Death of the priest?

[Danzka]

if tranqulity aint a AoE heal, then your prayer of healing or holy nova aint aoe either

[Dentoid]

without me having read this post (grammer) i can say
I TRUST BLIZZARD THAT THEY KNOW WTF THEY ARE DOING. thank you

[Karpalo]

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/6/87657...t-scaling.html

see it for yourself

[Pyrostemplar]

Blizzard dont see their own failure with this design. If they wanna make all classes viable they should balance all classes same way. They gave Frostmages better utility than spriests. They clearly got better dps than shadowpriests. it should go that way that when you got low dps you got utility to replace that, but no blizzard just have buttfucked shadowpriests in wotlk and no smart raid leader will take sp over frostmages with current mechanics. SP is now class that gets to raid when frostmages had to go in the pub or something similar.

WotLK isn't released yet... what you now see as greater whatever may not be anything as such. Remember also Priests have the greatest utility of all: healing. Yes, I do know that the heal of an SP sucks, but sure beats having none, particularly on non raid scenarios.

Anyway, SPs are a off spec of the priest. One spot per raid seems adequate (remember, 2.5 spots per class..).

[infernalx]

without me having read this post (grammer) i can say
I TRUST BLIZZARD THAT THEY KNOW WTF THEY ARE DOING. thank you

Sorry to burst your bubble but hehe....Blizzard has never known wtf they do (when it comes to WoW that is).

And I'm not talking about the priest class, i'm talking about everything, everything in WoW.

[Karpalo]

Yet to see what will the rewamp offer but hope its something decent so i can say GTFO to everyone who said "it`s fine"

[Yurok]

Without reading anything except the subject title.

Yes, they are trying to kill the priest class.

Everyone who believes this: you have just failed the stupid test. Stop playing WoW and stop dumbing down entire mankind.

[Tigercat]

Save your doom and gloom, and your comparisons based on level 70 mechanics (Just, please...stop assuming everything will be the same at 80 as it is now) for when the beta has had a little more time to develop.

Level 80 content would be the bare minimum, I'd say.

[Furs]

Imo, Shadowpriests needs to scale better. From top dps in T4(Well 3 piece T6. FSW was op) to 50% of the dps in T6/Sunwell is just bullshit. You don't fell that you make any progress as a shadow priest, you just slowly lose your power and stop caring cause you'll end up in the middle of the bunch anyway. Probably going to play my rogue in wotlk if nothing dramaticly happens with shadow priests. Oh, and they need to fix Dispersion. 51 point pvp talent in the main priest pve tree, go figure. I was hoping 51 point talent was a new nuke to replace the miserable mind flay.

[raefe]

Great posts so far guys.

I think the main thing that irks me about the holy/disc tree is when I compare it to a druid resto tree.

I tried specing my druid in beta for healing and I found I had about 10 talent points extra to spend in balance. I'm going to try to put all the good things about Druids, Holy Priests and Disc Priests up, and leave comments and also leave you guys to compare and draw conclusions on your own from there.

Druids

- Great single target healers with lifebloom and hots
- Great instant heals (Especially with inscription making swiftmend not consume the HoT it uses)
- Great spot healing with raids (Blizzard also wants them to just lifebloom targets after large aoe things and don't want a paladin sniping the heal so they are trying to change around efficiency like that)
- Great raid healers because of flourish which in my opinion more often better than circle of healing. Max rank heals 4410 or so over 7 seconds for 36% Base mana - enhanced by tree of life (-20% cost) Also ticks for larger higher for the first few ticks and diminishes over 7 seconds. (CoH Max Rank 684 - 765 for 21% base mana)
- Great regen with spirit like Priests
- Tree of Life - Reduce mana cost, aura for more healing
- Preventative heals - Living seed.
- Clearcasting on all spells (2% chance, 10% from a flourish)
- Tranquility - Faster than Prayer of Healing and more effective - Cooldown of 4min (if spec'd for, which you should be because of extra talent points)
- Nourish/Healing touch - Nourish is like Flash heal, but gains extra healing for every hot on the target. (Haven't been able to test yet, it's lvl 80 skill)
- Provide lots of extra goodies - innervate, battle rez, roots indoors, rejuv regen mana/rage/runic power/energy, stealth, Mark of the Wild.

Holy Priest

- Circle of Healing - Comparison to flourish above. Does get one extra target from inscription which makes it potentially better for raid healing. Both are "smart" heals too. Great synergy with Test of Faith (Giving more heal and crit chance on targets under 50%)
- Prayer of mending - Better than living seed because of bounces and reliability
- Prayer of healing - Comparable to Tranquility. Just as situational as Tranquility, less powerful, but no cooldown.
- Holy Concentration - Only procs on/used for Flash Heal, Greater Heal and binding heal. Nice that it increases our cast speed for the next 3 casts. Nice enough but not life changing - Rather predictable instant heals. Omen of Clarity procs more often because it procs on all spells and is more useful being used for any spell, allowing you to regrowth free (with a big crit to add living seed and a hot) or flourish/tranq saving you lots of mana
- Serendipity - Helps with downrank changes - Druids don't need to downrank unless using Healing Touch which isn't necessary.
- Guardian Spirit - Good spell, helps quite a bit with tank healing. However, the 10% heal if the tank is going to die isn't that helpful. on a tank that has 20k hp, that will be about 2k health. That should probably be raised (Paladins can instant cast 14k holy light after a holy shock crit) to match other instant heals from druids, pallies, shamans.
- Mana Regen - Same.
- Extra goodies - Fort, Spirit of redemption, Lightwell, Inspiration, Shackle, Holy nova?

Discipline Priests

- Single Target healing - Supposed to be better (Penance)
- Great preventative spells - Shields are getting big buffs (Divine Aegis, PW: Shield) - Better when the devs decide to change around the rage generation with shields on too
- Grace - Yummy to give 6% increased healing and 6% less damage to tanks.
- Rapture - Mana return on heals/shields - Adds to regen
- Extra goodies: Power Infusion, Pain Suppression, Spirit Buff, Faster Mass Dispel

Looking at priests, to spec into great single target healing (When Blizz fixes it) Priests have to go discipline, which means we do not get CoH which is our main raid heal. All other healing class/specs will have a raid heal except for discipline then (goes against this "Bring any class you want to raid to fill any role" thing blizzard is saying).

To spec into holy, we may "match" possibly (I haven't leveled my priest to 77 yet to test it all out yet.) match a druids AoE healing, single target healing and regen, but there are many other things that druids are going to be better at that just doesn't match up. Holy priests also have to spec into disc 14 points to keep their regen when druids get 10 extra points to spend.

I can leave you guys to make comparisons on your own.

Conclusion and Suggestions:

I love the thought of being the jack-of-all-heals (master of none), but it just seems that we fell a little bit short in all these druids buffs. I'm sure Blizzard will rebalance things later in the beta, it just seems we were overlooked a bit. (Though the post that they think Priests and Druids are the furthest along in the development process scares me a little bit).

** Give Discipline priests a raid spell heal-like. I would suggest a raid shield, it matches the discipline tree and isn't overdone like many other group heals. I imagine it to be much like the Death Knight Anti-Magic Zone, but for all damage. To make it not OP, make it channeled and 3min cooldown. Move penance somewhere else in the tree to keep with the single target healing ability.

** I would just like to see Priests match druids in some more sense, provide something more interesting extras for Priests (Mark of Divinity might make this much better).

** Give more bloat to Resto druid tree, or spread out their talents to balance as well so they have to spec 14 points into balance as well.

Maybe change around Holy Priest clearcasting to apply to all spells, but reduce the proc chance.

I'm not really sure what else they can give holy priests to change around. We have a lot of spells as it is. I'm sort of out of suggestions now hahah -_-;

Just wanted to point these things out and throw out a few suggestions. Thanks for reading this far if you did! ^_^ Hope things get better in beta. With all this great feedback from people, I have no doubt it will.

[Anglarana]

Just found some new info.

A fellow SP made an excellent post on the blizzard forums which got a reply from a Gm / developer of some sort. They let him / her know that SP will go undergo some serieus tweaking in this coming time.

The fellow SP explained that other classes are becoming better in any way versus the SP which makes use of SP hardly needed. (disc priests and frost mages getting a mana return option. etc..)

http://blue.mmo-champion.com/6/87657...t-scaling.html

[JesterGT]

To be honest, even if Priests are slightly weaker than some of the other healers, which I doubt will happen, almost every 25 person raid will take 3 priests, one of each spec. Heres why:

Shadow: 1 shadow priest for VT, yes its been nerfed, but SP damage has reportedly been buffed, which should equal all that out. Now it will likely only be 1 Shadow Priests if they make the mana return raidwide.

Discipline : Grace. 6% less damage AND 6% more healing on their main target (Main Tank). Nuff said.

Holy : Guardian Spirit - Very nice for the really touchy moments in a raid, especially in learning encounters, no raid leader will want to go without this.

COH - with the new talents that Holy has (increased healing to targets under 50%, also the 45 point talent which is 5%, or was it 10%, cant recall ATM buff to COH) plus if the COH inscription isn't changed a Holy Priest will be excellent for raid healing. If COH gets the 6 sec. cooldown added back it changes again, but atm it looks really nice.

For both Disp and Holy specs remember that the mana regen scales with both Int and Spirit, so with the downranking changes its also possible that mana regen rates will hit rediculuos levels in WOTLK, and if Holy Paladins and Resto Shamans have to be careful in their mana usage, Priests will be valuable for this reason as well.

And of course lets not forget Shackle.

So, now, do we really think that Priests are dead in WOTLK, or does it look like were pretty much guaranteed 3 spots in a 25 man raid.

/discuss among yourselves.

[elidion]

Forgive me if this has already been said but, raid wide VT won't be the end of SPs....

VT is not a buff you cast on a person so they can only get the effects of a single priests VT, if you have 3 SPs, that would be 3 VT mana regen you would be getting...It's kinda like that 1 Druid 4x SP group that clears all the heroics because they nonstop cast and the 4 VEs keep the tanks health topped off at all times and the 4x VTs keep the mana topped off at all times.

I think it would be great, and I am a SP...The arguments I read here don't seem very well thought out...Lightwell not breaking on most damage along with a bunch more charges, the smart CoH...puts us right on par with shamans for raid healing...

As I've told my guildies, nobody has raided level 80 raids yet, you are looking at abilities and talents thinking of current BC raids...anyone who played pre-BC knows how it goes. Last time, they released the talents for BC and everybody cried...because they were comparing to the world they knew at that time...Empowered healing? "why the hell would I want to waste 5 talents to give Flash heal 15% more healing effects...I only have 250 to healing".....Things change drastically...I noticed a strong emphasis on emergecy healing for priests...talents that a) Give mana back on overheal, B) Increase healing done on targets with low health, C) guardian spirit that will sacrifice itself to save the life of the person you are healing. In WotLK...we might be seeing some CRAZY shit in raids...

just quit freaking out, things are going to be great.

[seph]

In fact, for 5 man instances shadow priests have always had a bit of a hard time getting into groups. Why bring a shadow priest to a 5 man when you can get another mage for an extra CC and Aoe? Add to that the SP do more damage on targets that take time to kill (ie: generally not trash mobs) and the utility of SPs in 5 mans takes a big dive.

I get really excited taking a SP to 5 mans. SP+Tankadin makes for fast easy mode heroics. No CC necessary and no reason to stop and rest.

[shyg]

Shadow: 1 shadow priest for VT, yes its been nerfed, but SP damage has reportedly been buffed, which should equal all that out. Now it will likely only be 1 Shadow Priests if they make the mana return raidwide.

Discipline : Grace. 6% less damage AND 6% more healing on their main target (Main Tank). Nuff said.

Holy : Guardian Spirit - Very nice for the really touchy moments in a raid, especially in learning encounters, no raid leader will want to go without this.

COH - with the new talents that Holy has (increased healing to targets under 50%, also the 45 point talent which is 5%, or was it 10%, cant recall ATM buff to COH) plus if the COH inscription isn't changed a Holy Priest will be excellent for raid healing. If COH gets the 6 sec. cooldown added back it changes again, but atm it looks really nice.

This post pretty much sums up my thoughts on LK Priests. No, there will not be three shadowpriests per raid in progression fights, but frankly this was imbalanced and mana return mechanics needed to be spread around the game.

To make up for this Shadow damage is being increased and probably will increase even more as Beta continues.

In addition, Disc, the red-headed step-child of talent trees that so many priests love is going to be completely raid viable, as Grace will likely become a must Tank healing, it's like ToL aura crossed with Devo Aura but better. Not only that, but with enough plus healing and crit chance Priests will actually gain mana on Crit heals, (on top of crit healing for 180%) think Holy Paladin mana efficiency at the start of BC, but better. All that is standing in the way of this spec is allowing rage generation to function when shielded. Blues have stated several times that this is being looked at, I think it's only a matter of time.

[Karpalo]

They already stated at blizz that they gonna tweak shadowpriest. And for everybody who thinks shadowpriests were getting more dps in wotlk were right but calculations show that still best pve gear from tbc leaves sp lowest dmg dealing class in game when they nerffed our utility to bits. It`s proven that even current gear New water elemental would be superioir to shadowpriest.

Thats why blizzard is doing those tweaks.

[Nogi]

discipline has always been more of a pvp tree, why give it pve abilities.
holy has always been more of a pve tree, leave it that way.

i have never seen a discipline tree (more then 23 points in discipline - 23= ids) in a pve END GAMING raid. sure some will come and say "i saw the painsuppressions on felmyst" well, can tell you: never used and never was discipline for felmyst, not needed, not required and most don't use it since, discipline is more of pvp tree.
rapture, and the increased mana regen in the discipline tree, the improvement of a 1 target player is purely a buff for pvp, ask any GOOD pvp priest that pvp alots on 2vs2, 3vs3 5vs5, discipline tree has talents now that fit each of these, i agree penance is abit bleh. i don't see raptue or a discipline MT healer since his heals won't be that high without the holy talents which increase the healing effects, not only that i have checked it on the ptr by paying 1 copper and specing back and again to every combination posiable - as holy your heals hit for more then discipline - although the "high" potential to keep 1 target up with preventing damage - but that is pvp. i really doubt that blizz thoughts on disci tree is to make it more "friendly" to pve, i do believe the changes in disci tree were ment to add up the missing bits priests meet in arena and BG's (going oom really fast for example is one of my problems - when i specc discipline to pvp and change to resiliance gear my regen is extremely low with high ressiliance gear a problem i believe most priests meets - compared to other pvp healers).
about the holy tree: i think the talents are good, i dont agree that gaurdian spirit is:
Holy : Guardian Spirit - Very nice for the really touchy moments in a raid, especially in learning encounters, no raid leader will want to go without this. (Quote from: JesterGT on August 19, 2008, 06:29:15 PM). reading this made me abit laugh. no it won't make every raid leader chose a priest and tbh i'd rather be chosen cause i'm good over then cause i have gaurdian spirit. with that: a raidleader will chose: more BL, more totems, more inervates, more CR's and 3 blessings which is much more valuable then gaurdian spirit.
and ofc: - Extra goodies - Fort, Spirit of redemption, Lightwell, Inspiration, Shackle, Holy nova? (Posted on: August 19, 2008, 06:09:04 PMPosted by: raefe ) the whole idea of the priest is that he doesn't have that "extra goodies" to the raid that other healers bring, stamina - a shadow priest can buff, spirit - a priest that will go full holy gaurdian spirit won't have spirit or improved divine spirit, inspiration - shamans also increase armor on crits, in addition now shamans gain 25% bonus heal for healing wave and lesser healing wave so they will be much better keeping "increase armor effect" up - especially with all the crit talents going on there, shackle and holy nova - heh. yes blizz has been trying a while now to work one the lightwell - unsuccessfully so far if you ask me - especially cause most players dont really know how to use it - end up clicking the lightwell 20 times turning it off, or just not clicking it. in addition every dmg removes the effect which made it pretty much useless on most sunwell encounters. Yet again blizz has tried to improve the lightwell - i am glad to hear you are convinced that a lightwell is a extra goodie - i am still not convinced, might check it out if it works better in raids with the new build (removes only if 30%...) Yet i still think lightwell is a lolwell, and should be changed - especially that clicking part (they even nerfed mag's cube clicking). Shackle - CC, almost every class has one, in addition it isn't a holy talent - you won't have to have healer priests in for the shuckle, shadowpriests can easily do it, and most likely wont forget to re-shuckle like the healer will.
i can't say much tbh about what i see: i really thought lightwell would be change to a second aoe HoT effect which will be more powerfull then the CoH, i didn't expect a gimik 51 talent as gaurdian spirit, was expecting something much better, the idea of the holy priest is just that he's a powerfull healer and on wotlk i tend to believe the resto shamans and the resto druid will be more powerfull in their healing spells and abilities then the holy priest (which should be the oposite way since a priest doesn't rly buff the raid much - but he has all the abilities to heal better then other class - this uniquness is something the priest will lose on wotlk, and i was expecting to see something to "cover up" for me being equal to all healers - but not buffing the raid like they are.

Yet, i know that many developments and changes haven't been posted or decided, and some that were already publish will probably not happen - beta isn't really close to being done. (i doubt resto shaman tree will stay with these talents, same to resto druid tree, and if they will i won't understand why a priest shouldn't get atleast 2 new spells (healing spells) that will scale with the uniqness again. if not, truely nerf to holy's and i doubt you will see more then 1 in raid, it will just be more benifical to bring shamans and resto druids, tbc, wotlk - doesn't matter you will never say no for more bloodlusts and more combat ress, especially now that both class are extremely buffed and are powerfull in 1 target healing and raid healing - each one in his own way. i also doubt dual weilding 2h weapons on a warrior will stay - as i remember it was on the tbc beta as well and removed at the end, but thats another story).

[Yon]

Nice to hear all the optimism on these boards -- although I'd have to concur with the previous posters who pointed out the ultimate flaw of the WotLK shadowpriests. As long as Mind Flay has a lower coefficient than it should and doesn't benefit from crits shadowpriests will face the inevitable downfall once again as they progress through content.

One shadowpriest per raid seems like a fair deal to me, but it's important that he doesn't become relatively worse and worse the better gear the raid gets. In BC shadowpriests went from equal dps to a warlock at Karazhan level to ~60% of a warlock's dps at Sunwell level. Considering the hefty nerf to VT, there's no argument against having shadowpriests scale better in WotLK. To avoid misunderstandings I'd better clarify that I would not expect us to do equal dps to a warlock, but say the developers feel that a shadowpriest should do x% of a warlock's dps, then that should hold true in early as well as latter raid content.

That is why I am very hopeful after reading the blue post -- the poster in that thread outlined the problem quite well so I hope it will be dealt with when the developers put their heads together and brainstorm around shadowpriest issues.

P.S. To the people praising the 30% threat reduction in the shadow tree consider that Blessing of Salvation will be removed so there won't be any difference in our threat generation in raids.

[Dismas]

Only reason warlocks are OP in BC is Ruin and and Demonic Sac. I honestly hate Ruin. It's a great talent mind you, but it's tree placement is horrible. As long as it's there and Affliction doesn't scale better and Metamorphasis is gimpy then there will be a fair amount of 50/0/21 or 0/50/21. Assuming the lock doesn't go heavy fire.

But yea Shadow Priests and Affliction locks demand respect too! I play both and think both could use some scaling or utility love.

[Pyrostemplar]

...
One shadowpriest per raid seems like a fair deal to me, but it's important that he doesn't become relatively worse and worse the better gear the raid gets. In BC shadowpriests went from equal dps to a warlock at Karazhan level to ~60% of a warlock's dps at Sunwell level. Considering the hefty nerf to VT, there's no argument against having shadowpriests scale better in WotLK. To avoid misunderstandings I'd better clarify that I would not expect us to do equal dps to a warlock, but say the developers feel that a shadowpriest should do x% of a warlock's dps, then that should hold true in early as well as latter raid content.
...

That is more an issue of doing excessive damage at the early raiding than being lower than it should at later levels. Also of notice is that the relative ratio of SPs vs locks is mostly due to the later going from Aff to destro (aff shares some of the scaling issues that affect SPs). Regardless, yes the scaling of SPs should be fixed, but expect it to be more in line with the Sunwell status than Kara one, depending on utility.