Another general statement that needs to be heard.
Priests in general… have a lot of utility to help our allies out. But we LACK a lot of personal defensive type of utility. We can help reduce/prevent damage done to allies, but when it comes to ourselves, we are just meant to take a beating and hope we survive long enough to start to recover.
So why does it seam that the entire talent structure is designed around the idea that we are just free casting and never taking any damage as everyone is just avoiding us?
Look, we have great abilities that if left unchecked, we can get out of control. But that is why its so easy for us to get shut down in the first place and this is back to us not escaping from getting a beating. Yet at the same time, in order to recover… we have to be able to free cast. So this vicious cycle repeats over and over and we quickly fall behind. Some general examples include…
- As long as you can absorb damage with shield on… you do more better.
- As long as you can free cast, you can heal up via leech.
Those ^ 2 examples run counter to what we are able to do.
In the past, we had passive damage reduction abilities that made us tanky in a way.
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Blessed Recovery
After being struck by a melee or ranged critical hit, heal 25% of the damage taken over 6 sec.
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Focused Will
After taking a critical hit you gain the Focused Will effect, reducing all damage taken by 3% and increasing healing effects on you by 7%. Stacks up to 3 times. Lasts 8 sec.
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Shadowform
Assume a Shadowform, increasing your Shadow damage by 15% and reducing Physical damage done to you by 15%. However, you may not cast Holy spells while in this form.
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Blessed Resilience
Critical hits made against you have a 60% chance to prevent you from being critically hit again for 6 sec.
Those 4 examples ^ illustrate that all 3 specs share a common problem… we cant escape taking damage. So the design for all specs should take that in mind and not include “as long as shield holds” type of abilities or “Heal X amount via damage” when you cant even get a spell off as our only way of damage mitigation.
Over time our plight has not changed. But other classes get more and more uptime on us and stick to us more easily while we have been loosing more and more our capability to withstand their onslaught upon us.
We are not Mages where we can Kite or Warlocks with massive damage reduction cooldowns and chain CC to open a window and free cast or teleport with Demonic Circle or Gateway. We are Priests that have to take a beating. Keep that in mind when your implementing design decisions.
3 Likes
This is genuinely one of the few things I was looking forward to, and it looks like you not only left Shadow the way it is, but you somehow made it worse.
I dread the rest of these.
2 Likes
Spec-specific utility cannot be in class trees, but spec-specific utility should also not be in spec trees to compete with dps nodes.
Something needs to be done to address this.
6 Likes
Agreed. It should be removed, made self only, or nerfed to irrelevance (ie 5%).
1 Like
Blizzard waiting on Mages til the end cuz you know there will be chaos.
You know we’ll be last.
Least loved class by Blizzard. Paying the Frost Shock tax since Vanilla.
My impression of this whole thing was that spec-specific utility was meant to be abolished. See Druids getting Innervate on all specs or getting improved Stamp Roar on all specs.
Blizzard dun-goofed with the Shadow Priest spec design as a whole though, it feels like two different classes, the Priest, and the Voidmancer. Blizzard should be looking to merge the Voidmancer back into the Priest class. Unfortunately, the goal of these trees seems more–or-less to try to port 9.2 class design over to 10.0, when that mentality doesn’t work for SP.
1 Like
I really dislike this holy tree. I want to be a healer, stop making me use smite. I was hoping the trend of shoehorning smite and other damaging spells into our rotation would finally be dead with the talent trees, but there are damage ability talents all scattered throughout the tree. There is not “customization” of the talent build, just more gateway talents will never use but that I have to take to get to talents that I will use. I want a pure healer build, how do I do that?
1 Like
i like the holy tree. i like surge of light and smite talents. but i am a casual i guess.
Pure healers are not really a thing.
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In fact, a buddy just ranted a bit on discord this morning about people who think that playing a healer means playing an afk simulator even in Vault keys. Retail WoW is not designed for healers to not play the game. Classic is a much better fit for this playstyle and most healers who do end-game are happier with the more active/rewarding playstyle of having healers ABC - always be casting.
The general priest tree really feels like holy is forced into making chioces to get things they already had where disc is getting tons of new cool choices. Holy word: life is somewhat worthless too, in raid you’ll never be able to get the cast off inside a gcd before they either die or are topped above 20% by another healer and in m+ it is so rare to be able to use you’d just never take it. Holy Word: Life seems to be DOA. It really feels like Holy has to give up tons of what should have been core to be able to pick up things to do damage for M+ but disc can get lots of new dps abilities to help them dps/heal. I like the ideas in the Holy tree to be able to do more damage but i’m betting they’d have to give up so much healing to do so that they wouldn’t be viable enough to be able to do the content.
If the devs wanted to balance healer dps, they gave holy 0 real options to increase their dmg through the talent tree in raid content without gutting their healing and gave disc much more damaging abilities. This is just making the problem more glaring.
Generally not a fan of the holy tree, it seems like they’ve been sacrificed to make the other two specs trees good.
3 Likes
seems a bit more reasonable than my unholy dk having to use a point for a perm pet…
Still stupid you have to spend a point to get a silence/intrupt though
just went to wow head and filled one out
under shadow
1 Like
Yeah, there has to be damage. You can’t design for all healer casting to be healing because of the variable (very variable lol) skill. Anytime someone says pure healer all I see is “I want to watch Netflix and maybe hit a heal once in a while.” As a healer, it is a huge HUGE HUGE pet peeve of mine. We are not special. Tanks have to be active 100%. DPS have to be active 100%. Healers should too.
/soapbox
1 Like
Dude, speak for yourself. Thank you for the ideas that you’ve submitted, and I truly mean no offense to you, but just making everything a simple boost to damage and haste / insanity is BORING. A GAME SHOULD NOT BE BORING.
Living Shadow and Idol of Yogg-Saron are amazing, I cannot WAIT to make my priest into a master of Shadows. If these are taken away from me, for some high level, M+ competitive yakkity smakkity herpa derpa nonsense, I will hunt people down and give them the following:
Every. Day. Preferably when they’re pooping. Yep, it’s gonna get weird!
Seriously though, my main complaint with the Shadow Tree, is that it needs to be tightened up. Shadowy Apparition, and all of its effects, should all fall under the same branch. Eidolic Intuition should NOT be a final trait, it and Insidious Ire should be where Void Torrent and Shadow Crash are. Void Torrent and Shadow Crash should be higher up in the Tree, and attached to other branches.
Finally, I totally agree with your sentiment on Shadow Priests going back to SHADOW, enough of the Void. We should be summoning Reapers and making an enemy’s own shadow attack them.
Also, Blizzard, if you’re reading: anything non-boss creature we kill with Shadowy Apparitions, Living Shadow, or The Thing from Beyond should be dragged into the shadows, like Ghost. That’d be hot.
well I like how the shadow tree lets you decide rather to go all more voidy, or more vampiric I built mine around vampirism id show a ss of it but i cant post links lol
1 Like
My comments and concerns primarily center on the class tree. I can tell that Blizz put a lot of effort into making the spec trees interesting by giving meaningful choices and pulling cool old, existing, and new talents together.
The class tree is pretty lackluster as I see it. I can summarize my concerns in three main points:
- The left side of the tree is a dead branch
- There’s a strange amount of emphasis on mana
- The second column at the bottom is misplaced
Left Side of Tree
I don’t understand the emphasis on some of the least fun spells. Don’t get me wrong - I love benediction and say your prayers. Super happy to have the latter one back. But there are so many holy nova talents, which has two huge problems: 1) there is no reason shadow would ever come down this side and 2) it’s not fun. The first is my biggest gripe - there is a lack of meaningful choice here. Why would a shadow priest try to grab enlightenment or holy nova spells? Meanwhile, I main a holy priest and I keep looking at this thinking “Shadowfiend seems super cool for mythic+ damage, so let me rush over there.” Even if nova were tuned to be super powerful, I would be frustrated to have to get into a clump of allies or enemies to get value from it. It’s not a gameplay feature that interests me at all for priest. The one redeeming quality on this side of the tree is the life spell. Love the juxtaposition with death and think it brings really cool flavor. Think there was a lost opportunity to play with left side as life more to counter the right side as death.
Mana Emphasis
I can’t believe the number of spells that impact mana. From a balancing perspective this makes me nervous - how much mana is everything going to cost and is this going to force me down a side of the tree? I wish the trees brought to life other interesting interactions - like the shadowfiend increasing mastery when active. I was kind of hoping for a talent that made shadow word: pain do a bit of spot healing like in legendary from this expac. I know balancing it was a bit rough, but the emphasis on mana is confusing and concerning.
Misplaced Talents
These talents (charitable soul, and light’s inspiration, and crystalline reflection) aren’t very appealing to me, and they’re super buried. I can’t see much use out of them, and the only way to get there is through a long slog through stuff that is also pretty meh. They need to be moved up or they’ll see almost no play. It’s fine to only have 3 columns at the bottom. A side point to this is really disliking that discipline doesn’t have its own starting node (maybe power word: shield???). If we want them to have sw: death and POM so bad, just make them baseline.
Random things I like:
- Twist of fate for holy!
- Angelic feather for shadow!
- Mind restrain for everyone!
- Shadowflame prism!
4 Likes
I been holy for years looks like we’re going back to the dark ages, so many bloat talents locked behind others to get back Spells we already had.
2 Likes
Any hope/chance for Disc in Dragonflight?
You took my favourite Priest spec, and tossed it in the trash.
I legit was told I wasn’t viable enough for Heroic as Disc, and had to go Holy for the final raid. I hate Holy. Why did Disc get nerfed so hard? The heals are just awful.
