The Silence is deafening: Priest talent tree revamp

Classes Priest
21

I’d say column A column B.

Turning these down to 1 pointers (without just reducing them by half effectiveness - which would make them terrible) and putting a bunch more throughput points in the tree would just be strictly a buff to Holy priest healing. That’s something they’ve just been reluctant to do in general, lol.

I don’t know how you’d reduce all of these to 1 point talents and then create several more 1 point talents without increasing overall HPS by a significant margin. Regardless of if they’re imaginative enough to come up with ‘talent ideas.’ Which I’d guess they are - It’s very easy to be an idea man, it’s not easy to be an idea man while keeping playstyle and balance in check and then implementing.

And the only talent trees that do this are very much gating off playstyles, in a way. In Paladin almost the whole tree is 1 pointers, but half of it supports “caster” pally, which nobody’s really taking unless they want to opt into that. Monk’s got the whole jadefire side split up with a SooMi build that nobody plays (and worked to fistweaver’s detriment in raid).

But you look at the classes that aren’t doing that (or the playstyles are more differentiating raid from dungeon), the trees are very much intentionally gating off healing boosts from too many being taken at once.

Again, I think holy should have more pathing options, and I especially think it’s weird that we have choice capstones - they should be split and allowed to take both on each side - but I just wholly disagree that it should look anything like Paladin’s. We don’t have a weird split toolkit like they do.

I’d expect our tree to look more like shaman - which is a spec I think talents feel really good for still - paths where you can take a single point down to a capstone, but that single point is worth less than the 2 pointers to make up for the extra capstone you’re taking, etc. And ideally, just move options around so the single target and AoE talents aren’t all clustered around the spec in a weird way.

22

DRE is really bad numerically. It does roughly 2% extra healing in breakdown after you remove the contribution from Ascendance. Wellspring(if you like an extra button) and Tidewaters(if you don’t like extra buttons) are the ones you should be taking, because both of them are easily 5% or more healing as one pointers.

It’s not even comparable tbh, Chain Heal is in the ballpark of 4-5 times stronger than PoH even if you are not casting it with High Tide or Unleash Life, and it only costs ~1.5 times PoH’s mana cost.

Having 5 capstones to choose 3-4 out of would be interesting, I really like to pick Restitution but it generally feels bad because I have to drop Lightwell or Divine Word for it.

1 Like
23

The point was the pathing option, not how strong it is. Also DRE is an infinitely scaling talent based on RNG. That’s typically really bad for healers, but it doesn’t stop people from playing it and getting blessed RNG logs. Ele logs are hilarious for this.

I was talking raw healing. Without bounce falloff/ancestral reach/deluge/etc, etc. You’re looking at raw 660 sp spread to 5 (PoH) vs raw ~630? sp spread to 4 (chain). Chain heal’s difference being it’s focused into first target. But Chain heal has a LOT of talent support.

Yeah, especially considering well and restitution aren’t like giant increases. I think getting the option of more - and creating more paths towards them would feel way better.

24

You know what would be a really cool thing to do but totally near impossible to actually make it both feasible to implement in addition to balancing it would be to make it so when you use Spirit of Redemption be it passively when you die or actively in PvP that you become a beacon for your Allie’s to resurrect themselves.

I think of Eonar in the Argus fight where you can resurrect yourself when you die by going into her green vine magic thing.

But that would only work if when you die, you spawn at a currently active Spirit of Redemption… but as a ghost obviously.

So they would have to change the code so if a Spirit of Redemption was currently active when you die, your ghost spawns at it instead of the default location.

Then for balancing purposes, not sure if it’s possible or what route to take.

But for the shear fantasy of it, it would be interesting.

Edit:

Just thought of another interesting idea for possibly Shadow only and that is you can resurrect yourself if you die by possessing an enemy. But again, this would only work if you release and spawn nearby as a Ghost.

This is a callback to WC3 Banshees that can take over an enemy unit but the Banshee essentially dies as you loose it to gain a possessed enemy unit.

In PvP, perhaps you can possess an enemy player and for like let’s say 10 seconds you are fighting with the player for control over their body.

Perhaps you play a mini game where you have to hit directional keys in the correct order for X duration and if you are successful, you would just spawn with full life at their current location ready to go. If you fail, you just go to the graveyard.

So it would be similar to Shamans Ankh but with extra steps lol.

They at least sound like something fun and quirky to do, but they are both very much impractical. Be better suited for a more single player game.

2 Likes
25

Is the title supposed to be a pun because Silence is a (Shadow) Priest spell? XD

1 Like
26

Theres no room for mirth or joy in the priest forums! our class is BAD haven’t you heard? /s

27

And of course an interrupt. Or at least better than average ranged (reliable) AoE CC. Not having either, on top of not having a brez or lust, puts the spec at the mercy of other classes to carry it in a uniquely uncomfortable way and it’s especially bad in the PuG scene, of course to lack such tools.

28

manna regeneration is complete crap as well along with the cheat death being isolated away from the entirety of the output talents in the talent tree making you extremely weak to run it.

Everything about holy is lackluster to be honest other than the fact that serenity is a big heal.

if they would just unscrew the talent tree bottom 2 point nodes everything would be so much better.

1 Like
29

Right but these aren’t spec issues. These are priest things, not holy priest things, and they’ve been talked about to death. They’re very intentionally not adding these utilities to the class at this point and the only real explanation is PvP, because Disc/Holy are always breaking into the top 3 there unless they’re horribly undertuned in each patch.

30

Compared to mistweavers and resto shamans, Holy is an afterthought other than in very specific arena comps. Disc is a little more balanced out. but even disc and mistweavers who I dub the “soak healers” are becoming a dying breed as all that passive obsorb for disc and stacking of hots and passive healing from soothing mist with mistweaver are becoming a thing of the past as the pvp meta continually and rapidly shifts to even more spam cc instant burst caster call of duty style instant death horse crap. Though mistweaver and disc put up great numbers, it is only because they are soaking all the micro damage. They really aren’t doing much against the huge burst dps aside from padding heal numbers trying to keep themselves alive while their entire team gets blown up around them in battle grounds.

The fact is healers are an afterthought. people complain about healers doing 100m healing while the combined dps output in a bg is well over 500m damage and the bulk of that healing you see the healer doing is focused on themselves as healers are so absurdly squishy that they have to spam heal themselves. they have been reduced to tanks in pvp for the most part.

1 Like
31

This has not always been true.

Holy has broken into the meta a decent number of times. Disc stays there the majority of the time but therein lies the problem with strong PvP utility - the two specs share a class tree. Giving access to CC/interrupt in the class tree would give it to both and it SEEMS Blizz is totally against that. Is this a good thing? Lol no, definitely not. I’d way rather Blizz expand the PvP talent system and allow utilities like this to exist in PvE. I think everyone has always hated that Blizz does this to classes. PvPers hate it when things are done to fix up PvE problems that ruin PvP utility, too.

Disc has double pain supp, barrier, solace now and the absorbs are gigantic going into tww. And Leap of Faith/Vault have always been good, and feathers/body and soul are WAY more valuable in PvP where sight lines are more important than moving out of an area quickly, etc, etc. It’s a totally different game that’s sharing the same talent systems.

This all sucks, but again I struggle to call it a holy priest issue. The discussion I was responding to was specifically about holy priest design flaws. I think holy priest’s design is actually pretty good where it is. Minor changes to the tree would fix a lot of gripes. The class issues and Blizz’s insistence on priests not getting utility because of other game facets are something we share with a ton of classes and are overall balance philosophy issues.

1 Like
32

drustvar. com/leaderboard/stats/us/3v3?top=100

“Always top 3 healers”

S4 = second lowest represented class, with a combined 10% of representation between two healing specs. Only above resto sham in NA, similar representation in EU.

Please stop trying to pin priest’s issues on some mythical pvp balancing, there’s very VERY little over the course of wow’s timeline where something pvp related has been a massive detriment to pve.

PVE class design has always come first, and is almost exclusively the root cause of priest’s being in bad shape because PVE is what they build classes around with pvp being a very minor aspect of design choice for the cores of classes.

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33

I can agree with all of that 100%.

The sad part is that it wouldn’t take much to fix some of these issues. it’s the blatant refusal to so so and the silence coming out of them in regards to these things that is so frustrating. Even more so than the issues themselves. It makes the devs look like it is malicious. A spit in the face. regardless of how many people gripe. It’s “they reinvented the game and you will play it the way they want you to or get shunned entirely” Even though we are the customer, we pay the payroll, and many of us have been around here over a decade longer than these narcissistic devs have been. We know what is needed more than they do and we pay the bills so listening to us should be the priority. Not stroking their own egos as they double down on cognitive dissonance.

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34

You shouldn’t take every statement literally. Priest is QUITE OFTEN in the top 3. Taking specifically season 4 3v3 Arena is disingenuous. If I linked the same data and went to 2v2 top 100 suddenly Holy priest is third for the healers. That’s super sick, huh? I wouldn’t use that to justify an argument.

What I’m saying is if you go through season to season you’ll see priest in top 3 quite often. Blizz seems super wary of this, because the class tree legitimately just straight up lacks all kinds of utility every other class gets. They even shoved interrupt and survivability utility into Shadow’s tree in order to not allow the healers to get it. No other class has anything like this, and Priest hasn’t been meta M+ often at all. They got like 1 season there, which is where all these utilities would actually come into play. Nobody was using Shining force in raid.

Didn’t we literally get the explanation that shining force was removed for pvp? It’s not just super imagining things. There’s actually near-zero reason Priest couldn’t get these utilities in PvE. The healers are EASILY the worst specs in the game for dungeon utility - and their raid utility is basically fort and MD, something usually the Spriests do anyway.

35

I’d have less issue with mobility related stuff if they stopped designing fights with push backs and roots that require externals from others to actually do the fights.

2 Likes
36

Yeah agreed. They keep giving us PvE fights where quick mobility is king, and feather isn’t nearly enough for.

2 Likes
37

It’s because feather was never designed for us. it was designed for EVERYONE ELSE. And they are sticking with that. Just like symbol of hope was never designed to give us manna back or any meaningful cooldown reduction. It was designed to give a little bit of both to “EVERYONE ELSE”

So we are gated to near worthless in those regards for the sake of propping up others that already have way better at those things than we do. We are the buff and then die class.

2 Likes
38

I don’t disagree that both specs should have this utility, but it is probably even more unforgiveable for the more pure healing spec to lack basic utility than it is for the hybrid spec. They seem to have thrown up their hands and tossed a bunch of DPS at hpriest late in the day for lack of anything better to do.

Although to be honest they seem to have also lost the plot on disc balancing and design in DF so I’m not so sure what to classify the spec as, or if they even acknowledge the concept of a hybrid healer anymore. Or really, if there’s even a priest class designer for that matter! :slight_smile:

39

Priests aren’t exactly slow though. Between feathers and body & soul you can cover some distance and avoid most mechanics.

With Oracle… using PoM will make a PWS that triggers body & soul as well so you have triple movement speed things.

40

Disc design’s great for raid still - would expect it to be meta. It’s M+ they’re suffering. Tale as old as time.

1 Like