I don't really like "modern" class gameplay.

[Gestopft]

Cata was overwhelmingly the best class gameplay of 1.0 original styled talents. This is true of virtually every class and spec.

*cough* Warlocks were an absolute clusterfuck in Cata *cough*

[ThrashMetalFtw]

There is always classic if you want to press 123 repeat.

Isn't Classic era dead? If you are referring to Cata, anybody who liked Classic and TBC for the 222 rotations will hate Cata. Cata Hunters and all casters have the same rotational complexity and pace as anythig in retail. Melees don't have their GCD and spell CDs scaling with Haste until MoP, so those feel slightly slower paced, but the rotational complexity is still just the same as in retail.

This "issue" only gets worse if Classic goes to MoP, since the vast majority of MoP specs are objectively more complex than retail classes.

[Tech614]

since the vast majority of MoP specs are objectively more complex than retail classes.

This is absolutely false, and I generally only see this take from people that think snapshotting was complex when it wasn't lol.

[FAILoZOFF]

I don't get this, was classic mode wanted partially because it was a simpler time? That currently exists and is playable.

That's for sure, you don't. Sooo fkn tired af all dvmb fks that didn't bother to even read what this topic is all about and come and lecture me of how "I just want to mash 1 button all over again". -.-

[Heathy]

I'd argue the dumb fucks are the ones complaining that the easiest healing spec to play is too convoluted. When its really not. you pointed out that you 'have to keep renew on the target for 10% extra healing' (its actually 6%) when you don't have to do that at all, having 6% extra healing on someone isn't going to be the difference between them surviving and dying. seeing as priests aren't a HoT healing class like druids, and the last time you could keep people alive with purely renew was classic (and even then i'd argue you couldn't). we come full circle. our only HoT that does a lot of healing is our mastery which is passive.

'it was great when you could use renew and that would be enough by itself' when was this? classic. what was classic like, spamming largely one button. you dug this hole yourself. the ability has scaled so it is as good as it always was the amount of HP people have is proportional to the amount that it heals, 'BY ITSELF', now its even better because it increases the healing someone takes by... 6% does this not forfil the requirements of being good by itself?

if renew was all you needed to cast today to keep the tank alive, i'm not sure what sort of game play you're envisioning. where would the other abilities fit in if all you needed to do was cast renew and go afk.

i'm looking at my build and trying to see where all this confusion is founded but i'm just not seeing it. you have a few options but thats what they are, options. if you want to throw a renew on the tank for some upcoming spike damage you can do that, or you can not use that GCD. its an option, its not a mandatory part of the rotation.

looking at our other talents, most of it is just passive stuff that happens while you are doing what you do normally. i'm running the lightwell build

https://www.wowhead.com/guide/classe...lds-pve-healer << here, top build

we have divine image, procs from holy words, you're casting holy words and bringing them off cooldown with your spammable heals. flash heal, heal, Poh and Coh (if talented)

Pom can be talented to leave renews on people, so you don't need to manually cast renew unless you can waste a GCD setting up for incoming damage on that person, probably the tank.

we have a couple life savers, guardian spirit & power word: life

shadow fiend can be talented to heal people from the damage it deals, turning it into another mini heal cd.

you proc apothesis from Pom bouncing 50 times. make a weak aura, keep Pom on CD.

i'm really not seeing that many bullshit procs that make the spec impossible to understand, we have surge of light so free instant cast flash heals, thats not complicated to understand. i'm not seeing how the way that it currently is, is somehow that much different to the way it has been for the last several expansions. albeit we have the hero talents, as archon it primarily makes halo OP and heal for an insane amount.

infact the only consistent bullshit little proc that we do get all the time is surge of light. it procs off halo several times. looking at the build you could drop cosmic ripple for revitalizing prayers and then PoH has a 25% chance to leave a 6 second renew on people. assuming the goal is to simply get more (potential) renews spread around. lightwell puts renew on people it heals as well, so the ability is largely applied passively to people it matters. the ones who are either under 50% hp or who just got hit while they had PoM on them. you just don't need to manually waste the GCD applying it. I have it key bound and I do apply it occasionally, but only pre-emptively. if the damage is so low that I can start layering renews on the raid I'd rather do damage to the boss.

but again the entire original post was aimed at soley renew, renew used to be this amazing spell that could keep whole raids alive purely by itself, but it was never like that. so who is a dumb fuck again?

you're ok with the game having complexity and variety, but you also want it to be simplistic enough that a simple hot is powerful enough by itself to matter. this is the very defintion of having your cake and eating it too. you want to go back to a time where the encounters were tame enough that renew was good enough by itself to keep people alive and yet you don't want to go back to a time where we mainly mashed one button. I'm really struggling to see wtf you mean. it can't be both ways, you can't have increasingly difficult boss fights and have it so your slowest, weakest heal remains relevant, by itself. either the fights are slow, easy to understand, with little out going damage that is healable by a single HoT, or you have increasingly difficult boss fights were that HoT becomes less and less relevant as it is unable to keep people alive, by itself.

the only way I can see renew being useful by itself is either pre-casting it on the tank before they take a big hit, or putting it on yourself and increasing the healing you deal to yourself during big aoe damage. for the most part PoM can be talented to leave renews on people, PoH can be talented to leave renews on people, lightwell leaves a renew on people that drop below 50%, renew by itself is just not good enough when not used in conjunction with the rest of your tool kit. it wasn't good enough in classic either. maybe it was better when you were running 5 mans in t3? so when you out geared the content by 3 tiers.

rotations started in TBC, that was when you started having talents that caused some sort of proc that forced you to press buttons in a specific rotation. but BC for us priests was a flash heal spamming expansion where you'd be mashing flash heal 90% of the time. I don't really remember renew being amazing even then. it certainly wasn't enough to keep the tank alive in heroics let alone by t6. even today we end up spot healing damage that isn't raid wide aoe damage with flash heal, it is our go-to heal to top singluar people off. and its our primary heal for bringing serenity off cd, our main instant cast life saver and tank topper. the only real synergy renew has is with our mastery echo of light so they end up being a double HoT, except we didn't get mastery until Cata. so before then it was just a single hot which would only really synergize with other priests using it or druids and their HoTs, culminating in enough combined tick strength to keep that person alive. today the basic gist of it is that renew, by itself, is probably not worth the GCD to cast it manually so you're better off casting other heals and letting it proc from PoM,PoH or Lightwell. if you want to waste a GCD by throwing renew on the tank, or on yourself, that is entirely upto you, its just likely not going to be the defining factor as to whether you (or the tank) survive the next boss ability. it might help but help is about as good as it gets.

for disc it can be used as an instant to apply atonement while Power word: shield is on CD, its still lacking compared to just using say rapture and removing the cd on shield. it probably has more versatility as disc as a way to apply atonement.

[ThrashMetalFtw]

This is absolutely false, and I generally only see this take from people that think snapshotting was complex when it wasn't lol.

Same gameplay pace as today, more rotational buttons, more defensives, more Dps CDs, but no, the specs were totally easier to play than what we have today.

[Archy]

Amazing that you continued for paragraph after paragraph after paragraph after admitting this. All you then did was prove a lack of comprehension or even attempted comprehension. That's not "staying on topic".



...

Do you actually play WoW? Yes, absolutely there are a huge number of players who think they are too good for mechanics, and aren't interested in learning/obeying them. They tend to play DPS and then blame the healer and/or tank. That you've claiming to have never seen this really supports my "you literally don't understand what you're talking about" point.



With respect, I'm wondering if this is an language gap problem. Like, you're using "planning" to mean stuff that, in English, absolutely is not "planning". It's practice or learning or the like. You're also dismissing "tactics" and using the word "strategy" and they're not interchangeable words. It really seems like there's an issue linguistically here - I've encountered this before who learned English in Scandinavia and Germany particularly, where they speak superb English in terms of vocabulary and grammar, but have some very odd and narrow ideas about what words mean, which clash hard with actual English as spoken in the UK/US/Canada/Australia/NZ.

What a productive post. It's "you don't understand", "you bad english", "you no play game". Much wow.

I guess you never raided because you very much plan ahead in all fights. Raid wide healer CDs, personals, positioning is all planned and then learned. One doesn't prohibt the other.

[Being pedantic about the words strategy and tactic when you well know what I mean is just being a bitch. Especially because I didn't use the word "strategy" again, but you keep harping on about it.You plan stuff ahead of time, that's about it. If you don't do this you're playing at a very low level and we are talking about very different games. I don't plan ahead in open world content or delves, sure.]
Edit: I forgot that the starting point of a part of this discussion was specifically "no strategy". That's my bad. Looking up definitions of the word "strategy" and how it differs from the word "tactic" I don't really see why modern gameplay would have any impact on strategy at all. But please tell me why WoW used to be more strategic. I can't think of a single thing. Also people in the usually call things like "the portal strat", which would be a tactic if I'm not mistaken. So it's widely used interchangeably and we did talk about tactics (like the route in M+) already. So again getting really pedantic about it while still being vague with actual examples feels like a cop out because you feel like your other points don't really make sense.


And you thinking that players don't do mechanics on purpose instead of it being a skill issue is just insane to me. But that says more about you than anything else. Also it's amazing that you just lack any level of reading comprehension (not really surprising though, people tend to critize others for exactly what they lack). I never said or even implied that I haven't seen bad players/players not doing mechanics; I've never heard the explanation you provided. Two very different things.

Nope lol not in English.

And again reading comprehension. Not agreeing with my point is fine, but not actually getting it is just sad. I spell it out for you. If decision making (like using CDs intelligently, as you said) is getting hard because your rotation is hard to deal with, planning ahead makes it easier. If you have enough time/mental bandwidth to deal with moment to moment decisions, planning ahead loses some of it's value.

[Triceron]

This "issue" only gets worse if Classic goes to MoP, since the vast majority of MoP specs are objectively more complex than retail classes.

Same gameplay pace as today, more rotational buttons, more defensives, more Dps CDs, but no, the specs were totally easier to play than what we have today.

I'm confused. You say MOP specs are more complex than retail, and also specs are easier to play than retail? I don't see how that makes sense.

[Eurhetemec]

And you thinking that players don't do mechanics on purpose instead of it being a skill issue is just insane to me. But that says more about you than anything else.

Agreed. It says I've played the game and talked to players, whereas you clearly haven't for a long time and don't.

I notice you don't refute any of my allegations re: not playing and English not being your first language (the latter is fine, not a criticism, but explanatory as to your insistence of the meaning of certain words). Presumably both are true and you accept this?

Also it's amazing that you just lack any level of reading comprehension (not really surprising though, people tend to critize others for exactly what they lack).

Might want to think on that angle of attack a bit harder lol.

[Archy]

I notice you don't refute any of my allegations re: not playing and English not being your first language (the latter is fine, not a criticism, but explanatory as to your insistence of the meaning of certain words). Presumably both are true and you accept this?

Since you only care about making "allegations" (as you put it) and not actually discussing anything, I'm done here.

Also because you like to be pedantic, an allegation implies someone doing something wrong (feel free to look it up in the dictionary, also the word has obviously negative connotations), so if it's not a criticsm, "allegation" is the wrong word to use.

[sam86]

also i don't play priest on high skill, if u what u say is true, then this REALLY sucks
making renew strong won't turn priest to a druid, druid have lot of hots and weakest of them (used to be) as strong as renew (except lifebloom, but it compensate with high burst at end)
if renew now doesn't do anything, and exist just to proc other spells, this is a horrible design in itself, the design that turn a core ability that was good since classic (i still remember using renew while lvling because it was most mana efficient healing) to something to proc other spells
heck i'm old to still feel PoM a 'new' spell, since i changed main in cata so for me priest as hardcore raider stopped in wrath (and i was really hardcore that exp, multiple server firsts)
tldr: agree with u, hope someone who can actually do something read ur post

- - - Updated - - -

I'm confused. You say MOP specs are more complex than retail, and also specs are easier to play than retail? I don't see how that makes sense.

probably they had more impact?
i don't remember time that i use renew to 'proc' another spell, renew on itself alone was a good solid hot
maybe in MoP it had the same deal? i remember MoP as time where every class had ability to do something, everyone can dot, but warlock affliction is best, u can refresh ur dot while running (for pvp) with a crap instant cast that sucks for pve, but if u must move, u use it, instead of choose between die or fuck ur dps because for ur bad luck boss decided to use an AOE at ur place when ur dots are ending

[Neuroticaine]

I do think that damage/healing profiles have become extremely bloated, but I do not think that the classes and gameplay is bloated. A vast majority of specs have a core gameplay built around 5-6 abilities. Those abilities have very clear cut roles in the kit on paper, and they sound meaningful, and even feel good to press. But then you look at a damage meter and instead of 6 sources of damage you have 30, because there's so many layers of procs and passives going on with those core abilities plus enchants, trinkets, special procs etc..., and those 25 sources of additional damage dilute the core abilities, which makes them feel way less impactful. Like wow, this core ability that has been the most iconic element of the spec since vanilla only does 5-10% of my overall damage? That's... cool, I guess.

[Ereb]

I'm confused. You say MOP specs are more complex than retail, and also specs are easier to play than retail? I don't see how that makes sense.

He's obviously being sarcastic in the 2nd quote, no?

[ThrashMetalFtw]

I'm confused. You say MOP specs are more complex than retail, and also specs are easier to play than retail? I don't see how that makes sense.

Sarcastic reply to the guy who disagreed with my first post without any kind of explaination or reasoning.