The Legacy of the Priest!

[TheEaterofSouls]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-D-wW_Sdvc&t=0s

Here is the legacy of the priest from Vanilla til just before legion! I love these videos. Talking about all the changes and hardships of a given class! Kinda makes me wanna play a priest now. What do you guys think?

[khazmodan]

I watched it and it reminded me of how much of a diva you could be as a priest back in vanilla, lol. The rest was well detailed but a bit dull...maybe Preach is a bit burned out on the game as well...

[Danner]

Also watched it. The Vanilla part was extremely on the mark, and I say that as someone who never actually raided in vanilla. Watch it. Anyone longing for the classic days should see this video. Cast ... and jump! I remember doing this even back in Wrath our of necessity. Not good gameplay.

The TBC part was very solid (loved the lightwell skit), though from a healer (holy) perspective I feel he also lacked covering the very significant-for-priests topic of group composition. Circle of Healing made (holy) priests kings of healing in the black temple and disc could support those healers very well - while shaman stacking made any other healer undesired in the sunwell. TBC more than any expansion was all about class-stacking. It's why the "bring the player not the class" mantra came around later.

The wrath segment was excellently covering both shadow and disc, but as a holypriest I feel he skipped the spec entirely. Maybe there wasn't much to say. But there was, right? Sure, the core was the same, but wrath removed downranking, and nerfed that one trinket every healing priest ever had - the darkmoon card blue dragon. What was skillbased FSR dancing turned into stopcasting being the only mana conservation method. IMO a much lesser gameplay. Yet the later tiers in this expansion gave priests near-infinite mana (roughly mid-ulduar and up) which basically meant that healers were now only measured by throughput and cooldowns. Holy got progressively weaker in the expansion as a result, and that in itself is a very core part of why Holy ended up where it was in later expansions. It was simply neglected, and while other healers got new cool stuff to cover their weaknessess, holy got shackles.

I strongly disagree with Preach regarding the state of priests in Cataclysm ("best ever"); I remember being kicked from groups on sight because of my class. I remember spending 5 hours clearing a single dungeon. I remember my tanks being oneshot by trash mobs, there was nothing I could do about it (Guardian Spirit always bugged out, possibly by design if the incoming damage was > 2x the tank's max HP), and I got all the blame. I remember having a manabar able to cast 8 spells before oom'ing, and having near-zero manaregen while my paladin guildies could spam forever, and I remember running OOM smiting down a single quest mob, before it actually died. It was, for holy, a terrible terrible time to be a priest. Yet for disc? Not much if at all different from Wrath. Bubblespam had been "nerfed to the ground", but in its replacement atonement style Disc was still the most OP healer ever, and as Preach said in the video, still a form of spamming one button. How is that actually good gameplay? The annoying part is that Preach did actually address this in the wrath segment, I just feel he never took it to its natural conclusion with Cataclysm.

Almost every raid fight in the early part of Cataclysm were designed to help Disc out in some major way; frankly Holy was entirely redundant and/or useless during the entire expansion. Personally it meant that after two expansions of raiding and being my guilds healing officer, I was parked outside the raid more and more ofteen. At some point my raidleader confusedly sent me a whisper why I was outside the raid instance - he thought I had quit the guild because he never saw me in the raids. That was my cataclysm experience. It's as far from being "best ever" as it could possibly be. Grinding zhevra hooves in the barrens with a 0.14% drop rate was a far better experience.

As for MoP and WoD, I feel the video kinda dabbed off at that point. Yes, Halo and Cascade are the best spell ever in terms of visuals, and yes, visuals matter a lot. They were also actually really powerful spells in MoP. But at this point, it was a Shadowpriest legacy video, with the argument that shadow had no major changes. That's not much of a summary in the priest aspect.

For holy, Preach did address the "simplification" of chakra - now one button instead of dialing the right chakra. But he did not actually address the elephant in the room: chakra was a limiter, in a world where no other healers had a limiter. It's not about being "afraid" of switching chakra. It's a matter of doing so getting people killed. You needed to pull your weight as holy, because druids certainly did while also bringing a combat ress. And since every raid had a spothealing paladin and an atonement-spamming discpriest, you as holy were stuck in AoE mode for covering the stuff the OP healers could not cover. Not because of laziness. I strongly reject the reason Chakra was an unmitigated failure was because of player laziness. It would have worked just fine in a world where all healers were holypriests, or all other healers had similar shackles. But that's not where we were. Holy was the bottom dog for the better part of four expansions for a reason. Laziness ain't it.