40% movement speed is the absolute diet coke of mobility.
Psychic scream is actually a liability. They don’t have other CC except for very niche single target stuns in two specs, of which shadow doesn’t take theirs due to talent priority.
For defensives, they have dispersions if shadow. (I won’t argue holy/disc here because they have more). And 10% DR while faded. And angelic grace, which is okay, but not DR.
I want to paint the same scenario for you as I did someone else.
You list a group for M+, 20 people of equivocal item level queue up.
Unless they’re overtuned, why are you ever inviting a priest? Ever?
No kick.
No CC that can be used in dungeons reliably.
No lust.
No brez.
Stam is a very weak group buff.
Like as the group leader, what are you clicking invite on the priest for over another choice?
PI does not offset everything else they’re lacking anymore, and MD was gunned down in the street.
I’m not saying that priests aren’t somewhat lacking at this point, I just don’t think that the solution is to make them completely bog standard and just make a mathematical checklist for them. Having a class like Disc that might lack in some areas but makes up for it in damage and PI type buffs is I think awesome, and you can only have it by making sure they don’t also have all the “standard” advantages - it just needs to be balanced.
The only thing I think is truly a problem at it’s core is the lack of interrupt - and honestly that’s largely just encounter design
I mean, lack of mobility is also a core issue when several fights the last few expansions required other classes to save priests from mechanics that they physically cannot do with their current toolkit
If you’re gonna leave us in 2008 you can’t use 2024 fight design, and no one wants that.
We still have Apathy (for whatever good that does) that slows a target when you land a critical strike with Mind Blast or Holy Fire for Holy.
Apathy is a poor man’s version of Paralysis (no not the monk spell) but the spell that was a 2 point Shadow talent in Cataclysm before it got removed.
Cataclysm Paralysis caused your Mind Blast to root the target in place for 2/4 seconds when you dealt a critical strike.
Because of how Mind Spike worked back then in having a base feature of increasing the chance for your next Mind Blast to be a critical strike by 30% and stacking up to 3, it made your paralysis talent reliable and because of that root instead of slow feature, it granted you with enough time to really get you’re burst out and you can then chain root the target a couple times followed up with your psychic horror stun or silence as needed and then when they got close, you psychic scream them and then restart the paralysis root chain again until the target ran away or died.
So now with Apathy keeping the critical strike requirement yet it only slows the target instead of roots them, it is basically useless since it won’t prevent a warriors charge or leap or a demon hunters fel rush or fel blade or meta on you or any other gap closure most if not all other classes have.
I see the same path taken for most of our existing utility where it once was good but has been nerfed over the years to the point where it’s questionable as to why it even exists anymore and not just removed with other utility that allowed Priests some level of control in the battle like Spectral Guise granting you the capability to either escape an oncoming onslaught or to plan a sneak attack. Instead we are at the mercy of relentless melee that seem nigh unstoppable to anything we still have available to stop them.
Take everything you know of Priest in everything that it can do and what it brings and how it flows etc.
Then imagine that was removed from the game in its entirety.
Then imagine that the wow devs introduced a new class to the game and called it Priest 2 years ago at the launch of Dragonflight.
Now ask yourself this question, is everything that exists within the priest class as is up to par and fit with modern design and become a must bring class to your groups?
If not, then ask yourself that after 2 years of the live game and going through a alpha/beta development cycle and essentially just have the exact same class as it was prior be pushed into the new expansion is acceptable?
If not then why should anyone accept the state of Priest now?
Basically this gets at the question of “it’s always been like that so why is it a problem?” Sort of mindset. So if the priest was reintroduced as a new class in the current state it’s in now to the modern game then is it up to par? If not then it’s a failure by all counts.
I just think the wow devs have a blind spot when it comes to Priest and its plethora of issues and somehow they just don’t recognize the issues that all of us grapple with daily.
You mean like every other class in the game? Can you give me even a single logical argument for why priest and only priest are not allowed to have some form of mobility to survive fights like M Raza. Why priest and only priest have to 100% depend on DPS to actually interrupt/CC important abilities/enemies in a dungeon.
You see this all made sense back when you really only had a hunter and a mage who could CC and the most reliable interrupts came out of rogues and warriors. Classes actually had tools they lacked and it made having to depend on your allies a valid design decision. However, now every class has everything except priest. It is the only class stuck in that old mentality with zero justifiable reason for it. Either Blizzard has some idiotic bias against the spec, or they are flat out ignorant of how badly it has been neglected. There is not excuse.
I actually wanted to get your thoughts on this example specifically.
Mythic Raza was the most recent example of a mechanic that priest couldn’t handle of their own power. But in mythic raiding, it’s not unheard of to bench certain classes when their toolkit doesn’t mesh with a certain fight.
I raided heroic vault as a priest and had no trouble surviving. So if the push was so insurmountable for priest in mythic, wouldn’t it have just been appropriate and proper strategy to bench it for that specific fight?
That so-called “diversity” is every other class having everything and Priest uniquely lacking.
That’s not diversity, that’s discrimination.
It’s also funny that a shaman, of all classes in particular, is telling priests they should be happy with what they got, when they cried day and night, week after month after year to finally get a coherent rework that addressed many of their issues with mobility, survivability and crowd control, and now they want to pull up the ladder after them. And that reason is “diversity”, and any critcism that tries to refute that is written off and dismissed as “hostility”.
Yeah really is funny eh, shamans were the squeakiest wheel for literal decades, they get the grease, celebrate, then declare other classes also struggling are just “Diverse game design” as if we don’t already have a ton of class diversity atm with different damage profiles, utility kits and survivability tools that all function at a base gameplay level
Interrupts and mobility are currently mandatory, the entire game is designed around having them, leaving 2 specs without, and 2 specs with near worthless ones (Shadow and Boomkin) is unacceptable. I don’t care if we lose giving PI to others to get ourselves basic necessary mechanics, in fact i’d welcome it, PI should never have been sharable if it’s going to double dip into our power budget, all it does is make us play and feel worse because of something someone else gets to benefit from.
Maybe the theme of this expac is insanity. Not so much in a game sense but IRL.
Priest forums have been going in a circle for the past months, years even. For some reason asking Blizzard for things that should be baseline, changes, make the class less clunky, to not be the ONLY singled out class with key features, is a gigantic task for them. Meanwhile 11.0.5 has dished out 50+ changes to multiple classes (50+ for a singular class)
They probably have notifications of the Priest forums turned off tbh
My man it’s world of Warcraft you don’t have to be throwing around “discrimination” and talking about my forum character as a shamans (who is notably not even a maxxed character) like it’s my social class or something.
It’s fine. Priests are in kind of a bad spot. They should probably get some work soon - it is not a case of evil discrimination and conspiracy
This is so very true. There was a time when shamans were almost meme-status hilarious in some content, would go OOM at the drop of a hat, had similarly defective 2004-era utility, etc. The exact same issues plaguing current priest design.
And unlike priests they were extremely loud and angry and ranty about it… just saying, they were the squeakiest of all wheels.
The difference is they received a LOT of TLC from Shadowlands on and priest simply has not, in fact they made priest worse in many ways and left it in the worst state it’s ever been in for like 90%+ of DF.