Am I alone in saying these new talents bring with them too many buttons–button overload even. Disc is especially bad. I am more one to like passive abilities and talents, but if they are inferior choices, blah.
I mean, okay, I get it. Having more versatility for situations is a good thing. But at the same time, feeling overwhelmed is not exactly fun–and yeah, it gets easier with practice. That said, there is also something to be said about focusing on things like mechanics vs trying to get your head around which buttons to push when.
Some people have lives away from this game as well. All of the new buttons bring with them the endless need for research, study and thought. Not everyone has the luxury of having time in their lives to spare.
I actually have a free bind now. Didn’t take shackle, or holy nova, schism I use sometimes but not all. So that’s 3 freed up. I gained renew and PoM. I don’t use star, but if I did it’s still net zero. If you’re playing a dps heavy build with shadow cov, mind games, schism then you’re going to need to free something up but a shield build I am about the same. My C bind is about to free up because of ascended blast going away.
I’m feeling the same way and overwhelmed. I don’t have time to research all this new stuff and add all these new buttons (I’m a semi clicker). I just want to play my game and not think about it.
Hate to say this, but if you can’t handle playing a priest because of all the keybinds, maybe you should settle on a pure dps class that doesn’t have to worry about all the modifier keys to cast self heals while doing damage?
All this whining is what got classes pruned in previous expansions which caused many people to quit because the classes were one dimensional and boring. Heck, we already lost something this expansion I was 100% looking forward to using… Shadow mend!!!
The loss of Shadow mend is the only reason I will NOT play a holy priest. I was looking forward to mixing up some holy dps in pvp and relying on Shadow mend for some back up heals as necessary. That is no longer an option because of all the button bloat complainers.
Instead of blindly complaining about button bloat, try discussing what you think should be pruned. I’m dying to hear this.
Im a clicker/keyboard turner. I enjoyed then puzzle of working out what i was using where. Trick is to simplify it. People exagerate stuff. Work out what you will actually use and focus on that. ie i wont be using holy nova so i ignore it. I use decursive so that makes the dispels part easy. The most complex it got for me was finally using my alt keys for vuhdo. Otherwise its fine
Will give an example. In cata i was shadow for a bit as a main spec. I was chosen to do the alystrazor fight in the air flying through the rings as shadow. Im a clicker. Try flying while trying to dps while using the arrow keys and space bar to move… haha I had to do my first bind… mouse wheel scroll up mind flay, scroll down mind blast. Its still that to this day. As disc its penance scroll down and PTW scroll up. Been that way since then too. just simplify
Feel the same. I know pre-patch is pre-patch, but these changes are the most overwhelming I’ve seen since WoD, and they’re far more drastic than that.
I’m sure it’s me. I don’t love change IRL or in games and this is a lot. I could deal with it a lot better if I didn’t have too much going on in my actual life to re-learn WoW and priest from scratch which it feels like, but I’d deal with it better if it all felt elegantly designed and vastly improved.
To me, it doesn’t feel that. Holy priest isn’t vastly improved, it’s a lesser version of Shadowlands in too many ways that matter.
It isn’t elegantly designed either in my opinion: It looks like they took 2 decades of priest designs, shoved them in a blender, drank the contents of said blender and barfed up this bloated mess of too many abilities doing too many of the same things in a totally unintuitive and inelegant, situational way.
Far too much passive BS is going on vs. actual meaningful active choices, which has been a problem since Legion but now it’s more intrusively crazy than background noise.
I’m sure I’ll get over it (probably with time off) but right now I’ve been too shocked to deal with priest in either beta or pre-patch as it is.
I mean, that wasn’t even an example of pruning. Shadow Mend used to replace Flash Heal for disc, and now Flash Heal is back instead. Net change of zero spells. I mean we’re talking about specs that are bloating into like 60 different active abilities and worse in my opinion so many interlocking random nonsense going on in the background passively that it… doesn’t feel right.
Literally other specs are doing the same work, I’d argue even more work with like 40 keybinds and a handful of easily-tracked procs only. This is not elegant design they’ve handed us.
You can reduce the bloat by consolidating multiple talents into one, by turning multiple niche utilities into generally applicable utilities, by baking passives into something else, by having greater talents replace lesser talents entirely, etc. etc.
They took every half-baked thing that’s ever been in the priest class since 2004, invented a dozen new “why does this need to exist separately” buff talents to that already overly extensive list of like 8 different versions of the class and just called it a day when they ran out of time. This feels like the “put everything on the white board” stage of class design to me without the time given to consolidate and revise.
EDIT: (And I don’t want to sound so outraged… although it’s frustrating to me they basically told us they know it’s bloated but they just stopped making changes and stopped communicating - could be annoying if it has to wait til next expansion to see improvement that should’ve been done with a red magic marker over a weekend).
I like the choice nodes and I feel like they could have capitalized on that a bit more with distinct approaches to playstyle. Very difficult trying to weave a couple playstyles in with a single spec - but the issue here is the crossover that is needed to continue down a tree.
They really should not have had prerequisites to trees other than connecting nodes. As it stands, you are forced to dump points into nodes you may not want.
Looking at Shadow, it’s clear the left side of the tree favors the pet and channeling MF to empower dots and MFI yet we find a proc for Death getting the 150 benefit on that side while the right side has Damnation/Void torrent under the direct damage side.
Left is periodic damage focused, right is direct damage focused but we have a crossover that you need to dump points into to progress. This contributes to the clunk.
Centerline should have been choice nodes between those two styles starting with Flay/Spike as your filler builder. Needing to dump points into DD while making a channeling build is off putting, to say the least.
Then there’s stuff like Mindgames. It definitely hands out some damage but it doesn’t interact with our spells in any meaningful way so it’s relegated to “hey it’s off cooldown, hit it”. That’s an incredibly bad feedback loop. I understand its utility - especially in PvP but there’s other ways we could get that utility without needing to babysit a cooldown in PvE. “Keep it on cooldown” is very smooth brain gameplay since it offers little to no interaction with our other abilities and just adds to the bloat.
Well let’s hope that works out. When I was playing around with disc it felt like it needed a few more buttons. Buttons that actually did damage, felt like the spec had been wrapped in Nerf foam or something from what I remember it being
Yeah, there’s a lot of button bloat. It could be 200 required hotkeys and it could be learned. The issue is if that’s fun or not. I wouldn’t find it fun. I’d find it tedious. And the current state feels some what tedious for various specs.
The classes should be reimagined, and streamlined. The game had more subscribers when it was like that.
Okay, it might not technically be pruning, but it has a massive effect in PvP.
Disc and holy lose another school of magic to cast when countered. I was planning for Shadow Mend in my Dragonflight holy pvp dps build before it got removed. Now, I’m not bothering with holy because of that one change.
I mean… I have about as much hotkeys now that i did in wrath.
The only thing that maybe needs to be changed or updated is to redesign some skills to function in a help/harm form without the need of macros.
I would never play this game again if my class/specs core functionality is boiled down to 4 or 5 primary butttons and like 5 utilty buttons. Give me the power of control without going overboard and let an element of execution in playing matter.
I play both classic and retail. I have more buttons as SPriest in Retail than I do in Wrath by a mile. It’s not even close. Not by a longshot. I have 12 actions just mapped to my mouse in retail 6 buttons with 1 modifier. My keybinds also have modifier keys for more actions. That doesn’t count clicking things like mount, fort, Fleshcraft, etc. THEN on top of that I use Clique for party frame actions like heals, PI, etc AND harmful click binds for arena frames for silences, stuns, focus, etc.
I can play Wrath in my sleep with one hand. I love the expansion, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves, it’s smooth brain gameplay. Night/day difference in binds, rotation, etc. Definitely not the same by any metric. Not even remotely comparable.
Okay, another button bloat complainer who doesn’t give any advice on what he thinks should be done to reduce the bloat.
I’m also playing a spriest and have about 27 key binds but rarely use 2 or 3 of them (shackle undead, holy nova, dispel/purge). I’m not saying to prune those spells, but I’d like an option in the priest tree to avoid needing holy nova (or prayer of mending) in order to reach blessed recovery that I need in PvP.
And for godsakes, bring back Shadow Mend for holy and disc specs. It was an important shadow school of magic in PvP.
There are just as many priests around here that play disc that have been complaining on here about ability bloat. Disc has the same amount of buttons now than they did in wrath.
Regardless, Spriest in DF does not need more than 38 hotkeys and thats with considering rena targeting or edge case macros and even that is pushing it. If you think 38 is excessive then we dont have a conversation to be had.
Honestly it’s not bloat of spells period, it’s bloat of rotational spells. The way blizzard designed the talent trees active abilities are far stronger than passive talents on the tree, so the way you build shadow outside of some extreme cases is grab every active talent on the tree. This adds a load of buttons that effectively are just “Press on cooldown” and don’t really interact with the core rotation beyond that.
Shadow does not need to have Shadow Crash, Void Torrent, Mindgames, and Mindbender all at once, but it will do because they’re active spells and they’re better than every other option.
I’d like to see some real active vs passive choices when it comes to building a rotation, and spells like mindgames to be moved more towards a “niche but interesting” role instead of press on cd to do more dam.
This is of course ignoring the return of Mind Spike, a spell which intends to replace flay in the rotation, but doesn’t because of other talents that interact with flay but not spike, and instead lead you to use both on single target on top of all the other active buttons already mentioned.
