Well tbh without seeing class tree revamps we’re in the dark of how Holy is going to even play next expansion. This is why I’m not really getting too invested in making suggestions outside of the hero talent tree stuff. The hero talent trees are a small slice out of the bigger picture.
Halo is just a boring button to press like you said. You press it do raid wide healing and I usually combo’d it with Holy Nova Rhapsody. Divine Star used to be good, but then it got nerfed so much that Halo is just better.
Ultimately at the end of the day its up to the class designers on how they want to design stuff. I list out all the problems and if they want to fix the issues: that’s entirely on them.
Overall in my opinion I would say Holy was more enjoyable to play this expansion then the last two expansions despite the rollercoaster fest of nerfs and unnerfs a few weeks later. BFA was probably the worst state for Holy in M+… like it’s hard to describe how neutered you were then vs Holy now
I currently also use Halo now in DF.
Half because I want more AOE and half because I am getting used to using it now.
But regardless, I never made a point about it being an extra button. This is not concerning me.
The bit about PoM… I assume you mean Prayer of Mending? Well sure that could work for Holy… what about shadow?
I made the suggestion earlier of triggering Halo upon Holy Word: Serenity for Holy and Shadow Word: Death for Shadow.
I chose those spells because they are both word spells so they have that common link and they are both single target spells and instant cast spells.
Perhaps moving to Prayer of Mending could work for Holy… but honestly that is not my primary concern nor is it my experience and expertise regarding Holy. So I’ll let those who play Holy speak on that manner.
I was just making a separate point that Holy is already button bloated as is and Blizzard should at least remove abilities that functionally serve no purpose.
Example #1: why do we have Flash Heal and Heal when everyone just uses Flash Heal?
Example #2: why do we have Prayer of Healing if its so weak that its useless in M+ and is not that powerful in raid? circle of healing w/ healing chorus does way more healing.
Example #3: rhapsody holy nova is an extra button on the bar.
I just figured PoM would be a decent fit since it’s instant cast and does a similar thing which is AoE or spread healing. I wouldn’t mind Cascade being an active button on its own, but if they had to bake it into something I feel PoM does make sense. There could be better choices.
For Shadow Priest, if Archon’s main spell was Cascade, I’d bake it into another AoE spell rather than SW: Death. I like your idea of them being word spells thematically, but I would prefer to press an AoE ability to activate Cascade which does AoE damage. Shadow Priests have pretty weird AoE as it is since Mind Sear was removed from the spec and many people hate Shadow Crash due to how slow it moves. I wouldn’t want to make their AoE more complex.
If anything, for Shadow, I’d rework Shadow Crash into a better ability generally and then it might be a decent Cascade hero talent passive spell. I mean reworking Shadow Crash even to the point of changing its name. It’s an awkward, ground targeted, slow moving DoT spreader ability. Cool ability conceptually but feels strange to use in the fast-paced game we have today.
Back in BFA you had to manually tab target everything, and VT them before unleashing your ghost army (your primary cleave was Shadowy Apparitions). You kept refreshing your dots infinitely after because you could basically sit in Void Form forever since it was an energy bar back then.
They killed that playstyle in Shadowlands and gave everyone basically 0-60 upfront bursty AOE dps. Enter in the Mindsear clunky gameplay because tab dotting was out of the question since you’d be -50% behind every other dps. Not really much to say on Mind Sear. I didn’t like it: some people did.
Come DF after the Shadow Revamp they added in Shadow Crash and Psychic Link cleave which is a lot closer to how it was in BFA. There’s no difference between your single target and AOE rotation outside of using Shadow Crash. Compared to other casters I’ve played (Mage+Lock), Shadow has the easiest AOE dps rotation.
Just in terms of overall AOE performance in raid: Shadows been pretty bad. In M+ Shadow is constantly flip flopping between meta FOTM status and not being played.
Shadow’s just been a weird experience this expansion.
Oh yeah when I said complex, I didn’t mean difficult to execute necessarily. I just meant over-designing Shadow’s AoE to be so different from everyone else to a point where they keep going back and forth design-wise on things like you said. Though, I’m not mad at Blizzard for trying new things, so I have to praise them for trying.
I actually really love Psychic Link and feel it makes a lot of sense thematically. I also didn’t love or hate Mind Sear either, I just know many other players felt pretty strongly about it. I can only cross my fingers that the classes in TWW start to find solid ground that everyone enjoys. Mid-expansion reworks are nice but boy are they jarring.
That’s because they’re making the betas shorter and treating the game more like a live service where they push features and changes that’d normally be there at launch into subsequent patches.
This beta might only be 2-3 months long if were getting a late August-September release.
Yep. I remember the days when classes were the same the entire expansion nearly, with tuning here and there of course lol. Class reworks big or small were practically new expansion features.
Give and take I guess. Longer cycles between new content with more quality assurance, or faster content cycles with more bugs and design flaws. /sigh Wish we could have the best of both worlds, but it doesn’t seem to be in the cards. (Hire more people Blizz <3)
I’m fine with classes being continuously revamped mid expansion. The biggest issue has been on the M+ side of things where 9 out of 10 times the revamped spec is overperforming and ends up being the new fotm. Too many hard metas this season, especially on the tank/healer side, and Blizzard is way too slow with addressing them.
Prime example is VDHs being 85%+ of the tanks doing anything on a +15 or higher for weeks now.
Yeah, you’re not wrong. Many reworked specs/classes massively overshadow everything else for sure. Then the neglected specs are just left feeling even more terrible (Shaman players lol). Looking at M+ numbers/population and seeing how many Ret Paladins are being played is crazy. It must suck being a Ret main and having a harder time getting into groups due to the FOTM people lol. I laugh but it’s kinda sad!
Cascade, when we had it, was frankly also just a button to press, with the slight mini game of making sure your initial target was far away from you.
Whether the visual is more compelling for you than Halo, is entirely subjective. (The biggest disappointment for me with Archon isn’t the functionality, but that the visual isn’t anything new – it’s just more Halos). Archon could be built around either and not functionally be all that different. Cascade hasn’t been in the toolkit for a while though so I’m sure they largely went with Halo because it’s there in the active code.
I would have loved to see Archon be an enhanced Apotheosis / Dark Ascension on a 1 min cooldown (put in league with Avenging Wrath) but they didn’t go that way. Alas.
I mean I think this exists for the entirety of the Priest class and its specs.
Which makes me very surprised that the only changes we are seeing on the Alpha/Beta of TWW is number adjustments and slight changes to a very small handful of spells and talents across all 3 specs…
Like I would expect some major overhauls that you can see the other class/specs are getting.
The idea of them fiddling with Shadow Crash and this new Void crash alone is so frustrating as if you going to keep Shadow crash… then offer a completely different ability other than Shadow Crash “lite” in the form of Void Crash. Unholy Nova, Dark Void and Cascade are all spells that could easily be offered as a choice with Shadow Crash that actually changes how you play to an interesting degree… not just make one Area target vs selected target… such a half thought pathetic waste of time.
This is my biggest problem too, I mentioned it in my writeup but the problem with Archon is that from a flavour perspective it tells but does not show.
“Become and empowered version of yourself” is the tagline but there’s no visuals indicating anything empowered is going on.
The combined thoughts of myself and other members of the Priest Theory team have already been compiled and explained in thorough detail over on The Offcial WoW Forums, however these are my three main takeaways after having seen and played the Archon Hero Talent Tree in The War Within.