Ill try and remember that when Im getting roflpwnt by a frostmourne premade.
Nah, the reality is that this prepatch has broken more than it has fixed, which I 100% expected.
it really is OK its not the end of the world, i just wanted to get out there early with my criticism. And vent a lil.
Game is fine, poools open, and i can kill packs of mobs in the Nylotha assaults in holy spec, i was middle of the pack DPS in the few heroics i ran (i didn’t run mythics cuz i want all my new binds to be well) but i bet i will maybe even do decent dps there, closer in reality to disc, but not that crazy, i don’t mind… really.
I’m just passionate.
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Fair, there are a lot of games that achieve difficulty with extremely limited ability sets. WoW is unlikely to ever be one of those games. DOTA seemed a fair example, as it actually uses RPG mechanics and ability sets, and in its minute to minute gameplay is vastly more intricate and complex than WoW despite having only a tiny handful of buttons to press.
Unfortunately wrist and arm pain is a function of how active a game expects you to be, as opposed to just how many buttons there are to remember. Wildstar had a pretty simple interface but was an absolute wrist crippler as every basic mob fight was dance-dance-revolution. You could never stop moving. 18-24 year olds who don’t have this issue yet will find it catches them up quickly enough in their 30’s and 40’s.
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Good for you to be honest.
Shadow Word Death can be extremely useful to holy priests, at least in PVP. Ever heard of “deathing” a crowd-control ability?
Since the damage that SW:D does is reflected back unto you a second later if the target does not die from it, you can use SW:D to break out of a plethora of crowd-controls should you get the timing right. Honestly, it requires a good bit of skill to do so consistently, especially against opponents who try to fake you out, but it feels incredibly rewarding.
I know this is PVP oriented, but still, for my preferred area of gameplay I’m very happy to have it- And SW:P- returned for my holy spec.
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As a Holy Priest I second that. For me, this was an issue even before the pre-patch. But now the complexity just went through the roof and became unmanageable for most of my classes, with the Holy Priest being the most affected one. And while DHs continue to enjoy their simple rotation, Holy Priests are going to get roasted for not using the correct ability in the correct situation, because “if we have access to it, there is no excuse of not using it”.
I’ve reached a point where I found myself going to the extent of prioritising my talent choices as passive for the sole purpose to save some space on my action bars, even though some of those talents are clearly not aligning with the way I play, and that is even before reaching max level, and even then I still have like 8 abilities that I just can’t seem to figure out where to jam into, which really takes the incentive off leveling further when its evident that there is already too much complexity at the current level.
For each ability that was taken off GCD and could be combined into macros with GCD ones, a couple more were introduced. If there is one thing I miss about BFA is Blizzard not assuming that all of us are using a million of toolbar add-ons, and actually testing whether it is realistic and practical to use such humongous arsenal of abilities effectively, especially under demanding high pressure conditions such as Rated PvP or Mythic Raiding.
“Don’t fear the man who knows 1,000 techniques. But fear the man that has practiced one technique 1,000 times .” - Bruce Lee
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i feel like any removal of buttons for holy right now can only be stepping backwards, holy isnt very complex on a base lvl.
heres a beta screenshot of the binds i have: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/672304910708244515/765313434396000286/unknown.png
youll notice several macros of the same abilities all over the place, if ur raiding u need non of those and that frees up a ton of space. idk i recommend macroing dmg things together that helps, other than that you may just need to add and learn more binds. Holy is already on the low end of utility/ST hps, movement, defensives, id rather not lose absolutely anything, if its not replaced with someone, and that would only make binds stay the same not increase or decrease so youll have to add more.
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Prophet Velen: The light shall prevail!!! 111
SW:Pain, SW:Death on a crowd of unruly orcs.
MWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAA
Ahem. I am not sold. There’s alternatives to SW:D, Pain, mindblasts, sears, for holy. I really believe there is.
This made sense when the game was new. When we didn’t really know how to give priests a dps option and there wasn’t really a single spec, but 3 talent trees we could pick and chose from, and people would live in voidform.
The game and the lore is different now.
I’ll say this - if they want to make it impossible for holy priests to do “holy light damage” and give that to paladins. And bring back voidform as a baseline, and set all the kiddums straight so no one is DPSing and healing at the same time, I’m all for it.
Otherwise I would prefer some pruning of the holy spec and some combining of their powers and a simplification of their DPS to just priority targets or questing /leveling options. And be happy with mediocre dps from holy.
Scarlet Crusade was cool their holy spells hurttt tho. So I don’t see why we can’t go full on “Be redeeeemed by the light, whether you want it or not!!!” (except to mabye be PC or something)
@ the above poster: lolmynameis
Does holy really need like 6 damage spells tho???
give holy its 3 spells it can spam out during healing and help and defend itself from worldmobs that arent’ mega elites and we are OK
A dot, a single target nuke, and an AoE (cut the dmg in half of sear or something so we dont anger unskilled shadow priests who only know 1 button)…
Right now we don’t get extra utility we get… 5k (presquish) more dps on big packs of mobs by tossing out lots of SW:Pain on tab targetting, (low skill).
More utility would be a real genuine interupt or counterspell.
Or real CC that is useful to lock down say… that water elemental during the Shrine of Storm pull for later.
I did fix my binds by the way, I have like 6 empty buttons now, I sacrificed my pvp pots for my trinkets, i can swap those out with raid goodies later, but its an unnesseccary headache that could have been avoided.
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ill go ahead and explain the best way i know how from a pvp perspective.
The dot we need to get in combat quickly on our own, its instant ranged, keeps rogues from restealthing, can break mage out of theirs and does dmg to hunters under their turtle defensive
Shadow word death, breaks poly and other break on dmg CC, and can help with ur team getting a kill
Holy nova, helps get stealth classes out and helps kill mobs during lvling
Nuke, yes its nice to have a spell that hits alittle hard, but it also must have a CD cause of the very nature of it doing more damage which leads toooo
The constant spam “smite” which u use in the down time of your nuke CD
And chastise stun, is great utility pretty self explanatory to want a stun in your kit as you cross the map to fear a stunned target
let me know if i missed anything
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You’re right about needing a dot, and AoE, I agree about making rogues think twice before mashing vanish
the way CC works in pvp tho, they could just add a pvp talent to break sheep and it would be cool an normal, they already gave it diminishing returns and a kitted out character is barely phased by any incoming cc, plus the trinket or the talent, the way it looks they are going back towards having an actual trinket to break cc
SW:Pain still not the answer… holy fire could have been made into a quick dot on GCD.
Holy nova could have been made into a dmging only ability and it could have been made more on par with like ice nova, but a 'daze’chastize effect of like 1 second with a 2 second CD. idk, there’s so many different ways we could bake back in those kinds of abilities that mesh well in both pvp and pve
they cannot give only a pvp talent to replace death, holy already is fishing thru band aid fixes from its pvp talents to make it even playable in pvp, the loss of death would quite literally kill the spec.
people like to believe pvp talents are the option to all our problems, but for holy, their all that makes us viable and we have mandatory ones as a result that cant be replaced
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Around EP and before they really nerfed healing in arenas holy with artifice of time was GODLY in pvp lol… they overdid the nerf, but u could survive thru any cc with the right spells, a bubble, and renew or that instant single target heal we normally save for tanks getting chunked we use flash of light to refresh, it was gr8.
It did need to be nerfed, but now its just potatoes.
Then why not remove them? Also what if I’m not just raiding, but PvP as well? Do I have to setup a separate action bar for that? Because in 10 years that I play I never had to do that for any class or spec, but for SL Holy Priest the only real solution I’m seeing is that I will need 2 action bars and switch between them which is extremely impractical and something that I just will opt out of in favor of a less powerful but much more usable Disc, even though I prefer Holy.
Why? What’s the real value of the ability that you are not even putting on your action bar? For others to rub my face into, by saying that since I have that, I don’t need anything else, even though HW:P is essentially a duplicate of Holy Fire? In Classic WoW, there was a clear line between Healing and Shadow spells for a reason, having Holy Priests access to Mind Blast was just unthinkable. Not the case anymore apparently, its no longer Light and Shadow, its just … Twilight, no night or day, just like Shadowlands…
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as i said, cant look at pvp talents as an option for this stuff, if holy doesnt get some strong buffs (our legendaries/conduits suck atm for both pve and pvp) and we got no utility or other changes and no buffs to ST healing.
Ive pointed out how the 6 dmg abilities all have their use. Ur more than welcome to NoT use them tho, u can honestly just holy fire/smite and nova in open world and ur dps will probably be no different than other Hpriests with dot/death on bars, heck ull probably do better than them mana wise as well as those spells are not cheap atm
I don’t think blizz really cares about holys preformance in pvp and these extremely basic additions wont fix it 
you’ll get some help if ur at the top 1% of pvp players who kit out and focus only on pvp, but any serious pvp should consider disc…
btw i loved shadow/holy in pvp, in world pvp, in bgs, in the right scenarios it was fun, it was mediocre in arena and it was more a lulzy “U cant kill me spec” but it couldnt really kill the other team either and that was a huge shortfall when u faced two big tanks or like a resto druid who could do some decent dmg and out live u along with a nasty DK
anyway i’m bout out of this. I think we agree in princeiple that holly needed stuff and that it needs work especially if its to be considedered noteworthy in pvp rather than just a novelty, but there it is.
I’m roll holy for bgs and for raids, maybe for some easy early mythics come SL
but i think disc is were any serious priest is going to want to be ENDGAME in either pvp or pve and disc is getting the constant attention and tuning were as holy is just a pet RP spec… blue would love ur feedback on this 
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the reason u cant remove them from pvp is cause they actually have a use and its a skill to know when and where to use them. your comparing this to classic where classes had very little complexity and it was insanely ez to say oh X beats Y, its not like that anymore.
ill never understand how someone can look at holy right now as is and have checked all our changes/legendaries/conduits/soulbind abilities/covenant abilities and say yep lets remove more buttons from it? like what? were projected to be the worst off healer in SL as is and u want to pull that back further? by just pruning and not adding anything?
idk man you love classic, i here you, classic wow is right there and you can continue to play it my dude.
adding more buttons wont fix it but it’ll make it more classic lol
I swear to “ELUNE”?? (is that OK) its like dwarf fortress, just add some bone spikes, nope more adamantium spikes, SPIKES, lots of spikes!
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im so tempted to turn toxic and say please go play another game. i really dislike how you actively want to be mediocre in the spec you choose to play. ill never understand that mentality of not aiming for more out of what you can get.
idc that disc is ok, its not the playstyle i enjoy, holy is comfortable for me and id like it to not be the mediocre spec your comfortable having it be so you can do what content with? idk lfr? or heroic raiding progression 6months after its been out.
i have to apologize but comments like that which suggest its ok for the spec to just be lesser to disc infuriate me. as its not lesser to disc right now, infact its performing decently with the right build, pulling back on that so simplicity sake is a huge down turn.
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no, Lolmynameis, I want them to fix holy with holy spells and make it fun to play and less of a strange amalgamation aka nzothian abomination of spells from 3 different specs.
I do think 1 thing was good tho. The powerword:Shield that was a reall positive change we should share some disc like abilities and get at least 1 good absorb for ‘massive incoming dmg’ like ‘protect this person at all costs’ flavor
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well not exactly, classic wow had the same problem, especially those ability ranks which just put you in the impossible choice sometimes as lower ranks abilities were better than higher ranks in casting time or otherwise. My concern here is that I’m essentially forced to adapt to using too many abilities, and before you say I do not have to, is yes I do, because if its there and highlighted in my spellbook it looks like I’m lazy by not putting it into an action bar, while the reality is that there simply is no space for them there with the way and the muscle memory I have played since cataclysm.
If high end players like Mythic raiders or Rated PvPers want to be the masters of all, sure, make those extra abilities available as a part of a gear pieces or high level traits or something, but don’t force me to accomodate all of that when spamming mind blast on holy is just not something that I ever should have even have a choice of doing
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