"master of none" playstyle once again
The removal of Flash Concentration at-least in some form is pretty devastating. Holy Priest had suffered for ages by not having a potent filler heal spell, which made the spec feel patchy.Flash concentration fixed all that, and greatly defined the roll Holy played in raid as the best spot healer.Even if they're giving Holy priest some more potent single-target tools such as Holy Word: Life and Divine Word, I fear it won't be enough to bridge the gap that Flash Concentration did.
Please put Silence on the priest tree. Bring them in line with all the other healers.... At least give them the option.
Power infusion......great.....
hmmm i will change my Priest :( Ofc its alpha but nothing special for me
I am in the minority obviously but I hated Flash Concentration. It, to me, made holy feel like a single target healer as opposed to a strong AoE healer of past expansions. I hated having to build stacks of flash heal to make heal viable as well as how quick you would go OOM if you let your flash heal stacks fall off for some God Awful reason. To me, again a minority, I get it, let it go the way of the Dodo!
Holy word life? Really blizz.. Thats the best you got. Thanks Ill spend the point on the reduced mana cost for dispels before HW: Life. What a lame spell. You have to do better. Oh here, let me wait for someone to drop from 25 to 20% to use this one spell. Please, are you kidding me. Give us back Flash and stop being dumb dumbs.
Agree with this article that there is practically no choice in the class or spec trees, but maybe for slightly different reasons.
Can we get rid of Shackle Undead. How many priest actually use it?
Priests probably have the lamest talent trees of all the ones I've tinkered with so far, especially holy. There feels like theres almost no choice. Literally in the first 2 tiers on the holy tree you can take almost everything. There's no diversty no room for cool builds, there's just almost nothing to choose. Then you get to tier 3 and suddenly it's all fluffed out. There you basically choose between doing m+ damage, or doing more aoe healing (raids)... that's literally the entire holy tree now. You always take the middle capstone and then just go to the right one for m+ damage or left one for raids... there's no real choices here. Every holy priest will be the same depending on content. It's way lamer than even the current shadowlands talent trees. There's just nothing going on. The fact that they split up a MEDIOCRE legendary that barely anyone uses in PVE into 3 separate talent points you have to invest AND put it at the end o the tree where all "choices" have to be made, just sums up how awful and lame this talent tree is. There's plenty of other BIS legendaries in various talent trees that are only 1 talent point commitment, and blizz took a mediocre legendary and made it into 3 points at the end of the tree for priest... come on. The priest general tree has similar issues where there's just not much crossover. The left side of the tree is pretty worthless for Shadow/Disc, at most maybe Disc will take the mending/renew/benediction combo, that's it. No one wants crappy holy nova and multiple holy nova talents nor god awful Holy Word Life which is probably the worst capstone talent in all the trees (and crystalline reflection 2nd, yay priests). 0-20% window is way, way too low, people are rarely in that window for more than a split second, that's when their pots/hp stones are being used or their life saving talents are procing or 1 hot is ticking them out of it. By the time your global goes off they're probably not 20% or below anymore and the spell is awful damaging you and healing for a pittance, even below 20% it's a pathetic sized heal from what I've seen, doesn't even come close to topping someone despite having such a niche condition and 30 sec cd. Not to mention it's really not a niche holy needed filled, as they've already got guardian spirit and beefy instant holy words to save low hp people.
As a priest main for 3 expansions now, this looks boring and disappointing compared to other classes.
Blizzard stated recently that they're making some overhaul to the Priest trees.The best way for me to describe the Holy Priest talent tree is... "safe". There's only 1 new talent that isn't an already existing talent, conduit, etc. in the top and middle rows. The bottom row is overbloated with 3 Rune Talents, 2 point sinks, and a very underwhelming Lightwell ability. They put little to no effort into adding anything new or unique to the spec.The loss of Flash Concentration without anything to compensate for its loss is basically spec destroying. 5 stack Flash Concentration Heal did +40% more healing than Flash Heal at a lower mana cost. So the TLDR is you lose -40% single target HPS on-top of having to consume mana faster. Prayer of Healing received no buffs or anything to prop it up. Heal won't be pressed because it's a 2.5s cast vs Flash Heal 1.5s. Priests will just end up spamming Flash Heal.They didn't add in the unique and powerful covenant abilities like Boon of the Ascended which made Holy do good dps in keys or Fae Guardains which gave the spec a lot of utility. Also, every healer is getting a kick now except for Priests for w/e reason.So the TLDR is that Holy Priests (on the current alpha build) have been giga nerfed on their healing and damage outut by like 30-40%. They'll drop from A-tier to D-tier easily.
"Holy-spec tree has so little choice that you can't really make that bad of a build or really that unique of a build from other people even if you wanted to. It is a good tree, but not particularly advanced, possibly by intent."To be fair, that is much of the draw of Holy Priest to begin with. It's a low variance boom healer that is easy to pickup as a starter healer, because the gap between the floor and ceiling cap is minimal. Some healer has to occupy this design space, but the real issue is that the things Holy could expand into to become more interesting are already eaten up. By having two healer specs in one class, you're always directly competing against Disc for design space that overlaps enough to feel priesty, but differs enough to not feel the same. But a buff/utility based playstyle would suit holy priest well....except that's what Holy Paladin in.It's a shame that extracting things from Paladin causes such an uproar, because most of the healer uniqueness could be solved just by shifting a few things from H Pal and into H Priest/Monks.Perhaps if Holy became the "movement" healer, in that they could pickup more utility options in the spirit of Feather/Priest Grip, to allow for a playstyle where increased positioning could be mitigative. Or new H Priest minibuffs to the tune of how the Druid Kyrian ability worked is an open design space that's begging to be used eventually.The issue is that if you're not bumping their utility as playstyle changes, then really you're just making them too lean or too powerful and more of the same style.
Not adding Flash Concentration but giving most other specs their hallmark covenant ability / legendary kind of signals to me that they are ready to let Holy priests fade out from the limelight we have enjoyed this second half of the expansion. Seems purposefully low impact
