How would you like to see Priests change in WoD?

[Xesu]

I've mained a priest healer ever since I first started playing in early BC (just before BT launch), and I think it's safe to say that MoP has not been terribly kind, or fun to the men and women of the cloth. Disc has gone from a unique raid mitigator and powerful tank healer to an Arcane Mage that just so happens to do healing. Holy seems clunkier than ever, and feels like a undertuned Resto Druid or Resto Shammy. I don't play Shadow, but everyone I know who does is less than happy with where they are on the meters relative to other classes, and have been left with a bad taste in their mouth after all the petitioning they had to do to get some much needed buffs in 5.4

sSo, with that out of the way, what do you want to see Blizzard change for priests in 6.0? I'll start with some of mine, and hopefully we can figure out ways to bring a little more fun into the gameplay of one of the most storied classes in WoW's history!

Disc: Bring HEALING back to Discipline. Atonement is broken. Blizzard has already said they are looking to drastically cut down on the number of smart heals in the game going into 6.0, so we're already on our way there. I think Cataclysm had it right when Priests benefitted greatly from heavy-mastery builds, so that they could do great raid healing and mitigation with PoH, and could save a tank with a well-timed Bubble, followed by a Penance to shoot them back up to a fair amount of health. I do think the new talent and glyph system is partly to blame for this, seeing as now all Disc priests have 100% chance to hit with Smite/HF/Penance, reduced cast times on those spells, and Atonement/Archangel, whereas in Cataclysm, those talents often were not chosen because of how there were much better talent and glyph choices available. (I also miss how not every Disc priest had the same healing style in Cataclysm, some utilized atonement, some didn't, etc, etc)

Holy: Bring back the synergy. When I raided at my most serious, I was a Holy/Disc priest in an ICC-10 strict guild. I loved how CoH constantly procced SoL, which helped you build up stacks of Serendipity, to use on either a Greater Heal to keep a tank up, or a PoH to keep the raid up. I have NEVER liked the Chakra system, and I think it's way too clunky. Let the abilities and procs feed into each other again, bringing back that rotation-like feel to Holy, but leaving times where the Priest has to make the right decision on which heals to use, and when. Currently, whenever I try to get back into Holy again, I find myself just using PoM and CoH on cooldown, dropping my Sanc, and wondering what the hell else to do in the meantime.

Shadow: I do not play Shadow, but included it into the thread because it is still a major part of the Priest community here on the forums! So, I'll leave this part up to the DPS inclined of you. However, things I have heard people mention are issues with DPS loss in movement-heavy encounters.


And just since I have you all here, one game-wide change I'd really like to see are spec-specific talent/"perk" trees. Currently, when you choose your "Specialization", you gain every ability and buff that used to be in the old talent trees of that spec. What I'd like to see is there to be a main, class-wide "perk" tree, like they have now, and then another "Specialization-Specific" perk tree, so that way not every Disc/Holy/Shadow Priest has the same abilities.

For instance, one tier of the tree for Discipline might make you choose between Inner Focus, Rapture, and Evangelism (assuming they were all scaled to be relatively the same in mana conservation/regen) so that some priests might use Rapture because they find themselves bubbling often, Evangelism if they find themselves in fights with lull-phases where they can DPS, or Inner Focus so they can get big, 0 mana, PoH or Greater Heal crits.

Well that's all I've got, but I'm looking forward to your responses!
-Xesu

[Saphyron]

Interesting topic.
My oppinion is that:

Holy transformed 100% into a aoe healer remove chakra and make all our current heals aoe heal and place a hot(mastery on our target)
Disc make all spells into absorb spells. make it so you can glyph greater heal to heal instead of absorb.
Shadow bring us back to cata level of shadow. dot the dps even though I highly belieave it is needed but the playstyle. kinda hate the shadow from mist.

[Xesu]

Holy transformed 100% into a aoe healer remove chakra and make all our current heals aoe heal and place a hot(mastery on our target).

Agreed with everything, but ESPECIALLY this. I think Blizzard introduced Chakras as a way to bring back the feel of "Jack of all trades, master of none" to Holy Priests, but instead, it turned into a "What's best for this fight"-stance-choice that pretty much just left most priests using Sanc on every fight, now that just about every healer has a Healing Rain like ability, making every strat focus on the ranged stacking up.

It would be interesting if Blizzard worked a "and able to cast while moving" onto Inner Focus, now that I think about it. It would give a little more movement ability to Shadow Priests, without completely trivializing movement-based fights.

[Teegs]

I wouldn't say atonement is broken, by itself it's a great idea... but with all priests stacking crit it can easily be "OP" because it's so quick to drop DA's, mana cheap and efficient b/c it also allows us to preps for bigger damage(AA). I highly doubt they will remove this from the game...but it does need a revamp. I do see them removing atonement abilities from penance/HF and possibly leaving it just for smite or introducing a new single that would combine HF/Smite.

[Reptar]

I personally like the current disc playstyle. That doesn't mean that I don't think they should change it so Divine Aegis isn't as insane, but from how it's played, I enjoy it. Perhaps if anything, they could remove the smart healing aspect from holy fire (leave it for penance and smite), but then make renew useful for disc. Perhaps a ticking absorbtion. That way it would work like Holy Fire (our current Hot), but it would not be a smart heal, and it would benefit from Disc's mastery.

Another interesting concept would be to treat Atonement like Mages and Arcane Blast (Every consecutive one would increase the heal/damage's potency, but with a greater mana cost. This would still make it a great filler heal, but if you just spam it, you'll be punished.

[Xesu]

Another interesting concept would be to treat Atonement like Mages and Arcane Blast (Every consecutive one would increase the heal/damage's potency, but with a greater mana cost. This would still make it a great filler heal, but if you just spam it, you'll be punished.

That's a really elegant solution actually. That way Disc Priests would only really Smite/HF/Penance to get 5 stacks of Evang so they can pop Archangel. That way you're using Archangel on CD, but not just Atonement spamming.

[nobodysbaby]

Disc:

Atonment is a great thing, but it's just too strong. 50% healing transferred is enough to make it viable in low dmg phases OR make Atonment non-smart again.

Absorbs: Remove Aegis from Atonment. Balance healingpower and lower the absorbs in mastery for Disc.

Make the dmg done by Atonment and the absorbs, also by PW:B count in the overall picture! No, Disc should not be as strong as raw healers when it comes to healing.

Disc is simply a matter of "balance it better" imo.


Holy:

Remove stances! For the "button bloat" this is an excellent candidate.
1. Make Chakra a medium (1 min?) CD wich makes either your DPS/AoE/ST heals special/stronger in some way for XX seconds, perhaps depending on what spells you have been using the last 10s or something specul. It could also be about making your heals behaive differently; Refreshing Renews, putting Renews on 5 ppl at the time, Making heals "Echoe/bouncing/cleaving" or something like that... OR..
2. Let Holy have only 2 stances: DPS or Heal stance, can also be solved with Inner Fire for healing and Inner Focus for dpsing (with a minor CD so it wont be macro-abused), yay, more button bloat.

Keep PoH as it is, but make the radius 5-10y wider. I do NOT want it to be smart. I do not want it to be about "5 closest targets" either. I like it the way it is, but Holy needs better fillers for when the dmg is not spread equally amongst the raid.

CoH needs to be a little stronger than it is atm.

Let Holy keep Serenity (the instant heal that is) wich renew Renew, they need it badly as a filler/ST spell.

Sanctuary: I wouldn't really miss it at it's current form. If they want to keep it it should be about "reduce dmg taken by 10%/increase healing recieved by 10%" etc. It would be boring to just keep it and up the healing done by it to... We don't really need a weak copy of HR.


Together with this, I wish for more of a challange, more dmg in the upcoming raids!


Those are the most important changes I can think of in 5 min. Could write a full page but I'll spare ya all!

Merry Christmas

[Dierdre]

Shadow:

- Keep DoT snapshotting (I know, too late)
- Reverse shadowform nerf (I know, not gonna happen)
- Buff single target damage via mind flay.

And that's pretty much it.

[Leadfoot352]

I've not played my priest as much as I'd have liked this xpac, but from talking to several of my friends and guildmates who do I've landed on a small consensus for priests.
For Shadow I've seen a lot of players either want the dots to be a major focus, doing large amounts of damage and having to be constantly managed, or totally removed/reworked to where you don't even think about them, with MF refreshing them. I'm excited for the potential of a dotless shadow, but I know that makes me an enemy of shadow priests.
For Disc I'd like to see a change to atonement, not in its power, but in its smartness. A thought would be to have it instead shield players, thus being affected by mastery, rather than healing them, and in addition only shielding for the amount of health missing. This would make it a much more niche skill by not allowing it to heal players that are at full health, crit on them and then place a protective shield it will reduce the raw amount of shields being placed on the raid. In addition I think absorb shields should be capped to a percentage of a players max hp anyway, as they are in need of a reduction of power.
For Holy I've seen three major camps about the change wanted. The larger one is simply remove chakra in general, make it's effects baseline and give them something else to use. The 2nd camp wants it reworked in some way, turning it into a CD or made into holy's atonement or made into something new all together. The 3rd, and smallest camp, votes to actually make it MORE important to the holy play style, the idea being reducing the lockout time and reworking mastery to increase the power of the chakra to reward smart stance dancing gameplay, some would even like the procs and mechanics change, almost giving holy 2 different specs that need to be woven together, similar to disc/atonement and fist/mistweaving.
Anyway, that's just the stuff that I've seen and heard.
Thanks for listening to the ramblings,
Leadfoot352.

[Larynx]

I primarily play Disc. IMO, the spec is fine. I'd like to see them give more triage healing tools if they nerf atonement, because a nerf to atonement basically means PoH spam 24/7 which is even worse.

Really, people who suggest to nerf atonement don't think it through. What else do Discs have? Greater Heal, Flash Heal, Heal would need a major overhaul to be considered using, and it would destroy Disc's offensive healer niche that they now share with monks. So no, you can't just change atonement, pat yourself on the back and call it a day.


So lets see:

* Maybe make 50% of all overheal converts into a shield to compensate for the ridiculous 2.5 second cast times? People would be begging for atonement back.

* Reducing the range on atonement is just a huge QOL nerf that won't fix anything.

* Make it CD based? Give Discs a passive 90% mana cost reduction to Smite, Holy Fire, and Penance, with a 20 second CD that causes those abilities for the next 10/15/20 (some number) to convert convert all damage done to healing (doing zero damage in the process). Perhaps tie this in to Archangel.

* Make all the other tools not shit

Speculation is super hard, I know.

[wrynil]

...
Leadfoot352.

Absorbs are already capped to a percentage of the priests max hp.

The idea up there with atonement like arcane mages arcane blast is a great idea i think, i like it, would bring more healing into disc priests.

Nobodysbaby always have it out for discs so im not even going to consider what you wrote on that.
The part about chakra only being 2 stances seems like a nice idea to me though.
Also agree 100% on the Poh part. Its great as it is but it really needs the 5-10 yards increase to not feel clumsy.
I dont like the sanctuary part. I think it should stay as it is, except let it last longer, maybe 1 min. It wont be too strong but it will be nice on fights where you can stack for a longer period of time. It feels bad at the moment for me due to healing rains extreme potency and together with conductivity it also lasts forever with the 30% healing boost from unleashed elements which is just absurd.
Sanctuary could heal like 100 if one person stood in it, then 50 if 2 for each of the 2 and so on which wouldnt make a 1 min durance bad as it would benefit one person fine. Could be used on tanks like this aswell if they are having a tanking spot which they are not moving away from too much. ,,
Less dmg taken from sanctuary? No thank you, play disc then, cooldowns should remain somewhat different.

* Make it CD based? Give Discs a passive 90% mana cost reduction to Smite, Holy Fire, and Penance, with a 20 second CD that causes those abilities for the next 10/15/20 (some number) to convert convert all damage done to healing (doing zero damage in the process). Perhaps tie this in to Archangel.

Cant tell if you are serious but i love the idea ^^.

Also droods got 'atonement' so its now disc, monks and droods whos on that niche which is mjeh.

And Fluttershy, discs was used without atonement for a long time. It depends if we are talking ONLY priests without taking the bigger picture into account or not. With alot of smart heals gone from the other healers discs wouldnt be too bad without constant atonement.

Stop the prayer of healing smart heal yadayada.. Prayer of healing is great as it is , only lacks 5-10 yard increase. It takes 0 skill aswell to cast a prayer of healing on grp1 then grp2 when you are stacked and recieving constant aoe dmg. Its jsut clumsy when you are just a little spread out, without somesort of tracking of who to heal.. which is insane that it needs that in the first place.

Edit: Im not sure what the thing about disc being op in the latest patch is all about. To me its clearly the patch of shamans and droods. Maybe its cause i'm 2 healing all.

[Fluttershy]

Disc without atonement is a waste of a raid spot, not as big of a waste as the current holy priest but still really bad.

Prayer of healing has to be a smart heal and have that 50% converted shield for disc to even stand a chance against 0 skill druid/shamans that literally do 100% more HPS than priests in a 20 setting.

Knowing how blizz likes destroying priest viability at the start of expansions I'll be happy to even get a raid spot being a dedicated tank shield spambot with the t100 talent.

[Reptar]

The thing about threads like these is people base their changes based on healing meters. For example, disc is strong right now, so nerf it. People need to understand that it's fine to keep the playstyle of the spec the same with potentially making the skillcap slightly higher. The issue with Atonement in it's current setup is the frequency you can cast it (endless) and the insane amount of Aegis absorbs it can create. The most difficult part of balancing disc the more and more players outgear the content, the performance in disc scales insanely. While other classes deal with larger amounts of overhealing, disc priests just keep on absorbing.

So, how do we keep the playstyle the same, while making sure the performance isn't insanely OP. That is the tricky part.

First, disc would need some tweaking to some other filler type spell. Players are not going to be spamming shiels, flash heals, heals, greater heals, or renews. It could be interesting if they created another single target spell. For times sake, let's call this Smite2. At that point you'd have Holy Fire, Smite, Smite2, and penance. Perhaps only the heals from penance and Smite2 could crit along with only being able to build archangel with Smite2 and Penance. That way you could still use smite and holy fire for fillers (penance would be here too, but it has a CD), but when you need heavier absorbtions/larger smart heals/archacngel you have to use Smite2 at the cost of more mana. The trick would be managing to use smite2 at the proper time for large raid mitigation, while still keeping the disc playstyle.

Hopefully that makes some sense. I'm just trying to think of something that would make it more interesting/less OP from a meter perspective.

[laplacedemon]

And Fluttershy, discs was used without atonement for a long time.

You mean for bubble botting times or use Atonement until you can use AA and then just keep PoHing-PoHing-PoHing (weave in some shields for more hps) times? There were a few bosses with hitboxes preventing Atonement until it's fixed or things like Baleroc on which we took SoS, but disc always been very spammy so far regardless of the spell (although nowadays, every other healer is too).

(Like you said, we can't look at everything in a vacuum though.)

That said, I would've expected more people to complain about the lvl90 superhero talents -especially in terms of absorbs, instead of the it's-getting-really-old-now Atonement...

[wrynil]

You mean for bubble botting times or use Atonement until you can use AA and then just keep PoHing-PoHing-PoHing (weave in some shields for more hps) times? There were a few bosses with hitboxes preventing Atonement until it's fixed or things like Baleroc on which we took SoS, but disc always been very spammy so far regardless of the spell (although nowadays, every other healer is too).

(Like you said, we can't look at everything in a vacuum though.)

That said, I would've expected more people to complain about the lvl90 superhero talents -especially in terms of absorbs, instead of the it's-getting-really-old-now Atonement...

Regarding what discs was using at given points throughout the game i cannot say, but fact is discs was brought into raids before atonement even was in the game, he is saying without atonement there discs wouldn't have a spot. Luckily for us blizzard are fairly at balancing the healing speccs, some might be ahead but in an ever changing world someone will always be the loser and someone will always be the winner, its always been like that and no solutions have been found tus so far. In the last few years the balance have been well enough for all speccs to have a spot in raiding, just some more than others, and all speccs have succeded.

(id say halfus was a better cata boss to point out atonement opness when it was introduced, guilds running only discs due to mechanics working so well for atonement was crazy :P)

[Reptar]

Disc Priests that were brought prior to Atonement healing had 50%+ of their healing done by PWS Spam. Personally, that was boring to me and that is why I like the atonement healing style. He is right in saying that within the current state of the game, if you removed atonement, disc would be a dead spec.

[wrynil]

Disc Priests that were brought prior to Atonement healing had 50%+ of their healing done by PWS Spam. Personally, that was boring to me and that is why I like the atonement healing style. He is right in saying that within the current state of the game, if you removed atonement, disc would be a dead spec.

What you find boring got absoluty nothing to do with your other statement..

[Reptar]

What you find boring got absoluty nothing to do with your other statement..

My whole discussion in this thread is about how I like the play style and don't want that to change, thus me finding it boring spamming PWS. I was also agreeing with his claim that atonement would basically make it so Disc priests were unusable as they cannot maintain PWS spam, and their other heals are quite meh.

[Fluttershy]

Regarding what discs was using at given points throughout the game i cannot say, but fact is discs was brought into raids before atonement even was in the game, he is saying without atonement there discs wouldn't have a spot. Luckily for us blizzard are fairly at balancing the healing speccs, some might be ahead but in an ever changing world someone will always be the loser and someone will always be the winner, its always been like that and no solutions have been found tus so far. In the last few years the balance have been well enough for all speccs to have a spot in raiding, just some more than others, and all speccs have succeded.

(id say halfus was a better cata boss to point out atonement opness when it was introduced, guilds running only discs due to mechanics working so well for atonement was crazy :P)

Perma Efflo/insane healing rain and stream totem weren't implemented back then.

Prayer of healing is a fucking joke and PWS would have to be boosted by 30-40% to be viable as our only healing to be in line with both of those.

[Nightstorm]

Disc:

Atonment is a great thing, but it's just too strong. 50% healing transferred is enough to make it viable in low dmg phases OR make Atonment non-smart again.

Absorbs: Remove Aegis from Atonment. Balance healingpower and lower the absorbs in mastery for Disc.

Make the dmg done by Atonment and the absorbs, also by PW:B count in the overall picture! No, Disc should not be as strong as raw healers when it comes to healing.

Disc is simply a matter of "balance it better" imo.


Holy:

Remove stances! For the "button bloat" this is an excellent candidate.
1. Make Chakra a medium (1 min?) CD wich makes either your DPS/AoE/ST heals special/stronger in some way for XX seconds, perhaps depending on what spells you have been using the last 10s or something specul. It could also be about making your heals behaive differently; Refreshing Renews, putting Renews on 5 ppl at the time, Making heals "Echoe/bouncing/cleaving" or something like that... OR..
2. Let Holy have only 2 stances: DPS or Heal stance, can also be solved with Inner Fire for healing and Inner Focus for dpsing (with a minor CD so it wont be macro-abused), yay, more button bloat.

Keep PoH as it is, but make the radius 5-10y wider. I do NOT want it to be smart. I do not want it to be about "5 closest targets" either. I like it the way it is, but Holy needs better fillers for when the dmg is not spread equally amongst the raid.

CoH needs to be a little stronger than it is atm.

Let Holy keep Serenity (the instant heal that is) wich renew Renew, they need it badly as a filler/ST spell.

Sanctuary: I wouldn't really miss it at it's current form. If they want to keep it it should be about "reduce dmg taken by 10%/increase healing recieved by 10%" etc. It would be boring to just keep it and up the healing done by it to... We don't really need a weak copy of HR.


Together with this, I wish for more of a challange, more dmg in the upcoming raids!


Those are the most important changes I can think of in 5 min. Could write a full page but I'll spare ya all!

Merry Christmas

This^

That "Holy needs better fillers for when the dmg is not spread equally amongst the raid."

And most of all. Chakra makes holy feel like a master of nothing. Chakra is more of a nurf to everything that is not buffed by the chakra you are in. Making them passive right now wouldn't even be over powered. 25m priests still will hardly use Renew and would the dps increase be that much more over powered considering it can not heal?