I am a healer, I don’t need your heals.
honestly blizzard please rework dks, and druids
make it like priest where one side is mostly the healer holy bs and other is shadow
for dk make one side mostly blood one mostly frost one mostly unholy
for the sides make unholy left side more summoning and right side more plagueish
for druid same diff
priest HAS ONE WAY SUPERIOR to druid and dk… those suck tbh
so much better getting what i want in priest and not having to touch the trashy holy side at all
Here is a modified version of the Current Shadow Talent Revamp with my own spin / flavor.
Notes:
- I build it in a way to cater between 3-4 primary paths of playstyles.
- Clarity of Power: The Short Burst style. Always instant / Short cooldown Mind Blast & Mind Spike. Useful for quick fights when you want quick burst.
- Auspicious Spirits: The Dot Spec style. You are always rolling dots. Dots dots and more dots.
- Dark Archangel: The Wings Spec. Where you play the way before Shadow Orbs or Voidform was a thing. You do your standard dots with Mind Blast weaves in for chunky damage and Mind Flay as filler.
- Void Eruption (Voidform): The Insanity Madness playstyle. Here you focus on getting into Voidform and then going all out mad with Void beings making an appearance and just going nuts.
The following are the various paths you would take. The talents listed are either required or most likely taken.
Clarity of Power Build Path
- Mind Spike
Blasts the target with Shadowfrost damage, but extinguishes your Shadow damage-over-time effects from the target in the process.
Mind Spike also increases the critical strike chance of your next Mind Blast on the target by 30%. Stacks up to 3 times. - Surge of Darkness
Your Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch have a 10% chance to make your next Mind Spike instant, deal 50% more damage, and not consume your damage-over-time effects. Up to 3 charges. - Clarity of Power
Your Mind Spike, Mind Sear, and Shadow Word: Death deal 40% additional damage to targets not affected by your Shadow Word: Pain or Vampiric Touch. Also reduces the cooldown on Mind Blast by 3 sec and makes it instant cast. - Mind Devourer
Mind Blast deals 5/10% increased damage and has a 10/20% chance to make your next Devouring Plague cost no insanity. - Insidious Ire
While you have Shadow Word: Pain, Devouring Plague, and Vampiric Touch active on the same target, your Mind Blast deals 20/40% more damage. - Shadow Power
Increases the critical damage of your Shadow spells by 10/20%.
Auspicious Spirits Path
(Same as above, just swap out CoP with AS)
- Auspicious Spirits
Your Shadowy Apparitions have a 15% increased chance to critically hit and generate 2 Insanity. Double the insanity generation when it critically hits.
Dark Archangel Path
- Eidolic Intuition
Vampiric Insight has a greater chance to occur. - Rot and Wither
Mind Flay and Mind Sear damage has a 50/100% chance to refresh Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain. - Dark Archangel
Increases the damage done by your non-periodic Shadow damage abilities by 20%. Lasts for 18 sec. 90 sec cooldown. - Shadow Power
Increases the critical damage of your Shadow spells by 10/20%.
Void Eruption (Voidform) Path
- Void Eruption
Releases an explosive blast of pure void energy, activating Voidform and causing Shadow damage to all enemies within 10 yds of your target.
During Voidform, this ability is replaced by Void Bolt. - Void Torrent
Channel a torrent of void energy into the target, dealing Shadow damage over 3 sec. - Void Touched
While not in Void Form, Mind Flay has a 5/10% chance to allow you to cast Void Bolt.
- Hungering Void
Void Bolt causes the target to become vulnerable to the void, increasing their damage taken from you by 10% for 6 sec. This effect may only be active on one target at a time.
Casting Void Bolt on an enemy that is already vulnerable extends the duration of your Voidform by 1 sec, or 2 sec if Void Bolt critically strikesOR
- Surrender to Madness
Deals Shadow damage to the target and activates Voidform.
For the next 30 sec, your Insanity-generating abilities generate 100% more Insanity and you can cast while moving.
If the target does not die within 30 sec of using Surrender to Madness, you die. 1.5 min cooldown
- Ancient Madness
Voidform increases your critical strike chance by 30% for 15 sec, reducing by 2% every sec.
- Idol of the Gods (Blizzard Dev variant)
These “procs” I think should only occur during Voidform. But that up tp balancing. Also I think only 1 can proc at a time.
- Idol of N’Zoth
Damage dealt by Shadow word: Pain, Vampiric Touch, and Devouring Plague has a 20% chance to apply Echoing Void. Each time Echoing Void is applied, it has a chance to collapse, dealing Shadow damage to all nearby enemies untill no stacks remain.
- Idol of Y’Shaarj
Shadowfiend causes you to gain a benefit based on your targets current emotional state.
- Idol of C’Thun
Mind Flay and Mind Sear have a chance to spawn a Void Tendril or Void Lasher that channels at your target for 15 sec, generating 3 insanity every 1 sec.- Idol of Yogg-Saron
After conjuring 50 Shadowy Apparitions, you summon a Thing from Beyond that serves you for 20 sec. The Thing from Beyond blasts enemies for Shadow damage.OR
- Whisper of the Gods (My variant)
While Voidform is active, Your Mind abilities have a chance (chance equals current Insanity level) to obtain an Old Gods gift. You will be empowered by a random Old God, receiving their gift. This effect lasts for 10 sec or until consumed. You can only have a single Whispers of the Old Ones buff active at any one time.
- Whisper of C’thun, your next Mind Flay becomes empowered, increasing damage and insanity generated by 300% and horrifying your target.
- Whisper of Yogg-saron, your Mind Control becomes empowered, becoming instant cast and usable on any type of creature. Your Mind Controlled target has its damage and haste increased by 300% for 5 sec. This effect does not cause you to loose control of your character.
- Echo of Y’Shaar, your Mind Sear becomes empowered for 10 sec. Increasing damage and insanity generation by 100%. This effect pulses 200% faster.
- Whisper of N’Zoth, your next Mind Blast becomes empowered, dealing 300% more damage and is replicated on 2 additional nearby targets.
- Shadow Power
Increases the critical damage of your Shadow spells by 10/20%.
Note:
I wanted these Old god talents to take a more “Active” role instead of acting like Old God themed borrowed powers that randomly proc (passive). The way I would imagine is if you want the empowered Mind Flay, you cast Mind Flay to fish for the proc. The higher your insanity, the higher chance it procs.
- In the case to procing Empowered Mind Control, we can just instead have any of the 4 Mind Spells proc itself and 1 other. Or 1 Proc and the next you use out of any of the 4 gets buffed. Anyway that makes the most sense.
- Or if we have access to Mind Spike, then that can be a more burst like ability and do something like… for the next 10 sec, your Mind Spike doesn’t consume your Dot’s but the damage done equals all the damage left that your dots would do. So basically explode your dot damage without consuming them.
Other Abilities that I included in the tree
- Mind Melt
Increases your Mind spells critically strike chance by 3/6/9%.
- Fiend Acceleration
Reduces the cooldown of Shadowfiend by 3 sec each time Mind Flay critically hits.OR
- Fiending Dark
Increases the duration of Shadowfiend by 2 sec each time Mind Flay critically hits.
-
Insanity
Casting Devouring Plague transforms your Mind Flay spell into Insanity for 5 seconds. Insanity’s damage is double that of Mind Flay. -
Blackout
Gives your Mind Flay a 5/10% chance to stun the target for 3 sec.
Shadow Talent Tree (My Alteration on the WoW Dev Version)
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I totally agree, I love how Blizzard gives the option to break free of the same old Void options, and we can focus on shadow or vampirism. I think they just need to move a few things around, to make the paths a lot clearer (and less point expensive for us).
Have you really looked over the combination of the Priest Tree and the Discipline Tree? I am super excited to play it, it looks pretty powerful.
Disc looks amazing. I am super excited.
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Personally I cant wait for shadows, i hope it stays the same i love how its set up…
I was extremely disappointed when i saw how horrible dks and druids were… but it seems priest has an amazing god tier tree
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I just don’t want anyone to get “distracted” by all the pretty bells and whistles while not paying attention to the new cool car we just signed off on… is missing the engine.
The “flavor” they are adding in might be cool, but for now its just another layer of paint smeared on a wall that’s been molding for 3 expansions. We need to clear the rot out first and get a solid foundation before we let it fester any longer.
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anyways looking at the tree, and seeing what you can do with it I have a suggestion
For warlocks under affliction I suggest you had a tome of kel’thuzard talent, or necrolord talent removing demons from the class (optional so why not) and replacing with undead…
I also highly suggest we use what priest has, to allow us to design other classes within the class/spec tailoring it for our desires.
where we could tailor around vampirism.necromancy etc
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Honestly, I believe you and I are on the same side of the overall conversation, we’re just approaching the matter from different angles.
I definitely agree that Blizzards’ damage formulas and proc timers need to be revisited. The only thing is, we’ve not gotten a look under the hood with several of these as of yet (to continue your car metaphor), so we can only guess at the damage throughput and proc schedules. The themes are mostly all we have to work with right now, and flavor-wise, they sound fun.
There’s no reason the new stuff can’t be fun and effective, so long as they aren’t homogenized. So, let’s be sure that we keep them on point with both. We forum dwellers need to remember that we’re all on the same side, and present options that satisfy the RP and the mechanics when requesting these changes and updates from Blizzard.
Super wish I was on the community council, I’d have so many threads open for us right now.
Yup for sure.
I’m just a bit cynical and jaded throughout my years of having expectations and then hit with the results far too many times that I tend to tread carefully when it comes to new things that are to “alien” or “abnormal” in order to get a solid grasp around before we get a chance to really see how it works.
Frankly I think whoever designs the Priest and specifically “Shadow” either doesn’t play a priest or doesn’t factor in the various types of content a Priest is in and how drastically it changes pending on fight time and if your allowed to cast i.e. movement fights or in PvP forcing ones self to be rooted to do damage or just flat out denied anything because we cant immune or kite ourselves to free cast.
So I am very very very wary of what they show the masses when I can still clearly see all the underlining issues. No point to have all this cool crap if you can never use it because we are denied one way or another.
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Agree or disagree on the finer points, I don’t think anyone could fault another person for being jaded and cynical about almost anything at this point. I try to keep a positive attitude, but I get it.
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This is a great start. Hopefully you continue to build on and evolve this system instead of replacing it in the next expansion. Corruption, Covenants, Azurite, etc. So much engineering time invested and thrown out the window 2 years later and almost broken for most of those two years.
Bit concerning that took an entire month just get one class done since the release of the original two. There aren’t enough months left before release lol.
I think there are some interesting choices and I like that Holy actually can make choices instead of just having every possible button… but in terms of “opening up play style options,” I feel like there is too many fluff talents that just increase healing or damage to move you down the tree and things that we used to talent into or could take as a legendary are much further down.
In particular what worries is me the Harmonious Apparatus had it’s effect split into individual talents (each of the Rune talents). I get it and part of me actually likes being able to say “I want to focus more on keeping my single target or AOE heals off CD faster or just buff the spells I use more.” I cannot find a path through the holy tree that let’s me get back to the current capabilities though… the runes are all in tier 3 talents and spread across the whole set of trees so it’s impossible to make a build focused on reducing holy words which is how I’ve personally played for several expansions… I have enough spells, I like passive cooldowns and focusing on making the best choice at any time knowing how many other spells will trigger cooldowns again…
So I guess I’m happy with the concept of that legendary still being around and even with it being split into 3-4 talents… but move it up in the tree so I can take those as filler and more mechanic interactions that boost certain spells deeper in the tree… or group the runes together so you can go down one branch of the tree that focuses you on more frequent holy words at the cost of more powerful healing numbers.
The class tree + holy tree interaction with Renew makes me really hope Renew is getting a baseline healing buff. If the whole concept is to put focus on Renew again in its current state, all that’s doing is forcing us to waste a GCD on it. Those are numbers that can be tweaked easy, so we’ll just have to see.
Holy Word: Life worries me as a healer in a larger setting. I like the concept of the inverse of Shadow Word: Death and I like the concept of another life saving heal (I’d like to know if it benefits from other things that benefit holy words)… but in a group setting where players actually play well, they’re not likely to let themselves get that low or may even trigger their own heals or be picked up by another healer before then or worse within the window… making it so this spell requires very careful coordination or at least hope of no latency when you cast it… I don’t want to see it encouraged to wait until someone is almost dead so you don’t get the negative heal back. Honestly I’d prefer more if it behaved like Shaman mastery. Maybe the heal increases in percentage by the amount of health missing by the player but has no negative side effect or has a similar debuff like the Death Knight pact so you can’t benefit from any other heals for N seconds. Those two changes would make it a “is this the right button for this situation” instead of “race against what other players are doing and hope it doesn’t backfire.” Or even allow the heal to work like some of the “keep fighting after your dead” mechanics. Holy Word: Life brings you back from dead for 30 seconds.
I do really like that I could stay Holy and have a more DPS focused set of talents for dailies and soloing instead of having to go shadow. That side of things is great and does open up play style changes more…
To get ahead of the curve before its testable. If its on the mob Echoing void needs to auto proc on target death.
Lightforge draenei have this issue with their racial where if the target dies before the 3 seconds it just does nothing, even if theres still mobs around wasting a 3-minute cooldown. That’s almost tolerable since you control what target it goes on but if you’re multidotting in aoe, like any shadow priest should, and all your rng rolls to put them all on the lowest health mob and that dies before ever proccing the explosion its going to feel terrible.
If its the stacks are kept on the priest like combo points that’ll fix the problem right there, but if its mob based it needs to either still do damage when they die or have a guaranteed way to trigger the stacks to make sure you get value.
Random thoughts on the shadow tree:
- Vampiric Touch and Mind Flay should swap places.
Too much in the tree is centered around Vampiric Touch, while in certain cases Mind Sear can be optional, and so could be mind sear (dungeons, bosses with consistent add spawns, 2-3 target bosses). You could technically do a build like this centered around VT, without ever speccing VT: https://www.wowhead.com/dragonflight-talent-calc/AABsAAABmORQWBAFQlYUIKBYBA
- Shadow Crash and Void Torrent placement.
Right now, there is no way to reach the Idol talents without picking Shadow Crash or Void Torrrent. Adding buttons beyond the core kit should be optional. I’d swap Shadowcrash with Asp. Spirits, Void Torrentt with Unfurling Darkness, or maybe even combine Damnation/Void Torrrent in a talent (malediction can reduce the CD of both)
- Death and Madness
Should be merged with Improved SW:D in the general priest tree. The CD reset has value for all priests, esp with Shadowflame prism, and the insanity can be changed to insanity/mana similarily to Throes of Pain/Mindbender.
- Mental Fortitude and Sanguine Teachings
In any scenario with consistent AoE damage, you’re unlikely to get any advantage of this combination. It’s rather see the max-hp restriction removed from Mental Fortitude, and change it to something like “while at max HP, shield generation/cap is increased”
- Unleash the Shadows
Chance on a chance talents aren’t fun. We’re probably looking at about 30% crit (45 with Abyssal Knowledge) on Vampiric Touch ticks at the end of the expansion. At the current values, that’s a 3% chance per VT tick to spawn an apparition.
- Rot and Wither and Void Touched
At a 5% proc chance the talent seems too random. I’d rather see a higher proc chance, with lower extension values. At the end of the day, it’s feels too similar to Void Touched, as Voidbolt also increases DoT duration. So i don’t really think both should exist.
Really underwhelming as a holy priest main. I’ve played every iteration of holy priest, it’s been my main since January 2005. Looks like I’m not playing one next expansion.
If I may ask, what is it about Holy that you don’t like? Blizzard is actively requesting our insight on what we like and dislike, so please share and be specific.
I just got done playing with Holy earlier, and it seems that I can crank out some decent DPS with a few builds, which I dig. I think that a lot of people are forgetting that the Priest Tree combines with the spec trees, and all of the Smite and Holy Fire stuff looks nice.
Also, I want to see how specializing entirely in the Holy Word heals will work out, I like the concept of a healer that does miracles rather than just standard heals. My main focus is going to be Disc, but still, Holy looks interesting.
They’re gating baseline spec functionality behind superfluous talents to fill out a tree that they don’t seem to understand themselves. Lightwell is a meme, has always been a meme, and will be utterly useless in a raid environment where other healers are constantly heal sniping. And you’re definitely not using it in mythic+.
Holy Word: Life will never be useful, as has been pointed out ad nauseum in this thread. THey’ve given me nothing new to work with, but have once again stripped me of most of what made the spec fun to play. It’s going to feel like it did at the beginning of BfA, a broken half-shell of a spec that never felt right post-Legion.
I didn’t particularly enjoy the focus on flash concentration in this expansion, so I don’t care that they’ve thrown that out, but making me spec into which holy words I want to be actually useful? Might as well just give me back chakras so I can laugh at myself. I have no defensive cooldowns, I have no interrupt still but cool, disc is king again I guess. I don’t like disc, I have never liked it, I will not play it. I’d rather play a different class.
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As a Priest main… I find holy to be /snooze. Disc is my favorite healer in the entire game. Would much rather have more than 2 buttons do 90% of my healing
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