I have an army of priests because I USED TO like both specs. But neither looks very promising in a host of ways.
Is it so tough to have a goal of actually improving specs and making them more enjoyable to play vs just changing them for the sake of change? And without consideration for enjoyment? I don’t get how little critical thought, effort and understanding of feedback go into priest healer design.
Is it just me? I join others here who are ready to uninstall Wow. No joke.
I won’t say not to judge the specs as they are now, but try to keep in mind we don’t have our full kits.
Prepatch is unbalanced and weird. General design is clear for holy and disc, but we’re missing several talent points and apex talents which may or may not have further changes to help the specs feel better.
If something seems off in your play though, report it, call it out. Because changes are still rolling through, they’re watching for feedback. We may or may not get what we want, but calling out means we’re trying.
They tied Mindbender (which was great for damage windows via Shadow Covenant) to Evangelism, lol–virtually making it unusable in outdoor content. And void pet to SW: Death–which you typically use at the end of a fight. That is a farce on countless levels. End of story for me. I don’t see how they can fix those problems without considerable changes. The idea of questing as Shadow Priest, which I have rarely played, and when I enjoyed doing it as desk is unacceptable to me.
I will simply uninstall the game and use me free time in other pursuits.
While I do agree that there are some instances where you can’t judge the class without its apex talents, I can tell you apex talents won’t really fix what people are unhappy about with holy or disc.
Holy’s apex talents just buff cosmic ripple and causes it to proc more, which was a pretty forgettable talent of the holy tree prior. Disc priest apex talents really just give you a chance to proc a void shield.
A lot of people are unhappy with the fact that we’ve lost a lot of our tools and interactions. Void shield is pretty cool, but ultimately, it’s a random proc from using penance. It’s not a new button or something of the sort. Shadow covenant was a super fun gameplay loop to me. I used my mindbender and it turned my penance into a shadow spell, and it allowed me to cast a shadow halo or divine star. Sure, it replaced spells, but it wasn’t some random proc. I could guarantee it on a 30 second cooldown. Combine that with Entropic rift and void bolt and I felt like a full-on void healing priest and that was such a fun playstyle. Having the pet tied to SWD is a terrible move because why would I need my pet if I just executed my target? that doesn’t feel good. It’s not an impactful fun button at all.
We now also have to choose between Ultimate Penitence and Power Word Barrier, which is such an awful choice. Especially when other healers have much better utility. I also hate the loss of Luminos Barrier as it was very useful when people couldn’t move to a specific spot for PWB.
We lost multiple impactful buttons and interactions and replaced them with yet more proc chance talents. SWD only has a 40% pet proc chance. Shadow Mending is from a random SWP proc chance, void shield is also just another proc chance.
As far as holy goes, I honestly just can’t even begin to describe how bad it feels now, and some additional cosmic ripples won’t help anything. Holy has effectively been reduced to apply Prayer of Mending → HWS for instant heal → Prayer of Healing or Sanctify for some AoE healing and then Divine Hymn after big damage. In combat your options are smite spam and holy word fire on CD. It’s so much worse than its TWW counterpart in so many ways. SWP and PWS were base priest spells for 21 years. Why change that now?
And I know a lot of people are already getting ready to jump in with a comment about how you shouldn’t be worried about DPS abilities on Holy because you should be switching to shadow instead. To that I say, it never was a problem the past 21 years of WoW. I’ve never once had to switch spec for solo play. None of the other healing specs really have to do it, so why holy?
I’ve ranted long enough here, but I think I’ve made my point. People liked priest because of utility. We didn’t mind that we had a few more extra buttons than other healers. We accepted that when we rolled priest. Now we’ve lost 8 buttons (potentially 9 if you go oracle since Prem is dead) and we just feel so gutted without them.