…to get anymore changes before TWW.
This feels like Dragonflight all over again, where Priests received little to address issues that existed before the release of the expansion and needed a rework in the middle of it.
Minus the removal of Mindgames and addition of the talents to replace it, what have they really done for Priests in preparation for TWW?
They haven’t addressed Holy and Disc getting access to an interrupt.
They haven’t addressed Priest mobility.
They haven’t addressed several things with Shadow (adding Void Crash isn’t it).
We have had people on these forums write up great posts outlining issues that need to be addressed and we’ve received next to nothing. Just some small tuning adjustments.
16 Likes
Didn’t the Devs flat out state that the players asking for these two particular things need to go pound sand?
4 Likes
Its a full xpac later and door of shadows hasnt been added. Its in the name, not sure why we cant even have a clunky ability left in the dust.
My biggest issue is still aoe and how bottlenecked it is on shadow crash. if it fails its over.
Suggestion: make it cost 50 insanity, no cooldown, buff the base damage, make insanity set to 50 out of combat. Also make it baseline.
Those changes fix a lot of issues, shadow crash is out of the single target rotation, we have baseline aoe, our already high ramp rotation gets the kickstart many other specs have.
6 Likes
This is honestly worse than the DF beta. At least in the DF beta we had an alpha tree to look at and developer feedback that they were working on talent revamps.
This beta? We have literally zero communication and zero changes have been made or announced to any of the Priest specs. I’m not resubbing if they don’t overhaul the Holy/Disc trrees.
17 Likes
Which would be ok if we had SOMETHING to counterbalance. But our toolkit is a joke and our healingpattern doesn´t fit the damagepatterns in Raid and in M+ we have to push the grp up global for gloabs when AoE is incoming, which being forced to Lightweaver, is also horrible.
Looking at our kit, we should be by far on top in terms output but not even that is happening.
1 Like
I don’t recall what they’ve stated about those items, but I do recall them saying that “too many classes have access to knockbacks” in regards to taking Shining Force away from Priests, and in almost the same breath they introduced Dracthyr. 
I can imagine that’s probably their reasoning for not giving us an interrupt or displacement ability as well.
Imo Holy Priest mobility is fine. We’re allowed to be the worst at something and we can hit our best heals if the movement phase is intermittent and not constant which is usually the case as dps casters get wrecked by that most.
2 Likes
It’s worse than Dragonflight. It’s worse than Shadowlands. It’s worse than BFA.
Thus far, we have two changes total: Void Crash was added, and Mindgames had its three nodes replaced. The expansion is probably going to have its launch build finalized in four or five weeks.
Despite Blizzard telling priests they don’t get to do anything other classes do and giving other classes superior versions of our most unique abilities, they actually did have changes for the community to comment on. They were terrible changes, but they were there.
This time we have no meaningful changes whatsoever. They’re wasting all of their priest dev time trying to make oracle flavorless so that people don’t choke on it even if it holds zero appeal.
We are not running out of time. We are out of time by Blizzard’s own admission. They said they ran out of time to do anything with priest two months out from Dragonflight’s release candidate. We’re probably one month out from TWW’s.
They “ran out of time” again.
15 Likes
- make silence baseline talent
- reduce cd of mass dispel
- bring mind sear for aoe shadow dmg like df season 1
just these 3 things would fix it a little until they had time to work better in class. and they’re SO SIMPLE TO DO, runing out of time is no excuse
every healer have interrupt, more utility than you and heals as much as you, that makes your priest just weak why would anyone be a priest healer at this point? every other heal spec do better than you and its not even a question, its just over
5 Likes
See, that’s where you’re wrong. Blizzard can easily run out of time to work on priest because nobody at Blizzard is interested in priest.
That’s why mage got large numbers of weekly updates in Dragonflight development while priest got one and then nothing that. That’s why mage got a full talent update a year ago and is getting another one now. That’s why mage is allowed to step on every classes’ toes and priest isn’t allowed to step on any.
Because Blizzard devs are interested in mage. They’re not interested in priest, so they don’t have any ideas of what priest should be able to do and why all our updates are firmly rooted in Cataclysm-era design sensibilities. Blizzard gives mage a free pass on their purported design philosophy because they get excited to make mage fun. Priest is completely constrained by their design philosophy because the devs aren’t interested in priest, so the rules are always at the front of their thoughts during the design process
12 Likes
Agreed, there are a few changes that most of the Priest community agrees on that would be an easy win for Blizz, like making Silence baseline.
For the class tree, I would want them to:
- Combine Angelic Feather and Body and Soul into a choice node at the Body and Soul location
- Add Door of Shadows to the class tree at the Angelic Feather node. 1 sec cast
- Remove Twins of the Sun Priestess and make Power Infusion self cast only
- Replace Twins with an ability that makes Power Infusion increase the Haste of all party members by 5%
For Shadow, my wishlist would be:
- Remove Silence, make it baseline for the class
- Move Last Word off the choice node with Psychic Horror and place it in the Silence node location
- Revert Psychic Link to only work off of direct damage abilities. Damage reduced above 8 targets
- Remove travel time for Shadow Crash. Bake Whispering Shadows into it
- Add new talent in place of Whispering Shadows. Feedback: when an enemy dies with your Vampiric Touch active, the cooldown of Shadow Crash is reduced by 2 seconds
- Remove Mind Spike and bake it into Dark Ascension, converting Mind Flay into Mind Spike while active
- Add new talent in place of Mind Spike. Pure Insanity: Mind Flay: Insanity also hits all nearby targets for 50% damage. Mind Spike: Insanity increases the crit chance of the next Mind Blast by 100%
- Remove Mind Melt and move Dark Evangelism to the Mind Melt node location
- Make the Dark Ascension cast do an AoE similar to Halo. Give Dark Ascension the floating animation as well
- Make Void Bolt increase the damage of damage over time abilities by 2% for 10 seconds, stacking
- Make Mental Decay work off of Shadowy Apparitions
- Give Devouring Plague a chance to spread to a nearby enemy each time it deals damage
6 Likes
I think sadly we will never really see Priest have that interest for development because of the fundamental constraints it has due to the strangely unique design of two opposing power sources in one class. The most attention our class ever received (even though it was extremely divisive) was legion because they tried to truly embrace and flesh out lore that was nonexistent for Shadow.
But as long as devs have to deal with the fact the baseline abilities and the class tree need to fit into the light and the void, it’ll likely always be frustrating to deal with and therefore no one will ever stay the Priest person for long.
I don’t have access to Beta, can a tester confirm something for me? Is Premonition on the GCD? Because if so, that needs to go.
Can I again ask what the issue with shadow is outside of PvP?
Weren’t they literally meta all of DF or at least S2 and beyond?
2 Likes
Difference between being meta and how good it feels to play, how talent choices feel, aesthetics, etc.
Being meta can just be changed anytime through x,y,z nerfed by x%.
4 Likes
Let’s assume that not every class should get updated for the new expansion for a moment.
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Priest has the worst combat mobility in the game by a mile. It is the only class that has been completely dependent on being saved in multiple encounters in Dragonflight.
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Priest is the only class with two healer specs, but is the only healer that can only cleanse two types of debuffs while the others can cleanse at least three.
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Priest’s CC options are uniquely strong in PvP and nearly useless in PvE.
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Priest is the only class with no interrupt. Shadow has an interrupt, but it has nearly double the cooldown of a standard ranged interrupt for no additional benefit in PvE.
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Every priest talent tree has between 8 and 10 2-point nodes when they’ve largely been removed from every other class.
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Every priest tree except shadow has between 10 and 15 truly dead talents that have no value. The shadow tree only has two truly dead nodes, but all the rest are defensives, utility skills, or passive damage increases.
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Numerous unique priest abilities have been given to other classes, which now are generally more powerful than the priest versions.
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Priest had no abilities return during Dragonflight unless they were replacing a much better ability, which was unique among all classes. We did lose abilities, however, because other classes gained similar abilities and Blizzard didn’t want priest to encroach on those other classes’ niches…which priest previously occupied.
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Priest is going to ship in TWW with one perfectly okay hero tree, one that will need to be fundamentally reworked because of how it hurts holy’s healing profile, and one that’s so bad that nobody will play it unless Blizzard makes it so insanely overpowered that the other two options disappear.
Now, let’s get back to the notion that not every class should be updated for the new expansion. Given the above issues, should priest get a bit of attention or should mage get it’s second full talent refresh in a year?
21 Likes
Not sure about this.
I just started playing my shadow priest this week because enhancement shamans are the ones literally being ignored.
I’m looking forward to the TWW spriest changes.
I do have one major complaint. I wish mind flay was considered a direct attack spell so it could qualify for many of the talent bonuses. I hate using mind spike 
Oh, and I hate when a fury warrior gets in my face during a pvp match. Same with assassin rogues. Do the fights really need to be so lopsided? At least let me use a shield or give me a knockback when stunned. Why is my only option dispersion?
As for my enhancement shaman… let’s just say the only way I play him in TWW is if there are some exploits to take advantage of while Blizzard catches up on all the hot fixes LOL
It is not on the GCD. I had to checked that out for you I couldn’t remember since it has been a while since I tested it out.
You have to look at why they were.
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Power Infusion with Twins is the main reason. Some other dps classes scale really well with it, and thus, comping a Spriest with them is what makes it meta, not Shadow itself.
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Mass Dispel was also a big reason, though Blizz decided Priests couldn’t have that so they extended its cooldown.
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Vampiric Embrace makes Shadow an attractive spec to bring in “no healer comps.” VE has also been nerfed over the expansion.
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Mind Soothe can help with trash skipping.
Notice none of that has anything to do with the damage profile or rotation. Even if a class were meta because they’re doing the most damage doesn’t mean they don’t have issues, it just means they’re tuned really high. If I recall correctly, this is what the devs did to Shadow before the start of DF because the Priest dev had left / been let go leading to there not being the needed attention to balancing and design that the other classes got. So they just upped the numbers so they could point to how well Shadow was doing and say “See? They’re fine!”
And then followed up with a mess of a rework in Season 2.
3 Likes
You may want to look into the beta changes from the 7/2. The shaman class tree was redone, and is now unique in that it is, I believe, the only class tree with 0 2-pointers. It also now has an AE stop with 3 flavors, if you like, and you can also take that odd channeled stun.
Enhance spec on the other hand got got tossed into the priest bucket, where it will likely be ignored for 6-8 months, then get some halfhearted changes.