You’re the guy who keeps complaining about how this change will affect PvP. I wonder how much quality PvP you’ve done on the PTR.
priest can’t tank. but can do dps or heal. neither of the of the spec. go shadow or holy.
Aren’t you the one complaining priests couldn’t get into 12s at the beginning of release? Careful how hot and heavy you fire off those nerf requests - Blizz has a long tested and true history of nerfing a class out of existence.
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I’ve tested the changes on the PTR and QOL wise Disc is coming out a lot stronger. The major nerf is that you can’t blanket spam PWS on the entire group for every boss mechanic anymore. This pushes Disc out of the S-tier mandatory category if you want to time bigger and bigger keys. They can balance this out by making the bosses less burst AOE damage and more RoT auras.
They also hit Resto Shamans with nerfs and this coming dungeon rotation is far less dispel heavy then this one. The main issue with this season is every single dungeon has some kind of cleanse.
I honestly have no idea what healers going to be “meta” this coming season. It could be Holy or it could be Disc if there’s a lot of mind soothes.
Rapture is my favorite CD, truly disappointed with this change.
How much faith do you have that Blizzard will actually do this?
Who knows. The biggest wall in timing bigger keys becomes survivability more then anything which is why you see all these comps stacked to the roof with group DRs and damage mitigation. They also hit Augs with nerfs as well so Ebon Might doesn’t work on the tank/healer anymore.
When you take an Aug, Mage, and Disc Priest together you have the wombo combo of every group DR effect. Every single boss mechanic can be mitigated by -20% or more.
It’s been like this since the mage rework + aug addition in the middle of DF S2. Before that we didn’t see comps running around with these group DRs.
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I’m always going to root for bubble priest.
Actually I think moving away from a spell that takes 3-5 gcds to be useful is a good idea and am happy to see rapture go.
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Depends on where you’re playing really. For me, rapture was a button to hit between rifts/benders in m+ and for tank healing. I found it exceptionally valuable. However, I don’t like that it makes for some stupid long ramps in raids so while I found it useful in m+, I too don’t like it taking 3-5 gcds to be useful in a raid setting at least (not sure on pvp). Really I find the ramping on disc in raid excessive to put it mildly.
edit: it’s what 19 buttons for the ramp with rapture/evangelism on wowhead though you could argue some of the last 4 are just doing your normal dps rotation. Still, you’ve gotta do it right after the ramp or you don’t heal so I guess it’s okay to consider it part of the ramp. Removing rapture I’m not exactly sure will shorten it much, but I haven’t looked into what a post rapture ramp looks like exactly outside of just the standard evangelism one.
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It has its moments, sure. That said whether it is or isnt in the game hardly “destroys and guts the spec” in any content, as the OP claims.
I spoke up because this mentality is so tiresome, and when every change is a “guttoral hemorhage, slap in the face, obliteration, loss of identity, fantasy destruction, absolutely devastating fiasco” we can’t have any actual meaninfgul discussions.
Ive never truly disliked the ability, but its definately cumbersome, so i welcome a different aproach.
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It kinda does in PvP - You can’t interrupt an instant cast, and having 5 instant casts that give huge shielding that can be used any time you want over a long period is just obviously extremely good in PvP.
So disc is losing a thing that is basically its strongest healing tool in PvP in exchange for extra penance bolts that can be kicked - I get why it feels like the spec is just going to die there.
In all other content, it doesn’t really ultimately matter as much as people are making it out.
This doesn’t make sense, it’s useful as soon as you press it. It’s an instant massive shield followed by three more instant massive shields. It’s not Atonement, that needs 3-15 GCDs to start healing at full power.
Removing Rapture feels like a spiteful move on Blizzard’s part because it is good and they want to nerf Disc.
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You’re being delusional, disc priest has none CD’s to compensate the lack of rapture, evangelism is a extender on atonement gives no healing increase, and the “buff” healing a bit is nowhere near as strong rapture is atm.
And rapture can be seeing like a spot heal, the most inefficient role that a disc has besides a double harsh discipline single target penance, and this is on a double radiance cd.
Our spot heal is nerfed, our dmg is nerfed, our capability to cast shield is being nerfed, and we’re not getting any in return, just pruned stuff.
And to be fair, the differences between PVP and PVE should be higher, PVErs being punished cause it’s op on PVP is just pure BS, like the nerf on mass dispel
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Evangelism isn’t bad, but it’s also not great. It is good in that it’s an instant heal to all your targets with atonement so you can funnel 5-6 mil healing into 1-2 people if you really wanted. You also have easier access to Uppies, but it’s on a 4 minute cd.
Rapture wasn’t healthy for the M+ scene because Disc was the only healer ingame that could mitigate 1.5-2mil+ damage to the entire group which made them meta. Even without Rapture you could reset PWS in 2-3 casts of Flash Heal or Renew and still PWS people. I was doing this in +14s as Disc and it’s not really until you hit +15s that stuff one shots.
This is more of a problem with the damage patterns in M+ rotating between bosses with rot auras and those that do nothing but hit the group for a lot of damage. You eventually run into a survivability wall where classes don’t have enough cooldowns to survive the hits. This is where Mage, Aug, and Disc fit in…
For what Disc lost though we’ve gained a lot. They’ve tuned our healing/damage to not require even having Mindbender anymore.
I think Disc will still be solid next season, but it’s not going to be uber fotm op. Resto Shamans shouldn’t be fotm again due to the nerfs they got and the new season is not as dispel heavy.
Holy Priest may become the new fotm, but that’s still up in the air. It’d probably be Holy Paladins if anything.
Honestly, it just feels like Blizzard has a lot of darlings when it comes to priest that they just refuse to kill no matter how terrible the design or strength is.
Uppies is bad, so nobody takes it for over a year. What’s their solution? Not to solve the problems with uppies, but to remove useful abilities and force you to take a somehow worse version of uppies instead.
Evangelism is only used in raid, so they add a heal to it to make it useful in 5-man content. Except the heal is pathetic unless you deliberately do not heal half of your group for at least 8-9 seconds to make the heal good enough.
Twilight Equilibrium is a cool concept, but is utterly useless in practice because voidweaver does all of its healing using shadow and can’t benefit from it and oracle gets far more value from other talents because simply casting another Smite is better than wasting a GCD getting the pathetic application damage from SWD for +15% more Smite damage.
PWL is cool, but it’s a terrible capstone. Benevolence is added and is essentially just nerfing yourself by 3% if you don’t take it. But they refuse to remove it, or even revise the class tree at all despite the fact that it’s functionally unchanged from its only revision during Dragonflight beta.
Why does SWD still do recoil damage? Or, if it must, why is it at all necessary to waste design space in the class tree on Tithe Evasion? Why do shadow and disc have to route through Holy Nova for Spell Warding? Why does Holy Nova require two talents to have any value at all? Why does Sheer Terror exist? Why does Void Tendrils exist? WHY DOES VOID SHIELD EXIST?
Why does Rapture have to go away, but Mass Barrier is fine? Why does Dispersion need to silence the priest but Ice Cold doesn’t have to silence the mage? Why is Rescue on 2/3 the cooldown of Leap of Faith when it’s better in every way without even taking the shield? Why does priest have a terrible dispel profile but still has to talent into disease dispel when druid has an amazing profile and doesn’t have to talent into poison and curse?
Blizzard clearly puts zero thought into what priest is supposed to do. They cobbled together something that resembled what they made for every other class in about ten minutes at the end of DF beta, shipped it, and the only thought they’ve put into the class since was oracle, and it feels very much like the only consideration they’ve had in 11.1 for priest is how to make oracle more appealing.
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To be completely fair though, this is just how Blizzard operates in general.
If players avoid certain talents or options, instead of redesigning them or buffing them to make them more appealing or competitive with the main builds, they often will just nerf or remove the better options entirely. It’s a tale as old as time with this game, unfortunately.
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Rapture legitimately the best feeling button to press on disc.
+1 for not taking it away.
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I enjoyed this rant lol.
Lots of good questions haha 
I would say that the reason so many fluff talents exists if simply because when it comes to Priest, they are very uninspired to actually introduce cool things. So they just pad the talents that many I can see being merged into a single talent or removed entirely and made passive once they actually provide cool and interesting choices for Priest to choose from.
Everything in priest in how it functions is all very archaic compared to the other more modernized classes.
The reasoning for this is what I don’t understand. Like compared to Paladins, they seem to get all the interesting Holy theme ideas… Even the Val’kyr theme went to Paladins which I see much more Priest related because Priests are supposed to be this Angelic Angel inspired class and these Val’kyr that we see in Legion and the ones the Lich King and Slyvanas used would be a great fit for the contrast of Holy/Shadow in this yin/yang similar but opposites aspect. Heck just look at the Priest Class Crest for further proof. Clearly depicting an angel with wings.
Gift of the Golden Val’kyr
Talent
Requires Paladin
Each enemy hit by Avenger’s Shield reduces the remaining cooldown on Guardian of Ancient Kings by 1.0 sec.When you drop below 30% health, you become infused with Guardian of Ancient Kings for 4 sec. This cannot occur again for 45 sec.
I have recently been playing all the classes and am familiar enough with them to understand the basics and themes and man I can really feel the inequity when I jump on my Priest lol. So many other classes things just flow more smoothly yet I can perform much better on my Priest typically just because I’m so ingrained with it for the better part of the last 20 years.
Priests definitely need some real attention and no more crunch time afterthoughts. We need some real inspiration and dedication to fully bring Priest to modern design standards because it’s becoming increasingly more noticable when you compare to the rest of the classes.
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What’s the final verdict about the loss of Rapture?
I’ve heard some latest improvements are kind of making up for it in the PTR, but I’m genuinely concerned for Disc in PVP without it.