deaf ears for me. Its like okay okay enough of the whiny outrage - I get you’re upset- but WHY. Literally EVERY FORUM for EVERY CLASS is crying EVERY DAY about how they’re "in the toilet, a dumpster fire, ignored, ect, ect, ect when its blatantly not true across the board.
I for one am sick and tired of hearing “how come X class has Y when we don’t and every class has Z but us” Well MAYBE, that’s because we’re different classes and SHOULDN’T have the same paths to success.
I fully embrace being the healer without a kick, why? because I get to spam dps spells and melt faces while hp bars go up. We’re also the ONLY healer with a complete agro dump.
I fully embrace being a healer without a Brez or a heroism, why? Because we’re the only healer with ally cheat death and the only healer with PI
Also before anyone says it, I’m not white knight fanboying over blizzard either. As I said I think the mind sooth change is unnecessary. Additionally I’ll share my frustrations to somewhat meet you in the middle:
I do think we could use an additional crowd control ability - preferably one that’s aoe, not melee, and not target capped (basically void tendrils should be something more than it is).
I do think our talents are bloated and limited on pathing
I do think its silly to tie hero specs like oracle to a non-baseline ability, especially one that is a choice node with no alternative.
I do think our defensives are wonky in that they require more thought than others and far more talents. That said, our DR from flash heal has 0 cooldown, and fade’s cd is very short compared to other classes.
So in short; We WILL be playable, we WILL be viable, and we WILL be competitive in many ways.
Is it perfect, no; is the sky falling - absolutely not-
Life will go on, and I’ll still be over here outperforming most of my peers with what you consider to be a dumpster fire.
Stop jumping on the crybaby bandwagon, its full already.
Your points are valid and I am in no way talking about the hero classes. Honestly you could give me wet noodle hero class and I could care less. As long as the core kit is intact. And it is not. It is gated and now bloated with talents that locks you out of synergy that preexisted on it’s own before shadowlands. Not even counting the manna issues with Holy.
Most specifically putting power word shield on a single cooldown instead of having weakened soul cooldown per target. only 1 PWS up at a time. To compound this they removed rupture and replaced it with a watered down version only for disc leaving Holy completely up a creek when it comes to manna generations.
First they removed spirit, then they gated PWS to a single cooldown and gutted rupture from Holy while giving disc an absurdly watered down version of it.
Now the stars do not align at all and the talent gating at the bottom of the tree leaves both holy and disc half the priest they used to be.
Roll back the clock to BFA or any expansion before that and we didn’t have these issues.
Prayer of healing is a complete joke now, Circle of healing is gated behind an absurd amount of talents on the left hand side of the tree, Prayer of mending is gated behind an absurd amount of talents on the right hand side of the tree and Apotheosis is in the middle of no mans land, gated from the rest of the kit by a completely useless 2 point node that no one ever uses because it is simply horrible and needs removed. All the core power that holy once had by default is now stretched thin and gated behind multiple 2 point nodes preventing you from having the full experience ever again. Disc honestly isn’t much better in that regard.
But thats ok. they are giving me some random crap “borrowed powers” and calling it hero classes. That will just make everything ok right? How did that work out in shadowlands? The fact that I am already hearing the words “light weaver” coming out of people’s mouth is telling me how bad the situation is. Shadowlands 2.0
I agree with you on the talent bloat. Honestly I think if they were to just make most of the 2-node talents down to 1 (you could even nerf them slightly to compensate if you really want to) we’d collectively be feeling a lot better about it
I empathize with the PW:S comment because as a disc player that’s kind of how I feel about PoM, meaning; PW:S is kinda worthless for holy and PoM is kinda worthless for Disc. Not terribly sure what to suggest to that.
I sort of see discs’ barriers and rapture as the answer to holy’s holy words but I don’t know what I’d change either in regard to that. My verdict isn’t in on the new rapture yet. I do like that is feels more significant on the people it does effect; and in a round about way is faster (since you need 2 less gcd’s than before). So, I don’t know what to say to this yet.
By the sounds of it disc raid ramping has some clunk but I’d have to play it to see come s1.
When you boil it down it doesn’t sound like concerns are terribly outlandish; its when you say it on the soapbox with the “slap in the face” language, its just another rant in the dark that I’m sure a long term player like yourself has witnessed time and time again.
Sorry. This is 4 years of frustration bubbling over and knowing I am not the only ones with these exact gripes as the forums has been littered with it for months now, I am just on my last nerve with these devs. Over 15 years with this char. it is older than my children. it is a part of my life and something I have enjoyed for the better part of that time. And to have it all washed away by some wet behind the ears devs who thinks they can just walk up in here an reinvent the wheel on a 20 yr old game and then completely ignore the community who is telling them LOUDLY! HEY! YOU ARE AN IDIOT! FIX THIS CRAP! and they just ignore you, give the silent treatment, and completely revamp and balance out classes that won’t nearly in as bad shape as priest, It just makes my blood boil and I simply want them fired.
As for POM and PWS disc vs holy, I say just return both back to their preexisting power and everything will be fine for both. POM used to heal much more than it does now and was good for both specs as a filler. PWS though much stronger for Disc was the bread and butter method of generating manna for Holy. It was never about if the shield was strong, as Holy, you wanted the shield to pop.
Holy is far from fine. how many years have you been playing Holy? The talent tree is a train wreck and your so called rework did nothing but gut the spec.
Weird. I find S3/4 hpriest playstyle the best it’s ever been, albeit partially thanks to the set bonus. We have tools for every scenario, our best heals are all instants and short term mobility is great, you can play simply and use a few spells or you can button bloat yourself to hit the most optimal spell for the occasion. You can even change your playstyle to suit with weaver which is not for me but that’s what makes it great that others can choose that if they want.
I didn’t read it all, but I do agree that having to spend 2 points on shadow crash is a slap in the face. They should completely remove insidious ire and just make void torrent hit that hard any way
They don’t get good marks just because they tuned Shadow high to cover for the design shortfalls. There’s clearly a misconception that performing well = well designed, as we keep seeing people use this same defense of being meta as some sort of signifier that nothing is wrong. We see Blizzard do this over and over, cause it’s easier to change some numbers rather than make meaningful design changes.
Oracle was also one of the “preview” hero talents, when they were very much early in development. So of course it got a lot of pushback as it was not designed well when they previewed them. They also did not give us an official Feedback thread for Voidweaver and Archon like we got for Oracle, thus nowhere to collate all our thoughts for them. Instead, they gave us what they wanted, didn’t change a thing for Archon and just nerfed Voidweaver into the ground.
Their lack of communication, as the title of this post suggests, is deafening. We are still grappling with many of the same issues we gave feedback about during the Dragonflight beta, and here we are a whole expansion later with no acknowledgement to any of that feedback over the last two years.
As someone who has quite often talked about how I don’t like a spec’s design even when it’s doing well (this is something I’ve said about shadow repeatedly)…
Holy Priest is still pretty good? Its problems are mostly feelsbad things from the spec tree. But this is something that exists on several specs/classes in the game and are things that they’ve been reworking over time for different specs. I expect that they’ll be reducing the 2 pointers eventually. But if I’m being as objective as possible, it’s not something holy NEEDS.
The spec would be a great spec for content if it just got throughput buffs, too. And the healing playstyle has an obvious core gameplay loop that’s decently fun with holy word resets. There’s nothing really TERRIBLE about the spec design, it’s just not particularly strong in this patch. Though I do think Holy is a sleeper spec going into TWW.
In fact, I think Oracle as a hero spec fits really well with Holy’s playstyle, too. If anything is objectively bad about our hero talent design right now, it’s that Oracle doesn’t play nearly as well with Disc as it does for Holy, and Voidweaver being a mess for Shadow.
Priests were completely ignored the entire beta because Blizzard either 1) thought Priests were/are in a good state or 2) were pushing the update off to a later patch.
All they did was move a couple of end tree talents around which caused their own problems. They didn’t address the underlying issues of their being too many 2 point talents, 8 PoM talents, only 3 end tree talents, and its point expensive to get all your dps talents. There’s also mandatory talent issues like Divine Image and Answered Prayers (for raid). It’s either pick Divine Word or Lightweaver/Lightwell. That’s the only choice you have.
In a perfect world everything on the bottom of the tree should cost 1 point so we can get 10 talents instead of 6-7 currently.
Holy isn’t fine in its current state in TWW where you frontload a huge amount of healing into Archon Halo and then your own personal hps is half of the other healers for the remaining 45s.
Haha, that’s what people have been saying for so many expansions now. “Well, holy may not be exciting, but it’s functional.”
Or sometimes the “jack of all trades, master of none” line. Or sometimes we’ll defend the lack of attention by highlighting how accessible it is, as though any of the healers (bar disc in some respects) are all that complicated anymore.
You’re right though that they could tune things to shore up some of the pain points. Lack of DR could be addressed by tuning up PW:Shield some more. Lack of a brez could worked around more by playing with Spirit of Redemption as an active ability with a CD/combat rez or the like.
They probably could prune a few older abilities in the class and spec trees and add something flashier for filler. Maybe make Apotheosis even more core to the spec and have it grant a movement speed buff to address mobility, etc.
I guess the disappointing part is there just hasn’t been all that much innovation since the Legion redesign in 7.0. Holy still feels like a very Classic healer in a different modern WoW.
Holy (and priest overall I guess) is a bit egregious, but those 2 pointers are there for a reason to gate off choices. The classes that have a ton of 1 pointers at the bottom are GENERALLY pretty low value 1 pointers, or 2 pointers in disguise (Pally having multiple talents for getting full wings functionality, for example).
The sacrifice is always made somewhere. I think Shaman’s tree is pretty good where it is right now, but they’ve still got a lot of 2 point gates - and where they allow you to skip (for example, getting DRE) you’re going to take a 1 point talent that isn’t as good as the 2 point gates (imp. earthliving). It wouldn’t really BE a talent tree if you could always grab everything you wanted.
That said, what I think holy needs is a rework of the bottom tree to split out the capstones. I really don’t think there’s much sense to the choice nodes down there right now, and I think it’d be OK to split them apart and let you take multiple. But probably not give you DI + DW + Lightweaver, etc.
Also wish Resonant was a 1 pointer in place of Pontifex.
So yeah, we could use a rework, moving things around, fixing up that it’s a full wall of 2 pointers… But I don’t think we should be getting triple capstone with 1 pointers everywhere. I DO think it could be reduced and reworked, but I still think the gates are a bit necessary.
Sure, but I’d say it is pretty fun and exciting enough on its own. Like the design itself is great, it’s just in this weird balance point where they refuse to give it utility, but it doesn’t have quite the throughput to back that up, SEEMINGLY because of PvP since there’s really no PvE reason for them to not have one of em.
The only place the design is “stuck” is AoE burst. It’s really bad at that because PoH is very weak and expensive, and the only talents supporting it suck (contrast with Shaman Chain Heal, which ALSO is expensive and kinda sucks baseline, but has talents that make it cast-able and gives it even burst heal levels of healing).
Archon makes this less an issue with the Halo windows, and Oracle fixes that with piety right now. So I think the spec is in a pretty good place tools-wise. The actual theme and playstyle I’d even say is GOOD. I guess I’d like to see a couple talents mixed up, and like I said above, split up LW/Well and Restitution/DW.
Most specs that have 1-point talents also have 16-20 talents on the bottom of the tree which forces you to make conscious choices on where to spend your 10 points.
Filling our tree with mainly 2 point talents is due to Blizzard simply lacking creative ideas. Also, a lot of these 2 point talents really should be 1 point talents.
Voice of Harmony and Light of the Naaru should really just be a singular 2-point talent.
Answered Prayers is completely useless unless you have 2 points.
Say your Prayers should just go. Add another charge to PoM.
Epiphany should be 1 point because that better fits the RNG element of the talent.
Desperate Times is fine as 2 points.
Resonant Words should be 1 point.
Then you have our end tree talents.
Divine Image and Miracle Worker are 100% mandatory picks. Same with Holy Word Salvation and Answered Prayers for raid.
So literally the only choice you have on building a Holy build is 2 point in LOTN and Lightwell or 2 points in Epiphany/Desperate Times and Divine Word.
Even then Divine Word and Lightwell have very clunky usage in raid. Divine Word Sanctuary massively overheals and Lightwell requires the group to drop <50% hp to trigger. If the group is spread out then Divine Word Sanctuary is useless.