Shadow Word: Death backlash damage is defaulted to be 8% of your max health if you do not kill the target but can be reduced to 4% with Tithe Evasion.
I find it both funny and tragic that people expected anything more than the bear minimum from Blizzard for this class.
Priest continues to be the most outdated class with little to no real end in sight. The only time we actually got something interesting was in Legion and that was only because of who Xal’atath is as oppose to the class itself.
1 Like
I expected Cascade to come back, maybe even to be the main focus of Archon. There was a hint in the previous build as one of the talents that said “When you cast Halo, you also cast Cascade.”
I just wanted something fun to shake up this spec a bit. Didn’t have to be something chaotic and completely game-changing, but as “baby’s first heal spec”, as Blizzard likes to call/treat it, I wish they would’ve gone the extra mile. Especially considering our only other option is whatever the hell Oracle is supposed to be.
Turning Apotheosis/Holy Word: Salvation into a cool new transformation (Which is what the tree implies) would’ve been neat. 
1 Like
Priest feedback on Oracle: “Power Infusion is a headache of a spell which at best requires out-of-game context and addons to use to full ability and at worst often incites toxic behavior in DPS. The slot machine implementation of premonition is clunky and painful, and several of the premoniton ‘buffs’ are terrible but non-intuitively so. Finally, you don’t seem to have accommodated enough for the ability to tune the effects on the external player versus the effect on the casting priest sufficiently.”
Blizzard: “So we heard loud and clear with Oracle that players hate support specs and do not want another…”
WRONG. MESSAGE. RECEIVED.
1 Like
Current shadow sucks big ole hairy bawlz. I quit playing it altogether with the latest rework. Shadow and Void should be separated into 2 specs. The only argument I’ve ever heard against it that makes sense is “blizzard can’t even get 1 shadow spec right why would we ask them to attempt 2” besides that 1 reason there is absolutely no reason they couldn’t or shouldn’t. The spec feels Garbo to play unless you really enjoy being trained the whole game/match.
3 Likes
Yes, that is bad game design for PVP, I am aware of how it works. A important tool for insanity generation should not hit ourselves for more then the enemy.
That’s just the trade off I suppose.
I rather have access to the backlash damage from Shadow Word: Death at any point in time as was the case when it made its debut in BC as that is a very good tool to avoid CC that breaks on damage.
Honestly, Shadow Word: Death generating insanity is just not needed imo and actually detracts from our overall insanity (resource) system generation from other abilities.
I would rather we build insanity in chunks instead of trickles with our rotational spells.
But in the case of Shadow Word: Death, perhaps only generate insanity when the target is <=20% health so you get the full damage effect and a chunk of insanity which feeds into more Burst with higher uptime on Devouring Plague.
Basically mimic Warlords of Draenor functionality a bit.
I think baseline only rotational spells like Mind Blast grants a good chunk of insanity with Shadow Word Death: Death granting a good chuck of insanity at that 20% and below threshold.
Then with talents you can supplement additional insanity from abilities like…
- Mind Flay
- Mind Spike
- Vampiric Touch
- Shadowy Apparitions
- Void Torrent
It’s funny, you have Warlocks with Soul shards that can passively generate a few outside of combat so you are always ready to start the fight with cooldowns going. Same can be said about mages and more so with Sunfury as well as combo point and energy/focus classes.
I dunno, I think the Shadow Orb resource system worked well. Only issue was starting a fight with zero orbs. But if we started out with 3 orbs and had 5 total. It would work out great imo.
there are a bunch of arguments about this.
How can you split these two specs up when they both, void and shadow, use majority of the same spells.
SWP
SWD
Mind blast
mind flay
every priest spell pretty much
VOid only has a VERY VERY small number of spells.
The end of legion strips it into a inferior form.
BFA was potato.
Shadowlands pretty much made void side irrelevant but still forced insanity and void form down your throat when they should have just removed it altogether. Or redesign it completely. Make Void something new.
We no longer need void eruption nor void form.
But what we could have gotten was nice void spells that could have paired nicely with our shadow theme.
Oh man.
In BGs Cascade was totally baked.
SPriests routinely would ask, “Sorry, did I kill you on accident?” as their damage meters soared.
So, if its making a comeback, then it’ll be all about the tuning numbers. Time will tell.
cascade would have looked cooler than halo for sure. more fun.
I think the issue with cascade is performance and it also had issues in the past with jumping onto pets and summons. That doesn’t mean it’ll still show up on the alpha/beta though.
I’m still fingers crossed there’s going to be some talent tree revamps in general.
Is there any actual positive feedback on Oracle? Just from the looks of it no one likes it, which is understandable because it’s just micromanaging a bunch of passives and doesn’t play into class fantasy at all. When I think of a priest I don’t imagine a fortune teller or fatescriber, those feel more like a shaman
This can assist in widening the talk about Oracle and its connection to Priest.
https://www.thecollector.com/oracle-of-delphi/
I said a few things regarding it here…
Except the Oracle of Delphi doesn’t fit how WoW portrays priests. In that the Oracle is a diviner who prophecies events, the closest thing to that in WoW would probably be Zul who held the title Prophet but was not a priest. Putting into that sense they need to make a new class called Diviner or Prophet and give them the hero class Oracle.
I have more constructive criticism than positive/negative.
Archon (for example) on Holy more or less helps address several of the spec issues in M+ (lack of spread healing + passive AOE healing) and makes Halo a strong AOE heal for raid. Passively it provides a lot better bonuses than Oracle.
Oracle just feels a bit directionless in comparison. For example… you can use Premonition to give a +25% healing bonus to a single target for 10s while Halo on Archon is +10% healing increase to an unlimited amount of targets for 15s. I guess you can see where I’m going…
Oracle is mainly just passive stat bonuses (bonuses to PoM, Renew, etc) without really providing you much utility other than a 1 minute pick-and-choose ability. Archon in comparison is more active bonuses where your Surge of Lights are stronger and you have to use Halo on cd to min-max it. You also get longer duration Apotheosis which is way more powerful than any of the passive bonuses from Oracle.
They just need to take Premonition back to the drawing board. Make it more group utility focused, beef up the passive bonuses, and make it fun.
1 Like
When you read the description of Oracle in the game
Oracle Description…
Gain insight into the future and use it to protect and empower your allies. Future sight grants the Priest the ability to grant multiple different and unique beneficial effects to their allies.
Then some of the Oracle talent names…
- Premonition
- Preventative Measures
- Preemptive Care
- Waste No Time
- Prompt Deliverance
- Foreseen Circumstances
- Grand Reveal
- Perfect Vision
- Fatebender
- Clairvoyance
You can clearly pick up the idea in the language used that you are getting knowledge from the future and you will apply that accordingly to you and your group in order to prevent some manner of failure.
So the opening paragraph that describes the Oracle Priest with that Delphi link is as follows…
What exactly is an oracle? Or, more specifically, what was an oracle in an ancient Greek context? The communication of divine knowledge from god to mortal, also known as divination, played a major role in ancient Greek religion. Divination took many forms, from the study of sacrificial entrails to the interpretation of the flight of birds. But perhaps the most important form of divination was the practice of consultation of a god through an intermediary. This intermediary was known as an oracle.
What I can clearly see is that the Priest is used as a conduit to take “divination” of what will or should happen and act/prepare accordingly.
Basically I see the Oracle as a step in for some ruler that claims they know the word of a god and say that the god entity has spoken to them and that the people must obey the word of god even though he can very likely be a fraud, a charlatan that only claims things they know but in reality they know not.
But in the case with Priest in WoW with its fantasy element, the Oracle Priest actually knows what’s about to happen be it from an unknown power or connecting to a higher being of an entity that communicates to the Oracle what will happen and as such is called a “Divination” as it is from a “Divine” source of knowledge you can tap into and act accordingly.
So I very much see the connection.
Also, if you want to get technical, you can find Oracle Naga in the game. But they just do some healing stuff with water based spells that could seem more Shaman-like but clearly that is not the direction the devs took when creating the Oracle Talent tree and its names and description. So what the wow devs made thus far connects more so OUTSIDE of wow in real life examples and less so with what has already been established within wow.
That may also be a reason why its not looking like a great talent tree as its solely new without much to pull from within game.
Where as you look at the Warrior and Mage and those have decades worth of material to draw from that is not just within WoW but those are very common archetypes throughout gaming as a whole and so its much easier to create a core element to build from which is no surprises that they have good rounded base and spec talent trees as well as the Hero Talent trees being good and interesting.